Overtime: Know God: No God? Why Should I Believe At All? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

All right.

Well, welcome to our very first overtime.

This is going out to our MetaCurch audiences on the MetaCurch YouTube channel, as well as our social media and uh to the Clayton Tiner podcast audience.

And so we want to get this out as far reaching as we can because we think that this is really, really important.

We are in a series at MetaCurch where I'm the lead pastor called Know God.

And in this series, we are practicing apologetics.

Now, people hear that and they think it sounds like we're maybe apologizing for what we believe, but apologetics is from the Greek word apologia, which means a defense of our faith, a reasoned defense of our faith.

Now, if you're just listening to this overtime and you want to get the full picture, you can go to metachurch.tv slash know God.

I'll remind you that at the end as well.

MetaCurch.tv slash know God, K-N-O-W-G-O-D.

And that will have a link to all of the sermons.

It's going to be a six-week series.

And we just did week one.

In week one, we asked the question whether or not there is a God and why should we believe in God at all?

And what we did is we gave three arguments for the existence of God.

We were looking specifically at theism, which doesn't prove the God of the Christian Bible.

Um, it just proves a creator God that has some significant characteristics to that creator.

So the three arguments were an argument from creation, an argument from design, and an argument from morality.

I'm not going to go through those in detail because I just did that.

There's a 48-minute video of me really walking through these in as much depth as I had time to go into.

And I want to go into a little more depth right now.

There's so much to say about these topics, and there's so much that kind of, you know, metaphorically got left on the cutting room floor when I was editing these weekends down that we wanted to do this midweek overtime in order to get some more things out there.

So the three arguments, the argument from creation, this is technically called the Kalam cosmological argument.

Probably the most famous person who's putting this forward today is William Lane Craig, who is actually in the hospital right now.

And if you are a spiritual person, maybe you could lift up a prayer for one of the greatest um just uh defenders of our faith that's alive today.

The Kalam cosmological argument says that everything that began to exist has a creator.

The universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a creator.

And so we looked at the evidence, which overwhelming scientific evidence for the beginning of the world at what is commonly known as the Big Bang, that before the Big Bang, it is general scientific consensus that there was nothing.

There was no time, no space, no matter.

What that means is that if there was a creator, they have to be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.

They also would have to be all powerful to create the universe out of nothing, and they would have to be personal because an uncaused cause, like we're describing here, is either an abstract idea like a number, or it is a mind or consciousness.

And numbers don't make decisions.

It is minds that have a personal capacity to make a decision to go from nothing to something.

And so we're left with uh immaterial, spaceless, timeless, all-powerful, personal creator.

Now, that does describe many of the attributes of the Christian God, and it actually distances itself from many of the religions that would be polytheistic or have an impersonal God or have a God who has existed for all time, because before the universe there was no time.

Now, that's kind of confusing, and we're going to get there at the end because we believe that the God of Christianity is eternal.

And some people think eternal is a measurement of time, but eternity is actually the absence of time itself because the creator of the universe had to be time-less.

And so those are our our first argument, is the cosmological argument.

Our second is the argument from fine-tuning.

We looked at the anthropic principle, which basically says um we're here, and because we're here, we can seek to discover why we're here.

The anthropic principle has over a hundred constants that must be in place for the universe to be sustainable and for life to be sustained within it.

And these are our fine-tuned constants to astronomical degrees, literally astronomical.

We're looking at numbers like 10, you know, 10 to the 100th power.

Um, for all of the principles of the anthropic principle to be put together, um, some have estimated to be as small of a chance as like one to 10 to the 138th power.

That's one with 138 zeros after it.

Just to put that in scale, all subatomic particles in the entire universe come out to about 10, uh one to 10 to the 80th power.

That's how many 10 to the 80th power is the number of subatomic particles in the universe.

So uh really, really just like unbelievably low odds.

It takes an incredible amount of faith to believe that all of these principles are there, completely unguided.

That argument says that uh every design has a designer.

The universe is intricately designed, therefore the universe has a designer.

And last we looked at morality, which is the fact that everyone can be moral and everyone can know morals, what is right, wrong, good, bad, and evil.

But an atheist cannot justify their morals.

And people like Sam Harris have gone to great lengths to do that.

I've addressed that on the Clayton Tiner podcast before, that there are some real, real problems with having no God, nothing outside of us to cement our moral claims on or in, and yet trying to live in a world where we can justify our morality.

If there isn't a standard outside of us, if there isn't uh someone to give that moral law to us, then it's just a matter of opinion, and there's no way to get around that.

The uh the Russian scholars like Nietzsche and Dosievsky, um, they knew this.

They were very honest about this, even though they were atheists.

So those were our three arguments, and there was a lot that we weren't able to get to that I want to kind of dive into now.

I want to look at three things I wasn't able to uh address.

I want to look at truth itself, how we know truth, and if we can know truth.

I want to I want to look at evolution, which is obviously a big topic, right?

That didn't even come up at all in the sermon.

And then I want to um just give a response to probably the most common pushback on the idea of theism, a creator God.

So, first, let's take some time to look at truth.

And I want to talk about objective versus subjective truth.

Number one is where does truth come from?

Like in your own life, how have you decided the truths that you hold?

Because we have some truths that we hold about politics, about relationships, the way that the world works, our moral truths, all of these different things.

Now, if you really think about what you can cement those truths in or where truths come from that are valid, there are a lot of ways that we inherit our truths.

We inherit our truths from the society around us.

We get a lot of our truths from our parents.

You know, the number one correlating factor of what party you're gonna vote for when you grow up is who your parents were and who they voted for.

There are uh sociological factors, there's all of these things that lead us to what we hold as truth.

But if you really investigate those things, all of them have a lot of points of failure.

And so that's not where absolute or objective truth comes from.

Objective truth has to come from an actual investigation into the best evidence and best facts present, and then finding the truth that actually actually corresponds to the claim that you're making.

That is objective truth.

Objective means that it's just true.

It doesn't matter who believes it or disbelieves it.

It doesn't matter if the truth is said in 2022 or the year 22 AD.

It doesn't matter what the consensus is around it, either it's objectively true or it's not.

If it's not objectively true, then it's subjectively true, which means it's just relative.

And we live right now in a society that is pushing relativism like never before.

And there are many, many people, kind of more modern scholars, who have completely left the idea of objective truth behind.

There's actually, they believe there's no way to really know truth.

There aren't any absolutes in the world.

Everything is malleable, everything changes.

What's true today may not be true tomorrow and may not have been true yesterday.

Everything is relative.

And this really started uh coming in full force uh maybe 10, 20 years ago, but it goes back a lot further than that.

And there's a uh there's a post-modern thought that has really um started kind of in our universities and it's crept its way out uh into more mainstream beliefs.

And postmodernism says that we're post-modern thought.

In modern thought, you have objective truths that you can actually discover in postmodern thought you do not.

And what's so interesting is that people can hold to relativism and yet still try to do things like science and history, things that are seeking to find objective truths.

And so when you have someone come against a belief in God with the idea of relativism, there's actually a way to defeat that line of argument that is so simple.

I think once you learn it, it will be one of the greatest tools in your tool bag in order to give a good defense of the faith that you have.

And it's all based in the law of non-contradiction.

The law of non-contradiction very simply says a and not a cannot both be true at the same time.

You cannot have a and not a.

Those are contradictory things, which means they can't both be objectively true.

On relativism, you allow for contradiction in any and every way.

And so uh a contradictory statement would be to say, uh, I can't say a single word in English.

It's like, well, no, you can because you just said that sentence in English.

It's like, nope, I don't know a single word in English.

It's like, well, no, again, you you just even added a new word, you know English.

It's like I'm telling you right now, I don't know a single word in English.

Well, now you said I'm telling you right now, those are even more English words.

That's a contradictory statement that is objectively contradictory, which means it is objectively false.

On relativism, there is no objective truth or there is no objective non-truth.

Everything is just relative.

You can't introduce yourself as a married bachelor.

Hi, yeah, nice to meet you.

I'm, you know, 35 years old.

I'm a married bachelor, really happy about it.

It's like, no, no, no, you can either be married, that's a, or you can be a bachelor, that's not a.

You can't be both of them at the same time.

Well, it's all relative.

Actually, it's not.

The law of non-contradiction just simply takes these claims of relativism and shows very clearly that they cannot live up to their own standard.

If a statement cannot meet its own standards, it's called a self-defeating statement.

And so these are things that are being pushed in the universities, they are being pushed on atheism, they're being pushed in a lot of different areas.

And I just want to look at the very, very simple defeaters to them.

Something you will hear is there is no truth, right?

It's all relative.

Okay, it's all subjective.

There is no truth.

If you understand the law of contradiction, then your question back is is that true?

There is no truth.

Okay.

What if they say there are no absolutes?

You can't say that anything is absolutely certain.

That's just too high of a bar.

That's a very postmodern thought.

There are no absolutes.

The question you should ask is, are you absolutely sure about that?

Because if you're absolutely sure that there are no absolutes, then you have defeated your own statement by proving at least one thing that is absolutely true.

And if you have to say no to that, I'm not absolutely sure that there are no absolutes, then there could in fact be absolutes.

You can't know the truth.

How do you know that that's true?

You'll also hear all truth is relative.

All truth is relative, man.

It's just about where you are and who you are and how you think and your lived experience and what period of time you're living in.

All truth is really just relative to the culture around you and the people around you and the upbringing that you're in.

Your question should be: is that statement relative?

Is the statement all truth is relative relative?

Does it actually apply to everyone?

You see, what they're trying to do in the world of relativism is to make absolute statements in order to undergird a relative worldview.

And it is all self-defeating.

In a subjective world, all truth claims are inherently self-defeating.

They cannot get around it, they cannot get away from it.

And why this matters so much is because we are on a search in this know God series for the truth of who God is, who Jesus is, what we can trust, what's coming after this life, all of these giant fundamental questions.

What is the universe?

How did it start?

How did we get here?

We're looking for the objective truth of those questions.

And if there is no truth, then we're all just wasting our time.

And what you'll find is there are passionate defenders of relativism.

They passionately believe, they are absolutely sure and know it to be true that relativism exists.

And in fact, that it touches every facet of knowledge, science, and philosophy.

And so the question is: are you absolutely sure that that isn't relative itself?

It's a statement, a series of statements that cannot meet their own standards.

Now, we can trace back in the history of thought to really the two intellectual giants who brought this into the forefront.

And this isn't the only time we're going to talk about David Hume, but David Hume and Emmanuel Kant, they both really push these into the mainstream.

And many people are still holding on to what they believed about relativism in the first place.

Hume made the argument that any claim has to be verified by abstract reasoning, like something that is definitive, like math, like you can see two plus two equals four, or by empirical verifiability.

What is that a word?

Empirically verified is what I'm trying to say.

So it either has to be true by definition or it has to be empirically verified, which means we use like our five senses in the scientific process in order to verify it.

And so that's what he said that if it requires anything outside of those two domains, that it's just relative, right?

Everything else is relative, which means everything that's metaphysical or supernatural or goes beyond the realm of what we can see with our senses, then we can't know that, which means we cannot know God.

That is just a relative area where we'll never really know.

Okay.

Well, the problem with that is that his own, uh, his own ways of determining what truth is can't live up to their very own standards.

The problem is that standards are not true by definition, is not true by definition.

That the statement, all claims must be verified empirically, which means actually you can't know really anything about the past or anything about history because you can't go back and observe those events empirically.

So you don't know anything about the past, can't know anything about history, which means you can't know anything about Jesus, can't know anything about the origin of life, can't know anything about the beginning of the universe.

You can't empirically verify any of those things.

However, that statement is not empirically verified.

His statement about things that have to be true by definition, that statement's not true by definition.

His statement or premise that things have to be empirically verified cannot be empirically verified.

It's an idea.

It can't be put under a microscope.

And so, once again, even though they're a little bit more sophisticated than just saying all truth is relative, which is easily defeated, even Hume's arguments for how you determine truth cannot live up to their own standards.

It's a very real problem.

And he was setting out to say you cannot investigate the idea of anything supernatural, anything pertaining to God.

And really, if he followed his arguments logically, you couldn't learn anything about history.

Emmanuel Kant goes even further.

He says we have to be agnostic about everything because we perceive everything through our five senses, and we don't really know that we can trust our five senses.

And so if we can't trust anything from our senses, then how can we trust the words that Emmanuel Kant is saying because we are receiving them through our senses?

And furthermore, how can Emmanuel Kant even come to his conclusion since he just discovered that and thought of that through his own senses?

And so, once again, just like the founders of this, Hume and Kant have these really, really big problems where their own statements and their own standards don't live up to themselves.

And so these guys who want so hard to say, all we can do is just be naturalists, all we can do is just study the empirically verifiable world.

That's a very real problem because in order to do that, you have to use things like thought and consciousness and abstract reasoning and all of these things that are not empirically verified.

And so once again, we see that if you have the law of non-contradiction in your pocket and you use it as a filter for truth claims, you will you will be able to filter out a significant number of arguments that come against things like theism, come against things like objective truth or objective reality, because so many of those statements are self-defeating and contradicting by their very essence.

So that is objective versus subjective truth.

Many people, a growing number of people in the world today, hold to the idea of subjective truth, hold to the idea that there is really no way to know that everything is relative.

And relativism as a concept itself is self-defeating.

And relativism largely came from the ideas of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, which, if you really study the premises they put forward are self-defeating within their own system.

All right, that is objective and subjective truth.

There's a lot more to say about all of this stuff.

There's a lot of study that you can do.

If you go to that website, metachurch.tv slash know God, I recommend a few books on there.

There's links that you can read and study.

And I mean, there is like volumes and volumes of books that you can study, all of this stuff, and study both sides of the argument.

You're obviously hearing uh somewhat of a biased sampling from me because I have done a significant amount of study on this and I have come to the conclusion that there is a God and he does exist and that he came down in the person of Jesus and proved his deity by dying and rising again and all of those things that uh traditional Christian belief holds.

So that's truth.

Now let's look at evolution.

Uh, if you were either at Metachurch on Sunday or maybe you streamed with us, you might have been surprised to see that evolution was not really in the picture.

It's not something that we talked about at all.

And the reason is because it takes a long time and I am limited in my time at MetaCurch because we have multiple services coming, and because I don't want to like put anyone to sleep or anything like that.

So we try to keep me around 45-ish minutes.

But evolution is a huge topic.

And, you know, we talked about the Big Bang on Sunday, and the Big Bang can be really controversial to talk about in church because I grew up in churches who were super anti-Big Bang, you know, and they felt like atheists were using the Big Bang to try to discredit the idea and the need for God.

When in fact, the Big Bang is the greatest evidence against a static eternal universe.

And so the Big Bang tells you there was a beginning, which is important because the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible starts with in the beginning.

The Big Bang gives us a beginning where there was nothing, and out of nothing came all of this, which on theism begs for a creator.

Um, evolution is another one of these things that is used to discredit the need for God and the creation of life.

So, cosmology, the study of creation, the study of the cosmos, including the beginning of the universe, cosmology talks about the beginning of the universe.

Evolution really talks about life.

That is the creation of human life and how we got to humanity in the first place.

You probably know a little bit about evolution.

However, um, one thing that they don't really teach you, which I think is is um is kind of a a trick, you know, in a sense.

It's it's really it's sleight of hand, is that there are two big branches of evolution.

One is microevolution, and the other is macroevolution.

Microevolution is the small changes uh over time, across time, for the adaptation of uh different animals, different beings within themselves.

And so, Darwin, one of the original things he studies were finches, and he would go to these different islands and the finches, their beaks would be shaped a little bit differently.

And over time, through adaptation, natural selection, um, the beaks would be significantly different depending on what they needed to do.

On some of the islands, they had these big, like really robust nuts that they would eat.

And so they had these big beaks that could like chomp through those nuts.

And that just makes sense.

The birds that were able to do that would survive because they'd get more food to eat, they'd be more attractive as a mate, and so their, you know, their genetics would go forward.

And over time, the bigger beaks went out, right?

Um, on other islands, they would need to like get deep into a plant in order to get it, and so their beaks would be more narrow and that would be more adapted.

And so over time, microevolution, small changes in form would happen.

We know this because this is what genetics does.

You know, you learn about this pretty early on in science.

Like you take some of your mom's DNA and some of your dad's genetics, and that comes together.

And so, you know, you get the receding hairline of your dad, and that's kind of a bummer.

And you get, you know, your mom's colored eyes and your hair color and all of these things.

So they're determined and they're passed down.

And through natural selection, some of it is about sexual selection, and some of it is about a Adaptation to your environment and who can actually survive the longest to propagate their genes.

Microevolution is just a scientific fact.

There's no way around it.

We know it.

It's empirical, which means we can observe it happening right now, right here, today, right?

The population over time has gotten a lot taller.

Why is that?

Well, because generally, sorry, short guys, females find tall guys more attractive, right?

I am right in between short and tall.

I'm just kind of a nice, lukewarm medium sitting on the fence between short and tall, like everyone else wishing I was taller.

Okay.

Tall guys more attractive.

The population gets taller over time.

Things like that happen.

We see that happening in real time.

That's different than macroevolution.

Macroevolution is going from a single-celled organism billions of years ago to then different genetic life forms, different uh man, I don't remember this at all, but you had like uh kingdom, phyla, genome.

I don't even know, right?

Did not do well in science in school, just full transparency.

But it's going from like single-celled organism to fish, to bird, to primate, to human.

It's jumping across genetic categories, right?

Over time, given lots and lots and lots of time.

That is macroevolution.

Um, some would say it's from goo to the zoo to you, right?

From a single-celled organism to animals to humans across time.

I get it, scientists, Darwinists, that is a ginormous oversimplification, but it's right in its general premises that macroevolution allows for the crossover between genetic categories of beings, of animals, even uh crossovers from things like reptiles into mammals.

So um, macroevolution is not a scientific fact, although it is treated like one.

Now, I want to say this up front.

Much like the Big Bang, the church has been anti-evolution, macroevolution, that is.

Microevolution is a fact.

Macroevolution, the church and Christianity at large has been against that fully.

Here's what I want to say: I don't know.

Um I don't have a problem with macroevolution.

Um, I just see evidence that there is a creator, that there is design.

And so if there is an all-powerful, immaterial, spaceless, timeless creator, and there is design in the universe, I think that that creator is the designer behind the design.

And so I don't have a problem theoretically with God choosing macroevolution as this complex, somewhat beautiful, somewhat savage, because a lot of population of animals die out, way of actually using macroevolution as a mechanism to create life, to create the first Homo sapiens, which would be the beginning of consciousness, the beginning of higher thought.

Um, in theological terms, that would be the beginning of something like a soul.

Um, so there are, just so you know, there are evolutionary theists.

There are Darwinists, the Darwinist theists.

So there are people who completely believe in God, the God of the Bible, and also believe in macroevolution.

I don't have a problem with that in theory.

If God wanted to use macroevolution as his way to populate his earth, to bring about humans so that he could bring about one day Jesus, to save humanity from themselves, all of those things.

I don't actually have a theoretical problem with that.

Um, however, I do have some problems.

My number one problem is that Darwinism is the religion of the naturalists.

It's a religion and it has all of the blind dogmas attached.

Okay.

And what I mean by that is I think there is also good evidence and mounting evidence for things like intelligent design.

And if there is an intelligent creator, which I believe there is, then there is intelligent design, whether it is used through some form of evolution or not.

Darwinism, on ideological grounds, will not even consider the fact that there could be a creator or designer, even when there's overwhelming evidence of design and overwhelming need of a creator starting at the Big Bang beginning of the universe.

So Darwinism takes this religious fervor.

And if you want to see how it is like religions in the past, just look at the people in the scientific community who don't hold to it.

It isn't like, hey, we have a difference of opinions, we can sit down and figure it out.

I'll hear your ideas about intelligent design and creationism and a young earth and all these other things, and you hear my ideas and maybe we'll learn something.

No, no, no.

If you step out of the mainline evolutionary, macroevolutionary uh idea, if you step out of that, you are excommunicated, ostracized, and attacked for believing anything else.

Nothing else is even willing to be considered.

Now, there are some very real issues within macroevolution that there is at this time not an account for, which doesn't mean it's wrong.

It doesn't mean it's wrong.

It doesn't mean that's not a method that God used to bring about civilization and humanity.

It just means that they're not answered.

And you know, what atheists have accused Christians of doing and religion of doing forever, of having this God of the gaps, where when we can't explain something, we just go, you know, it's just the mysteries of God.

Darwinists have the exact same thing.

And when you point out these holes in their logic, they'll just say, evolution fixes it.

Evolution explains it.

And if we can't explain it now, we believe that's a faith statement.

We believe that science will fill in these gaps later.

Well, that's kind of like saying, hey, I'm sure God will answer these questions for me when I get to heaven.

You know, it's like, I'm not saying which one's better than the other.

I'm just saying, let's be honest that we're on an even playing field here.

There are some very real questions.

So again, I don't even want to feel like I'm making a case against macroevolution.

Um, there are significant holes, though, that keep me from being fully convinced on it for sure.

And so here are some of those.

The first is just the origin of life or the genetic Big Bang.

So if you listen to this Sunday's message uh about the cosmological argument, you have this huge problem, which is that science has concluded at one point before the universe there was nothing.

Aristotle says nothing is what rocks dream about, that like there was no time, no space, no matter.

And then the universe came into existence out of nothing.

Creation ex nilo.

And so that's kind of a problem.

And the answer is either someone created something out of nothing, like a creator, that's theism, or no one created something out of nothing.

One of those is a miracle, and one of those is absolute madness.

We have the same problem with the origin of life.

The Big Bang explains how the universe got here, but it does not explain how life got here.

So, where did that first uh prototype, that first single-celled organism, which on macroevolution everything sprang from, where did it come from?

You see, this requires faith.

And there are non-theists who are willing to admit this, that this requires a high level of faith.

They can give no account for how the first life got here.

In the same way that it takes an unbelievable amount of what I would consider unreasonable faith to believe that out of nothing the universe came, it also takes a very high bar of somewhat unreasonable faith to believe that blind natural forces created the first spontaneous life, that there was no life, and then spontaneously life came.

Now, a huge problem is obviously that spontaneous life has never been observed.

And what makes that even harder is that for a lot of modern history, scientists have been going into the lab trying to create with their intelligent minds the perfect scenario for life to spontaneously burst into existence.

And not only has it never failed, it has actually proved more and more just how impossible the very idea of it is.

And so, even with intelligent minds and the perfect conditions, we can't observe spontaneous generation of life.

And yet we believe that unguided, with no mind, with just simple, uh uncaring Darwinistic evolution, that the first life appeared.

That's a big, big hurdle.

And there are just astronomical odds for you to believe that life spontaneously generated one time in this miracle of miracles and that it's never happened again.

That's a really big problem.

So, yes, macroevolution is a theory that posits how we got from that first single-celled life to today, but macroevolution does not tell you how you get to that first life.

That is a massive gap.

It's as massive as the Big Bang of something coming from nothing.

Okay, a few other issues with macroevolution.

One is what's called Darwin's doubt or the determinist dilemma.

The Darwin's doubt, as he expressed it, is that his theory had proven that we all came about from uncaused, um, only naturally guided, so unguided by anything conscious or an intelligent mind processes, which means that really all we are is an evolved, much evolved version of a single-celled amoeba.

Well, a single-celled amoeba can't do science, it doesn't know math, it doesn't know philosophy, it has no consciousness, it has, it has no dreams, it can't think about the future.

Even our like closest related animals on evolution can't do those things.

They can't actually plan for a future.

Now, there are some incredible animals out there and they can do some incredible stuff, but what it looks like they're doing and what they're actually doing and how we perceive it through the anthropomorphizing of them, in other words, treating them as if they are humans and acting like us and thinking like us.

Man, there is a massive Grand Canyon size gap between those things.

And so Darwin's doubt said if evolution is true, then we are simply genetically determined through genetic adaptation, survival of the fittest, natural selection.

And if all that we are is billions of years worth of evolution, then how can we actually believe anything that we think or anything that we conclude?

In other words, if all that we are is determined, predetermined, including our consciousness and including our thoughts, then how can we actually rely on those thoughts?

And this is the problem with atheistic determinism.

And any consistent atheist has to believe in some level of genetic determinism.

And that just means that we have no free will, we don't make free choices, that everything we do is already pre-programmed to run out.

And so, how can we trust the conclusions that we come to if those conclusions were predetermined by our genetics?

We don't actually think of things, we don't actually make decisions, we don't actually come to conclusions.

And so, how can we trust any of those things without the ability to have free will and free choice?

That's another real problem.

And Darwin himself had this doubt.

If I'm right, what that means is that my brain, my consciousness, my mind, my thoughts are really just the random firing of synapses that are a part of an evolutionary chain going back billions of years.

How can I actually trust what those thoughts are?

Another problem with macroevolution is the missing fossil record.

This is kind of the dirty little secret of evolutionists, is what you would expect to find is the missing links between the genetic jumps from one category of species to the next.

And so if you're going to go from fish to bird over time, then what you would expect to find is a fish with some feathers and wings, and then some kind of a bird with scales and fish vertebrae.

You would expect to see these crossovers.

And even high-level agnostic paleontologists are admitting that if it were just based on the fossil record, there would be virtually no proof for uh evolution.

Now, if a Darwinist were sitting right next to me here in my office, they would talk about some different things that they see, certainly not as proof, but as maybe evidence and things that you could leap to the best conclusion, which might be evolution.

Um, I have not personally been convinced by any of those.

Um, what you don't see is category jumps.

You do see significant variation within categories themselves.

That's microevolution, even if it's at a large scale, but macroevolution to actually make the genetic jump, that is a real problem.

Attached to that, and maybe the biggest problem is irreducible complexity.

What irreducible complexity says is that if there, and Darwin knew this, if there is anything inside of a a uh any any one of the species that is complex to the point where you couldn't make an alteration in even one part without the whole thing losing function, then that would make it impossible to make the necessary transition from one species to the next.

If you think about the amount of change that has to happen inside of one species to become a complete different species, if there's anything inside of one of those that is so complex it wouldn't be able to make the transition, it would mean that evolution would have a very, very difficult time explaining that.

And we actually know that uh there are many of these things that are irreducibly complex.

You got to remember, when Darwin was doing this, the cell had not been investigated or even understood, that DNA had not been discovered, that the complexity Darwin was working with is a fraction of a fraction of the complexity that we actually know exists within every living thing today.

The eye is a good example of irreducible complexity, and not just the eye, but the actual ability to have vision.

Um if it's irreducibly complex, that means you can't change one part of it without it losing function.

And there's so much difference in the eyes of the supposed species that made the link from one to the other that what you would end up with is the missing links who had no vision.

And no vision, if you're wondering, is pretty damning for survival of the fittest.

If you can't see in a world that's constantly trying to eat you, you're probably not going to actually be the fittest.

The cell itself, in many cases, is irreducibly complex.

And the change in cell from one link to the next has so much variation that the cells just could not have actually made that leap.

Other things like blood collotting, there are many examples of this that have been shown to be irreducibly complex, which means they could not have jumped links.

That's a real problem for macroevolution.

Now, this is just more of a social and maybe even emotional problem.

Um, but evolution was rooted in significant racism.

And you may not know this because you will never see it in a modern reading of the origin of the species, which was Darwin's treatise on macroevolution.

You will never learn about this in a uh elementary, middle school, high school classroom.

Um, but the full title of Darwin's Origin of the Species is Origin of the Species or The Preservation of the Favored Races.

And Darwin had some ideas in evolution that are in fact the same ideas held by white supremacists today.

They have been proven to be wrong.

And you can uh you can look up some of what Darwin really believed and uh and what he thought about race and ethnicity and everything else, and um, it's difficult to read.

And so there was a very real racial component to this, which he's also just been proven wrong on, been proven wrong on on so many aspects of this.

And yet, like where I started, Darwinism is a religion and you can't question it.

And its founder was racist.

Well, you can't question that.

And if you question it, then you're out of the cult.

So um anything that has to hide some of its origins, anything that has to explain away um some of its real missing pieces, anything that excommunicates you for asking too many questions, that's a religion at best and a cult at worst.

And cultic mindsets do not help you discover the truth.

What helps you discover the truth is looking at the best evidence available with an open mind to all physical and metaphysical uh possibilities.

And if you can do that, I think that you will will come to the to the right conclusions.

And if you're a Christian listening to this or watching this, you also need to know you don't have to be afraid of the Big Bang.

You don't have to be afraid of evolution or even macroevolution.

And even if all the fossils come up and there's all the missing links and irreducible complexity, man, that's answered for.

And the origin of life, somehow they're able to demonstrate exactly how it happened and there's there's perfect proof of it.

Um, that doesn't mean that theism and macroevolution cannot coexist.

Um, what it means is that God is God and He can decide to do this thing however he wants to do it.

What I'm saying is there's some real issues with it.

And so for atheists to take evolution and say, hey, we don't need God, we've got evolution, that's just not a correct argument.

Number one, evolution gives you the progression of life, it doesn't give you the origin of life.

Man, that is the biggest missing link, right?

Not only that, but there are some just very real issues that have to be answered before you can just say, hey, man, you can just get rid of your God because we've got Darwin, right?

Uh it's it is propagated as if it is that cut and dry.

And it simply is not.

All right, we've talked about truth and we've talked about evolution.

Now I want to talk about the most, well, I'll be honest, the second most common pushback that I hear against theism, the belief in God.

The first most common is if God is good, then why do bad things happen?

And we're gonna talk about that in week three of the series.

And so I'm not gonna talk about that today.

The second most common is who made God.

So let's say that you're right about everything, Christian, right?

That there was nothing and and you can't get something out of nothing.

And so there had to be a someone, some kind of mind or spirit or consciousness, and everything is designed.

I'll give you that.

It like even atheists will admit there's evidence of design everywhere.

We just don't think there's a designer.

So maybe there is a designer because that actually makes more sense.

And you know, I do think there's good, right, wrong, bad, evil.

And so, you know, I guess there has to kind of be a God in order for that to be objective.

So let me just grant you all of your points and all of your premises.

But who made God?

So God made it all, you know, that's a cosmological argument.

We had to have a creator, but who made God?

Right?

And so people will say this and they're like, Gotcha.

God made it all, but someone had to make God because everything that exists has a creator.

You said that, that was your argument.

Okay.

This is uh a great pushback, and I completely get it because it's like there was nothing and now there's something, and all that came from God, but who made God?

It sounds really smart on its face.

It just misunderstands our actual argument.

Again, the cosmological argument says everything that began to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.

You couldn't make the same deductive argument, the same syllogism for God.

You couldn't say everything that began to exist has a cause.

God began to exist, therefore God has a cause, because we believe that God never began to exist.

He's called the uncaused cause.

He is the first cause of all the rest of the causes.

And so this is a misunderstanding.

Who made God misunderstands not only the argument that we're making, I mean, to prove that second premise that God began to exist, all we all we have to do is prove that false, and the entire deductive argument falls apart.

And it's not just out of the Bible where God says that he is timeless and he was here from the beginning and he sees the end from the beginning, the beginning, from the end, and he exists outside of space and time.

And in the beginning, God was already there.

It's not just a biblical argument, it's actually a philosophical argument.

If you remember at the very beginning, when we talked about what the cosmological argument tells us and what the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, tells us about if there's a God, the properties that God must have, we learned that He had to be spaceless, immaterial, all-powerful, personal, and timeless.

And the reason that God, creator God, on theism, must be timeless is because the Big Bang shows us that before the Big Bang, there was no time.

There was no material, there was no space, and there was no time.

So for the scientific conclusion of the Big Bang to be accurate, there could not exist something with time.

God must be timeless.

Well, if God is timeless, then God was never created.

He never began to exist.

We believe God is eternal, and eternity is not a measurement of time, it is the absence of time.

God is timeless, and the creator must be timeless because of the constraints of the pre-Big Bang lack of cosmos.

There, cosmos, there was nothing.

If God is timeless, then God never began to exist.

And so he is exempt from the deductive argument that everything that began to exist must have a creator.

God did not begin to exist on theism, on Christianity, and on the philosophical implications of the Big Bang.

Stephen Hawking himself said, everyone, almost everyone has no time.

This is the scientific conclusion.

Now, I did want to mention there are other options that are being posited out there, and they're very fascinating to listen to, um, like a metaverse or a continuous cycle of Big Bangs, or things like the uh galaxy seeds where there were aliens who came and seeded all of the different galaxies.

And there's a couple things happening here.

Number one is people who are ideologically opposed to there being a God are searching desperately for some answer to the fact that at one point there was nothing, and now we have the entire universe.

What you need to know about these arguments is that they're fascinating to listen to, but they are just speculation.

Now, to be fair, the atheist would say to us that God is just a speculation.

We believe we have good philosophical and scientific reasons to believe in God, that things that begin to exist.

Have a creator and the universe began to exist.

So the universe should have a creator.

That things that are designed to have a designer and the universe shows evidence of unbelievably complex design, so complex we can't even really understand it.

So the universe should also have a designer in itself.

That there are social and relational problems.

Like without God, there is nothing to really root the objective of morality in.

So it's just your opinion versus mine of whether the Holocaust and rape and child abuse and all of these genocides and all these things are actually bad, or if we just think that they're bad.

So there's a there's some huge problems if there's not a God.

We also experience God.

And you can't prove God, but if you open the door to the possibility of there being a God and you seek after that God, you start reading the New Testament, you start praying to the best of your ability, I believe as a Christian that God will prove himself to you experientially and will back up your good reasons for your faith.

And also we have Jesus, and we're going to look at that in week two of our No God series.

Is the resurrection reasonable?

Because if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, throw it all out the window, man.

All like all options are on the table.

But if Jesus did predict his own death, burial, and resurrection, and pull it off, we should lean in and pay very, very close attention to who he was, who he claimed to be, what his plan is, and how he's asked us to live.

So we're going to look at that next week.

I hope that this content is helpful for you.

This series has been so much fun for me to put together.

Um, I've been really interested in this stuff for many years, reading a lot about it, watching everything I can, listening to everything that I can.

And I'm trying my best to distill so much information and to be kind of choosy and to pick some of these things.

And if you're really interested in this, man, there are so many good resources.

I want to remind you, we've put some of those at metachurch.tv slash know God, K-N-O-W-G-O-D.

I think that will be really helpful for you.

And uh, and I just want to thank you.

I want to thank you for tuning in or listening in.

I want to invite you out.

If you're in the San Antonio area, come out to MetaCurch on Sunday.

We have two services, 945 and 1130 a.m.

We're right off of Highway 151 and Petrenko Road.

Our address is 1207 Richland Hills Drive, San Antonio, Texas, 78251.

Again, that's MetaCurch, 945 and 1130.

If you don't live near us, subscribe to the MetaCurch YouTube channel because we stream our services there every single week at 9:45 and 1130.

We archive the sermons on there so that they exist forever.

And uh you can find those sermons as well on the website.

This is overtime.

The information I couldn't get to.

I preached for like 48 minutes.

Uh, by the time I say goodbye, it's gonna be another 47, 48 minutes.

So we're just trying to give you a lot of content.

Um, if you're a believer, we want you to be able to give a reason for your faith.

Uh, Peter says, man, be ready when someone asks the reason for the hope that you have in you.

Uh, the apostle Paul said, be ready in and out of season to give a reason for your faith.

You should have a reasonable faith.

The Bible does not call you to blind faith.

If you're on the fence, maybe you are not a believer, but you're spiritually curious.

Maybe you are a believer, but you're kind of on your way out.

Um, I hope that you will really wrestle with these.

And if you are an agnostic, an atheist, a skeptic, I hope that you will have the humility to just be open.

And I'm naturally a skeptic.

And I came really to faith as a child.

I grew up in the church.

I felt like I experienced God and that was great.

And then I just ran from God really, really hard.

And when I came back, I knew, man, I had to, I had to put a foundation to the faith that I have.

And so I began studying this stuff and I did become convinced that it is way more reasonable to have faith in God than to have faith in a world where God does not exist.

And so I just hope that you will uh you'll wrestle with these things.

Um, my prayer is that there will be some people who will just crack open that door uh of spiritual curiosity, um, maybe even step out and and seek after God and uh see if he's real.

Because if if it is, it means everything.

I'll leave you with this.

It's called uh Pascal's Wager.

And uh Pascal was uh he was a brilliant mathematician, became somewhat of a philosopher, and um, he didn't believe in God, but he became convinced of God.

And his wager basically said this if I spend my life believing in God and God is real, then I've gained everything and I have escaped the worst possible fate.

And yet, if I spend my life pursuing God and believing in him and God is not real, then all I've done is live the best life that I could live.

There's really nothing to lose.

However, if you live life like there is no God and you don't seek him and you don't believe in him, and you're right, then we're all just worm food at the end of this, six feet under anyway.

But if you live your life like there is no God and you're wrong, then there will be serious consequence to pay.

So Pascal's wager basically said if we just look at this mathematically, it makes way more sense to spend some time to open your mind, maybe even open your heart, and see if there is some legitimacy to the claims of who God is.

And if the God of the Bible exists, he cares about you, he loves you, he wants to know you, has a purpose and plan for your life, the significance that you're longing for, I believe it is found in believing in God and following after Jesus.

And if there, if that's even remotely true, that you could live the life of purpose that you are longing for at the deepest core of who you are, this is worth considering.

And I hope that you will.

This has been Overtime.

I love you guys, and uh, hope to see you soon.