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Join Bob Enyart and Fred Williams in this intriguing episode of Real Science Radio as they delve into the evidence supporting the reality of the global flood described in the Bible. Amidst common skepticism, our hosts present compelling arguments and authenticated scientific findings that challenge mainstream thoughts on the global flood. From sedimentary layers spread across continents to the fossil records' hidden testimonies, this episode is packed with enlightening details that reinforce the Biblical accounts of history. As they navigate through evidence tailored for both materialists and Christians, Bob and Fred discuss the presence of marine fossils on mountain tops and the implications of dinosaur soft tissue findings. Their engaging dialogue makes a case for interpretation of ancient narratives with modern scientific discoveries. Whether you're a skeptic or believer, prepare to reconsider your perspective on historical floods and what they entail for our understanding of ancient earth events. Furthermore, the episode explores the anthropological insights drawn from numerous cultures worldwide, each recounting its version of a catastrophic flood akin to that of Noah's Ark. Together, these pieces of evidence unravel a narrative written into the fabric of geological and cultural history, offering a fresh lens through which to view ancient and sacred texts.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob and Your Life. Today, we are going back to an episode of Real Science Radio, and this is evidence for the global flood, the global flood that wasn't just some allegorical tale. That was true history, the history of the Bible, the history of reality. The Bible, the Genesis, it is a literal telling of history. It is not just allegorical. We can trust the Word of God. And here is scientific evidence for the global flood in the Word of God.
SPEAKER 02 :
Scholars can't explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune into Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 02 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 03 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I'm Bob Enyart. And I'm Fred Williams, creation speaker and software engineer. Well, this is RSR's list of evidence for the global flood.
SPEAKER 04 :
But wait, Bob. There is no evidence for a global flood. There is no evidence. I mean, if I could count the number of times. If I was given a dollar for every time I heard that through my life.
SPEAKER 03 :
There's no evidence for a global flood. Speaking on creation. It's so funny. Mars, NASA says maybe Mars had a global flood. or hemisphere, it's bone dry up there. I mean, there's some water, but it's like a desert. Yeah, it's amazing how they can find a global flood there, but not on Earth. Earth is covered like 70% of average of two miles deep in water, and no, it's impossible for there to be a global flood on Earth. So, Fred, this will be so fun, and this show is a long time coming. We should have done this years ago. Could you believe we have never done a show...
SPEAKER 04 :
A list of the evidence for the global flood. Of all our list shows, that is amazing. And this is a really long and it's a really fun list. So you'll find that we've divided this show into two sections. Evidence for materialists and evidence for Christians. And the reason is because the folks in each of these camps, they tend to want to consider different kinds of evidence.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that's true. The New Testament... says that faith is the evidence of things not seen. That's such a cool teaching. It is really cool.
SPEAKER 04 :
So many people think faith is blind, and it's not. The Bible defines faith as evidence.
SPEAKER 03 :
And so later, as we get to the second half of the list, Fred, you said the evidence for Christians, then let's talk a bit about the use of of evidence for God's existence, right? There's the whole presuppositional versus evidentialist debate. So let's talk about that as compared to presupposing God's existence. But this, of course, is not theism. This is evidence for the global flood. And they say there's no evidence that So we're going to have a fun list of no evidence. That's right. A field day. So to begin with our evidence for the materialist, Fred, across the world, when you look at the continents, there is an average of a mile deep of sedimentary layers on the continents. Sedimentary layers. These are rock layers where the sediments, they were laid down by water. Laid down by water and they're a mile thick everywhere. All over the earth. So you have hundreds of different layers. They add up to an average of a mile on the continents all over the earth. And many of those sedimentary layers are regional in extent. It's all over the continents. Yeah. Have you heard of the Grand Canyon? Yeah. Have you been there? A dozen times. Oh, wow. Rafting, camping, researching. Fred, we have June is Grand Canyon Month at Real Science Radio coming up in just a couple weeks. It's going to be the greatest month. Oh, that's awesome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. But yeah, the Grand Canyon has millions of years of layers.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that's right. Right? So those layers are a huge extent. They go through a major region. of the continental U.S. So that's our first piece of evidence for a global flood, that there's an average of a mile deep of sedimentary layers on the continents, and they're massive. Some of them are 500 feet or thicker in thickness. Many of them have great purity. And their boundaries are often flat. Maybe we'll talk about that later. Yep, flat gaps. And they're regional in extent. So all over the world, mile deep, sedimentary layers. That's exhibit number one entered into evidence for the prosecution.
SPEAKER 04 :
That's right. And this next one is a famous statement coined by none other than Ken Ham of billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water in strata all over the earth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, the fossil record. And when he says billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water, yeah, that's right, billions. And then, of course, there's the microorganisms. Yeah, there are billions of fossils. And the way fossils form, it's not just an organism keels over dead and then turns into rock. No, typically it's something that happens naturally. very fast, and there's often fossil graveyards where there's thousands or millions of dead organisms all broken up and jumbled up all together.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and not only that, many of them are buried alive. We have evidence for that that we can talk about later.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, so many. It's so typical. You've got fish that were fossilized in the process of eating other fish. Yep. And fish fossilized in the process of giving birth. Now, that's rough. That is. That's a tough one. Yep. Right? So, yeah, the fossil record is evidence of catastrophism. And of rapidity. Something happened very quickly to billions of organisms to turn them into stone. Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Clams are in the closed position often. And, you know, those things in my fish tank, they're alive when they're closed. If they're open, that's not good because that means they're dead and other fish have eaten them.
SPEAKER 03 :
So when they die, the clams open. They do. Yeah. And there's got to be billions of clams in the fossil record, just clams. Oh, yeah. And the Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado out to the west of our studios here in the foothills of the Rockies, we call that Clam National Monument because there are way more clams than there are dinosaurs. So, yeah, you've got a mixture of marine and land organisms in fossil graveyards and where you find fossils all over the earth. Yep. You can find them at Home Depot in the gravel. Wow. And then our third piece of evidence. A documented extinction, they call it the Permian extinction, an extinction event that that destroyed 90% of all the species that lived in the oceans.
SPEAKER 1 :
90%?
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, they say the extinction event lasted a long period of time, but they say it was a single event. They say everything lasted a long period of time.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, long ages is their rescue device, their hero, the hero of the plot, as they call it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, it's their knee-jerk reaction. Like, how long does it take for opals to form? Oh, 100,000 years, maybe a million years. Then they actually find out how they formed. Oh, we were wrong. It takes about six or seven weeks. It takes a couple months, and you've got opals, a never-ending supply because they're made by microorganisms with wet sand on a couple beaches in Australia. So you go from a million years to six or seven weeks. Wow. And that's because of their knee-jerk reaction. Everything is millions of years. But the point here is that the Permian extinction is recognized by scientists around the world as an event that occurred in the oceans that destroyed 90% of all the species in existence. And so if there's a global flood, With all that turmoil of their ecosystem, all the upheaval, it's not surprising that 90% of all marine species have gone extinct in a single event.
SPEAKER 04 :
They have. They're documented extinction. They call it Permian extinction.
SPEAKER 03 :
We call it the history of the global flood as documented in the Bible. Right. In Genesis, God's word, it's the global flood in the days of Noah. Yep. When he built the ark, as Jesus said, as Peter said, the Apostle Peter, as is affirmed in the New Testament. Yep.
SPEAKER 04 :
This next one. Do you know that there's sufficient water in our two mile deep oceans to cover the entire earth? Whoa. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
People say, where's the water for the global flood? Well, those who say there's not enough water on Earth, it is funny. In fact, we'll link to NASA and their Noacon Epoch, where they say on Mars, Mars was once flooded. And they say it's a hemisphere flood. Like hemisphere, like maybe half the planet, maybe more, was flooded. And it is bone dry. It's a desert up there. I mean, they found water on Mars a thousand times. Yeah. It's not the kind of water that you go jet ski in. Exactly. Right. So NASA, and that means pretty much all the secular scientists, they're like sheeple. They believe that there could have been a global or a near global flood on Mars that but there's not enough water on earth for a global flood. So the global flood model is that in the pre-flood world, the mountains were not as high as the mountains are today because the Bible says that the mountains rose up and the valley sunk down. In a day, this happened as a result of the global flood. So when the mountains were more modest in the initial creation, when everything was perfect... then there's plenty of water on the surface of the earth today to flood the pre-flood mountains.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, if you took the mountains and collapsed everything, the water would cover the whole earth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, exactly. And you could still have relatively high mountains, just not like today.
SPEAKER 04 :
That's right. And I think all you could do is jet ski. You certainly couldn't play a lot of football, you know, a lot of land sports. Wait a minute. Oh, during the flood? No, if you shrunk all the mountains and just flattened the earth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah. Well, then water would cover everything. It would. Right. If you leveled out the surface of the earth, yeah, then it would all be covered by water. Exactly. So, Fred, our fifth piece of evidence, all major mountain ranges have marine fossils on their summits. Now, there are major mountains all over the world, and they have clams up on the tops of the mountains.
SPEAKER 04 :
Buried alive, by the way.
SPEAKER 03 :
Buried alive. And not buried on volcanoes, obviously. Oh, yeah. We're not talking about volcanic mountain ranges, obviously. Yeah. We're talking about where the earth compressed and the mountains were raised up. And so, in fact, there's a documentary showing just like this month called Everest. And they point out that on the very summit of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, Now, not if you go from the center of the earth. If you go from sea level. Yeah, from sea level. If you go from the center of the earth, what is it? It's in South America because of how the earth bulges near the equator. Maybe it's in Columbia. But from sea level, the tallest mountain on earth, Mount Everest, has in this documentary. It's so fun. They're like, here's these marine fossils on the very summit, on the very top of Mount Everest.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think this is a good time, Bob, to remind our audience that there is no evidence for a global flood. There's no evidence. So we find fossils close... Buried alive on all the major mountain ranges, excluding volcanoes, on Mount Everest, on Mount Longs Peak, Hikes Peak, you name it. We find fossils, marine fossils that are buried on these mountains, and yet there's no evidence for a global flood.
SPEAKER 03 :
No evidence for a global flood. The average mile-deep sedimentary layers on the continents, no evidence for a global flood. Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the Earth, no evidence for a global flood. 90% of all the species in the oceans going extinct in a single event, no evidence for a global flood. Two mile-deep oceans that could cover the Earth, no evidence for a global flood. All the major mountain ranges have marine fossils on their summits. No evidence for a global flood.
SPEAKER 04 :
And number six, no evidence for a global flood is dinosaur soft tissue. I think we've talked about that one before.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah. That's so much fun, right? That when they break open dinosaur bones and so many other species, kinds of animals, they Dozens of different kinds of creatures. They're finding soft tissue that still exists. It's still, for example, with the T-Rex, they have T-Rex blood cells. Yeah, it's not fully fossilized. Right. Tyrannosaurus Rex blood vessels they have. Original material. A dozen different proteins from a dozen kinds of dinosaurs and countless other organisms that They find it in skin. They find it in feathers. They find it in embryos, fossil embryos. And we have documented all this, rsr.org slash dinosaur. And when you go there, the very first link goes to a Google spreadsheet, a Google Docs spreadsheet. Fred, we're up to now about 100, 100. Wow. Wow. 1.8 billion years old, it's like, come on. Yeah. Cut us a break. Yep. These soft tissue fossils, original biomaterial fossils, they're not millions of years old. They're more equivalent to the soft tissue that's still in mummies. If you take Egyptian mummies, break open their bones, you'll find little bits of DNA. You'll find proteins, little bits here and there. It's not all decomposed. Well, dinosaur bones and all the rest of the fossils, it's very similar to the amount of decomposition you get from Egyptian mummies. I mean, this soft tissue is all documented in the world's leading science journals. That's right. And the ones who deny it are disappearing. Almost no one any longer denies dinosaur soft tissue.
SPEAKER 04 :
It's like when Mary Schweitzer asked this one guy, well, what would convince you, you know, when all this stuff first came out? And he said nothing. No matter what, his mind was made up. Dinosaurs are millions of years old. There's no way this is original biological material. Nothing will convince him. Exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER 03 :
So, anyway, that's our sixth piece of evidence. And, you know, you mentioned DNA. Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, I know one thing that's kind of becoming a fossil in itself is Rational Wiki. It should be called Irrational Wiki. Yeah. I guarantee you they still... The eight-piece website. Yeah. They still say that there's no DNA been found in dinosaur bones. And if there was, it would be evidence for...
SPEAKER 03 :
A young Earth. And now we have DNA from a hadrosaur and a T-Rex. So they provided a test. Great. A scientific test.
SPEAKER 04 :
We could falsify or confirm the theory.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, we have that link to Rational Wiki, whatever the atheist website. On our website, rsr.org slash STDs. Oh, yeah. STDS. Because soft tissue deniers, and they're science deniers, right? Yeah. Soft tissue deniers. Okay. Next piece of evidence. anthropological cataloging of hundreds of cultures. Fred, I used to say 100 cultures. It's now hundreds of cultures with an ancient corporate recollection of a flood that
SPEAKER 04 :
And their accounts have so many similarities. It really is truly amazing. I mean, I really like the Chinese account. Their varied language, the characters in their language, because their language is, you know, those pictograms. Oh, yeah. And you break them apart, and then you get the meanings of words.
SPEAKER 03 :
So they have one pictograph, which is... The number eight and mouth. Eight mouths to feed. And that's their symbol for a vessel, for a ship. Eight mouths to feed. Because on Noah's Ark, there were eight people. So the pictograph in the ancient Chinese pictographs for a ship is the number eight, the symbol for mouth, eight mouths to feed, and a vessel. It could be a vessel like a bowl or something. So eight mouths to feed in a vessel, that's how they wrote ship, boat. Yeah. And that comes right out of Genesis.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, yeah. It was so interesting about that is I presented that evidence once to a class at church when I was going through some creation stuff. And a lady there who had been to China, she's not from China, she's American, but spent like 10 years there, definitely an older. There was definitely skeptical of some of the things I was saying. She immediately said, oh, that's not the number eight. I know Chinese very well.
SPEAKER 03 :
The Chinese symbol. Yes. She said, that's not the number eight.
SPEAKER 04 :
I'm fluent in Chinese. And I'm like, okay. I was like, I'll look into this. Yeah. You know, I feel like my source is reliable, but definitely I'll look into this and I'll get back to you. Well, at that time, I just started working at Trimble. And my manager was a PhD scientist from China. Yeah, that's awesome. This lady named Kuang Yi Chin. And I asked her, I said, Kuang Yi, you know, I have this issue. I just want to ask you about the number eight. And I showed her the symbol. And she goes – and I told her, you know, this lady said that that's not the number eight. And she goes, well, no, it's not. And I'm like, oh. You know, I'm kind of like, oh. It's scary. But she goes, but it used to be. Oh, right, right. It used to be. It was the ancient version of the number eight. Just like how our language deteriorates over time or changes over time.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 04 :
It's like the King James. There's so much you can't read out of there because, you know, our languages, you know, change.
SPEAKER 03 :
Exactly. In language – is the greatest monument to a culture. The fact that there's a book called Discovery in Genesis, and there's been a lot of research since that book was published, but so many of the significant words in ancient Chinese came from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, right up to the dispersion at Babel.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it's truly amazing.
SPEAKER 03 :
So Fred, of these hundreds of cultures with an ancient corporate recollection of the flood, they have so many similar details. Like there was a flood that would be so bad that it would kill all the animals and you had to have a vessel that saved some people and some of the animals. Some of the accounts like the ancient Babylonians, the guy who was their Noah released a bird And waited for the bird to come back to see if they could get out of the boat. And the similarities all over the world are stunning. There's a worldwide recollection of a global flood that has been documented not by creationists. but by secular anthropologists in their own texts. That's right.
SPEAKER 04 :
And what's so cool about the biblical account, it's the only one of all of these accounts that when it describes Noah's Ark, it's scientifically accurate. It actually is a boat that can float. In fact, it's built for stability. Shipmakers will tell you that. The dimensions for the ark are perfect for stability. Whereas I think the Babylonian account, it's a cube-shaped
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. I mean, you were very unstable. The animals inside a wave comes. Everybody's going 90 degrees over.
SPEAKER 04 :
You better have lots of motion sickness.
SPEAKER 03 :
They're going to start rolling. Yeah. You're on your head, on your feet, on your head, on your feet. So, right. The Bible's account is the most matter of fact account of all these accounts. And it's scientifically plausible. So now we're up to our eighth piece of evidence for the global flood.
SPEAKER 04 :
And that is the extent of stratigraphic layers of regional and continental scope.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, and I mentioned this earlier, Fred, but you've got layers, strata, that will go for thousands of square miles. And so if the old earther, the uniformitarian, wants to say that this was the result of a local flood... So you have at the Grand Canyon, the red wall limestone covers thousands of square miles. It's 500 to 800 feet thick. And it's part of an unbroken series of all these other strata with no erosion between the strata. And it goes for thousands of square miles.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it's amazing.
SPEAKER 03 :
What kind of a local flood is this that has regional and continental-wide stratigraphic layers? That's some local flood.
SPEAKER 04 :
Lots of huge local floods.
SPEAKER 03 :
It just doesn't work. It's a global flood. And so our next piece of evidence, and it's related, and here we focus on the flat gaps. And we could talk about as it's exposed in the Grand Canyon, but this is true in sedimentary strata layers. Characteristically, in places all over the earth, they show no evidence of what should be millions of years of relentless erosion. But instead, the boundaries are flat gaps. They're flat gaps.
SPEAKER 04 :
And we've talked before about how water is the universal solvent.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. Right. And we've talked about cavitation. Oh, brother, all the things that water can do, right, to rocks. And, in fact, what I'd like to embed in this show summary, Fred, is a photo of the Grand Canyon with an arrow pointing down. to one of the layers. You know, you could throw a dart at any of the layers, and the boundaries are flat for as far as the eye can see. But one of them in particular, the USGS, the National Park Service, indeed pretty much all old earth geologists, they say right at that boundary, perfectly flat, like a laminated piece of wood, or like a layer cake, right at that boundary... There's 100 million years missing. Now, it looks just like all the other boundaries, flat gap, no evidence of erosion, no evidence of deposition, flat. But they look at the fossils that are below that boundary and the fossils above it, and they say, well, we know that there was 100 million years of evolution, but there's no evidence for it here. So they say the entire Ordovician and Silurian periods are just missing. With what? With no erosion? Yeah. Come on.
SPEAKER 04 :
Erosion is relentless. I like what Dr. Ariel Roth said on this. Now, he's like so many scientists, you know, they were brainwashed into believing evolution. He's got a PhD from Michigan in biology. Well, he's a creationist now. And this is what he said about these flat gaps that you find all over the place and really fascinating. cool in the Grand Canyon. You have a great picture of him there. He said this, in fact, according to average erosion rates, many or all of the layers should be gone. Since they are there and flat, this indicates that the millions of years postulated for these gaps never occurred. These flat gaps are so common that they pretty much challenge the validity of the whole geologic time scale.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, just the fact that they're flat gaps means Now, geologists, they might rarely call them flat gaps, but what they call them is paraconformities. They're paraconformities. You could look it up on the internet, look it on Wikipedia. Don't trust Wikipedia, but you could look on Wikipedia if it's sourced correctly. But these are parallel strata with no erosion. There's no evidence of erosion. Fred, if you travel... We have gone studying the Bible to Europe. We've gone to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel. And you'll find cities that today are desolate, including in Egypt. We did our evidence for the Exodus. Cities that are gone in one major reason is because of the change of the terrain. Erosion has decimated cultures. And we're talking about in 1,000 or 2,000 years. Imagine a million years of erosion.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Then 100 million leaving no trace.
SPEAKER 04 :
And just everywhere where we see how solvent water is, how powerful water is, how it can cut through rock like – knife through butter and that depends on the circumstances but it certainly erodes rock well here i had to there's a quote from nature magazine about this cavitation that collapsed bubble temps can rise as high as 27 000 fahrenheit which is as hot as the surface of a bright star that's the power of water people don't realize that right and that's when there's
SPEAKER 03 :
For example, if there's a natural dam that breaches and there's a flood and you get cavitation, those tiny, almost microscopic bubbles that burst.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
With all of them going. Right. And because of their surface area and. Yeah, the physics of erosion with water, water destroys things. It doesn't leave layers of soft rock because these sedimentary layers are mostly soft rock, perfectly undisturbed for millions of years.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I liked your analogy of layered cake. I mean, that's what these sedimentary layers are like.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. It's really pretty. Yeah, and I'll put an image in also of laminated wood. That's what the Grand Canyon looks like. It looks like flat, laminated layers. When I stand on the South Rim or the North Rim, and I love to talk to tourists. I get addicted to it. I talk to the guides, the rangers. I talk to the park employees. And I'll ask them, look across the Grand Canyon. You're looking 10, 20 miles away. Look at that wall one mile deep. Look at all the flat boundaries between them. For as far as the eye could see, why is there no erosion? Why are they not all irregular? And their eyes get real wide. And they say, why? As soon as you bring it up, it's obvious it should all be irregular. So these layers at the Grand Canyon were laid down rapidly. Now, Fred, a tangent on this, maybe we should make this like our 10th piece of evidence. In that red wall limestone at the Grand Canyon, I did my own calculation to see how quickly an inch of that stuff would form because they don't like to talk about that. They'll tell you the age of the layer below the red wall and the age of the layer right above the red wall. Well, when you take that, subtract one from the other, you get that it took like 38 million years for the red wall limestone to be deposited.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you want to catch the rest of this broadcast, you can find it online by going to RSR, that stands for Real Science Radio, rsr.org slash flood. Again, that's rsr.org slash flood to get the rest of this broadcast. Hey, may God bless you guys.
In this engaging installment of Theology Thursday, Pastor Bob Enyart challenges listeners to discern the pervasive clichés that have crept into Christian teaching. The conversation shifts toward understanding the rightful place of judgment and forgiveness in our lives as believers. With a focus on cultivating meaningful relationships and spiritual growth, this episode encourages you to reflect on the key teachings of Christianity and how they apply to our contemporary church environment.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I'm Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
SPEAKER 01 :
Please turn to the epistle to the Hebrews chapter 5 verse 12. Now as we go on assuming we get into the next chapter before the end of this lesson will introduce the subject of eternal security it's called the endurance, perseverance of the saints, whether or not you could lose your salvation. That, of course, is a topic that interests many Christians. It's very controversial. At Denver Bible Church, we teach that under the law, you had to endure to the end to be saved, but under grace, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. So that there are many Bible verses that teach both. Some people think, well, the Bible would only teach one. Well, there are two covenants for God's two covenant peoples, and God teaches different things for his different covenant peoples. So we think that that's the reason why so many people have their proof texts showing, say, you can lose your salvation, and then their problem texts, the ones that seem to say you can't, and then they have to fight one set or the other. We think both sets are true. that'll come up in a little bit now I'd like to reread the last few verses were were up to Hebrews 512 but to give us the context speaking of Jesus in verse 9 having been perfected and we saw last week that Plato was horribly wrong when he claimed, without any kind of defense, he just asserted that anything perfect cannot change, and one of the many examples you can give to refute that is the baby Jesus, the holy child. As with any baby, Jesus changed enormously, certainly his physical body, and he was perfect. Adam and Eve were perfect. The Garden of Eden was perfect, yet they changed tremendously. So, having been perfected, he, Jesus, became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. called by God as high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. And notice that to all who obey him. We'll get into that idea as we get into chapter 6 with the question of eternal security. Is it possible to lose your salvation? What if someone puts their trust in Christ, becomes identified with him as a member of the body of Christ, and then stops obeying him? What happens then? verse 11, of whom, speaking of Melchizedek, of whom we have much to say, and we'll get to that in chapter 7, and hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. So this is where we left off last week, and that's quite an insult, right? You wouldn't want that said of you. I wouldn't want it said of me, but easily it could be said of us. It's so common that that human beings become dull of hearing. Now, what might be a symptom of someone who has become dull of hearing? How do you know? How do you know if you or I, if we are dull of hearing? Well, one symptom would be if you notice yourself or someone else putting one ear towards something, sort of half paying attention, half and then concluding that, well, that's too confusing, or criticizing the speaker instead of my own inattention. Oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's too confusing. It's whatever. That's an example or a symptom of being dull of hearing. It's like, please, don't bore me any further. But what's being presented might be important, true, even fascinating but it could come across as boring if somebody's not investing themselves in trying to understand what's being said but now what if something really is boring or false or unimportant and somebody's going on and on and on about something that's not important well of course that happens and so then when listeners tune out it's the fault of the speaker of course when his or her message is boring or unimportant, and it's also good that the listeners tune out if the material is false. If it's just downright false, you tune in to the radio, or you pop in a teaching tape or a podcast, and you're listening, and you could discern that what's being said is not true, well, then it might... dull your hearing very quickly, and that'd be the fault of the speaker. So as with all conflicts, there are two sides to the matter. In this case, though, here in Hebrews, it is the hearers that are being reprimanded, appropriately so, we know, because this is part of God's Word, and God's Word is inspired, so they're at fault. I think in the days that we live in, when we could be intensely entertained at any moment. Isn't that true? At any moment, merely by pushing a button on a remote control or sliding in a DVD or turning on a podcast, entertainment easily could hit us like in a maximum way because it's all recorded and because of technology. And so it's easy to get addicted to things that produce adrenaline, whereas a Bible study probably doesn't produce as much adrenaline as, say, a Tolkien story made for a major motion picture. There's a huge difference. And you could entertain yourself with the one and so end up being lax on the other. So... we need to pray and ask god for the strength to focus on what is important and especially on what is important to him and then also to have healthy relationships with family and friends lord god help me to focus on what is important to those i love because if i'm only interested in what's important to me then i'm not going to have good relationships And I won't have a good relationship with God if I'm only interested in what's important to me. So March for Life is coming up. Somebody's going to pray for good weather. There's bad weather. Then they're upset. Their prayer didn't work. Why did God let it rain on our event? And so they're focusing on what's important to them and not to others. That is especially to God. Regarding being dull of hearing, sometimes the Apostle Paul, we can tell from reading the New Testament and others in the Bible, undoubtedly even the Lord, Paul would give Bible studies that lasted for hours. Remember in Acts, there was a guy named Eutychus. And he was listening in an upper window. The home was full. And Paul was going on and on. He's getting ready to leave the next day. So he doesn't want to leave any moment to waste. So he's going to keep teaching as much as he can. So it's midnight now. The guy falls asleep, falls out of the window, down, and to his death, gets killed. So, as we've often said, if there are no casualties, it's not a Bible study. That story is in Acts chapter 20. And you read it, and you see Paul speaks to midnight. Here's this crisis. Paul then, with God empowering him, restores this man to life. And then he continues talking until daybreak. So... we need to focus focus on the text focus on what's important focus on the strategy focus on our relationships so that we can apply the mind that God has given us to make wise decisions and take proper actions so verse 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers. Now, who ought to be teachers? Only a few people? No, those who are reading this, if they've been believers for a while, then they ought to be teachers. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God. And you have come to need milk and not solid food. So everyone should become a teacher eventually. The purpose of being nurtured spiritually, intellectually, is not just to fill up, but then to share what we've learned with other people. Friday night, some of us went to Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, and Peter here was there, and he brought his friends, telling them about what's important, so that we receive not only from God for our own edification, but then we can impart to others what we've learned. And one of the things, we heard a creationist expert on astronomy speak about planets, and And it was to the glory of God. It was very exciting. And so it's so important not to view our own edification as an end in and of itself. But I learn so that I can share with others the truth about the Lord. So because those reading this, the book of Hebrews, because they have not learned They need to start over again with the basics. But that's sad for these people because they should be mature by now. And they have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone, verse 13, for everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. So there is something beautiful about coming back to the foot of the cross. We become Christians at that moment when we realize that Jesus Christ is real. He died on the cross. He loves us. He was raised from the dead so we could have eternal life if only we trust in him. And then we could get busy with our lives and even with Christian ministry and lose that first love. So there is a real fundamental way in which returning to the basics is so important when it involves our relationship. Return to your first love, as Jesus said in the book of Revelation to some believers who had left their first love. So return to your first love. But when it comes to matters of theology, doctrine, the scriptures, it's sad if we've gone five years, 10, 20, 30, and really don't know much. Then that's unfortunate. Is everyone called to be a theologian? No, definitely not. And there are people who are theologians, they study Greek and Hebrew, they study theology, and a theologian might be a man or a woman, but either way, they might be married to a spouse who's busy providing, earning a living, or taking care of the kids, or taking care of the house. And so the spouse is not going to be able to take the time to become proficient at the various intricacies of doctrine when that's not their profession. And so in a body that As with the body of Christ, there are many members. The members have different gifts. But it doesn't mean, therefore, that, well, I don't need to know about the Bible because I'm not called to be a theologian. That would be an overreaction in a bad direction. And so some of us easily get all head knowledge, and our Christian life is not experiential, it's only head knowledge. Others have intense experiential Christian living, but not the knowledge of the Word of God. So both are errors. And we ask God to help us to be whole and well-rounded, to live the Christian life, to experience it, that our emotions themselves might be honoring to God. I'm not self-indulgent. I don't get carried away. But I honor God in the way I have empathy for other people, in the way I've learned to love Him, the way I love my kids and my family, my friends. So I serve God with my emotions also, not only my actions, not only my mind, but as a whole person. And so we need to be able to become spiritually mature, including and understanding God's word, regardless of what part of the body of Christ we're in or that we make up. But that doesn't mean that one person will be as proficient as another. Of course not. Now, This here was a sad state of affairs, that these believers were so immature that the analogy is made to an infant who cannot eat solid food, but they can only drink milk, that's it. So then today, if they were that bad then, I think you can make a case that we're worse off today. that today forget milk the body of Christ is lactose intolerant they can't handle the milk and I'll give some examples we could think of Christian cliches which are only popular because we are lactose intolerant as a body we cannot handle even the simple truths as a result While the Bible is set aside, there are cliches that are paramount, that no one dare challenge any of the cliches. And they are, don't judge anyone ever at any time for any reason. Even though Jesus said, don't judge you hypocrite, first stop committing the same sin, then you can judge your neighbor. Then you can judge your brother. But we stop where Hillary Clinton stops. Don't judge. That's it. As though we're an absolute. So that's an example of being lactose intolerant. There's an entire book in the Bible called Judges. What are the judges? The evil people? No. They're the good people. Jesus commanded us to judge with righteous judgment. Paul says we are going to judge on Judgment Day. We'll judge the angels, the fallen angels. We will judge the world. Christ commits judgment into the hands of the saints. And he says, if we're going to judge angels in the world, shouldn't we be able to judge even the least matters? I'm embarrassed about you guys, he writes to the Corinthians, because you're not judging. Start judging. We have the mind of Christ. He who is spiritual judges all things. So that's the other side of the coin. And that's the side that's ignored because the body has become lactose intolerant. If you think you can't judge people selling drugs to kids on a playground, well then you're pretty much setting yourself up to be thwarted in any kind of spiritual or emotional growth. You're not gonna be able to grow if you think you can't judge. And it set yourself up for being a hypocrite because in my perspective, the most judgmental Christians are the ones who say they can't judge. Intensely judgmental. Not against homosexuals or child killers, but against those who would rebuke homosexuals and child killers and atheists and so on. Another of the clichés is to forgive everyone. That forgiveness is an absolute. And if that were true, that means that repentance is superfluous. It's not necessary. And if we forgive everyone, we're teaching the world that God will forgive everyone without repentance. Whereas Jesus said, if someone sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, Luke 17.3. If he repents. So we could throw that out too, because that doesn't fit in with the cliche that the body of Christ has accepted, because we've set aside the Bible for these easy, super-spiritual rules that which contradict the scriptures, but they make us feel good. Sort of makes us feel self-righteous. Takes me out of the battle. Hey, I can't judge anybody. Besides, I forgive them anyway. Well, what do you forgive them for? You can only forgive someone that you've judged to be wrong. So the cliches tend to contradict themselves. Does that make sense? How can you forgive someone if you don't think they're wrong? And how could you think they're wrong if you can't judge them? So judge not and forgive everyone is a contradict, where truth doesn't contradict. Truth is non-contradictory. All sins are equal. That's a cliche. Makes it easy, right? If somebody is apathetic about killing unborn children, and then, hey, that's the same as stealing a Tic-Tac. And so what's the difference, really? And I hear that kind of thing on Christian radio. So all sins are equal. That's what the Bible says, right? The Bible says, all sins are equal, thus saith the Lord. No. Jesus said some people have the greater sin. In fact, that guy there, he has a lesser sin than these guys, because to whom much is given, they're more accountable. And so you have a whole... a whole chunk of the teaching of the Bible that shows that some sins are far more grievous to God than other sins. That's why there's a judgment day. Judgment day is not to determine who's going to go to heaven, who's going to go to hell. That's determined when somebody dies. And when they die, then they're separated. Those who go to hell, they die and they go to Sheol, to Hades. The believer dies and he goes to be with the Lord. So Judgment Day is not to decide your eternal residence, but Judgment Day, Jesus said, some will be punished intensely, others will be punished less so, and it will depend on many factors. So if you sin and you're not forgiven by Christ, you'll suffer for that sin. But what if you teach others to commit the same sin you did? Then you'll suffer worse. And these are all fundamental principles of scripture that are contradicted by the cliches. But the cliches go unchallenged. And one reason is because they take the Christians out of the spiritual battle. And the Christians no longer are a challenge. So if you have a large church, and the church is sort of uninvested from the battle that's raging around it, for example, with our godless public schools, So giving your child a godless education, I believe, is inherently sinful. It's inherently wrong. So you have a big church, a megachurch, thousands of members. How many send their kids to public schools? Well, a lot. So if the pastor stands up and says it's a sin to send your kids to public school, then what happens? Those people all leave, and then you can't meet your budget, and you have 20 people on staff and property, eight acres and building. So what happens is the kind of thing that goes for doctrine today is really superficial cliches that are false. And all sins are equal, so it really doesn't matter. Even if it's wrong to put your kids in public school, who are you to judge and forgive everyone? So what does it matter? And pretty soon, the only thing that matters is tithing, putting it in, but not taking it out. And if you're not supposed to judge, then when the plate comes by and you took out, would the church that says don't judge, would they somehow all of a sudden find a backbone and be very critical? Say, we're not going to tolerate that. Well, why not? Don't judge. Forgive. So you can very quickly find out where people stand when it comes to money quite often. Sort of follow the money. Don't call anyone a fool. The Bible does frequently. Jesus, David, Paul, they call people fools. But you can't call anybody a fool. That's more important than do not commit adultery. More important. Hate the sin, love the sinner. We paraphrase that, hate the gin, love the dinner. When God sends people to hell for all of eternity, is he sending their sin or is he sending the sinner? Who goes to hell? Is it the sinner or the sinner? It's the sinner. It's not their skin that gets judged. It's not the finger that pulls the trigger that kills an innocent person. It's not the action that gets judged. It's the sinner. And so hate the sin, love the sinner. Of course, God loves the whole world. But he also hates those who shed innocent blood. He hates those who sow dissension unnecessarily. So God can hate and love at the same time, and we can too. We can hate the person who kills the innocent, but love them enough to share with them that they need God, and Jesus Christ will forgive them. So you could do both. You could hate the perversion, the homosexual who is trying to undermine the truth of God, but love him enough to share the gospel with him. You could do both. And the Bible calls on us to do both. that God has a plan for your life. So, you know, what car do I have to buy? What job do I take? Who do I marry? So, God told me to marry this person, and everybody's so happy, and then a year later, there's a divorce. And what happened? God told me to divorce this person? No, it's just we make claims and we attribute our own decisions to God as though God is the one who got me into this mess. And why? And that's common in prison if you have a jail ministry. Everybody who's in jail because of their own sin and decisions and actions say, why did God do this to me? God has a plan for my life. This is part of his plan for me. Why? Why? Why does he have nicer plans for other people and my life is miserable? You see how it's a victim mentality. It's not biblical. God's plan for our lives is very general. It's an umbrella plan. It is that we would love him, serve him, become conformed to the image of Christ, love and serve our family and our friends. That's God's plan for my life. Now, which car I buy, the myriad of decisions I make day to day, every year, God is not micromanaging my life. As our kids become adults, we don't want them to call us and ask every decision they make, should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do that? What should I do on every decision? Because then they would never grow up and mature. So God, he doesn't want to make every decision for us. He's given us a mind, faculties, so that if we honor him, we could make decisions that are good. They don't have to be the perfect decision. Like, am I hiring the perfect person? That's no such thing. That's a make-believe thing. Am I marrying the perfect person? Am I buying the perfect car? That's all make-believe. Right? God gave Adam Eve, and they fell into terrible sin. So, what? If God would have given Adam someone else, then... It's not God, if only God will show me the right person to marry, then my life will be great. That's false. There's only one person for me to marry in God's perfect plan. If I find that person, then everything will be great. Is that true? Well, what if you find the wrong person? You marry, some guy marries the wrong woman, right? She was supposed to marry another guy. Now that poor slob, his life is ruined. Because some other guy he never even met married a woman he never met that he was supposed to marry. So now he's stuck with second best. Isn't that absurd? And then just within a few iterations of that, everyone in the world has married the wrong person, everybody. But if we have no free will, if we have no will, and everybody has to marry whoever God picked, then God is picking all these people and it's a catastrophe because divorce is epidemic. So all these superstitious ways of trying to simplify the Christian life, they're all cliches that are so popular because we're lactose intolerant. The body of Christ can no longer even handle the milk. Forget the meat, we can't handle the milk. So it's easier to get someone who's an unbeliever and bring them to the Lord and then build them up than it is to take a Christian who's already been ruined by 20 years of teaching and try to help them to grow. If they want to grow on their own and come along, great, but you can't force feed to someone who's an adult. God does not change in any way. The utter immutability, of course, that's not true. God the Son humbled himself, became flesh, took on the sin of the world. The Father poured out his wrath on the Son. All those were terrible changes, important changes, but terrible. God became nicer in the New Testament. Old Testament, he was mean. New Testament, he's nice. And that contradicts the God cannot change attitude. cliche. So cliches tend to contradict each other.
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Hey, this is Nicole McBurney jumping into the broadcast. We are out of time for today, so be sure to come back next Thursday to hear the rest of this study. To find other resources and Bible studies, be sure to go to kgov.com. That's kgov.com.
Through a series of engaging discussions, Cherry Campbell unveils the rich blessings that come with entering the Kingdom of God. Listeners are taken on a journey through scriptures in Matthew and Luke, illustrating how Jesus combined healing with His teachings. The episode also explores testimonies of power displays that surpass any form of darkness, ultimately pointing to the superior power in God's kingdom.
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Good morning. Welcome to Victorious Faith. I'm Cherry Campbell. This morning I'm going to continue sharing with you the lesson I've been sharing with you all this week that I taught in a class called the Kingdom of God. And this is lesson nine in that class called Blessings Available in the Kingdom of God. So join me now for the continuation of this lesson. Lesson number nine called Blessings Available in the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God, or you inherit the kingdom. So when you get born again, and you enter into the kingdom of God, you inherit all the kingdom of God, and you don't have to be poor anymore. Hallelujah. Amen. Because we're blessed. Amen. Well, let's look at another blessing. Another blessing that comes from the kingdom of God is healing. Healing. Now let's look at Matthew chapter 4. Go to Matthew chapter 4. Matthew chapter 4 and verse 23. It says, Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. How many diseases and sicknesses? How many? A few? Every. Every disease. Everybody say, every. Every. Yes, amen. Healing every disease and sickness among the people. But what was he preaching? He was preaching the good news or the gospel of the kingdom. So when he preached the gospel of the kingdom, what did he do? He healed every disease and sickness. So healing every disease and sickness went with the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom. Amen. Let's look at it again. Matthew chapter 9. Chapter 9, verse 35.
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935.
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Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing how many? every disease and sickness. It said it again. Said it again here in Matthew chapter 9. He preached the good news or the gospel of the kingdom and healed every disease and sickness. Again, we see that the healing of diseases and sicknesses go right along with, hand in hand, with the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom of God. Hallelujah. Amen. Amen. Now let's go to Luke. Go to Luke chapter 9. Luke chapter 9. And here in Luke chapter 9, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. Chapter 9, let's start in verse 1. Verses 1 and 2. When Jesus had called the twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases. And actually back in Matthew 10, it refers to the same passage and it says every disease and sickness. But we see that Jesus gave the disciples authority to cure every disease. The word every is in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 10, verse 2. And he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. Jesus sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. Jesus preached and healed and he told them to go preach and heal. But what did they preach? The same thing Jesus preached. Jesus preached the kingdom of God and he told the disciples, you go preach the kingdom of God and you heal the sick. So the healing of the sick is part of preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. Hallelujah. Amen. Now the same chapter in Luke 9, look at verse 11. Verse 11, but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God and he healed those who needed healing. He spoke about the kingdom of God and he healed. He spoke about the kingdom of God and he healed. What should you and I be doing when we preach the gospel? We should be preaching the gospel not only of salvation, not only the cross and the resurrection, but the gospel of the kingdom of God. God coming to earth. God's kingdom coming to earth. God's law. God's order. God's system. God's ways and methods. God's language, God's currency, all of it coming to earth. That's what we preach. And when we do that, we also heal those who need healing. Hallelujah. Amen. And also in Luke chapter 10. Luke chapter 10, verse 9. Now, actually in verse 1, Luke 10, 1. After this, the Lord appointed 72 others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. So he sent them out. And what did he tell them to do in verse 9? Heal the sick who are there and tell them the kingdom of God is near you. In other words, preach the gospel of the kingdom of God. And heal the sick. God's words to us today are the same. He never changes. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. He tells us to go preach. Don't preach religion. Don't preach your denomination. Don't preach your doctrinal preferences. But preach the kingdom of God. And with it, heal all the sick. Hallelujah. Amen. And why is healing part of the kingdom of God? Because of 1 Peter 2, verse 24. 1 Peter 2, verse 24. By his wounds, you have been healed. By his wounds, you have been healed. You see, it was his wounds that he received on the cross, before he went to the cross, by the beatings of the Romans. when he was being beaten and scourged, and also when he hung on the cross and they pierced his hands and his feet and his side. Those wounds purchased our healing. His death purchased our forgiveness of sin, but his woundings purchased our healing. And that's why it's part of the gospel. Healing is part of the gospel of the kingdom of God. Amen. Amen. Hallelujah. Praise God. Well, let's go on and let's look at another blessing. Another blessing in the kingdom is power. Power. You know, so many people in the world today are looking for power. That's the main reason why people get into witchcraft, because they're looking for power. And a lot of times, I mean, I've heard many testimonies, you probably have too, of people who used to be in witchcraft. They may have even been very, very powerful in it. Like one of the high-ranking witches in a certain area. And they confronted the power of God and found the power of God was greater and stronger than their power. And in many cases, that has caused them to get born again. They found that the power of Satan that they were working by was not as great as the power of God. I remember hearing a testimony of this from a friend of mine from one of the island nations where I had been visiting. And this pastor said to me, you know, Cherry, how the gospel reached here and got established here? There was witchcraft being practiced here many, many years ago in this nation. And we had strong witches that were over villages. And one time, there were a couple missionaries that came. They came by boat years ago. And as they came and approached the island, the witch could see them coming. Now, I don't know if he was talking about the witch could see them coming physically. Maybe he was on a high mountain or a high place where he could see out on the sea and see them coming physically. Or maybe he saw it in the spirit as he was practicing his witchcraft. Either way, he saw them coming. But when he saw them coming, he saw on them the power of God. And he saw that their power was greater than his. And so that when they arrived, he immediately welcomed them. And he received them because he could see that their power was greater than his. I don't know any more of the story. I don't know if they demonstrated the power of God. But they were coming in the power of the Holy Spirit. I've heard other testimonies. I've heard in another nation about one of the great powerful witches of the whole area, the whole region. was so strong, and he was putting curses on people. And he confronted the power of God as the Christians. I heard one pastor led his church to go pray outside of this witch's home and to bind the spirits of darkness and to pray that this man would repent. He had to repent. And they commanded him to repent in the name of Jesus. and I don't know how long, a very short time, maybe hours or a few days, that witch's power had left him completely. It was gone. He was very, very powerful. He did so many powerful things through the power of Satan, but it was gone. He found himself like an ordinary man with no supernatural power whatsoever. And there was nothing left for him to do but to go to the church of that pastor that had prayed for him and get saved. Praise the Lord. So power is available to us in the kingdom of God. It is great power. And we've already said it is superior to the power of the kingdom of darkness. Let's look at a few scriptures. Go to Mark chapter 9. Go to Mark chapter 9. In Mark 9, look at verse 1. Verse 1. And he said to them, I tell you the truth. Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power. The kingdom of God come with power. Now, I don't want to talk about the prophetic side of this scripture. All I want to mention is that the kingdom of God comes with power. If we are operating in the kingdom of God, we should be operating in the power of God. What you just heard was the continuation of lesson number nine that I taught in a class called the kingdom of God. And this lesson number nine is called blessings available in the kingdom of God. And we will continue this lesson again tomorrow. So join me again tomorrow. And remember, God loves you. You are blessed and highly favored by the Lord.
Join us as we delve into the provocative views of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who confronts materialist orthodoxy by proposing a world where consciousness is as widespread as life itself. This episode covers Sheldrake's critiques of the atheistic perspectives common among scientists, his belief in a spiritually infused universe, and the remarkable influence of psychic phenomena in both humans and animals. Discover how his unique ideas defy conventional scientific dogmas and offer a broad, embracing vision of nature.
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Please stay tuned for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theories on everything from dog intuition to a conscious sun and stars to the mind's influence on health.
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and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
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You know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
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Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that Average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle. Every day there's a new puzzle. Millions of people do it. Is it getting easier to do in the evening compared with the morning? Well, we don't know yet, but there's a student looking into this here in Britain at the moment, and she's going to measure the first, when it's first published in New Zealand, then it sweeps around the world with the day and the last people doing it in Hawaii. So she's getting the scores from New Zealand and Hawaii, which would be right to an extended day to see what's going on. Now, this also applies to crystals. If you make a new chemical and crystallize it for the first time, it may take a long time to crystallize. But if you keep making the same chemical, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world as a new habit develops. And that seems to be what happens. Chemists find that new compounds often get easier to crystallize. So these are all examples of morphic resonance.
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Okay, and I want to jump in real quick. Dr. Sheldrake, the examples you just gave, they seem to terrify materialists. I watched your debate with Michael Shermer, and at the very early stages of the debate, as soon as you mentioned anything... I can't remember the exact phrase, but you mentioned something immaterial, and Michael Shermer immediately crossed his arms, and pretty much for the rest of the debate, he sat in this defensive cross-armed position, and I've read a number of the criticisms of your experiments online, and it seems to me that there is some measure of actual hysterical fear on the part of materialists whenever you get into mentioning things like this that cause them to attack your methods. Rather scrupulously, I must say. They do attack your methods rather scrupulously. What do you think is the source of the fear that is obvious in their hearts and in their eyes when they're confronted with this idea that there may be things outside of the material universe that are worthy of consideration?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, some materialists have made materialism into their worldview. It is a kind of religion for them. It's an anti-religion. I mean, it's an atheist worldview. And if you look at the actual personal history of many materialists, they're people who themselves or whose parents or grandparents have rejected a religious worldview, usually Christian, sometimes Jewish. But Christianity is the religion that generates the largest number of atheists. Islam isn't so atheist-generating as Christianity. Christianity is like a kind of engine for generating atheism. Now there's an interesting concept that we should look into. That is profound. Well, I think it's a very important fact, and we need to recognize it. You see, I think what happens with materialists is that they've personally rejected Christianity or Judaism for various reasons. I mean, Oliver Sacks, the Jewish neurologist, was a militant atheist. He rejected Judaism because he was gay. And when he was a teenager, His Jewish family told him that God was against everyone who was gay, and he was utterly condemned for being gay. So he decided he was against God. And so, if God was against him because he was gay. So he found a ready basis for that in materialist atheism, putting his faith in science. Some people reject Christianity because, you know, for a variety of reasons, they've had oppressive puritanical upbringings, etc. And if they take up materialism, then it provides them with an alternative worldview that seems to explain everything with no afterlife. So no need to be, if you've been brought up to be afraid of hell, then you don't need to be afraid of hell anymore because there's no such thing as any afterlife. If you've been brought up to feel guilty about sex, no need to feel guilty about sex. But above all, the big payoff for materialists is the feeling that if they become materialists, they're smarter than everyone else. They've seen through the dogmas of religion. They've seen through these childish beliefs that have held back humanity for centuries. They've seen through all that, and they've risen above it. And basically, their stance is they're smarter. So materialism is very important for them because it justifies their atheism and their self-satisfaction at being smarter than everyone else. And what happens, why I get a lot of flak, is that, you know, I'm a scientist, I've studied at Cambridge, I've studied at Harvard, I got a PhD, I've published papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And they can't dismiss me as being someone who's just ignorant and stupid, who doesn't know these things, who hasn't studied science. So I get under their skin. And then what I'm basically doing is trying to point out, as in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science Set Free in the US, the ten dogmas of materialism, which are part of their belief system. actually are not very well supported by science. They're not supported by science at all. It is a dogmatic belief system. And they're very, very resistant to that being pointed out because basically their whole sense of personal identity would collapse without it. So it does trigger off anxiety, anger, fear, because it is essentially a dogmatic belief system. They like to portray religious people as dogmatic believers and taking everything on faith and authority, but actually nowhere is that more true in the modern world than among materialist atheists. Most of them actually don't know very much science, and when they say they put their trust in science, basically they put their trust in what the high priests of science tell them, They haven't personally gone to the Large Hadron Collider and conducted experiments or personally sequenced DNA or personally analyzed genes or anything. They've just taken the whole lot on faith. So I think that is the real reason they get so upset and angry and why they're so immune to evidence. I mean, in the debate with Michael Shermer, he showed not the slightest interest in evidence for anything that went against his point of view. He just thought it must be rubbish.
SPEAKER 05 :
yeah yeah so instead they do things like ban your talk on ted tv i mean was that i guess that really was banned i know you can watch it it was uh we've played clips of it before well they tried banning it but um they the thing is that you can't really ban anything nowadays and when word got out they were planning to ban it people cloned the talk and put it up all over the internet
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, they did me a good turn. You see, I think Providence works through atheists as well as through Christians and believers. And, you know, before my talk had been planned, it had about 30,000 views. It's now had about 8 million in various formats on different websites. By far the most successful thing I've ever done in terms of exposure. And that would not have happened without a helping hand from the militant atheists.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well said, well said.
SPEAKER 04 :
It goes back to the truism that God's Word never returns void. And God's Word, whether the atheists want it to or not, God's Word does govern everything to a certain degree. Now, you had mentioned earlier, when I asked you about spiritual versus physical things, It seemed like you implied that spiritual is necessarily separate from nature. Is that your belief? Can you clarify that? Is the spiritual necessarily separate from the natural?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, actually I think the spiritual underlies the whole of nature. As I was saying, I think the energy in nature is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see God as sustaining the whole universe from moment to moment, underlying all reality, not just setting up a universe in the first place, pressing a start button, and then having it all go on automatically like a machine. I think that God is sustaining all things. So in that sense, the Spirit of God pervades all nature all the time. But as we experience the spiritual, I think we experience it through our consciousness. And I think we experience our consciousness is not the same as the material activity of our body. It's obviously permeates the body and depends on it. But the distinction I really make, which I think is important, is between the bodily, the psychic and the spiritual. You know, because when St. Paul says, the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God, the natural man in Greek is anthropos psychikos, the psychic man or the ensouled man. And I think there's a realm of the psychic. which includes telepathy, premonitions, and what some might call the sixth sense, which is part of animal nature as well as human nature. I've done a lot of research, as you know, with psychic dogs, as in dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And I think the psychic level is to do with survival abilities and skills. I think wolves know what other wolves are doing when they're miles away. It's part of the way they coordinate the social group. Dogs become part of a human family and pick up our intentions, our thoughts. I don't think these are spiritual powers. I think they're to do, they're like the senses. I mean, smell, taste, touch, vision. I think they're like a kind of invisible sense, like a sixth sense, which, like everything in nature, has a spiritual underpinning, but it's not in itself spiritual. So I think I distinguish between psychic and spiritual. Now, this is one area where I run into problems with our friends, the materialists, because they don't believe in psychic phenomena. They don't think telepathy and things are possible. They don't think dogs can possibly pick up their owner's intentions and so on. And the reason they're so down on psychic phenomena is they think that if you let in any invisible influence at all, then God's going to come back through the back door. And so they feel they have to deny all these psychic phenomena. I spend a certain amount of time speaking to skeptic groups. If they invite me, I accept their invitation. I go and address them, you know, atheist organizations. And one of my messages to them is you don't need to be afraid of telepathy and psychic powers because these are part of nature. They're natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal. They're just something science hasn't dealt with yet, but they're part of nature. Whereas spiritual things are somewhat more different. They're about choice. They're about the most fundamental choices we make. They're about morality. They're about our connection with the divine, our openness to God and the influence of God. And they're not quite the same as totally survival instinct level. This is something of a different level of consciousness. So, I think all of them, everything is ultimately pervaded by the spirit. But I think there's a distinction between body, psyche, and spirit in our own lives, which is important to recognize.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, that's interesting. So, this gives me a better picture of this morphic resonance. And you've got… Isn't there evidence, for example, of like dogs who kind of react when their owner's on the way home? So there is evidence. It's not just a thought and an idea. And one of the things about science is a hard currency of science is predictions. And I love that you're doing that test with that dog. Werbel? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER 01 :
I don't play it. W-O-R-B-L-E.
SPEAKER 05 :
Werbel, yes. Okay. And, you know, I will have to say anecdotally, it's not working on my dad. He's still terrible at those games, no matter what time of day it is. But, wow, that's really interesting. And I know you've even talked about... And I know this is going to be foreign to a lot of people, but maybe even the sun and the stars, they have a consciousness about them. And that somehow plays into this morphic resonance, that there's a third element. It's not just matter and energy, that somehow there's an interaction. And I'm curious, because I've heard you talk about that. Would you believe that that's kind of tied together electrons with a magnetic force? Because, you know, that's what plasma cosmology does. thinks that magnetic forces are not considered enough by the secular standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think that somehow, in a way we don't understand yet, that electromagnetic fields are a kind of interface with consciousness. Our brains are mainly electromagnetic in the way they work, and somehow our minds interact with our brains. No one knows how. But I think that if we take the view that what interfaces with our bodies and brains is this electromagnetic activity, then the Sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic activity than we do. I mean, solar flares, sunspots, 11-year cycles, all these NASA space probes and space observatories monitoring solar weather. It's changing all the time. And I think the mind of the Sun could interface with these electromagnetic fields which are basically within plasma. The Sun's made of plasma. And I think the Sun and the other stars may be conscious beings. I don't think that consciousness is confined to brains. And, you know, one of the things materialists believe is that the whole universe is completely unconscious, except in human and perhaps a few animal brains, the light bulb of consciousness is switched on for unknown reasons. That's the materialist worldview. And they have an awful problem explaining why anything's conscious at all. That's why it's called the hard problem, the very existence of human consciousness. But in the past, people thought consciousness was much more widespread in nature, that nature was alive. In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted. It was taught in medieval universities that nature was alive. Animals are called animals because they have a soul. Anima is the Latin for soul, built into our language. So they didn't believe they had an immortal soul like humans, but they thought they had a soul that organized their bodies and their instincts. And so I think that the stars and nature are all a reflection of an ultimate conscious source of all things, which I think of as God. And there's no reason why consciousness should just be confined to human brains. That's why I'm exploring the idea that sound is conscious, because I think from a scientific point of view, this is an open question. It's not because it's a dogma of religious belief or anything like that. It's not part of my religious faith that it's conscious or not conscious. It's an open question. And I think it's the kind of thing scientists should look at.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's a fun topic to consider. It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility in God's created nature. I love how you referred basically to Hebrews 1, 3, that God upholds all things by the word of His power, so He's upholding all things now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. You know, it's a question, I'm afraid, that is off-limits. for materialist scientists. It simply can't be looked into because, as you said earlier, it would threaten their entire worldview. You said something earlier that could be construed by Christians and Jews to be a threatening statement. You mentioned a fellow who rejected Judaism because he was taught by his family that God is against everyone who's gay, and he decided since he was gay that he was going to be against God. And I could go like this and start to get a little bit defensive, but of course... You know, we all understand that God's not against any man. He's not against anyone. He's for everyone. God recommends against certain behaviors for obvious reasons, and God wants what's good for all of us. But I don't feel the kind of the knee-jerk need to defend every aspect of God against any question at any time. The way I saw Michael Shermer respond to your question implications that there was something beyond the material. Michael Shermer said, first of all, he said, I'm not God, you're not God. And he said, there's an objective reality. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. Dr. Sheldrake, I think that's an overstatement.
SPEAKER 01 :
What do you think? Well, I think it would be definitely true to say that no one understands the whole of reality, including the mind of God, the whole of nature, etc. We're limited humans, and obviously, by definition, our minds are human minds with a limited power of understanding. So I think that confession of ignorance is reasonable for anyone. So I don't have a problem with that. I think the idea that there's an objective reality to which science has unique access is questionable because scientists are humans. And as some physicists have pointed out, Our theories about nature are theories in human minds. And the so-called laws of nature are not out there. You don't actually run into a law of nature when you're sort of looking through a telescope. You don't see Newton's laws or Maxwell's equations. These are invisible things which are accessed only through minds. And so for scientists to understand nature, they can only do so through their minds. So the very idea of objective nature relies on human minds to formulate that very idea. So I think that the idea that somehow nature is totally independent of all minds and all consciousness is an illusion that materialists have created and they themselves are the first to say they believe in science and reason and reason itself implies mind. So if you're going to have mind in nature and mind in underlying nature which makes it comprehensible, their belief that it's comprehensible through mathematical laws implies that underlying nature is something mind-like. And it can only be appreciated through minds. And they're very proud of their own minds and how smart they are. So it's actually to think of it as objective out there with no consciousness is not what science is actually telling us. True. And not what Schirmer could possibly believe, given that he's a devotee of science and reason.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes, and that's why the statement struck me as disingenuous. I'm not God, you're not God, that's not an overstatement. That's true. I don't necessarily believe that Michael Schirmer believes that he's not God. But I also believe it's an overstatement to say... that we don't know what reality is. I think we do know what reality is, and I think that Michael Shermer's statement that he doesn't know is simply a revelation of the fact that he doesn't know God. And so, Dr. Sheldrake, I don't want to imply that I absolutely understand everything about nature, but because I do know who God is, I can say that I do know what reality is and I know that it will all be explained to me. The things I don't understand will be explained at some point. Michael Shermer does not have that touchstone. Michael Shermer and other materialists do not have that touchstone in their mind and in their heart and not even in their psyche. And so, anyway, that seems to me to be the source of some of the inherent fear that you seem to strike into their heart.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it certainly doesn't help, the fact that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Christian. I mean, that arouses tremendous prejudice in a lot of scientists, just to start with. And it doesn't help that I have unorthodox theories, and it doesn't help that I think there's evidence for telepathy in dogs and people and so on. None of that helps. But it doesn't help with dogmatic scientists. But the interesting thing is that a lot of dogmatic scientists, when I'm talking to them alone in the evening and stuff, become much less dogmatic. A lot of them are frightened of not agreeing with the party line when they're at work. But when they get home, many of them have had psychic experiences, some have had spiritual experiences, some have had near-death experiences, some have dogs waiting for them when they get home from the laboratory. The fact is that most dogmatic materialists Some are really dogmatic. I mean, Michael Sherman's made a living out of it, and Richard Dawkins, it's his whole public persona. But we recently did a survey, the Scientific and Medical Network in Britain recently did a survey of scientific, medical, and engineering professionals in Britain, France, and Germany, working scientists, and asked them, we had it done by a professional public opinion survey organization, How many of them are atheists? It's about 25%. Quite a lot compared with the normal population, but it's certainly not the majority. About 20% more describe themselves as non-religious agnostics. 45% describe themselves as atheists or non-religious. about 45% have described themselves as religious or spiritual or spiritual but not religious or spiritual and religious. So about 45%, about 10% didn't say or didn't know or whatever, but about equal numbers were sort of non-religious and spiritually bleak religious. And the atheists are certainly not a majority, even within Europe, where atheism is much more predominant than it is in the United States. And I know from my own experience of giving talks in scientific institutions that after the talk, one after another, people come up to me and they look both ways to make sure no one's listening. And then they say, you know, I'm really interested in what you say. I agree with a lot of what you say. I've had these experiences myself, but I can't tell my colleagues because they're all so straight. And after three or four have done this, I said, well, actually, you're not alone. I said, there's at least three or four other people in your institute who think like you do. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me, him and her and him. And what I say to them is, you know, your life would be so much more fun if you come out of the closet. Spiritually-minded scientists who've had psychic or spiritual experiences are quite common, and they behaved like gays did in the 1950s. You know, they were all in the closet, I think they couldn't possibly admit it. So my slogan to them really is, you know, come out of the closet, and you'll find that if you talk freely in your laboratory tea room or with friends after work and stuff... you'll find a lot of them who actually agree with you. So right now, people who do have these views are hiding them from their colleagues. Another metaphor for this is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. You know, in the last days of communism, how many people in the Soviet Union really believed in communism? I mean, there were certainly some, but the majority didn't. But they didn't become outright dissidents because then they'd be locked up in psychiatric institutes or sent to Siberia. So they pretended to go along with it. You know, party congresses, they dutifully clap at the right moments and stuff. I think that within the world of science, it's rather like that at the moment. I think there's this materialist orthodoxy, which is held in place by inertia and by fear, but which is not actually sincerely believed in by most scientists. And if you include among most scientists, Indians and South Americans... There are more scientists in India than there are in the United States. I lived and worked in India. I hardly ever met an atheist in India. Most of the scientists, my colleagues, were devout Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Jains or Christians.
SPEAKER 03 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That's Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That's what I'm talking about
Delve into a thought-provoking discussion on the boundaries between science and spirituality as Dr. Rupert Sheldrake questions materialism's resistance to the existence of non-physical phenomena. Listen as he argues that consciousness might be embedded not only in human brains but possibly in stars, electromagnetic fields, and the cosmos at large. Engage with his insights into how this perspective could reshape our understanding of reality, offering a profound connection between the physical and spiritual realms.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please stay tuned for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theories on everything from dog intuition to a conscious sun and stars to the mind's influence on health.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that Average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle. Every day there's a new puzzle. Millions of people do it. Is it getting easier to do in the evening compared with the morning? Well, we don't know yet, but there's a student looking into this here in Britain at the moment, and she's going to measure the first, when it's first published in New Zealand, then it sweeps around the world with the day and the last people doing it in Hawaii. So she's getting the scores from New Zealand and Hawaii, which would be right to an extended day to see what's going on. Now, this also applies to crystals. If you make a new chemical and crystallize it for the first time, it may take a long time to crystallize. But if you keep making the same chemical, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world as a new habit develops. And that seems to be what happens. Chemists find that new compounds often get easier to crystallize. So these are all examples of morphic resonance.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, and I want to jump in real quick. Dr. Sheldrake, the examples you just gave, they seem to terrify materialists. I watched your debate with Michael Shermer, and at the very early stages of the debate, as soon as you mentioned anything... I can't remember the exact phrase, but you mentioned something immaterial, and Michael Shermer immediately crossed his arms, and pretty much for the rest of the debate, he sat in this defensive cross-armed position, and I've read a number of the criticisms of your experiments online, and it seems to me that there is some measure of actual hysterical fear on the part of materialists whenever you get into mentioning things like this that cause them to attack your methods. Rather scrupulously, I must say. They do attack your methods rather scrupulously. What do you think is the source of the fear that is obvious in their hearts and in their eyes when they're confronted with this idea that there may be things outside of the material universe that are worthy of consideration?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, some materialists have made materialism into their worldview. It is a kind of religion for them. It's an anti-religion. I mean, it's an atheist worldview. And if you look at the actual personal history of many materialists, they're people who themselves or whose parents or grandparents have rejected a religious worldview, usually Christian, sometimes Jewish. But Christianity is the religion that generates the largest number of atheists. Islam isn't so atheist-generating as Christianity. Christianity is like a kind of engine for generating atheism. Now there's an interesting concept that we should look into. That is profound. Well, I think it's a very important fact, and we need to recognize it. You see, I think what happens with materialists is that they've personally rejected Christianity or Judaism for various reasons. I mean, Oliver Sacks, the Jewish neurologist, was a militant atheist. He rejected Judaism because he was gay. And when he was a teenager, His Jewish family told him that God was against everyone who was gay, and he was utterly condemned for being gay. So he decided he was against God. And so, if God was against him because he was gay. So he found a ready basis for that in materialist atheism, putting his faith in science. Some people reject Christianity because, you know, for a variety of reasons, they've had oppressive puritanical upbringings, etc. And if they take up materialism, then it provides them with an alternative worldview that seems to explain everything with no afterlife. So no need to be, if you've been brought up to be afraid of hell, then you don't need to be afraid of hell anymore because there's no such thing as any afterlife. If you've been brought up to feel guilty about sex, no need to feel guilty about sex. But above all, the big payoff for materialists is the feeling that if they become materialists, they're smarter than everyone else. They've seen through the dogmas of religion. They've seen through these childish beliefs that have held back humanity for centuries. They've seen through all that, and they've risen above it. And basically, their stance is they're smarter. So materialism is very important for them because it justifies their atheism and their self-satisfaction at being smarter than everyone else. And what happens, why I get a lot of flak, is that, you know, I'm a scientist, I've studied at Cambridge, I've studied at Harvard, I got a PhD, I've published papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And they can't dismiss me as being someone who's just ignorant and stupid, who doesn't know these things, who hasn't studied science. So I get under their skin. And then what I'm basically doing is trying to point out, as in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science Set Free in the US, the ten dogmas of materialism, which are part of their belief system. actually are not very well supported by science. They're not supported by science at all. It is a dogmatic belief system. And they're very, very resistant to that being pointed out because basically their whole sense of personal identity would collapse without it. So it does trigger off anxiety, anger, fear, because it is essentially a dogmatic belief system. They like to portray religious people as dogmatic believers and taking everything on faith and authority, but actually nowhere is that more true in the modern world than among materialist atheists. Most of them actually don't know very much science, and when they say they put their trust in science, basically they put their trust in what the high priests of science tell them, They haven't personally gone to the Large Hadron Collider and conducted experiments or personally sequenced DNA or personally analyzed genes or anything. They've just taken the whole lot on faith. So I think that is the real reason they get so upset and angry and why they're so immune to evidence. I mean, in the debate with Michael Shermer, he showed not the slightest interest in evidence for anything that went against his point of view. He just thought it must be rubbish.
SPEAKER 05 :
yeah yeah so instead they do things like ban your talk on ted tv i mean was that i guess that really was banned i know you can watch it it was uh we've played clips of it before well they tried banning it but um they the thing is that you can't really ban anything nowadays and when word got out they were planning to ban it people cloned the talk and put it up all over the internet
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, they did me a good turn. You see, I think Providence works through atheists as well as through Christians and believers. And, you know, before my talk had been planned, it had about 30,000 views. It's now had about 8 million in various formats on different websites. By far the most successful thing I've ever done in terms of exposure. And that would not have happened without a helping hand from the militant atheists.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well said, well said.
SPEAKER 04 :
It goes back to the truism that God's Word never returns void. And God's Word, whether the atheists want it to or not, God's Word does govern everything to a certain degree. Now, you had mentioned earlier, when I asked you about spiritual versus physical things, It seemed like you implied that spiritual is necessarily separate from nature. Is that your belief? Can you clarify that? Is the spiritual necessarily separate from the natural?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, actually I think the spiritual underlies the whole of nature. As I was saying, I think the energy in nature is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see God as sustaining the whole universe from moment to moment, underlying all reality, not just setting up a universe in the first place, pressing a start button, and then having it all go on automatically like a machine. I think that God is sustaining all things. So in that sense, the Spirit of God pervades all nature all the time. But as we experience the spiritual, I think we experience it through our consciousness. And I think we experience our consciousness is not the same as the material activity of our body. It's obviously permeates the body and depends on it. But the distinction I really make, which I think is important, is between the bodily, the psychic and the spiritual. You know, because when St. Paul says, the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God, the natural man in Greek is anthropos psychikos, the psychic man or the ensouled man. And I think there's a realm of the psychic. which includes telepathy, premonitions, and what some might call the sixth sense, which is part of animal nature as well as human nature. I've done a lot of research, as you know, with psychic dogs, as in dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And I think the psychic level is to do with survival abilities and skills. I think wolves know what other wolves are doing when they're miles away. It's part of the way they coordinate the social group. Dogs become part of a human family and pick up our intentions, our thoughts. I don't think these are spiritual powers. I think they're to do, they're like the senses. I mean, smell, taste, touch, vision. I think they're like a kind of invisible sense, like a sixth sense, which, like everything in nature, has a spiritual underpinning, but it's not in itself spiritual. So I think I distinguish between psychic and spiritual. Now, this is one area where I run into problems with our friends, the materialists, because they don't believe in psychic phenomena. They don't think telepathy and things are possible. They don't think dogs can possibly pick up their owner's intentions and so on. And the reason they're so down on psychic phenomena is they think that if you let in any invisible influence at all, then God's going to come back through the back door. And so they feel they have to deny all these psychic phenomena. I spend a certain amount of time speaking to skeptic groups. If they invite me, I accept their invitation. I go and address them, you know, atheist organizations. And one of my messages to them is you don't need to be afraid of telepathy and psychic powers because these are part of nature. They're natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal. They're just something science hasn't dealt with yet, but they're part of nature. Whereas spiritual things are somewhat more different. They're about choice. They're about the most fundamental choices we make. They're about morality. They're about our connection with the divine, our openness to God and the influence of God. And they're not quite the same as totally survival instinct level. This is something of a different level of consciousness. So, I think all of them, everything is ultimately pervaded by the spirit. But I think there's a distinction between body, psyche, and spirit in our own lives, which is important to recognize.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, that's interesting. So, this gives me a better picture of this morphic resonance. And you've got… Isn't there evidence, for example, of like dogs who kind of react when their owner's on the way home? So there is evidence. It's not just a thought and an idea. And one of the things about science is a hard currency of science is predictions. And I love that you're doing that test with that dog. Werbel? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER 01 :
I don't play it. W-O-R-B-L-E.
SPEAKER 05 :
Werbel, yes. Okay. And, you know, I will have to say anecdotally, it's not working on my dad. He's still terrible at those games, no matter what time of day it is. But, wow, that's really interesting. And I know you've even talked about... And I know this is going to be foreign to a lot of people, but maybe even the sun and the stars, they have a consciousness about them. And that somehow plays into this morphic resonance, that there's a third element. It's not just matter and energy, that somehow there's an interaction. And I'm curious, because I've heard you talk about that. Would you believe that that's kind of tied together electrons with a magnetic force? Because, you know, that's what plasma cosmology does. thinks that magnetic forces are not considered enough by the secular standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think that somehow, in a way we don't understand yet, that electromagnetic fields are a kind of interface with consciousness. Our brains are mainly electromagnetic in the way they work, and somehow our minds interact with our brains. No one knows how. But I think that if we take the view that what interfaces with our bodies and brains is this electromagnetic activity, then the Sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic activity than we do. I mean, solar flares, sunspots, 11-year cycles, all these NASA space probes and space observatories monitoring solar weather. It's changing all the time. And I think the mind of the Sun could interface with these electromagnetic fields which are basically within plasma. The Sun's made of plasma. And I think the Sun and the other stars may be conscious beings. I don't think that consciousness is confined to brains. And, you know, one of the things materialists believe is that the whole universe is completely unconscious, except in human and perhaps a few animal brains, the light bulb of consciousness is switched on for unknown reasons. That's the materialist worldview. And they have an awful problem explaining why anything's conscious at all. That's why it's called the hard problem, the very existence of human consciousness. But in the past, people thought consciousness was much more widespread in nature, that nature was alive. In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted. It was taught in medieval universities that nature was alive. Animals are called animals because they have a soul. Anima is the Latin for soul, built into our language. So they didn't believe they had an immortal soul like humans, but they thought they had a soul that organized their bodies and their instincts. And so I think that the stars and nature are all a reflection of an ultimate conscious source of all things, which I think of as God. And there's no reason why consciousness should just be confined to human brains. That's why I'm exploring the idea that sound is conscious, because I think from a scientific point of view, this is an open question. It's not because it's a dogma of religious belief or anything like that. It's not part of my religious faith that it's conscious or not conscious. It's an open question. And I think it's the kind of thing scientists should look at.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's a fun topic to consider. It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility in God's created nature. I love how you referred basically to Hebrews 1, 3, that God upholds all things by the word of His power, so He's upholding all things now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. You know, it's a question, I'm afraid, that is off-limits. for materialist scientists. It simply can't be looked into because, as you said earlier, it would threaten their entire worldview. You said something earlier that could be construed by Christians and Jews to be a threatening statement. You mentioned a fellow who rejected Judaism because he was taught by his family that God is against everyone who's gay, and he decided since he was gay that he was going to be against God. And I could go like this and start to get a little bit defensive, but of course... You know, we all understand that God's not against any man. He's not against anyone. He's for everyone. God recommends against certain behaviors for obvious reasons, and God wants what's good for all of us. But I don't feel the kind of the knee-jerk need to defend every aspect of God against any question at any time. The way I saw Michael Shermer respond to your question implications that there was something beyond the material. Michael Shermer said, first of all, he said, I'm not God, you're not God. And he said, there's an objective reality. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. Dr. Sheldrake, I think that's an overstatement.
SPEAKER 01 :
What do you think? Well, I think it would be definitely true to say that no one understands the whole of reality, including the mind of God, the whole of nature, etc. We're limited humans, and obviously, by definition, our minds are human minds with a limited power of understanding. So I think that confession of ignorance is reasonable for anyone. So I don't have a problem with that. I think the idea that there's an objective reality to which science has unique access is questionable because scientists are humans. And as some physicists have pointed out, Our theories about nature are theories in human minds. And the so-called laws of nature are not out there. You don't actually run into a law of nature when you're sort of looking through a telescope. You don't see Newton's laws or Maxwell's equations. These are invisible things which are accessed only through minds. And so for scientists to understand nature, they can only do so through their minds. So the very idea of objective nature relies on human minds to formulate that very idea. So I think that the idea that somehow nature is totally independent of all minds and all consciousness is an illusion that materialists have created and they themselves are the first to say they believe in science and reason and reason itself implies mind. So if you're going to have mind in nature and mind in underlying nature which makes it comprehensible, their belief that it's comprehensible through mathematical laws implies that underlying nature is something mind-like. And it can only be appreciated through minds. And they're very proud of their own minds and how smart they are. So it's actually to think of it as objective out there with no consciousness is not what science is actually telling us. True. And not what Schirmer could possibly believe, given that he's a devotee of science and reason.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes, and that's why the statement struck me as disingenuous. I'm not God, you're not God, that's not an overstatement. That's true. I don't necessarily believe that Michael Schirmer believes that he's not God. But I also believe it's an overstatement to say... that we don't know what reality is. I think we do know what reality is, and I think that Michael Shermer's statement that he doesn't know is simply a revelation of the fact that he doesn't know God. And so, Dr. Sheldrake, I don't want to imply that I absolutely understand everything about nature, but because I do know who God is, I can say that I do know what reality is and I know that it will all be explained to me. The things I don't understand will be explained at some point. Michael Shermer does not have that touchstone. Michael Shermer and other materialists do not have that touchstone in their mind and in their heart and not even in their psyche. And so, anyway, that seems to me to be the source of some of the inherent fear that you seem to strike into their heart.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it certainly doesn't help, the fact that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Christian. I mean, that arouses tremendous prejudice in a lot of scientists, just to start with. And it doesn't help that I have unorthodox theories, and it doesn't help that I think there's evidence for telepathy in dogs and people and so on. None of that helps. But it doesn't help with dogmatic scientists. But the interesting thing is that a lot of dogmatic scientists, when I'm talking to them alone in the evening and stuff, become much less dogmatic. A lot of them are frightened of not agreeing with the party line when they're at work. But when they get home, many of them have had psychic experiences, some have had spiritual experiences, some have had near-death experiences, some have dogs waiting for them when they get home from the laboratory. The fact is that most dogmatic materialists Some are really dogmatic. I mean, Michael Sherman's made a living out of it, and Richard Dawkins, it's his whole public persona. But we recently did a survey, the Scientific and Medical Network in Britain recently did a survey of scientific, medical, and engineering professionals in Britain, France, and Germany, working scientists, and asked them, we had it done by a professional public opinion survey organization, How many of them are atheists? It's about 25%. Quite a lot compared with the normal population, but it's certainly not the majority. About 20% more describe themselves as non-religious agnostics. 45% describe themselves as atheists or non-religious. about 45% have described themselves as religious or spiritual or spiritual but not religious or spiritual and religious. So about 45%, about 10% didn't say or didn't know or whatever, but about equal numbers were sort of non-religious and spiritually bleak religious. And the atheists are certainly not a majority, even within Europe, where atheism is much more predominant than it is in the United States. And I know from my own experience of giving talks in scientific institutions that after the talk, one after another, people come up to me and they look both ways to make sure no one's listening. And then they say, you know, I'm really interested in what you say. I agree with a lot of what you say. I've had these experiences myself, but I can't tell my colleagues because they're all so straight. And after three or four have done this, I said, well, actually, you're not alone. I said, there's at least three or four other people in your institute who think like you do. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me, him and her and him. And what I say to them is, you know, your life would be so much more fun if you come out of the closet. Spiritually-minded scientists who've had psychic or spiritual experiences are quite common, and they behaved like gays did in the 1950s. You know, they were all in the closet, I think they couldn't possibly admit it. So my slogan to them really is, you know, come out of the closet, and you'll find that if you talk freely in your laboratory tea room or with friends after work and stuff... you'll find a lot of them who actually agree with you. So right now, people who do have these views are hiding them from their colleagues. Another metaphor for this is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. You know, in the last days of communism, how many people in the Soviet Union really believed in communism? I mean, there were certainly some, but the majority didn't. But they didn't become outright dissidents because then they'd be locked up in psychiatric institutes or sent to Siberia. So they pretended to go along with it. You know, party congresses, they dutifully clap at the right moments and stuff. I think that within the world of science, it's rather like that at the moment. I think there's this materialist orthodoxy, which is held in place by inertia and by fear, but which is not actually sincerely believed in by most scientists. And if you include among most scientists, Indians and South Americans... There are more scientists in India than there are in the United States. I lived and worked in India. I hardly ever met an atheist in India. Most of the scientists, my colleagues, were devout Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Jains or Christians.
SPEAKER 03 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That's Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That's what I'm talking about
