This is the Truth Network. Welcome to If Not Forgot. Stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Can we trust Genesis 1.1.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. All right, Carl Kirby is the former founder, direct founding director of Answers and Genesis and the president and the founder of the ministry Reasons for Hope. He's also the co-creator of the popular debunked video series and co-host of the debunked files podcast. Known for his humor, clarity, and passion for helping people think through faith, truth, and culture, Carl brings a practical and engaging message for audiences of all ages. To find out more about the ministry, you can visit their website, rforh.com.
And Carl, what got you interested in? evangelism and in apologetics.
Well, thanks, Michael, for having me on. You know, it's a weird story. I grew up in the church, but I didn't know Jesus. I mean, I knew ritual. I knew stand up, sit down, meal.
I knew when the offering plate was coming, and we had we just had that pattern down. I didn't get saved until I was twenty six years old. At 26, and that's a long story you don't want to hear. It'd take up your whole podcast or your whole radio show, I should say. I got saved, and my first Sunday school teacher taught me: you take evolution, you put it in the Bible, God used it, God directed it, and that's all I knew.
I was saved. And I was evangelistic. I was sharing. And then I was an air traffic controller. And during that time, before 9-11, we could fly in the cockpit with the pilots for training purposes.
And so I was flying out to Portland, Oregon in the cockpit of a Delta aircraft and Witnessing to the two pilots, and that turns out they were both Christians. And I'm like, are you kidding me? What are the chances of that? And so I started sharing Jesus with them and they started talking about creation and evolution. And so I just threw out my wisdom.
Oh, you take evolution, you put it in the Bible, God used it, God directed it. And the co-pilot, man, he started twitching and jittering. I was like, what in the world? The cockpit's a pretty tight place. And He turned around and he looked at me and he said, Carl, I'm sorry, but that's incorrect.
And I was like, Oh, really? Why? It wasn't like I had a bone to pick. I didn't have anything to throw at anybody. I didn't have any theological training or anything like that.
That's just what my first Sunday school teacher taught me. And he did what I tell people I'm eternally thankful for. He opened the Word of God. He had it right there in his bag by his side. He pulled it out.
And he said, this is what the Word of God says. This is the evolutionary sequence. This is the biblical sequence. And they do not match. And I was literally blown out of the water, Michael.
I'd never seen anybody use the Bible like that. And that started my passion because now I'm like, Hold up. Uh, my Sunday school teacher taught me this, he's teaching me this, the world taught me that. Who's telling me the truth?
So I just started digging and um. Came down to finding out which one really fit with the evidence that we see in the world around us. And it was consistent with what the scripture taught.
So it began a lifelong journey there at age 27 and a half. Yeah. Yeah, well you know when I was a kid, even growing up and even high school and middle school and especially college, we were told that the Christian belief system in creationism, a seven-day literal creation, is inconsistent with science. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I mean, that's probably the norm, even in the churches, unfortunately.
And my challenge is this: it's like, look, I'm not going to tell people that they're not saved if they don't believe in, you know, God created in six days, resting in one, approximately 24-hour days. The earth is young. There's not millions of years. It's not a scientific issue necessarily. And I won't fight with people.
I won't argue with people over that. If somebody challenges me on it, I'll give an answer for the reason for the hope that lies within me with meekness and fear and use the Bible to defend it. But it's a very important issue that I think we do need to address because in some ways it's almost as if. If the God of the Bible used millions of years of death and suffering to get to where we are today, That is really inconsistent with the scripture message that death and suffering came by one man. One man sin came into the world by sin and death.
And so there's a dilemma there. And if I get somebody to the point where, okay, look, Genesis, you don't really have to believe that. It's a good book, spiritual and moral stuff, but it's not real history, which. a vast majority of Christians will take that stand on.
Well, then why should I trust John? All that wonderful theology that we have in John and throughout the whole New Testament is all predicated on the history that was given to us in Genesis. And I'm a simple guy. I really truly am. I'm the son of a professional wrestler, right?
If you grew up around guys with one name like Crusher, Bruiser, Mauler, Sassen, IQ is not stressed in the home.
So trust me, I'm not that bright. But if Jesus and Paul can take Genesis as real history, and their writings make it very clear that they did. This poor pea brain here can take it as real history. And so me, I'm just going to allow God to be God and him to tell me what he did and then take that worldview, go to the world that I live in. What I see in the world, I find is very consistent with what God said and not consistent with millions of years of slow, gradual processes.
Well, so what I mean, when you say the evidence is there, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'd love taking people out. We go dinosaur digging. We get take people down the Grand Canyon.
We take people to museums and zoos and aquariums. And we look at the real evidence. I'm this guy that says, look, if the Word of God is true and trustworthy, what we see should be consistent with what we read.
So let's take a couple of things. We take you out and dig dinosaur bones. When you see the bones that you pull up from the ground, And you think that that is consistent with millions of years of slow gradual processes. It screams absolutely the contrary. I'll never forget, first time I went out to where we dig the dinosaur bones, we were walking in the Hell Creek Formation, which according to the evolutionary model is sixty eight to seventy million years, somewhere in that range.
And we came across a petrified log that was extending out of that layer. And when it had broken off and fallen down, and when we flipped it over on the bottom side of it, there was wood. Good.
Now, this is a log that's been embedded in 68 to 70 million-year-old layers. How in the world does organic material like wood last? It gets even worse. The first dinosaur bone that I ever found myself pulled it out of the ground. I took it down to Glenrose, Texas, about three years ago now.
And they have electron microscopes down there that they took the bone that I found, cut off the tiny, like I think it was three to five micron slices, very small, and ran them under the electron microscopes. And inside of the bone that I discovered, I pulled out of the ground. They found collagen. Blood cl uh blood clots? I mean, in almost every dinosaur bone that you're finding now, you're finding organic material, like blood vessels, red blood cells.
Uh that stuff cannot last millions of years. It just screams contrary to that. I take you down the Grand Canyon, I throw I show you the geologic layers where there's folding and strata.
Now the the evolutionary model will teach you millions of years, slow, gradual processes, all the layer upon layer upon layer, which is over you're over a mile deep in the Grand Canyon at the deepest point. And according to the evolutionary model, there's three miles of dirt above that that's been washed away.
So that's a lot of dirt to laid down over slow, gradual processes, over millions of years. And then I'll take you to a 150-foot section that has all of these very fine layers, and there's two 90-degree folds in it. How do you bend rock? Oh, there's one way, heat. But if you heat sandstone, which this is, up to the point that it will become flexible, it is no longer sandstone.
It's going to metamorphize into another type of rock.
So that is actually Fabulous evidence that these layers lay down very rapidly. And we're still soft, so when you had the uplift, you got a bend in the stratigraphic layers and not a break. That is consistent with what scripture says and not with slow, gradual processes over millions of years.
So to me, again, fall back on what God says. Trust what he says before you start going after a system that changes every time they find a new rock somewhere. Everything we know about evolution is true until we find a new rock, and then that changes everything we've known. God's word's not like that.
So I just tell people: be patient, give scientists time, they'll catch up to reality. And almost every finding they find shows God's word is true. It does. Do do you think the people who are pushing evolution, do you think at least some of them know it's not true? They just may not like Christianity or religion or?
Oh, there's no doubt that that's some of them. I mean, there's quotes that will tell you exactly that. It's like we believe in evolution not because of the evidence, but because the alternative.
So there are literally quotes by evolutionists that will tell you those things, that they do not like the alternative. And if there's a creator that created the way that he said that he did, they are going to be held accountable for their life choices. We don't like that. We're stiff-necked people. Sinners, you know, we like darkness rather than light.
Now, that's not all of them. And I don't want to give you a broad brush that they're all bad, they're all lying, they're all trying to deceive. I think that there's different categories. There are those that know and willingly reject. The Bible talks about them.
That they willingly reject the truth. There are those that they don't really even know there's another way. Right, I mean, that's just the way that it is. That's who I was. I didn't know there was another way.
I grew up in the church, but the world had done all the influencing on me, done all the teaching. I mean, I grew up in secular schools, whole works. In my church, we didn't learn how to apply the Bible in real world. We just learned it as stories, Bible stories. And unfortunately, I think a lot of Christians are like that.
They just, it's a good book, and we do it's got spiritual and moral teaching, but they have not learned how to take it and apply it in the real world. Yeah, okay, so what should they do?
Well, I would say that maybe find somebody that can help them on this journey. You got questions? There's great organizations out there that have all kinds of resources that will help you learn how to take these biblical truths and apply them in the world around us. Like I told you, I love taking people through zoos, museums, aquariums, because our tax dollars are paying for those places, and most of the time they're lying to our children and the other people that are out there. I teach a class at Faith Baptist Bible College.
Well, three classes. And one of them is called Creation Apologetics. Where on Thursday we literally take the young people to the zoos. And Omaha Zoo, a road trip, and they have to do a presentation on one of the animals there with all the people walking around, and they have to present the gospel in the presentation. And we get conversations going.
So, how do you get to that point? Man, you got to get in and study, and you got to find somebody that can open up the scripture and show you that here's what God says, but here's what we actually see.
So, I would say there's great ministries like Answers in Genesis. You can go to their website. I started that website when I was with them a long time ago. You started that website? Yeah, I started the Answers in Genesis website years ago when I was on the board.
And now, what I started, brother, I don't want to take credit for it. I mean, what we did back then. The internet had just really started coming out, and I read a Wall Street Journal article and talked about Al Gore invented the Internet, right? Yeah, Al Gore invented it. But they were talking about websites, and I was like, what's a website?
And so I started reading about it, and I took it to the board and said, guys, we got to get a website. And they're like, what's a website? I said, I don't really know, but it's going to be a way to get information out all over the place, and we don't have to travel and tell people.
So that's how I started the website. But it's blown up to amazing now. Yeah, it has. And so as you've done this for years and years and years, and I guess as you've dug deeper and deeper and deeper, do you have any stories of where maybe you shared the truth of creation with somebody and it really made them think or they were able to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ that you know of? Oh my goodness.
Oh, every year. We do equip retreats. Anybody wants information, get your junior high school or to one of our retreats. We're in six places across the country, equipretreat.org. Uh I'll just give you a quick one.
I mean, there's a bunch. Just last year, we had a young lady and her friend who had been coming to camp for three years. And they loved the camp and they were traveling and coming. And last year, men, we had the opportunity to really open up. And they came and they opened up and we went after it.
And these two young ladies came to the Lord, but there were over 30 that came to the Lord last year at our camps. I've had conversations. A guy up in Sugar Creek, Ohio, I'll never forget this one. He's like third row back, and he started peppering me with questions. I started answering him.
He started cutting me off and stuff. I said, hold up, we'll talk when we're done. And when we got done, he came up. Because he was just interrupting the thing, wanted to be a nuisance-type thing. We got done.
He came up with a list of questions, and I said, Okay, Dennis, ask your questions. He asked when I started to answer it. He cut me off. I started to answer that. He cut me off.
He said, Okay, Dennis, you're playing games with me. You just want to play games. I'm answering the question. You're not listening. You're cutting me off.
So you don't really care. You want to play games. I'm done. He said, no, man, I got real questions that people won't answer. I said, get to them then, because you're playing games with me right now.
You're not listening. He watered up the paper. We talked for an hour and a half. I get a message from him. Oh, two months later?
He's received the Lord. England, same thing. I've got, man, I've got stories from all over. When you start showing people that God's word is true and trustworthy, it is not going to change everybody, but that's not my job. That's the Holy Spirit's job.
My job is to give an answer for the reason for the hope that lies within me, but make this inferior and watch what the Holy Spirit does. But evangelism is a conversation, not a presentation. And when we can converse about our faith and show it applies to the world that we live in, people are listening. Yeah. They they do listen.
And you said you've got other stories as well. Oh yeah. Oh, I mean, okay. I'll give you I'll give you one from England. The guy was a PhD scientist.
He came and at the end he started asking me questions. I started answering him. It was really good. And he was a little antagonistic, and we had fun with it. I'm sorry, I thought you were saying something.
No, I was laughing. You said he was antagonistic and you had fun with it, guys. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was kind of fun. And I keep it light, man.
I mean, and I told him, I said, look, man, I said, look, I understand you don't agree with me. I get it. I said, I look at people like Richard Dawkins, and Richard Dawkins gets visibly angry. When a Christian comes along or somebody who believes in creation, they get visibly angry. And I put it like this: he thinks we're stupid, we're just imbeciles.
All right, if you came to me tonight, sir, and you said, Carl, I believe the moon is made out of green cheese. Am I going to get mad at you? Am I going to fight you? No, bro, I'm going to pat you on the back and say, You might want to go do some research. I'm going to feel bad for you.
Right. Because if you legitimately believe that the moon is made out of green cheese, there's not a whole lot I can do to help you. And so I would feel sorry for you.
So the fact that he gets angry at me tells me that it's a spiritual issue and there's still hope for him.
So I keep praying for. him to come to the Lord Jesus Christ. I got an email from that guy six months later. He said, Carl, you didn't know this at the time, but when you were talking to me, I had written on my Facebook page that Richard Dawkins is God. I received Jesus last Saturday.
So this guy came to the Lord six months later and went from Richard Dawkins as God to Jesus as Lord. Only Christ can do that type stuff. And so, yeah, there's a bunch of type stories, man. We've been doing this for a long time.
Well, the Bible says always be ready to give an answer if anybody comes and ask you for the reason or for the hope that you have within you. And I noticed when I was growing up, Carl, a lot of times I would see a non-Christian come and give a Christian an objection to Christianity, and they would just clam up. The Christians wouldn't say anything at all. And to me, that's really unacceptable.
Well, that's where my heart breaks, Michael, because that is probably the vast majority of Christians. And we'll use this line of, well, I don't want to jam my opinion or my values down to anybody else. And I'll be honest with you, I think that's a cop-out most of the time because they don't know how to give an answer. That's why we do what we do, because we want the body of Christ to know when it comes to our faith, you've got to know it. Live it and share it.
Look, I've been in apologetics for a long time, and I've been with people that know a lot. They're geniuses, they're brilliant, but they're worthless when it comes to the gospel because you look at their life. And if your life and your lips aren't in sync, then that's called hypocrisy, one of the number one attacks against Christianity. But guess what? You can have all the answers.
You can live a great life and still be worthless in ministry. Because if you never share it, if you never share Jesus Christ, Then it's worth this because it's at the name of Jesus that every knee is going to bow and tongue is going to confess. You have to have all three components to be very effective in this world today. And unfortunately, I think that we're really lacking many times in the know-it part. And we're strong in the share it, or we're strong in the share it part, but we lack the know-it part.
It's like you have to have all three of those components. Because I personally have seen it as well, just exactly what you said.
Somebody coming and asking a question, and then what do we do? And the church many times is like, Quiet. Good boys don't ask those questions. Children to be seen and not heard. To me, that is a cop-out.
That is an indicator that this person doesn't have an answer, so they're just trying to tell you to be quiet. We have to study to show ourselves approved and be able to give that answer with meekness and fear. But we have to give an answer. That's true love. It is.
I don't know if you know this, but Jimmy Carter, the former president, in 1952, he got an opportunity of a lifetime. He got an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover for a chance to join the nuclear submarine program. Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, was not just one of history's most brilliant minds, he was one of history's hands-on leaders. He interviewed every single candidate for the submarine service himself, including the future president. There were long interviews for two or three hours.
Rickover asked Carter about strategy, tactics, physics, literature, and history. Carter had prepared for days, weeks, and the interview seemed to be going well until Rickover asked, Where were you ranked in your class at the Naval Academy?
Now it's only gonna get better, Carter must have thought to himself. He said, I rank 59th in a class of 840, sir. Carter would recall the surprise of not receiving congratulations, but instead another question. Did you always do your best? Carter began to instinctively answer that, of course, he always did his best, but something inside of him caused them to pause.
He said, I recalled several of the many times at the Academy when I could have learned more about our allies, our enemies, weapons, strategy, and so forth. Carter would say, so he was honest, no, sir, I didn't always do my best. Rick Irver didn't say anything and just looked at Carter for a long time before asking one final question. Why not? Then he stood and walked out of the room.
Carter would never forget this question. In fact, his campaign memoir from his run for governor of Georgia is titled, Why Not the Best? This question became the meaning of Carter's life as it should be for ours. Did I do my best? Am I giving my best?
Am I really trying? And so I think about that. You know, there's a lot of things that we need to do our best at, Carl. I need to do my best at selling insurance. I need to do my best at being a father.
But if there's one thing. That we really need to give a lot more effort to and give 100% to is giving our very best for the Lord. Not only praying, not only reading the Bible, but also learning how to share His Word, also learning how to share the truths of the Bible, and also defending the faith as well. Is that right? Oh, amen.
We're called to do it. We are commanded to do it.
So it's not Carl or Michael telling folks that they need to be able to give an answer. It's God telling us to be able to do that. And again, it's scary, it's intimidating, but it is absolutely possible because when you submit yourself to God, He blesses obedience.
So just be obedient. Yeah, and so every single day, I don't know about you, but I knew a guy who I was meeting over in Greensboro one day, and we went out to lunch, and he said that every day he prays to the Lord for an opportunity to be able to share the word of God. And when we had a waitress who came up to us, she started talking to this man, and she gave him a couple of objections. And he was able to answer the objections. And she said, You know what?
She said, My grandmother has been praying for me every single day, and I believe that God brought you in here. But see, it's not only that God brings us to a situation, there are times where we have to be obedient, and sometimes it's difficult, sometimes it can be a little socially awkward. But for me, I think we have to do it anyways.
Well, I do one talk called 10 Things I Learned On Evangelism from an Atheist. And Penjillette did a video a long time ago, and one of the points that he makes in there is about this man that came up, gave him a Bible, told him about Jesus. And towards the end of the video, he says, how much do you have to hate somebody? This is an atheist. Remember this.
How much do you have to hate somebody? to believe in everlasting life and not tell them about it. And that has resonated with me for Ever, ever since I saw that. And every time I give that talk, I try to actually finish with that talk when I go out and do a series of talks at places because it's a reminder to me that. I have to open my mouth.
And I say this to people: you don't feel comfortable doing it. Neither do I. I'm an introvert. I don't like talking to people that I don't know. But guess what?
That's why we're here. As a Christian, to love the Lord means that we got to talk about the Lord. And not just about the weather.
So you can do it. Find creative ways. Praying for your waiter, your waitress is a phenomenal, phenomenal one.
So yeah, people can do it. Yeah, there's a guy who wrote the book 23 Minutes in Hell, Bill Weiss, and he said something a little while ago that kind of resonated with me, resonated with me. He said this. He said, I noticed in my life, he said, when I start to do evangelism, that miracles show up, that God starts to do things that are just out of the ordinary. And I know Robbie Dilmore has seen that too, but I had a friend of mine named Tiger Aber who lives right near Greensboro, Whitsit.
And he said this. He said that him and his wife went on a trip to Myrtle Beach this past weekend. And he said, the place smelled like weed. He said everybody was drunk. He said there was a bunch of cursing.
They had their kids there.
So there was a lot about it that they did not like. He said, but at the end of the trip, there was a woman who was either from Haiti or Jamaica or something, a very strong accent. And he said that he went in. There and he said that he talked to this woman. And when he started talking to her, he said, all he said was this.
He said, the Lord loves you. And he said, when he said that to this woman, he said, she started to just weep and cry and was just having, just really touched by the Lord. And he looked at her and he goes, well, what's going on? You know, because obviously it made an impact. And she said, well, today is Friday.
And she says, Wednesday, two days ago, she said, I asked the Lord, I said, Lord, do you even hear me? Are you even hearing me when I'm praying to you and talking to you? And she said, if you can hear me, Lord, I'm going to ask you that you send one person to let me know that you can even hear me. And he said that when he was obedient to the Lord, the Lord showed up. And he also said this too, Carl.
He said, I wonder how many other Christians walked into her store and could have said something or should have said something and never did. It impacted me to want to make a difference to others as well. And I know that we can. Amen. I'll tell you a question that I use.
I was on, I call it the Emergency Room World Tour. a couple of years ago when I was having heart issues and ended up having to have an ablation. And I was I started asking in the hospital, 'cause you're a slab of meat and they're busy and they're just trying to get through stuff. And I was like, what is the best decision you've ever made in your life? I had a lady, she was down in Florida.
She was shaving my chest to put the electrodes on there so they could give me a cardioversion, jumpstart it, get it back in rhythm right. And she's like, ooh, that's a good question. Keeping my son. What do you mean? I was 23, I was in law school.
I figured out I was not going to be a lawyer. I drop out. I get pregnant. I'm single. Everybody told me to abort my child.
I didn't do it. I kept him. He's 13 now. I'm married to that man, and he has two siblings, two siblings. That was the best decision I ever made in my life.
What was yours? What do you think I said? It's an opportunity we just get to share with people. And people are hurting. We have hope.
His name is Jesus. Do not be afraid to share hope. That's good. And so, if people want to check out your website or they want to see what you're doing, you have it. What is the YouTube channel you have?
Oh, well, you can go to Reasons for Hope, just search for Reasons for Hope on YouTube. Debunked, our debunked YouTube channel has all of our debunked videos on there. A really great tool that is absolutely free is our app. If people go to the app store and just search for five letters, R. F O R H C Stands for Reasons for Hope, and you can type that out if you want, but that's a lot longer.
But R4H, and that's our app, and uh. That's our website as well, r4h.com, and they'll find us in all kinds of stuff. Yeah, well, I sure do appreciate you coming on today, and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from you. You know, sometimes it can seem like such an arduous task and something that, oh man, it's too hard. But if we take one step at a time, the Lord will lead us.
So I just want to thank you for what you're doing, and God bless you. God bless you, Mr. Michael. Appreciate being on. All right.
Have a great day, if not for God. All right, for my YouTube channel. If not for God with mighty wick, Just like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell.
So, you'll be alerted when we have our next video.
