The Scientific Basis for the Bible, Part 1

Thank you very much, Angel. That was beautiful. In a way, I couldn't even... I didn't even want to open my briefcase to take out everything to come for the sermon. I just wanted to just listen to it. So that's why it took me a little while to get things together. But that's a tribute to you because it's just so enthralling that nobody wants to move, just to listen to that beautiful voice and certainly a very inspiring piece as well.

And also, the sermonette. Many of you might not recognize, but that letter of polycarp is one of the few that are recognized as from God's true church. And it's one of the few surviving fragments in church history of polycarp and what he wrote after the destruction of Jerusalem and then five years later that terrible earthquake that devastated the city of Philadelphia.

Is that about right? I couldn't get all the historical facts. I have to talk to you a little bit about it because it's been a while since I've gone through that. A recent book started very startlingly in a very remarkable way. The person says, while he's in a Protestant church, look around you. See the youth that you see to your right, to your left.

He said, most of the youths that are attending Catholic and Protestant churches, virtually two-thirds of them will not be around for their young adult years. Two-thirds of them will have already been gone. So as he started this book called Already Gone, Ken Ham is the author. He contracted a polling agency and they interviewed about a thousand youths and their young adults in their twenties and asked them how many attended church.

How many left the church that they were attending. And it was startling because about two-thirds had left their church by the time they got to their mid-twenties. It says, after surveying more than a thousand twenty-somethings on multiple occasions, Ken Ham, an American research group founder, Britt Beamer, found that those who had regularly attended Sunday school classes while growing up were more likely to question the authority of Scripture. These twenty to twenty-nine year olds were also more likely to leave the church, defend the legality of same-sex marriage and abortion, and defend premarital sex. This is brutal and a wake-up call for the church showing how our programs and our approaches to Christian education are failing dismally, says Ken Ham. In his latest book, Already Gone, Why Your Kids Will Quit Church and What You Can Do to Stop It.

It says, according to Ken Ham, the church began planting seeds of doubt in the last century among younger generations by turning the Genesis creation account into a figurative story that rendered proof of the Bible's inerrancy.

This inconsistency, says Ham, created a deep questioning that was furthered by an increasingly secular school system that held everything up to the plumb line in science.

What you see in the Bible is that when there is a compromise in one generation and it's not dealt with, you usually notice it to a greater extent in the next generation.

Because the way in which they have been educated, today's teens now believe that what they are taught in school is reality.

But the church teaches stories and morality in relationships. Bible teaching is not real in the sense of real history.

And so you see youths having a disconnect as they get older. And he mentions this starts basically in pre-teen years, then elementary school and high school.

They begin this separation. One thing is science and all of this historical reality. And the other part is, oh, Sunday school stories.

And how nice and pretty and all of these interesting things. But they don't make the connection that both are factual.

And many churches are compromising on this. And certainly we are not immune to it as well.

So it's not just good enough to talk about nice little stories on relationship and what we should do to be nice to other people.

We have to get down to the nitty gritty of showing these youths to be proud of what they believe in and that it is scientifically verifiable.

What we believe it is not. Some allegory, some little nice story. And of course, this hits hard with me.

Because at the age of 17, I was a young Catholic lad who believed in evolution. And I didn't see that the church had a problem.

The Catholic church, basically, they taught me that, yes, evolution was true, but that God intervened, creating the first cell.

And then eventually, as evolution took course, we came to apes. And then God eventually, as the ape evolved, put a soul and then he became man.

So from the relation, the account that we hear in Genesis about God creating man out of clay or of the ground, now we have this evolutionary chain going from the first microbe to man.

And so as a Catholic, I thought, well, all of those stories in the Bible, as they told me, was just an allegory.

An allegory is a fable with some moral backing, something that is supposed to teach you a good moral principle, but you shouldn't take it for granted.

And so I was on my way out of a church and into secular society. That's where I was headed.

And I was headed toward university, following my dad's footsteps as a doctor, and that was where I was going and probably would have not continued going to church because I was beginning to feel that disconnect.

Especially when I went to a priest and asked him about the first chapters of this book of Genesis. I asked him, can you explain to me the first chapter of Genesis? I'll never forget.

Walking into that little parish in Murphy, North Carolina, and the priest looking and said, oh, well, you know, Genesis 1, these are just allegories. This is the way the Jewish people basically pictured how humanity came to be in all of these stories about the Garden of Eden and that the earth was created in this way. But they're not really true history. This is not something. This is just the way their version of explaining how the universe was created and man came to be. And so after probably 10 minutes of listening to him, I said, thank you. And that was the last time I went to a Catholic church. Now, at that time, I was reading another, the other side of the story. I was reading the Plain Truth magazine. I was reading the Bible. I was reading the articles where God's church was explaining it very differently from that Catholic priest. They were actually saying, yes, this actually occurred. This is the way things started and that there was a Garden of Eden and there was an Adam and Eve. And Adam wasn't just a bright monkey that God happened to put a soul inside.

And so to me, I started pursuing and finding out that reading the Bible as it was being explained and letting the Bible speak for itself, it made a lot more sense than what I had heard from that priest. Of course, that changed my life. And it all comes to a scripture we read in 2 Thessalonians 2. Let's go there for a moment. 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 8. It says, This is describing more the false prophet because he's the one that does miracles. And it says, So it comes down to the love of the truth. You either have it or you don't. If you're in this church and you learn to love the truth, you're going to persevere. But you're going to have a struggle because this world is going to try to brainwash you differently. The churches of this world are going to try to brainwash you as well. And you cannot compromise with the truth that you see coming from God's Word, from the Bible.

You have, first of all, the love of the truth, which is being spoken about here as Biblical truth. What emanates from the Bible. Not what you read into the Bible, but what you read from the Bible, out of the Bible. That is the Biblical truth that you have to love. It's not just intellectually accepting it. You have to love it with a passion. Just like you have Christopher Columbus. He fought and he defended with a passion that the earth was round and that he was going to prove it. And he was willing to put action into his words. And he sailed across the horizon, which no one had dared to do before. And he actually proved because he had analyzed and he had studied and done the research.

And so he staked his life on that truth. And many men of science have had to stake their lives on certain truths. And some were killed because of those truths.

And so you have to have the same love and passion for God's truths as some of these men did as well. And from Biblical truth, this leads to physical truths as well. In other words, it's not just, oh, let's stick with the Bible. That's the only truth we have. No.

The Bible, as we said in Ambassador College, there was a motto above one of the doors there in Ambassador Hall and said, the Bible is the foundation of knowledge. And that was very wisely coined. Didn't say the Bible is all knowledge because it isn't.

And it's not the branch of knowledge. It's the foundation. But what do you do with a foundation? You build upon it. So all the other branches of knowledge emanate from the Biblical foundation. That's where it's established. And from there, it can rise up.

And these physical truths are found around us. They govern all the laws that we have, whether they're physical or also science, economic science.

All of these things, there's a foundation that emanates from God's Word.

You have men like Copernicus, Newton, Galileo. They believed in the Bible.

Now, the Catholic Church had some ideas they didn't believe in, but these men believed that God was a righteous God, he was an orderly God, he was a rational God, and that he set up laws that were orderly and that man could discover.

In particular, Isaac Newton was a great student of the Bible, and he discovered some of the universal laws of the universe. And there are many more as well.

Linus Pauling, who won not one, but two Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, as I recall, said, Science is the search for truth, the effort to understand our world.

See, that's all science is. It's a search for truth. Yes, more than anything else, physical truth.

But there is also a science that affects biblical truth. The science of archaeology, the science of history, many other sciences that we have, ethnology, the study of the races, I can go on and on. The different sciences that do touch on biblical truth as well to help verify and confirm.

Because the Bible was not written in a vacuum. It was written in a context. The better we understand the context, the more we can confirm that God's word is true. And God said, prove me. Check things out. He defies us all the time. Not only to search for spiritual truth, but he says, look, what I am saying is true from the very beginning of Genesis all the way to Revelation.

We have nothing to apologize about. Thankfully, we live in a...we have a church that has stripped out all of these man-made ideas and removed all of these preconceived ideas.

And we can teach the pure truth. And that doesn't mean we have all the truth, because we're still searching. But if we find we are wrong, we are willing to change. And we have shown that in our history as well. I'd like to give not only this sermon, but the next one too, on the scientific basis for the Bible. And help us see that the foundation is solid, that the kids who are listening in here, they don't have to worry about this explanation of scientific evidence that doesn't have to do with the Bible. You can actually wed or unite the two. The Bible and science go together. They do not conflict. In any point that we have a conflict, it is because we don't have a good understanding. But it does not mean that it is a factual conflict. Like I said, we don't have every answer, just like science does. And they're always revising their own theories. But the foundation where the Bible is built upon is firm. I hope to show you that.

Mr. Herbert Armstrong, who died in 1986, but thanks to him, certainly God's church revived. He didn't create anything. There was already a church of God when he was born.

But he started searching for God's true church and for these truths. And through God's working, he was stripped of those preconceived notions that he had.

He had been born into a Protestant church, the Quaker church, and that's the way he grew up. But he had to remove and unlearn many of the Quaker beliefs that were not biblically sound.

He had to strip his mind of preconceived ideas. He had to unlearn man-made teachings, which is so difficult to do, and let the Bible speak for itself.

And as Ken Ham's book already gone mentions, the number one reason that they found among these thousand interviewees from 20 to 29 years old was that the account of Genesis was not scientific, and that these kids had lost their faith in the validity and the veridity of the Bible. They didn't think it could be verified, and so they started losing their faith.

So you have two different creation accounts that today are part of our culture. One is creation in all of its varieties, and the other one is creation. Did I say creation? You have evolution in all of its varieties, and you have creation in all of its varieties.

Basically, philosophers, scientists, and others say there are only two different ways to explain life. One is through evolution, and the other one is through creation.

And this is where many of the churches have failed to make a cogent, a valid argument for creation. And I'll explain to you why so many churches have failed.

The problem why kids leave is that most Christian churches are in two wrong camps.

The first one, which is the majority of the Christian churches, this includes Catholics and mainline Protestants, believe that Genesis 1 through 11 are just allegories. They're stories that don't have any factual basis to them.

And just like I told you, the priest told me, well, you shouldn't take this seriously. These are just fables. These are allegories. These are stories that are not true, but they have moral purposes, and it's for inspiration.

Most of these churches, like I said, the Catholic, mainline Protestants, believe evolution is true, but God guided.

In other words, God has been sort of working through the system. Eventually, of course, he didn't figure evolution just on its own, you know, matter and energy and the laws that govern physics that you can come up with a complete cell.

So God says, well, I intervene. But once I created the cell, then I went back to be an absentee landlord and just let the cell sort of work its way out and see how it can eventually evolve, you know, throw more ammonium gas in, throw more nutrients, you know, stir it, you know, electrify it, give it water. And then eventually, the poor cell will finally say, I learned how to reproduce. And so then now pops out two cells. And okay, hey, guys, you know, we got to keep going here. So then they finally multiply to four cells. Now, what are they? A little social group now? Or well, let's see, how do we create the first organ? Who wants the first organ? The four cell? Yeah, we do. Okay, let's keep working at it, you know, you build thousands of cells, and then, okay, now we need to develop organs. And so you eventually evolve in this way to the point where you have animals, you have plants.

And then eventually, you have human beings. And God just left this go, and he basically just worked through time and accident and intervene here or there where necessary.

Now, that's a view of one camp in Christianity. For instance, the Pope has said, this recent one hasn't said it as much as the previous one, John Paul II. He was the one that was quite positive to evolution.

He basically said that yes, apes evolved, and finally, one that advanced was given a soul. That is the Catholic version. You can look it up.

That is the official Catholic version of how human beings came. They don't talk about Genesis 1 and God creating man, you know, from the ground, and that eventually Eve was taken from the rib. No, no.

This all sort of evolved, and God just said, I gave you souls.

The second erroneous camp, according to our point of view, are recent creationists.

They put the earth, the universe, everything is around seven to ten thousand years old.

And the sun, galaxies, everything is anywhere from seven to ten thousand years old. And then, man and woman were created, and along with them, dinosaurs, trilobites.

Now, I happen to have brought one of my little favorite fossils here. I got it from the Bolivian Mountains, a little trilobite encased this little rock, and this little trilobite is found at the bottom of the geologic record. Now, according to recent creationists, these little trilobites were created along with Adam and Eve and all of the five hundred species of dinosaurs, so we actually had sort of a Jurassic Park as a Garden of Eden.

And then, Adam and Eve lived with dinosaurs and all of these creatures, you know, after they got expelled from the Garden of Eden. And then, aboard Noah's Ark, we had dinosaurs, we had these little trilobites, all swimming in the oceans, along with all of the, you know, pterosaurs, which are the, you know, flying, reptile-like beings. Like I said, 500 different dinosaurs, and these all perished in a flood, except for the ones that were on the Ark. And then, Noah and his family left the Ark, and a pair of all of these animals existed, along with dinosaurs and things as well. And so, what is the evidence as... what does it say? Well, there are about 40 tests in astronomy, physics, shows expansion rates of the universe, of course, the speed of light, the echo that is still part of the original Big Bang explosion that you can still detect. You have the strata of the geologic record, you have radiometric dating, you have the dating of ice cores, you have the dating of corals, which go back millions of years, and fossil layers. And all of these are like time clocks that can tell you that the Earth and what has existed is far more than 10,000 to 7,000 years.

Besides this, one of the most important evidence we have is that the fossils are not all mixed together. If you would have had a flood, and all of these dinosaurs existed along with man and all the mammals, and eventually they would have been buried in sediments, just like you do when you have a major upheaval, and you have these mudslides, and it hits a village, and after you uproot that and you dig in, you find dogs, you find human beings, you find rabbits, you find basically everything that perished.

And it's all mixed in. Well, you can imagine in a flood, after the water receded, and all of this was buried in mud, what you would find in the levels would be a mixture. Reptiles can run as fast or faster than human beings. So who's going to go up a mountain when you have the flood? Well, you're going to find some pretty speedy reptiles going up there, and they're going to be drowned along with human beings, and they're going to be out there carcasses floating, and then finally receding, getting buried in mud.

You would find those layers, but you do not find that. There are basically 15 layers in the geologic record that show the death of creatures, all the way from this tiny little trilobite, all the way to giant dinosaurs, to mammals, and human beings. And geologists the Earth over have looked at these layers, they have never found human beings mixed with trilobites, they have not even found trilobites mixed in with dinosaurs.

You do find an orderly burial of creatures. Now, you might have up-thrusts, and you have all of these twisted things, but you find the fossils in an orderly level. Let me just give you real quickly, there are 15 fossil layers, just like a layer of cake on the Earth, and you have what they called old life, which is the Paleozoic period, which starts with these little trilobites, and there are no previous ancestors to the trilobites. You find these trilobites, hard-bodied creatures, you do not find where these other creatures appear. Let me read to you real quickly. This is an article from Time Magazine, 1995, it's called, Evolution's Big Bang.

And they talk about this first period, called the Cambrian period. It says here, this is at the beginning of the fossil record. Remember, underneath you don't have any other, you know, basically any hard-bodied creatures. All you have underneath, some micro-fossils, very primitive-type unicelled creatures, a couple of little worms and things, and then you come to this Cambrian level, where it's just an explosion of life. It says here, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialize with the suddenness of apparitions.

Just like a ghost just appears out of nowhere, all of these creatures appear in the fossil record out of nowhere. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom. This explosion of biological diversity is described by scientists as biology's big bang. So they call it the big bang. All of a sudden, all of this life appears. The 32 out of 33 body forms appear at the beginning.

Let me just pause for a moment. When I talk about body forms, we have the human body form. It actually goes back to what they call chordates because we all have the spine and we have vertebrae. We belong to that class or the phyla. It should be called the phylum of chordates. We have the backbone. Well, back in this period of time with the little trilobites, you begin with a jollis fish that has a vertebrae. And so we have a body form that already has the vertebrae in the system. What you have here is like the body plan, a refrigerator, you have a washing machine, you have a vacuum cleaner, you have a car, you have a basic airplane, where birds are going to come out of, and you have a submarine.

All the fishes are going to come out. But I'm talking about living things. But you see, they are parts that are just types that are very separate from these others. Well, phylum is way up here at the animal level, the animal kingdom, and then you have phylum, the body parts. Thirty-two of the thirty-three appear at the beginning. That's not one little primitive creature. You have thirty-two body forms, from sponges, you have urchins, you have clams, you have jellyfish, all kinds of different body forms.

They cannot explain this scientifically. So, our point is that recent creationism, where everything arises at the same time, is not shown. And there's not only the fossil record, but just what we know of life, there is a separation between them. Then, we have a third camp of the churches, and that third camp is where we are situated. And that is what is called ancient earth creationists. And there are basically two groups of these ancient earths. They accept that the earth is much older, millions of years old. We don't know exactly where radiometric dating is as accurate as they say.

We don't know, but we just know it's been around because of the fossil record and the separation and all of these forty different types of measuring time that it is an ancient earth. There are two groups.

One is called the day-age group. That means that they think that those six days of creation week were actually ages, geological ages, which could be millions of years old. Now, we don't believe that because we believe that when God said that there were six days, there were actually six days. Because it talks about, and the evening and the day was one day. It's kind of hard to say an age is one evening and the daylight.

And say it could be millions of years old. In a way, it's a desperate attempt to fit geology into these six days of creation. You have to change and talk about ages. And then you have the group where we belong, where we do believe that six days of creation were literal days.

But we believe there was a destruction right before that first day. I'll explain this in a minute. Between Genesis 1.1 and 1.2, there is a space of time where it describes a destruction.

When you study evolution, I believe it takes more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in a creator God. Here are four or unanswered questions that evolutionists haven't been able to explain.

First one, where is the evidence from non-life to life? Now, where is the evidence that something evolved first from non-life to life? In other words, can you get a living creature from a rock, from sand, from lightning? Can you make something that's dead come to life? Dead matter? Science has not been able to explain. This is the greatest step of all. Now, to have life, living things have these features in common.

They all possess DNA. They all have metabolic systems, which means that you have a system of keeping a certain temperature going and energy being expended. They all have to reproduce. They all grow. They all respond to stimulus. They have a goal-directed interaction with their environment. In other words, they have a purpose. They want to survive. Something puts into even the smallest amoeba, the will to survive. None of these creatures wants to die.

They are goal-directed to survive within their environment. So, from non-life, you have to create all of this. And all of them have cell membranes to separate from their environment to be able to protect themselves. The second question is the chicken or egg dilemma. What came first, the chicken or the egg? If you say the chicken, you'd have to say you'd have to...where did the chicken come from? Well, chickens come from eggs. Now, how can you have an egg without a chicken?

So, let me tell you, the dilemma goes better to DNA and proteins. DNA is information that programs a cell to be able to produce proteins. And proteins are the machines in the cells that produce the DNA. And so, the chicken or the egg. If you have DNA, you have the information, but you don't have the machines to translate that information to create proteins.

And if you have proteins first, where do you get the DNA? In other words, you can have the machine, but you need the program to make the machine work. And if you have the machine first, then where do you get the program? So, they have not been able to answer. You know, what came first? DNA or proteins? And the third question is the DNA information. Where did the DNA information come from? In one analogy, I have here several books that I'm going to put.

Okay, just two books I brought. But just imagine this. In a pinhead full of DNA, you've seen a little pin, you've seen the head of a pin. If you had DNA information, the size of a pinhead, you could put information, you could stack these books not all the way to the ceiling, not a mile all the way up, but actually not even 25,000 miles high. All these books, if you went 25,000 miles high, you know what you'd hit?

You'd hit the moon. And a pinhead of DNA information has more information than all the books stacked from here to the moon, and you would have to multiply that 500 times. So the books would go to the moon, you'd have a pile of books from the moon to the earth, 500.

Can you imagine the amount of information? It is mind-boggling. I know that all of these books, and they would be instruction manuals, and that's just from a pinhead. The circumference of the earth is 20... Let me correct myself. I should have said from the earth to the moon is 250,000 miles. 250,000 miles, the circumference of the earth is 25,000 miles. So let me clear it up. So 250,000 miles high, and then you multiply that by 500 times. That's the amount of DNA information in a pinhead of DNA. And the circumference of the earth is 25,000 miles, and you would have to go 5,000 times around the earth with information to be able to equal the DNA in a pinhead of information.

Where did all of this come from? Do you think evolution could have come up with that? Evolution couldn't come up with one book of information, much less all of this. And the fourth question, evolution has two mechanisms to make it work, chiefly mutations and natural selection. They say that through mutations, which are basically typological errors in the DNA, like typos. So you can imagine all of those books of information, and that through typos, you can eventually start coming up with more genuine information. And that natural selection will just be kind of the editor that will contain valuable, profitable information and discard the wrong information.

Through mutations and natural selection, you have the evolution of the species. But my question is, where in the fossil record are all the species in the process of mutation? Where are all these mutating species? Because Charles Darwin said there would be innumerable where you would find species gradually mutating, changing from their ancestors to a new type. See, you can't have all of these perfectly designed creatures, but you have to have some that are changing, mutating into others. Where is the evidence? Where is the smoking gun in the geologic record?

Has anybody ever seen a cat slowly changing to a dog? Have you ever seen a pigeon slowly evolving into a vulture? Have you ever seen a barracuda mutating into a shark or other? See, we don't find this, and the evidence has to be in the fossil record. Well, all they find are more of these species that are all perfectly designed, no mutations to speak of, and yet you have a million of these different species on Earth right now, and yet you don't find the transitional links, the separations that should be there if evolution works. See, that is the Achilles heel.

Until you come up with transformational animals, don't talk to me about evolving. Evolving just means going, changing, through time, by a gradual step-by-step process of mutating into another creature. So, the bottom line is, I don't have enough faith to believe in evolution. It takes more faith than what I have. Now, about the ancient Earth, Mr.

Herbert Armstrong wrote about it in his books, and he basically saw that before God created the universe, he first created angels. So, what was the first thing that God created? It was not the material universe. He created the angels. Let's go to Job 38 real quickly here. Job 38. It says here in verse 4, Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Tell me if you have understanding. Later on, he says, verse 7, So, before creating the earth and everything that we see around us, God created angels. So, that's the first information we have. Science can't explain that. We learned it from the Bible that he first created spirit beings called angels. He also tells us in Genesis chapter 3 that one of those angelic beings was in the Garden of Eden, which was Satan, who had become this adversary.

So, here was an angelic being, the Bible says his name was Lucifer before, who fell, who rebelled against God, and was thrown to the earth, and there he was in the Garden of Eden. Let's look in Revelation 12 verse 9. It says here, so the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of all, talking about that serpent that was at the Garden of Eden, called the devil and Satan, so that's his name, who deceives the whole world.

He was cast out to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. So, he was not only cast out, but his demons as well. And it does mention here in verse 4 that his tail, talking about this same dragon, drew a third of the stars of heaven. So, that indicates he had a third of the angels that rebelled with him. Also, in 2 Peter chapter 2 verse 1, we see why they were cast down. 2 Peter chapter 2 verse 1.

It says, but there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who brought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed by covetousness. They will exploit you with deceptive words. For a long time, their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber. For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell, which is the word tartaroo, which is a place of confinement, and delivered them into the chains of darkness to be reserved for judgment. So we know that they were hurled down to this earth. That's where Satan and his angels are presently.

And going to Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, we see here the beginning of the Bible. The first verse tells us about the creation of the universe. It says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It's important to hear two words. In the beginning, some translate this originally. In other words, with the original creation, originally God created the heavens and the earth. The term created is bara, which means to create out of nothing. It's not something that happens when you create after you have material things. God brought this out from his spirit came this material world. And it says the earth was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep. And the term without form and void, toh-huh, and bo-huh, means chaotic and in destruction. And does something cause chaos and destruction to come upon this original creation? And then God begins to recreate.

And in Psalm 104, it actually tells us that God renewed the face of the earth. Notice here Psalm 104. In verse 30, talking about this whole, I wish I could focus on the whole song. It's talking about the creation of earth and the animals. He says, verse 30, You send forth your spirit, they are created. That's how things come into being. And you renew the face of the earth. There was a renewal of the earth. So from the original creation into the destruction of the earth is where we find the geologic strata. Of all of this time that appears until the creation of man and woman and the mammals and everything that we see around us, approximately 6,000 years ago. We don't know all the details. Like I said, we have 15 layers of geologic rock, which was established over 200 years ago. It hasn't changed. Anybody that studies geology, that hunts for oil, knows all of these strata by heart. They've explored all of the continents of the earth. They see the same patterns around it. You have six what they call Paleozoic levels, which is the old earth where the trilobites are found. You have three layers called the Mesozoic, which means the middle layer. Paleo, of course, means old layer. Then you have the middle layer and then Cenozoic, which are six layers that go all the way to the recent, what we call recent historical times.

From the Cambrian to the Permian is the Paleozoic. From the Triassic to the Cretaceous, this is where the dinosaurs lived, is the Mesozoic, and the Paleocene to the recent is the Cenozoic. Now, one possible explanation of why all of this developed the way it has. This is just one possible one. It certainly makes a lot of sense to me. Having studied this for 30 years, I'll just share with you. God is an educator par excellence. He educates us. He gives us free will. In 1 Corinthians 2-9, it says that, Isaiah 55 verse 8 says that, So in other words, what an ant is to man, man is to God. So we have such a vague notion of the mighty and the supreme intellect of God. It's like a human being looking to God is like an ant looking to a human being. So we have to have a lot of humility on it. But we know that God is a great educator. He began the process educating angels.

He wanted angels to serve man, his ultimate creation. And so he prepared angels. And he did that through this layer after layer of creatures that he introduced so they could administer, so they could learn.

And eventually he would create mankind. But that is a story that I hope to begin next week about how man came to be and also about the book of Job and the wonderful scientific truths that God revealed to Job when he talked with him.

So next week we'll continue with this. Remember, a lot of kids are already gone. They have left the church because they never found a satisfactory explanation. They separated scientific truths from biblical truths when both of them come from the same great God. He doesn't separate religious truths from scientific truths. They are all part of his great domain.

So next time we're going to see the marvels of the physical world and beyond.