My youngest son is about 18 months old, which happens to be the perfect age to start donning those super-cool dinosaur t-shirts. I pulled one out of his dresser the other day when I was getting him dressed. Tan shirt, dinosaur green lettering, white T-Rex skeleton in the center – classic. Then I read the writing, “40 ft long… 7 tons… Could run 20 mph… 60 razor sharp teeth… Lived 65 million years ago.” Ah, there’s the evolutionary propaganda!

One of the most fundamental pieces of evolutionary theory is its immense timeframe. If all the complexity of life on Earth came from one common ancestor, then you need millions and billions of years for those changes to develop. With enough time, anything can happen, right? So, evolutionists claim that life has been billions of years in the making, but how could anyone know that? Prove that? 

How could anyone know that the T-Rex lived 65 million years ago?

Carbon dating is the answer we’re given. Carbon dating is key to the claim that the Earth is billions of years old, and it proves that the T-Rex on my son’s shirt is 65 million years old… or so we’re told. Unfortunately, we’ve not been given the whole truth about carbon dating. 

Did you know that carbon dating is totally ineffective once too much time has passed? Did you know that carbon dating has an expiration date after which it becomes completely unreliable? And did you know that its expiration date is about a few thousand years?

Consider what the renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins, had to say about the limitations of carbon dating, “It is useful for dating organic material on the archaeological/historical timescale where we are dealing in hundreds or a few thousands of years, but it is no good for the evolutionary timescale where we are dealing in millions of years.” 

Evolutionary theory requires an extraordinary chunk of time to back up its claims, but the dating method it uses to establish that time frame is more suspect than a gallon of milk that’s been sitting out on your counter since 2018. I’m not sure they could fit all those words on my son’s shirt, but it’s far more honest than declaring that T-Rex lived 65 million years ago.

- Jonathan Banning
 

Did you know that Darwin had reservations about his own theory of evolution? Did you know that there is one piece of data that gave him fits and cast doubt on everything he’d theorized? That piece of data is the fossil record. Last week, we discussed on Evolutionary Theory has a life problem, but it also has a fossil problem. Rather than offering support for Darwin’s theory, fossil evidence unravels everything.

Darwin’s theory proposes that all life evolved from a common ancestor: an alleged single-cell organism that crawled out of a primordial chemical soup. The theory goes on to claim that over the course of billions of years, all life forms gradually evolved from basic and simple to diverse and complex. If that were true, then we should see two things in the fossil record:

First, we should expect the fossil record to be arranged in a certain way. We should find only simple, basic creatures in the lowest layers of dirt, and we should find that the creatures become more diverse and complex as we go up. Second, we should also find millions of fossils of transitional life forms that demonstrate the gradual evolution from one type of creature to another. To offer an example, if we believe that fish eventually evolved into dogs, then we should be able to find many fossils that illustrate how the fish-to-dog transition took place.

Of course, that is not at all what we find in the earth.

The fossil record doesn’t show a gradual progression from simple life to complex life. Instead, there is an explosion of life—both simple and complex—that happens all at once. It’s even called the Cambrian Explosion. Neither does it show millions of transitional forms that catalog the gradual progression of evolution. Instead, we find that lifeforms have remained surprisingly static throughout the layers of sediment. To be fair, we do occasionally find that natural selection has led to some changes within species, but nothing that demonstrates the transition from one type of animal to another.

The fossil record looks nothing like Darwin and exactly like Genesis (Genesis 1:20-27).

- Jonathan Banning

It’s so tempting to follow the crowd. It’s so tempting to be swayed by popular opinion. People find great comfort in knowing that they’ve aligned themselves with “The Consensus,” or that they’ve agreed with, “The Experts.” Truly, more often than not, public opinion is accurate, and the experts are correct. However, this is not always the case—there was a time when the public believed the Earth was flat and the experts believed the sun was the center of the universe. 

You shouldn’t always follow the crowd, nor should you always trust the experts.  

We bring this up because Darwin’s evolutionary theory has become the preferred explanation for the origin of the universe among the experts and the masses. The notion that all of life on Earth evolved from a single-celled organism over billions of years is pretty much “The Consensus.” We want you to appreciate that, despite the overwhelming support of the public and the gatekeepers in academia, evolutionary theory has some tremendous flaws. So, we’ll spend the next three weeks highlighting some of those flaws.

- Jonathan Banning

The work of Christian apologetics largely comes down to arguments for and against certain things. But the necessity of those arguments stems from our responsibility to love and serve the one true God. Creation-versus-evolution is more than an argument to be won; it’s ultimately a discussion of whether we must obey God or not.  This is especially true of the teleological argument: it’s not just about finding the fingerprints of God in his created universe. It’s a demonstration that the universe is not just a meaningless churning of matter and energy; it’s the design of a Creator. And that Creator creates with purpose. And that means that he has created us with a purpose. 

God’s seven-day work of creation reaches its climax in the creation of mankind. The account of man’s creation says these familiar words: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gn. 1:28) There is a broad and deep purpose in those commands; a purpose that God gave to no other creature. Man is unlike all of God’s other creatures. There is a kind of nobility—what Francis Schaeffer called “mannishness”—that is unique to us. Man has a telos—a purpose, a responsibility to labor in God’s world to bring it into full alignment that glorifies Him.

No other earthly creature has such a grand purpose. No other creatures fills a role so important. No other creature has received the favor of God in such a special way. And no other creature has such responsibility put upon them.

This is where the implications of apologetics come into full view. If our arguments for God’s presence are true, then we must ask, “What does believing in God mean that I’m supposed to do?” The answer is that we are supposed to fulfill the purpose for which he made us. We are supposed to live in faithful service to him.

The universe is declaring that you were made on purpose, with a purpose. Go live that today, for the glory of God.

- Dan Lankford, minister

Last week, we discussed the teleological argument: that a universe which appears to be purposefully designed must surely have a designer. Here are some examples which we believe prove that point.

First: Earth’s placement in this solar system. As many scientists have noted, this is the only planet in the solar system which is suited for carbon-based life forms. Its perfect distance from the sun means we stay warm without baking to death. Its size allows gravity to hold us to the surface without crushing us. Its atmospheric gases are perfectly balanced for countless types of creatures to breathe them. Our single moon has the perfect ratio of mass, distance, and movement to keep the world’s tides moving (which keeps the oceans clean) without destroying life on land. These evident designs point to a Designer.

Second: The nature of many biological systems. Michael Behe coined the term “irreducible complexity” to describe biological systems where the removal of one part would disable the entire system. The principle shows a key problem of Evolutionary Theory, which believes that complex systems come into being one element at a time. But even in single-cell organisms, some things are so complex that they *must* have been designed as a complete system. These evident designs point to a Designer.

Third: The DNA code—a language, written in chains of nucleotides, which is so intricate that were its like discovered in any other setting, we would have no doubt that it had been created purposefully by an intelligent being. This “Signature in the Cell,” as Stephen Meyer calls it, shows another compelling example of purpose in the universe. It is yet another evident design that points to a Designer.

Ultimately, God’s purpose in creation is to glorify himself and share his immense love. He does things on purpose. So, whether we look to the planets and the stars, the cycles of waters and winds, the systems in cells, or our own existence (cf. Gen. 1:26-27), we will continue to see teleology. Reality has his fingerprints on it in so many ways that someone once said, “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.”

- Dan Lankford

The truth that God created the universe is of utmost importance to the faith. And it’s no wonder that it continues to be so hotly debated. The logic follows perfectly easily: If God is not the creator, then the world is not his and neither are we, which releases us from responsibility of knowing him. Conversely, if God is the creator, then world is his and so are we, which means we’re accountable for serving him. And so this one fact is of truly great importance. Is God the source of existence, life, and human purpose; or is he not?

We are writing these articles because we believe that he is the creator. One of the reasons for this is the apparent design in the world—the fact that everything from the vastness of space to the precise perfection of the subatomic world bears the marks of purpose, design, and seamless fit. There is function and beauty in this reality that cannot have come to be by the atrophy that characterizes natural processes.

This is the principle of teleology. It’s the principle that says, “If a thing appears to have been designed with a purpose, then there must have been a mind behind that purpose.” This principle stands in direct opposition to naturalistic philosophy, which believes that all reality can and should be explained by unintelligent happenstance in the natural processes.

Evidence of a telos is abundant in the natural world. It is wonderfully ironic that many efforts to discredit divine creation lead us again and again to clearer evidence for its truth.
It’s no wonder that Paul said there are truths about God that can be known by observation of the natural world (Rm. 1:19-21). It’s no wonder that Job was left speechless as God enumerated the unknowable but clearly intentional workings of the natural world (Jb. 38-39). It’s no wonder that Jeremiah felt right in comparing God’s unwavering love to the predictable orderliness of the sun and the moon and the ocean’s rolling waves (Jr. 31:35-36). All of these, and many more besides, show that the function and beauty of reality are the work of an intelligent mind. Do they teach us his will for our lives? No. But they do stand as testaments to his existence and creative work.

- Dan Lankford

Every effect has a cause. That’s just common sense, isn’t it? We intuitively understand that whenever something happens (e.g. an apple falls from a tree), the event was caused by some force that acted upon it (e.g. the apple falls due to gravity). Every effect has a cause. In scientific circles, this is known as the Law of Causality.

Those who believe in God lean heavily on the Law of Causality. Just like apples don’t fall from trees without a cause, neither do universes explode into existence without a cause. So, we argue, the Law of Causality points to God. In response, some nonbelievers have raised an interesting objection,

“If God created all of these things, then who or what created God?”

It’s an intriguing question to be sure, but it has a simple answer – nothing created God. He is eternal, uncreated, and uncaused. Perhaps that answer seems like a cop-out to you, but I’d urge you to recognize that it makes a lot of sense. You see, while the Law of Causality holds true in the natural world, philosophers and thinkers have pointed out for millennia that in a world of cause and effect something or someone must be the first cause. There must be some force whose existence isn’t dependent on some other cause. Think about it this way…

Imagine that our world is like a long trail of dominos being knocked over. Every domino falls because it is struck by the previous piece (every effect has a cause), but if you trace your way back through the fallen dominos, you’ll see that something had to knock over that first domino. In that trail, something must have knocked over that first domino without having been knocked over by a domino itself. Something must have been ABLE to knock over that first domino without NEEDING to be knocked over by a previous domino.

Logic demands that there must have been an eternal, uncreated, uncaused first cause that set our world in motion. Christians call Him, “God.” God is not just another domino. He is the force that was ABLE to create this world without NEEDING to be created Himself. And that’s exactly how the Bible presents Him, “He is the Alpha and the Omega… who is and who was and who is to come” (Revelation 1:8).

- Jonathan Banning

When making a case for the existence of God and his creating everything, we tend to default to evidence outside the Bible. So we begin—as we’ve done in this series—with premises like “design is evidence of a designer” and “morality is evidence of a moral originator.” Maybe this is because we feel that defending religious things from the Bible is circular reasoning, and so we shy away from it. But if there is sufficient evidence to the Bible’s legitimacy (which we intend to discuss in articles later this year), then its claims about God himself ought to be taken seriously. Neither its antiquity nor its obvious religious bias give us reason to disregard its claims wholesale.

And so, for this Faith-Building Friday, consider some of the many places where the Bible’s writers stated that the world was created by God. These statements, while not the whole case, are valid evidence to the truth of his existence and creative work.

• “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gn. 1.1)
• “in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them” (Ex. 20.11)
• “You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.” (Nh. 9:6)
• “For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.” (Ps. 95.3-5)
• “Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.” (Jr. 32.17)
• “long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water.” (2 Pt. 3.5)

To be sure, there is an abundance of extra-biblical evidence to the facts of his existence and creative work. But let’s not skip the spoken truth of these things inside the Bible. The claims made there are sincere, powerful, and faith-building in their own divinely-spoken right.

- Dan Lankford

Something never comes from nothing. That’s one of the most fundamental facts about our natural world. Stuff doesn’t just pop into existence; it always comes from a source. For that reason, when we look at all the physical stuff around us, we’re compelled to ask the question: “Where did all of this come from?” Because something never comes from nothing.

That simple reality is why the old-school skeptics used to argue that our universe was eternal, that everything has always been here. Turns out that the best way to avoid the question of origin is to argue that the universe had no origin. They argued vehemently for the eternal universe, and, in some cases, even cut corners to win the argument. The reason Einstein made the rookie mistake of dividing by zero when establishing his theory of general relativity was to avoid the fact that his equation proved the universe was not eternal. 

Of course, this debate was put to rest in 1919 when a man named Sir Arthur Eddington first observed that our universe was in a constant state of expansion. He found that everything in the universe was exploding outward in every direction from a central point – like shrapnel from a bomb. It was as if the entire universe had burst into existence from a single infinitesimal point of nothingness. Edwin Hubble would go on to observe the same, and because of this discovery, the scientific community would go on to accept that our universe was not eternal. That’s why the prominent atheists of our day no longer argue for an eternal universe, but that our universe originated with a “Big Bang.”

It is a verifiable scientific fact that our universe had a beginning – something did, indeed, come out of nothing.

What does that mean? It means that our world cannot be explained naturally. It means that our existence must be the result of something “supernatural” – something beyond the physical. What we see when we consider the origin of our universe is precisely what is written in Hebrews 11:3, “By faith, we understand… that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.”
 

- Jonathan

"The Tipping Point" refers to the moment when a great number of tiny changes culminate in an overwhelming and unstoppable change. Think of it like rolling a heavy stone up a hill. You push and push that stone, tediously making progress with every step, until you finally reach the crest of the hill. Once you reach the teetering point of perfect balance, all you must do is give that stone one more nudge to send it careening down the other side. That’s your tipping point – the moment when many tiny changes lead to an enormous change.  

I think faith works that way; it has a tipping point. 

Establishing a firm belief in the existence of God, the inspiration of the Bible, and the deity of Jesus does not happen in a moment. It’s not the result of hearing one cool fact or one compelling argument (even if that sounds more romantic). Instead, it’s the result of hearing a great number of arguments. True faith is engrained within our hearts when we peruse the mountain of evidence God has provided for us piece by piece until the argument is so compelling that we reach faith’s tipping point – the moment when faith becomes so irresistibly rational that it can no longer be reasonably denied. That’s even how faith works during the ministry of Jesus (John 1:50).

Faith is a tipping point kind of thing. 

For that reason, Dan Lankford and I have designed a project that we hope will convict, confirm, and establish your faith. We’re calling it, “Faith-Building Fridays,” and the aim is simply to offer you one compelling piece of evidence – one reason to believe - every Friday for all of 2024. It is our prayer that through this project we can help you build your faith in the existence of God, the inspiration of the scriptures, and the deity of Jesus Christ. 

Come back tomorrow for a few more introductory remarks from Dan.

- Jonathan Banning