Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
Today's show features Dr. Jason Lyle, astrophysicist and director of physical sciences with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Lyle. You know, science really confirms biblical creation.
It's sort of an irony that some of those things that evolutionists like to use to allegedly argue against creation, things like genetics and fossils, Actually, strongly confirm biblical creation. And so I'd like to talk about those. First, we need to avoid straw man arguments.
Sometimes evolutionists will perhaps inadvertently misrepresent what creationists teach. They'll say things like: well, creationists believe that God created all the animals exactly as they are today, every species. But you see, that's not what creationists believe because that's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible does not say that God created every species. Rather, it says every kind.
And a kind is not exactly the same as a species. And certainly, we believe that animals have changed significantly since creation, but they remain the same basic kinds. For example, the dogs that God created originally don't look exactly like the dogs we have today. We can get these different breeds of dog through artificial selection and so on, but they're still dogs. Cats, for example, the big cats, the wild cats, and those little felines, house cats that you come and pet when you get home, well, those are basically the same kind of animal.
God just created cats in the beginning, and they have diversified into different breeds, and you can't even get different species in some cases, but they remain the same kind.
So changes within kind or variation within a kind is what we as creationists would predict. Whereas in the evolutionary worldview, the kind of changes are unlimited and they're upward. You can basically turn bacteria into people over long periods of time.
Now, to see which of these views matches up with science, we need to study genetics. This is the study of how traits are passed on to organisms from their ancestors. And genetics centers around a molecule called DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, which is a very long molecule that exists in the cells of your body. And it looks sort of like a twisted ladder. And on the rungs of this ladder are chemicals called nucleotide base pairs.
And there are four different versions of these. And based on how these four different letters Are arranged, it spells out information. Just like, you know, there's 26 letters of the English alphabet, and depending on how they're arranged, you can write a book, and it contains information. DNA is like a cookbook of how to make you. And it's kind of astonishing, really, that God wrote all the instructions to make you on a molecule.
And the mechanisms of your cells know how to read that molecule and produce the appropriate structures. And that's true of all other forms of life as well. They all have DNA with the instructions to make them.
Now to make things even more interesting, you have two sets of DNA. You get one set from mom, you get one set from dad, and it's actually the combination of those two sets that determines your traits. That's why you may have noticed you look a little bit like your dad and a little bit like your mom, but you have some traits that neither parent has because you have a unique combination. And so you might have blue eyes even though neither of your parents has blue eyes because that's a recessive trait and you need both the blue alleles. It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea.
You can have traits that neither parent has, but you still got the information from them. It's just you have a unique combination.
Now it seems to me if evolution's true, then something like a bacterium, a single-cell organism, evolved over millions of years, billions of years, into human beings.
Now, bacteria have some information in their DNA, and human beings, we have a lot more information in our DNA because we're a more complex organism. We have instructions on how to make eyes and how to make hands and things like that. Bacteria lack those instructions because they're not able to produce those traits. They don't need them. And so it seems to me, if bacteria eventually became people, or something like bacteria eventually became people, then information in DNA must have increased, right?
I mean, if bacteria lack these instructions, but we have them, then at some point, Instructions had to have been added. To DNA.
So evolution is all about adding new information to DNA. And that's very interesting because you see the kinds of processes we observe scientifically. reduce the information in DNA or are perhaps neutral, but we don't observe them increasing information in DNA. And one such process is natural selection. A lot of people think that natural selection is the same as evolution.
They're not. They're very different. People think that it's an evolutionary concept. Actually, Edward Blyth, who was a creationist, talked about the idea, the concept of natural selection some 20 years before Darwin. Darwin just thought he could convince people that evolution is true by means of natural selection.
But the way natural selection works is very simple. Suppose you have some different breeds of dogs, and some of them have very long fur, and some of them have very short fur, some of them have very, you know, sort of medium-length fur. And suppose they're out in the wild, and they're in a climate that happens to be very, very cold.
Now, what's going to happen?
Well, the dogs that have the short fur and the medium-length fur are not as well insulated against the cold, and so they're more likely to die. The dogs that are well insulated have the longer, thicker fur, and they survive and they reproduce because they're able to survive. And pretty soon, you find that all the dogs in that environment have long fur. And this is a great example of adaptation because we say the animals, these dogs, have adapted to their environment. But is this evolution?
Well, not at all. First of all, we started with dogs and we ended up with dogs. That's not evolution, that's just dogs. That's variation within a kind. That's exactly what creationists would expect.
But secondly, and more importantly, there's been no new information. We started with information for long, medium, and short fur, and we ended up with just information for long fur. You see, information, it's not only not been gained, it's actually been lost. Natural selection actually reduces the information in the genome. It can't possibly increase it.
So, natural selection is certainly true, and it's the exact opposite of evolution. Let's take a short break. Stay with us. What happened to the dinosaurs? Are monkeys and people the same?
Why do we live on Earth and not some other planet? Kids have some great questions about God's creation, but do you have the answers for them? At the Institute for Creation Research, our scientists and Bible scholars have produced The Guide to Creation Basics. This book contains full-colored images and fascinating commentary from experts in biology, geology, astronomy, and biblical study. Guide to Creation Basics can help teach your children how the animals could fit on Noah's Ark, how dinosaurs and humans could live at the same time, and how God's power and wisdom can be seen in something as small as a single cell.
Find basic answers to your child's biggest creation questions. Order your copy of Guide to Creation Basics from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting www.icr.org. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Lyle.
While we've seen how genetics confirms biblical creation, that God created organisms and they vary within their kinds, we find this is also true when we look at fossil evidence.
Now, of course, fossils are found in rock layers all over the world, and I would expect to find fossils. Fossils are basically a dead organism where the usually the soft tissues decayed away, but the outer, the skin and muscles and things like that. But the bones, which can last a little bit longer, have permineralized. Minerals have come in and filled in all the little holes that exist in bones. And so you end up with a stone that's in the shape of a bone.
And that's, in most cases, that's what a fossil is.
Now, I always sort of had the impression that fossils took millions of years to form. But if you think about it, that can't be right. They take the right conditions to form. They don't take millions of years. They can happen rapidly.
In fact, you know, if an animal is buried quickly under the right conditions, it can fossilize relatively fast. I've even seen a fossil hat. It was actually, it used to be a soft kind of felt hat that somebody dropped in a mine, and then later when they Excavated lower in the mine, the hat had fossilized because it was in part of water that had a lot of minerals in it. And so now it's a hard hat. Pretty remarkable.
Now that obviously didn't take millions of years. It happened quickly. And people think, but the rocks in which fossils are formed, don't rocks form over millions of years as mud turns to rock? And the answer is no. Again, rocks form under the right conditions and they can happen very quickly.
But we find fossils with things like soft tissue in them. For example, if you take dinosaur fossils and you dissolve away the outer portion, a lot of times we're finding soft tissue on the inside, things like blood vessels and other springy, soft tissue.
Now that can't last millions of years.
So fossils don't take millions of years to form. They form rapidly under the right conditions. And the right conditions to form fossils are flood conditions. And so the fact that we find fossils all over the world suggests that there was a massive flood that covered all of the world. And that's exactly what we read in Genesis chapter 6, 7, and 8.
We read about this worldwide flood where God judged the wickedness of mankind, but spared Noah and two of every air-breathing land animal to reproduce after their kind after the flood. Second, the kinds of fossils that we find are consistent with biblical creation and non-evolution. The kinds of fossils we find?
Well, we find the kinds of fossils of animals that are around today, horses and and clams and fish and things like that, as well as kinds that have gone extinct. But what we don't find is a continuum of one basic kind transitioning to another basic kind. And you'd expect to find thousands of such examples, millions of them even, if evolution were true. And yet all the fossils we find in the fossil record, if you have a good example of it, and not just bits of one tooth or something, but all of them can be easily classified into these standard taxonomic groupings in terms of, well, this is a mammal or this is a reptile. You don't find something that's sort of 70% reptile, 30% mammal.
No, they all form in these discrete kinds.
So the kinds of fossils that we find are consistent with what we'd expect given biblical creation. Third, the order in which fossils occur is consistent with what we'd expect given biblical creation. You see, the order of fossils is not simple to complex, as evolutionists would expect. In the evolutionary scheme, the simpler organisms, and by the way, no organism is simple, even a bacterium is extremely complex and not something that we can build. But nonetheless, they're simpler than things like a horse.
You don't find that kind of simple to complex. Rather, what you find is aquatic to terrestrial. The organisms that are found in the lower rock layers tend to be water-dwelling organisms. And as you go up higher and higher, there tend to be organisms that lived up higher and higher. It's primarily ecological zonation.
And of course, it's more complicated than that because animals, some animals can move a bit, and depending on how mobile the animal is, it could get to higher ground during the flood. But that's basically what we find. And we find also that the lowest layers are marine only. It's what you'd expect. The first mud that washes out into the ocean buries marine organisms.
And then the upper layers, you'd think, well, if evolution is true, they'd just be land, but they're not. They're a mix of marine and land. And so we actually have a fossil here at ICR of a dinosaur and a fish buried in the same rock layer.
Now, clearly, it would take a flood condition to do something like that.
So, you see, when we study fossils, we find that the evidence is consistent with what we would expect given the history recorded in the Bible. And likewise, when we understand genetics, we see how it confirms Genesis, that organisms reproduce according to their kinds. Science certainly confirms the truth of the Bible. Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org.
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