Latest / Madison Church of Christ Bible Studies / Evangelism Using God's Creation | Mike Houts | Week 09

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Evangelism Using God's Creation | Mike Houts | Week 09 · Madison Church of Christ Bible Studies

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us online@madisonchurch.org be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
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  Speaker B: Well, start out, I want to thank Sunny for covering for me last week. Ended up having a really, really good trip over into Columbia. They're public schools there. We ended up getting into a bunch of colleges and high schools and we gave a talk basically science, engineering and other. And we spent the entire talk on other but it was really good. They, you know, talk openly about the Bible. They all agreed, professors included, that it's silly to think the universe and everything in it just made itself. They the students were very good, good questions. So thank everybody for their prayers here. But just it was a real encouraging trip, but got to probably several hundred high school and college students. So it was really good. So, so we'll go ahead and start out. So I think where we'd left off two weeks ago, we were talking about some of the age of the earth. And again, as we've said, it's really obvious if someone thinks about it that again, claiming that life could just make itself is less credible than claiming an iPhone could make itself or a car or an airplane or because people can make those. God gave us that creativity and intelligence. We can't make life. And so it's almost the more you think about it, the more absurd it is that you'll go into a museum and say, oh, 3.8 billion years ago, life arose in the oceans. And that's all they say because they don't want you thinking about. I want you to move on to the really nice exhibits. So that's an easy one. I think information in the genome, it sounds complicated, but it's also an easy one. You usually just tell someone, hey, why don't you go out to your transmission and just take one part of it and put something else in there, kind of mutate your transmission and just see how much better your car runs. I mean, you can do all kinds of. Because they might do it and they sue you. But the whole point is that's a pretty easy one. The free will, hopefully is an easy one. Although it's amazing how much traction the idea that we can't make choices is gaining. And it doesn't make any sense. Everybody knows they can make choices, but the problem is it's very tempting to be able to say, well, you know, yeah, I kind of messed up there, but it was just my chemicals, you know, or oh, I kind of. That wasn't really my, you know, so there's this huge temptation for people to believe that. But when you get to age of the earth or origin of the universe, some of the stuff we've been talking about, you know, it's almost like people have to think about it more or differently because it's not stuff you can repeat. As we talked about when God created the universe, well, that's not going to happen again. You can't go into the laboratory and create the universe. And so you're not going to really have any operational science, any true science that can be applied to that. What you have is observations. And based on those observations, people develop theories. And depending on their paradigm, you can really take those observations and kind of view them from completely same evidence. But you can just try to create a paradigm that's really whatever anybody wants it to be. And so now the biblical paradigms, like we showed on the creation of the universe, they are much more consistent with our observations. But someone can still say maybe Zeus created the universe. Well, you can't prove he didn't. So if someone chooses to put their faith there, they can. But they did choose. And again, that was a choice. And it's the God of the Bible that gives the ability to choose. And so the same thing with dating was typically, as we talked about, we'll go through some more during this time. Almost all of the ways you could just objectively estimate the age of the earth are consistent with the earth being 6,000 years old or so. Okay? The only ones that where you have the big difference is if you use radiometric dating with certain assumptions. And so those are called uniformitarian assumptions. But what they always do, at least the ones that contradict the Bible, is they ignore the flood and they ignore a recent creation. Okay? So if you ignore the flood and you ignore recent creation, essentially you're saying, well, the Bible's wrong. In other words, I'm not going to consider the effects of a flood. I'm not going to consider the effects of A recent creation. But by putting that into your paradigm, putting into that into how you're going to develop your theories, you've essentially assumed the Bible's wrong. Well, if you assume the Bible's wrong and then using those assumptions, those assumptions lead you to say, oh, the Bible's wrong. Well, it's circular reasoning. I don't know if that makes sense. In other words, you had to assume the Bible was wrong and then use those assumptions that the Bible was wrong to turn around and try to claim the Bible is wrong. And so that's. So. But it's. Again, you can't. It's. It's a different way of thinking. It's not like going up to your college professor and saying, okay, if life made itself, why don't we go in your lab, make some life? You know, I mean, that's a real kind of upfront. Oh, you know, you know, you know, kind of real straightforward. This one's a little bit different. So we'll talk about a lot today, but we'll mention, you know, second Peter 3, 3, 6. I think we did talk about that. But says, knowing this first, that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts and saying, where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. For this, they willfully forget that by the word of God, the heavens were of old, and they were standing out of water in the water by which the world that then existed perished being flooded with water. And so again, they're just talking about just, you know, things aren't. You don't have uniformitarian assumptions. There's been major events in the history of the universe that we need to take into account. So I won't review these. I know you guys want to, but let's see. Okay, so again, I'll point out again that there are many miraculous events during Creation Week. In the flood, Genesis 1:1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but just all throughout Genesis says God did this. So again, it's a miraculous event. That's another thing to take into account that there were miracles going on that would also affect what we observe today. If we don't take that into account again, we'll get the wrong answer. So I have to include that. And then Genesis 7:4. For after seven more days, I will cause to reign on the earth 40 days and 40 nights, destroy the face of the earth and all living things that I have made now. So what happened is about the year 2006, it's kind of interesting because this was also the year that it became accepted that there's soft tissue in dinosaur bones. And it's actually really exciting. There's actually groups of Bible. I'll just say Bible believers are actually. They think they're going to be able to go to the furthest north latitude that we've ever found dinosaur bones and try to get bones from there, I think next summer. And then if they get some, they'll just hope that they might be able find some DNA. So it's kind of a side, but it's about the same time. So about 2005 is when it started to get accepted. Oh, wait, there's soft tissue in dinosaur bones, which is again, one of the major reasons we can consider that the dinosaur bones can't be millions of years old. It's hard to imagine them even lasting thousands of years with the types of molecules that are still existing in those bones. But they also are reporting fluctuating radioactive decay rates, and they're very small fluctuations. What they are is, it looks like, some of the reports say it looks like it depends on our distance from the sun. You know, we're closer to the sun in January than we are in July. You know, some other factors. So we've seen them change. And so no one really knows why they're still. But the whole point is, is we know that they can change. There's also recently secular studies saying there's actually like, it's consistent with what's being observed here that like a huge neutrino fluxes might cause huge changes. So again, it's just kind of an aside. But the fact that these decay rates are changing at all now is. Would. If those changes were larger during creation week and the flood, then that would reconcile the differences between the other ways, I guess, of estimating the age of the Earth and what the radiometric dating would estimate. And then also, of course, any differences with the Bible. And so that's kind of big. Now, a point that's made is again, lots of miracles going on. It could literally be that decay rates changed during creation, we changed during the flood, but they changed in a way that's not happening today. So in other words, we might not. The stretching out of space is like one example Bible mentioned 17 times God stretching out the heavens. And so. Well, that's not happening today, really. I mean, it kind of is. But that goes based to the biblical model. It's different than the firmament is basically expanding at an accelerating rate, but that's because of the waters above the firmament. So it's different than the actual stretching of the space would have been. But anyway, so, and then the other thing people mention is, yeah, if we could change radioactive decay rates, the great news is, boy, you get rid of nuclear waste problem. But the bad news is you'd also have all kinds of ways to accidentally destroy the Earth. So maybe God didn't make that available to us right now. And so these are just some quotes. I won't read them all. This one in Popular Science, it talks about Stanford and Purdue Scientists found that the core of the sun, nuclear reactions, neutrinos, looks like it's having an effect. And so that says, how could nebulous neutrino, which does not interact with normal matter, be affecting decay rates? No one knows. It might be a previously unknown particle instead. Stanford University. Now this individual, Sturrock, so he was the professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University, passed away at 100 years old just about a year or two ago. But he actually helped invent radar in World War II. And so it's kind of interesting. So he was obviously pretty young, but he was attributed or given credit for basically us getting ahead of our adversaries in radar during World War II. So smart guy and important guy, too, because you think that could, literally something like that could have changed a lot that happened. But anyway, so he really got interested in this. So he's a professor at Stanford University, talked about looking at experimental results, worked with a lot of other professors, went on, said that the fluctuations matched some of the neutrino data that they had. And so he was looking at actually just to try to do more neutrino research. And I know it's getting kind of geeky, but again, a lot went into this type of work. And then so he talked about that. And then Astroparticle Physics also had an article on it. And you can still get his obituary out on the Stanford website. And it talks a little bit about the work he did. So anyway, you have some evidence today that the decay rates are still fluctuating, which of course isn't assumed when we went through the radioactive decay equations. You assume that they're totally constant, but more importantly, they could have been changing at a much greater rate during creation week and the flood. So the question is, okay, what evidence do we have for that that they might have been changing? Okay, so one of them, this was a chart. And there's usually when we use those other methods of radiometric dating, you're lucky if you have one Isotope chain. Basically, you're looking at a decay chain. You start with one isotope, it radioactively decays into other isotopes. You look at that decay chain, and then based on the assumptions, which, again, they always assume that the decay rates have always been the same. And that's one assumption that, you know, we're talking about. There's a couple other assumptions they have to make also. But you're lucky if you get one radioisotope that you can use to date that rock, because a lot of rocks, they don't have any of the isotopes that are needed to do the dating methods. Okay? So, so, but there's rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. They have three different isotopes in them that can be used for dating them. And so what you can do is you get those rocks and then you go ahead and estimate the age or have the age estimated based on those decay chains. So if you look at this chart and apologize, I know the print's probably a little small for some people, but the. On the left, upper left, you see this is uranium lead decay rate. And it basically says, oh, that rock is 1.883 billion years old. So 1883 million years old. You have in the lower, you know, kind of towards the middle, that's a rubidium strontium decay. That's giving you 12, 40 million years, you know, 1.24 billion years. And then you. And then it's plus or minus 84 million years. The top one was plus or minus 53 million years. And then the one on the right, that's a samarium neodymium. That's giving you 1,655 million years or 1.655 billion years, plus or minus 40 years. Okay, so at a cursory look, it's very easy to look at that and say, well, wow, there's three different dating methods, and they all said it's over a billion years old. So how are you going to argue with that? Right. Okay, well, it's very easy to argue with that because none of their error bars overlapped. Okay, so I'll give you an example. Have to use my remote. Okay, say I sent this remote out to a lab, and I want to say, okay, how long is this remote? And one lab comes back and it says, well, it's 100 meters long, plus or minus a meter. Actually, we're in the UUF, so I'll use feet. Okay, 100ft long, plus or minus a foot. Right. Then I send it to another lab, and it says, It's 200ft long, plus or minus 2ft. And I send it to another lab, and it says it's 300ft long, plus or minus three feet. Okay, well, I know it's at least 100ft long, right? No. All I know is two of the three labs have to be wrong. And if they're making the same assumptions using the same techniques, there's a really good chance all three are wrong. But at least two have to be wrong. So from this chart, all I know is at least two of those measurements are wrong. Right? I mean, okay, this one's. Again, I told you, it gets a little more subtle than some of the other arguments. But again, it can't simultaneously be 1.88 billion years old, plus or minus 53 million years, and 1.24 billion years old, plus or minus 84 million years, because the error bars don't overlap. In other words, two of those three points have got to be wrong, right? Because the error bars are overlapping. So that's all it really tells me. And the problem is, you get an Earth Science textbook. Hate not picking on people, but 8th graders gonna look at that. They're just trying to pass the test, and they'll say, oh, it's gotta be at least a billion years old. I got three measurements saying it's over a billion years old. And if they don't put the error bars on it especially and they don't talk about it, that'll kind of stick. But the reality is, at least two of those three has to be wrong. This cannot be 100ft long and 200ft long and 300ft long, and there's a good chance all three are wrong. Okay. Does that make sense to anybody? Okay, good. If it didn't make sense to you and back, I'll just assume it did and you just couldn't hear me. So. Okay. All right. Great. Okay. All right. Okay. So that's one option we have now. Here's another one that you can use. Okay. So that would be consistent with accelerated decay in the past, but affecting different isotopes differently. And there is actually seems to be a little bit of a link between if it's an alpha emitter, which is basically spitting out a helium nucleus, or a beta decay, which is spitting out an electron, what the atomic mass of the nucleus is. Again, it's. And so one of the exciting potential positive things of AI if we just get the raw data from a lot of stuff you could probably piece together, like, okay, whatever caused that accelerated decay, it had this dependence on atomic number or some. So you can start getting some really subtle things that are really building up a model. It'd be really hard for a handful of people to sort through all that, but maybe that'll come down the road. So that's one thing we notice. But again, consistent with accelerated radioactive decay affecting different isotopes differently. So it gives very long ages, which are wrong because it's accelerated, but also it affects different isotopes differently. Second one people point to a lot is helium retention and zircons. Now, we mentioned this a little bit in the overview, but again, this is the idea that helium will diffuse out of just about anything. And there's a crystal called a zircon, and sometimes it contains a few percent uranium. And so if it has uranium in it, that uranium is going to be decaying to lead. And in the process of a uranium 238 decay, decay into a lead 206, you get eight helium atoms. Okay? Trust me. Okay, so you get eight. Okay, so you get eight helium atoms. And so that helium is going to start diffusing out, right? And you can measure the diffusion rate. So I can take a zircon crystal to a lab and I can measure how fast helium would diffuse through that crystal. And so when we look at how much helium is left in that crystal, there's way too much. So it'd be like having, I think we used the example, like 100 balloons in here and they're all floating up on the ceiling. And we could just look at how fast do they sink to the helium filled balloons. You could, eventually you could measure the actual diffusion rate of the helium. You know, there'd be more sophisticated ways to do that. And so, but if you came in here and there was a balloon floating on the ceiling and someone said, oh, yeah, we built this building 25 years ago. You had a big party, a balloon got released, and it's been there the whole time. You'd be like, oh, that doesn't sound right because there's too much helium left in the balloon. So that's what you have here. You have way too much helium in these zircon crystals. So you had a lot of radioactive decay, but the helium didn't have time to diffuse out. So what you see on the top curve, that's what they called here, the creation model. Oh, by the way, they published the model before the data came back, and that's really gutsy scientifically. So they waited, they published the model. So this is what we expect. Got the samples, sent them out to different laboratories, you know, totally Blind. Just, hey, tell us what you know, what's in here? And when it came back, the creation model, which basically says all that decay occurred within the past few thousand years, that matched the data almost exactly. That's the top curve. Okay. The unifermitarian model that said, oh, that decay happened over, you know, billion and a half years or whatever. The date that's often given for zircons is that was off by a factor of 100,000. Okay, so you get. Okay, so again, I think we talked about, if you're on the elevator with somebody, unless it's a really tall building, you probably don't want to lead off with this one. Yeah, it takes a little while to get through, but again, it's consistent. You're starting to get clues, and hopefully we'll have more clues just, again, learning more about what was going on in Creation Week. And again, it could have just been miracles, but it might also been God might have been using the physical laws that he'd created to cause some of these effects to happen. Okay, so that's. So you have the discordances between estimated ages. You have helium retention and zircons. And then you get the questions like, well, if all the energy from this radioactive decay was released very quickly, wouldn't you melt the Earth? Well, at the energy levels released per decay now, then if you accelerated it too much, you would melt the Earth. Okay, so that's a valid point, but that's another clue because you say, well, it doesn't look like the Earth melted. So whatever mechanism would accelerated these decays. Again, I'll pick on stretching of space, because that one's tossed out a lot. Well, it must have also changed the energy per decay. So you start getting clues about, okay, if God used his laws of physics that he created to do this, what might those have been? What might have been some of the effects? So, again, there's a lot of fun information here. I can tell y' all are having fun. Okay, so. But anyway, so that's just a point. Now, you also get a lot of inaccurate dates. And I know these are what we read a lot when people are just talking about kind of the humorous side of radiometric dating. So there's one down in a museum in New Zealand, actually. Chris Hurd, we talked about him, and I know a lot of you guys know him. Also took me to a museum, this is probably 10 years ago down there, and it talked about the 1954 AD eruption of Mount Narahu. I always mispronounce it, but I always Mispronounce it the same way. So at least I'm consistent. But anyway, and it gave a potassium argon age of 3.5 million years. And so we saw it erupt in 1954. They sampled the lava and it says 3.5 million years. So it's kind of humorous they just mentioned. Yeah, yeah, we're trying. But you know, these dating methods can be way off. So that's great. So that's first exhibit. Museum. Hey, this is a great museum. Well, literally you go like three exhibits down and it talks about this volcano that erupted like 551,200 years ago or something, something like that. You're like, wait a second, you just told me your dating method is off by three and a half million years. And you gave me four significant digits on the age of that other. You know, and so, and so the problem is is that can caused people again because all it's going to stick in someone's. And of course had all these like prehistoric looking creatures and stuff over there, you know, and it's. So all that was sticking in people's heads was oh yeah, I saw how this one volcano erupted, you know, again, outside the biblical time frame. So it's. Yeah, I don't even think that's intentional. You know, it's just, that's just trying to make an interesting museum exhibit. But again, stuff like that, people just get exposed to that over and over. And so. Well, I guess go ahead and be irritating with people. If you're with them in a museum and you start seeing stuff like this, just point out that, oh well, yeah, but you know, what about this? This was an easy one. But it's, but again it's a way that people could, I guess they'd say get confused. So radiometric dating just summarize again, significant evidence against typical uniformitarian assumptions. You've seen the fluctuation in radioactive decay rates now may or may not be the same mechanisms that could have been going on during creation week in the flood. Carbon 14 in coal and diamonds. We didn't talk too much about that. But you know, carbon 14 again has the 5730 year half life, meaning half of it goes away every 5730 years. And so with that, you know, it can't. If the sample is more than I think now we have, we're really good at detecting carbon 14. But even after like 90,000 years of that decay rate, you wouldn't be able to detect it even today with our best equipment, some of the accelerated mass effect. But yeah, sometimes you read coal. Hundreds of millions of years old diamonds. The Hope diamond up at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, they say it's a billion years old. No one's gotten permission to take a sample out of the Hope Diamond. But you know, but I mean it's just. But you do find carbon 14. And so it's. So that's again consistent with the much younger creation discordance is in age estimates based on radioactive decay serum and helium and zircons and circles dating rocks of known age. And so again, the accelerated rate of decay rates during creation we can have. The flood could explain the discrepancies. So I'll say true science is the Christian's friend. First Corinthians 10:13. No temptation has overtaken you except something common to mankind. And God is faithful, so he would not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able. But with the temptation will provide the way of escape also so that you'll be able to endure it. Now by temptation. It's not really a. If you've got someone and they're really interested in studying the Bible with you and they get stuck on any issue. Yeah, I mean there's all kinds of different issues. This would just be one. It probably wouldn't be this one. There's so many issues that you get this. Do you ever get this feeling that if I just kind of soften what I'm saying on this issue or I don't want to go, that maybe they'll be more receptive or more willing to study the Bible with me? I mean, it's like a temptation and it's a fine line because obviously you don't. You don't immediately jump into the area that they think they're going to disagree with you on. You get them engaged in the whole Bible. But at some point we also have to make sure that we don't compromise. That was one of the conversations, I think I mentioned I had a roommate in college that was really influential in me becoming a Christian. And we were talking about the flood and it was just really strange. It was like that same week or something, I ran across this article in National Geographic and it was explaining how, well, if Noah was real, well, maybe he just made this really big flood and he just thought it was global, but it was really just local and all this other stuff. And so I have the article and I'm all excited because I'm going to talk to him because he's a really nice guy. We were friends and I go kind of show him the article. And the whole time I'm like, this is going to be great. We're finally going to agree on this thing. And he goes, no, the Bible's very clear. It was a global flood. It covered the whole earth. And I just remember my first thought was like, hey, I'm trying to work with you here. I mean, but in hindsight, if he had said, well, yeah, it's not too important, then the obvious conclusion is, well, how could God have made it any clearer that it was a global flood? And then if somehow you could read Genesis 6 and 7 and say, oh, it wasn't a global flood, or you could read Genesis in general and say, oh, well, maybe there's 4.5, 4 billion years old. Well, you can read anything you want to in the rest of the Bible. Right? I mean, because those are really clear. There's other parts of the Bible that are. They're all clear. But I mean, that's really clear. And so this actually. So we have to avoid that temptation. I'm glad my friend avoided the temptation because if he just said, well, it's late, I'm tired, I'm just going to say, sure, I literally would have kind of lost respect for him because it had been like, okay, so he kind of believes, and there's a lot of good stuff in the Bible, but he doesn't believe what the Bible's really saying. And then 1 Timothy 6, 20 through 21 O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called knowledge which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. Grace be with you. And then again, just always be ready to present the Gospels.