GYC SE 2010: Infinity - The Pursuit of Excellence

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GYC Southeast

Faith, Science & Religion

Lee Spencer

Faith, Science & Religion Part 1: Why Do We Care

Let's go ahead and have prayer to start off with.

Dear Lord, thank you for the few that are here.

Thank you for the chance to be warriors for you in these last days.

Grant us your wisdom as we deal with the topics that concern these last day events.

We commit it to you in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, basically the first part we're going to talk about is why do we care?

Why is this not something that's just in our ivory towers at the school and we make you take the course and we give you your grade and then you can go on and forget whatever you've learned.

Why do we care about whether God did it, whether he did it in 6 days or 6000000 years Why does it matter?

So why do we insist in believing in a literal biblical creation.

We may have to stop in the middle and move this back if they get an extension cord for us.

But in the meantime, we'll go on as it is.

So the first part we're here we're talking about is why do we insist as a church in believing in a literal biblical creation.

Many of you may be aware of the controversy that was going on at the general conference because 1 of our Adventist schools came out, 1 of the faculty came out public and said that we should all be teaching evolution.

And so it was brought up at the general conference to strengthen fundamental belief number 6.

So as a church, we do insist on a literal biblical creation.

We're just starting anyway, so maybe the Lord has had things in mind to begin with here.

The first reason that the church insists on having a fundamental belief that keeps us on a literal creation is that the Bible quotes God himself as saying that he created the earth and all that's in it in 6 24-hour days.

Actually, that's, Genesis says it, but Moses wrote that.

I believe it's in Exodus, Exodus 20, I believe.

Secondly, without the belief in a literal biblical creation, what reason can you give for having a morality?

If it's survival of the fittest, why shouldn't I find a way to knock you upside the head and take everything that you have and give it to my kids?

Well, of course, the Bible tells us why we shouldn't and it gives us a morality but without the Bible there's no reason for a morality.

I should just be able to lie and cheat and whatever gets me ahead.

The third point is the last day arguments will be centered, excuse me, will be centered around the worship of God, the Creator and His Sabbath, or Satan, the false Creator through evolution, and His spurious Sabbath Sunday.

So, these really are the last day events.

So, we're going to look at each of these 3 items in a little more detail.

So the Bible clearly teaches that God created the earth and all life in 6 24 hour days.

The author of Deuteronomy and Exodus, we'll assume it's Moses.

The Bible clearly teaches that God created the earth and everything, all life on it in 6 24 hour days.

The author of Deuteronomy and Exodus, Moses for most of us, states that God wrote the 10 Commandments with his own finger on stone tablets.

The fourth commandment states that God created the earth and all life on it in 6 days.

So here are your little memory verse texts for today.

When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the 2 tablets of the testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God." So here the author is making the claim that God wrote the 10 Commandments with his own finger and stone.

This isn't about God adapting a story to a primitive people walking around the desert.

This is about a claim that God wrote Himself with His own finger in stone tablets that He did it in 6 days.

He declared to you his covenant, the 10 Commandments, which he commanded you to follow, and then wrote them on 2 stone tablets, Deuteronomy 4, 13 and 14.

Finally, The Lord wrote on these tablets what he had written before, the 10 Commandments, he had proclaimed to you on the mountain, Deuteronomy 10, 4 to 5.

Now what does it mean, the tablets he had written before?

Yeah, Moses was going down the hill and said, oh my goodness, what are my people up to?

And threw the tablets down on the ground and broke them.

On both sets he wrote down that he did it in 6 days.

The fourth commandment says that God created all the earth and all life.

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, for in 6 days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but He rested on the seventh day and made it holy." So to truly believe in the Bible requires accepting creation in 6 days.

If, now here's this is if, I'm not saying this is true.

If evolution is really true, and life was not created in 6 days, but rather evolved over millions of years, then there are only 2 possibilities in understanding the biblical statements.

1, the author of Exodus and Deuteronomy is a liar.

He said God wrote in stone that he created life in 6 days, but God didn't really write that in stone.

For those of us who believe the Bible, of course, we believe that God wrote it with stone, in stone.

The second possibility is that God's not telling the truth.

He wrote in stone that he created life in 6 days, but he really didn't.

If either 1 of those things, well, first of all, if somebody is lying to you in Exodus and Deuteronomy, what else in the Bible is a deliberate lie?

And if God's lying to you, what do you care what Genesis says?

You know, how do you know, I mean, how can you trust a God that would lie to you.

Therefore, in order to believe the Bible as anything more than a collection of ancient myths, requires accepting creation in 6 days.

Again, if the author of Exodus lied, what else is a deliberate lie?

If God's a liar, what's the point in believing the Bible at all?

I don't see any way around claiming to be a Christian and yet not believing that God did it in 6 days.

So this will bring us back then to, we're gonna say that we are creationists because we believe in the Bible, we believe in a God of love, we believe in a Savior that is gonna bring us out of this suffering world in the near future.

So what are the implications for the 2 belief systems, creation and evolution?

And morality is essentially the guide for how we live.

So if evolution is true, if it really is true, then we should have a certain behavior related to the tenets of evolution.

If the Bible is really true, then we should live according to the guidelines in the Bible.

So what does the Bible say on the origin of good and evil?

Evil originated in heaven through Satan, so evil is real and Satan is real.

This is an important concept because when we start looking at the fossil record, what are fossils?

Fossils are dead things, Dead things that are buried in the rocks.

So if death came through Adam, then when did the fossils have to form?

So therefore, all of the fossil record would have to be after Adam if the Bible is true Evil and death will be destroyed through Christ.

Faith, Science & Religion Part 2: Apes, Apemen, and Men

All right, let's go ahead and get started on This second talk is science and faith the fossil ape men or As it was in your handout apes ape men and man What I've handed you had handed out to you, and I think we need a few more here.

What we're going to talk about here is not so much the origin of man, Because we know how man was originated.

So then, if we accept that as true, then how do we understand these things we see in front of us?

So as we start our talk, let's start with prayer.

Dear Lord, we thank you again that we can come and study these things that you've given us gifts and wisdom to be able to understand some of the traps that Satan sets for us.

Open our minds now as we discuss this tender topic.

Help us to hear your Holy Spirit, have your holy angels here accompanying us.

We want to commit it to you and your care as well as the people that are here.

Watch over us Lord for we are your bride in waiting.

We commit it all to you in Jesus' name, amen.

There will be some time after the last lecture if anybody wants to stay around and look at these more closely, you're welcome to do so.

Basically, I better introduce, before we get too far, what the characters are that you see up here.

This is a cellanthropus chadensis, supposedly the oldest hominid, radiometrically dated at between 6 and 7000000 years.

This is, these are the 2 species of chimpanzee, the bonobo and the chimp.

This is the species that had the famous Lucy in it, you know.

But this is a controversial specimen from the country of Georgia.

It's kind of halfway in between the Homo erectins and the Australopithecines.

Right now, it's probably called Kenyanthropus rudolfensis.

I think myself that it lies outside what Homo erectus should be.

And I prefer the name that was given to it originally, Homo Soloensis.

This is Attaquerpa man, Rhodesia man, Neanderthal, the famous Cro-Mignon, and a skull I've snatched from our human anatomy and physiology course.

This skull is in between Neanderthals and us, kind of, in many ways.

This is from Mount Carmel in Israel and it's called the SKUL skull number 5.

So these are the other are the characters that we're going to be examining as we go through here.

You mentioned that 1 of the skulls was radiometrically dated to like 5 million years or so.

Some radiometric methods, as a creationist, I do not understand.

And if we had time for another hour's talk, I would do 1 on radiometric dating.

I believe that this specimen was dated by potassium-argon dating.

The 1 that's probably 1 of the most troubling dating methods, radiocarbon dating is 1 that's more easily understood from a creationist point of view.

But again, it would take a long time to explain why.

But if you come up afterwards, we could do something with it or something if you wanted to stay.

Okay, so I want to look at the relationship between science and faith because evolutionary scientists have said that creationists cannot do science by definition if you believe in a God or whatever, you cannot do science.

So I want to look at the role of faith in science as it relates to these ape men.

And 1 more thing that we don't often appreciate is I want to look at the gift to the church of the writings of Ellen White.

And So I'll probably speed through some parts of this that are less important and more technical so we have some time for discussion about How we how I would interpret these of these fossils?

But first some background These are all classified in the same super family that contains 3 families within it the Gibbons 5 the hylo beta D That what used to be the pawn Judy the chimpanzee species grew?

Gorilla and urangutan the great apes now because The chimpanzee is thought to be our closest ancestor.

We can't have humans and Apes in a different family, but we used to and then we had the family hominid They still have no idea.

So anyway, the family Hylobatidae are break eaters.

That means that they move by swinging arm movements under the tree limbs.

You're going to see why we're talking about this at the end when we look at how other creationists have discussed what these hominids mean.

The pongids, I believe that they should still be a pangenae separate from the hominidae.

There's no other group of animals that walks on the backside of their hand or feet.

So when they're on the ground they make a knuckle.

With the chimpanzee species in the gorilla, it's the second bone, the second phalanx of the hand.

It makes a fist and so it walks on the first phalanx.

But no other group of animals that I know of walks on the backside of their hands or feet so I think that that's a character that would unite the ponsons to the exclusion of the humans hominid II are habitual hot bipeds most of the time The forelimbs don't normally make contact with the ground unless there's dinosaur bones around.

That's what these are, are dinosaur bones.

Today there are no modern morphologic intermediates between the families.

However, if we look at the fossil record, there are bipedal fossils that are intermediate, that are in between the pongids and anatomically modern man.

I'm going to use this term throughout the thing, anatomically modern man, because there's debate about what it is to be human.

So, which ones of these are human and which ones are not?

The ones that are undoubtedly human are us and that so we're just going to call that Anatomically modern man, and then we'll worry later about whether anything else should be called human or not Yes Yes?

This kind of goes back to the hominids, where bipeds most of the time, according to what you just said.

How do you account for those people who are born quadrupeds, or people consider them to be quadrupeds?

Oh, Before they learn to walk It's a it's the way kids learn they learn by Watching their parents Now if a child is kept in a closet or something and some less than nice people have done that, When the child comes out, if it's never learned to walk between a certain age, it will never learn to walk.

But we're not, we don't do well on all fours because our legs are so much longer than our arms.

In order to walk on all 4, you need them to be more equal.

These bipedal fossils fall into 6 main groups.

The Australopithecines, the center 1, that's the 1 that the famous Lucy is a member of.

There's what you call early Homo, Homo habilis.

And there are probably some other evolutionists that would also believe that.

It's almost universally agreed that they're in our genus, and again, I wouldn't put them in our genus.

Then there are what used to be called the archaic Homo sapiens.

That's these here that are now Homo heidelbergensis or adequarpensis.

Faith, Science & Religion Part 3: Dinosaurs in the Flood

Okay, we're going to end the day Talking about dinosaurs because Most people find them more exciting than these except for Adventist And so we're going to look at why are dinosaurs only found in the middle of the fossil record.

And the, well, let me go on through and talk about it.

But Let's start again with prayer once again.

It's still an interesting time, but you've given us information that allows us to stand with confidence in your word and know that we can understand the history of the earth that you've given us with integrity.

That we can look at the fossil record and understand it and be honest with it because of what you've left for us.

Now, as we discuss this and pass this information on, we again ask for your Holy Spirit and your holy angels to guide The whole interaction that we can come away with a true understanding that supports your word.

Because we've committed it all to you in Jesus name, amen.

Okay, it's going to be hard to talk about dinosaurs with the other guys sitting out here But I'm not gonna take the time to put them all away yet So 1 thing I want to talk about is the difference between data and interpretation That may sound technical, but data is something that you look like.

It's based on a real specimen, came from France.

There are real characters on it that you can see.

Those things that you can see and measure, those are data.

Interpretation is what you do with the data.

So as you look down the line, each 1 of those skulls has a set of characters that will be data for that skull and data for the series.

But what that series represents is interpretation.

To the evolutionary scientist, that will be interpreted as representing an evolutionary series.

To me as a creationist, I look at that and say, well, That looks like what I would predict from amalgamation or blending or genetic engineering, but that's my interpretation.

And so we need to keep separate in our understanding data and interpretation, because oft times data can have multiple interpretations, not just 1.

So the evolutionary scientists and myself are looking at the same data set, But we're interpreting it differently because our world views are different.

So there may be some data that is used to support evolution that when you look at it critically and you interpret it from your point of view actually explains the what you see better than the evolutionary hypothesis and I think dinosaurs is 1 of those.

I want to offer your interpretation of the data of the fossil record and dinosaurs that's intellectually honest and biblically consistent.

I want to show you that you can be intellectually honest and still believe the Bible.

The major divisions are the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic.

Paleozoic means old animal life, old zoo.

You can see that there's nothing too complicated about that.

Dinosaurs are restricted to the Mesozoic or the Middle Zoo.

The order of the geologic column is real and it's based on observation.

If you were to take a trip, and I'd love to do that with some students sometime, is go to the Grand Canyon.

So if we look here, we're going to look through the Cambrian, up through the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Tertiary.

So you go up through the Grand Canyon you're going up through the Paleozoic the Kaibab limestone that makes the cap here the Kaibab plateau is Permian the last layer of the Paleozoic These mud layers here the moan kopi on up are Mesozoic and finally the why?

Wasatch they don't call it Wasatch anymore.

So you can walk up yourself, and you can collect fossils outside of the National Park And verify for yourself that the order is real So here's the Grand Canyon this stuff is pre-cambrian Means it means lies below the Cambrian boundary the tepeet Sandstone is the base of the Cambrian.

Bright Angel Shale and Muave Limestone, Those are all Cambrian.

And you go on up through the, this is a cool 1, the Coconino Sandstone.

Brand at Loma Linda has studied that extensively.

It's got footprints in it from late Paleozoic amphibians crawling across some sand dune-like things.

Then you can go up to the Kaibab Plateau, Drive along that to the belted cliffs, the vermilion cliffs, the white cliffs, the gray cliffs, the pink cliffs, all these cool cliffs.

So you notice back here that you have all of these different cliffs going.

That in the back there is the Navajo Sandstone, which is Jurassic.

And then you can go from Zion National Park along the Carmel Formation up through Bryce Canyon and the tertiary.

So I want you to see that the order in a fossil record is real and it's based on observation.

I'm going to look in detail here at this Permian section.

And I want you to see, this happens to be a kind of fossil called a brachiopod.

You aren't going to know what it is because they're all extinct, but there are some today a little different than these things.

They look like a clam, kind of, but they have uneven shells.

The bottom shell is usually smaller than the top shell, and they have a little hole.

But what I want you to get out of this is there is order here, if you're carefully measuring where they are found in the rock layers.

So here are the rocks that were studied by Murchison in Russia.

In these layers, he found rocks equivalent to the Carboniferous in England, the rocks that held all of the coal measures that fueled the Industrial Revolution.

The coal measures became the carboniferous.

And then above the fossils here in Russia, there were a whole bunch of other layers that sat on top of these.

These happened to be near the town of Perm in the Caucasus Mountains.

And so it became the Permian, because these fossils were from Perm, Russia.

They're a giant single-celled amoeba-like thing, about a half inch long, shaped like a bullet.

So the ranges of these different fossils is strictly based on observation.

If you were to look at, go back to here, the Perm Mountains, Carboniferous, Moscovian.

Now Where would you guess the Moscovian would be from?

If you were to walk through these from the Carboniferous on up and you carefully measured where you collected each fossil, you could end up with a chart that looks like this, going from the Carboniferous to the Permian.

2 main interpretations then would be evolution or Noah's flood.

The question is, how do you preserve order in a flood?

And he's getting so that I can't use these jokes anymore because they say Bill who?

Series

Faith, Science & Religion

Faith, Science & Religion Part 3: Dinosaurs in the Flood

Transcript

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