Secularists expect a theory to be falsifiable. Eric and Paul discuss this and other issues.

The following program is made possible by the friends and partners of God quest ministries. What is Atheist greatest sphere? Well from the Ctn studio in Pensacola florida, this is the creation today’s show and we’re gonna be talking about that. I’m one of your hosts, eric Donovan and I’m paul taylor. And on today’s show we’ll be discussing whether you can falsify biblical claims, is it possible? We’ll be discussing the laws of thermodynamics, that should be great fun and just like on the London underground will be minding the gap Oh, sounds fun, remember we believe the bible is literally true and scientifically accurate in every single detail, we’re not ashamed to say so, enjoy the show. Welcome back to the Creation today’s show where we’re going to be discussing today. What is Atheist greatest fear all that right after these announcements? Yes, don’t forget please that during next March, March 16th and 17th near Orlando in florida, you can go to an absolutely amazing conference, it’s incredible. It’s going to be great, it’s gonna be called the proof of God conference, don’t, as I just said near Orlando florida 2012 in March and there’s gonna be some absolutely top notch amazing speakers, speakers, the very best, the very best in Creationism and and we’ll be there were gonna be there too, it’s gonna be awesome. We’ve got a great lineup of speakers, don’t we? There is going to be carl Kirby from the reasons for hope ministers, Mark Spence of where the master is going to be there and our good friend Cy 10 Bruggen Cate will also be traveling down from Canada. Yes. So it’s gonna be a great conference. We want people to understand how to defend the God that absolutely exists and that’s what this conference is all about. The proof of God strengthening your apologetic to defend the absolute God of the bible. Not to mention we got this genesis series that has kicked off and it’s just incredible. If you haven’t seen the trailer, you need to go to genesis series dot com and check that out and see the progress on that. What’s interesting is just here this past week, seven fold films is actually move their organization to Pensacola and is set up to be able to work directly with us and we are really excited about the work that God is doing there, it’s just, it is so cool seeing what takes place in order to put together a three d version of genesis chapters one through chapters three, it’s going to be absolutely phenomenal. And you mentioned the website, genesis series dot com. Didn’t you? If I didn’t mention it, you can go to genesis series dot com, what’s that website again, genesis series dot com. You ought to go check it out genesis series dot com. Any other announcements. I think we’ve covered those. There we go and speak. Hey, if you’d like to have one of us come to a creation today, live events in your location would be more than happy to come do that at your church or group. So call or email and we can schedule that. You can go to Creation today dot org For more details, write question number one. You ready to hit it? Oh yes. And we’ve got a question here from Joshua and it’s more of an accusation really than a question. It’s quite hard hitting. So let’s, let’s go for it. He says, whenever you answer these questions, you turn directly to the bible or you just assert that it’s part of a God induced process. Isn’t this a priority? By asserting these things based on a preconceived notion that God indeed exists and that the bible is correct. You leave no direct means of falsification should just break into his question. That that’s something that’s often a word that’s often used, isn’t it? In scientific hypothesis building. You build a hypothesis and it’s supposed to be possible to falsify that hypothesis so that people have something to work on to determine if it’s true or not. So Joshua goes on. Then he says, your replies are not at least in my opinion, he says empirically tractable. Thus the inability the inability to falsify by what means based on your views. Could we falsify your claims. I love this accusation because it gets right to the heart of what we talk about all the time. It’s a very interesting accusation actually and it’s one that if I could just drop a name for a moment. My good old friend Professor Richard Dawkins in a in a debate that I did on BBC radio ulster. He kept accusing me of that. He said at one point in the debate, he said this man, every time you say something to him, he keeps going back to the bible. Why do you do that paul? Why do you keep going back to the scripture in order to make your claim? Because it’s necessary to go back to the bible. And that’s why it’s a good foundation for everything we believe. And the point is, it is our priests opposition. But what we need to understand as well is that people like Richard Dawkins and dare I say it? Like this question actually have their own presuppositions Exactly, right. And this really is atheist greatest fear is that we as christians, will doggedly stick to the bible, can you say doggedly? I think so, yes, doggedly. We stick 100% with God’s word. And what he says, because that is the revealed word to us, that is where truth comes from. It is as you said, our presupposition. And so their fear in any argument is that you stick to God’s word, because soon as we leave God’s word, we have lost the debate, haven’t we? We have. And you know, this is something that we really want to explain to out there, those, those of you who are supporters and you want to know how to how to discuss these issues, how to debate these issues and I come across so many creationists who are very, very well meaning, but the first thing to start with is let’s hammer the evidence, you know, and even have someone criticizing this on on our facebook page saying, you know, I don’t want to do this your way, I want to do it this way, I want to present the evidence that will undermine immediately their argument and in theory it sounds very good and it’s it’s done for well meaning purposes. I understand why such people are doing these things, but it is the wrong way because what you’re actually doing then, if you’re trying to present evidence to persuade that unbeliever that God exists and that the bible is true and that creation is right and evolution is false, what you are doing in effect is putting God on trial because you present evidence to a judge and it’s the judge then who makes a decision based on that evidence and that’s not what we should be doing. You know, I know for several years, I was very frustrated with the evidential conversion because I wasn’t people, we’re not converting to Christianity and I’m the one of all this evidence going, why don’t you guys see the truth and they would not, they refused to see the truth, Jason lyle hits it on the head in his book, the ultimate proof of creation a great book that’s available at, you can get that at Creation Creation creation story dot org. Yes, that is a shameless plug on page 35 of this book, he outlines the unbelievers desire to get us to go to neutral ground. He wants us to go and say, look, leave God’s word. Let’s talk about the science. Let’s talk about this on neutral ground. The problem is there’s no such thing as neutral ground. That’s right. As soon as you step off the bible as your foundation, you haven’t gone on to neutral ground, you’ve gone onto the enemy’s territory. You’re arguing from their point of view. So you have actually conceded the argument. The whole point is our declaration that God’s word is true. And as soon as you step off that you’ve conceded that maybe God’s word isn’t true because we don’t need it to make the argument. So, unfortunately, what many of us do is we step into that neutral ground. And I remember trying to do this for years, paul saying, okay, if they say I don’t believe the bible is true, then let’s set the bible aside and let’s argue just the evidence. It doesn’t work, friend, I’ve got years of telling you of experience telling you that argument that method just simply does not work. Me too. And you know, this is this is how so many of us as creationists have presented, presented things in the past. So you say how can you falsify our claims when you can’t actually because the bible is true. So there is going to be no falsification of the claim because it is the presupposition on which we build it is the ultimate proof of creation really is the ultimate proof. And that’s what this comes down to. This is why we use this approach in talking to Unbelievers. I love what you said there, paul, you don’t go to the unbeliever with lots of evidence because that puts them in the judge’s seat. Instead we need to put them on trial and put God and let God continue to be the judge that he is and judge us for our sins. You know, a lot of people going to the scripture though, you can talk about books like this, How do we know the bible is true. A new book by ken ham and uh bodie Hodges and I know you wrote a couple of chapters in this, you wrote a couple chapters that we’re gonna be talking about in the next couple of segments. Right, okay, I jumped the gun on that. Well, that is a really good segment. Um we got a couple more questions we want to get into. I want you to realize the Atheist biggest fear is that you will stick to God’s word as your absolute ultimate authority. Don’t ever ever leave your authority. Trust in jesus christ and what he said, a a mhm Yeah, mm hmm. Okay, welcome back you’re watching Creation today with me paul, taylor and eric husband and what we’ve been talking about the bible and its authority and how you need to rest on the authority of the bible. And that’s the case with every sort of question. You have, even questions that appear to be more generally scientific and at first sight appears that they’ve got no scriptural basis to them. Got to continue to go to scripture. I know in several past episodes, especially recently, we’ve discussed this in depth. How do you use this apologetic? How do you stick to God’s word when arguing with an unbeliever that says I don’t believe in God’s word. And you can go to Creation today dot org to check out those episodes this week, continue to discuss that. And we had a couple of episodes with Our Good Friend citing Bruggen Cate So please look those up because we went into the presupposition all apologetic approach and its superiority really over the evidential ist apologetic approach. And if you want to see this approach in action, I really encourage you to get the unbelievable debate series that sided because he really he used this approach. He didn’t go based on evidence. He took the legs out from under the atheist pallbearers worldview by showing him that nothing makes sense. He can’t have any absolute truth without the God of the bible and he lives his life based on the fact that there are absolute truths, otherwise, you couldn’t do anything with absolute certainty. So, taking a drink of water, how do I know that water isn’t gonna change into something else? I gotta use faith. And I’m basing that on God and his word, not on anything else. Absolutely. Right. Yes. I believe there may be some sort of conference coming up on a similar subject. There is we’ve got a conference called proof of God. I’m glad you mentioned that proof of God. Conference. That’s going to be in Orlando florida, coming up on March 16th and 17th. Right? Because we haven’t mentioned that for 10 minutes. So we haven’t it is going to be good. So, you’re gonna want to make sure and check out when it’s available, which it’s not right now, proof. Conference dot com proof conference dot com. Coming soon to a website near you. Well, how about another question, Alright, David writes in he says, I heard a recent debate where an atheist said that the first law of thermodynamics proves that matter is eternal, that it was never created, and then it will never be destroyed. Can you comment on that? Or direct me somewhere on your website or another website to help me with this. All right. So, what about the second Law? Uh excuse me. First Law of thermodynamics. What is the first law? First of all, I think we should talk about the first law of thermodynamics. We should talk about the second law of thermodynamics as well, because they’re related. And and people just don’t understand these terms. And it’s thermo thermo dynamics. Thermo meaning hot if you don’t drop it, dynamics meaning work. So it’s a it’s a relationship between heat and work. There used to be some old comics singers back in Britain who did a whole song called the Second Law of Thermodynamics song. But really you can find that on Youtube because I’m sure it’s as good as you’re telling me it is. But the first law of thermodynamics is the idea that heat and work our equivalent, the idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but simply changes from one form to another. So, for example, supposing you’ve got a typical energy changing device, for example, an elastic banding stretched between the fingers. I like elastic bands being stretched. That’s that’s why I use this analogy. So that has got a form of energy in its potential energy. And in fact, there are certain people I believe who even have an an extra way of doing it. So there’s twice as much potential energy on one side as the other. If you haven’t learned the scientific way to shoot a rubber band, you’ve got to get the magic tricks video available at Creation Store dot org because we teach the scientific way to shoot it and it goes four times farther than anybody else’s which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Go ahead paul. Well, that’s got potential energy in it because the elastic has been stretched, but it’s not moving. It’s not doing anything. The energy is in the elastic by virtue of being stretched against the force you let go of the elastic band and the potential energy changes into movement energy. So you haven’t lost energy. You haven’t gained energy, you haven’t lost it. There has simply been a change from one sort to the other. And basically every machine that we have is for that purpose to change the energy from one thing to another. Do you think of just a fire, for example, chemical energy in the wood or the coal that you’re burning, turning into heat energy, correct? So that’s the first, that’s the first law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics related to it, is this that actually of course, that elastic band doesn’t keep moving forever, right? Everything tends toward disorder. And of course, what happens is that the elastic band will hit something and you’ll hear a sound. And also, maybe the elastic band has got very, very slightly warm. You’ve had a really accurate thermometer, you may be able to measure that. It’s just increased in temperature a bit. You can’t do anything with that very low temperature heat, but it’s there. The fire, not all the chemical energy from the cold gets turned into heat. There is some that’s wasted some of it. You’re not it’s not heating you, It’s heating up the air around and and so on. It’s waste is always wasted energy. And that measure of wasted energy which scientists like to call entropy. That’s what the second law of thermodynamics is about. Which says the entropy is constantly increasing. That in every energy change, there is always some wasted energy, not that it’s lost, but that it’s gone into a form that can no longer be used. So his question, is it possible that the first law of thermodynamics proves that matter is eternal? Well, the answer to that is if you took God out of the equation, I guess it would. But that’s the whole point of the whole point is that it doesn’t prove any such thing, because these scientific laws are in place because God put them there. And of course the one person who is not bound by those laws then is God. And of course we use that as a very, very strong evidence that jesus it was, and is God, you know, jesus turned water into wine. So he turned molecules of H 20 into molecules of C two H five oh H. Where did the sea molecule, where did the c atoms come from? The carbon atoms created from nothing by the creator God. He can do that. And I hear this argument a lot really? What it comes down to is if you take God out of the equation, you must have matter itself. The eternal matter is now your God. So you’re not at all an atheist by any stretch of the imagination, you’ve just put Godlike properties on matter itself, allowed Matter to create things, allowed Matter to exist forever. These are properties of God. So, and of course, you can’t, as we’re just saying, you can’t have the second law of thermodynamics without that, with the first law of thermodynamics, a bigger problem without the second law. So there’s always going to be this wasted energy. So therefore, if matter had been eternal, you would have expected everything to run down by now anyway, so it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t happen now. Here’s what the Atheists say. They’ll say, oh, well, those laws only apply to a closed system, and we are an open system. We’ve got energy coming in from the Sun. So because we’re an open system, those laws don’t apply. Yes. See evolution clearly defines the second law of thermodynamics, as you say, many, many Atheists will say, well, that doesn’t apply because you’ve got the sun. But they see the Sun’s energy is not you can’t just utilize it. You can’t just pour energy in. You might as well say that I could just plug a simple plug and some wires into the into the socket and expect therefore, a vacuum cleaner to run by itself. I’ve got to have the machine attached will therefore be able to do the tidying up, it’s got to be that system, and when you look at the whole system as a whole. When you look at each individual molecule, you can see it’s a closed system, you cannot get the order there. The information just by having the sun beating down on the adding energy is destructive without a complex mechanism to harness that energy, I could throw a hand grenade into a room. It’s not going to clean the room up is, but if I put the energy through a complex mechanism like a kid, which is pretty nice, I can put the kid in there and tell them, hey kid, go clean your room. Now you’re harnessing that energy, not to mention the fact we are not a closed system or we’re not an open system. Were a closed system alright enough about the Second law of thermodynamics. Another question, right after this, A welcome back to the creation Today’s show. Atheists cannot stand it when you stick with God’s word, make sure and do that and don’t forget it. And can we clarify as well from the last segment that we were not advocating throwing a little boy into the room after a hand grenade. Oh no, not after the hand grenade, It’s to clean the room. That’s right. And if he doesn’t, God tells you to do something about that, spare the rod spoil the child, something like that. Then you throw the hand grenades, pull the pin on the boy. Anyway, I think we ought to go to another question, john writes this, he says not really a question, but a statement. Is this a critique again? It is really says the word in Genesis. Chapter one verse to the word was in the beginning was ashes. Not it’s in the verse too, isn’t it? In the beginning? The earth was without form and void. He says it’s the word higher and it should have been translated as became the same word was used in Genesis chapter 19 verse 26. And he looks at up as the strongest number 1961 And also also strong’s number 5027. For those people want to look those up. You guys actually look those numbers up. You guys look at the strong numbers. I like it. But most people they don’t know about you guys, even when the strongest numbers are. Well, I find them quite useful on seriously on on software. I find the book too difficult to use. But I do have a large strong’s concordance and I use it to be able to get up onto the top shelf. But let me give you a hint, blue letter bible dot com Go there. It will give you the Strong’s word. You click on that number. That word that he’s talking about and it shows you the other places that same exact word is used in the scripture as well as that’s that’s what it’s for. So that you can trace where a particular hebrew or greek word is used without having to know the hebrew or the greek correct. So the point in genesis chapter 19 verse 26 it’s talking about Lot’s wife turning around, she looked back and his wife from behind him and she became a pillar of salt and he says quite rightly that the word she became there is the word higher and therefore says that that’s the word that should be in genesis chapter one verse two. So genesis chapter one verse two, he says, should be translated and the earth became void and without farm dot form. Darkness was on the face of the deep and therefore, if it became without form and void, that means there must be some gap there. That’s the point. That’s what he’s trying to push in there is the gap theory. That’s right. So it’s basically his argument is in favor of the gap theory. Now, really what we need to look at here and this is why it is useful to have the strongest numbers to some extent. Because if you look at the strongest number, you will see that the the hebrew word higher does have a range of meanings. Now, you’re more of an expert on hebrew than I am here to jump into this point. But if you have more than one, meaning one of those meanings is going to be the usual meanings. That right? The first and most important meaning other meanings are ones that you would have only of the context demands it. But the context would let you know exactly what that’s going to be exactly, that’s the point. So, in Genesis chapter 19 we can see that the context is that although the word higher can mean was or became In Genesis 19 verse 26, the context clearly is that she became, you could read it like this, that his wife looked back from behind him and she was a pillar of salt, correct and that would work. But clearly in our heads we understand that to mean she became a pillar of salt. She wasn’t and now she is, Yes, she wasn’t a pillar of salt. Now she is a pillar of salt. Yes, it became so the context is became but only because that’s the secondary meaning. You can’t then take that as a secondary meaning and place it somewhere where the context says nothing about that because clearly where he’s talking about it coming from in genesis the first time it’s used and the earth was without form and void. It does not necessarily mean became foreman voice. The whole reason they want to switch that to the word became is so that they can say it was all good and then it got destroyed. And hence that’s where the gap theory comes in to play. Now you’ve got to really understand as well. There is a priest oppositional elements in this word always comes in. The whole idea originated with thomas Chalmers, it wasn’t there in earlier than thomas Chalmers date now, thomas Chalmers was a very godly man and said a lot of great things. That was an interesting anecdote actually about our friend Todd Friel really hammering home at some point that thomas Chalmers had made in a, in a conference, major conference and he was saying that you can believe this fellow because he’s he’s dead and therefore you can, you can trust everything he said. And afterwards, one of the other speakers who happened to be another friend of ours, ken, ham took him aside and, you know, thomas Chalmers invented the gap theory. So the point is, thomas was wrong. Todd Friel of Wretched Radio was wrong about I’ll come back to you, okay, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But the point is that Chalmers had a presupposition he was embarrassed on this issue, although it’s a very Godly man, he was embarrassed because he he knew that some scientists have got these ideas and millions of years. So he was looking at scripture to see where there’s millions of years could be. And here was his answer. So, we put a gap in there of the long period of time just to try to coincide with the, this current science that was coming available. His authority therefore was from outside scripture. I don’t think he really, really understood that and I don’t really think he did it fully deliberately, but that’s where his authority is coming from, from outside scripture. I think it’s the same today. I think many people out there that believe in the gap there and you probably have dealt with people that are saying, well hang on, can’t creation and evolution both be true. Can’t the old Earth and God’s word both be true. The problem is we are coming about it to say that you are not using the bible scripture, God’s word as your authority. We are now taking on outside influences such as modern science and modern science has been wrong many, many times and the wrong about the age of the earth for example. Right now remember we’re gonna take our cue from scripture itself and what scripture itself said and this is one of the beauties actually of the King James version in Genesis chapter one at this point because you’ve got the word and very, very frequently and there is a reason for it. It’s not just archaic language at this point in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the earth and this and that and that and the word and they’re represents the fact that there is no punctuation there in the hebrew and in fact the way it reads is pretty much breathless. So it’s like it’s just one continuous sentence. It’s saying, hey, there’s no gaps here. This is one thing to get directly following another, directly following another directly follow another really. If you wanted a gap between verse one and verse two, you have to have a gap halfway through verse two as well and a gap between verse two and verse three in order to every single place that it’s there. But the word and just gives us that impression of breathlessness, there is no pause there and therefore there is no gap. Well, we keep going back to the authority of scripture and kim ham and bodie Hodges just authored another book. Man. They write a lot, of course, they use other people like paul here to help them. Right, And you’ve got a couple of chapters in here and one of them is on, I wrote a chapter in there called Did Miracles Really Happen? And I also wrote a chapter jointly, jointly with bodie Hodge on the three days between jesus dying and rising again. What day did jesus die? What they did? You write your chapter is only one page long. That’s just must be a misprint, but a great book that’s available. And where does the creation story of this one? It’s going to It’s going to if it doesn’t, you can get some answers in genesis or master books would have that, but hopefully we’ll get that at the creation store soon. That’s right. You got another thing. Well we’re running out of time. So I think we should just say that’s the end of our show and thank you very much for listening. If you’ve got any questions, then you can address them two questions at Creation today dot org or join us on twitter at Creation today or facebook creation today forward slash facebook forward slash creation today or something like that. You can tune in each episode to see if we’ve had time to answer your questions, which we encourage you to continue sending us. We certainly certainly appreciate it. This has been a production of God Quest ministries, God bless! 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