September 10, 2024 • 49 mins
In this exciting episode of The Michael C. Sherrard Podcast, I sit down with Dr. Tom Woodward, senior lecturer for Apologetics, Inc., and the author of several books, including Darwin Strikes Back and The Mysterious Epigenome, to discuss the remarkable surge of interest in intelligent design. We delve into how Stephen Meyer, a leading advocate of intelligent design, has captured mainstream attention with appearances on popular platforms like the Joe Rogan Podcast and Piers Morgan's show.
Together, we explore the scientific evidence that is turning heads and the implications of the "Return of the God Hypothesis" in today's culture. Whether you're a skeptic, a seasoned believer, or just curious about the intersection of science and faith, this episode offers insightful perspectives on why intelligent design is gaining pop-level attention and what it means for the ongoing conversation between science and belief in God.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Well, good morning, Dr. Tom. How are you? Hey, brother Mike,
my leader, my fearless leader. I'm saluting you.
Fearless leader. You're the one that got me into this trouble.
My gray hair and sleepless nights are your fault is what I'm saying. That's okay.
(00:23):
I apologize that I proposed the leadership concept to you.
And you just long, no, I know you carefully considered it step by step.
And the Holy Spirit was leading.
I'm a witness to that process. So we're shouting hallelujah a thousand times a day.
Thank you for coming on board. That's too kind.
(00:44):
I see you're wearing the C.S. Lewis shirt, a throwback, if you will.
I love the logo, by the way.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so for those that are picking up to our conversation here without
any context, Tom was the founder of the C.S. Lewis Society.
And a couple of years ago, he and Dave Englehart reached out to me to see if
(01:05):
I would be interested in taking over the ministry.
And real quickly, it was clear to me and my wife, Terry, that there was an opportunity
here to advance the kingdom of God by showcasing the truth, goodness,
and beauty of Jesus Christ.
And it led to a rebranding, but the rebranding of the name Apologetics Inc.
(01:26):
Is actually what the C.S. Lewis Society was always incorporated under.
And years ago, Tom, you did that. You got...
The URL apologetics.org. And in this new season of ministry and the expansion
and the addition of speakers and different podcasts and a youth discipleship
initiative and the follow the science work that you're doing,
we thought we needed a name that would be maybe more suitable banner for these
(01:50):
various ministry initiatives to come under.
So, uh, no, I jokes aside, I'm grateful to, to have taken over this ministry from you.
You have left it in a great place. The health of
this ministry is amazing and it is a joy to serve
uh still with you because you haven't left you're the senior lecturer for us
now and i'm really really looking forward to our conversation today yeah i just
(02:12):
uh thank you for the opportunity stay on board so instead of being the captain
of the ship i'm one of the guys who gets to choke in the life routes and go out and meet people and,
help to present jesus as the true lifesaver the one who died in our place and
rose again and who is an explosion of evidence, and the whole universe is kind
of rocking and shocking.
(02:35):
Shaking with the explosions of new evidence that are just coming onto the scene now.
And some of that is scientific, some of it's historical and archaeological,
but altogether the evidence is saying that there is truth, there is beauty,
there is goodness in the gospel.
And I love the way you have reoriented, as it were, the whole show and taking
(03:00):
us in exactly the right direction.
Just my thanks to you and my excitement. Hopefully it shows itself.
Well, that's very kind. And that's what I want to talk to you about.
I want to talk about this explosion of evidence, starting maybe with the scientific
evidence. I'm really curious to see what you think about this recent interest in intelligent design.
(03:25):
And what I mean by this is Stephen Meyer, who runs the Discovery Institute,
wrote a bestseller, Darwin's Tao, one of the pioneers in the intelligent design movement.
And for years, there were some that turned their nose up at it.
And this is like pseudoscience. Even if you've got the Wikipedia page that someone's
hijacked for Stephen Meyer, it uses the language pseudoscience.
(03:48):
But recently...
Uh in 2021 meyer wrote
return to the god hypothesis but it's just been within the last couple of months
here that he was on joe rogan and he was on piers morgan and the interview with
piers morgan is remarkable you find an unlikely allies seemingly in in piers morgan who is really,
(04:12):
taken by the scientific evidence and the implications that they have for theistic
So I don't know if you've seen either of those, Meyer on Rogan or with Piers
Morgan, but what do you think about,
how do you account for this renewed interest and excitement?
Well, number one, this is the kind of dream coming true right in front of our
(04:33):
eyes that we and the intelligent design movement, I kind of function as the,
let's say, the unpaid historian.
I've written two, only this through, of the intelligent design movement.
Doubts About Darwin came out in the early 2000s, and then Darwin Strikes Back,
the kind of fight against us that emerged in the mid, you know,
first decade of the 2000s.
(04:55):
And I've just been shocked in a positive sense because we're used to being attacked
and minimized and our message distorted.
But it's like, finally, here and there, beginning in 2016.
A major conference took place in London, the Royal Society, the number one and
(05:18):
most esteemed, older scientific society in the world was tackling the question
of what will replace Darwin.
What is going to have to come in to save Darwinism, which is falling apart in
front of us? It cannot account for the digital code.
I brought my DNA model. Maybe we could talk about DNA.
But that's just one side of 20 or 30 or 50 sides of this ongoing meltdown of
(05:43):
the Darwinian hypothesis.
It just doesn't fit the evidence. And so when I got to listen to,
just in the past week, the Joe Rogan with Steve Meyer dialogue, I'm just listening.
Number one, Steve Meyer hit the ball out of the ballpark. I think he catapulted the ball into orbit.
(06:03):
Excellent summary. I mean, oh my goodness.
If anybody wants to get a good short course on intelligent design,
just listen to that podcast.
And I was, you know, Joe Rogan is no easy guy to banter with.
And we're talking about one of the biggest, what, podcasts on the planet and
kind of like a tough, like, you know, show me, prove it.
(06:24):
I mean, the ultimate doubter, curmudgeon, I can use that word.
And then I haven't had a chance. I've been trying to finish the rewrite for
Discovery Institute of a book that Dr.
Gill's, the famed eye surgeon, did on epigenetics. So I've been working like
24-7 on that. But the Piers Morgan, from what I've read, I've read summaries
(06:47):
of it, and it just sounds like a turning point.
And even yesterday on the Discovery Institute website, if I can do a shout-out
alongside apologetics.org, our website, the second most important website in
the universe is evolutionnews.org.
Because every day, anywhere from two to six to even ten articles appear on this
(07:10):
whole area of the God Eye office.
That's where Darwin's collapse, the rise of new arguments and evidence for design.
So as I have been just kind of following this Piers Morgan phenomenon,
and then more recently, the tipping point description has come up.
(07:31):
And I'll just say this and pass the baton back to you.
Some people were writing, two authors were writing that there was a tipping
point that has been reached in the last few years where you don't get attacked
mercilessly among the Darwinists if you talk about teleology or purpose.
In other words, they're so tired of fighting against intelligent design that
(07:53):
now if you bring up these what were officially banned.
I mean, like you dare not bring them up. Are we going to brand you?
Pseudo-science. Now, this tipping point has been reached, and the whole article
is quoting a non-Christian, I think he's an agnostic, and he said,
now that I'm questioning Darwinism, they just shrug their shoulders.
So, it's like there's a new day of opportunity that we hardly could even imagine
(08:18):
10 years ago. It's exciting, and God's behind it all.
Yeah. Okay. So the tipping point, is it just there is an enormous amount of
evidence that you cannot, you just can't ignore anymore?
Or what's the cause of the tipping point? I think it's that because the complexity
of the code, the digital information in DNA,
(08:43):
which is 100% mathematically structurally identical to a computer code.
Let's just get that out of the way.
When people said, oh, that's just an analogy, that's just like a simile or a
metaphor. Yeah, I know about language tricks.
Well, my doctorate is in that rhetoric of science, the communication theory of science.
So I know about this a little bit. I studied it at the doctoral level.
(09:07):
And so to me, when you get into this area of what is driving the tipping point,
it's the accumulation of exploding quantities
and qualities of scientific
discoveries that make the cell
look like an extremely advanced high civilization starship that you might find
(09:33):
floating in space with literally billions of microchips running everything and
hundreds of thousands of automated mechanical machines interacting.
I mean, we don't ever see anything like this coming out of brute nature,
simple like forces and atoms bumping into one another.
(09:54):
If anything, it's not just a shout of design. It's like an earthquake that is
wracking the whole planet.
That design is exploding from everywhere in the world of biology.
And again, we don't see the transitions. Darwin said, Just give us time,
we'll connect these huge chasms that exist between different forms of life in the fossil record.
(10:16):
Well, that's a nice thing. That's a nice prediction.
That prediction has not just flopped or failed.
It has failed in a spectacular, again, world-shaking way.
The more we learn about the fossil record, it seems like these chasms are getting
deeper, not more shallow, and they're hardening over time.
(10:36):
We are just not finding anything connecting this route transitionally,
which has to be there. Darwin's theory is true.
It's not an option. It has to be there.
And so we see, you know, the Mormon search is like sampling error,
or sometimes those terms are used.
Well, we sampled the fossil record across so many different strata,
(10:58):
every country in the world, going all the way down to the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian,
and those chasms are real.
So it's not just like we haven't looked hard enough. Oh, no,
we've looked plenty hard, and those chasms have now hardened,
and there's nothing between them.
Well, that shouts either evolution through some vague way, but with intelligent
(11:19):
design creating new creatures along the way, or intelligent design,
boom, in a collective massive initial act.
And because that's where the many brutes are discussing that within intelligent design theory.
Well i think it's as important as
it's ever been for this kind of news to be
(11:40):
heard by everyone it's a shame that
there are people that have never heard something like this and
frequently when our team of speakers will
go out and give lectures on whether it's this or
something else in kind of the apologetics christian theology or worldview
space inevitably we hear from a
young man or a woman why hasn't anybody ever told
(12:01):
me this before and so
it's crucial that this message this news
this these these discoveries are shouted
from the mountaintops and everybody hears
it because i think there's a generation that's now becoming very weary
of secularism i i'm as i would go
(12:23):
as far as saying i think that the enlightenment project has
run out of gas secularism is coming to
an end i think there's a generation of people that have
bumped into the edges of non-theistic world views
and they go there's got to be more for
for a number of reasons and this there's got to be more has them looking for
(12:45):
spiritual answers but one of the stumbling blocks along the way is they're going
to have to know how science and this spirituality can come together. Is it irrational?
Is it foolish? Am I stupid to believe in science and God?
Because, you know, at the end of the Enlightenment, there was the push of the
intellectuals to say that there's a big time incompatibility between science and faith.
(13:09):
And interestingly enough, you'll even see some of that attitude within the Christian church.
But from the other side, they'll say, you know, if you're a Christian,
you don't need answers. You just have to have faith.
So, maybe a question here as we get into looking at more of the evidence.
Why do you think that belief in God and a belief in science,
(13:29):
if you will, is totally compatible and there's not going to be any problems
in trying to be a man of science and a man of faith, if you will?
Well, I love any question that deals with both science and faith or theistic,
you know, biblical faith in the same context, because I think they fit massively
(13:50):
and beautifully together.
And one of the keys is to realize that the view of science is to respect what
has been seen and observed. or empirical data.
Our five senses are gathering information. We're formulating ideas,
theories, observations feed into that all the time.
(14:13):
You modify your theory, you update it, you tweak it, and you try to come up
with a better theory of what's happening, the why, the cause of what's happening in front of you.
And the scientific revolution, Actually, the scientific revolution exploded
onto the scene originally because the Christian worldview was triumphing in the early Middle Ages.
(14:39):
And because there is a universe that is created, if you're taking the Christian
approach, by wise, brilliant, super intellect, designer,
a thinker who acts and produces things in nature.
If you take that assumption, then the laws of nature are there,
(15:00):
they're dependable, and they really would point to a lawgiver.
So the scientific laws themselves are pointers to a fantastic source of those regularities.
In Jeremiah chapter 33, God even says,
No more would I contemplate changing my covenant than I would think of changing the laws of nature.
(15:29):
I think it's significant that God compares his dependabilities,
his reliabilities, his solidity to the very laws of nature.
And so you see all the historians now say it was the Christian worldview that
gave rise to the scientific revolution. That's significant.
Secondly, when you see descriptions in the Bible match discoveries in science, that's another clue.
(15:57):
And I point out how there are nine key passages in the Old Testament.
We actually have a sheet that we provide in our ministry that just capitalizes
on these key passages that describe God as stretching out these stars to heavens.
And those descriptions are so very close to what we've seen confirmed in the
(16:22):
last hundred years about the expansion of the universe.
I think it's more than just happenstance. I think it's more than just,
you know, oh, they just sound like, you know, what we see now in the cosmological expansion.
And so we're struck by that, that then thirdly, science respects cause-effect
(16:43):
relationships on a close with this third point.
Cause-effect in the past would really be kind of similar to cause and effect in the present.
So if we're looking for causes that could give rise to molecular complexity
that looks like a digital code in the past, we look at what produces digital code in the present.
(17:04):
Well, I'm sorry, but bumping of atoms against each other, don't write code for computers.
It takes very, very smart computer
engineering, brilliant, and sometimes hundreds of thousands or more.
And so this effort to be able to create computer code that works very well,
(17:26):
that effort in the present produced by massive intelligence would point to our
DNA computer trope as produced by a massive intelligence.
And he is known as God, the God of the Bible, who's stepped forward and identified
himself at the beginning of history to all mankind.
Thought wow so the christian worldview giving rise to the scientific endeavor
(17:51):
has led to a number of discoveries and it seems that the more and more that
we learn about the universe the more signs there are.
That there is an intelligent mind, a creator behind this.
I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing just what you think are some of the
more astonishing scientific discoveries here in recent history that have theistic implications.
(18:19):
They may not be discoveries that definitively, you know, per se show that there's
a God, but they're at the very least, they have theistic implications.
What are the some more astonishing discoveries in your mind?
Well, that's a great, great question, Mike.
And I think, as I'm considering the one cosmic scale discovery,
I mean, there is the expansion.
(18:41):
We actually have produced at the CSO Society of Hologetics Inc.
Website, we can actually offer people a special bargain to get one of our DNA models.
And I'll do a little demo, if that's okay with you in a minute.
But what are our DNA models and some blow up the universe balloons we have a
black balloon but has a pattern from the Hubble space,
(19:04):
deep space photograph of galaxies and
you actually blow into this balloon and see it expand over time so the expansion
of the universe pointing backwards when it was smaller and smaller to an initial
beginning without which the universe could not have come to its present state so the The,
(19:24):
I would say,
most significant thing is both the fact that scientists acknowledge an absolute beginning.
They sometimes refer to it as the Big Bang. And, of course, among Christians,
there's some confusion in this discussion of Big Bang.
Because I tell my students that the Big Bang theory, if anything,
(19:47):
is destructive or it tends to erode atheism.
And so whether we like the Big Bang theory or not, whether we adhere to it as
a Christian or doubt it, I think that's an interesting question.
We're going to have time to get into that today.
But the one thing that the Big Bang theory has done, the hot Big Bang says before
there was matter or energy at that, the initial point of the universe, there was nothing.
(20:13):
There was zero, zip, nada, physical.
And so all of physical reality came from nothing. We do not know of any instance
where there is an effect without a cause that produced the effect.
So I would say that Jesus, in his discussion in John chapter 4, the woman at the well,
(20:35):
She was fiddling with, where do we worship God, here or there?
Jesus said, you're missing the point. God is spirit, and those who worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.
And so I think the woman at the well was being instructed that God is not a
physical being. He is beyond physicality.
(20:55):
And that's the very perfect fitting explanation of the origin of the universe.
Why can you have an effect that is physical come from a cause that is not physical?
Because God is massively, infinitely powerfully above the physicality and can
produce this beautiful physical universe.
(21:16):
And so sort of alongside with that is the fine-tuning.
There are over now 150, last time I checked, major parameters,
qualities of the universe, where it had to be just in this narrow range of settings.
Like I say to my wife, let's set the temperature at 72 degrees.
(21:37):
But if I said, let's make sure it has to be 72.16884953827, and then go on for another 20 digits.
She's going to look at me and stare and say, you're crazy. Well,
I don't know if I should say that, but something like that.
It's like, obviously, you're making a point. I don't know what your point is.
(22:01):
Well, imagine 30 or 50 or 100 digits like that. The temperature had to be just right.
The expansion rate of the universe, which is very, very delicately matched with
all the parameters that are interacting in the universe. Expansion rate had
to be fine-tuned to at least 70 decimal places.
(22:22):
I mean, that's beyond my imagination. And that's just one, those are just one
or two, let's say, 150 qualities of the universe that had to be fine-tuned.
And then if we have time, I'd say my third favorite topic of major discoveries,
deals with this little mousetrap I got in Tokyo, near Tokyo.
(22:44):
I was speaking in Japan, and the missionary there, I said, do you have a mousetrap?
He said, what do you want with a mousetrap? I said, because molecular machines
are like a mousetrap, or I think they call this a rat trap. It's a little bit bigger.
But it has five parts. It has a base. It has a little hammer that does the job.
It has a spring. It has a catch and a holding bar that work together to hold it back.
(23:09):
If you miss any one of those five parts of the rat trap, guess what? It doesn't work.
Well, machines inside our cell are just like that.
Only massively more complicated instead
of five parts all of which are necessary for
function you may have 30 or 80 or 150 parts miss
(23:30):
a miss any one of them the thing shuts down it doesn't function at all so how
could a machine like that have developed over time by blind you know the evolution
of new parts when there's no driving force there's nothing that would lead you in that direction,
because all 10 or 150 parts are necessary to function.
(23:52):
And this discovery by biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Bifox has
just been expanded greatly since he brought that out just before the year 2000.
I'd say we're sitting on top of, just imagine grabbing a surf board.
Somebody at the north coast of Hawaii says, look at that big,
big old wave out there, 50-foot wave.
(24:13):
I think we got a two-mile-high wave. Let's call it a tsunami of evidence that
we're sitting on now. It's pretty exciting. Wow.
So you've got the evidence that leads us to believe that the universe came into
existence at some point in the distant past.
You've got the evidence that shows the design and the fine-tuning of the universe,
(24:39):
how precise these conditions must be for life.
And then the third one, irreducible complexity, that these systems are so complex.
And if you get one step of them wrong, none of it works.
And so the chances of something like this just coming online or coming together
through a blind random process is virtually impossible.
(25:04):
Statistically, it's impossible. possible.
Now, for those that might be listening to this and going, okay,
great, this is not my wheelhouse cup of tea science.
I'm happy to listen to somebody else.
I'm happy that someone like Dr. Tom has spent his life doing this.
But then they start thinking about their kids. And I know recently we even had
(25:27):
one of our staff members reach out to you because one of our sons was in a conversation
with someone who was an advocate of Darwin's evolutionary theory.
What are some practical ways for parents, pastors, church leaders to hear what we're talking about?
No other people need to know about this, but they themselves kind of feel clueless
(25:48):
as to what is the first step or how do I even begin talking about this?
Any practical tips or guides for those people?
Sure. I mean, what I would say is, and this may sound like an old idea or just
an idea that's too general that just escapes us sometimes, is that there are
housed on Vimeo and YouTube,
(26:11):
the two main streaming platforms that I'm aware of, dozens,
hundreds, even thousands of great video resources.
Now, two of those, I'm willing to say that there are three of them.
I'm going to say three of them have come through Discovery Institute.
I mentioned that organization before. They lead, as it were,
(26:34):
the whole research and education on intelligent design theory.
And Discovery Institute has developed a fantastic series called Secrets of the Cell.
Where Michael Behe, the one who made the mousetrap analogy, a professor still
teaching biochemistry at Lehigh University, the elite school up in Pennsylvania.
(27:00):
So Michael Behe has done Secrets of the Cell, and they're five-minute segments.
They started in the year 2020, I think, and they're still going strong now.
So if you just put Secrets in the Cell, you can find either the five-minute
Whenever they combine the whole season as a 25-minute, you know,
it's a little bit longer, but it's still very doable.
(27:22):
Behe, this famous scientist with this little, you know, kind of French cabbie
hat and this beard and just talking about these things, he's just perfect.
You know, he's hanging out at this car shop where they're repairing engines.
And the guy says, why don't you just go stand over there? He says,
so he gets over on the side where you can see everything.
(27:44):
But being his molecular complexity of the cell work is fabulous.
It's mandatory watching.
There is another series I'll mention, Long Story Short.
Okay. Long Story Short is animated, but this is like animations for teens and adults.
I mean, it's such powerful science. I don't know if it's fifth grader or third grader.
(28:10):
They could get some of it. But if you're a teenage or older,
this is perfect, hilarious, sharp, brilliant science, unforgettable.
So long story short. And then the third series, which I think,
Mike, you may have seen some of these, Science Uprising.
And that's actually filmed through some studios out in California.
(28:33):
And you hear the Darwin side being presented in classrooms and museums,
and all of a sudden this girl puts on a mask, kind of a sunny New Orleans face.
Kind of masked and so she takes over the internet
and she basically types a little bit on
a keyboard and all of a sudden interviews with intelligent
(28:55):
designs theorists scientists who actually believe that there's evidence for
design they come in and suddenly you can finally for the first time hear the
other side and that's uh science uprising and i i just uh hope that we will
see a questioning of Darwinian theory,
that kind of, if you will, a sound, logical, evidence-based uprising is just
(29:21):
what the world has been waiting for.
As long as we keep our proper etiquette and don't do anything nasty,
but in the name of truth, in the name of God our creator,
we're questioning what people of authority have been telling us for many,
many decades. Yeah, that's good.
Tell me about, you've created some resources that are very helpful from DNA
(29:45):
and beyond and follow the science.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that and how that's a helpful resource
for parents, school leaders, the church?
I'm glad to show our model. We have one of them right here.
It's ready to come on view.
So this is our DNA model that is 21 rungs long.
(30:10):
So it has handles at each end, and you can actually twist it, just like DNA.
It's a double helix, so that's kind of fun to do. We have some little clear
tubes that enable you to do that.
And the color code of this model is designed to teach easily. This is confirmed.
First, second, third graders grab it very, very quickly. Within a few minutes,
(30:33):
they know the structure of DNA.
Junior high and high school love it because you can memorize the code by looking
at the colors. So the white here, the white tips, this is the sugar.
There are deoxyribose sugars. That's where the DNA, deoxyribose sugars.
And so those just help to keep everything lined up nicely.
(30:56):
These little pink balls with nooks, you can see they have like eight little
nooks. And that's usually the way its phosphates are structured.
Here I have an actual molecular model. We actually got this from another company.
So that's pretty cool. This is the phosphate up here.
And right here is the side of sugar.
(31:18):
And right here, this little molecular grouping molecule is the amino acid,
excuse me, is the nucleic acid.
And so these four, if you can just see them right here, four colors,
I call these C and G, green and crimson.
(31:38):
And it just so happens those are the letters that always go together in DNA.
And these are, we call them the A and the T letters, A.
There's a word for blue, azure. I'm expanding maybe somebody's vocabulary.
Or if you like Spanish I used to teach Spanish at our college ASUL that's the
(32:00):
A and then the T I call this because it's orange it's tiger tangerine,
So tiger stripes or tangerines are orange. So the A and the T,
C and the G always go together.
So I think of these as the Christmas colors. And I know, Mike,
you're in Peachtree City, Atlanta area.
(32:22):
But if you're in Florida, the orange and the blue are the Gator colors, right?
Or University of Idaho, it's orange and blue. Auburn is orange and blue.
Okay. What is it? University of Virginia. There's about 10 other schools.
Anyway. Anyway, so just think of Gator and Christmas.
They always go together. And because of that, if this opens up and needs to
(32:42):
be replicated, because our model does open up, like that, and it comes back
together through embedded magnets.
So we actually, we've had scholarships given. I think about 800 scholarships
have been given so that this would normally retail.
Am I allowed to reveal our reduced price?
Of course. Okay. I just want to make sure I'm not trampling on any toes here.
(33:08):
Normally this would be with our five lesson, actually now six lesson course,
which we have online at our website.
Perfect for junior high school and above. So this would normally be well over $150 now for $35.
So I think that's a pretty interesting bargain.
And we're asking people just to give us some kind of little report on how they used it.
(33:31):
And so So this is the equivalent of one short gene.
RNA is now known to have microRNA genes.
Basically, it's like one of these looped back upon itself. And those are now
some of the most amazing workers in the cell.
What we actually did with our package.
(33:55):
All in silence, we're bridged to faith.
We actually supply an ammonite. This is a black ammonite. We use,
I think, usually light gray ammonite fossils.
And those ammonites suddenly appear in the fossil record right after the Cambrian explosion.
And we also provide trilobites.
(34:17):
Everybody that wants to add that little duo.
And we actually have a T. rex tooth available. available
and these are all in our package
announcement and i don't have them here with me but um
we we have like i say in our announcement kit uh
a basically a group of three of our blow up the universe balloons the expanding
(34:39):
universe that some of the students when i show them so let's call them blow
up the universe so i can tell my mom what it is so those are the black with
a pattern of galaxies as you blow it,
you can just see it over time it's expanding like those nine passages the Old
Testament described I just think it's awesome to see what God has shown to the watching world,
(35:03):
the universe of scientists or science geeks like me are like almost in awe,
our jaws hanging open to see what is coming out every month,
a new phase of discovery so I just appreciate opportunity to write,
you know, a new version of the epigenetics book for discovery.
(35:24):
And that's, to me, the ultimate frontier is epigenetics.
So how did you, well, first, where, if people are interested,
where can they go to get a hold of some of these resources that you were just detailing?
Right. So we have on our, if I could just say a little shout out,
we want to thank the people at Princeton University. That's where I came to faith.
(35:49):
Maybe I could share my testimony at some point.
The events that we were able to do the last three years at Princeton featuring
the faith writings, faith-focused writings of C.S.
Lewis and his own journey to faith out of atheism. And he was an atheist for 20 years.
(36:11):
But with the help of J.R.R. Tolkien, none other than Lord of the Rings Tolkien
and other Christians, witnessed so effectively to those, he became the number
one, or at least one of the very best of our era.
Apologists, witnesses for Christ to the academic world, to those who have doubts
and who question their faith.
(36:33):
So as I've been working with this opportunity at Princeton, and we were able
to organize three events over the last few years at reunions,
we had to turn people away.
There was standing room only from alumni, many of whom were agnostics.
Mike, I couldn't believe how many people came. I said, that event was fantastic.
(36:55):
And they said, well, what is your journey to faith? Oh, I'm an agnostic.
And it's just because of the attraction of who C.S. Lewis was and what he'd done.
There's just this incredible drawing power that he has.
So if you go to apologetics.org forward slash Princeton, thanks to my good friend
(37:16):
Mike Sherrard, who wrote a painful intro for that page, we have been able to
upload some key resources.
So I would just say that's a good place to start. Or the other thing is to go
to DNA and Beyond, spell out the word and.
That's like Bed, Bath, and Beyond, okay? Except here we just put in DNA and then andbeyond.org.
(37:40):
That's where you can actually, if you want to grab any of our resources,
our DNA model, we have a new kit that's called the tRNA and amino acid, friends of DNA.
We have a course there. But if you wanted to just get the special deal, it's called FTS Bridge.
(38:00):
That document is at the Princeton page. So apologetics.org forward slash Princeton.
And that's where you can see about the opportunity to get the hit of fossils
along with the DNA and the blow up the universe on balloons.
I hope that is a bit of a guide. Yeah. So maybe last question here.
(38:23):
I'm very curious why you got interested in this line of the work in the first
place and how you came to the Lord at Princeton, if you don't mind sharing that. No, not at all.
It's my story. Paul shares his story, what, I think three times in the book of Acts.
So I'll just do it one time. What's that podcast?
(38:46):
I basically grew up in a Christian home, you know, the Christian in quotes.
I mean, I'm not sure how with my parents and my three older brothers,
all four of us boys, when we got into high school, we did well,
you know, all four of us were valedictorians. All four of us went to Princeton.
(39:07):
My dad had gone there, class of 28.
So, academics and intelligence, you know, respectability with your mind was
really kind of paramount in the Woodbridge family.
And when we got there, like my three older brothers, they had dropped their faith.
I mean, we'd gone to a local Protestant church, I won't name you the denomination,
(39:27):
but we'd gone through confirmation and said, yeah, I'm a Christian, but then we were not.
I had never really heard the gospel, the good news of Christ ever explained in that church context.
But when I got there, I found some students that were involved in a vinyl study,
and I heard that they were even presenting a little bit here and there,
(39:50):
some new scientific evidence for creation. And I just thought, what?
Evolution is a fact. What are they doing here on an ivory campus doing some
kind of academic or educational travesty like that?
And I thought these guys need help they need to be updated
they need to be you know brought in the 20th century
(40:11):
so uh one of the alumni principal alumni who actually had founded the group
he was in his late 70s at that point I mean he was president class of 13 I mean
Woodrow Wilson was running the university when he was there so I I cornered
him that he cornered him but I I said said, I just want to talk to you.
And he wound up sharing in literally 45 seconds a capsule summary of the gospel
(40:36):
as we were standing at the end of a lecture.
And I thought, I've got to deliver my Darwin lecture to him.
He's the source of the problem.
So we went to his home, and we talked for two and a half hours.
We came in with Isaiah 53, which I'd never heard of.
Christ died for our sins and dealt with the sin problem, and we need to receive him.
We have eternal life if we turn and receive him and confess that we're sinners.
(41:01):
And I'm thinking, you know, fossils and natural selection and mutations.
And so we're arguing on two levels.
And the next day I came back for more. I thought I can try to just,
you know, complete the job. I want to just convince him to be an evolutionist.
And he went on to, you know, sharing more of the gospel. I just kind of got out of there.
I prayed a prayer, but I didn't mean it. He thought I was a new believer.
(41:24):
I told him when I came back after Christmas, I didn't want to see him anymore.
I just couldn't go my own path.
But the angst, the existential, like, you know, anxiety, what happens when you die?
I had no answers. So I reached out to a younger guy. He was 25 years old.
He also had become a Christian at Princeton University.
So he started coming to my room, and his name was Bill Fay.
(41:46):
And Bill shared simply his heart, his life, the Book of Romans, the person of Jesus.
And at his apartment, the end of that year, our final study of the semester,
I opened my heart to Christ and received the gift of eternal life.
Everything was coming together.
But I told God, going down the street back to the campus, I pray I won't have
(42:07):
to get involved with this Princeton group.
Donald Blanchard, creationist. Lord, you know I'm an illusionist.
That was my first prayer after receiving the Lord. I can imagine God's permission
denied. And I, uh, so how, so how then did you get into that?
So it's interesting, right? It wasn't that evolution was dismantled.
(42:30):
And then you became a Christian. It was you became a Christian and then had
to reconcile this. So how did you work that out?
So I was a genuine Christian.
I mean, I actually received Christ. I embraced him by faith.
But I just assumed the science was all, you know, the science was good.
And it was that moment when I realized, you know, that's not the big deal.
(42:54):
So don't stop fellowshipping with these people. And literally two days later,
I found myself on a Bible study setting with them.
I let the whole thing kind of fade to the background.
And then it wasn't until that summer I actually got a job on the campus,
and I went to a local evangelical church.
And it was at that church, standing in the back, looking at some literature
(43:16):
about a fossil conference, that a guy whose name I don't know presented to me
in five minutes the case for creation from the fossil record.
And I flipped, standing at the back of a local church for a five-minute presentation
because he knew what he was talking about and I had never heard about the utter
absence of transitional forms.
(43:36):
And, of course, the reason is it's not in the books. They're sequestering information
that is devastating to the Darwinian eye. Obviously, you don't hear it in the schools.
I wonder why not, because they want to protect the theory and they don't want it questioned.
And so literally, so for two months, maybe three at the most,
(43:56):
I was a genuine believer,
a theistic evolutionist, until someone probably, you know, just kind of happenstance
just sharing at the back of that church, looking at some literature. That's when I flipped.
And I didn't really know why, because every bit of evidence to me supports creation
or intelligent design, if you want to use that term.
(44:18):
That's a wonderful story. And I think it gives some hope and vision for many
moving forward and how they are to appropriately engage important questions
and scientific questions.
And far too often, it seems to me, I see in the church, science just dividing us.
(44:39):
And you find people that believe the earth is really old. There are some that
believe the earth is really young, and they fight vehemently one another,
and it causes division and separation.
Whereas even in your story, you see the hope of coming to know the Lord,
knowing that the manner in which the universe was created is important,
(45:00):
but it's not something to sever fellowship over.
And in a spirit of grace and humility to pursue honest answers to these good questions.
I think your story is an example of how the church ought to treat one another
as we're pursuing answers to the biggest questions that there are.
(45:21):
Yes, and the intelligent design movement is a very big movement. It's a big tent.
The majority, I would say, are probably conservative Christians,
mere Christians, if I can use C.S. Lewis's term.
There are some Islamic or Muslim, you know, intelligent design theorists.
There are some searching open-minded agnostics and other faiths.
(45:44):
But to me, once you see the evidence for design, if you're coming at it like
design and now who's the designer, then the universe, as it were,
of biblical evidence comes into play.
And that's where, again, we see this tsunami of biblical and historical evidence.
So, if I could, could I just close by reading a short quote from the book by
(46:08):
David Frost, The Blind Evolution?
Yeah, yeah. It's pretty startling. It's pretty amazing.
And he basically says at the end of chapter five also, but I'm just going to read what he says.
He says, I conclude with a startling assertion that alone among the world religions,
(46:29):
Christianity believes that its unseen God offered himself for scientific scrutiny
in the person of Jesus Christ.
Isn't that amazing? God offered himself for scientific scrutiny in the person of Jesus Christ.
And he says, so doing, God united our modes of perception, allowing each to
(46:55):
balance and correct the other.
So when David Frost, this notable intellectual, taught at Oxford, Cambridge,
and many universities in Australia, When he writes in his book,
Blind Evolution, that the unseen God offered himself for scientific,
that is empirical, that is using your five senses inspection.
(47:16):
I just say, wow. In other words, the evidence for design is a very,
very thick towering tsunami.
And the evidence for Christ is that second tsunami that invites all the world
to experience the fullness of life.
That which is a true and beautiful
(47:37):
and good thank you that's why
I love that's why I love Christianity it is
a come-and-see religion it is not a shut-up-and-believe religion it invites
the honest seeker to inquire to ask questions and as we read in the New Testament
from and we see from Jesus how he treated people that had questions.
(48:02):
He embraced them. I'll just mention that Kurt Bladman, a Princeton graduate
friend of mine, a little bit younger than I am, he now has been writing a Bible.
It's called BibleApologetics.org.
Kurt Bladman has actually presented every day for the last four years evidences
that link the real world with the world of Jesus' belief.
(48:25):
And it's fantastic. So a little shout out to a guy who actually struggled with
faith, a Jewish atheist at the time, a graduate of Princeton,
and then he found there was evidence, limited evidence, and now he's sharing
it with the whole world on BibleOlogetics.org.
Very good. Well, Tom, it's a pleasure to see you as always and talk,
and really appreciate your work and your friendship and for all that you've
(48:49):
done to shine light on what is true and the abundant life found therein.
And I hope you have a great day and until next time.
Thank you for pursuing the true Jesus.
Music.
Well, good morning, Dr. Tom. How are you? Hey, brother Mike,
my leader, my fearless leader. I'm saluting you.
Fearless leader. You're the one that got me into this trouble.
My gray hair and sleepless nights are your fault is what I'm saying. That's okay.
(00:23):
I apologize that I proposed the leadership concept to you.
And you just long, no, I know you carefully considered it step by step.
And the Holy Spirit was leading.
I'm a witness to that process. So we're shouting hallelujah a thousand times a day.
Thank you for coming on board. That's too kind.
(00:44):
I see you're wearing the C.S. Lewis shirt, a throwback, if you will.
I love the logo, by the way.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so for those that are picking up to our conversation here without
any context, Tom was the founder of the C.S. Lewis Society.
And a couple of years ago, he and Dave Englehart reached out to me to see if
(01:05):
I would be interested in taking over the ministry.
And real quickly, it was clear to me and my wife, Terry, that there was an opportunity
here to advance the kingdom of God by showcasing the truth, goodness,
and beauty of Jesus Christ.
And it led to a rebranding, but the rebranding of the name Apologetics Inc.
(01:26):
Is actually what the C.S. Lewis Society was always incorporated under.
And years ago, Tom, you did that. You got...
The URL apologetics.org. And in this new season of ministry and the expansion
and the addition of speakers and different podcasts and a youth discipleship
initiative and the follow the science work that you're doing,
we thought we needed a name that would be maybe more suitable banner for these
(01:50):
various ministry initiatives to come under.
So, uh, no, I jokes aside, I'm grateful to, to have taken over this ministry from you.
You have left it in a great place. The health of
this ministry is amazing and it is a joy to serve
uh still with you because you haven't left you're the senior lecturer for us
now and i'm really really looking forward to our conversation today yeah i just
(02:12):
uh thank you for the opportunity stay on board so instead of being the captain
of the ship i'm one of the guys who gets to choke in the life routes and go out and meet people and,
help to present jesus as the true lifesaver the one who died in our place and
rose again and who is an explosion of evidence, and the whole universe is kind
of rocking and shocking.
(02:35):
Shaking with the explosions of new evidence that are just coming onto the scene now.
And some of that is scientific, some of it's historical and archaeological,
but altogether the evidence is saying that there is truth, there is beauty,
there is goodness in the gospel.
And I love the way you have reoriented, as it were, the whole show and taking
(03:00):
us in exactly the right direction.
Just my thanks to you and my excitement. Hopefully it shows itself.
Well, that's very kind. And that's what I want to talk to you about.
I want to talk about this explosion of evidence, starting maybe with the scientific
evidence. I'm really curious to see what you think about this recent interest in intelligent design.
(03:25):
And what I mean by this is Stephen Meyer, who runs the Discovery Institute,
wrote a bestseller, Darwin's Tao, one of the pioneers in the intelligent design movement.
And for years, there were some that turned their nose up at it.
And this is like pseudoscience. Even if you've got the Wikipedia page that someone's
hijacked for Stephen Meyer, it uses the language pseudoscience.
(03:48):
But recently...
Uh in 2021 meyer wrote
return to the god hypothesis but it's just been within the last couple of months
here that he was on joe rogan and he was on piers morgan and the interview with
piers morgan is remarkable you find an unlikely allies seemingly in in piers morgan who is really,
(04:12):
taken by the scientific evidence and the implications that they have for theistic
So I don't know if you've seen either of those, Meyer on Rogan or with Piers
Morgan, but what do you think about,
how do you account for this renewed interest and excitement?
Well, number one, this is the kind of dream coming true right in front of our
(04:33):
eyes that we and the intelligent design movement, I kind of function as the,
let's say, the unpaid historian.
I've written two, only this through, of the intelligent design movement.
Doubts About Darwin came out in the early 2000s, and then Darwin Strikes Back,
the kind of fight against us that emerged in the mid, you know,
first decade of the 2000s.
(04:55):
And I've just been shocked in a positive sense because we're used to being attacked
and minimized and our message distorted.
But it's like, finally, here and there, beginning in 2016.
A major conference took place in London, the Royal Society, the number one and
(05:18):
most esteemed, older scientific society in the world was tackling the question
of what will replace Darwin.
What is going to have to come in to save Darwinism, which is falling apart in
front of us? It cannot account for the digital code.
I brought my DNA model. Maybe we could talk about DNA.
But that's just one side of 20 or 30 or 50 sides of this ongoing meltdown of
(05:43):
the Darwinian hypothesis.
It just doesn't fit the evidence. And so when I got to listen to,
just in the past week, the Joe Rogan with Steve Meyer dialogue, I'm just listening.
Number one, Steve Meyer hit the ball out of the ballpark. I think he catapulted the ball into orbit.
(06:03):
Excellent summary. I mean, oh my goodness.
If anybody wants to get a good short course on intelligent design,
just listen to that podcast.
And I was, you know, Joe Rogan is no easy guy to banter with.
And we're talking about one of the biggest, what, podcasts on the planet and
kind of like a tough, like, you know, show me, prove it.
(06:24):
I mean, the ultimate doubter, curmudgeon, I can use that word.
And then I haven't had a chance. I've been trying to finish the rewrite for
Discovery Institute of a book that Dr.
Gill's, the famed eye surgeon, did on epigenetics. So I've been working like
24-7 on that. But the Piers Morgan, from what I've read, I've read summaries
(06:47):
of it, and it just sounds like a turning point.
And even yesterday on the Discovery Institute website, if I can do a shout-out
alongside apologetics.org, our website, the second most important website in
the universe is evolutionnews.org.
Because every day, anywhere from two to six to even ten articles appear on this
(07:10):
whole area of the God Eye office.
That's where Darwin's collapse, the rise of new arguments and evidence for design.
So as I have been just kind of following this Piers Morgan phenomenon,
and then more recently, the tipping point description has come up.
(07:31):
And I'll just say this and pass the baton back to you.
Some people were writing, two authors were writing that there was a tipping
point that has been reached in the last few years where you don't get attacked
mercilessly among the Darwinists if you talk about teleology or purpose.
In other words, they're so tired of fighting against intelligent design that
(07:53):
now if you bring up these what were officially banned.
I mean, like you dare not bring them up. Are we going to brand you?
Pseudo-science. Now, this tipping point has been reached, and the whole article
is quoting a non-Christian, I think he's an agnostic, and he said,
now that I'm questioning Darwinism, they just shrug their shoulders.
So, it's like there's a new day of opportunity that we hardly could even imagine
(08:18):
10 years ago. It's exciting, and God's behind it all.
Yeah. Okay. So the tipping point, is it just there is an enormous amount of
evidence that you cannot, you just can't ignore anymore?
Or what's the cause of the tipping point? I think it's that because the complexity
of the code, the digital information in DNA,
(08:43):
which is 100% mathematically structurally identical to a computer code.
Let's just get that out of the way.
When people said, oh, that's just an analogy, that's just like a simile or a
metaphor. Yeah, I know about language tricks.
Well, my doctorate is in that rhetoric of science, the communication theory of science.
So I know about this a little bit. I studied it at the doctoral level.
(09:07):
And so to me, when you get into this area of what is driving the tipping point,
it's the accumulation of exploding quantities
and qualities of scientific
discoveries that make the cell
look like an extremely advanced high civilization starship that you might find
(09:33):
floating in space with literally billions of microchips running everything and
hundreds of thousands of automated mechanical machines interacting.
I mean, we don't ever see anything like this coming out of brute nature,
simple like forces and atoms bumping into one another.
(09:54):
If anything, it's not just a shout of design. It's like an earthquake that is
wracking the whole planet.
That design is exploding from everywhere in the world of biology.
And again, we don't see the transitions. Darwin said, Just give us time,
we'll connect these huge chasms that exist between different forms of life in the fossil record.
(10:16):
Well, that's a nice thing. That's a nice prediction.
That prediction has not just flopped or failed.
It has failed in a spectacular, again, world-shaking way.
The more we learn about the fossil record, it seems like these chasms are getting
deeper, not more shallow, and they're hardening over time.
(10:36):
We are just not finding anything connecting this route transitionally,
which has to be there. Darwin's theory is true.
It's not an option. It has to be there.
And so we see, you know, the Mormon search is like sampling error,
or sometimes those terms are used.
Well, we sampled the fossil record across so many different strata,
(10:58):
every country in the world, going all the way down to the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian,
and those chasms are real.
So it's not just like we haven't looked hard enough. Oh, no,
we've looked plenty hard, and those chasms have now hardened,
and there's nothing between them.
Well, that shouts either evolution through some vague way, but with intelligent
(11:19):
design creating new creatures along the way, or intelligent design,
boom, in a collective massive initial act.
And because that's where the many brutes are discussing that within intelligent design theory.
Well i think it's as important as
it's ever been for this kind of news to be
(11:40):
heard by everyone it's a shame that
there are people that have never heard something like this and
frequently when our team of speakers will
go out and give lectures on whether it's this or
something else in kind of the apologetics christian theology or worldview
space inevitably we hear from a
young man or a woman why hasn't anybody ever told
(12:01):
me this before and so
it's crucial that this message this news
this these these discoveries are shouted
from the mountaintops and everybody hears
it because i think there's a generation that's now becoming very weary
of secularism i i'm as i would go
(12:23):
as far as saying i think that the enlightenment project has
run out of gas secularism is coming to
an end i think there's a generation of people that have
bumped into the edges of non-theistic world views
and they go there's got to be more for
for a number of reasons and this there's got to be more has them looking for
(12:45):
spiritual answers but one of the stumbling blocks along the way is they're going
to have to know how science and this spirituality can come together. Is it irrational?
Is it foolish? Am I stupid to believe in science and God?
Because, you know, at the end of the Enlightenment, there was the push of the
intellectuals to say that there's a big time incompatibility between science and faith.
(13:09):
And interestingly enough, you'll even see some of that attitude within the Christian church.
But from the other side, they'll say, you know, if you're a Christian,
you don't need answers. You just have to have faith.
So, maybe a question here as we get into looking at more of the evidence.
Why do you think that belief in God and a belief in science,
(13:29):
if you will, is totally compatible and there's not going to be any problems
in trying to be a man of science and a man of faith, if you will?
Well, I love any question that deals with both science and faith or theistic,
you know, biblical faith in the same context, because I think they fit massively
(13:50):
and beautifully together.
And one of the keys is to realize that the view of science is to respect what
has been seen and observed. or empirical data.
Our five senses are gathering information. We're formulating ideas,
theories, observations feed into that all the time.
(14:13):
You modify your theory, you update it, you tweak it, and you try to come up
with a better theory of what's happening, the why, the cause of what's happening in front of you.
And the scientific revolution, Actually, the scientific revolution exploded
onto the scene originally because the Christian worldview was triumphing in the early Middle Ages.
(14:39):
And because there is a universe that is created, if you're taking the Christian
approach, by wise, brilliant, super intellect, designer,
a thinker who acts and produces things in nature.
If you take that assumption, then the laws of nature are there,
(15:00):
they're dependable, and they really would point to a lawgiver.
So the scientific laws themselves are pointers to a fantastic source of those regularities.
In Jeremiah chapter 33, God even says,
No more would I contemplate changing my covenant than I would think of changing the laws of nature.
(15:29):
I think it's significant that God compares his dependabilities,
his reliabilities, his solidity to the very laws of nature.
And so you see all the historians now say it was the Christian worldview that
gave rise to the scientific revolution. That's significant.
Secondly, when you see descriptions in the Bible match discoveries in science, that's another clue.
(15:57):
And I point out how there are nine key passages in the Old Testament.
We actually have a sheet that we provide in our ministry that just capitalizes
on these key passages that describe God as stretching out these stars to heavens.
And those descriptions are so very close to what we've seen confirmed in the
(16:22):
last hundred years about the expansion of the universe.
I think it's more than just happenstance. I think it's more than just,
you know, oh, they just sound like, you know, what we see now in the cosmological expansion.
And so we're struck by that, that then thirdly, science respects cause-effect
(16:43):
relationships on a close with this third point.
Cause-effect in the past would really be kind of similar to cause and effect in the present.
So if we're looking for causes that could give rise to molecular complexity
that looks like a digital code in the past, we look at what produces digital code in the present.
(17:04):
Well, I'm sorry, but bumping of atoms against each other, don't write code for computers.
It takes very, very smart computer
engineering, brilliant, and sometimes hundreds of thousands or more.
And so this effort to be able to create computer code that works very well,
(17:26):
that effort in the present produced by massive intelligence would point to our
DNA computer trope as produced by a massive intelligence.
And he is known as God, the God of the Bible, who's stepped forward and identified
himself at the beginning of history to all mankind.
Thought wow so the christian worldview giving rise to the scientific endeavor
(17:51):
has led to a number of discoveries and it seems that the more and more that
we learn about the universe the more signs there are.
That there is an intelligent mind, a creator behind this.
I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing just what you think are some of the
more astonishing scientific discoveries here in recent history that have theistic implications.
(18:19):
They may not be discoveries that definitively, you know, per se show that there's
a God, but they're at the very least, they have theistic implications.
What are the some more astonishing discoveries in your mind?
Well, that's a great, great question, Mike.
And I think, as I'm considering the one cosmic scale discovery,
I mean, there is the expansion.
(18:41):
We actually have produced at the CSO Society of Hologetics Inc.
Website, we can actually offer people a special bargain to get one of our DNA models.
And I'll do a little demo, if that's okay with you in a minute.
But what are our DNA models and some blow up the universe balloons we have a
black balloon but has a pattern from the Hubble space,
(19:04):
deep space photograph of galaxies and
you actually blow into this balloon and see it expand over time so the expansion
of the universe pointing backwards when it was smaller and smaller to an initial
beginning without which the universe could not have come to its present state so the The,
(19:24):
I would say,
most significant thing is both the fact that scientists acknowledge an absolute beginning.
They sometimes refer to it as the Big Bang. And, of course, among Christians,
there's some confusion in this discussion of Big Bang.
Because I tell my students that the Big Bang theory, if anything,
(19:47):
is destructive or it tends to erode atheism.
And so whether we like the Big Bang theory or not, whether we adhere to it as
a Christian or doubt it, I think that's an interesting question.
We're going to have time to get into that today.
But the one thing that the Big Bang theory has done, the hot Big Bang says before
there was matter or energy at that, the initial point of the universe, there was nothing.
(20:13):
There was zero, zip, nada, physical.
And so all of physical reality came from nothing. We do not know of any instance
where there is an effect without a cause that produced the effect.
So I would say that Jesus, in his discussion in John chapter 4, the woman at the well,
(20:35):
She was fiddling with, where do we worship God, here or there?
Jesus said, you're missing the point. God is spirit, and those who worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.
And so I think the woman at the well was being instructed that God is not a
physical being. He is beyond physicality.
(20:55):
And that's the very perfect fitting explanation of the origin of the universe.
Why can you have an effect that is physical come from a cause that is not physical?
Because God is massively, infinitely powerfully above the physicality and can
produce this beautiful physical universe.
(21:16):
And so sort of alongside with that is the fine-tuning.
There are over now 150, last time I checked, major parameters,
qualities of the universe, where it had to be just in this narrow range of settings.
Like I say to my wife, let's set the temperature at 72 degrees.
(21:37):
But if I said, let's make sure it has to be 72.16884953827, and then go on for another 20 digits.
She's going to look at me and stare and say, you're crazy. Well,
I don't know if I should say that, but something like that.
It's like, obviously, you're making a point. I don't know what your point is.
(22:01):
Well, imagine 30 or 50 or 100 digits like that. The temperature had to be just right.
The expansion rate of the universe, which is very, very delicately matched with
all the parameters that are interacting in the universe. Expansion rate had
to be fine-tuned to at least 70 decimal places.
(22:22):
I mean, that's beyond my imagination. And that's just one, those are just one
or two, let's say, 150 qualities of the universe that had to be fine-tuned.
And then if we have time, I'd say my third favorite topic of major discoveries,
deals with this little mousetrap I got in Tokyo, near Tokyo.
(22:44):
I was speaking in Japan, and the missionary there, I said, do you have a mousetrap?
He said, what do you want with a mousetrap? I said, because molecular machines
are like a mousetrap, or I think they call this a rat trap. It's a little bit bigger.
But it has five parts. It has a base. It has a little hammer that does the job.
It has a spring. It has a catch and a holding bar that work together to hold it back.
(23:09):
If you miss any one of those five parts of the rat trap, guess what? It doesn't work.
Well, machines inside our cell are just like that.
Only massively more complicated instead
of five parts all of which are necessary for
function you may have 30 or 80 or 150 parts miss
(23:30):
a miss any one of them the thing shuts down it doesn't function at all so how
could a machine like that have developed over time by blind you know the evolution
of new parts when there's no driving force there's nothing that would lead you in that direction,
because all 10 or 150 parts are necessary to function.
(23:52):
And this discovery by biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Bifox has
just been expanded greatly since he brought that out just before the year 2000.
I'd say we're sitting on top of, just imagine grabbing a surf board.
Somebody at the north coast of Hawaii says, look at that big,
big old wave out there, 50-foot wave.
(24:13):
I think we got a two-mile-high wave. Let's call it a tsunami of evidence that
we're sitting on now. It's pretty exciting. Wow.
So you've got the evidence that leads us to believe that the universe came into
existence at some point in the distant past.
You've got the evidence that shows the design and the fine-tuning of the universe,
(24:39):
how precise these conditions must be for life.
And then the third one, irreducible complexity, that these systems are so complex.
And if you get one step of them wrong, none of it works.
And so the chances of something like this just coming online or coming together
through a blind random process is virtually impossible.
(25:04):
Statistically, it's impossible. possible.
Now, for those that might be listening to this and going, okay,
great, this is not my wheelhouse cup of tea science.
I'm happy to listen to somebody else.
I'm happy that someone like Dr. Tom has spent his life doing this.
But then they start thinking about their kids. And I know recently we even had
(25:27):
one of our staff members reach out to you because one of our sons was in a conversation
with someone who was an advocate of Darwin's evolutionary theory.
What are some practical ways for parents, pastors, church leaders to hear what we're talking about?
No other people need to know about this, but they themselves kind of feel clueless
(25:48):
as to what is the first step or how do I even begin talking about this?
Any practical tips or guides for those people?
Sure. I mean, what I would say is, and this may sound like an old idea or just
an idea that's too general that just escapes us sometimes, is that there are
housed on Vimeo and YouTube,
(26:11):
the two main streaming platforms that I'm aware of, dozens,
hundreds, even thousands of great video resources.
Now, two of those, I'm willing to say that there are three of them.
I'm going to say three of them have come through Discovery Institute.
I mentioned that organization before. They lead, as it were,
(26:34):
the whole research and education on intelligent design theory.
And Discovery Institute has developed a fantastic series called Secrets of the Cell.
Where Michael Behe, the one who made the mousetrap analogy, a professor still
teaching biochemistry at Lehigh University, the elite school up in Pennsylvania.
(27:00):
So Michael Behe has done Secrets of the Cell, and they're five-minute segments.
They started in the year 2020, I think, and they're still going strong now.
So if you just put Secrets in the Cell, you can find either the five-minute
Whenever they combine the whole season as a 25-minute, you know,
it's a little bit longer, but it's still very doable.
(27:22):
Behe, this famous scientist with this little, you know, kind of French cabbie
hat and this beard and just talking about these things, he's just perfect.
You know, he's hanging out at this car shop where they're repairing engines.
And the guy says, why don't you just go stand over there? He says,
so he gets over on the side where you can see everything.
(27:44):
But being his molecular complexity of the cell work is fabulous.
It's mandatory watching.
There is another series I'll mention, Long Story Short.
Okay. Long Story Short is animated, but this is like animations for teens and adults.
I mean, it's such powerful science. I don't know if it's fifth grader or third grader.
(28:10):
They could get some of it. But if you're a teenage or older,
this is perfect, hilarious, sharp, brilliant science, unforgettable.
So long story short. And then the third series, which I think,
Mike, you may have seen some of these, Science Uprising.
And that's actually filmed through some studios out in California.
(28:33):
And you hear the Darwin side being presented in classrooms and museums,
and all of a sudden this girl puts on a mask, kind of a sunny New Orleans face.
Kind of masked and so she takes over the internet
and she basically types a little bit on
a keyboard and all of a sudden interviews with intelligent
(28:55):
designs theorists scientists who actually believe that there's evidence for
design they come in and suddenly you can finally for the first time hear the
other side and that's uh science uprising and i i just uh hope that we will
see a questioning of Darwinian theory,
that kind of, if you will, a sound, logical, evidence-based uprising is just
(29:21):
what the world has been waiting for.
As long as we keep our proper etiquette and don't do anything nasty,
but in the name of truth, in the name of God our creator,
we're questioning what people of authority have been telling us for many,
many decades. Yeah, that's good.
Tell me about, you've created some resources that are very helpful from DNA
(29:45):
and beyond and follow the science.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that and how that's a helpful resource
for parents, school leaders, the church?
I'm glad to show our model. We have one of them right here.
It's ready to come on view.
So this is our DNA model that is 21 rungs long.
(30:10):
So it has handles at each end, and you can actually twist it, just like DNA.
It's a double helix, so that's kind of fun to do. We have some little clear
tubes that enable you to do that.
And the color code of this model is designed to teach easily. This is confirmed.
First, second, third graders grab it very, very quickly. Within a few minutes,
(30:33):
they know the structure of DNA.
Junior high and high school love it because you can memorize the code by looking
at the colors. So the white here, the white tips, this is the sugar.
There are deoxyribose sugars. That's where the DNA, deoxyribose sugars.
And so those just help to keep everything lined up nicely.
(30:56):
These little pink balls with nooks, you can see they have like eight little
nooks. And that's usually the way its phosphates are structured.
Here I have an actual molecular model. We actually got this from another company.
So that's pretty cool. This is the phosphate up here.
And right here is the side of sugar.
(31:18):
And right here, this little molecular grouping molecule is the amino acid,
excuse me, is the nucleic acid.
And so these four, if you can just see them right here, four colors,
I call these C and G, green and crimson.
(31:38):
And it just so happens those are the letters that always go together in DNA.
And these are, we call them the A and the T letters, A.
There's a word for blue, azure. I'm expanding maybe somebody's vocabulary.
Or if you like Spanish I used to teach Spanish at our college ASUL that's the
(32:00):
A and then the T I call this because it's orange it's tiger tangerine,
So tiger stripes or tangerines are orange. So the A and the T,
C and the G always go together.
So I think of these as the Christmas colors. And I know, Mike,
you're in Peachtree City, Atlanta area.
(32:22):
But if you're in Florida, the orange and the blue are the Gator colors, right?
Or University of Idaho, it's orange and blue. Auburn is orange and blue.
Okay. What is it? University of Virginia. There's about 10 other schools.
Anyway. Anyway, so just think of Gator and Christmas.
They always go together. And because of that, if this opens up and needs to
(32:42):
be replicated, because our model does open up, like that, and it comes back
together through embedded magnets.
So we actually, we've had scholarships given. I think about 800 scholarships
have been given so that this would normally retail.
Am I allowed to reveal our reduced price?
Of course. Okay. I just want to make sure I'm not trampling on any toes here.
(33:08):
Normally this would be with our five lesson, actually now six lesson course,
which we have online at our website.
Perfect for junior high school and above. So this would normally be well over $150 now for $35.
So I think that's a pretty interesting bargain.
And we're asking people just to give us some kind of little report on how they used it.
(33:31):
And so So this is the equivalent of one short gene.
RNA is now known to have microRNA genes.
Basically, it's like one of these looped back upon itself. And those are now
some of the most amazing workers in the cell.
What we actually did with our package.
(33:55):
All in silence, we're bridged to faith.
We actually supply an ammonite. This is a black ammonite. We use,
I think, usually light gray ammonite fossils.
And those ammonites suddenly appear in the fossil record right after the Cambrian explosion.
And we also provide trilobites.
(34:17):
Everybody that wants to add that little duo.
And we actually have a T. rex tooth available. available
and these are all in our package
announcement and i don't have them here with me but um
we we have like i say in our announcement kit uh
a basically a group of three of our blow up the universe balloons the expanding
(34:39):
universe that some of the students when i show them so let's call them blow
up the universe so i can tell my mom what it is so those are the black with
a pattern of galaxies as you blow it,
you can just see it over time it's expanding like those nine passages the Old
Testament described I just think it's awesome to see what God has shown to the watching world,
(35:03):
the universe of scientists or science geeks like me are like almost in awe,
our jaws hanging open to see what is coming out every month,
a new phase of discovery so I just appreciate opportunity to write,
you know, a new version of the epigenetics book for discovery.
(35:24):
And that's, to me, the ultimate frontier is epigenetics.
So how did you, well, first, where, if people are interested,
where can they go to get a hold of some of these resources that you were just detailing?
Right. So we have on our, if I could just say a little shout out,
we want to thank the people at Princeton University. That's where I came to faith.
(35:49):
Maybe I could share my testimony at some point.
The events that we were able to do the last three years at Princeton featuring
the faith writings, faith-focused writings of C.S.
Lewis and his own journey to faith out of atheism. And he was an atheist for 20 years.
(36:11):
But with the help of J.R.R. Tolkien, none other than Lord of the Rings Tolkien
and other Christians, witnessed so effectively to those, he became the number
one, or at least one of the very best of our era.
Apologists, witnesses for Christ to the academic world, to those who have doubts
and who question their faith.
(36:33):
So as I've been working with this opportunity at Princeton, and we were able
to organize three events over the last few years at reunions,
we had to turn people away.
There was standing room only from alumni, many of whom were agnostics.
Mike, I couldn't believe how many people came. I said, that event was fantastic.
(36:55):
And they said, well, what is your journey to faith? Oh, I'm an agnostic.
And it's just because of the attraction of who C.S. Lewis was and what he'd done.
There's just this incredible drawing power that he has.
So if you go to apologetics.org forward slash Princeton, thanks to my good friend
(37:16):
Mike Sherrard, who wrote a painful intro for that page, we have been able to
upload some key resources.
So I would just say that's a good place to start. Or the other thing is to go
to DNA and Beyond, spell out the word and.
That's like Bed, Bath, and Beyond, okay? Except here we just put in DNA and then andbeyond.org.
(37:40):
That's where you can actually, if you want to grab any of our resources,
our DNA model, we have a new kit that's called the tRNA and amino acid, friends of DNA.
We have a course there. But if you wanted to just get the special deal, it's called FTS Bridge.
(38:00):
That document is at the Princeton page. So apologetics.org forward slash Princeton.
And that's where you can see about the opportunity to get the hit of fossils
along with the DNA and the blow up the universe on balloons.
I hope that is a bit of a guide. Yeah. So maybe last question here.
(38:23):
I'm very curious why you got interested in this line of the work in the first
place and how you came to the Lord at Princeton, if you don't mind sharing that. No, not at all.
It's my story. Paul shares his story, what, I think three times in the book of Acts.
So I'll just do it one time. What's that podcast?
(38:46):
I basically grew up in a Christian home, you know, the Christian in quotes.
I mean, I'm not sure how with my parents and my three older brothers,
all four of us boys, when we got into high school, we did well,
you know, all four of us were valedictorians. All four of us went to Princeton.
(39:07):
My dad had gone there, class of 28.
So, academics and intelligence, you know, respectability with your mind was
really kind of paramount in the Woodbridge family.
And when we got there, like my three older brothers, they had dropped their faith.
I mean, we'd gone to a local Protestant church, I won't name you the denomination,
(39:27):
but we'd gone through confirmation and said, yeah, I'm a Christian, but then we were not.
I had never really heard the gospel, the good news of Christ ever explained in that church context.
But when I got there, I found some students that were involved in a vinyl study,
and I heard that they were even presenting a little bit here and there,
(39:50):
some new scientific evidence for creation. And I just thought, what?
Evolution is a fact. What are they doing here on an ivory campus doing some
kind of academic or educational travesty like that?
And I thought these guys need help they need to be updated
they need to be you know brought in the 20th century
(40:11):
so uh one of the alumni principal alumni who actually had founded the group
he was in his late 70s at that point I mean he was president class of 13 I mean
Woodrow Wilson was running the university when he was there so I I cornered
him that he cornered him but I I said said, I just want to talk to you.
And he wound up sharing in literally 45 seconds a capsule summary of the gospel
(40:36):
as we were standing at the end of a lecture.
And I thought, I've got to deliver my Darwin lecture to him.
He's the source of the problem.
So we went to his home, and we talked for two and a half hours.
We came in with Isaiah 53, which I'd never heard of.
Christ died for our sins and dealt with the sin problem, and we need to receive him.
We have eternal life if we turn and receive him and confess that we're sinners.
(41:01):
And I'm thinking, you know, fossils and natural selection and mutations.
And so we're arguing on two levels.
And the next day I came back for more. I thought I can try to just,
you know, complete the job. I want to just convince him to be an evolutionist.
And he went on to, you know, sharing more of the gospel. I just kind of got out of there.
I prayed a prayer, but I didn't mean it. He thought I was a new believer.
(41:24):
I told him when I came back after Christmas, I didn't want to see him anymore.
I just couldn't go my own path.
But the angst, the existential, like, you know, anxiety, what happens when you die?
I had no answers. So I reached out to a younger guy. He was 25 years old.
He also had become a Christian at Princeton University.
So he started coming to my room, and his name was Bill Fay.
(41:46):
And Bill shared simply his heart, his life, the Book of Romans, the person of Jesus.
And at his apartment, the end of that year, our final study of the semester,
I opened my heart to Christ and received the gift of eternal life.
Everything was coming together.
But I told God, going down the street back to the campus, I pray I won't have
(42:07):
to get involved with this Princeton group.
Donald Blanchard, creationist. Lord, you know I'm an illusionist.
That was my first prayer after receiving the Lord. I can imagine God's permission
denied. And I, uh, so how, so how then did you get into that?
So it's interesting, right? It wasn't that evolution was dismantled.
(42:30):
And then you became a Christian. It was you became a Christian and then had
to reconcile this. So how did you work that out?
So I was a genuine Christian.
I mean, I actually received Christ. I embraced him by faith.
But I just assumed the science was all, you know, the science was good.
And it was that moment when I realized, you know, that's not the big deal.
(42:54):
So don't stop fellowshipping with these people. And literally two days later,
I found myself on a Bible study setting with them.
I let the whole thing kind of fade to the background.
And then it wasn't until that summer I actually got a job on the campus,
and I went to a local evangelical church.
And it was at that church, standing in the back, looking at some literature
(43:16):
about a fossil conference, that a guy whose name I don't know presented to me
in five minutes the case for creation from the fossil record.
And I flipped, standing at the back of a local church for a five-minute presentation
because he knew what he was talking about and I had never heard about the utter
absence of transitional forms.
(43:36):
And, of course, the reason is it's not in the books. They're sequestering information
that is devastating to the Darwinian eye. Obviously, you don't hear it in the schools.
I wonder why not, because they want to protect the theory and they don't want it questioned.
And so literally, so for two months, maybe three at the most,
(43:56):
I was a genuine believer,
a theistic evolutionist, until someone probably, you know, just kind of happenstance
just sharing at the back of that church, looking at some literature. That's when I flipped.
And I didn't really know why, because every bit of evidence to me supports creation
or intelligent design, if you want to use that term.
(44:18):
That's a wonderful story. And I think it gives some hope and vision for many
moving forward and how they are to appropriately engage important questions
and scientific questions.
And far too often, it seems to me, I see in the church, science just dividing us.
(44:39):
And you find people that believe the earth is really old. There are some that
believe the earth is really young, and they fight vehemently one another,
and it causes division and separation.
Whereas even in your story, you see the hope of coming to know the Lord,
knowing that the manner in which the universe was created is important,
(45:00):
but it's not something to sever fellowship over.
And in a spirit of grace and humility to pursue honest answers to these good questions.
I think your story is an example of how the church ought to treat one another
as we're pursuing answers to the biggest questions that there are.
(45:21):
Yes, and the intelligent design movement is a very big movement. It's a big tent.
The majority, I would say, are probably conservative Christians,
mere Christians, if I can use C.S. Lewis's term.
There are some Islamic or Muslim, you know, intelligent design theorists.
There are some searching open-minded agnostics and other faiths.
(45:44):
But to me, once you see the evidence for design, if you're coming at it like
design and now who's the designer, then the universe, as it were,
of biblical evidence comes into play.
And that's where, again, we see this tsunami of biblical and historical evidence.
So, if I could, could I just close by reading a short quote from the book by
(46:08):
David Frost, The Blind Evolution?
Yeah, yeah. It's pretty startling. It's pretty amazing.
And he basically says at the end of chapter five also, but I'm just going to read what he says.
He says, I conclude with a startling assertion that alone among the world religions,
(46:29):
Christianity believes that its unseen God offered himself for scientific scrutiny
in the person of Jesus Christ.
Isn't that amazing? God offered himself for scientific scrutiny in the person of Jesus Christ.
And he says, so doing, God united our modes of perception, allowing each to
(46:55):
balance and correct the other.
So when David Frost, this notable intellectual, taught at Oxford, Cambridge,
and many universities in Australia, When he writes in his book,
Blind Evolution, that the unseen God offered himself for scientific,
that is empirical, that is using your five senses inspection.
(47:16):
I just say, wow. In other words, the evidence for design is a very,
very thick towering tsunami.
And the evidence for Christ is that second tsunami that invites all the world
to experience the fullness of life.
That which is a true and beautiful
(47:37):
and good thank you that's why
I love that's why I love Christianity it is
a come-and-see religion it is not a shut-up-and-believe religion it invites
the honest seeker to inquire to ask questions and as we read in the New Testament
from and we see from Jesus how he treated people that had questions.
(48:02):
He embraced them. I'll just mention that Kurt Bladman, a Princeton graduate
friend of mine, a little bit younger than I am, he now has been writing a Bible.
It's called BibleApologetics.org.
Kurt Bladman has actually presented every day for the last four years evidences
that link the real world with the world of Jesus' belief.
(48:25):
And it's fantastic. So a little shout out to a guy who actually struggled with
faith, a Jewish atheist at the time, a graduate of Princeton,
and then he found there was evidence, limited evidence, and now he's sharing
it with the whole world on BibleOlogetics.org.
Very good. Well, Tom, it's a pleasure to see you as always and talk,
and really appreciate your work and your friendship and for all that you've
(48:49):
done to shine light on what is true and the abundant life found therein.
And I hope you have a great day and until next time.
Thank you for pursuing the true Jesus.
Music.
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