Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Mark Clark Podcast. Hopefully you are doing well. We are jumping into week two of Anything Goes. This is a series that we did where we asked the Internet what they wanted us to preach on and organize it in regard to votes. We got over 10,000 votes for these questions and this was the fourth most voted for question. And it was the question of how evolution is compatible with the Adam and Eve story or are they not compatible at all? How does that all work? Creation, evolution. And so we jump into that in detail in this podcast.
Mark Clark [00:00:31]:
We are really excited about it. Remember, we are part of the Thrive Podcast network. We have a lot of great podcasts for you to listen to, a whole bunch of fun stuff that you can download and listen to anytime. So go over to thrivepodcastnetwork.com and see all the different podcasts that you can listen to. Let's get into this week two of this question of evolution, creation, the Bible, does it all work together? Let's get at it. I am going to present ideas, some of which are my own, some of which are other people's. I'm going to present conclusions to you, and then you can draw your own conclusions about these. Now, I'll introduce this by explaining, really this question, technically, the question is this.
Mark Clark [00:01:10]:
This is how the questions came in. Remember, we opened this up to the Internet. Anybody could ask any question and then we put it out there, people could vote on them. And these are the top seven questions. And this question was number four or five on the list, I think. And technically, the question is this, how is the theory of evolution compatible with the Adam and Eve story? So there's lots of things we could do with all of this. And I'm going to try to stick to the point of the question in particular. But let me introduce both aspects of this question, because some of you, if you're a skeptic and you're here and you're exploring or you're just, you've never really been to church before.
Mark Clark [00:01:39]:
You might not even know what the Adam and Eve story is. So you don't even understand the question. And so let me bring both, or some of you maybe growing up in the church, you don't know what the evolution part of the question is. So let me explain both of those to you before I try to bring them together in some way, if that's possible. So the Adam and Eve thing is, of course, Genesis 1 and 2. God creates the world and he puts Adam and Eve, he takes Adam and builds him out of the dust of the Earth and breathes life into him. That all takes place in Genesis 1 and Genesis chapter 2. There's this.
Mark Clark [00:02:11]:
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And he creates light. And then in chapter two, where'd it go? Chapter two, verse seven, it says, then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living creature. And then he makes Eve and the two of them exist. And there's animals and so on, and there's the Garden of Eden and they have a couple of kids, Cain and Abel, and the story continues.
Mark Clark [00:02:41]:
And so that's generally the Adam and Eve story. And then of course there is the theory of evolution, popularized by Charles Darwin, who lived from 1809 to 1882. And he popularized it, but he wasn't the first one to come up with it. And he popularized it in the Origin of the Species, his book, and talks about the idea that all living things come from one particular thing, what's called common ancestry. So everything from moths to human beings developed in one long process that took millions and billions of years, came from one celled organisms that became alive. No one necessarily knows how we'll come back to that. Multiplied out gradual transitions into bigger and more intelligent things. And that's how we've arrived at horses and mice and human beings and so on.
Mark Clark [00:03:24]:
So there's three basic aspects to the theory of evolution. One is common ancestry, that everything comes from a common lineage, not just within species, but actually from one species. One species will transition into another species. And so over time, millions and millions of years, a whale becomes a horse. It starts as an amoeba, moves to a fish, moves to an amphibian, moves to a reptile, and then moves to mammal. And that's how everything was created that we see, or everything came about or evolved over time. The second issue is that the first cause we don't know what it is, but it came from non living matter. So all living matters came from non living matter.
Mark Clark [00:04:02]:
It was some kind of amoeba. The classic examples in textbooks from 40 years ago, some kind of an amoeba in a pool. And there was energy and there was lightning, and it somehow sparked life. And then that life mutated and multiplied. And then it slowly evolved and moved from fish to amphibians, to reptiles to mammals and so on. And then the third part of it is natural selection or survival. The fittest, where things actually are selected out by nature based on whether they can survive. And so a five finger, the reason we would have five fingers is because we as mammals were able to kill off four fingered things and so on.
Mark Clark [00:04:36]:
And it's easier for us to, you know, peel fruit or something. Whatever it is, is that everything that exists right now, it's because that was the better way to survive. And so those were stronger genes and they got into the gene pool and moved forward. And so how do both of these worlds actually combine? Are they compatible? There's three basic views on this question. So I'm gonna unpack all three views for you and try to tell you a little bit of where I land on this. The first view is that these two views are 100% compatible. And so there are Christians who say, look, I believe in the Bible. I believe everything the Bible says, and I believe in evolution and everything that it says.
Mark Clark [00:05:15]:
Men like Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, Alison McGrath, Dinesh D'Souza, they talk about this idea that evolution itself isn't a problem. Francis Collins is in charge of the Human Genome Project. He goes to Harvard, he tells people about the human. He actually mapped out the human genome in the mid-90s, and he goes to Harvard and gives lectures and talks to people about the human genome and evolution. And then he pulls out his guitar, sings worship songs, gives his testimony, and people come to know Jesus, that's his whole life. And what he says is, it doesn't contradict at all evolution, because of course, as we saw in Genesis 2, God takes pre existing material out of the dust and he creates humankind out of the dust. And so they would say we're not supposed to push the Bible into a strict literalism, that there is poetic license in these passages in these stories. They're more parables, they're 30,000 foot points about what God is, who he is, that he created, who humankind is, and so on.
Mark Clark [00:06:14]:
And so he built a machine and that machine produces the results. And the implication is, yes, of course we're connected to other animals. There really is no literal Adam and Eve. But the idea that we're connected to animals isn't actually a bad thing. Because all through Christian history, Christian theology has always said that humankind is a rational animal, all the way back to Aristotle. They've always recognized that we're part of that kingdom. We mate, we produce, we survive, we go in clans. That's not a problem biblically, because what they say is the bodily frame of humankind is derived from other creatures.
Mark Clark [00:06:47]:
But that's okay. It's never been an issue because the Bible stresses in Genesis, chapter one, let us make man in our image. And he puts humankind, of course, he makes animals his own. Then he puts humankind in creation. And he says, make man in our image. And the point is, he instills in that person his, his morality. That creature becomes a spiritual being. That's what it means to be made in the image of God.
Mark Clark [00:07:11]:
It's never meant that we look like God. God is not a 6 foot one, 170 pound human being with 5 fingers and 5 toes and walks around. That's not who God is. It's never when what being made in the image of God is. And so this position would say it doesn't really matter that we came from creatures. The point is that at some point, this creature was stamped with becoming the image or the iconos of God. They carry in Latin the imago dei. They become a moral creature, a spiritual creature.
Mark Clark [00:07:43]:
And so it's never been an issue. In fact, here's a crazy idea. We're gonna be exploring a few crazy ideas today. One of them is just to blow your mind for a second. So the data tells us that 65 million years ago, we all know this from science and exploration of history, archeology and so on, that 65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Yucanan Peninsula, Mexico, and created a massive dust cloud that killed all the dinosaurs. Okay, so 65 million years ago, all the dinosaurs go down. And that creates a scenario where mammals were able to survive. All right, so of course, our lineage being mammals, we become the apex predator over time, and we become the intelligent creatures on the Earth.
Mark Clark [00:08:26]:
Only because the apex predator called dinosaurs on the earth gets eliminated. Are mammals actually becoming intelligent creatures that begin to do agriculture, metal work, start to love one another, start to have marriage, start to paint and draw and do mathematics. All of that comes about because the dinosaurs were wiped out. And so evolutionists talk about the idea that if the dinosaurs didn't get wiped out because of the nature of natural selection, of course, humankind moves from Homo erectus to homo sapien. The Latin word sapien means thinking. We go from erect man to thinking man. The reality is, if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out 65 million years ago, the higher intelligence might not have gone to mammals at all. Check this for a second.
Mark Clark [00:09:09]:
It might have gone to reptiles. Sorry, what? Picture this. The idea that reptiles, if the dinosaurs don't get wiped out, reptiles actually become the thinking, intelligent creatures. And so we might go, oh, My goodness, that's crazy. These reptilian people walking around and drawing pictures and doing math and being like, how are you doing, Tom? All right? And they're like, eyes are on. But the reality is what this idea talks about is that could have happened if the dinosaurs had been eliminated. And the point from an evolutionary theistic mind is this, it doesn't really matter because the point isn't that we're made in the image of God, meaning we look like him, it's that we get stamped with the iconos, the image of God. We become moral spiritual beings.
Mark Clark [00:09:52]:
So it really doesn't matter what we look like in the end or what version of higher intelligence actually evolved or immersed through all of this process. It's that we're made in the image of God. Morally, virtually, we become distinct from the animals. We become conscious, we become self aware, we become moral. And that, that at 30,000ft is the point of the story. That's what this. And of course we know that, that sharks forcibly copulate with other sharks in order to get their sperm into the next generation to get their seed continuing on so that they can continue. That's what animals do.
Mark Clark [00:10:29]:
That's what sharks do. They don't walk up, they don't date their shark girl for a little bit and hope that she likes them. And then they, you know, they get married and then they're just sharks. Literally, a shark just comes up behind, right? And then that continues on. At some point we were distinct from that and we said, you know what, A man can't really just walk up to a woman and say, you know what? I don't have a girlfriend and rape her. Actually there is, and this is where I'm going to talk about a few problems with naturalistic Darwinism as we go. But one of the problems is that if you take it from a social Darwinistic perspective where you begin to talk about the implication of these ideas, you begin to realize they break down a little bit. Because there are people who have written papers on the natural history of rape.
Mark Clark [00:11:11]:
And what they talk about is rape is very natural for men who aren't good looking and can't get their seed into the next generation. It's the only way they can get their seed into the next generation is by forcing themself on another person. But don't worry about it because it's a very natural part of our history because we're all just growing out of our hundreds of thousands of years of coding that's happened through animalistic instinct. But there's A moment, this view says, where we become moral creatures and we can't rape anymore. There's a moment where if you looked at animals, lion kills a tiger, lion kills another lion, lion kills an antelope we talked about last week, but he doesn't murder it. We don't call up 9:1 and say, oh my goodness, I can't believe a lion did this. But at some point, humankind actually has something called murder when they kill somebody. So we're different, we're very unique.
Mark Clark [00:11:54]:
And so this view would say this story is a parable. Adam and Eve are a parable. You don't need to push the Bible into a literalistic framework. It's not a science textbook, which of course the church has always believed to some level, up until 150 years ago when fundamentalism came about. John Calvin in the 1500s said the Holy Spirit had no intention to teach astronomy. There is something about the Bible that is of course poetic, and there's poetic license in the midst of it, that we're not supposed to force every single scientific thing into some Bible passage and think that it has to do with it. And the message of this particular camp is that don't let naturalists or atheistic philosophy and interpretation take over evolution. That's not the point is that you can have a Christian version of it.
Mark Clark [00:12:37]:
And so that we don't, we don't want to take atheistic interpretations of it. The problem is not Darwinism, it's the atheistic interpretation of it. And so we have to actually take it back from a Christian perspective and show people that the two things can exist together. Which was part of Darwin's point is the argument at the conclusion of Origin of the Species, Darwin himself said this. There is a grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one. And that whilst the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. And of course he's saying that you have to have a creator begin that process, which we'll talk about in a second. And so the problem, of course, with this view are all the problems I'm going to mention about evolution, naturalistic evolution in a few minutes.
Mark Clark [00:13:33]:
Okay, so that's the first group. The second group to this question is a group that says these two views. Adam and Eve, Genesis 1, 2 and 3, and evolution are never compatible, Never the two shall meet. If you believe evolution, you're not even a Christian because there's a historical Adam and Eve. You take the Bible literal, it's 24 hour period. It means six days literal creation. It means the world is 10,000 years old, 6,000 years old. Of course, when we dug up dinosaur bones hundreds of years ago, this became a problem because it was like, well, how do you actually gauge how dinosaurs are walking around with Adam and Eve on a literal 24 hour period? And people just said, well, there's two solutions to that.
Mark Clark [00:14:10]:
One is Satan put dinosaur bones in the world. The other is that we didn't actually ride around with dinosaurs at all. That would actually be problematic. The Flintstones is not a documentary is the basic idea. And so we've got to understand that this view says you take the Bible exactly as it says it. It presses the Bible. The problem with this view is it presses the Bible into saying things that the Bible doesn't necessarily need us to say. The concept that the world is 6 to 10,000 years old and so on.
Mark Clark [00:14:43]:
We know genealogy is missing in the Bible. We can actually, as I'm going to explain, pack in billions and millions of years. Of course, this kind of thinking that says the Bible says this, ergo no scientific idea can fit into it and give no poetic license and take everything. Stark literal is a problem when it comes to genres of literature. Of course the Bible talks about God wraps us in his wings. And of course we don't believe God is a bird. It talks about God thinking, uses anthropomorphic language that God reaches out or he repents. These are all poetic license ideas where the Bible's explaining things.
Mark Clark [00:15:16]:
And this view has got into trouble in the past, of course, because it reads Job and the Psalms and Isaiah and it says the four corners of the earth. And they say, well, that's gotta be taken literal. Ergo the earth is flat. And so Christians for years and years thought the earth was flat because it says the four corners of the earth. Not recognizing the Bible is a beautiful poetic book that at times, depending on the genre, you have to be very careful how stark literal you force it to be. That's the second view. Now there's a third group that I'm going to explain some details on because I think it's worth talking about. That I think is probably the most plausible group.
Mark Clark [00:15:49]:
And it is that the truth is found somewhere in between these ideas that Adam and Eve are likely historical people. A critique on the first view. And Genesis is literal in itself. Meaning, but its details shouldn't be pressed to be literal. Science A critique on the second view. And in many ways, this is my position. It takes the Bible serious and science serious. It accepts most modern scientific conclusions, if they're legitimate, and says, look, this all fits within the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:16:17]:
And we do that, we see the Bible isn't really asking to be pressed into a literal model necessarily. And what I mean is, if you look at the creation story, Genesis 1, Genesis 2, light is actually made on day one. So of course, in the beginning, Genesis 1, verse 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Verse 2 and 3, the earth was about form and void and darkness over the face of the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. The problem is, is that the sun and the moon and the stars are not actually made until day four. So in Genesis 1 you have day one, which is explaining light and darkness.
Mark Clark [00:17:00]:
But it isn't until day four that you actually have sun and moon and stars, which of course, it's impossible to have light without those things. In the creation narrative, the idea that plants are sitting and surviving, which are made before the sun, plants are actually made. If you take Genesis 1 totally literally, plants are made on day three, but the sun is not made until day four, which obviously becomes a problem with photosynthesis and other things. How could they survive? There's probably something bigger going on in the story of Genesis 1 and 2, other than being taken as a stark literal science textbook. One of the critiques of evolution in this view though, is that in Genesis 1 it says that everything was made according to its kind, which is really important because evolution, of course says that not only was there micro evolution or evolution within species, but macro, which is that one species became another species. And this view would say, no, a plant gives seeds according to its kind, animals give according to their kind. And that is to be retained within Genesis. Because as I'll talk about modern science, after 250 years of testing, we would think we would have millions of examples of transitional forms and we literally don't have any.
Mark Clark [00:18:18]:
And the few that we have have been combated and actually disproven the things in our textbook as we were growing up. Third, a day in the Hebrew when it says that he made this in a particular day, he made plants, he made people, he made everyone. Day six, the general consensus is some people, people say, well, we gotta take that literal. It's a 24 hour period. And so he made the day. So it doesn't give room for the billions and, and billions of years that it would take to create the Earth. Because of course, the classic idea of what, what the earth is is it's literally a rock that got hit, it sat, and over billions of years, about 4.5 billion years ago, the earth was created and just slowly kind of emerged. The reality is people say, no, that can't be the case because the 24 hour period.
Mark Clark [00:19:01]:
The problem with that view, of course is, is the Hebrew word yom never means a 24. It can sometimes mean a 24 hour period, but often, oftentimes it means an epoch or an era, an undefined amount of time that something takes place within. This is why in Genesis chapter two, verse five, he describes one day period. And he says that there's no plants on the earth yet because it hadn't rained. He makes this point, there was no plants on the earth yet because it hadn't rained. But it's kind of weird because plants can go one day without surviving. If his only point is, hey, it hadn't rained that day, it seems weird to kind of go out of his way. But he's saying there hadn't been rain for a long period of time.
Mark Clark [00:19:39]:
Genesis 2 said Adam and Eve, it says that they're created on the same day. Genesis 2 actually says that they were created separate days. But Genesis 5 says the day Adam and Eve were made. Genesis 5, verse 2, the Yom that they were made, well, it just means the same era. Of course they weren't made in the same day, because in Genesis 2 we see that Adam actually does a bunch of things. He names animals, he does a whole bunch of exploration before. But Genesis 5 says the day that Adam and Eve were made. It doesn't mean a 24 hour period.
Mark Clark [00:20:09]:
Which saves us from the seeming contradictions all over. Genesis 1 actually says that. In chapter 1 it says plants are made before human beings. But in Genesis 2, Adam and Eve are made before plants. It saves us from all those contradictions because it basically says there is poetic license to this story in a very powerful way. If you look at the way the create. I did this earlier so we could save time. If you look at the creation narrative, what you have is day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six.
Mark Clark [00:20:40]:
But they're not necessarily taken in chronological order or not supposed to be. If you're a good reader of story and understand how the Hebrews function around the fireplace, telling poems, being able to tell a creation story that actually has as its massive point, not so much science and, and details about all the details all the little minutiae of astronomy and so on. It actually has to do with setting a rhythm for the Hebrews in the midst of exile, looking against the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Egyptians and us, and setting a rhythm for their life and their days, Day one, two, three, four, five, six. And then they rested on day seven. And the whole point of is the moral structure and rhythm and pattern for our lives. But if you read the story, it doesn't necessarily function chronologically. What you have in day one is you have a forming, and then day day four, you have a filling. So basically what it does is it parallels all the way through.
Mark Clark [00:21:28]:
On day one, he creates light. On day two, he creates water. On day three, he creates land. But it's not meant to be chronological. The point of it is this, because day four comes up and he creates the sun and the moon and the stars, which is just the filling description of what he did on day one. On day five, he creates the fish and the thing, the swimming things in the ocean, which is a filling of what he did in day two. And on day six, he puts animals and humans on the land, which is the filling of what he did in day six. So we begin to understand that we don't need a literal 24 hour period anyway because the Bible doesn't force us to do that.
Mark Clark [00:21:59]:
So we save ourselves from human beings riding around on dinosaurs and existing together. I was just speaking at a camp in the summer and we did Q and A at night and they said, is there any question if someone puts it in the box that you don't want answered? If someone puts that question in the box, you don't know what the answer is, you don't know what to do with it. And so I should just crumple it up and take it out. And I said, yes, dinosaurs. I don't know what to do with dinosaurs. They get okay, me either. And they walked away. I'm like, I'm joking.
Mark Clark [00:22:22]:
And they're like, what do you mean? It's a, it's not a problem in this view because we can basically take most of the scientific conclusions and be able to fit them in the context of what God has done. Because in Genesis chapter one, verse one, even if you go billions of years in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, It's a summary statement. And then in verse two, it says the earth was without form and void. And so literally people talk about the fact that right in here, in between verse one and two, you could literally have billions of Years. Because the reality is verse one is a summary. Verse two. You have the earth, and it's without form and void. It's sitting there like it's.
Mark Clark [00:23:05]:
So he creates the universe ex nihilo out of nothing in the beginning, creates the heavens and the earth. And then verse two transitions and starts to talk about. Now he took the thing that it's obviously not without. It's without form and void. It's sitting there. It's like clay. And he starts to actually shape it and mold it. And so this view would say the Bible's not.
Mark Clark [00:23:25]:
It's telling us the what, not the how and the why. It's. It's actually describing. It's subverting the Assyrian and Babylonian and Egyptian creation myths that believed that the sun and the moon were gods. The God Ra, they would worship them. And what the Genesis story is doing is it's not speaking to the 2019 scientific mind, trying to bat every scientific reality. It's trying to say in a subversive way that the gods of the Assyrians are false. That the things that the Egyptians worship as gods.
Mark Clark [00:23:55]:
God literally made that the God of Israel is the God of all creation. And it says he made the stars also. These. These bodies that you worship, he actually made in a day. It's just like. Yeah, on the side. And so you need to actually give your life to the God of Israel. That's the point of the story of Genesis 1 and 2.
Mark Clark [00:24:14]:
It's not meant. And it's also, as Calvin pointed out years ago, it's. It's almost unfolds as an observer on the ground, watching all these things take place. Light is there, but then day four, epoch era four, actually, the sun and the moon and the stars emerge, and you can see them and so on. And so it's about demythologizing the false creation narratives of the world around them. And so the point is this. We have creatures. We have tigers, we have bears.
Mark Clark [00:24:44]:
They have big teeth, they have big claws. And that's okay within this version because of course, in the second camp, you have the idea that death cannot enter the universe until sin comes into. But of course, this camp would say, no, no, no. What it's talking about is. Is human sin. Human sinfulness. It doesn't mean death because plants have to die. Stars have to die.
Mark Clark [00:25:03]:
There is death in the universe. For billions of years, the reason tigers and bears are walking around with big teeth and big claws was not to eat berries. Wasn't the cinematic. Well, I like. I like plants. But one day hopefully people fall and I can start eating that antelope over there. I'm really hoping that the animals were all killing each other anyway. All right.
Mark Clark [00:25:20]:
For millions of years. It's not a big deal. It all fits within the Bible perfectly. And so just as we expect scientists to be humble, we as Christians need to be humble. And we say, hey, science, maybe you're wrong about this or that. Oftentimes we can be wrong about an interpretation. And so how does humankind fit into this? Of course, we have this idea that In Genesis, chapter 2, verse 7, the Lord God formed the man out of dust from the ground. So there's this existing materials.
Mark Clark [00:25:51]:
He forms him and he breathed into his. And so what this view would say is, let's take the billions, let's take the millions, whatever. But we don't want to take necessarily the gradual transformation of humankind simply evolving from animal species in such a clear form. And what it says is this most conservative. I found the most conservative scholar I could to unpack this idea for you, just in case you're suspect that this is some kind of, you know, wonky secular idea or something. He says, this man, like science says, could fit into. Could have first appeared on Earth 2.5 million years ago and fit into the classic scientific structure. The question is, what kind of man are we talking about? And, of course, if you go through the textbooks, I won't unpack it all for you.
Mark Clark [00:26:35]:
But you have all kinds of different. You have Homo habilis, which was a skillful man, stonework and so on, all the way up to Homo erectus. And then Homo erectus, of course, that's the. You know, that's the guy who's like this. And then he goes and he straightens out. So Homo erectus is this guy. And then there's, of course. What's the last one? Homo sapien, right? And these are Latin terms.
Mark Clark [00:26:54]:
Homo means man. Sapien means thinking. So you go from erect man to thinking man. Don't tweet that. In a vacuum, it could be weird. And so the reality is you have thinking man who say, starts to draw on walls, starts to do agriculture, metal work. They find him in Siberia, he's raising cattle. All of this is considered Homo sapien, which most scientists say happened between 10,000 and 40,000 100,000 years ago.
Mark Clark [00:27:25]:
The point is, at some point, Homo erectus gets life breathed into his nostrils, and the man becomes a living creature, a spiritual creature, a mortal creature, a creature that understands a relationship with God. And so they transitioned into beings with souls. All of this is the point. They begin to bear the image of God and life in that way begins. Which of course squares with science now, which means there was versions of humankind walking around, but they weren't blessed with the image of God, which makes sense of a few different things in the Bible. So one writer, this conservative writer, writes these words. He says this. There is much agreement between the biblical and scientific data on the age of the first true Homo sapiens.
Mark Clark [00:28:10]:
That is true humans who lived in villages and practiced agriculture. Scientists generally date the origin of such species to less than 10,000 years ago, even as they date other human like beings much older. Furthermore, their studies are now concluding that there was a first human female mitochondrial Eve and a first human male Y chromosomal, atomic. And these are genetically unconnected to other Homo species such as Homo erectus and so on. So it makes sense out of a lot of things. Why was Cain, you know, Adam and Eve are the only two people in the world and they have, they give birth to Cain and Abel. Why is Cain afraid to go outside of his community? Because he's going to get killed? Because there's other things walking around. It's not just the four of them hanging out.
Mark Clark [00:28:50]:
That's the idea. And there's a million versions of this. But the point is, is people who look to even the creation narrative and say, well, you got billions of years here possibly jammed in here. I don't like that because, well, here's what we got to understand. How many of you know, as one of my theology teachers used to say, that we serve a three mile an hour God. How many of you know that God doesn't move quickly? He doesn't care. It's just him watching creation unfold. He's watching the earth over billions of years, full of.
Mark Clark [00:29:19]:
Listen, how, how, how much quicker do you want your sanctum sanctification to work? He is so slow, right? I, I, I watch my kids. I'm like, lord, please help sanctification work better. These kids are, these kids are wicked. Help them to stop stealing from me, lying to me, those little conniving. I just, all right, I want to be an 80s dad who can just kick them around, but I can't. All right, so point is, is that God can you move quicker. And so there's no problem with billions of years because the universe, as we're going to talk about an alien week, which is crazy that we have one, is the universe is so expansive. The point of it is the awe and the amazingness and the awesomeness of this God who is so large and so the Bible and science, we can approach them both confidently.
Mark Clark [00:30:05]:
Now, let me spend the next few minutes. Now that you know that I'm not some person who believes that, you know, Oprah's the Antichrist and I live in a backwaters in some swamp somewhere, I want to actually offer some legitimate critiques to naturalistic evolution that I think are problematic. And the reason I want to do it is not to, you know, redraw our textbooks or something. It's because I think after 60 or 70 years of actual DNA work and scientific development, since all your textbooks, you know, were drawn up from Darwinian ideas, observational science that's 200 years old, the reality is there's been a lot of work recently that causes a lot of questions with the classic evolutionary framework. And the reason that's important is because evolution has become an all encompassing idea and the secular cultures become ideologues in regard to evolution and has probably accepted it a little too easy. And so I want to push back and offer a few critiques on it. First, we have to understand that the modern naturalistic evolution idea is a philosophy, oftentimes more than it is a science. There's two types of causes to everything in the universe, either intelligent or natural.
Mark Clark [00:31:20]:
And naturalists and Darwinian begin by ruling out the intellectual, they rule out the supernatural. And so the game gets fixed because they say we have to give natural explanations to everything that we see. So what happens is a lot of errors start to, to take place when that philosophical, not scientific framework is actually set up. It'd be like going to, going to a murder scene and saying, okay guys, here's what we got to understand. We got to look at the evidence, but let's rule out the husband right away. Here's a woman, she's killed in her kitchen. We got to go in, we got to look at all the evidence, we got to come to conclusions. But let's all just say right off the bat it wasn't the husband.
Mark Clark [00:31:55]:
Now go. Let's try to figure out what to do. Well, that's a problem and you're going to actually have errors. And that's precisely what naturalistic evolution has done. It says we cannot use an intelligent mind as an explanation for anything we find, so we must find purely material or naturalistic explanations for it. The second thing I would say to this community is there should be some humility here because as scientists have pointed out over and over and over again, there is non overlapping categories here. When you're doing the Work of physics. When you're doing the work of science, when you're looking at bones and DNA and so on, it's very hard to jump from there and start making metaphysical or philosophical comments about religion or God.
Mark Clark [00:32:34]:
You can't look at bones and say, ergo, God doesn't exist. Over and over and over again people have said this. Stephen J. Gould, who is a Harvard evolutionary thinker, an atheist, a paleontologist, said, these are non overlapping magisteria. We can't make a comment about God because we're dealing with the world of physics. Physics doesn't immediately conclude anything about God and certainly his non existence. Einstein himself said setting up goals and passing statements of value is not the domain of science. Right.
Mark Clark [00:33:04]:
Physics can't comment on metaphysics. And this is where you need to be a little more humble. Okay, now let me talk about three basic problems that people have raised in regard to the classic evolutionary thinking. The first is the question of the origin of life. One of the main questions evolutionists have to answer is the question of the origin of life. They know this, it's kind of the thorn in their side, the idea of a first cause. If this thing, life began in amoeba or whatever and it started multiplying out and it was the first thing, where did that actually come from and how did it take place? There's been, it's never been observed. And so it's a faith position.
Mark Clark [00:33:41]:
That's issue number one. It's a faith position. People have tried to create it. There's something, a very famous experiment called the Miller Experiment, you can go Google it. Where they took methane, ammonia and hydrogen and they began to try to set the environment. This was in the mid-90s. To create a situation where they could find where life began, they did the experiment. Everyone said, oh, great job, this is great.
Mark Clark [00:34:02]:
We found out where life began. But then NASA came in and said, no, no, no. The problem is, it is you did a closed environment, you had an intelligent mind actually doing it, which is obviously problematic if you're a naturalist. But you also used water, carbon dioxide. Earth only actually had water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, and you use methane, ammonia and hydrogen. And so it's actually seen as a failure. Got published in some books and now it's been rewritten. And so one doctor says, this, Dr.
Mark Clark [00:34:28]:
Bradley says more than 50 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than its solution at present, all discussion on principle theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. Francis Crick, who was one of the guys Crick and Watson found the DNA, the double helix. He wrote this, an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. So many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going. Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I say I will never write another one because there is too much speculation. Even Darwin was doing observational science, looking at bones and turtles and birds. It was before DNA. Once DNA cracked we were able to look through microscopes and see that in even a human cell there are 3,000 million sets of letters.
Mark Clark [00:35:31]:
DNA is a literal language that has an intelligent mind seemingly behind it because it is a language. If I was to walk out, if you were to leave here today and see someone wrote in the sky, you know, I love you mom with a plane, you probably would say an intelligent mind crafted that because it's a competent language that actually has comprehension and meaning with letters and so on. That's what DNA is. And when we found DNA and we began to realize it was a language that mapped out everything, we began to realize, well, you kind of have to have a mind, that the basic assumption of evolution is matter over time creates mind. And that of course is a logical problem because every single situation evidentially we see is that mind creates matter. And so the reality is this. Anthony Flew, who was back in the 80s and the 90s, Anthony Flew was the biggest atheist, used to debate every single Christian and rip them apart on a stage. And in 2010, just before he died, he became at least an agnostic, if not a theist.
Mark Clark [00:36:27]:
And part of his issue was because he said this. The enormous complexity of even the simplest self producing cell with no better explanation of a first cause. And then he concludes his book by saying this. People overlook the fact that Darwin himself, in chapter 14 of Origin of the Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. A creature that evolution must give some account. 4 Darwin knew he hadn't given an account. And now it seems to me, Anthony Flew, that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument for design. That's the point.
Mark Clark [00:37:09]:
And so we know that there's micro evolution within species. What has never been documented without failing later is a, is an evolutionary example of something jumping species. Something might evolve, bacteria might, you might give it antibiotics. And then on the other side say, look, it evolved, but it stayed bacteria. It didn't jump into something else. And so there's never been a changing from one species to another observed. You have dog breeders, but they all remain dogs. But you can do different sizes and so on.
Mark Clark [00:37:36]:
A Great Dane, a Chihuahua, so on and so forth. So the reality is Darwin thought that single celled organisms would be super simple and it would be easy to multiply and replicate, complicate. But as we looked into DNA, we actually, science moved along. We realized that a single celled organism is more complicated than anything we've been able to create with a supercomputer. They're very complex. They have decoding systems, artificial languages, factories to produce themselves. They have proofreading. I mean, it's crazy.
Mark Clark [00:38:05]:
I say all of that to you. The amount of complexity in creation always points to a creator. That's the point. It doesn't point to a nothing so much. So, and this is what you gotta understand. How many of you cross our sights? Raise your hand if you've seen the movie Prometheus by Ridley Scott. Okay, raise your hand. Don't be embarrassed.
Mark Clark [00:38:23]:
Okay? You like aliens? You're cool. All right, so Prometheus opening scene confused a lot of people because it's a man who is an alien and he's all like a 12 pack and a big weird head and he comes off a spaceship and he's sitting on Earth and there's a waterfall and he opens a little canister and he drinks a canister and then his body dissolves and he jumps into a waterfall. And then the camera zooms in on a double helix, a DNA. And the point of it is, is that this is why. Because as we've looked into life, as we've seen the complexity of DNA and how it all works, there is no great explanation if you just leave meat to create mind. And so everyone's saying, what do we do? So there's all kinds of theories. If you eliminate God, then what are you going to come up with? It's called panspermia, and it's aliens. The reason that there is intelligent life, the reason there is language encoded in DNA isn't because there's a God, it's because of aliens.
Mark Clark [00:39:17]:
That's what that opening scene's about. And people have published many papers and lots of books about this very theory. It's called panspermia. Go look it up. Make sure you got the right words. There, when you Google it, the point is, is that aliens created life because there's no better explanation. Now, of course it's a stupid answer because who created the aliens? All we do is we push it one step further. But the point is, is that all the intelligent coding that we see forces us to think of a mind and a creator.
Mark Clark [00:39:45]:
And so Darwin himself said this. If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. And so we know now of many organ systems and processes in life that fit that exact description. And that's why people actually cause questions about it. Now, the second issue, and the last one I'll share with you before praying for us is the fossil record. People have raised the fossil record to show that you have to understand that if the theory of evolution was true as it lays, then what you would see are millions of examples of transitional fossils. So a, if you've seen the movie the Croods, all right, they're all walking around and there's like a half fish, half turtle, and his eyes are all messed up because you have to have animals in transitional form. And of course, when we've done all the fossil records and we've been searching through rocks for 300 years, there is literally no examples of a half evolved species in the rock bed, which you would predict to actually happen.
Mark Clark [00:40:54]:
As you see the different layers and you see the different epochs and eras, you would think that you would start to see some of these what are called transitional models, but there aren't any. And Darwin himself said this. Why then is not every geological formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links. Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain. And this perhaps, he said, and this perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The idea is people look at it and they go, this is evidence that evolution has a problem. Stephen Jay Gould, who's Evolutionary Thinker atheist, said this. The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with evolution exhibit they exhibit no directional change, and species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors.
Mark Clark [00:41:51]:
It appears all at once and fully formed. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that are in our textbooks as kids have data only at the tips of their branches. The rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. And so the rally is, it's not even following evidence anymore. It's all inference because we don't know, we haven't unseen. So it must be this way, which again is a faith position. It's a religious position.
Mark Clark [00:42:24]:
It's not a. A position based on evidence. And of course, you can go look at The Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago and realize why people raise this question. You have an explosion of animal phyla that is literally in the rock bed and they're all fully formed. There's no transitional models. And so Darwin said this to the question why we do not find records of these primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer. And then he says this. The case at present must remain inexplicable and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views I have here entertained.
Mark Clark [00:43:00]:
Now, all of that with this conclusion. The other massive problem with purely naturalistic evolutionary theory is that philosophy doesn't work because of course your mind and everything that you believe is a product of evolution, which means it was a product of something that helped you survive, not necessarily that hooked up with reality, not necessarily something that is true. And the problem with that is that means our cognitive faculties believe things that aren't necessarily true. They just believe things that helped us survive. Well, that then is true about our existence, but it's also true about evolutionary theory. And so Darwin himself said this. Within me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the conviction of a man's mind, which has been developed for the mind of lower animals, is of any value or at all trustworthy. Who can trust the convictions of a monkey's mind? Think about how haunting that is.
Mark Clark [00:43:54]:
Nobody. Which means this. You and I, we're in the matrix. We can't actually. The minute you want to believe evolution is true, it means may be just a product of your cognitive faculties believing something not that's true, but that helps you to survive. And so it actually, as Mitch Stokes the philosopher, says, atheists have a reason to doubt whether evolution would result in cognitive faculties that produce true beliefs. And if so, then they have a reason to withhold judgment on the reliability of their cognitive faculties. This ignorance of atheists are consistent spread to all the other beliefs, including atheism and religion.
Mark Clark [00:44:35]:
Believing in unguided evolution comes built in with its very own reason not to believe it. Take that in your pipe and smoke it. That's crazy. That means we don't even know if I'm a brain in a vat right now, bro. Now to all of that comes the biblical story, which is that you're made in the image of God. You Fell and you sinned. That's why you feel broken, that you are a soul and not just meat. Which means when a friend of yours kid falls and hits their head like a family that I'm following right now, it's breaking my heart watching their 8 year old get surgeries and I'm praying and fasting for this family.
Mark Clark [00:45:21]:
It means when I feel that and I'm crying in my backyard, it's not just synapses in my brain. It's because I'm a, I'm a psyche, I'm a soul. God put something in me. It's why you love art and, and, and, and, and music and there's, there's something transcendent about you. And when God comes to Adam and he stands before him and he breathes life into him, it's, it's, it's, it's like he's, it's intimate. In the Hebrew, it's intimate. It's like a kiss. So let me tell you this.
Mark Clark [00:45:48]:
If you're here and you're wondering whether you're just an animal, here's the thing. God made you. He breathed like a kiss. That's an image of love. You are loved so much that Jesus actually came to correct all the wrongdoing, died on a cross for our sin, rose again to give us life so we can be truly human. We can follow the second Adam as the Bible talks about Jesus, the one who was perfect and never fell so that we could be redeemed and made perfect. And in John chapter 20, as if bringing the whole thing full circle, Jesus breathes on his disciples and the Holy Spirit comes upon them and gives them life and gives them mission. Which is my prayer for you who are exploring.
Mark Clark [00:46:32]:
And you're wondering, is there any purpose and meaning and value to my life? In a pure naturalistic evolutionary framework, no. In a Christian framework, yes. Because you're made in his image and he has a plan for your life. Father, I pray that you would speak to us. You would burn away the discouragement that comes from a vacuous worldview. And you would help us know that we were made with purpose. So much so that you love us so much that you came to save us, that you would do that work among us. And as we explore over the coming weeks, that we would have the courage to actually explore the evidence versus running away from it.
Mark Clark [00:47:07]:
In your good name, we pray. Pray. Amen.