Matt Slick Live (Guest Host Luke Wayne)

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. Hi, I'm Matt Slick live.

I will be your host today. I am not Matt Slick, I'm a colleague of Matt's at the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. You can find us online at calm.org, that's C-A-R-M dot O-R-G. And for those of you who are new to the show, this is a show about Christian apologetics. So we answer your questions about biblical doctrine, about challenges to the Christian faith, Christian worldview issues, or challenging passages. So if you have questions on any of those things, give me a call at 877-207-2276.

Again, this is Luke Wayne filling in for Matt. Matt's going to be hosting a program at this same time at the Arabic Broadcasting Network, ABN-SAT. So after this program, you may want to check in and watch the rebroadcast of that and see the work Matt's doing over there taking on issues of the truth of Christianity, the falsehood of Islam, and issues of that nature. So again, you can call us live here at 877-207-2276 with your questions. So before we turn to the phones, just wanted to talk a little bit today about a project that I've been working on, been digging into the issues of origins, of creation, evolution, science and faith, how all these things fit together. I'm still in the middle of the study, been writing articles, putting them up at com.org, so you can see some of the work there, again at carm.org, but as I've been doing that, one of the things that's really come back over and over again throughout the study has been the necessary preconditions to even have this conversation.

What do I mean by that? What kind of universe do we have to be in for science to even be possible, for us to even be able to ask, well, where does the science point as far as our questions about the origins of life, origins of humanity, origins of consciousness, origins of the physical universe, the stars, the galaxies, so many fascinating questions on any of these particular topics. But for us to be able to use the scientific method to explore those kinds of subjects, certain things have to be true about the universe that aren't logically necessary. There could be a universe in which science doesn't work, and yet that's not the one that exists. We're in a universe that is rational, it's coherent, it's governed by consistent principles that we describe in scientific laws. So when you look at the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or the various mathematically precise, consistent laws of science, what are those laws except descriptions of regularities in nature, aspects of the universe that always hold true, that are regular, consistent, and understandable, rational. And so when we think about that kind of universe, why is the universe that way? What would explain a universe in which math works? What would explain a universe in which we can count on the laws of physics today being the laws of physics tomorrow? And today, ironically, in the most scientific era in human history, debatably, at least within the last few centuries, we pride ourselves on the rigor of our science.

And yet, this is the era in which we have least taken the time or been willing to ask this question. You look throughout history, and in cultures around the world, people have noticed the regularity and the stars and the heavenly bodies. They've noticed the regularity in weather, the predictability of seasons, noticed that things work in consistent ways, in breeding, or even when you shoot an arrow or throw a rock, that you can calculate its trajectory, know where it's going to land.

Why? Because of this consistent, rational way that the universe works. And what those who have fought on this throughout history, what it's driven them back to consistently, is that there is an ultimate, singular, supremely powerful mind beyond the universe that is responsible for the universe. You can find this in even pagan Roman polytheists, who you would think would try to explain it through their many gods, but instead, you read men like Cicero, the Roman statesman, who writes regarding this in his On the Nature of the Gods, writes, what can be so obvious and clear as we gaze up at the heavenly bodies, as that there is some divine power of surpassing intelligence by which they are ordered, an attentive and supremely powerful god. And if even the pagans can look out and recognize these things, it's because Romans 1-20 holds true. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes and eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood, stood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. When we look at the way that the world around us operates, we see that we are dealing with a world that is governed by God, not by some unknowable force, but by a personal, rational, intelligent God. And so when we reflect on these questions of science and faith, creation and evolution and all these other things, remember that behind that, we all have to assume the world as it really is. And that is a world that demands a mind, a mind that prescribes the laws of nature that govern all of these consistent, orderly things we're discussing.

And so behind it all, the existence of God is undeniable. Well, let's go to the phones. We're going to go first to JB in North Carolina. JB, you're on the air.

Thank you. JB, are you there? Yes, I am.

Yes. Hi. I wanted to ask a question in reference to First John chapter four about testing the spirit, because I find myself connecting with people who have, who deceive me. And I love God, I'm filled with the Spirit, and I don't want to, I want to test the Spirit correctly, so if you could just give me, you know, I'll be quiet and let me know how to put First John chapter four into operation. Thank you.

Thank you. That is a fantastically important question. And for those listening, let me read that passage so you know what she's asking about. So in First John chapter four, it says, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. Because many false prophets have gone out into the world, by this you know the Spirit of God, by this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.

This is the spirit of Antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. You are from God, little children, and have overcome them, because greater is he that is in you than he who is in the world. They are from the world, therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. He who knows God listens to us.

He who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the Spirit of error. So here, John gives two crucial tests for testing spirits.

We live in a world filled with spirits, filled with spiritual experiences, and some people believe that because they have had this very real and positive and good-feeling spiritual experience, that that experience must be true, must be of God, because it feels so good, it's so affirming. But that is not, we're warned, there are false spirits. In the same way, it parallels that with false prophets. So we have false teachers and false prophets who speak by these spirits other than the Spirit of God, and their message may be powerful, and it may be stirring, and it may be very persuasive.

But we're given here in this passage two important tests. First, what do they say about Jesus? Do they say that Jesus came in the flesh?

And that doesn't just mean that Jesus had a physical body, though there certainly were Gnostic teachers in the late 1st, early 2nd century, and afterwards, who literally, tonight, that said that Jesus was only a divine being and never became man. But this is drawing back to, 1 John is written by the same John who wrote the Gospel of John, and in John chapter 1, In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. So this idea that the divine Son, the second person of the Trinity, came and took on flesh and dwelt among us, this is what John's pointing back to and saying, if that teaching is denied, then they are not speaking of the Spirit of God. Any spirit that would lead you away from that is not the Spirit of God.

But he goes on further. He says, we, he and the apostles, we are from God, he who knows God listens to us, he who is not from God does not listen to us, and by this you know the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error. So we compare spiritual testimony that we experience today, we compare that to the testimony of Scripture. The writings of the apostles in the New Testament, we go back and we look, is what they're saying, does it line up with, whether it's an inner spiritual experience or the voice of a so-called prophet or teacher, if what they are saying does not line up with the plain teachings of the New Testament, then they are not speaking from the Spirit of God, or the spiritual experience you're having is not coming from the Spirit of God.

And so, I live in Utah, and here, people put a lot of weight on spiritual experience. Well, I prayed and I had this feeling, and it told me, and yet, so often where that feeling leads them to is a denial that Jesus is the one true God, and a denial of many of the New Testament teachings, a denial of what was plainly laid out in Scripture. And so Paul echoes this idea elsewhere, where he says that if a prophet, an apostle, or even an angel from heaven, this is in Galatians chapter 1, even an angel from heaven were to preach to you any gospel other than what the apostles preached, other than the one you find in their teaching in the New Testament, then they are to be accursed. Even having a vision of an angel telling you this teaching, if it does not line up with Scripture, and it does not teach Jesus as the one true and living God, then we are not to trust that Spirit. We are to reject it. And it is literally a command in Scripture.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits. So this is urgently important. Alright, we're heading to a commercial break, but call us at 877-207-2276. We'd love to answer your questions. Alex from Florida, you'll be on right after this. Welcome back to the show.

This is not Matt Slick. For those of you just joining us, I'm Luke Wayne, a colleague of Matt's. Filling in for him while he's doing ministry on another program, and delighted to be here with you guys this afternoon. So the phone lines are open. Please give us a call at 877-207-2276 with your questions. Questions on difficult passages of Scripture, on challenges to the faith, questions in theology, church history, world religions.

Would love to talk to you guys about these important matters of the Christian life. So with no further delays, let's go to the phone lines. We're going to talk to Alex in Florida. Alex, you're on the air.

Hey, Luke. Appreciate you filling in for Matt today. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah. No, I appreciate you producing the discussion too with Andrew and Eli and that thing, what was that, a couple weeks ago? I really enjoyed it about presuppositional apologetics and the future of apologetics.

Oh, yeah. For anybody who missed that, you can go on our Facebook page, just scroll back to last week, and we had an amazing panel discussion, brought in some great apologists, and I did the most important thing I could do. I just stayed out of it and managed the technology and let those guys talk. Wonderful conversation about the state of apologetics in the Christian church. So we'd encourage everybody, check out the recording of that on our Facebook page.

Glad you enjoyed that, Alex. So what's your question? Yeah, so my question is, I'm memorizing Romans 4, 22 through 25 right now. I just think it's important to talk about the imputation of the righteousness of Christ in us when you're doing apologetics and evangelism. So I decided to take a crack and start memorizing these verses, but I noticed in the NASB, it's credited to him. So I use the NASB, and then in the ESV, it says counted to him. So NASB, it says credited to him, ESV, it says counted to him.

What can you tell me about that? I feel like there's a little bit of a difference there, but maybe you could go to the original text or help me out with that a little bit? Alright, so for the listeners' sake, let me kind of read the text here, what we're talking about.

So we'll step back a little so people get the context. So it's talking about the faith of Abraham, and so it begins in verse 22, Therefore it was also credited to him as righteousness, so his faith was credited to him as righteousness, now not for his sake only was it written that it was credited to him, but for our sake also to whom it will be credited as those who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. So this is, as Alex was saying, a super important passage about the nature of our justification by grace through faith, and that faith credited to us a righteousness not our own, but through our trust in Christ and his perfect righteousness. Now the question here then is, why do some translations vary on the wording?

So I'm pulling that up now to sort of see what's behind that there. Sure, yeah, I can make the distinction there, but it's kind of a little nuance to some extent. I don't know if you think it's a huge deal, or what the Greek said there, and why the two translations kind of vary on that. Okay, so yeah, just looking through ways that it has been translated in a variety of English translations, historic and modern, there's no ambiguity in the Greek there. We do know for sure what that word is, it's not a manuscript issue, and so you see it's been variously translated as imputed to him, reckoned to him, credited or counted.

And when we put all of those words together, I think we see a huge overlap in the meaning, where they're all driving at the same thing. So in this case, counted to him as righteousness, probably the less clear of the options that English translators have given us. But when you put it next to imputed, reckoned, credited, I think we could say counted to him as righteousness is really meant to say the same thing, to say that you are counted as righteous.

You are given the credit that righteousness is imputed to you, so that God would look upon you as bearing that righteousness, not your own, given to you by Christ through faith in him. Also I think, though counted is less clear, that when we look at the range of the various words used, I think they all are driving at the exact same meaning. Okay, yeah, I'm memorizing the NASB, and I like the credited, because I've heard Matt Flick use that many times, talking to unbelievers or teaching to believers, and then I was looking at easier translation to use, like the ESV and NIV, but I don't like the counted to him. It just sounds, like you were saying, it's a little less, what were the words you used?

It's a little less clear. It's less precise than, say, credited or reckoned or imputed, as we find in some of the older English translations. So, yeah, I mean, this is one of those cases, if you are memorizing in a different translation, say, you find the ESV easier to memorize in, but in that one particular word, you just find it less clear, you're honestly not doing anything wrong to just borrow that one word from the NASB that translates it clear, and memorize it as credited, even if the ESV says counted. They mean the same thing in context, and so you're not altering the Word of God to do that in your memorization, to have it in a way that is most clear and precise in your mind, to aid you in both understanding and evangelistically using that. But if you're not comfortable with substituting the one word, then I'd say just memorize it in the NASB. It's a little harder, but once you get it in there, retain it in the translations that you are most comfortable using it in, both in reminding yourself and in preaching to others. Yeah, I appreciate that. That's something to consider.

It's just a hard kind of three verses to memorize, to be honest, because it's like a big long run-on sentence-type thought, and it's kind of like you've got to break it down, I've noticed. Absolutely. Yeah, I appreciate you clearing that up for me. Do you have time for one more question? We've got a few more callers waiting, but if it's quick, sure. Yeah, really quick, really quick. You do some work with the King James only stuff, right? Yes, yes I do. Okay, I'm running into a few guys that I care about that are getting into this TR only stuff.

Can you just explain a little bit the Texas Receptor, where it came from? Absolutely. We're going to a break right now, but I will go right into that when we get back from the break. So everybody stay with us, and get in line. Give me a call. 877-207-2276. We'll be right back after this break. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Welcome back to the show.

This is Luke Wayne filling in for Matt Slick. I'm a colleague of Matt's at the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, for those of you who are just joining us. And I was on the phone with Alex from Florida, and he had a question related to the Texas Receptus and the TR only movement.

So, Alex, you are back on the air. Okay, sounds good, brother. Yeah, so like I was saying about the Texas Receptus, and also about, you know, guys that are falling into this kind of King Texas Receptus only.

If you could kind of touch on both of those. Okay, now that's a big question that we could spend the whole hour of the show on, because there's so much to it. For the sake of other callers who have been waiting, I'll give as concise a response as I can.

And then if you have further questions on details of that, probably be best to get back in line, and I would love to dive into that more later in the show if we've got more time. But on the quick version of it, so the Texas Receptus, for listeners who don't know, that's a term used for the Greek New Testament text that was used in translating the King James Version and other early English Bible translations. And it's not really one text, but a series of printed texts by several men, Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza, who made adjustments to each other's works based on the handful of manuscripts they had available to them. And you have to remember, this was done in the 1500s, and you didn't have vast libraries of manuscripts you could go to, no digital databases to look at, no vast collections, the printing press was just coming to its own. So this was the first people who were making printed Greek text to be available to people.

So what could they do? They had to go to local libraries in the area they were in, through university libraries, private libraries, monasteries, anybody who might have a manuscript of a book of the Bible, go see what you could look at and compare. So for any driven book of the New Testament, the TR is based on only two, three, four, five manuscripts, in certain passages, one manuscript. People point out that there were probably two dozen manuscripts used for the whole TR, but most of them were not complete New Testaments. So one manuscript might have the Gospels, another the letters of Paul, another one Revelation, and so on. And so you have this situation where they've compiled the best Greek text that they can, with the manuscripts they have available to them, and then done the critical work of comparing those texts, and also looking at readings in the Vulgate and building the best text they can. And so those early translations were fantastic translations from the text they have available.

But since then, we've had the chance to evaluate a much larger number of manuscripts, much earlier manuscripts. And so the TR, it's now obvious that in some places, the TR was based on a tiny minority of very, very, very late manuscripts, in a few cases, no Greek manuscripts at all, but was based on the Latin Vulgate, and we've never found a Greek manuscript ever that backs up that reading. So the TR was fine textual work for the beginning of returning to the text, the Greek and Hebrew, after the time of the, well, specifically Greek for the TR, but after the time of the Middle Ages. But there's absolutely no reason for any Christian to reject all of the work that, whether you prefer a Byzantine majority text position, or you accept the critical text found in the Nestle Elan and the UBS text and such. Whichever position you land on either makes much more sense than clinging to the TR out of tradition, when even the people who compiled it themselves did not treat it as the work was finished. The King James translators themselves in the introduction to the 1611 KJV specifically, they were very clear that they were not making this to be the end-all be-all translation of the end-all be-all text, and so it is simply a later human tradition that would make the TR the final word on these things. Is that helpful? Yeah, that's really helpful. So the King James is comments from the TR, is that right?

Yes, yes. The King James translators, primarily what they had available to them were the different editions of the TR. The volumes of Erasmus, of Stephanus, and Beza. And they generally preferred Beza, but they consulted all of those, either directly or indirectly by relying on the work that had been previously done by the Geneva Bible, by William Tyndale, people like that who also were using editions of the TR. So when they recycled those guys' translations in many places, which they unashamedly did, and there's nothing wrong with that, they recognized Tyndale did fine work, so sometimes they just used his words.

And so when they did that, either by using earlier English translations or by using those printed texts, they were reliant on various editions of the TR throughout the KJV. Okay, yeah, that's really helpful. I'll call back about the TR-only guys stuff. I want other callers to get a chance to call in. Okay, thank you. I do hate to have to rush you off, because it is important, but it's your second question, those guys have been waiting for a long time, but please get back in line, and I would love to talk to you more about it.

Okay, thank you. Alright, that was Alex from Florida, we're turning now to Rudolph from Raleigh, North Carolina. Rudolph, you are on the air. Yes sir, will the Holy Spirit be around during the tribulation time? Will the Holy Spirit be around during the tribulation time? I mean, the Holy Spirit is eternal, so of course the Holy Spirit will always be omnipresent, always be God, always be there.

I imagine you mean something more specific than that. Well, a lot of people... What do you mean by be around? They say that he won't be working in the lives of people during the tribulation time, because some of the priests say that he's going to be taken away from the earth. Do you know what passage they try to base that on?

No. I just heard them say that. I don't know the way they do it, but I just heard them say that.

Yeah, I see no reason to think that that would be true. One, it is by means of the Holy Spirit that Jesus is with us always to the very end of the age, and so if Christ has people on the earth, if there are regenerate believers here, the Holy Spirit is here dwelling in them and with them. If anyone is being convicted of sin, any unbeliever being convicted of sin and judgment of the truth of Christ, it's the Holy Spirit who does that work. So unless someone is wanting to say that there's a future tribulation time with no believers and no redemptive work of God on the earth going on at all, then there would be absolutely no biblical grounds for saying that the Holy Spirit would not be present on the earth.

So I see no biblical grounds for saying that he wouldn't be, and plenty of biblical reasons to say the Holy Spirit will still be very active, very present, working through his people, convicting of sin, doing all that the triune God has ordained for the third person of the Trinity to be doing. Yes sir, I am. And what you were talking about, about the scientific things in the world, do you know anything about them? They're very good. I'm sorry, your connection was cutting out a little there, I couldn't hear you. I'm sorry. Do you know anything about ICR?

ICR, the Institute of Creation Research, Creation Ministries International at creation.com, Answers in Genesis, do a lot of great work from the younger creationist perspective, and argue their case from scripture extremely well, and deal with scientific issues, so yeah, those are great ministries in that area. Sure. Okay, well thank you very much, God bless you, take care, bye bye. You too, and thank you for your patience, I know you had to hold a while today Rudolph, I appreciate you. Yes sir, no problem, thank you, bye bye.

Alright, have a great one. Okay, that was Rudolph from Raleigh, North Carolina, and so we will be back to the phones after this break, but we do have an open line, so please call in 877-207-2276, and we'd love to hear from you. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276, here's Matt Slick. Welcome back to the show, this is not Matt Slick, I am Luke Wayne, a colleague of Matt's filling in for him today, and so it's a delight to be on here.

I work with Matt at the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, you can find us online at CARM.org, that's C-A-R-M dot O-R-G, and if you don't have time to call in and have your questions answered here, many of these questions have been addressed on articles at CARM, and so if you want the expertise that Matt and guys like him bring to these questions available to you 24-7, head over to CARM and you can Google the way that he's written up and researched, numerous questions just like the ones that you guys call in with, always available to you for free on there. So let's get back to the phones. Turning now to Paul in Virginia. Paul, you are on the air.

Hello, thank you. My question is of a general nature, I'm a regular listener and have spoken to Matt several times. What are you all's thoughts on the midterms, if they will occur, and I'll just leave it there for the moment, the midterms.

Okay, you're cutting in and out a little, I apologize, the audio's not real clear, so if you could restate your question, just speak slow and clear, I apologize. Yes, I was saying, what are you all's thoughts on the midterm elections in November, do you think they will occur? Now, I have to be honest with you, I know Matt fields a lot of the political and current events stuff a lot on here. He spends more time thinking and doing work in that area, but I am not extremely informed on politics or what you find in the newspaper.

It's just, it's not my area, and so I would be, I would be ill-equipped to give you any meaningfully informed answer to a question related to the upcoming election or anything like that. I apologize. Oh, it's okay. Do you all, you all are considered Reformed theology?

Yes, yes, Karm holds to a generally Reformed perspective, yes. Okay, all right, thank you very much. No problem, no problem. You have a great day, Paul.

You too, thank you. Okay, that was Paul from Virginia, turning now to Michael from North Carolina. Michael, you are on the air.

Yes, I just have a quick comment before my question. I consider myself a close brother in Jesus Christ to Matt Flick. He and I have the same reaction whenever we attend a church service where the gospel is intensely preached and the Holy Spirit is heavily present.

We break down into weeping children, and I thank God for that. Amen. So, my question, do you consider the Apocrypha the Word of God? Do I consider the Apocrypha to be the Word of God? No, no I do not.

Okay, we're in agreement there. The Apocrypha, for those listening, I imagine a lot of listeners are probably fairly familiar, but in case you've tuned in today and you're not familiar with what we're talking about here, the Apocrypha or Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox would often refer to it as the Deuterocanonical books, the second canon. They are a group of books that were written after the Old Testament time period, before the time period where the New Testament books were written, and are included by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox in their Bibles as being Scripture. They are considered by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox to be inspired Scripture. Now with Roman Catholics that was not always the case.

The Council of Trent was the first to officially dogmatize that. Before that, some Roman Catholics did believe that they were Scripture and some did not. It was an open, debated question, so you can actually find a number of historic Roman Catholics, including popes, who did not believe that the Apocrypha were Scripture. But it is the official dogmatic position of the Roman Catholic Church today that books like 1 and 2 Maccabees, Syriac, Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, Tobit, Judas, and longer versions of the book of Daniel and the book of Esther are Scripture.

The Eastern Orthodox would also include the 151st Psalm, and I want to say the one or two other books of Maccabees, and maybe a few others in there. So these are books that themselves do not claim to be Scripture. They were written after the time of the Old Testament prophets, before the time of the apostles. The books of Maccabees even acknowledge that there was no active prophet or revelation at that time, and that certain questions had to be left open until God should raise up a prophet in the land to speak to things.

The book of Syriac in the prologue identifies itself as the author as one who is a student of the Torah and the prophets and the writings, and is summarizing the wisdom from those things. So these authors don't seem to have been believing that they were composing Scripture. They acknowledge their writing in a time period afterward and distinct from the composition of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jews have never accepted them as Scripture, and Paul says in Romans 3 that the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

Paul affirms the canon as was carried on and preserved by the Jews. And so the New Testament writers never cite the apocryphal works as Scripture. They make allusions to material from them, the same way that they make allusions to material from other Jewish or even pagan writings. So it's not that the New Testament authors didn't know they existed.

They knew about them. They referenced them as their familiar writings of the day, but never as it is written, or thus saith the Lord, or anything that would treat it as a distinctly scriptural document. So for numerous reasons, we have no reason to accept, and plenty of reason not to accept, these books as being God's work.

Yeah, I agree. I consider them inspirational books, but not the Word of God. As a student of history, I find several of the books useful for research, for understanding the historical context of the time period and the way certain words were used that can even sometimes be helpful in understanding the culture behind the New Testament time period and things like that. So they're not useless books, but we should not treat them as inspired, God-given, God-breathed Scripture. They're not.

They're historical books written by Jews during a time when God was not at that time revealing Scripture. So does that cover what you wanted to cover there, Michael? Yeah, thank you and God bless you. God bless you too. Thank you for calling in and for waiting. I appreciate it.

Thanks. Okay, that was Michael. We're now turning to Mike from Winston-Salem. Mike, you were on the air.

Hey, Luke. I have a question. Have you ever heard of Leonardo Fibonacci? Leonardo Fibonacci? Is that what you said? Yes. I've possibly heard the name. Is that a mathematician?

Yes. He was a mathematician, lived about a thousand years ago, and he was considered one of the most brilliant minds of his time period. And he developed something called the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, where you take the numbers, like you start with the number one, then you go to the number two. Now then you add the previous number to that number. So two plus one is three. So that's the next number. Then you go two plus three is five.

Five plus three is eight. See how the sequence goes? What he discovered was that every number in that sequence has the same ratio. It's 0.61, blah, blah, blah, blah, I don't know, going into infinity.

You can take any number in that ratio except the first two, two or three, but after that you can go into the thousands. And every number in sequence, when you put it in a ratio, it's the same ratio. Now the reason that's important, and I think this is important for people that want to defend the existence of God, is that scientists have discovered, I had a book that I read and I cannot find it, I've gone crazy looking for it. It was a mathematical book. And what scientists have discovered is that everything in the universe, from the organizations of spiral galaxies to the DNA sequence follow, that is called the golden ratio.

So what's your question? How can something so intricate be a matter of chance? There has to be a creator. Because I'm telling you everything, scientists have discovered the Nautilus organization of flowers, the book goes into detail about the different things that are in nature that follow what's called the golden ratio. And as a matter of fact, even our concept of beauty follows that golden ratio. So this is a subset of a larger fact that, you know, whether what you're saying is exactly right or not, but the fact of the matter is that when we look at the way that theoretical math so neatly corresponds happens in reality, that philosophers have wrestled with this question for years. Those who deal with mathematics have recognized that the correspondence between mathematics and the actual reality of the physical universe, most people just take it for granted, but it's not a logically necessary thing and it's astounding that there have been mathematicians who wrote books exploring the question of why does math work.

And so what you're talking about, if true, is one of just many examples of this reality that conceptual math, which is a mental system and framework, an abstract, immaterial, mental, rational system and framework, corresponds perfectly with the way that actual physical reality behaves consistently and perfectly in a way that is extraordinarily difficult to explain by chance or a sort of necessity. Well, that's all the time that we have. Thank you for your call, Mike. Thank you everybody who called in. Kit, I'm sorry I didn't get to your call back tomorrow, but you guys, God bless you, have a great day, and we will see you back with Matt again tomorrow, Lord willing.