Lesson 4 - What Effects Does Evolutionary Theory Have Upon the Modern Agenda?

© 2017, Charles A. Clough

Thinking More Deeply About the Bible, Science, Reason, & Language

What Effects Does Evolutionary Theory Have Upon the Modern Agenda?

Beth Haven Church Creation Conference
Charles Clough Lesson 4
May 14, 2017
www.bibleframework.org

Let’s open with a word of prayer.

“Father, we’re so thankful that You have provided a means of fellowship through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank You for His sacrificial death on the Cross on our behalf and that our relationship with You through Him is not founded on any human work but on His completely finished work. We thank You therefore that it is all of grace and that we cannot add to that package by our own efforts.

“And we ask that You today, this morning, would help us with Your indwelling Spirit; that we would have the concentration and be able to follow Your glory in the creation around us and that You would give us the insights to see the trustworthiness that You have demonstrated down through the centuries in verifying every word of the inspired Scripture. We pray that this would be a powerful, relaxing foundation on which we build our lives day after day, in contrast to the surrounding world system that would undo everything we stand for.

“But we know that Your Son is seated at Your right hand, far above all principalities, powers, might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come, and it’s in His name we look to You. In Christ, Amen.”

You know in the speaking of Mother’s Day, it’s very interesting that there used to be the saying that “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” and the role of the mother has been again depreciated in our culture, but over the years it’s been proven that the mother is the one that is most influential on the children. And so for Christian mothers it’s a big challenge and increasingly more of a challenge because your children are immersed in a culture that is anti-biblical.

We’re not trying to be paranoid about this but in Deuteronomy 6, Moses directs the mom and the dad to sit down with their children and teach them. And it’s interesting that in Israel the context of Deuteronomy 6 is the Shema; it is the basic core of Jewish belief. “The Lord our God is one God”, and obviously after Moses says that, the next question would be, well, if that’s our faith, if that’s a statement of our Jewish faith, then how do we get that faith into the next generation? The answer he gives right in Deuteronomy 6: You will discuss every day, whatever happens, in the light of the Word of God.

What happens in our culture is there is so little time for family gathering. It used to be that everybody had supper together and the supper table was a good time to just discuss what went on that day and everybody would be at one place, at one time, for at least 45 minutes. Today, and I’m working with the ladies that are trying to get some Framework material for kids and families, they say that the problem now is that nobody has supper together. At supper time you’ve got to compete with Judy who is out doing hockey, somebody else is doing baseball, and the sports have culturally invaded the supper time.

So here’s a basic tool of family education gone because the culture rips it apart, not intentionally, it just happens that way, but we have to as Christians trying to raise the next generation—and remember, the church is only one generation away from extinction—to raise the next generation requires an awful lot of parenting work.

So with that if you’ll take out your handout I want to just quickly review the previous three sessions and what we have accomplished in those sessions. Remember in the first session we talked about this diagram, the limitations of knowledge, and we won’t go into all the details today, but there’s an awful lot of information packed into that diagram. The crucial thing about the diagram is the fact that when we talk about “past”, the unobserved past, we have to rely on conjecture because there are no observations; there are no direct measurements of that past, and that means right away that historical science cannot be the same as operational science.

To follow, we have two views in the world, and one of the things in our second session when we were talking about the age of the earth, we noted that paganism over here—the belief in the continuity of being—all we mean by continuity of being is that rocks, animals, plants, gods and goddesses, they’re all part of nature. There’s nothing higher than nature. Nature is all there is, and paganism has always believed that.

The thing to understand when we get to the age of the earth and those kind of chronological questions is that paganism always has believed in an old earth, and that’s something people forget. We think that the old earth idea started with geology. No, it did not. It preceded, by at least 3,000 years. Modern geology because Hinduism, as Carl Sagan himself said, believed almost in an eternal universe that would go through; the Hindu picture was a rope that you untwine the rope and then you tighten the twine and that was their picture of the eternal universe.

Paganism historically has always believed in an old earth, and so we wanted to make that point so that it doesn’t appear like science invented this. This is just the pagan belief and is the alternative to the Creator/creature distinction.

So that was the second session and going down the diagram on page one we go to page two and that, remember, was the triangle. That’s the design of how God made us and how God made nature. That diagram shows why we can see and understand nature. We are created, as Genesis 2 says, we are created to be “namers” and those who subdue and manage the nature around us.

And then on page two we had those two slides with the quotes, and those quotes do not come from creationists—they come from the natural science people and I wanted to show that.

Then we have the verses from Job 38 and 2 Peter 1 and then we come to the conclusion on page three where the historical science is very worldview-dependent, and we’ve gone through that a number of times.

Then we have the quotes; we have the candle clock; and the reason why I showed this wasn’t to have a math class, it was just simply to show that you can’t calculate age if you don’t have values to plug into the equations. You can’t solve an equation with three or four unknowns. You have got to put values into those numbers, and when you plug values into the numbers in order to solve the equation, you’re bringing your worldview in because your worldview determines the range of values. So that’s important.

And I might add that a gentleman came up here earlier just before we started and reminded me that even if you took the constancy of rate, i.e., that rates have never changed in any of these processes, you still could come out with a young earth because there are clocks and the sun is burning up. The sun is not an infinite supply of energy. In fact it’s been measured that the diameter of the sun is shrinking, very slowly, but it’s shrinking because it’s running out of energy. The sun isn’t going to be there forever. So we have those running-down systems.

We have the fact that if you take the population growth of the Jews from Abraham (around 2000 BC) up until now—let us think about population growth and let’s use Jews as a clock because we know when they started. They started with Abraham. So if you start with the initial condition of Abraham and you know the totality of the number of Jewish people on earth today, and we do, you can compute the growth population.

Henry Morris did this years and years ago. You get an average rate, and it’s a good rate. It’s conservative because think of how many Jews have been murdered down in history, so it’s not like this is a population growing very fast. But you take that growth rate and you say to yourself, okay, we’ve got a rate of the growth of the Jews from about 2000 BC until now, so that is about a 4,000-year sample.

Now if you take that same rate and you project it back from the world population it shows that the human race couldn’t have been around for more than 6,000 or 7,000 years because if the human race were around, at that rate we would be on top of each other; we’d be overpopulated everywhere.

So what do you do with that clock? We’re using uniformitarian rates. You have the sediment that’s going into the sea. You have the mutation rate—every child has about hundred mutations more than mom or dad did. Now it turns out that most of those are harmless, but the accumulation of mutation rates in the human race would make us all genetic freaks if we were around for a million years.

So these are some areas where even if you don’t change the rates you’re still in trouble. I want you to see that this business of having clocks is a very, very tenuous situation because of the rate issue.

We also talked about uniformitarianism and how that was a very slippery word and it took 150 years to define. Now think about this: here we have a controversy that brought old earth into the entire educational establishment—brought into the so-called science, the historical science; the whole idea of an old earth; and they weren’t even clear on what they meant by uniformitarianism.

It took Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard University in 1960 to clarify what that noun meant. You can’t have clear-thinking people if you don’t understand the nouns in the words that you’re using to talk with and to think with.

These are the things that we’ve gone over. And let me go back to this one so I don’t get ahead of myself.

Then finally on your handout on pages four and five there were the clocks. We had concluded on page five the geologic column and the problems of the geologic column and that the facts in the column aren’t the problem, it’s the interpretation of the facts where we differ.

On page six I gave you the history of geology and showed the heroic age of geology from 1790 to 1820. The importance of why I put those dates in there is because I want you to see that the old earth position, when it mushroomed into our culture here in Western civilization, preceded Darwin and I’m making that point because now in this session I’m going to show why certain Christian evangelical scholars have not understood this. They haven’t looked at the calendars to check the dates and I’ll show you this as we go on today.

Let’s move now and on the handout we’re going to go to page seven; the last section. We’ve done the introduction review; we talked about the religion of naturalism—that it is a religion and why is it a religion. It is a religion because it is making three categories of statements:

1. It’s defining what reality is, and that’s a theological problem because a naturalist is saying that God is not there. Is that or is that not a theological claim? It’s a theological claim.
2. Then it makes an epistemological claim; that we can know the relationship between God and nature. That’s a universal theological claim.
3. Then finally it’s an ethical claim isn’t it? When they say religion should not, should not, should not influence science. Every time we use “ought” or “should,” now think about this: those two verbs it ought to be or it ought not to be; you are making an ethical claim. It doesn’t matter who you are; it doesn’t matter what the subject is. Whenever should or ought are used an ethical claim is being made, and in polite conversation we have the right to ask, “What is your standard that you were applying to make your shoulds and your oughts? Where is your standard? Let’s go back to what the standard of reference is.”

Frequently, of course, in unbelief what you ultimately come up with when you ask people the question is, “Well that’s just what I believe.” Well if that’s what you believe that’s fine, but that’s a subjective statement. We’re not asking for your opinion on what ought or should be, we’re asking for the objective standard that you are using to decide what ought and what should be.

Well, the Bible gives us that standard but if you don’t believe the Bible, I don’t know where you’re going to get a universal statement because we have finite minds and finite minds can’t generate universals. The Scriptures are so necessary for everything.

Now what I want to do in this session is move to evangelical compromise and that is that the religion of naturalism under the guise of science has deceived Christian scholars.

Yesterday Dr. Baurain went through details of the “gap theory,” the “day age theory,” and he went through all of those compromises that had been done. These were all compromises that actually began back in 1820–1850; they’re not new. They started back then because of the dates of the Genesis geology debate. Those started before Darwin. Evolution had nothing to do with it. It was geology; that was the problem there.

So since he’s done all that for me we don’t have to worry about it, but what I’m going to do now is I want to show you a systematic error that’s being made by today’s evangelical scholars. I’m going to show you two quotes and I want to spend a few minutes here on these quotes because I want to show you an error that has crept into these quotes. This is (William A.) Dembski (b. 1960); Dembski is an evangelical; he wrote a book: The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World, (2009), and he’s done some good work in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, but I want you to watch and let’s unravel his statement here and think about it.

“I myself would adopt [young-earth] creation in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it … In our current mental environment, informed as it is by modern astrophysics and geology, the scientific community as a whole regards young-earth creationism as untenable.”

Now keep in mind that he is not an evolutionist; he’s an Intelligent Design man and he is trying to deal with evolution, i.e., the change in the botanical and the zoological realm. But notice he’s omitted the fact that naturalism preceded Darwin. So now what he’s saying is: I would adopt young-earth creation in a heartbeat. So he has no problem with Intelligent Design and creation regarding biological changes. That doesn’t bother him. What bothers him is that it appears to him that science today believes in an old earth. But if you have an old earth you can’t accept the Genesis text in a straightforward fashion.

But let’s look at the presuppositions here, “In our current mental environment, informed as it is by modern astrophysics and geology, the scientific community as a whole regards young-earth creationism as untenable.” How are they informed? They are informed by modern astrophysics and geology.

Let’s go back to the slide when we talked about uniformity. Is Dembski, when he makes the statement, is he accepting or is he carefully distinguishing between operational science and historical science? What’s strange is he seems to distinguish operational interests and investigations in the biological realm from historical Darwinian stuff in the biological world. He seems able to grasp that difference, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact that the problem isn’t with Darwin. The problem goes back further than Darwin and it’s in the area of the age of the earth and the age of the universe inferred by historical scientific interpretation of the rocks and various clocks.

Let me go back and forth between these two slides here a minute … see where he says, “In our current mental environment informed by;” now look what he says it’s informed by: astrophysics and geology. Do you see any kind of adjective in front of geology here that would distinguish between, say, a petroleum geologist and a historical geologist? See what’s happening? You’ve got a noun without a qualifying adjective.

Let’s go backwards again to this slide. See what Google did at Harvard? They did everybody a favor and nobody reads the guy. The uniformity of law, apparently from Dembski, he thinks that natural science is a physical law; astrophysics, he says. See mentally he has in mind the uniformity of law, but the problem is the old earth didn’t come about just with the uniformity of natural law. It came about with some further content to the noun. It was loaded with these other two meanings, namely uniformity of process “kinds”, that in the past, the kinds of processes that were working then are identical to the kinds of processes working today—the doctrine of actualism.

Another part of the meaning of the noun “uniformitarian”, i.e., the uniformity of process rates, is that the rates were always the same. You see, this is where you get in trouble if you start making statements with nouns and you’re fuzzy about the meaning of the noun. You can’t use the noun with meaning number one, and then you skip to meaning number two or meaning number three. That’s illegitimate, that’s equivocation, that’s an error.

Going back now to the slide we were looking at this morning here, we have the guy (Dembski), and bless his heart, the guy’s done some great work in Intelligent Design, but the problem is he doesn’t seem to distinguish what he has already done in Intelligent Design in rejecting Darwinian notion and then he loads it with this: modern astrophysics and geology.

The scientific community as a whole regards young earth creationism untenable and by the way, that last statement is another illegitimate appeal. Notice the word, scientific community as a “whole”. Maybe there are skeptics in it; how you know that? You see there’s another logical fallacy and it’s the idea that you are appealing to authority in a blanket-type way.

Now let’s come down and look at Dr. Geisler’s statement in his book, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, (1999). He makes the same mistake Dembski is doing. “Most scientific evidence sets the age of the world at billions of years.” Why is that true? He’s already rejected naturalism in the area of biology. Why does he have a problem rejecting naturalism in the area of geology? See, it’s a halfway house and it’s amazing to me that evangelical scholars are in a halfway house here. This is why they still haven’t clarified and still make fun of us because we believe the Word of God literally. Enough said for that; religious, the evolutionary history, the effects it has on religion and naturalism in the guise of science has deceived Christian scholars.

Now I want to conclude with another section and that is the modern consequences of historical conjectures, Notice we are calling it conjectures. Folks we’re not just talking here about Genesis 1–11 as a Bible issue. When I use the term “Bible issue” I’m talking about the religious area. If the Bible is what the Bible claims to be, It is speaking to all knowledge in every subject area. That’s why we started the first session with Colossians 2:3.

What kind of knowledge and truth is contained in Jesus Christ, Paul asks, just religious truth or all truth? All truth is, meaning that every subject has to be brought into submission to the Word of God because God alone has an infinite mind. God is the Creator and He expects us to interpret the reality around us in terms that He has given. That’s the authority of Scripture over all of our life, whether it’s economics; whether it’s politics; whether it’s history; whatever it is.

That’s why my website, www.bibleframework.com, comes out of the frustration of trying to work with college students for years. I saw college students raised by godly parents, they knew their Bible, and they would come to a secular university and get smashed because they couldn’t see how the Bible related to calculus; they couldn’t see how the Bible related to chemistry; they couldn’t see how the Bible related to the subject materials and they were disarmed because they hadn’t thought through these basic assumptions going on in the subject. I don’t fault the Christian parents. These kids weren’t homeschooled. Homeschooling didn’t catch on back in those days.

What was happening was godly parents were trusting the school education system to take care of the job and what they were in essence doing was contracting out their Deuteronomy 6 responsibilities. It’s not the state that has ultimate authority over your children, you do as mom and dad.

That’s another legal issue that we’re fighting in the courts right now: Does the state have authority over children that it delegates to you, as mom and dad, or do you have the final authority over your children that you delegate to the state? Which way does it go? It’s a political question folks, and by the way, Deuteronomy 6 answers that political question.

So the kids would come to university, and it’s not that they rejected the faith, they were just troubled by this environment and so I decided we would go through the Scriptures and we would relate not all the details, but the major events of the Scripture, and show how those events impact all kinds of ideas.

So what I want to do now, on point four of page seven, is I want to just briefly touch on why what we’re talking about in this Creation conference has widespread implications.

First one: medical research. I have a son who is an MD surgeon. My wife is a retired RN. So we’ve seen the medical profession inside. The problem throughout the history of medicine is that if you accept evolution, how is your view of the human body different? If I accept creation, what does Psalm 139 say about the human body? It says that we are marvelously made; marvelously made; created by God. If you are an evolutionist what is your human body? It’s the million-year accumulated debris of chance processes.

Do you know where that medically impacts healthcare? When they look at the human body, any organ or any function that is not clearly understood becomes a vestigial legacy of evolution. In other words, they are meaningless junk that’s accumulated over millions of years of trial and error and evolution.

When I was young the appendix was supposed to be a vestigial organ that was absolutely useless; it has no function and tonsils were looked upon as a vestigial organ that has nothing to do with anything. So if you got a sinus infection they just ripped out the tonsils.

Well it just turned out that the generation that lost their tonsils was the also the generation that had polio; iron lungs and all of that was almost an epidemic. I was raised fearing the iron lung. We had pictures in school about the iron lung and what can happen if you have polio. Well do you know what happened after they got the Salk vaccine [Jonas Salk (1914–1995) and Albert Sabin (1906-1993)]? They did a little research and discovered the tonsils really aren’t a vestigial organ. They’re part of your immune system, and within the tonsils was the breeding ground for anti-polio.

So here was a major medical issue that was a mistake born of the idea that there’s junk in the human body. Now if you read Psalm 139, God doesn’t make junk. Every part of your body and my body has a function. Now it may be in disrepair, it may be hurt by the Fall, but the design of every organ and every process in your body comes from God the Creator and it is not junk. And even if we don’t understand it, that is no excuse to kiss it off as debris from millions of years of evolution and you’re going to be in trouble because your idea of health is so truncated by your belief in evolution.

I’ll give you another example: when (James) Watson (b.1928) and (Francis Harry Compton) Crick (1916–2004) did that work with DNA. They had the helix and had the whole thing—all of a sudden we were told that we’re the product of our genes. Well now it turns out that isn’t really so because ICR, the Institute for Creation Research (www.icr.org), has been doing a lot of work recently in genetics and the genome and there’s an amazing thing in the genome.

You’ve heard that chimpanzees and man are 97% the same, yeah, in the section that deals with the fact that we have hands and we have legs. Yes, that’s similar, but there’s a whole bunch of other stuff. And guess what the name of the other stuff in the genome was called when they first got into genetics? Junk DNA. We did the same thing to DNA that we were doing with the tonsils and the appendix because we can’t think clearly about what the body is! And God’s creation and God created this.

Now it turns out we talk about epi-genetics, i.e., when, for example, a man eats a tomato; we know all of us guys need lycopene for our prostate gland. There are 300 switches that are thrown when you eat a tomato. Your stomach chemically recognizes this, it communicates to the rest of the system electrically and chemically, and all of a sudden the genes are switched on and off. There are certain switches that go on. It’s not junk DNA.

Those are switches that are turning genes to be active or turning genes to be passive. Why did we call it junk DNA? Because we’re evolutionists. There is debris that has accumulated in our bodies because of this. So long story short, we have a contamination in the corruption of healthcare directly attributable to the belief in evolution.

Some of you are aware of the ICR video on the human body. My son went to see one of the first lectures that were later filmed to make that video. The first film deals with the 48 hours between the time a baby is in the womb until the baby is born. This engineer (Dr. Randy Guliuzza), he’s a Professional Engineer and an MD, and he sees things as a Bible-believing Christian about the design of the body. You know what he said?

He goes through the entire set that’s happening and we take childbirth kind of, well, it’s been always there, but he said, “Think about this: the baby inside the womb is in an all-water environment, it’s getting its food through the placenta and it’s getting its oxygen through the placenta. Then the baby comes out and is in an air-breathing environment. Now what happens to its food supply and how does it get oxygen?” Have you thought about the fact of the modifications?

You listen to this 45-minute lecture and you’re thinking, Holy Mackerel, valves have to change, the heart has to be reconfigured, the lungs have to be reconfigured, and all that has to happen in the act of childbirth. That is a functioning, complicated system and it can’t be partially working. Evolution says well we get this little piece and later we’ll add this piece; you can’t do that. The baby as it’s being born has to have a complete change. You can’t have partial change or the baby would die. All those functions have to function and function perfectly. That is Psalm 139:14; we “are fearfully and wonderfully made”, and only now, only now are we learning the details of this.

Do you see what I’m saying? Today we know more details about God’s creation than any generation of Christians all the way back to Jesus’ day and yet here we are fumbling around. We can’t read Genesis, for heaven’s sake. We have more details, and this is why some of you young people ought to go into science—you ought to be in the forefront of some of these discoveries and if you can’t be in science then support those who are doing it in creation work because these are worshipful discoveries. We should be worshiping these discoveries.

We should see that film; that magnificent set of lectures about how a baby changes from being in all water entity to an all air entity, and he does it within hours and if the switches don’t change, his heart doesn’t change, his lung system doesn’t change, he’s dead. It has to function and function perfectly and mom and dad have nothing to do with it; not even the doctors. It’s all done “by itself.” Amazing! That to me is a source of worship of my God and that’s why I say we’re not against science.

Don’t walk away from this conference thinking we’re against science. Science from the biblical point ought to be a vehicle of worship of our Creator.

We go now to psychological dilemmas and the identity crisis. Rosaria Butterfield, I recommend her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (2012). Dr. Butterfield for years was a lesbian activist at the University of Syracuse in New York. She started women’s studies at Harvard University and Harvard asked her to come and set up these kinds of studies. She has a PhD in Queer Theory, which goes into the whole theory of homosexuality.

She by God’s grace has become a Christian. She is now a pastor’s wife. If you read her book you will see how she has thought her way through and she says, “My conversion wasn’t easy. I was the student faculty advisor to six gay groups on the Syracuse University campus. I know what’s going on.” In that book she says, “My conversion was a train wreck—it totally devastated my life and I had to go through years of change.” Long story short, Dr. Butterfield points out something I wish we had known 10 years ago.

What she says is this whole gender crisis, this identity problem goes back to 1890. Before 1890 the two nouns, heterosexuality and homosexuality, did not exist. Prior to 1898 we referred to sodomy, which by the way can happen with a heterosexual or homosexual, was defined in terms of a behavioral act, but in 1890, thanks to romanticism and everybody now looking at their feelings, now we’re going to discuss two classifications:

1. Those people who just prefer socially to interact with their own gender, and;
2. Those who prefer socially to interact with the other gender. Now that’s just all that homosexuality and heterosexual is and that’s what they meant. We’re not talking about physical sex here. That’s the other delusion of these two nouns.

Now if that definition is correct, David and Jonathan were homosexuals; they had a strong male-to-male friendship. Does that make them homosexuals? No, they weren’t doing sodomy. The point was that they cared for one another as guys and guys or girls and girls.

So here we’ve taken innocent social interactions and now we have redefined them and the guy that really did damage was Sigmund Freud. Dr. Butterfield points out how Sigmund Freud destroyed the idea of the human soul.

There are three men that in our real education we should read and I confess I haven’t read all of them:

1. Karl Marx;
2. Charles Darwin, and;
3. Sigmund Freud.

Those three people have changed and altered Western civilization. So we have Sigmund Freud, as Butterfield says, “It used to be thought that we were created in God’s image, male or female, and that we are fallen sinners in need of a Savior. That was our identity and that still is our identity and when we become Christians by God’s grace we have a third layer of identity. We are in Christ.”

That’s the source of identity and the reason we go to those sources of identity is because that is God’s Word telling me and my heart. My identity is not something I create. My identity comes from what God tells me I am and that means the identity crisis that we see in our society comes about now, again, because we’ve rejected the Word of God.

We buy into evolution, and now we’re fumbling around on the basis of our feelings. And the disaster that this is causing young people, this is why suicide rates …

Think about this, here you’re a young person and you’re trying to have your identity and something happens in your life to destroy your particular [identity]. You might be an athlete and you have an injury, that would be an adversity to a normal person, or a Christian. But for you if that destroys your identity you’ve got a life survival problem now. What would have been a minor incident in your life has become a life-transforming disaster and so now we have among young people the second leading cause of death is suicide.

The third thing: nature is more valuable than man. This is the whole environmental movement. I must proceed fast with this. The whole environmental movement places the value of nature over the value of man. Think about it ... you can abort a human fetus but try destroying an eagle egg. Now you tell me what is more valuable. The legislation, we’re talking about political and legal policies, is saying that we are not made in God’s image and superior to nature.

Finally there’s one other slide I wanted to show. Here’s what happens in worship. Look at what happens to the attributes of our Lord. If nature is all there is, then God, who is from eternity to eternity, isn’t there and we substitute deep-time. Deep-time provides a wonderful service—it keeps us separate from creation and also from the return of Christ.

Then we have omnipresence, where God is personally present in our lives everywhere we go every day, versus an impersonal universe. And so we are obsessed with trying to find other forms of life in an impersonal universe. That’s partly a religious quest. It’s a symptom of denying the fact that we have a personal, omnipresent God so we have to look frantically around. We have to use millions and millions of dollars to find life somewhere in the universe because we feel lonely, we’re cosmically lonely.

We have God’s omnipotence; I won’t bother about God’s sovereignty. If you give up personal sovereignty, you wind up with fatalism or a hyper-regulatory state. See what it does to politics? If God is in control they say, “We have to be in control! We’re going to regulate your life!” There are political implications.

Finally love, the last one. God is the source of love. If we don’t believe in the Trinity, with the Father eternally loving the Son and the Son eternally loving the Father, and so on, you have love functioning for all eternity inside the Trinity and then it comes out and He shares His love with us by allowing His Son to pay for our sins—an act of love.

If you don’t have that where do you get love from? You know where you get it from? From other people and other people can’t supply you with enough love. This is what happens oftentimes in an unbelieving marriage where we depend on our spouse to supply the love that God alone is capable of providing. Love cannot be supplied to the degree we need it by somebody else and if you overload someone else with that expectation, you basically ruin the relationship finally. You can’t overload people, expecting them to love you like God alone can love you.

Well, that’s the end and we’re going to end here. Thank you Charlie Clough; let’s end in prayer: “Heavenly Father, thank You for men like Charlie and also for men like Dr. Baurain who have these thoughts and are able to convey them, thoughts concerning our origins and how it is affecting not only our spiritual battles within our societies, but it affects our society as a whole. It affects our politics, our laws, our understanding. Help us to be able to within our minds be more convinced and have more confidence in the understanding of the truth of Genesis. Also Lord, help us to be able to communicate that to a dying world—conviction and truth seasoned with grace and love. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.”