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Join Nicole McBurney and Pastor Bob Enyart for *Theology Thursday*, where scripture comes alive through deep dives, cultural commentary, and a dash of humor. Whether it's exploring the poetic justice in Ezra, unpacking prophetic timelines, or drawing surprising parallels between King Darius and modern politics, this show offers fresh insights with a Christian worldview. From burnt offerings to the Feast of Unleavened Bread, you'll learn how history, theology, and prophecy connect to our lives today—often with a witty twist.
SPEAKER 01 :
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 02 :
For the burnt offerings of the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine, and oil, according to the request of the priests who are in Jerusalem, let it be given them day by day without fail. That's just so funny. Poetic justice doesn't begin to describe it. And he's obviously rubbing salt into a wound here. What would that be like today? It would be like telling the Democrats in the Senate that they have to fund Don Wildman's American Family Association. You guys got to pay for that. You got to pay for James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Oh yeah, whatever it costs to reinstall Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument, You got to pay for that too. It would just kill him. That's not what Tat and I and company wanted to hear. So just in case they're not understanding the king's intent, verse 10, do this that they may offer sacrifices of sweet aroma to the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons. So he's saying, I want them to pray for me. I want the blessings of their God upon me and my household. Now, by the way, the Bible speaks often of animals sacrificed as burnt offerings, describing the smell as a sweet aroma. And why does it do that? Well, of course, if you have a backyard barbecue, you got spare ribs or lamb chops on an open fire, smells great. But, That's not necessarily the point. Yeah, it smells great, but it's a sweet aroma because it's acceptable to God as a substitutionary sacrifice. God wants to redeem his children who have rebelled against him, but he can't just make believe we never hurt anyone, we never did anything wrong. Because we've sinned, there has to be a punishment for the sin The only acceptable punishment, since we are eternal creatures who now deserve eternal death, the only way that God could forgive that is to pay for it with something that's valued or worth more than the debt, equal or more than the debt. So what's worth more than the eternal death of millions or billions of human beings? What's worth that much? Well, in all of creation, There's no animal that's worth that much, no tree, no star, no angel. The only thing that could be worth that much is the creator, God the son. So God decided that he would offer himself as a blood sacrifice to die for us so that we can have new life, so that the debt would be justly paid for. And so the Bible refers to the sweet aroma of, to the Lord as God accepting the animal sacrifices as pointing to Christ's sacrifice. That's why we read in Isaiah 53, verse 10, speaking of the crucifixion, that it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Now that's an especially harsh verse to read a week after most all of us went to see The Passion, Mel Gibson's movie, And we saw the suffering Christ went through. And then we read, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. So that the crucifixion was at the same time wonderfully beautiful and utterly horrible. Horrible in what Christ had to go through, but beautiful because God loved us so much. The Son and the Father loved us so much that he was willing to do that for us. Okay. Okay. So Darius, he's speaking like he's a believer. It's amazing how he is interested in getting the blessings of the God of Israel. And just in case, Tat and I, the governor and your cohorts, just in case, now wait a minute, don't go anywhere. I'm not done yet. Just in case you need some fatherly encouragement to make sure you adhere to my wishes here, Verse 11, I also wish you would decree that whoever alters this edict, let a timber be pulled from his house and erected and let him be hanged on it. Sounds like what happened to Haman, doesn't it? And let his house be made a refuse heap because of this. So, hey, if wicked men refuse to honor God, well, then at least they'll have to honor the governing official who honors God. for the time being. And God will punish the unrepentant by turning his eternal habitations into a pile of refuse which burns forever. That's what Jesus describes hell as, like a junkyard, a trash heap that burns forever. And so for now, the king, this earthly king, will turn a wicked man's earthly home into a refuse heap. Same punishment, just different order of magnitude. Verse 12. And may the God who causes his name to dwell there destroy any king or people who put their hand to alter it or to destroy this house of God, which is in Jerusalem. I, Darius, issue a decree. Let it be done diligently. Okay, so that's the letter that they received in return. Last study, we saw the letter they sent out and we thought, here we go again, same story. And they got quite a response, one that they were not expecting. So how did these mid-level bureaucrats respond to the letter? Then Tatanai, governor of the region beyond the river, Shethar-Baznai and their companions diligently did according to what King Darius had sent. So, Call me a hopeless romantic, but this reminds me of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. He's divesting himself of weapons of mass destruction as quickly as his bureaucrats can find them. Not because he's had a change of heart, but because he wants to keep his heart right where it is, in his chest, beating. So the bad guys obeyed the king who is siding in a wonderful way with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah with Ezra the priest and Zerubbabel, the governor of Palestine, of Judah. And also he's the general contractor, so to speak, of the temple project. Now this next verse 14 covers a great part of the story. It encompasses the next four years of construction right through to the completion of the second temple. also called Zerubbabel's temple. Verse 14. So the elders of the Jews built and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai, the prophet, and Zechariah, the son of Ido, son of Ido. And they built and finished it, the temple, according to the commandment of the God of Israel and according to the command of Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. Now, notice again and let your mind keep a mental note of when these prophets lived and ministered. Haggai and Zechariah were prophets of the building of the second temple. And that's helpful. I try to make mental notes like bookmarks of when certain prophets were working and ministering so that if you happen to hear a quote from their book, or turn and read a chapter, you know the historical context. If you don't, you open Zechariah and you're reading, you could get something out of it. But it's a lot more helpful when you know, where does he fit in? Is he before Noah? Is he during the time of... Where is he? Is he with Jeroboam, the king? Well, if you know, Zechariah and Haggai are involved with the encouraging the Jews to rebuild the temple after it had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, you have a pretty good idea. Okay, this is just over four centuries before Christ was born. It was half a millennium after David and Solomon. It was a century or so after Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. So you start to put it together. And when you then read, you know the historical setting in it. It makes more sense. By the way, if these two are the prophets of the second temple, Haggai and Zechariah, who were the prophets of the first temple, of Solomon's temple? There were three, and you should be able to guess one. Nathan. Nathan. But then there were two more. There was Ahijah and Edo. I-D-D-O. Now, it's not the Edo we just read, Zechariah, the son of Edo. That's centuries later. But what's with that? Nathan, Ahijah, and Edo were the prophets of the first temple. Prophets of the second temple were Haggai and Zechariah. And if you consider Herod's temple the third one, who was the prophet then? Well, John the Baptist. So you've got three prophets for the first temple, two for the second, and one for the third. This prophet Zechariah, son of Edo, He really wasn't the son of Edo. He was the grandson of Edo. He's actually Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Edo. But in Ezra, and only in Ezra here, he's referred to as Zechariah, son of Edo. And I actually think, you know, God likes to do that. Even though Jason may take me to task with this. But God likes to cross the T's, dot the I's, He likes the parallelism. And it seems like, well, we've got Edo, the prophet for the first temple, and here we are half a millennium later. We're building the second temple. Let's get another Edo on the scene. Because Edo, what does he do? He doesn't do much other than he prophesies of Solomon and his time building the temple and the kings that followed Solomon, Rehoboam and Ahijah. And And the Bible repeatedly says that he was a prophet who wrote down the record of what these guys did, but we've lost the record. But he was the prophet, one of the three of the first temple. And so anyway, I think that's why God refers to Zechariah as the son of Edo, who's really his grandfather. Okay, let's read again. Verse 14, the last sentence, and they built and finished it according to the commandment of the God of Israel. And according to the command of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. And I've mentioned the difficulty in identifying who these ancient Persian kings are. And that Artaxerxes, he's the guy who married Esther, protected the Jews and told Nehemiah he could go rebuild the city and the wall. And then their son Cyrus, allowed the Jews to begin rebuilding the temple. But then he turned against them sometime later. And by the word of Darius, who was quite a bit later, the project resumed and the temple rebuilt. Oh, by the way, I brought this book. Bishop Usher did this book. It's been out of print in English for 400 years. So it's an old book. And it was just republished. this year by Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham's group. So I'm really thrilled and it's a brilliant history. He's an accomplished historian of the ancient world and he's an expert at the Bible. And so he attempts to combine ancient history with biblical history and try to put as authoritatively as he could what happened in which years. What I'm hoping is Now that this is available again, which it has not been, not even on the internet, you were not able to get this. So now that it's available, I'm hoping that some conservative Christian scholars will do a thorough and complete re-evaluation and a harmony of Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian history with the biblical record. Take a new shot at it. I know that Christians have been working on that And their work is being published in some creationist journals, including in Ken Ham's TJ, Technical Journal. But I'm hoping that work will be expanded. And I think this will be a great resource because Bishop Usher's done an extraordinary job at a first crack at the project. Okay, let's continue with Ezra chapter 6, verse 15. By the way, When we break, if anybody wants to look at this, just grab it. Ezra 6.15. Now the temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar. That's the last month of the Jewish calendar. The temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius. Now a numerologist could have a heyday with that. Since Jason's in the room, I'll just continue. this month of Adar that was their 12th month just prior to the Passover so it corresponds to the end of winter and the beginning of spring verse 16 then the children of Israel the priest and the Levites and the rest of the descendants of the captivity celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy and praise the Lord Undoubtedly, for many, it was only a superficial revival. For many, it wasn't a real revival. They're just going along with it. But for a good number, there was obviously a real heart, repentance, conversion, a desire to please God. So how many had the history become part of their actual personal relationship with God? We don't know, but it was very possibly significant. And this was a great milestone, the rebuilding of the temple, because the temple was the center of Jewish spiritual life, their culture, history, and their social center. And it was what helped them keep their national identity over the next four centuries until the first coming of the Messiah. So they remained an identifiable group of Jews from the time of Abraham right till the time of Christ and even till today. Verse 17, And they offered sacrifices at the dedication of this house of God, 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 lambs, all paid for, no doubt, out of the cheerful heart of Governor Tatanai, and as a sin offering for all Israel, 12 male goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. So because there were 12 tribes and God had said, use goats as a sin offering, they offered 12 goats. Now my guess is they paid for them themselves. That's my guess. But why 12 tribes? I thought the northern 10 tribes were lost. Well, they pretty much were lost. Remember, Israel had a civil war north and south. The north had the 10 tribes called the kingdom of Israel. The south was Judah and Judah was mostly the tribe of Judah and Simeon in the south and the Negev, a little bit of Benjamin just north of Jerusalem. And so when the Jews returned from Babylon to Judah, it was mostly all men of the tribe of Judah. And there were some Levites and descendants of Aaron, some priests, and maybe a few of Simeon and a few of Benjamin, but mostly just Judah and Levi and the priests, sons of Aaron. So why did they do 12 goats for 12 tribes? Well, even though they were not there, a couple of things were going on. One, they could offer the sacrifices for their brothers wherever they were in the world. But two, they wanted to reconstitute the 12 tribes, at least symbolically, even if they were not there in actuality. In the priesthood, the sons of Aaron, now remember Moses was of the tribe of Levi. Pops, do you know what tribe you're from, your family? You're Jewish, right? Who knows these days, right? We don't know. But probably most of the Jews who we identify as Jews are from the tribe of Judah or Levi. Jacob had 12 sons. Levi was the third. Judah was the fourth. Of the tribe of Levi, Levi entered into Egypt with a couple of his sons and they multiplied and eventually from the sons of Levi came Moses. And Moses had a brother Aaron. So Aaron was the high priest and Aaron's sons are priests. But his cousins... were not priests. They're still of the tribe of Levi, but they can't be priests because they're not his sons. So what do we call those guys? Levites. And God gave the Levites the job of helping the priests. Thus, they decided to do 12 goats, even though the 12 tribes, for the most part, were no more. The northern 10 went to Assyria and the Borg-like Assyrians assimilated them. And some historians say you can trace going up into Europe, but it's not as clear as tracing the Jews who were taken into Babylon because they returned to Judah and they were the Jews mostly who were there when the Romans came and occupied at the time of Christ. And then in AD 70, there was an uprising of the Jews and the Romans crushed the uprising and destroyed Jerusalem, leveled the temple, eventually saw the suicide of a couple thousand Jews, was it, on the mountain fortress of Masada. And so those Jews then in AD 70 were more identifiable and they were scattered. And so most of the Jews that we're familiar with today are Jews of the southern kingdom of Judah. Ezra 6, verse 18. They assigned the priests to their divisions and the Levites to their divisions over the service of God in Jerusalem as it is written in the book of Moses. So God had said specifically, here's what the priests do and here's what the Levites do. And so they took upon themselves those roles again. But also, King David had taken the priesthood, the sons of Aaron, and I think it's in 1 Chronicles 24, he took the sons of Aaron and he divided them into 24 groups or 24 courses or orders. And so that through the year, they would cycle through those 24 and they would know when their family had to go to the temple to do the work and they'd all take turns. So that by the time you get to, The New Testament, John the Baptist, his father's name was Zechariah and he was a priest. So he was the son of Aaron and he was of the order of Abijah. And Abijah was the eighth of the 24 groups that David broke the priesthood up into so that they would know what time of the year each group was due to work at the temple. So it was the time for the order of Abijah to go work at the temple. So Zechariah went, him and all his close relatives. Well, after they came back from Babylon, they had lost those 24 orders. They only had priests from a few of them. So what could they do? They reconstituted the 24, even though they didn't have actual family members from the original 24. Still, they were all descendants of Aaron. So they took upon themselves the names of the 24 families that David had divided. So when it says here they assigned the priests to their divisions and the Levites, as it is written in the book of Moses, the book of Moses told them their main roles, but then it was David, his work in the book of Chronicles that broke them up into their priestly divisions. Verse 19, And the descendants of the captivity kept the Passover... on the 14th day of the first month. And that's exactly what God had commanded through Moses in the book of Exodus, that you're to keep this day, the 14th day of the first month, as the Passover for all your generations. And it turned out to be that day when they were killing the Passover lamb to celebrate the Passover. As the Jews are killing the Passover lamb, that's the day that Jesus Christ was crucified, on that day. And in Exodus, God says, four days before the Passover, you're to pay the money to buy the Passover lamb on that day. And so in the Gospels, it's hard to peg it exactly, but we can see that Judas paid, well, Judas was paid by the high priest 30 pieces of silver to purchase Jesus Christ, who is the Passover lamb, to buy him as the sacrifice for the whole nation a few days before Christ was actually crucified. So my guess is that that happened on the 10th day of the month of Nisan. And it was actually originally called the month of Abib, which was the Jewish name. But when the Jews were taken into exile... In Babylon, when they came back 70 years later, they had all pagan names of the month. When God said, your year shall begin in the month of the Passover, they gave up on that. And so they began keeping their calendar. You know, the Jewish New Year, what's that feast called? The Jewish New Year is Rosh Hashanah. Is that right? And they keep that. That's when the Babylonians started their year. It's not when God said, do it at the month of the Passover. And the original Jewish biblical names for the months, they stopped using. And after 70 years in a foreign country, you come back and you use the pagan names, which they did. And not that that's evil, but so the month of Nisan is the Babylonian name for the month. It was originally Abib. Okay. So from this, when they kept the Passover here in verse 19, They would do that for the next 450 years or so until the time of Jesus Christ when he came as the lamb from heaven and was offered up. Verse 20, for the priest and the Levites had purified themselves. All of them were ritually clean and they slaughtered the Passover lambs for all the descendants of the captivity, for their brethren, the priests, So after the Passover, beginning immediately, there was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which would last a week. And they couldn't put yeast in the bread. And yeast is leaven. It causes the bread to decay. It breaks it down. The bacteria rots the wheat. And as it rots it, it produces the waste result is carbon dioxide. And that gas causes the bread to rise. And so unleavened bread is when the bread does not decompose. It'll stay for a long time. It won't go bad. Jesus Christ was the bread from heaven. So he's the Passover lamb. He was killed like the Passover lamb without his bones being broken. And then the Jews immediately began keeping the feast of unleavened bread when the bread would not decompose. And their Jewish scriptures said that his body would not decompose in the grave. And Jesus Christ, the bread from heaven, was put into the grave and he did not decompose. While in every house in Israel, the bread was not decomposing. And what's the next feast? The next one on the calendar in Leviticus 23 is the feast of first fruits. And that would fall on that Sunday. So you have the Passover, the feast of unleavened bread. Christ is in the tomb. The next feast is on Sunday, the feast of first fruits. That's when Christ rose from the dead. The first fruits from the dead, Jesus Christ. before the rest of us as we will follow Him in resurrection. So the Jewish feasts were symbolic and prophetic of Christ's ministry for us. And let's finish with verse 22. They kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with joy, for the Lord made them joyful and turned the heart of the king of Assyria toward them to strengthen their hands in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel. May God bless you all.
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Join Nicole McBurney and Pastor Bob Enyart for *Theology Thursday*, where scripture comes alive through deep dives, cultural commentary, and a dash of humor. Whether it's exploring the poetic justice in Ezra, unpacking prophetic timelines, or drawing surprising parallels between King Darius and modern politics, this show offers fresh insights with a Christian worldview. From burnt offerings to the Feast of Unleavened Bread, you'll learn how history, theology, and prophecy connect to our lives today—often with a witty twist.
SPEAKER 01 :
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 02 :
For the burnt offerings of the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine, and oil, according to the request of the priests who are in Jerusalem, let it be given them day by day without fail. That's just so funny. Poetic justice doesn't begin to describe it. And he's obviously rubbing salt into a wound here. What would that be like today? It would be like telling the Democrats in the Senate that they have to fund Don Wildman's American Family Association. You guys got to pay for that. You got to pay for James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Oh yeah, whatever it costs to reinstall Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument, You got to pay for that too. It would just kill him. That's not what Tat and I and company wanted to hear. So just in case they're not understanding the king's intent, verse 10, do this that they may offer sacrifices of sweet aroma to the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons. So he's saying, I want them to pray for me. I want the blessings of their God upon me and my household. Now, by the way, the Bible speaks often of animals sacrificed as burnt offerings, describing the smell as a sweet aroma. And why does it do that? Well, of course, if you have a backyard barbecue, you got spare ribs or lamb chops on an open fire, smells great. But, That's not necessarily the point. Yeah, it smells great, but it's a sweet aroma because it's acceptable to God as a substitutionary sacrifice. God wants to redeem his children who have rebelled against him, but he can't just make believe we never hurt anyone, we never did anything wrong. Because we've sinned, there has to be a punishment for the sin The only acceptable punishment, since we are eternal creatures who now deserve eternal death, the only way that God could forgive that is to pay for it with something that's valued or worth more than the debt, equal or more than the debt. So what's worth more than the eternal death of millions or billions of human beings? What's worth that much? Well, in all of creation, There's no animal that's worth that much, no tree, no star, no angel. The only thing that could be worth that much is the creator, God the son. So God decided that he would offer himself as a blood sacrifice to die for us so that we can have new life, so that the debt would be justly paid for. And so the Bible refers to the sweet aroma of, to the Lord as God accepting the animal sacrifices as pointing to Christ's sacrifice. That's why we read in Isaiah 53, verse 10, speaking of the crucifixion, that it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Now that's an especially harsh verse to read a week after most all of us went to see The Passion, Mel Gibson's movie, And we saw the suffering Christ went through. And then we read, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. So that the crucifixion was at the same time wonderfully beautiful and utterly horrible. Horrible in what Christ had to go through, but beautiful because God loved us so much. The Son and the Father loved us so much that he was willing to do that for us. Okay. Okay. So Darius, he's speaking like he's a believer. It's amazing how he is interested in getting the blessings of the God of Israel. And just in case, Tat and I, the governor and your cohorts, just in case, now wait a minute, don't go anywhere. I'm not done yet. Just in case you need some fatherly encouragement to make sure you adhere to my wishes here, Verse 11, I also wish you would decree that whoever alters this edict, let a timber be pulled from his house and erected and let him be hanged on it. Sounds like what happened to Haman, doesn't it? And let his house be made a refuse heap because of this. So, hey, if wicked men refuse to honor God, well, then at least they'll have to honor the governing official who honors God. for the time being. And God will punish the unrepentant by turning his eternal habitations into a pile of refuse which burns forever. That's what Jesus describes hell as, like a junkyard, a trash heap that burns forever. And so for now, the king, this earthly king, will turn a wicked man's earthly home into a refuse heap. Same punishment, just different order of magnitude. Verse 12. And may the God who causes his name to dwell there destroy any king or people who put their hand to alter it or to destroy this house of God, which is in Jerusalem. I, Darius, issue a decree. Let it be done diligently. Okay, so that's the letter that they received in return. Last study, we saw the letter they sent out and we thought, here we go again, same story. And they got quite a response, one that they were not expecting. So how did these mid-level bureaucrats respond to the letter? Then Tatanai, governor of the region beyond the river, Shethar-Baznai and their companions diligently did according to what King Darius had sent. So, Call me a hopeless romantic, but this reminds me of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. He's divesting himself of weapons of mass destruction as quickly as his bureaucrats can find them. Not because he's had a change of heart, but because he wants to keep his heart right where it is, in his chest, beating. So the bad guys obeyed the king who is siding in a wonderful way with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah with Ezra the priest and Zerubbabel, the governor of Palestine, of Judah. And also he's the general contractor, so to speak, of the temple project. Now this next verse 14 covers a great part of the story. It encompasses the next four years of construction right through to the completion of the second temple. also called Zerubbabel's temple. Verse 14. So the elders of the Jews built and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai, the prophet, and Zechariah, the son of Ido, son of Ido. And they built and finished it, the temple, according to the commandment of the God of Israel and according to the command of Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. Now, notice again and let your mind keep a mental note of when these prophets lived and ministered. Haggai and Zechariah were prophets of the building of the second temple. And that's helpful. I try to make mental notes like bookmarks of when certain prophets were working and ministering so that if you happen to hear a quote from their book, or turn and read a chapter, you know the historical context. If you don't, you open Zechariah and you're reading, you could get something out of it. But it's a lot more helpful when you know, where does he fit in? Is he before Noah? Is he during the time of... Where is he? Is he with Jeroboam, the king? Well, if you know, Zechariah and Haggai are involved with the encouraging the Jews to rebuild the temple after it had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, you have a pretty good idea. Okay, this is just over four centuries before Christ was born. It was half a millennium after David and Solomon. It was a century or so after Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. So you start to put it together. And when you then read, you know the historical setting in it. It makes more sense. By the way, if these two are the prophets of the second temple, Haggai and Zechariah, who were the prophets of the first temple, of Solomon's temple? There were three, and you should be able to guess one. Nathan. Nathan. But then there were two more. There was Ahijah and Edo. I-D-D-O. Now, it's not the Edo we just read, Zechariah, the son of Edo. That's centuries later. But what's with that? Nathan, Ahijah, and Edo were the prophets of the first temple. Prophets of the second temple were Haggai and Zechariah. And if you consider Herod's temple the third one, who was the prophet then? Well, John the Baptist. So you've got three prophets for the first temple, two for the second, and one for the third. This prophet Zechariah, son of Edo, He really wasn't the son of Edo. He was the grandson of Edo. He's actually Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Edo. But in Ezra, and only in Ezra here, he's referred to as Zechariah, son of Edo. And I actually think, you know, God likes to do that. Even though Jason may take me to task with this. But God likes to cross the T's, dot the I's, He likes the parallelism. And it seems like, well, we've got Edo, the prophet for the first temple, and here we are half a millennium later. We're building the second temple. Let's get another Edo on the scene. Because Edo, what does he do? He doesn't do much other than he prophesies of Solomon and his time building the temple and the kings that followed Solomon, Rehoboam and Ahijah. And And the Bible repeatedly says that he was a prophet who wrote down the record of what these guys did, but we've lost the record. But he was the prophet, one of the three of the first temple. And so anyway, I think that's why God refers to Zechariah as the son of Edo, who's really his grandfather. Okay, let's read again. Verse 14, the last sentence, and they built and finished it according to the commandment of the God of Israel. And according to the command of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. And I've mentioned the difficulty in identifying who these ancient Persian kings are. And that Artaxerxes, he's the guy who married Esther, protected the Jews and told Nehemiah he could go rebuild the city and the wall. And then their son Cyrus, allowed the Jews to begin rebuilding the temple. But then he turned against them sometime later. And by the word of Darius, who was quite a bit later, the project resumed and the temple rebuilt. Oh, by the way, I brought this book. Bishop Usher did this book. It's been out of print in English for 400 years. So it's an old book. And it was just republished. this year by Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham's group. So I'm really thrilled and it's a brilliant history. He's an accomplished historian of the ancient world and he's an expert at the Bible. And so he attempts to combine ancient history with biblical history and try to put as authoritatively as he could what happened in which years. What I'm hoping is Now that this is available again, which it has not been, not even on the internet, you were not able to get this. So now that it's available, I'm hoping that some conservative Christian scholars will do a thorough and complete re-evaluation and a harmony of Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian history with the biblical record. Take a new shot at it. I know that Christians have been working on that And their work is being published in some creationist journals, including in Ken Ham's TJ, Technical Journal. But I'm hoping that work will be expanded. And I think this will be a great resource because Bishop Usher's done an extraordinary job at a first crack at the project. Okay, let's continue with Ezra chapter 6, verse 15. By the way, When we break, if anybody wants to look at this, just grab it. Ezra 6.15. Now the temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar. That's the last month of the Jewish calendar. The temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius. Now a numerologist could have a heyday with that. Since Jason's in the room, I'll just continue. this month of Adar that was their 12th month just prior to the Passover so it corresponds to the end of winter and the beginning of spring verse 16 then the children of Israel the priest and the Levites and the rest of the descendants of the captivity celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy and praise the Lord Undoubtedly, for many, it was only a superficial revival. For many, it wasn't a real revival. They're just going along with it. But for a good number, there was obviously a real heart, repentance, conversion, a desire to please God. So how many had the history become part of their actual personal relationship with God? We don't know, but it was very possibly significant. And this was a great milestone, the rebuilding of the temple, because the temple was the center of Jewish spiritual life, their culture, history, and their social center. And it was what helped them keep their national identity over the next four centuries until the first coming of the Messiah. So they remained an identifiable group of Jews from the time of Abraham right till the time of Christ and even till today. Verse 17, And they offered sacrifices at the dedication of this house of God, 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 lambs, all paid for, no doubt, out of the cheerful heart of Governor Tatanai, and as a sin offering for all Israel, 12 male goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. So because there were 12 tribes and God had said, use goats as a sin offering, they offered 12 goats. Now my guess is they paid for them themselves. That's my guess. But why 12 tribes? I thought the northern 10 tribes were lost. Well, they pretty much were lost. Remember, Israel had a civil war north and south. The north had the 10 tribes called the kingdom of Israel. The south was Judah and Judah was mostly the tribe of Judah and Simeon in the south and the Negev, a little bit of Benjamin just north of Jerusalem. And so when the Jews returned from Babylon to Judah, it was mostly all men of the tribe of Judah. And there were some Levites and descendants of Aaron, some priests, and maybe a few of Simeon and a few of Benjamin, but mostly just Judah and Levi and the priests, sons of Aaron. So why did they do 12 goats for 12 tribes? Well, even though they were not there, a couple of things were going on. One, they could offer the sacrifices for their brothers wherever they were in the world. But two, they wanted to reconstitute the 12 tribes, at least symbolically, even if they were not there in actuality. In the priesthood, the sons of Aaron, now remember Moses was of the tribe of Levi. Pops, do you know what tribe you're from, your family? You're Jewish, right? Who knows these days, right? We don't know. But probably most of the Jews who we identify as Jews are from the tribe of Judah or Levi. Jacob had 12 sons. Levi was the third. Judah was the fourth. Of the tribe of Levi, Levi entered into Egypt with a couple of his sons and they multiplied and eventually from the sons of Levi came Moses. And Moses had a brother Aaron. So Aaron was the high priest and Aaron's sons are priests. But his cousins... were not priests. They're still of the tribe of Levi, but they can't be priests because they're not his sons. So what do we call those guys? Levites. And God gave the Levites the job of helping the priests. Thus, they decided to do 12 goats, even though the 12 tribes, for the most part, were no more. The northern 10 went to Assyria and the Borg-like Assyrians assimilated them. And some historians say you can trace going up into Europe, but it's not as clear as tracing the Jews who were taken into Babylon because they returned to Judah and they were the Jews mostly who were there when the Romans came and occupied at the time of Christ. And then in AD 70, there was an uprising of the Jews and the Romans crushed the uprising and destroyed Jerusalem, leveled the temple, eventually saw the suicide of a couple thousand Jews, was it, on the mountain fortress of Masada. And so those Jews then in AD 70 were more identifiable and they were scattered. And so most of the Jews that we're familiar with today are Jews of the southern kingdom of Judah. Ezra 6, verse 18. They assigned the priests to their divisions and the Levites to their divisions over the service of God in Jerusalem as it is written in the book of Moses. So God had said specifically, here's what the priests do and here's what the Levites do. And so they took upon themselves those roles again. But also, King David had taken the priesthood, the sons of Aaron, and I think it's in 1 Chronicles 24, he took the sons of Aaron and he divided them into 24 groups or 24 courses or orders. And so that through the year, they would cycle through those 24 and they would know when their family had to go to the temple to do the work and they'd all take turns. So that by the time you get to, The New Testament, John the Baptist, his father's name was Zechariah and he was a priest. So he was the son of Aaron and he was of the order of Abijah. And Abijah was the eighth of the 24 groups that David broke the priesthood up into so that they would know what time of the year each group was due to work at the temple. So it was the time for the order of Abijah to go work at the temple. So Zechariah went, him and all his close relatives. Well, after they came back from Babylon, they had lost those 24 orders. They only had priests from a few of them. So what could they do? They reconstituted the 24, even though they didn't have actual family members from the original 24. Still, they were all descendants of Aaron. So they took upon themselves the names of the 24 families that David had divided. So when it says here they assigned the priests to their divisions and the Levites, as it is written in the book of Moses, the book of Moses told them their main roles, but then it was David, his work in the book of Chronicles that broke them up into their priestly divisions. Verse 19, And the descendants of the captivity kept the Passover... on the 14th day of the first month. And that's exactly what God had commanded through Moses in the book of Exodus, that you're to keep this day, the 14th day of the first month, as the Passover for all your generations. And it turned out to be that day when they were killing the Passover lamb to celebrate the Passover. As the Jews are killing the Passover lamb, that's the day that Jesus Christ was crucified, on that day. And in Exodus, God says, four days before the Passover, you're to pay the money to buy the Passover lamb on that day. And so in the Gospels, it's hard to peg it exactly, but we can see that Judas paid, well, Judas was paid by the high priest 30 pieces of silver to purchase Jesus Christ, who is the Passover lamb, to buy him as the sacrifice for the whole nation a few days before Christ was actually crucified. So my guess is that that happened on the 10th day of the month of Nisan. And it was actually originally called the month of Abib, which was the Jewish name. But when the Jews were taken into exile... In Babylon, when they came back 70 years later, they had all pagan names of the month. When God said, your year shall begin in the month of the Passover, they gave up on that. And so they began keeping their calendar. You know, the Jewish New Year, what's that feast called? The Jewish New Year is Rosh Hashanah. Is that right? And they keep that. That's when the Babylonians started their year. It's not when God said, do it at the month of the Passover. And the original Jewish biblical names for the months, they stopped using. And after 70 years in a foreign country, you come back and you use the pagan names, which they did. And not that that's evil, but so the month of Nisan is the Babylonian name for the month. It was originally Abib. Okay. So from this, when they kept the Passover here in verse 19, They would do that for the next 450 years or so until the time of Jesus Christ when he came as the lamb from heaven and was offered up. Verse 20, for the priest and the Levites had purified themselves. All of them were ritually clean and they slaughtered the Passover lambs for all the descendants of the captivity, for their brethren, the priests, So after the Passover, beginning immediately, there was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which would last a week. And they couldn't put yeast in the bread. And yeast is leaven. It causes the bread to decay. It breaks it down. The bacteria rots the wheat. And as it rots it, it produces the waste result is carbon dioxide. And that gas causes the bread to rise. And so unleavened bread is when the bread does not decompose. It'll stay for a long time. It won't go bad. Jesus Christ was the bread from heaven. So he's the Passover lamb. He was killed like the Passover lamb without his bones being broken. And then the Jews immediately began keeping the feast of unleavened bread when the bread would not decompose. And their Jewish scriptures said that his body would not decompose in the grave. And Jesus Christ, the bread from heaven, was put into the grave and he did not decompose. While in every house in Israel, the bread was not decomposing. And what's the next feast? The next one on the calendar in Leviticus 23 is the feast of first fruits. And that would fall on that Sunday. So you have the Passover, the feast of unleavened bread. Christ is in the tomb. The next feast is on Sunday, the feast of first fruits. That's when Christ rose from the dead. The first fruits from the dead, Jesus Christ. before the rest of us as we will follow Him in resurrection. So the Jewish feasts were symbolic and prophetic of Christ's ministry for us. And let's finish with verse 22. They kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with joy, for the Lord made them joyful and turned the heart of the king of Assyria toward them to strengthen their hands in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel. May God bless you all.
The duo also delves into the biology of sex, contrasting it with gender, and systematically outlines how sex is scientifically cut and dry, with roots traceable through human history back to Genesis. The episode offers listeners a journey into etymology, with insights into how societal influences shape the way words transform and ultimately the perception of concepts like gender in public discourse. An enlightening episode for anyone looking to understand the linguistic complexities and societal implications of gender terminology.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sexologist is just, I don't know, I guess a scholarly term for deranged pervert. And, you know, anyone with the title of sexologist should be kept far away from children.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stay away from my daughter.
SPEAKER 02 :
And your family. You don't even want to touch them with a six-foot pole. Any normal people.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in creation. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I'm Doug McBurney.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I'm Nicole McBurney. It's good to be on the air talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 01 :
That's right. It's Real Science Radio and Fred Williams is on assignment this week. And so we're joined today by Real Science Radio contributing editor and producer Nicole McBurney with some analysis on one of the more important stories of the 21st century and to set it up. I want to look back to the 20th century briefly because I remember listening to a radio talk show in 1994. The talk show host was G. Gordon Liddy, and he was warning his listeners that the subtle replacement of the word sex with gender was happening, and he noticed it because he's kind of a word geek. He noticed it, and he said, first of all, it's grammatically incorrect. And second, he noted that this was not by accident. Now, Nicole, you don't remember this, but the early 1990s were the full court press of the homosexual rights movement. The first full court press open out there everywhere. And G. Gordon Liddy noticed during this full court press to normalize. perversion, that the word sex was subtly and slowly being replaced in the media by the word gender. And he said it wasn't an accident. And he said there were nefarious motives behind it. And so now fast forward 30 years, And we're in the midst of what some have dubbed the collapse of Western civilization into gender insanity. Help us understand.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so gender insanity, I'd rather just call it insanity. Because calling it gender insanity would be adopting the terminology that you have just said is incorrect. Or I guess as your radio talk show host had said... And I would completely agree with him that it wasn't by accident. And we'll get into the reasons why a little bit later on the show. I would just call it the ultimate manifestation of a century's worth of rebellion against God's design for family.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow. Well, that's putting quite a fine point on it. And now some people might think that talk of grammatical terms is going to be a dry and boring subject, but this is not dry and boring because this is an analysis of the corruption of our society. And we're going to start in the area of grammar, and then we're going to take it from there. Let's talk about the grammar a little bit. What have you found out?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so the word gender originally, and I realize that, you know, when people, if people ask me what my gender is, I'm not going to be confused by it because, and this is an argument that people give all the time is, well, language changes. So, you know, deal with it. And I recognize that. But the term gender, when used as a noun, was originally a grammatical term for a category or a class that a noun falls into. And the word itself, the word gender, comes from the Latin word genus, which means kind, family, or order. So you're familiar with taxonomy. You know scientists will classify an animal by their genus. And genus also comes from an even earlier word, or the Proto-Indo-Perian Proto-Indo-European root gene, meaning to give birth or to beget. And this same root gives us our words generate, genetic, genealogy, or homogenous, for example. I mentioned the PIE languages. Are you familiar with the PIE languages?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, PI, I'm familiar with pie. And I mean, not just the kind you can eat. I'm familiar with 3.14. All right. So am I in the ballpark?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, not even close. But let me give you a third pie for you. This PIE is an acronym. It stands for Proto-Indo-European. And it's a... The Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language. It's not a real language, so you won't be able to go out into an archaeological dig and find a potsherd that says Arfaxid was here in the Proto-Indo-European language. But based off of how language has, I guess, evolved over time and distinguished itself into many other distinct languages, linguists can use these patterns and go backwards and reconstruct this mother language, this common ancestor. And this common ancestor encompasses languages all the way from the Indo-Iranian, like Bengali and Hindi, to the Greek and the Germanic and Italic languages. So all the way from India to Europe, you will find a common ancestor for these languages here. And that's a wide, broad area, which is pretty impressive.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have thought Hindi was related to German, but apparently the linguists do.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and so I had a graphic there of this family tree, and I'm putting up another graphic, kind of showing you how these words could be related. Here's the word two, T-W-O, as in the number two. And if you look, if you compare it to many of these other PIE languages, you see like dos, duo two twa they're all very similar and so linguists have linked this back to one word uh dwoh d-w-o-h and that's what they guess the proto the original language for this family would have looked like so the number two all goes back to this one common word and there are other words not just the number two but this is a really good example of that um and so um
SPEAKER 01 :
Words can have a common ancestor, unlike proteins, which we learned from. We learned that on Real Science Radio recently in an interview with Sal Cordova on proteins.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, we will link to that, because that was a fantastic show. I recommend everybody go watch that. But languages do have a common ancestor, and I guess the earliest we can really go back is the Tower of Babel, and I think that's about when you could have pinned the Proto-Indo-European languages would have existed. So I had just, out of curiosity, googled when the Proto-Indo-European languages, when linguists would have guessed that such a language would have existed, and they say probably around 1250, 2500 BC. And according to Answers in Genesis, Answers in Genesis has estimated that the Tower of Babel was around 2200 BC. So about that time frame would have been whenever God split the languages and Proto-Indo-European would have been one of those languages, it seems.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay, interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
But going back to the word gender, the topic of today's show, when we look at the Webster's 1828 Dictionary, we can see that this word was also used as a verb, and it means to beget or to breed, which is why in the King James, we should give a warning.
SPEAKER 01 :
Warning, warning, warning, Will Robinson, there are Bible verses up ahead. For those in the audience who advocate pluralism and diversity, we know here at Real Science Radio that you would censor anyone who would dare quote a Bible verse in public, so this warning gives you fair notice. Raw, unadulterated truth is about to be uttered.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's right. So we go to Leviticus chapter 19, verse 19. It says, quote, Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, unquote. And also in 2 Timothy 2.20, quote, But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing they do gender strifes, unquote. So we typically don't use the word gender as a verb today, but it was prevalent in the past. King James is evidence for that. But we mostly use it as a noun today. So that brings us back to gender as a case system in grammar.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, now before we jump into gender as a case system, let me just see if I'm understanding here. So thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. So in that phrase, gender has something to do with breeding. So one could say that it has something to do with Sex in the breeding sense, but it doesn't have to do with sex in the male-female categorization sense. And then in the Apostle Paul's instruction to Timothy, he's saying avoid unlearned questions knowing that they do gender strifes, meaning they cause strifes. They cause something to happen.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
So neither of those have to do with a male-female sex construct.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, not inherently. And as we get into this, the case systems, like I was saying, so the Proto-Indo-European languages, I'm just going to start calling them the Pi languages because that's much easier to say. So a lot of the Pi-derived languages have a tooth case system, masculine-feminine, or a three-case system, masculine-feminine, and neuter. But if you go outside of the Pi languages, you have Zulu, for example, which has 17 genders. 17 17 oh the zoo zulus must be popular over at the u.n with 17 genders right well and this shows that gender does not is not distinctly male and female or it doesn't have to be based off male and female as a category and i'm putting up a chart here and this is a category for people Not necessarily male and female, but you can see the word for boy, child, friend, parent, and person here all have a similar shape at the beginning. It all starts with um. So the word for boy is umfana, child umtwana, friend is umgane, parent umzali, and person umuntu. And for any of our Zulu speakers out there, I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong. I tried. But you can see there that they...
SPEAKER 01 :
We invite any Zulu speakers to call with corrections.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, absolutely. But you can see my point is that they all have that first um distinguishing that the noun here is talking about a person, and then the ending differentiates, it specifies what kind of person are we talking about. So that's how these nouns work in a gendered language. These are called inflections. The different shape is the inflection of the noun.
SPEAKER 01 :
Ah, okay. So... And none of the 17 genders in the Zulu language have to do with male, female, gender fluid, gender unconcerned, gender inconsiderate, gender confused, or any of that stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, that whole thing came much later, long after Zulu was around. But then if we go back to the Pi languages, there are also some languages that don't have gender systems like Turkish, Persian, and English. English does have gender for the pronouns, and the reason is that's just leftover of the old English system that used to be gendered. for all of its nouns. So, like, if you're familiar with Spanish, you would know that there's masculine and feminine and neuter. So, like, la mesa, the table, is feminine. El tomate is masculine. The tomato is masculine in Spanish. But in English, we would just say the table, the tomato. It's just... We use the same article, and the ending doesn't really specify anything in our nouns. But we do... But in Old English, it used to be that we did have these masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. And we lost those between the 11th and 14th century as the language lost its inflection. And our... our sentence structure, English syntax became much more rigid, so now we typically use a subject-verb-object order. So, like, I would say, I ate the soup. I wouldn't say... I could say, the soup I ate, but that sounds weird, and it's... Maybe you might see that in poetry, but it's not really standard English. Maybe an uneducated person might say something like that. But that was fairly common in Old English. It wouldn't have sounded as weird because the different inflections in the noun would have been very clear what the subject and what the object was.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay. Interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so in Old English, subject, verb, object was the most common word order, but you could switch them around. And In a highly inflected language like Greek, where the nouns have different endings and different articles depending on what part of speech they are, you can make a word salad and it still makes sense. It's not confusing. It doesn't sound weird. Whereas in English, you have to be very specific. You'd have to add more words to clarify what you mean.
SPEAKER 01 :
So you could put together word salads and basically be a speechwriter for any number of candidates for higher office these days. And so this does indicate that with English, there has been a devolution of the language. The language has become less sophisticated and I would say a little more legalistic, a little more rigid, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we've definitely lost. And this happens just because of various influences. Like I had mentioned earlier, people say language changes. And really, the reason language changes is because of various influences, whether another country comes in, like... William the Conqueror came in in the 11th century, so we now have a lot of French loan words in our language. Or cultural influences might have affected language changes. So all these various influences have caused us to lose our inflection and make our sentences more rigid. And now we generally have to use more words to describe what we mean. So I have this here. This is a book, Beowulf. And Beowulf is the English language's oldest epic, and I have it in parallel. So it has the Old English over here on this page and on the other page in Modern English. And if you just look at what I'm holding up, you can see that the Old English has, per line, fewer words than compared to the Modern English.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
So where, you know, a sentence might have four words in the old English, you might need ten words in the modern English. So that just shows you over time. And I think that's also a reflection of general laziness in people. We just, we start to break down. And so we need more information in order to pass on what we mean. Instead of using one or two words, now we need like ten.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, right. And it's sort of an algorithm that you can watch if you read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. You can see that more words are required to describe situations because the situations... just become more and more convoluted you know at the very beginning when god was in the garden with adam and eve he could speak in very simple terms with them yeah but by the time it came to to write the law down for the jews there's like 613 different laws that had to be so i i see a similar algorithm in the bible and in language wow yeah
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so I kind of want to talk a little bit about the origin of gendered and gendered languages, because not all languages are gendered. Like, Chinese, for example, has been around pretty much as far back as we can go, and it's not a gendered language. So it's not something that's necessary for language, and I think that's something that came out during the Tower of Babel. I have no other explanation. I think God's just creative, and He's just like, I'm going to do a little bit of this over here, and we're not going to do that over here. So... That's why we have some languages that do and some languages that don't. So in English, whenever we think of gender, you know, we tend to think male and female. And whereas in another language that is gendered, like maybe Spanish, growing up learning that language, you wouldn't really think of objects being male and female, they're just masculine and feminine, that's just how the language is. And so whenever I study a language, like Spanish, and they say, well, the genders are just kind of arbitrary, there's no reason for the table to be spanned, the table to be feminine in spanish while the book is masculine and that confused me because i'm thinking how can you categorize something arbitrarily like that just didn't make sense and as i was as i was studying this i realize it's because i'm looking at it backwards So let me kind of try and walk through this to help you understand where I'm coming from. So if we go back in time to the Sumerian languages, which linguists say is the oldest known language, and they did not have the masculine-feminine distinction, but rather a human-non-human distinction. And then later on, the Hittite language, which branched off the Proto-Indo-European early on, had an animate and non-animate. So kind of going from human to non-human, now you have like animate, meaning you could include animals and maybe some plants. So you're getting a little bit more specific. And then later on down the line, you get this from animate and non-animate. Now you have neuter, masculine, and feminine. And it's attributed to a man named Protagoras, who was a Greek philosopher and rhetorician. Linguists say he was the first to label nouns as masculine, feminine, and neuter. So I think up until this time, you know, in history, peace is not very common. You're almost always fighting some battle or some blight, just trying to survive. So I don't think many people really had the time to sit down and analyze and categorize languages. But then in the 5th century BC, and we get this source from Aristotle, he says Protagoras was the one who kind of sat down and he was fascinated with grammar. And he's like, I see a pattern. We have these three categories, and I'm going to classify them as male, female, and neuter. And I think the reason he classified it as male, female, and neuter was because that's a concept anyone can grasp, right? Masculine, feminine... Male, female, and neuter are three very distinct categories. At least we knew that up until modern times. And so he would look at these words and say, you know, okay, the word for woman here has this ending and this article, and so do these words over here. I'm going to classify those as the female nouns. And then he did the same for the male nouns. And then... Maybe whatever else was the neuter nouns. And there are some, you know, exceptions to the rules. But generally speaking, words that have a similar ending will have the same article. Like in English, we have a and the as articles. Greek has a lot more depending on what part of speech the noun is. So depending on masculine, feminine, or neuter, those articles would change. And so because he was kind of the first to categorize these, he noticed that some of these feminine nouns, such as menace, which means wrath and frenzy, or pelex, meaning helmet, he said these female nouns have the same ending as a lot of these masculine nouns. So we should stop using the female articles for these and categorize this as masculine. So I guess he was... picking going through and he's like you know some of these aren't really matching up so anyway that I just found that really interesting and so he had he had some influence on the structure of the language going forward after his analysis yeah it seems like I'm not sure if they categorized it to his liking or not and like I said I'm not really familiar with Greek but it was interesting he noticed these patterns he's like wait these don't really fit so going back to I said it was confusing to me that masculine, feminine, and neuter were arbitrary. And the reason I was thinking that is because I was thinking someone just sat down and decided this word's going to be masculine, this one's going to be feminine, and that one's neuter. But the language was already there. He was the one who just noticed the pattern and just categorized it by these masculine, feminine, neuter labels. He could have picked black, white, and gray. It didn't really matter what he called them. So in my English-speaking mind, I'm thinking backwards, thinking someone picked these, but that's just how language develops. So the arbitrariness comes into what words got what ending. That just kind of developed naturally. I don't know exactly what influences went in there. Maybe that was just the way God made it. That's the best I can say for that. So that's the aspect of gender and the linguistics. And if there's any linguists out there who want to correct me because I'm not a linguist, I'm just a word nerd, please reach out and I will make corrections in the KGov over at rsr.org in the show notes. But now I want to get into the science of sex, male and female. But before we do that, I do need to ask you the interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, that's right. The interesting fact of the week. We can't forget that. Everyone's on the edge of their seat.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Lay it on me. All right, so. Let's hear it.
SPEAKER 02 :
What do you call an animal with both male and female characteristics?
SPEAKER 01 :
Animal with both male and female. David Bowie.
SPEAKER 02 :
No.
SPEAKER 01 :
No? Not quite. Okay, well, I have absolutely no idea what you would call that, but I'm sure you're going to tell me.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, the answer is genandromorph.
SPEAKER 01 :
Genandromorph. Okay, well, you know, if I would have taken a little bit more time and gone through my rudimentary understanding of Latin and English, I probably could have come up, because it sounds like someone just mashed that word together. Pretty much. Three or four different words.
SPEAKER 02 :
It might be pronounced genandromorph, actually. I'm not totally sure. But gyno, meaning woman, andro, man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Uh-huh, andro, genandromorph. So there you go. I get it. I mean, it makes sense to me. I could see how that word. Right. Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So there you go. And I got some pictures up showing you it's a butterfly, a lobster and a couple of birds. And these animals sometimes have something goes wrong in their genetics and they have 50 percent male, 50 percent female. And the internal organs reflect that as well, not just the outside. But I do want to point out that this is an anomaly. This is not something that is normal.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, right. And I also want to be clear that I don't want to imply that there's anything like that going on with creativity. No, he's without excuse for how strange he was. Anyway.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so these anomalous, maybe you would even call them deformities?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I would call them a deformity because it negatively impacts the organism. As far as I know, a genandromorph cannot reproduce. And like I showed in the picture, a lobster, a butterfly, and a bird, It really only affects birds, insects, and crustaceans. It doesn't affect people. So some people will claim that there are intersex, but that's not what this is. That's not what a genandromorph is. An intersex person is just someone who had something go wrong developmentally to where their sex is not very clear. But they're still one or the other. Just the developmental, the physical development went wrong somewhere. And it's not just the reproductive organs that get affected. It's also typically like the joints are misshapen or you have weak ligaments, other physical problems to organs. It's not just one aspect. It's bad for the entire body.
SPEAKER 01 :
I see. And I remember, by the way, back during the full court press in the early 90s, when the normalization of sexual perversion was just full blown. If you spoke in the public square with the advocates of perversion, they would act like there was one of these intersex people around every corner. They were everywhere and they were always a topic that they brought up in order to try to normalize what... we always knew was abnormal and sad, by the way.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, like I said, it impacts people negatively who have this deformity. So sex, and let's just clarify, I'm talking about males and females, so we're getting into biology. It's a lot more cut and dry than the etymological origins of the word gender and gender categorizations and stuff. So explaining this will go by a lot quicker. But before we do that, a little bit of etymology. The word sex... comes from the pi root, the Proto-Indo-European root, sek, S-E-K, meaning to cut, which gives us words like section, dissection, insect, and even saw. And so that kind of reminds me of back in Genesis when God took woman from man, he cut her away from him. So that's pretty interesting. And so people and most animals and many plants reproduce sexually. In humans, the gametes, which are the ova and the sperm, each have 23 chromosomes, but you need 46 to make a new human being. So the males get half and the females get the other half. And God designed these two gametes to come together to produce offspring. And so Genesis 2.24 says, So God did separate men and women, but He still created a mechanism for them to come back together to become one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, and there's an interesting word right there that I've always wondered about. Because the word cleave, so you know what a cleaver is, right? Yeah. chop something with a cleaver so cleave implies to to separate but in the in the text it also implies to join together which is just really sophisticated interesting little word yeah that i've always wondered about we'll look further into that in fact we'll have our crack staff look into that yeah we should we'll put a little note on what we find over at uh rsr.org for
SPEAKER 02 :
Interested audience members.
SPEAKER 01 :
Cleave.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. But let's get back to the show here. So chromosomes, I also want to clarify here, chromosomes are packets of DNA that give an individual Greetings out there, brightest audience.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is Doug McBurney jumping into our own show. We've run out of time on KLTT. To hear the rest of this broadcast, be sure to check in at the podcast at rsr.org.
In this enlightening episode of Real Science Radio, Nicole and Doug McBurney tackle the complex subject of gender, tracing its origins from grammar to modern societal constructs. Listeners will learn about the etymological foundations of gender-related terms, the disappearance and evolution of gendered language structures, and the intricate relationships between language change and cultural shifts. Bridging historical insights with contemporary debates, this episode provides a critical perspective on how language influences perceptions of gender and societal norms. Tune in for an engaging analysis filled with historical examples and thought-provoking discussions.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sexologist is just, I don't know, I guess a scholarly term for deranged pervert. And, you know, anyone with the title of sexologist should be kept far away from children.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stay away from my daughter.
SPEAKER 02 :
And your family. You don't even want to touch them with a six-foot pole. Any normal people.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in creation. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I'm Doug McBurney.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I'm Nicole McBurney. It's good to be on the air talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 01 :
That's right. It's Real Science Radio and Fred Williams is on assignment this week. And so we're joined today by Real Science Radio contributing editor and producer Nicole McBurney with some analysis on one of the more important stories of the 21st century and to set it up. I want to look back to the 20th century briefly because I remember listening to a radio talk show in 1994. The talk show host was G. Gordon Liddy, and he was warning his listeners that the subtle replacement of the word sex with gender was happening, and he noticed it because he's kind of a word geek. He noticed it, and he said, first of all, it's grammatically incorrect. And second, he noted that this was not by accident. Now, Nicole, you don't remember this, but the early 1990s were the full court press of the homosexual rights movement. The first full court press open out there everywhere. And G. Gordon Liddy noticed during this full court press to normalize. perversion, that the word sex was subtly and slowly being replaced in the media by the word gender. And he said it wasn't an accident. And he said there were nefarious motives behind it. And so now fast forward 30 years, And we're in the midst of what some have dubbed the collapse of Western civilization into gender insanity. Help us understand.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so gender insanity, I'd rather just call it insanity. Because calling it gender insanity would be adopting the terminology that you have just said is incorrect. Or I guess as your radio talk show host had said... And I would completely agree with him that it wasn't by accident. And we'll get into the reasons why a little bit later on the show. I would just call it the ultimate manifestation of a century's worth of rebellion against God's design for family.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow. Well, that's putting quite a fine point on it. And now some people might think that talk of grammatical terms is going to be a dry and boring subject, but this is not dry and boring because this is an analysis of the corruption of our society. And we're going to start in the area of grammar, and then we're going to take it from there. Let's talk about the grammar a little bit. What have you found out?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so the word gender originally, and I realize that, you know, when people, if people ask me what my gender is, I'm not going to be confused by it because, and this is an argument that people give all the time is, well, language changes. So, you know, deal with it. And I recognize that. But the term gender, when used as a noun, was originally a grammatical term for a category or a class that a noun falls into. And the word itself, the word gender, comes from the Latin word genus, which means kind, family, or order. So you're familiar with taxonomy. You know scientists will classify an animal by their genus. And genus also comes from an even earlier word, or the Proto-Indo-Perian Proto-Indo-European root gene, meaning to give birth or to beget. And this same root gives us our words generate, genetic, genealogy, or homogenous, for example. I mentioned the PIE languages. Are you familiar with the PIE languages?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, PI, I'm familiar with pie. And I mean, not just the kind you can eat. I'm familiar with 3.14. All right. So am I in the ballpark?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, not even close. But let me give you a third pie for you. This PIE is an acronym. It stands for Proto-Indo-European. And it's a... The Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language. It's not a real language, so you won't be able to go out into an archaeological dig and find a potsherd that says Arfaxid was here in the Proto-Indo-European language. But based off of how language has, I guess, evolved over time and distinguished itself into many other distinct languages, linguists can use these patterns and go backwards and reconstruct this mother language, this common ancestor. And this common ancestor encompasses languages all the way from the Indo-Iranian, like Bengali and Hindi, to the Greek and the Germanic and Italic languages. So all the way from India to Europe, you will find a common ancestor for these languages here. And that's a wide, broad area, which is pretty impressive.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have thought Hindi was related to German, but apparently the linguists do.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and so I had a graphic there of this family tree, and I'm putting up another graphic, kind of showing you how these words could be related. Here's the word two, T-W-O, as in the number two. And if you look, if you compare it to many of these other PIE languages, you see like dos, duo two twa they're all very similar and so linguists have linked this back to one word uh dwoh d-w-o-h and that's what they guess the proto the original language for this family would have looked like so the number two all goes back to this one common word and there are other words not just the number two but this is a really good example of that um and so um
SPEAKER 01 :
Words can have a common ancestor, unlike proteins, which we learned from. We learned that on Real Science Radio recently in an interview with Sal Cordova on proteins.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, we will link to that, because that was a fantastic show. I recommend everybody go watch that. But languages do have a common ancestor, and I guess the earliest we can really go back is the Tower of Babel, and I think that's about when you could have pinned the Proto-Indo-European languages would have existed. So I had just, out of curiosity, googled when the Proto-Indo-European languages, when linguists would have guessed that such a language would have existed, and they say probably around 1250, 2500 BC. And according to Answers in Genesis, Answers in Genesis has estimated that the Tower of Babel was around 2200 BC. So about that time frame would have been whenever God split the languages and Proto-Indo-European would have been one of those languages, it seems.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay, interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
But going back to the word gender, the topic of today's show, when we look at the Webster's 1828 Dictionary, we can see that this word was also used as a verb, and it means to beget or to breed, which is why in the King James, we should give a warning.
SPEAKER 01 :
Warning, warning, warning, Will Robinson, there are Bible verses up ahead. For those in the audience who advocate pluralism and diversity, we know here at Real Science Radio that you would censor anyone who would dare quote a Bible verse in public, so this warning gives you fair notice. Raw, unadulterated truth is about to be uttered.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's right. So we go to Leviticus chapter 19, verse 19. It says, quote, Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, unquote. And also in 2 Timothy 2.20, quote, But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing they do gender strifes, unquote. So we typically don't use the word gender as a verb today, but it was prevalent in the past. King James is evidence for that. But we mostly use it as a noun today. So that brings us back to gender as a case system in grammar.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, now before we jump into gender as a case system, let me just see if I'm understanding here. So thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. So in that phrase, gender has something to do with breeding. So one could say that it has something to do with Sex in the breeding sense, but it doesn't have to do with sex in the male-female categorization sense. And then in the Apostle Paul's instruction to Timothy, he's saying avoid unlearned questions knowing that they do gender strifes, meaning they cause strifes. They cause something to happen.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
So neither of those have to do with a male-female sex construct.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, not inherently. And as we get into this, the case systems, like I was saying, so the Proto-Indo-European languages, I'm just going to start calling them the Pi languages because that's much easier to say. So a lot of the Pi-derived languages have a tooth case system, masculine-feminine, or a three-case system, masculine-feminine, and neuter. But if you go outside of the Pi languages, you have Zulu, for example, which has 17 genders. 17 17 oh the zoo zulus must be popular over at the u.n with 17 genders right well and this shows that gender does not is not distinctly male and female or it doesn't have to be based off male and female as a category and i'm putting up a chart here and this is a category for people Not necessarily male and female, but you can see the word for boy, child, friend, parent, and person here all have a similar shape at the beginning. It all starts with um. So the word for boy is umfana, child umtwana, friend is umgane, parent umzali, and person umuntu. And for any of our Zulu speakers out there, I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong. I tried. But you can see there that they...
SPEAKER 01 :
We invite any Zulu speakers to call with corrections.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, absolutely. But you can see my point is that they all have that first um distinguishing that the noun here is talking about a person, and then the ending differentiates, it specifies what kind of person are we talking about. So that's how these nouns work in a gendered language. These are called inflections. The different shape is the inflection of the noun.
SPEAKER 01 :
Ah, okay. So... And none of the 17 genders in the Zulu language have to do with male, female, gender fluid, gender unconcerned, gender inconsiderate, gender confused, or any of that stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, that whole thing came much later, long after Zulu was around. But then if we go back to the Pi languages, there are also some languages that don't have gender systems like Turkish, Persian, and English. English does have gender for the pronouns, and the reason is that's just leftover of the old English system that used to be gendered. for all of its nouns. So, like, if you're familiar with Spanish, you would know that there's masculine and feminine and neuter. So, like, la mesa, the table, is feminine. El tomate is masculine. The tomato is masculine in Spanish. But in English, we would just say the table, the tomato. It's just... We use the same article, and the ending doesn't really specify anything in our nouns. But we do... But in Old English, it used to be that we did have these masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. And we lost those between the 11th and 14th century as the language lost its inflection. And our... our sentence structure, English syntax became much more rigid, so now we typically use a subject-verb-object order. So, like, I would say, I ate the soup. I wouldn't say... I could say, the soup I ate, but that sounds weird, and it's... Maybe you might see that in poetry, but it's not really standard English. Maybe an uneducated person might say something like that. But that was fairly common in Old English. It wouldn't have sounded as weird because the different inflections in the noun would have been very clear what the subject and what the object was.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay. Interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so in Old English, subject, verb, object was the most common word order, but you could switch them around. And In a highly inflected language like Greek, where the nouns have different endings and different articles depending on what part of speech they are, you can make a word salad and it still makes sense. It's not confusing. It doesn't sound weird. Whereas in English, you have to be very specific. You'd have to add more words to clarify what you mean.
SPEAKER 01 :
So you could put together word salads and basically be a speechwriter for any number of candidates for higher office these days. And so this does indicate that with English, there has been a devolution of the language. The language has become less sophisticated and I would say a little more legalistic, a little more rigid, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we've definitely lost. And this happens just because of various influences. Like I had mentioned earlier, people say language changes. And really, the reason language changes is because of various influences, whether another country comes in, like... William the Conqueror came in in the 11th century, so we now have a lot of French loan words in our language. Or cultural influences might have affected language changes. So all these various influences have caused us to lose our inflection and make our sentences more rigid. And now we generally have to use more words to describe what we mean. So I have this here. This is a book, Beowulf. And Beowulf is the English language's oldest epic, and I have it in parallel. So it has the Old English over here on this page and on the other page in Modern English. And if you just look at what I'm holding up, you can see that the Old English has, per line, fewer words than compared to the Modern English.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
So where, you know, a sentence might have four words in the old English, you might need ten words in the modern English. So that just shows you over time. And I think that's also a reflection of general laziness in people. We just, we start to break down. And so we need more information in order to pass on what we mean. Instead of using one or two words, now we need like ten.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, right. And it's sort of an algorithm that you can watch if you read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. You can see that more words are required to describe situations because the situations... just become more and more convoluted you know at the very beginning when god was in the garden with adam and eve he could speak in very simple terms with them yeah but by the time it came to to write the law down for the jews there's like 613 different laws that had to be so i i see a similar algorithm in the bible and in language wow yeah
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so I kind of want to talk a little bit about the origin of gendered and gendered languages, because not all languages are gendered. Like, Chinese, for example, has been around pretty much as far back as we can go, and it's not a gendered language. So it's not something that's necessary for language, and I think that's something that came out during the Tower of Babel. I have no other explanation. I think God's just creative, and He's just like, I'm going to do a little bit of this over here, and we're not going to do that over here. So... That's why we have some languages that do and some languages that don't. So in English, whenever we think of gender, you know, we tend to think male and female. And whereas in another language that is gendered, like maybe Spanish, growing up learning that language, you wouldn't really think of objects being male and female, they're just masculine and feminine, that's just how the language is. And so whenever I study a language, like Spanish, and they say, well, the genders are just kind of arbitrary, there's no reason for the table to be spanned, the table to be feminine in spanish while the book is masculine and that confused me because i'm thinking how can you categorize something arbitrarily like that just didn't make sense and as i was as i was studying this i realize it's because i'm looking at it backwards So let me kind of try and walk through this to help you understand where I'm coming from. So if we go back in time to the Sumerian languages, which linguists say is the oldest known language, and they did not have the masculine-feminine distinction, but rather a human-non-human distinction. And then later on, the Hittite language, which branched off the Proto-Indo-European early on, had an animate and non-animate. So kind of going from human to non-human, now you have like animate, meaning you could include animals and maybe some plants. So you're getting a little bit more specific. And then later on down the line, you get this from animate and non-animate. Now you have neuter, masculine, and feminine. And it's attributed to a man named Protagoras, who was a Greek philosopher and rhetorician. Linguists say he was the first to label nouns as masculine, feminine, and neuter. So I think up until this time, you know, in history, peace is not very common. You're almost always fighting some battle or some blight, just trying to survive. So I don't think many people really had the time to sit down and analyze and categorize languages. But then in the 5th century BC, and we get this source from Aristotle, he says Protagoras was the one who kind of sat down and he was fascinated with grammar. And he's like, I see a pattern. We have these three categories, and I'm going to classify them as male, female, and neuter. And I think the reason he classified it as male, female, and neuter was because that's a concept anyone can grasp, right? Masculine, feminine... Male, female, and neuter are three very distinct categories. At least we knew that up until modern times. And so he would look at these words and say, you know, okay, the word for woman here has this ending and this article, and so do these words over here. I'm going to classify those as the female nouns. And then he did the same for the male nouns. And then... Maybe whatever else was the neuter nouns. And there are some, you know, exceptions to the rules. But generally speaking, words that have a similar ending will have the same article. Like in English, we have a and the as articles. Greek has a lot more depending on what part of speech the noun is. So depending on masculine, feminine, or neuter, those articles would change. And so because he was kind of the first to categorize these, he noticed that some of these feminine nouns, such as menace, which means wrath and frenzy, or pelex, meaning helmet, he said these female nouns have the same ending as a lot of these masculine nouns. So we should stop using the female articles for these and categorize this as masculine. So I guess he was... picking going through and he's like you know some of these aren't really matching up so anyway that I just found that really interesting and so he had he had some influence on the structure of the language going forward after his analysis yeah it seems like I'm not sure if they categorized it to his liking or not and like I said I'm not really familiar with Greek but it was interesting he noticed these patterns he's like wait these don't really fit so going back to I said it was confusing to me that masculine, feminine, and neuter were arbitrary. And the reason I was thinking that is because I was thinking someone just sat down and decided this word's going to be masculine, this one's going to be feminine, and that one's neuter. But the language was already there. He was the one who just noticed the pattern and just categorized it by these masculine, feminine, neuter labels. He could have picked black, white, and gray. It didn't really matter what he called them. So in my English-speaking mind, I'm thinking backwards, thinking someone picked these, but that's just how language develops. So the arbitrariness comes into what words got what ending. That just kind of developed naturally. I don't know exactly what influences went in there. Maybe that was just the way God made it. That's the best I can say for that. So that's the aspect of gender and the linguistics. And if there's any linguists out there who want to correct me because I'm not a linguist, I'm just a word nerd, please reach out and I will make corrections in the KGov over at rsr.org in the show notes. But now I want to get into the science of sex, male and female. But before we do that, I do need to ask you the interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, that's right. The interesting fact of the week. We can't forget that. Everyone's on the edge of their seat.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Lay it on me. All right, so. Let's hear it.
SPEAKER 02 :
What do you call an animal with both male and female characteristics?
SPEAKER 01 :
Animal with both male and female. David Bowie.
SPEAKER 02 :
No.
SPEAKER 01 :
No? Not quite. Okay, well, I have absolutely no idea what you would call that, but I'm sure you're going to tell me.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, the answer is genandromorph.
SPEAKER 01 :
Genandromorph. Okay, well, you know, if I would have taken a little bit more time and gone through my rudimentary understanding of Latin and English, I probably could have come up, because it sounds like someone just mashed that word together. Pretty much. Three or four different words.
SPEAKER 02 :
It might be pronounced genandromorph, actually. I'm not totally sure. But gyno, meaning woman, andro, man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Uh-huh, andro, genandromorph. So there you go. I get it. I mean, it makes sense to me. I could see how that word. Right. Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So there you go. And I got some pictures up showing you it's a butterfly, a lobster and a couple of birds. And these animals sometimes have something goes wrong in their genetics and they have 50 percent male, 50 percent female. And the internal organs reflect that as well, not just the outside. But I do want to point out that this is an anomaly. This is not something that is normal.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, right. And I also want to be clear that I don't want to imply that there's anything like that going on with creativity. No, he's without excuse for how strange he was. Anyway.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so these anomalous, maybe you would even call them deformities?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I would call them a deformity because it negatively impacts the organism. As far as I know, a genandromorph cannot reproduce. And like I showed in the picture, a lobster, a butterfly, and a bird, It really only affects birds, insects, and crustaceans. It doesn't affect people. So some people will claim that there are intersex, but that's not what this is. That's not what a genandromorph is. An intersex person is just someone who had something go wrong developmentally to where their sex is not very clear. But they're still one or the other. Just the developmental, the physical development went wrong somewhere. And it's not just the reproductive organs that get affected. It's also typically like the joints are misshapen or you have weak ligaments, other physical problems to organs. It's not just one aspect. It's bad for the entire body.
SPEAKER 01 :
I see. And I remember, by the way, back during the full court press in the early 90s, when the normalization of sexual perversion was just full blown. If you spoke in the public square with the advocates of perversion, they would act like there was one of these intersex people around every corner. They were everywhere and they were always a topic that they brought up in order to try to normalize what... we always knew was abnormal and sad, by the way.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, like I said, it impacts people negatively who have this deformity. So sex, and let's just clarify, I'm talking about males and females, so we're getting into biology. It's a lot more cut and dry than the etymological origins of the word gender and gender categorizations and stuff. So explaining this will go by a lot quicker. But before we do that, a little bit of etymology. The word sex... comes from the pi root, the Proto-Indo-European root, sek, S-E-K, meaning to cut, which gives us words like section, dissection, insect, and even saw. And so that kind of reminds me of back in Genesis when God took woman from man, he cut her away from him. So that's pretty interesting. And so people and most animals and many plants reproduce sexually. In humans, the gametes, which are the ova and the sperm, each have 23 chromosomes, but you need 46 to make a new human being. So the males get half and the females get the other half. And God designed these two gametes to come together to produce offspring. And so Genesis 2.24 says, So God did separate men and women, but He still created a mechanism for them to come back together to become one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, and there's an interesting word right there that I've always wondered about. Because the word cleave, so you know what a cleaver is, right? Yeah. chop something with a cleaver so cleave implies to to separate but in the in the text it also implies to join together which is just really sophisticated interesting little word yeah that i've always wondered about we'll look further into that in fact we'll have our crack staff look into that yeah we should we'll put a little note on what we find over at uh rsr.org for
SPEAKER 02 :
Interested audience members.
SPEAKER 01 :
Cleave.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. But let's get back to the show here. So chromosomes, I also want to clarify here, chromosomes are packets of DNA that give an individual Greetings out there, brightest audience.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is Doug McBurney jumping into our own show. We've run out of time on KLTT. To hear the rest of this broadcast, be sure to check in at the podcast at rsr.org.
Join us as we journey through the historical and theological significance of the decrees issued by biblical kings. In this episode, the prophetic voices of Haggai and Zechariah come alive, providing a powerful backdrop to the dedication of the second temple. Understand how these ancient narratives hold relevance for the Christian faith even today, framing our understanding of sacrifice, fulfillment of prophecy, and the enduring nature of divine love as illustrated in Resurrection.
SPEAKER 01 :
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 02 :
For the burnt offerings of the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine, and oil, according to the request of the priests who are in Jerusalem, let it be given them day by day without fail. That's just so funny. Poetic justice doesn't begin to describe it. And he's obviously rubbing salt into a wound here. What would that be like today? It would be like telling the Democrats in the Senate that they have to fund Don Wildman's American Family Association. You guys got to pay for that. You got to pay for James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Oh yeah, whatever it costs to reinstall Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument, You got to pay for that too. It would just kill him. That's not what Tat and I and company wanted to hear. So just in case they're not understanding the king's intent, verse 10, do this that they may offer sacrifices of sweet aroma to the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons. So he's saying, I want them to pray for me. I want the blessings of their God upon me and my household. Now, by the way, the Bible speaks often of animals sacrificed as burnt offerings, describing the smell as a sweet aroma. And why does it do that? Well, of course, if you have a backyard barbecue, you got spare ribs or lamb chops on an open fire, smells great. But, That's not necessarily the point. Yeah, it smells great, but it's a sweet aroma because it's acceptable to God as a substitutionary sacrifice. God wants to redeem his children who have rebelled against him, but he can't just make believe we never hurt anyone, we never did anything wrong. Because we've sinned, there has to be a punishment for the sin The only acceptable punishment, since we are eternal creatures who now deserve eternal death, the only way that God could forgive that is to pay for it with something that's valued or worth more than the debt, equal or more than the debt. So what's worth more than the eternal death of millions or billions of human beings? What's worth that much? Well, in all of creation, There's no animal that's worth that much, no tree, no star, no angel. The only thing that could be worth that much is the creator, God the son. So God decided that he would offer himself as a blood sacrifice to die for us so that we can have new life, so that the debt would be justly paid for. And so the Bible refers to the sweet aroma of, to the Lord as God accepting the animal sacrifices as pointing to Christ's sacrifice. That's why we read in Isaiah 53, verse 10, speaking of the crucifixion, that it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Now that's an especially harsh verse to read a week after most all of us went to see The Passion, Mel Gibson's movie, And we saw the suffering Christ went through. And then we read, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. So that the crucifixion was at the same time wonderfully beautiful and utterly horrible. Horrible in what Christ had to go through, but beautiful because God loved us so much. The Son and the Father loved us so much that he was willing to do that for us. Okay. Okay. So Darius, he's speaking like he's a believer. It's amazing how he is interested in getting the blessings of the God of Israel. And just in case, Tat and I, the governor and your cohorts, just in case, now wait a minute, don't go anywhere. I'm not done yet. Just in case you need some fatherly encouragement to make sure you adhere to my wishes here, Verse 11, I also wish you would decree that whoever alters this edict, let a timber be pulled from his house and erected and let him be hanged on it. Sounds like what happened to Haman, doesn't it? And let his house be made a refuse heap because of this. So, hey, if wicked men refuse to honor God, well, then at least they'll have to honor the governing official who honors God. for the time being. And God will punish the unrepentant by turning his eternal habitations into a pile of refuse which burns forever. That's what Jesus describes hell as, like a junkyard, a trash heap that burns forever. And so for now, the king, this earthly king, will turn a wicked man's earthly home into a refuse heap. Same punishment, just different order of magnitude. Verse 12. And may the God who causes his name to dwell there destroy any king or people who put their hand to alter it or to destroy this house of God, which is in Jerusalem. I, Darius, issue a decree. Let it be done diligently. Okay, so that's the letter that they received in return. Last study, we saw the letter they sent out and we thought, here we go again, same story. And they got quite a response, one that they were not expecting. So how did these mid-level bureaucrats respond to the letter? Then Tatanai, governor of the region beyond the river, Shethar-Baznai and their companions diligently did according to what King Darius had sent. So, Call me a hopeless romantic, but this reminds me of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. He's divesting himself of weapons of mass destruction as quickly as his bureaucrats can find them. Not because he's had a change of heart, but because he wants to keep his heart right where it is, in his chest, beating. So the bad guys obeyed the king who is siding in a wonderful way with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah with Ezra the priest and Zerubbabel, the governor of Palestine, of Judah. And also he's the general contractor, so to speak, of the temple project. Now this next verse 14 covers a great part of the story. It encompasses the next four years of construction right through to the completion of the second temple. also called Zerubbabel's temple. Verse 14. So the elders of the Jews built and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai, the prophet, and Zechariah, the son of Ido, son of Ido. And they built and finished it, the temple, according to the commandment of the God of Israel and according to the command of Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. Now, notice again and let your mind keep a mental note of when these prophets lived and ministered. Haggai and Zechariah were prophets of the building of the second temple. And that's helpful. I try to make mental notes like bookmarks of when certain prophets were working and ministering so that if you happen to hear a quote from their book, or turn and read a chapter, you know the historical context. If you don't, you open Zechariah and you're reading, you could get something out of it. But it's a lot more helpful when you know, where does he fit in? Is he before Noah? Is he during the time of... Where is he? Is he with Jeroboam, the king? Well, if you know, Zechariah and Haggai are involved with the encouraging the Jews to rebuild the temple after it had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, you have a pretty good idea. Okay, this is just over four centuries before Christ was born. It was half a millennium after David and Solomon. It was a century or so after Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. So you start to put it together. And when you then read, you know the historical setting in it. It makes more sense. By the way, if these two are the prophets of the second temple, Haggai and Zechariah, who were the prophets of the first temple, of Solomon's temple? There were three, and you should be able to guess one. Nathan. Nathan. But then there were two more. There was Ahijah and Edo. I-D-D-O. Now, it's not the Edo we just read, Zechariah, the son of Edo. That's centuries later. But what's with that? Nathan, Ahijah, and Edo were the prophets of the first temple. Prophets of the second temple were Haggai and Zechariah. And if you consider Herod's temple the third one, who was the prophet then? Well, John the Baptist. So you've got three prophets for the first temple, two for the second, and one for the third. This prophet Zechariah, son of Edo, He really wasn't the son of Edo. He was the grandson of Edo. He's actually Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Edo. But in Ezra, and only in Ezra here, he's referred to as Zechariah, son of Edo. And I actually think, you know, God likes to do that. Even though Jason may take me to task with this. But God likes to cross the T's, dot the I's, He likes the parallelism. And it seems like, well, we've got Edo, the prophet for the first temple, and here we are half a millennium later. We're building the second temple. Let's get another Edo on the scene. Because Edo, what does he do? He doesn't do much other than he prophesies of Solomon and his time building the temple and the kings that followed Solomon, Rehoboam and Ahijah. And And the Bible repeatedly says that he was a prophet who wrote down the record of what these guys did, but we've lost the record. But he was the prophet, one of the three of the first temple. And so anyway, I think that's why God refers to Zechariah as the son of Edo, who's really his grandfather. Okay, let's read again. Verse 14, the last sentence, and they built and finished it according to the commandment of the God of Israel. And according to the command of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. And I've mentioned the difficulty in identifying who these ancient Persian kings are. And that Artaxerxes, he's the guy who married Esther, protected the Jews and told Nehemiah he could go rebuild the city and the wall. And then their son Cyrus, allowed the Jews to begin rebuilding the temple. But then he turned against them sometime later. And by the word of Darius, who was quite a bit later, the project resumed and the temple rebuilt. Oh, by the way, I brought this book. Bishop Usher did this book. It's been out of print in English for 400 years. So it's an old book. And it was just republished. this year by Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham's group. So I'm really thrilled and it's a brilliant history. He's an accomplished historian of the ancient world and he's an expert at the Bible. And so he attempts to combine ancient history with biblical history and try to put as authoritatively as he could what happened in which years. What I'm hoping is Now that this is available again, which it has not been, not even on the internet, you were not able to get this. So now that it's available, I'm hoping that some conservative Christian scholars will do a thorough and complete re-evaluation and a harmony of Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian history with the biblical record. Take a new shot at it. I know that Christians have been working on that And their work is being published in some creationist journals, including in Ken Ham's TJ, Technical Journal. But I'm hoping that work will be expanded. And I think this will be a great resource because Bishop Usher's done an extraordinary job at a first crack at the project. Okay, let's continue with Ezra chapter 6, verse 15. By the way, When we break, if anybody wants to look at this, just grab it. Ezra 6.15. Now the temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar. That's the last month of the Jewish calendar. The temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius. Now a numerologist could have a heyday with that. Since Jason's in the room, I'll just continue. this month of Adar that was their 12th month just prior to the Passover so it corresponds to the end of winter and the beginning of spring verse 16 then the children of Israel the priest and the Levites and the rest of the descendants of the captivity celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy and praise the Lord Undoubtedly, for many, it was only a superficial revival. For many, it wasn't a real revival. They're just going along with it. But for a good number, there was obviously a real heart, repentance, conversion, a desire to please God. So how many had the history become part of their actual personal relationship with God? We don't know, but it was very possibly significant. And this was a great milestone, the rebuilding of the temple, because the temple was the center of Jewish spiritual life, their culture, history, and their social center. And it was what helped them keep their national identity over the next four centuries until the first coming of the Messiah. So they remained an identifiable group of Jews from the time of Abraham right till the time of Christ and even till today. Verse 17, And they offered sacrifices at the dedication of this house of God, 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 lambs, all paid for, no doubt, out of the cheerful heart of Governor Tatanai, and as a sin offering for all Israel, 12 male goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. So because there were 12 tribes and God had said, use goats as a sin offering, they offered 12 goats. Now my guess is they paid for them themselves. That's my guess. But why 12 tribes? I thought the northern 10 tribes were lost. Well, they pretty much were lost. Remember, Israel had a civil war north and south. The north had the 10 tribes called the kingdom of Israel. The south was Judah and Judah was mostly the tribe of Judah and Simeon in the south and the Negev, a little bit of Benjamin just north of Jerusalem. And so when the Jews returned from Babylon to Judah, it was mostly all men of the tribe of Judah. And there were some Levites and descendants of Aaron, some priests, and maybe a few of Simeon and a few of Benjamin, but mostly just Judah and Levi and the priests, sons of Aaron. So why did they do 12 goats for 12 tribes? Well, even though they were not there, a couple of things were going on. One, they could offer the sacrifices for their brothers wherever they were in the world. But two, they wanted to reconstitute the 12 tribes, at least symbolically, even if they were not there in actuality. In the priesthood, the sons of Aaron, now remember Moses was of the tribe of Levi. Pops, do you know what tribe you're from, your family? You're Jewish, right? Who knows these days, right? We don't know. But probably most of the Jews who we identify as Jews are from the tribe of Judah or Levi. Jacob had 12 sons. Levi was the third. Judah was the fourth. Of the tribe of Levi, Levi entered into Egypt with a couple of his sons and they multiplied and eventually from the sons of Levi came Moses. And Moses had a brother Aaron. So Aaron was the high priest and Aaron's sons are priests. But his cousins... were not priests. They're still of the tribe of Levi, but they can't be priests because they're not his sons. So what do we call those guys? Levites. And God gave the Levites the job of helping the priests. Thus, they decided to do 12 goats, even though the 12 tribes, for the most part, were no more. The northern 10 went to Assyria and the Borg-like Assyrians assimilated them. And some historians say you can trace going up into Europe, but it's not as clear as tracing the Jews who were taken into Babylon because they returned to Judah and they were the Jews mostly who were there when the Romans came and occupied at the time of Christ. And then in AD 70, there was an uprising of the Jews and the Romans crushed the uprising and destroyed Jerusalem, leveled the temple, eventually saw the suicide of a couple thousand Jews, was it, on the mountain fortress of Masada. And so those Jews then in AD 70 were more identifiable and they were scattered. And so most of the Jews that we're familiar with today are Jews of the southern kingdom of Judah. Ezra 6, verse 18. They assigned the priests to their divisions and the Levites to their divisions over the service of God in Jerusalem as it is written in the book of Moses. So God had said specifically, here's what the priests do and here's what the Levites do. And so they took upon themselves those roles again. But also, King David had taken the priesthood, the sons of Aaron, and I think it's in 1 Chronicles 24, he took the sons of Aaron and he divided them into 24 groups or 24 courses or orders. And so that through the year, they would cycle through those 24 and they would know when their family had to go to the temple to do the work and they'd all take turns. So that by the time you get to, The New Testament, John the Baptist, his father's name was Zechariah and he was a priest. So he was the son of Aaron and he was of the order of Abijah. And Abijah was the eighth of the 24 groups that David broke the priesthood up into so that they would know what time of the year each group was due to work at the temple. So it was the time for the order of Abijah to go work at the temple. So Zechariah went, him and all his close relatives. Well, after they came back from Babylon, they had lost those 24 orders. They only had priests from a few of them. So what could they do? They reconstituted the 24, even though they didn't have actual family members from the original 24. Still, they were all descendants of Aaron. So they took upon themselves the names of the 24 families that David had divided. So when it says here they assigned the priests to their divisions and the Levites, as it is written in the book of Moses, the book of Moses told them their main roles, but then it was David, his work in the book of Chronicles that broke them up into their priestly divisions. Verse 19, And the descendants of the captivity kept the Passover... on the 14th day of the first month. And that's exactly what God had commanded through Moses in the book of Exodus, that you're to keep this day, the 14th day of the first month, as the Passover for all your generations. And it turned out to be that day when they were killing the Passover lamb to celebrate the Passover. As the Jews are killing the Passover lamb, that's the day that Jesus Christ was crucified, on that day. And in Exodus, God says, four days before the Passover, you're to pay the money to buy the Passover lamb on that day. And so in the Gospels, it's hard to peg it exactly, but we can see that Judas paid, well, Judas was paid by the high priest 30 pieces of silver to purchase Jesus Christ, who is the Passover lamb, to buy him as the sacrifice for the whole nation a few days before Christ was actually crucified. So my guess is that that happened on the 10th day of the month of Nisan. And it was actually originally called the month of Abib, which was the Jewish name. But when the Jews were taken into exile... In Babylon, when they came back 70 years later, they had all pagan names of the month. When God said, your year shall begin in the month of the Passover, they gave up on that. And so they began keeping their calendar. You know, the Jewish New Year, what's that feast called? The Jewish New Year is Rosh Hashanah. Is that right? And they keep that. That's when the Babylonians started their year. It's not when God said, do it at the month of the Passover. And the original Jewish biblical names for the months, they stopped using. And after 70 years in a foreign country, you come back and you use the pagan names, which they did. And not that that's evil, but so the month of Nisan is the Babylonian name for the month. It was originally Abib. Okay. So from this, when they kept the Passover here in verse 19, They would do that for the next 450 years or so until the time of Jesus Christ when he came as the lamb from heaven and was offered up. Verse 20, for the priest and the Levites had purified themselves. All of them were ritually clean and they slaughtered the Passover lambs for all the descendants of the captivity, for their brethren, the priests, So after the Passover, beginning immediately, there was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which would last a week. And they couldn't put yeast in the bread. And yeast is leaven. It causes the bread to decay. It breaks it down. The bacteria rots the wheat. And as it rots it, it produces the waste result is carbon dioxide. And that gas causes the bread to rise. And so unleavened bread is when the bread does not decompose. It'll stay for a long time. It won't go bad. Jesus Christ was the bread from heaven. So he's the Passover lamb. He was killed like the Passover lamb without his bones being broken. And then the Jews immediately began keeping the feast of unleavened bread when the bread would not decompose. And their Jewish scriptures said that his body would not decompose in the grave. And Jesus Christ, the bread from heaven, was put into the grave and he did not decompose. While in every house in Israel, the bread was not decomposing. And what's the next feast? The next one on the calendar in Leviticus 23 is the feast of first fruits. And that would fall on that Sunday. So you have the Passover, the feast of unleavened bread. Christ is in the tomb. The next feast is on Sunday, the feast of first fruits. That's when Christ rose from the dead. The first fruits from the dead, Jesus Christ. before the rest of us as we will follow Him in resurrection. So the Jewish feasts were symbolic and prophetic of Christ's ministry for us. And let's finish with verse 22. They kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with joy, for the Lord made them joyful and turned the heart of the king of Assyria toward them to strengthen their hands in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel. May God bless you all.
In this thought-provoking episode, we navigate the complexities surrounding the historical evolution of Christian doctrine with Dr. Leighton Flowers. Unpack the layers of Augustine's influence and the ongoing dialogue about free will versus divine determinism. This episode offers insights into the fractious debate among contemporary theologians and how Dr. Wilson's work brings new light to these age-old questions. Tune in to grasp how these debates shape modern-day theological perspectives.
SPEAKER 03 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Baba Neart Live. I'm the pastor of Denver Bible Church. Dr. Leighton Flowers has been on this program previously. You can hear that at kgov.com slash Leighton. And I could give you his credentials, which perhaps we'll do later, but audiences tend to zone out when you give a guest's resume. So let me just say this. Right now on YouTube, Dr. Flowers is hosting the hottest internet channel for talking about God, Soteriology 101. Dr. Leighton Flowers, welcome back to Bob and Yart Live.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you, Bob. I appreciate it so much. It's an honor to be here.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, there has been quite an uproar on the Internet over James White, who I debated years ago downtown Denver at the Brown Palace. James White versus an Oxford-educated theologian, Dr. Ken Wilson, and you're right in the middle of it. So a week ago, we did talk about this on the air, but for those who missed that, can you describe what the dust-up is, and then I have a series of questions for you about it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sure. Dr. Wilson was on our program, Soteriology 101, a couple of years ago. I guess it's maybe 18 months ago or so. And we did an interview about the early church fathers and his particular dissertation, which is Augustine's conversion from traditional free choice to non-free free will, which is another way of saying compatibilism.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Go ahead. Not to interrupt, but you just said a mouthful for a radio audience. Augustine was converted from what to what? What?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, the name of his Oxford thesis is Augustine's conversion from traditional free choice to non-free free will. And what he's trying to say there in that title is that there was a conversion in Augustine's teaching when he first converted from Manichaeanism to into Christianity. He began to defend free will. He adopted what the early church had adopted with regard to man's responsibility in regard to the offer of the gospel. But over the course of his life, he had several different disputes, three major ones, the last of which was with the Pelagian controversy. And in that controversy, as often happens within debate, he was pushed to a further extreme than he had ever been before or the early church had ever been before. And that is to adopt a more deterministic way of salvation, which is more consistent with what we know as Calvinism today.
SPEAKER 03 :
So when Augustine went from free will to non-free free will, sounds like double talk to me. I'm just the talk show host.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it's another way of talking about what Calvinists call compatibilism, which is the concept and idea that man's free will is somehow compatible with God's determining what we will. In my estimation, it is doublespeak as well. It's just not coherent in my estimation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, there's a Knox Theological Seminary in Florida. It was founded, I believe, by D. James Kennedy and his professor of New Testament, Dr. Samuel Lamerson. He and I had a 10-round written debate about these topics years ago. And in the first round, I asked him if he believed in free will, and he said yes. So I was so thrilled then. We did a radio interview before round two. And I asked him, well, a man who commits a crime, do you believe that he was free to not commit that crime? And he said, oh, absolutely not. No, he had no such freedom. Dr. Lamerson, you just said you believe in free will. Well, yes, he has free will, but he's not free not to do what he does. He's not even free not to desire what he desires or to think what he thinks. It's all been decreed. That's right.
SPEAKER 02 :
What they're ultimately saying is they've redefined free will instead of it meaning what we all think of when we think of free will, the ability to do otherwise. In other words, if I accepted the gospel, I could have rejected the gospel, or if I rejected the gospel, I could have accepted the gospel. That's what we think of when we think free will. What the Calvinist has done, they've redefined it to mean doing what you want to do. And so if you do what you want, then that's considered to be free, and thus you're responsible for it. But the underlying presumption there is how do you want what you want? Well, your desires are decreed by God. In other words, God ultimately changes your nature to either make you want to receive the gospel or not. leaves your nature in the fallen condition, which he also decreed, by the way, to only reject the gospel. And so ultimately it's just determinism kind of clouded with an affirmation of a semi-freedom of the will, but it's not real freedom.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so really they've just punted from a free will to a free want, but like you just said, they believe that God has decreed their wants. And they could not, no person could want other than how they were decreed to want according to their theology. So compatibilist, also the term libertarian free will, to me these are like doubly redundant because your will is your ability to decide, and a free will is just sort of redundantly telling you what your will is, and to have libertarian free will That's doubly redundant, and we only have to do that because people are not being forthright about what they actually believe.
SPEAKER 02 :
Even in the political world, you have this happen where the word liberal, for example, becomes a bad word, and it can't get elected, so they change it to progressive or something of that nature. The same thing can happen in the theological world where a particular idea like determinism or something of that nature can become less popular. or denial of free will can become unpopular, and therefore you change the vernacular. And this is one of the reasons that Dr. Allen there at Southwestern says that Calvinists have the same vocabulary, but they have a very different dictionary. And they have defined some words very differently than what we typically think of them as, and sometimes it can get kind of confusing.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so I'm writing that down, same vocabulary with a different dictionary. So the dispute then that arose between James White, who our audience knows of him real well, and Dr. Ken Wilson, he's newer on the scene to our audience. How did James White become aware of Ken Wilson's thesis?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, we asked him when he was on the program to possibly produce a kind of a layman's summary of the thesis so that more people could have access to it because he knows seven languages and he uses all the languages here in the thesis. And so it's impossible really to read through it unless you happen to know seven languages. And so we just asked him if he might consider producing a smaller volume, more of a summary for layman. And he did that within a few months, in fact.
SPEAKER 03 :
So that book, The Foundation of Augustinian Calvinism, that came after you interviewed Dr. Wilson?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we requested that he do that, and he was gracious enough to take his time and to publish that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow, thanks for doing that. That's going to be a huge resource for the body of Christ to find out where this popular theology, where and how it originated.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and his thesis is really not brand new information. Obviously, he quotes from a lot of other scholars, Augustinian scholars, who say virtually the same thing with regard to the transition. I think what he's bringing new to the table is that this transition didn't happen earlier as some scholars used to think. It actually happened during the Pelagius controversy, because some people try to argue that it's when he really began to study Romans that he transferred to this more compatibilistic, non-free-free will. But the truth is, it's not actually until later in his life that he really changed over when he was beginning to debate Pelagius.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don't recall at what point in his writing career Augustine wrote Confessions, and I read that decades ago. We recently took a quote from that and put it on our website at kgov.com slash Augustine or Augustine. And in there, he says, I mean, he admits to me it's the biggest confession in confessions. He says whenever he finds a difficulty in the Bible, especially in Paul's epistles, basically he says, I read them in light of Plato. I realized that whatever truth I had read in the Platonist, that's what I find in the Bible. And then he goes on to emphasize a Platonic philosophical claim. So I don't know, perhaps you do, Dr. Flowers, how early or late did Augustine write Confessions? But at least at that point, he was already looking to Greek philosophy for aid in interpreting the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Dr. Wilson suspects that he did not really transition his views until around 412, which would probably be after his writing of the Confessions. But still, he was a philosopher primarily. I mean, that's not to say he didn't do theological work. It's just prior to becoming a Christian, he was in the philosophical world. He was influenced by, as you already mentioned, Neoplatonic views, Stoicism, and then Manichaeanism for a good 10 years of his life. And they are philosophically more deterministic. Obviously, there's a lot of difference between even those three groups and very different than what we would know as Calvinism today. And so we're not trying to say that he brought in all of the weird Gnostic perspectives. We're just saying that the determinism within his philosophical training influenced how he interpreted Paul. And therefore, he introduced within the church for the very first time a more Calvinistic or compatibilistic view. reading of Romans 9 and other texts such as Ephesians 1 and the others that are hotly debated today.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow. So previously, more than a decade ago, we did a program. We've been on the air for 29 years, five days a week. We did a program based on the writings of Marston Forster, and they went through the first 300 years of the early church Christian writings. And they demonstrated, and we go through so many of the quotes on that program, and it's right online at kgov.com slash 300, that the early Christian leaders believed that human beings had a functional will and could respond freely or not to God's offer of salvation. And there was no such doctrine, nothing like irresistible grace, where God had to impose belief on someone. Right. When I listened to you and Dr. Ken Wilson in this dispute with James White, I was really excited to hear that really, for the most part, it's the first four centuries where the church was teaching, clearly teaching with one voice, free will.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's correct. And it's interesting you mentioned Marston and Forrester's work. I have it sitting right here next to me, God's Strategy in Human History, a great work. But the interesting thing about this is that you don't have to even look to scholars like Forrester and Marston who agree with us theologically. You can actually look at Reformed scholars. There are quotes from, for example, Herman Bavinck, who was a well-known Reformed scholar who explicitly teaches that the early church was believed in the freedom of the will and that they believed that you could accept the proffered grace of God. That's a quote there. They affirmed that you could accept or reject the proffered grace of God. And he even goes on to say the church's teaching did not include a doctrine of absolute predestination. and irresistible grace. And I provide quotes from not only John Calvin, but from Lorraine Bettner and Sam Storms, who is a modern-day theologian who works with John Piper's ministry, and others who are intellectually honest enough to admit what I think James White isn't willing to admit, and that is the first time we see anything even remotely resembling irresistible grace or this total inability from birth concept, it's found in Augustine's work.
SPEAKER 03 :
That video that you produced, and what a great job you did narrating it also, about the dispute between James White and Ken Wilson, it has these quotes from these highly respected Reformed Church historians, and they, beyond any doubt, they confirm Ken Wilson's thesis And Dr. James White, he's just thrashing and desperate, but he's just wrong, but he's clinging to something that I think the information age is spelling the end of an argument for Calvinists. I think they will not be able to maintain any longer... that they have recovered church history, that the early church fathers were teaching what they teach. In fact, they were not. Augustine's writings is what they emphasize in contradiction to the voice of the early church. So the argument isn't really, and Dr. Flowers, I believe I heard you say this in your live broadcast, which, was that on Sunday or Saturday? You did a great...
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you. Yeah, we recorded Friday, and then it came up on Saturday, correct?
SPEAKER 03 :
But this does show that the Calvinists who argue that they're the ones representing the teaching of the early church, that that is a false argument. That's not valid.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's true. And I think what you have to emphasize is how much influence this one person, Augustine, had on the entire church. A lot of people have underestimated this. And so we're not trying to say that Calvinists don't go straight to the Scripture and don't try to interpret the Scripture. We understand that there's influence that has been brought into the church that gives credence to this interpretation versus the original, I think, understanding of the Scriptures. And even R.C. Sproul, who obviously is a well-known Calvinist, he said this. He says, it has been said that all of Western theology is a footnote to the work of Augustine. This is because no other writer, with the exception of the biblical authors, has had more influence on Christendom. When Martin Luther and John Calvin were accused of teaching new doctrine, they pointed to Augustine as an example of one who had taught the things they were teaching. Right. had a huge impact on the direction of Western Christianity.
SPEAKER 03 :
And when that accusation was leveled at them for their predestination, irresistible grace-type teachings, and they said, no, this isn't a new teaching, and they point to Augustine, well, the same accusation then is leveled at Augustine in the 5th century AD. He's the one who introduced the new teaching, and they're just promoting the new teaching. not the original teaching on this topic.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's right. And a lot of people get confused in thinking that Martin Luther and John Calvin or Zwingli are the only ones who really reformed the church. And those are obviously the popular names, but there were others. Prior to Luther, there was men like, for example, Balthasar Hubmeier. who believed like you and I would with regard to soteriology. And he actually even went further than the reformers, believing in religious liberty, that we shouldn't try to convince the atheist or the pagan with sword and fire, but with patience and prayer like Jesus does. Because Jesus wants their salvation. We should be patient with them. like Jesus is. And so there were people like this. And then after the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon, though he started very much more in the camp of Luther with regard to sociology, you see a development in Melanchthon's work in his interpretation of Romans 9, which sounds a lot more like our interpretation of Romans 9 than the current Calvinist. And that's why you see Lutherans kind of go in a different direction than a lot of the Calvinists are today. And so don't mistake the Reformation as only being Calvinistic in its soteriology. I know we call that Reformed theology. But the truth is there were a lot of people involved in the reforming of the church that were not necessarily five-point Calvinists.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and there were practically wars going on between – The Calvinist type and the Arminian type reformers and entire communities and cities were on one side or the other of that dispute hundreds of years ago. Have you had Dr. Michael Brown on your program? We did.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, years ago we did have Dr. Brown on.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, yeah, he's awesome. He's been on this show, and I don't know why this just occurred to me, but we were – We were presenting from Martin Luther's writings his fierce anti-Semitism, his racism, which is absolutely horrific. And it's, of course, a different topic, but it's another reason I have to be disappointed in a man who should have been so great and continued so much that is false and even evil in the teachings of the Church. So could you tell me, do you know how James White found out about this? That part of the story I'm not aware of.
SPEAKER 02 :
According to his own testimony, he just talked about how people were tweeting so much about this new book that Wilson had put out, the smaller version of it, and that he got a copy of that smaller version and began to critique it publicly. And part of the problem with that was that in the preface of the book that he produced, Ken actually anticipated that if scholars wanted to critique this, that they should do so with the scholarly version, not the layman's version, because it's not produced for critique. It's produced for information. And so that's how it started. And he was complaining that it cost $100. And so Ken Wilson, out of his own pocket, because he doesn't own the rights to the book, He bought it and sent it to James so that he could actually critique the scholarly work for himself. That's kind of how the debate began.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, these university-published texts. We just interviewed a theologian trained at Cambridge, now at St. Andrews, Dr. Ryan Mullins. And yeah, and these books, they all cost $100 or so, and the authors get about $1 every time one is sold. So James Why accuses Ken Wilson of not being qualified. to discuss these issues. And that was really bizarre to hear. Can you share with us Ken Wilson's credentials and this disagreement about whether scholars have actually done what Augustine asked them to do? He said, please read my works in order so folks can see how his ideas changed over time. And Ken Wilson has done that. So what's with James White saying Ken Wilson is not qualified?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, this is what ad hominem attacks are. Ad hominem are a way to avoid actually answering the argument. Ad hominem means literally to the man. And so instead of talking about the argument that the person's making, I can discredit the person that's making the argument. And it's really hard to do with a orthopedic hand surgeon who knows seven language who has an Oxford degree. But that doesn't stop James White from trying, at least. I think he knows that's not going to hold much water, which is one of the reasons I think he's spent so many hours, I think 15 over the last month, hours trying to critique Ken Wilson's work. And he does get some arguments in there, but he just doesn't. He sprinkles it with a lot of ad hominem and rhetorical kinds of debate fallacies that you have to kind of weed through in order to find the factual arguments that he's making or the biblical arguments that he's making. And sometimes that's difficult to kind of weed through directly. James is a little bit rough around the edges. I mean, he is an apologist and so he's, he debates for a living. And so that can cause your, your, your skin to get a little tough possibly. And maybe, uh, he'd be a little bit more cantankerous than some of us like, but, um, or it could cause your skin to get a little thin too.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think we see both happening. Uh, The point you're making is good, though, and it's a danger for talk show hosts, too. And for 30 years, I've had to remember when I go home to see my wife and kids, okay, turn off the talk show mode. Don't bring that home. But King David, he was a warrior. He killed people. He did it all the time. Started with Goliath, and then when he perceived he had a problem, he sure saw it backward. But He killed somebody because that's what he was used to doing. And I think you're making a very good point about James White. You debate everybody, you fight all the time, and it's difficult to remember where the boundaries should be of polite, civil, respectful disagreement.
SPEAKER 02 :
He often accuses me of being imbalanced because I don't debate other world religions. And I would just push back and just say, could it be that imbalance could also come from debating too much and not being involved in evangelism as my major livelihood, my career is as a director of evangelism for Texas Baptists. And so I don't spend my livelihood or my work debating other Christians or other worldviews. I spend my livelihood debating. You know, sharing the gospel and doing evangelism. And that, I think, brings a proper balance to how we should address these issues.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is a weird one. So if you haven't debated Zoroastrianism, you're not qualified really to have what? A ministry? I don't know.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's more of the ad hominem approach where I can focus on Leighton's shortcomings versus Leighton's arguments. And this is when we just push back and say, okay, if a more qualified person made the same argument, how would you answer it then? Because you're avoiding the argument.
SPEAKER 03 :
I'm thrilled that you mentioned you have Morstan and Forster's book there, God's Strategy in Human History. I read that back before 1991 was our first radio broadcast, so back in the 80s. And they note in there, I'd love to read this quote from Oxford professor of historical theology, Alistair McGrath. And this is exactly what you have been teaching, and I wouldn't be surprised if you have quoted this, but the pre-Augustinian theological tradition. So what Christian leaders and writers believed and taught before Augustine. The pre-Augustinian theological tradition is practically of one voice in asserting the freedom of the human will And Dr. Flowers, he's an Augustinian sympathizer, Alistair McGrath, but he recognizes that Augustine taught something different than the Christian church did for the centuries before him.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Ken Wilson quotes over 80 scholars, none of which would consider themselves theologically necessarily in our camp. He purposely goes for scholars who are outside his tradition and outside his camp so that they can't – in other words, you can't blame it on bias. And James White has quoted how many scholars in support of what he's saying? Zero. Zero. And how many scholars from the opposite camp?
SPEAKER 03 :
Zero. When you have testimony contrary to interest, that tends to be the most reliable testimony. No matter what discipline you're in, if you're evaluating scientific data or it's a criminal case or historically or theologically, testimony contrary to interest is usually the most honest observation. And when you have a multitude of Calvinist-leaning, reformed theologians historians saying well you know what the early church didn't teach what we teach That's authoritative. And I think that even James White, I think, here's a prediction, that James White will stop making this argument anew. I'm not saying he'll do what we have called on him publicly to do, which is apologize to Dr. Wilson and retract his video, that very egregious video. That's what he should do. And I'm not saying he will. I wish he would. I pray that he does. But I'm saying he's not going to introduce this argument publicly. anew, afresh for the rest of his career. That's my prediction.
SPEAKER 02 :
I can imagine if he gets into a live debate that he's going to try to undermine the credentials of Dr. Wilson. I don't think that he has any grounds to do that, and hopefully he'll go that route.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, but my prediction is the bigger question. I don't think he's going to A fresh anew, like on a new day, a new argument, a new opponent. I don't think he's going to make this argument that the early church really agreed with the Calvinists. If you read between the lines and look at the tea leaves. I don't think he's going to continue that argument. Do you think he will? I know we're just guessing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, he's already on record saying that the epistle of Mothates to Diognetus was a monergist. I mean, he said, this is a second-century monergist. He said it really firmly right into the camera. Right, yes. And so he has already made that audacious claim going against all these other scholars that somehow Clement, because he speaks at the number of the lect, and somehow Mothates— which just means disciple in Greek. We don't know who the name of the person is, but that early epistle, that he's claiming both of them seem to have a more Calvinistic reading or belief simply because they refer to a couple of passages. Again, I think he's reading them much like he misreads Paul, and he takes certain passages out of their context to make them say something they don't. And of course, we go over this in several broadcasts there at our website.
SPEAKER 03 :
Dr. Leighton Flowers, your heart clearly is not just in debating theology, but in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. You were named the Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptist. That's just awesome. So there are so many people who are not Baptists. People ask me, Bob— What denomination are you? We're non-denominational for the most part. But I say, but we're closest to Baptist for all the big denominations. But thank you. There are so many people who are not Baptist who greatly appreciate your work. It's really awesome. There's another book, I think a groundbreaking book, written by an assistant professor at Liberty University, Dr. Richard Holland. He's an Arminian. His book is called God, Time, and the Incarnation. I just wanted to let you know about that book. You might be interested to interview Dr. Holland, but I think you will love him and love his work.
SPEAKER 02 :
I'm writing down that name right now. Thank you for the reference.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you're welcome, Dr. Richard Holland. So the best way for listeners to keep in touch with your work, is it Soteriology 101?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, sir. That's the best place to go for this information. Of course, if you're interested more in my work in evangelism, texasbaptist.org, if you want to go there.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Leighton Flowers. What an honor to have you back on.
SPEAKER 02 :
My pleasure. God bless.
SPEAKER 03 :
So we are absolutely out of time. That was a great joy. Our website, kgov.com. You could click on the store and you will find Bible seminars on these very topics. And we teach verse by verse through so many of the books of the Bible. There's so much there to enjoy. As always, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So this is Bob Enyart. May God bless you. Join Colorado Right to Life in the fight against abortion. Head over to CRTL.org to make a donation and abolish abortion in the state of Colorado.
In this compelling episode, Fred Williams and Doug McBurney explore the phenomenon of 'brain rot,' a concerning trend linked to endless digital consumption. Learn about the implications of doom scrolling and the steps you can take to protect your mental health. As they debunk myths about aliens and explore the concept of the universe's center, the hosts provide a refreshing perspective on scientific dialogues. Don't miss the chance to be part of Real Science Radio's Project 2025, an initiative aimed at spreading truth and knowledge in the coming years.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don't think they could do a Mrs. Pibb. This would be quite a crisis in marketing. The his or her, they Pibb. It would be they Pibb. His, her, them, they Pibb. That's it. We'll try and figure that one out.
SPEAKER 07 :
Scholars can't explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 07 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 04 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I'm Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 05 :
And I'm Doug McBurney, Bible student, science geek, amateur comedian. Fred, people may not recall, but Bob Enyart launched this broadcast as Real Science Friday. in response to NPR's leftist propaganda, dressed up in scientific garb and painfully doled out every Friday like gruel at a Soviet soup kitchen by Ira Flatow and other propagandists. You know, Fred, NPR calls it Science Friday. And keeping that in mind, it's good to be with you again, Fred, talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 04 :
Happy New Year, Doug. It's the new year, and we're going to give our top three New Year's resolutions for science.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, I love it. I love it. Well, Fred, same to you. Happy New Year. I'm excited, by the way, to tell our audience that we have big plans for 2025. For starters, we have some pretty big-name scientists that have agreed to come on the show, but I'm not ready to spill all the beans yet, Fred.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, well, you know, Doug, one of these guys, I'll just give the audience a clue. He had a video on TED Talk. You know, the TED Talk channel is really popular. So you're doing really well if you get on TED Talks. And he got banned. They kicked him off of TED Talks.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, sounds perfect for us.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, he upended the apple cart on some mainstream science. And, of course, the secular world isn't going to like that. So he's going to be a guest that we're going to have on. We're also going to have a molecular biologist on the show. who's going to help us deal with one of the claims that Professor Dave just keeps doubling down on. It just amazes me that he does this. And by the way, for those who missed our tussle with Professor Dave, you can go back to last week's show. In fact, we dealt with two of the problems of the, I think there's at least 26 to 29 problems that he has that he's wrong about. We dealt with the two that we thought were the funnest to attack right away. So go back last week and you'll see our response to Professor Day's response to our debunking of his alleged debunking of creation science.
SPEAKER 05 :
I think you got, I think you followed the chain all the way back, Fred. Great job. Great job. That's right. That's right. Professor David James, as his mom calls him, you know, when she catches him in a lie. Now, Fred, we've got the ball rolling here. He's going to have to answer real challenges to his his propaganda dressed up as science whenever he promotes the Big Bang and evolution and millions and billions of years. Anyway, later in the show, we'll mention ways, by the way, that you can help us. You can invest in this ministry, a ministry we intend to reap eternal rewards as we continue to grow and we reach more of the lost and edify more of the saints. I mean, right now, Fred, we're approaching 5,000 subscribers. And with the help of you out there in the audience, we have a stretch goal to double that. In the next six months, we want to reach... Well, I guess 9,000. No, we want to break 10,000. And we just want to respond to more atheists of renown so that we can reach their audience.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so let's get to the top three science resolutions for the new year. And just for our audience, you know, we get a lot of news stories. We get it from our producers. We get it from the audience. We just get it from watching news feeds ourselves. And we always try to pick the jewels of the bunch because, Doug, if we went with all the ones that are just great, we wouldn't have time to do it. You only have so much time to do a show. Right. So we try to pick our best ones. So here's our top three that we pick that we think are, hey, they're good New Year's resolutions.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, and Fred, before you do that, at the end of the show, we're just going to share a little bit of a letter that we're going to send out to some of our longtime supporters. Just wanted to give a heads up. We don't want to forget that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so number three, stop rotting your brain. So this is from just last week, Doug, December 29th, right?
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, well, Fred, the election's over, so at least some level of brain rot must have fallen away. Yeah. No, this is different. This is serious. This is a clinical study.
SPEAKER 04 :
So this is from a story on December 29th, so just last week. A warning issued over brain rot, the 2024 habit that's on the rise, and this was reported on Australia's leading news site. So doctors are warning those guilty of a bad habit that's booming in popularity to be careful so it can seriously damage our brains. The doctors are issuing a warning that after brain rot was chosen by the Oxford University Press as its word of the year. Now, that's the Oxford University Press, Doug, and that is the word of the year. This is two words, brain rot.
SPEAKER 05 :
So that's... So aside from that, you know, that's... They have some trouble counting at Oxford these days, but don't be alarmed about that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, you know, they say there's three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, those who can't, but I digress. So... So the phrase has boomed in popularity among Gen Z, largely as a direct result of young people's lack of moderation when watching online material. Yeah, no shock there. So far from being a new slang word, the term refers to the potential medical impacts of continuously scrolling through social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. It's a habit known as doom scrolling.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, doom scrolling.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
I'll tell you one thing about Gen Z. They certainly have a way with words.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, they do. So according to the Oxford University Press, that same group that doesn't know how to count, brain rot is defined as the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state after the overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging. And, you know, Doug, we've been told, we know that there's an attention span problem. And even with YouTube, you know, to try to get your videos listened to, you've got to try to get to the point right away. And that's part of why we started doing shorts. So Real Science Radio, you can start watching shorts, which are one-minute videos, one minute or less. But we actually try to have things that aren't trivial or unchallenging. And I know, Doug, you could attest to that with just some of the interesting facts of the week. They're not trivial. They're not unchallenging.
SPEAKER 05 :
They're certainly not unchallenging since I miss most of them. Hey, Fred, so one thing my dad taught me is that real men are never seen in shorts. I mean, unless you're on vacation, like in the Riviera, but we're doing them for the sake of the younger audience. But Fred, this isn't just young people because I think I've experienced this myself. In fact, I've developed a habit of, Of forcing myself to get up out of the chair and get outside of the house or outside of the building. Literally, I force myself outside whenever I realize. And it's usually because my backside's getting numb. And there may be a direct correlation to if your backside's getting numb, there's a pretty good chance that this side's getting numb. And maybe you should... Get up and get out from behind the screen, right?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it may be another form of neuroplastic atrophy. And so there's a study, such as the one in Frontiers in Psychology from 2023. It has shown that endless passive consumption of trivial content can lead to what's called neuroplastic atrophy. Translation, your brain gets lazy. Instead of building robust neural connections through challenging activities like problem solving or learning, It weakens from too much mindless swipe and scroll. So there's a behavioral neuroscientist, Dr. Kyra Bobinette, and she just had a clip show up on Fox Digital Science News. And let's play that clip really quick.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's in the zeitgeist that people have really difficulty with their attention span. They feel brain foggy. They feel less concentration for what they want to do. They can't do deep work. And then there's also this epidemic of loneliness layer that has been kind of sitting on the heels of this because we can't really focus on anything, including relationship building. And so that stuckness that people feel with brain rot is really the habenula going on because it's been shown to go on when you doom scroll. It's been shown to be triggered by those kinds of activities. And so when we're online too much and we don't find what we need or we feel dissatisfied, even in a tiny way, if this activates, then we're not going to feel motivated to do anything for ourselves for the rest of the day.
SPEAKER 04 :
okay so that was dr kyra bobbinette she's the author of unstoppable brain so and as she mentioned in that clip you know people they their brain starts feeling foggy they have less concentration and they have less motivation i mean it sounds like like our marijuana shows doug
SPEAKER 03 :
If you think about it.
SPEAKER 04 :
So this is just another thing that kind of affects the brain. And we want to let our audience be aware. Watch out for brain rot. We know we've got a lot of listeners, maybe have kids going to public schools, and Lord willing, they yank them out of there and send them to Christian school or homeschool them. But there are remedies for this, right, Doug? There's a doctor came up with some things you can do.
SPEAKER 05 :
But hey, Fred, before we get to the doctor's solutions, I just wanted to quote one of the authors in the clinical article from Frontiers in Psychology who said that this... this practice of mindless scrolling, endless consumption of trivial content, I think is what they called it. He said, quote, it's like feeding your brain a steady diet of candy when it's begging for veggies and protein. The result is reduced attention spans, impaired memory, difficulty focusing. And then he says this is a phenomenon sometimes nicknamed digital dementia. So... I don't know about you, Fred, but my brain, my body has never begged for veggies and protein ever. I've pretty much always had to force the veggies and I've always had to force the good stuff in. I've always had to make a conscious decision, especially if there were Froot Loops available. If there's Froot Loops available. So I think what the psychologists may not fully comprehend is that there is no begging for veggies and protein on the part of our body or our mind. And this is one of the reasons welfare is so evil and corrosive, Fred, is that for most people, if you give them an opportunity to endlessly consume trivial content, That's what they'll do with their life, and that's what we have to be careful about.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. Yeah, so this Dr. Zach, he gave a list of things to do to kind of try to prevent this, so let's just quickly go through them. He suggests move your apps off your home screen, so out of sight, out of mind. Set screen time limits so phones have the ability to do that. Doom scroll with intention. So if you must scroll, set a goal. Are you looking for news updates? A cute dog video. And then schedule screen-free zones. You know, no phones at dinner, things like that. So we're going to leave it up to our very bright audience to figure out how you're going to deal with this with both yourself and with your loved ones. I mean, I know I've caught myself sometimes... I don't do the scrolling through shorts and stuff, but sometimes I just get into this... brainless stuff, some of the brainless stuff I'll watch. Yeah, of course.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, and so typical of liberals is that all of these psychologists, they give you a list of rules to make for yourself so that you can't. Well, I'm telling you that you can't set rules for yourself that make it so you can't. That doesn't work because we're sinful and we're fallen. What you need to do is become otherwise interested and motivated. Get interested and motivated in other things by getting up off the chair and going and doing something else. You might be surprised. You might find it interesting.
SPEAKER 04 :
That's right. Okay, so Doug, we're going to get to number two. All right. And before we do, and this has to do with aliens, we did want to quickly mention our RSR Project 2025.
SPEAKER 05 :
That's right, our very own Project 2025. And Fred, we didn't hire any outside consultants for this. We did not have a committee funded by donors working on our Project 2025. This is an organic project.
SPEAKER 04 :
It is, and it's kind of our in-house advertising for this video. We're going to advertise for ourselves because we want your help. Our number one priority at Real Science Radio has always been sharing the truth of the gospel with as many people as we can in order to hasten the fullness of the Gentiles. So why RSR? Why Real Science Radio? So we put heavier emphasis on the more tangible sciences of genetics, biology, and chemistry. and to some degree physics, as opposed to the more subjective and abstract sciences such as baromology, paleontology, geology, and geophysics, that honestly and frankly, we believe that some of the dear Christian brothers, our creation friends at CMI, Answers in Genesis, ICR to some degree, and definitely CRS, they seem to be a little too top-heavy in these more abstract sciences. And so there's the famous creationist apologetics verse from Romans 1.20. So we want to make a biblical case of why we take the approach we do. And that's God's invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made. And the word made could just as easily read designed. Right. or engineered. In Hebrews 3.4 it says, For every house is built by someone, but he who built all things is God. People know every house has a builder, and therefore will know that even more complex living things must also have a builder. And finally, Jesus also taught, But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, Believe the works. Jesus' works were 100% concrete miracles that people witnessed with their own eyes, not something described by theory or mathematics. So we believe there's much truth in Nikola Tesla's words. We're going to throw in a secular reference that he said this, Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure. which has no relation to reality. So while we say that, we also highly value both historical and forensic science, and we believe both are capable of providing sufficient proof of that which is being investigated. So we actually here at Real Science Radio, we resist the claim that you can't prove anything that isn't a repeatable experiment. So we don't adhere to that. We think historical and forensic science can prove things like Jesus truly rose from the dead.
SPEAKER 05 :
That's right.
SPEAKER 04 :
We have concrete proof of that. And Bob is always careful to present topics that have been carefully vetted. So we do the same thing. We've continued that tradition. And we have a production team that helps us with choosing speakers and topics. And while we do often partner with our friends in the intelligent design movement, we're more aligned with their approach in certain ways. We also hold strongly to the historical account of Genesis that places the earth at roughly 6,000 to 7,000 years old. Both of these, both appealing to design God's invisible attributes and the historical account in Genesis, we believe are both critical to reaching the lost who have been indoctrinated in both millions of years and evolution. We don't place any requirement on our speakers that we bring in to hold those views as long as the reason for their appearance is to either bolster or in a way debate a position that we support. So we will always stand by Genesis. That's our foundation. And finally, Bob is always resistant to having guests on the show who do not provide something new unless it was something we believed worth consideration that was otherwise suppressed or censored by groupthink. And believe me, groupthink happens everywhere, and it happens in creation circles, too. And we've witnessed that with many of the things we've talked about here. Now, again, I want to make it clear, though, we are dear friends with all the major creation groups. But what RSR does is we fill a void for those descending creationist positions, such as the hydroplate theory and plasma cosmology theory. So at Real Science Radio, our primary emphasis will be on observable phenomena with a secondary focus on the more abstract and subjective areas such as geology and paleontology. This is how we believe we can more effectively reach the lost, just as the Apostle Paul outlined in Romans 1 and Hebrews 3. Amen!
SPEAKER 05 :
So anyway, one of those things that we can observe, by the way, is the Bible, which is one of the keys to understanding origins and creation sciences, the Bible. And back to Romans 1, Fred. Because we have the Bible and because we have the things that we can see that were obviously created, the Bible says of all of us, they are without excuse. There is no excuse. And we're here to help people realize that they are without excuse when it comes to the creation, especially.
SPEAKER 04 :
That's right. So we've sent out an email to people who we had their email addresses. If you want to get this letter, our RSR Project Plan 2025, please contact us, provide us your email, and we'll get you a copy of that Project 2025 for RSR. So, Doug, number two, number two on our scientific New Year's resolutions. Stop getting spooked by Spock.
SPEAKER 05 :
Spook by spy. One of my favorite topics, aliens. And I'm so glad, Fred, that we made it through November without the deep state unveiling the aliens. I was actually concerned about that because we talk about brain rot and where people are these days and what they might fall for. And you just never know. So we have an article from another one from Fox News. Luis Elizondo. Are you familiar with Luis, Fred?
SPEAKER 04 :
I think I've heard of this person. And by the way, this is from Christmas Day.
SPEAKER 05 :
Christmas Day. Yeah. And it's Louise with a Z, not with a S-E. Louise is a guy. How do we know he's a guy? Look at his picture. He's chunky. He's got something of a beard and a bunch of tattoos. He looks very masculine, Luis does. Now, Fox News says he's the former head of the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. He and other witnesses, Fred, testified before the Congress back in November about an alleged group within the government hiding the fact that, quote, we are not alone in the cosmos. And Luis Elizondo said of that fact in his testimony, he said, quote, I believe that we as Americans can handle the truth! And I think he said it just the exact same way that the actor said it. His name escapes me. That's embarrassing because he's a very famous guy. Actually, that's a point in my favor, Fred, that I can't remember the very famous actor's name because it's been so long since I consumed any media.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, good for you, but that was Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson.
SPEAKER 05 :
How do you forget Jack Nicholson for crying out loud? That's pretty bad. It could just be that I've got either brain rot or... Early stage Alzheimer's. But let me just comment, Fred, real quick on Mr. Elizondo. So the fact, Mr. Elizondo, that you claim that you finished your career in a defense bureaucracy initiated by the godfather of the deep state, Harry Reid, initiated this defense, whatever it is, department, sub-department of a department of a department at the aerospace threat identification, whatever it is. So it was started by Harry Reid, and then it was signed off on by America's dumbest president, George W. Bush. There's no doubt about that. So just that, I mean, that gives me some pause as to taking you seriously. And then the fact that he got into this bureaucracy and somehow remained politically correct long enough to get to the top of the pile in the bureaucracy, mostly during the Obama administration, by the way. And then finally, the fact, Mr. Elizondo, that you have a book out that you're promoting, it just doesn't make your testimony particularly compelling to me. And then second, the fact that you quote a fictitious character from a movie. Now, the movie, I remember the title, Fred, A Few Good Men. You can't handle the truth, right? I got that. Anyway, the fact that you quote that in your testimony, I mean, it makes me wonder if you've maybe suspended disbelief one time too many and you've just gone totally around the bend.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, you know, Doug, I don't know if you remember the number one first thing that the Clintons did when they got in the office was they were going to unveil the Roswell, the alien landing. And you know what? So if there really was something with Area 51 and there really was aliens there, I guarantee you the liberals would be pushing that all over the media. There would have been somebody, you know, we got to keep it top secret because of this and that, you know, the technology. No, they would have leaked it to the media, to somebody, because they love, they want there to be aliens. And I tried to think of an analogy, Doug, and one that, I don't know why it came to my mind, but it's like the KJV-only crowd, you know, the King James Version-only crowd. Oh. That it's the one only true translation of the Bible. You know, Bob Binyard had a really good debate with a KJV-only guy, and Bob actually went out and he looked at the original KJV, King James Bible, used that as part of his debate. And, well, the guy he was debating quit, so that kind of gives you an idea who won that debate, right? I mean, I think that thing just ended. Yeah, so anyways, for the King James only, it made me think, okay, too bad for the Japanese. So I guess God favored only the people who understand English. So how does this relate to this whole alien thing? And by the way, I met our fantastic producer for our radio show, the guy who puts all of our content on KLTT, the blowtorch of the Rockies. And yes, Professor Dave, we are on the radio. We have been for many decades. That's right. So Jamie, yeah, I met him in a booth at a fair in downtown Denver, and he was debating somebody who was a KJV-only guy, and Jamie did just a fantastic job of showing him why the King James only isn't the only true translation of the Bible. So anyways, here's the analogy. Too bad for those aliens since the Earth, really the scientific evidence shows that we are the center of the universe. So the aliens are then coming from somewhere that isn't the center. You know, I guess unless they're maybe in our Milky Way, but too bad for them because we've had this scientific data. You can go to rsr.org slash center. That's right. And the quantized redshifts continues to be a problem for those who hold to the, you know, the secular world tries to tell you, oh, the universe doesn't have a center. Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
Which is just like, are you smoking dope?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and you can go to our page and we quote secular scientists who admit that that claim is philosophical and not science. So we'll leave it up to the listener on the radio and to you watching this on YouTube. Go check out that webpage. And we're also showing a paper from 2024, September 2024, Quantized Redshift and Challenges to Big Bang Hypothesis. And then this other guy publishes a study supporting century-old theory that challenges the Big Bang, etc.
SPEAKER 05 :
So, Doug... Well, Fred, so if the universe doesn't have a center, it's the only physical thing that doesn't have a center, right? And that's not philosophical. That's deranged. That's deranged to think that.
SPEAKER 04 :
It is.
SPEAKER 05 :
That's what happens when you get too far down the rat hole of atheism.
SPEAKER 04 :
You live out in California. The Golden State Warriors, for a long time, they were winning championships without a center.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, man. Okay, so I digress.
SPEAKER 05 :
That's a bone for all of our sports fans out there. Good one, Fred. That's pretty good.
SPEAKER 04 :
Now we're down to the number one New Year's resolution for science. But before we do that, Doug, we almost forgot. We got to do our interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yo, interesting fact of the week, Fred. I almost forgot. Having so much fun. Okay. All right.
SPEAKER 04 :
What causes an aurora? An aurora. Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, there's a city like Denver that gets too big, and then eventually they have to do a suburb, and also in Chicago. No. Do you want to take another shot? Okay, so you're talking about an aurora in space where you see, let's say you have a body in space, but then there's glowing around the body.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, aurora borealis. Think of that. Now, what could cause that? You know, speaking of aliens and whatnot, you know.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, so what would cause that aurora would be... Heat and light energy emitted from the body and then interference by particles between us and the body. Okay, not bad.
SPEAKER 04 :
That's kind of close. Okay. So it's charged particles from solar winds.
SPEAKER 01 :
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 07 :
Scholars can't explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real. That's what I'm talking about.
Join Bob and Fred as they take you on an enlightening journey through the cosmos, examining shocking planetary and genetic revelations that challenge mainstream science. From Mercury's mysterious surface activities to the astonishing genetic diversity that contradicts Darwin's tree of life, this episode is packed with revelations that underscore a young Earth narrative. With expert insights and engaging dialogue, the show highlights the ongoing debate between traditional evolutionary theory and creationist perspectives, offering listeners a fresh take on science's biggest surprises.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bobineer Live. Today we're getting into Real Science Radio's list of shocked evolutionists. Shocked evolutionists. So why would evolutionists be shocked? Well, when you deny Genesis chapter one, you end up making a lot of very big scientific mistakes. And that's just to be expected. If you think that the universe is billions and billions of years old and the stars and the planets are millions to billions of years old and the moons, you're going to make a lot of mistakes that will end up shocking you. For example, with the first missions to put a spacecraft on Mars... One of the things that they worried about was that there would be so much dust on the moon, right? Dust accumulates slowly over time. They were worried that it's been so undisturbed for so long that there'd be so much dust on the moon and that when you first landed, the spacecraft would sink into the dust. So they put these giant, big padded feet on the bottoms of the spacecraft when they first landed on the moon. However, because the earth is young and the moon and the stars and the sun are young, as the Bible teaches, there was no huge problem with feet and feet of dust. There was maybe an inch or two, which you might expect after about 6,000 years or so. But the point is, these secular scientists were shocked when the Christians who believed in a young Earth and a young universe were not shocked. We knew exactly what we would find, and of course, we did. And so, with that said, we're going to get into RSR's list of shocked evolutionists.
SPEAKER 03 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country.
SPEAKER 1 :
Welcome to Real Science Radio. I'm Bob Enyart.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I'm Fred Williams, creation speaker and software engineer.
SPEAKER 03 :
And this is our first installment of a brand new list show, Fred. Our list of shocked evolutionists.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's going to be an electrifying show.
SPEAKER 03 :
It really will be because, you know, almost like a candid camera for biologists and astrophysicists, Real Science Radio has been noticing PhDs in all kinds of fields. Evolutionists, whether chemical, stellar, or biological scientists. who look at the latest research, and then they're shocked.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, they're quoted as being shocked. They're horrified, surprised, jaw-droppingly shocked. I like that one because somebody once posted in my forum on my website that creationists are jaw-droppingly stupid because he said that there's a universal truth that there are no absolutes. That's what we're jaw-droppingly stupid about. Is that hysterical? Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Doesn't he realize he's contradicting himself within one sentence?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don't know how they do that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, it's amazing.
SPEAKER 03 :
But they are good at it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yep.
SPEAKER 03 :
So Fred, baffled. They're banging their heads against the wall even. Yeah, that's a quote. Yep. None of this is because they've discovered something new. When you discover something new, do you bang your head against a wall?
SPEAKER 02 :
No. No. You know, I might be amazed. You think about what creationists, how we react. We're thrilled. Oh, yeah. We're amazed. We brag. Yeah. We're touting the latest discoveries. Or we're delighted. Like Richard Dawkins said that, you know, with the Cambrian explosion, that creationists would be delighted. Yeah. Of course we are.
SPEAKER 03 :
And he recently debated the chief rabbi over in England. Yeah. And he said in there, oh, with the ENCODE project and all this function in 80% of the human genome, these creationists are really making a big deal out of this. Good point, Fred. I've never thought about that. We are, time and again, we're ecstatic with each new discovery. And the evolutionists are always freaked out. So it's not that they've just discovered something new. That's no big deal. That's, well, it's cool. Yeah. But they express all this dismay when they discover amazing things that contradict their most fundamental evolutionary expectations.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. In other cases, they're embarrassed. Now, would we say that we're embarrassed that we discovered dinosaur fossils with DNA? No. No protein, soft tissue. That doesn't embarrass us. We're not embarrassed at all. We're delighted. How about carbon-14 and diamonds?
SPEAKER 03 :
We love it because it only lasts thousands of years. And they say the diamond is a billion years old. So it's not surprise at a new discovery. That reaction would not make the cut. It wouldn't make it onto Real Science Radio's list of shocked evolutionists. This list is for bona fide exclamations of amazement that their evolutionary predictions could be so totally wrong.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that it goes against their paradigm. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Darwin is banging their heads against the wall. I'd love to start with that one because that cracks me up.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that's a good one. This research team at the University of Michigan, they performed these experiments on 60 species of freshwater green algae. And, well, they failed to support Darwin's theory. They said it was completely unexpected. And they sat there banging their heads against the wall. And they said, Darwin's hypothesis has been with us for so long. How can it not be right? Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
Fred, this comes from the National Science Foundation. I mean, this is the pinnacle of Darwinist propaganda. And so they're saying about these headbangers, life science reports, researchers were more than shaken. They were shaken. We should add that too.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. I didn't even circle that one.
SPEAKER 03 :
Just imagine when we see that Mercury's magnetic field is decreasing at a wildly rapid rate. Are we shaken? We're ecstatic. Yeah. Time and again, we're so happy. Well, they're banging their heads against the wall more than shaking in excitement. Yeah, right. Yeah. That their experiments fail to support Darwin's theory. Fred, there's a brand new group. called The Third Way, that when we do our list of scholars doubting Darwin, we've just added that. So the next time we do that list, these are prestigious scientists from the world's leading institutions, and they're saying, you know what? We're not creationists, but there's no way neo-Darwinism is true. Natural selection cannot explain Darwinism. the diversity of life in the world. These guys are not going that far, but they're banging their heads against the wall because, hey, survival of the fittest, if you've got the fittest, it should survive. They've got 60 species of algae and they're saying, look, we cannot make Darwin's theory work. We just can't even make it work. Reminds me of the peacocks. Remember in Japan, they cut off all the plumage. They made it, the males, they made it just fine. Thank you. And they're like, boy, Darwin said they wouldn't mate.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, because that's their mating signal and all that.
SPEAKER 03 :
And remember we talked about the heavy metal in outer space. It's all missing. Heavy metal. And then who's the soft tissue dinosaur scientist from North Carolina State who has done all the discoveries? Mary Schweitzer. Mary Schweitzer. Remember we called her the Iron Maiden? Yeah. Because she thought iron did it. So we got heavy metal, Iron Maiden, and now these headbangers. Fred, I think it turns out that rock and roll must be of the devil after all. This is just. Oh, man. Sorry. Yeah. But it's all so funny.
SPEAKER 02 :
It is. It's great. Now, this next one is one of our favorites. It's this whole business with sequencing the chimp Y chromosome. Oh, yeah. So, you know, we're supposed to be so similar to chimps. Oh, 99% similar.
SPEAKER 1 :
99, 97.99.
SPEAKER 02 :
98.5. Yeah, it's always somewhere way up there.
SPEAKER 1 :
98.96.
SPEAKER 02 :
The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. two years ago still had that in their museum about how 98% similar. Yeah. Well, they did the sequencing of the Y chromosome, and they discovered that it was different than they expected. But they added an extra word. It's a real scientific word. The scientific word, horrendously different. Horrendously different. Horrendous. I looked in the science dictionary. I don't find that word unless it's maybe it'll be in the evolution section.
SPEAKER 03 :
And so this comes from the journal Nature, which is the world's leading journal. And they're quoting Dr. David Page. He is a molecular biologist from Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so, yeah, he says that the chimp Y chromosome and the human Y chromosome, they're horrendously different. And so, you know, why not just say, well, Mercury and Saturn are different?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Why say they're horrendously different?
SPEAKER 02 :
They're not horrendously different. Now, from my worldview, my point of view, I might say they're laughably different.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Maybe.
SPEAKER 03 :
Because the evolutionists say they're 99% the same.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And so it turns out that they're so wildly different that you can't even align them. Huge portions of them are simply unalignable. Yeah.
SPEAKER 1 :
30%.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's a huge chunk.
SPEAKER 03 :
Is unalignable.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's at least 30%.
SPEAKER 03 :
In both directions. Yep. And it turns out that a huge chunk of the gorilla genome is closer to us. That's right. Than the chimp's Y chromosome. And that's supposed to be a more distant cousin.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, what I remember, too, about this is the Y chromosome, it's really hard to change it. It's hard to mutate that guy. He's very robust. In such a short time. Yeah, you would think that would be one. It would be real similar to chimps if it's so hard to change. Right, right. Okay, so now could we go to...
SPEAKER 03 :
The jaw dropping. The jaw dropping.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Because we had the headbangers and we had the horrendous. And now it's National Geographic and we're out in space. NASA's messenger team, their messenger spacecraft going out and looking at Mercury and its magnetic field that's dropping so rapidly. But they were jaw dropping shocked when they looked at Mercury carefully. And they found that the surface features of Mercury are actively forming.
SPEAKER 02 :
Actively, yeah. He said it's something that nobody predicted this. Well, yeah. You know, at least from your worldview of evolution. Right. Because what?
SPEAKER 03 :
They think it's how old, Mercury? Four billion years old. Yeah. You know? So you got this little rock. And it's 4 billion years old. And it's still... It's this inert rock. It should be dead. Yeah. And here it is. These are transient features like of the moon and like of Saturn's rings and like throughout the solar system. And they say, well, isn't that amazing? They're 4 billion years old, and yet we're seeing this very rare occurrence right now. Just like with Earth's magnetic field decaying 10% in the last 150 years. They say, isn't it amazing? We're seeing it right now.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right now. And yet we're this old, so old.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, right. Just like with Mercury, it's decayed even more rapidly. Isn't it amazing? We're seeing it right now. So all this is evidence that the solar system is young, only thousands of years old. And that's why these activities, we're seeing them because it's not surprising because obviously they happen. Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Our jaws aren't dropping.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, they're not.
SPEAKER 02 :
I see your jaw in a normal position. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Fred, pick up your jaw just a little bit. So we got the headbangers, the Darwinist headbangers, the horrendous, the jaw-dropping shocked. And then I like this one, alarmed. I don't think we use that word in our introduction.
SPEAKER 02 :
Alarmed hasn't come up yet.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, alarmed.
SPEAKER 02 :
And what's alarming him are what?
SPEAKER 03 :
Worms. Worms. I mean, how do you get alarmed when you look at a little worm? Yeah. And it turns out that according to Live Science, and this is a report from the journal Nature, Fred, these reports we give, time and again, they go back to peer-reviewed scientific journals. And this is the mainstream science media reporting on them. And so the reason they're alarmed at this little worm is because they believe that this worm was the common ancestor of man and insects. So you got to go way back, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
In the evolutionary story. Well, it turns out that the missing link between man and insects has gone missing because they found out that these worms were are more closely related to humans than they are to mollusks or insects. Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
So this is... So that doesn't make sense as an ancestor to humans and insects. And insects. Because it's in between us as opposed to in front of both of us.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and mollusks are supposed to be way back there.
SPEAKER 02 :
So anyway... And didn't we come from the ocean?
SPEAKER 03 :
Remember Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies?
SPEAKER 02 :
I do. I don't remember her evolutionary worldview, though.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, well, you know, they moved to Beverly. Yeah. And she got a little tour, and there's the Pacific Ocean. And the tour guide said, and Granny, that's where we came from, the sea.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, man.
SPEAKER 03 :
She said, the only sea I came from is Tennessee. So I don't know if that's apocryphal or if that's canonical Beverly Hills material.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
But either way. So, yeah, we're supposed to have come from the sea. And Fred, this continues like that roundworm. See elegans? They say that 40% of its genes match humans.
SPEAKER 1 :
40%.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
And they match a bunch of other things too. The sponge was 70%.
SPEAKER 03 :
The sponge thing was hysterical. Because everything is supposed to come from a sponge, right? They were alarmed when they realized that the link between humans and insects has gone missing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Well, this next guy is both surprised and embarrassed about bulges, spiral galaxies and bulges. What's up with that?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it turns out that when they look at the large spiral galaxies, they say that there's a hierarchy to them. And that to get a large spiral galaxy, you need smaller spiral galaxies to merge. To merge. Well, all their computer simulation shows that if two galaxies merge, which doesn't really make sense because they're so far apart. Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
But forget that. But let's say they're merging.
SPEAKER 03 :
There's so many collisions because each one has a billion stars. So, of course, there'd be collisions. And the Big Bang model has for decades said that's why the spiral galaxies, which are pretty big, have not all of them, but so many. have bulges in the middle. A big bulge. Because of all the collisions. Well, the scientist, the astrophysicist who did this work from Princeton University, this is a cosmologist, Jim Peebles, he said, you know, this is really an embarrassment. Yeah. He says they look rather too perfect. They look too perfect. Cosmologist John Cormady says that it's something of a shock. Ha ha. So, yeah, it's a shock. They're embarrassed. They're too perfect. And again, this isn't just a discovery. Discoveries are fun. But embarrassments are when your big discoveries contradict what you expected to be the case because of your paradigm, your worldview. And these are their fundamental predictions. Yes. Not like, oh, yesterday I thought this, and today I realized I was wrong. No. This is decades of thought of how it must be, and it turns out it isn't. Something similar reported in the journal Science is 300 galaxies in what they say was the early universe look mature. They look old.
SPEAKER 02 :
They're old, yet it's supposed to be in the nursery of the universe.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. So they baffle observers. The theorists shrug. They're startled.
SPEAKER 02 :
So that's another one, shrug. Yeah. What was the one, the other one? It was shaken.
SPEAKER 03 :
They're shaken and shrugging. Shaken and shrug. It sort of sounds like when you're supposed to tithe.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, sorry.
SPEAKER 03 :
That's a TV evangelist inside joke.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's funny.
SPEAKER 03 :
So shaken and shrugged. So, Fred, at Denver Bible Church, I'm the pastor there. We don't teach tithing. We teach that you don't have to tithe. That was part of the law, and we're no longer under the law.
SPEAKER 02 :
We're not under the law. That's right.
SPEAKER 03 :
That's a Theology Thursday topic.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's a great show, too, by the way.
SPEAKER 03 :
It's fun, isn't it?
SPEAKER 02 :
I like listening to that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, we have some great shows coming up on the Incarnation. Stunning.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, here's another one where this guy's embarrassed. Hey, wait a minute. This is the same guy that's embarrassed before, so here he is embarrassed again. This is Peebles, Dr. Peebles. From Princeton University. He's embarrassed again about the dominant forms of matter in the universe. Hypothetical.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. So it's like 97% of the whole universe, not only do they say they can't see it, but they say, we don't know what it is.
SPEAKER 02 :
So they have to do this whole dark energy thing they came up with. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And that's like at cosmologystatement.com. Notice I said .com.
SPEAKER 02 :
.com, you did. I did. I was about ready to correct you, but it sounds like you know what you're saying.
SPEAKER 03 :
Cosmologystatement.org, which lists hundreds of astronomers who say the Big Bang is bogus, That website is down. Oh, it is? It's down. But thanks to Real Science Radio, it's back up. Oh. If people go to cosmologystatement.com, it goes right to our website, and they click, and they get an archived version of cosmologystatement.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Statement.org. Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
So isn't that wild that the website is down? That is.
SPEAKER 02 :
So, hey, I really love this next one. We've talked about this before. The axis of evil. Oh, yeah. So here's another thing they've observed in the universe. And they call it evil. Now, why would they call something evil?
SPEAKER 03 :
This is the world's leading astronomers and astrophysicists. This is the greatest satellites we've ever put out in space. Telescopes. The WMAP and the Planck space telescopes. And Fred, they're looking at the whole universe and they're saying the universe has a preferred axis. A preferred axis. Yep. Like you could put a plane through it. And something really weird is that the preferred axis of the universe seems to pass through the solar system of the Earth. The Earth's solar system. Not only that, it's even more astounding. Yeah, doesn't it tie in with the equinoxes? The spring and fall equinoxes on the Earth's orbit, and you define a plane that divides the universe. It's just astounding. You and I did a whole show on this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we did. And I know there's quotes we could add to this that we don't have in here now about these scientists that are, again, they call it the axis of evil, and they're just…
SPEAKER 03 :
That's like saying it's horrendous, right? Exactly. It's horrendous. It's evil because it makes the Earth look special. It does.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so, in fact, just March. Plus it refutes the Big Bang. Why would one side have a different set of variations in temperature than the other side? One globe is different than another globe.
SPEAKER 03 :
And even if you look at quasars, they're not divided evenly statistically the way you'd expect. Yeah. Something is afoot in the universe. There's a preferred direction. Fred, in March of 2014, another paper, the astronomers are perplexed by the asymmetry in the universe. Perplexed. I just love it. We're amazed. I think it's cool. And if God made the universe such that it's pointing to the earth being special and Hey, that's fine with us. That doesn't perplex us. We're not dumbfounded.
SPEAKER 02 :
We're not. In fact, I brought this whole topic up in a talk at Cornerstone Christian Academy, and some of the people said afterwards, that's really cool. They didn't say, oh, that's shocking.
SPEAKER 03 :
Let's all go bang our heads against the wall. So it's fun. And with the apparent concentric spheres of galaxies... so that the universe does have a center and the Milky Way is approximately in the center of the universe, that's really cool too. And so that is totally unexpected to the Darwinist worldview. So what should we do next? These are so fun, Fred.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, I like this next one about the solar system formation theory, which, you know, these guys are admitting, hey, this thing looks like it's wrong. So here's this guy, Mike Brown. He's with the California Institute of Technology, and he manages this huge database of NASA's exoplanets.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so he's NASA's guy there. He is, absolutely. The database of exoplanets, that's all the planets they found outside of our solar system.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and he said before we discovered any of these planets, we thought we understood the formation of planetary systems pretty deeply. You know, real deep. We really understand it. We got it. It was a really beautiful theory. Hey, Wikipedia had the whole thing. Oh, yeah. And if you doubted it, you were an idiot. And you didn't know how to read. You didn't. Right. And he now says that they were clearly, thoroughly wrong.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is fun because when they said, here's how solar systems form, they were just telling a story that matched our solar system. That's sort of easy to do. You make it up after the fact. But then you find another planet orbiting another star. And they said, you know, that didn't fit our model. Now they have hundreds of planets and they don't fit their story. So they don't know how the moon formed. They don't know how planets form. They don't know how stars form. They don't know how solar systems form. They don't know what comes first, galaxies or stars. They don't know how life forms from non-life. They don't know how DNA started to get encoded. They don't know anything, Fred.
SPEAKER 02 :
They don't. Now, this next one reminds me of the platypus. So they discovered a platypus in space, right? Because aren't asteroids and comets kind of looking the same? Oh, that's a good one.
SPEAKER 03 :
The platypus... Looks like it's put together from so many different animals.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Scientists at the time said it was a fraud. They didn't believe it. Because how could it look like a beaver? It looks like six different animals all put together. Yeah. Different warm-blooded animals put together with cold-blooded. It was, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
An echolocation. It's just utterly dumbfounded. And so what did it evolve from? A bat? Yeah. And a beaver.
SPEAKER 02 :
So since you said dumbfounded, they actually say that these objects that they find that are combining asteroids and comets, they're literally dumbfounded.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, and this is based on observations with the Hubble telescope. And they're finding out that things that are supposed to be asteroids are behaving like comets. Yeah. And that's not supposed to be because they allegedly originated in very different ways. And so you're not supposed to have asteroids with tails like a comet. They'll just alter their Oort cloud theory, right? Just throw some asteroids in there. They're going to have to alter it in a really major way. In fact, more recently than this story, which is only a couple of years ago, just a few months ago, they watched an asteroid disintegrate before their very eyes and they said, That's not supposed to happen. And they think they figured out maybe why it happened, because the sun's radiation could cause the asteroid to become unstable, possibly, and break apart, which is fine. That's cool. But they already had so many physics problems forming an asteroid. It's like it won't form because dust in space doesn't collect into planets or asteroids. If two dust particles come together, they bounce off of one another or they accelerate as they come together and they pass each other and go off in their own trajectories. By the laws of physics, you can't form stars. You just can't. So now it's even harder for them to... to explain how asteroids could form when they see that the sun will break them apart. So they're literally dumbfounded.
SPEAKER 02 :
Literally dumbfounded.
SPEAKER 03 :
Because now, what, asteroids and comets, they're the platypuses of space.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yep. Well, you know what people would be dumbfounded about? You know, somebody saw our pictures on our website of us dressed like cavemen.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I had just gotten back from the Bahamas, and one of the guys on my forum said that, hey, did you wear your caveman outfit on the beach? Caveman. And I said, well, my wife wasn't. I was going to put it in the suitcase, but she wouldn't let me. So, you know, this gets to the next one, which is Denisovans. Maybe we were Denisovans.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, Fred, the New York Times, we might have been, right? Dressed up in our caveman garb. The New York Times said that scientists are baffled because they got DNA now from, I think it was a thigh bone. And they said that they believed that this thigh bone was 400,000 years old. Okay. Now, first of all, they should be baffled that they got DNA from it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, DNA that can't – DNA is a fragile molecule. It can't last – Right. It probably can't last 4,000 years.
SPEAKER 03 :
It has a half-life of 521 years. A half-life. Half-life, yep. So how many half-lives are in 400,000 years? Yeah. It should be totally unsequenceable. Absolutely. Well, anyway, first of all, they sequence it. And they think 400,000 years ago, it would be a forerunner of Neanderthal. However, when they sequenced it as much as they did, they said, you know, it looks like these Denisovians. Looks like Bob and Fred. It looks like Bob and Fred and Denisovians. lived allegedly 300 and some thousand years after whoever owned that thigh bone.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
So that doesn't fit. The New York Times says that the evolutionists are baffled.
SPEAKER 02 :
Baffled again. Yep. And like you said, they should be baffled both by this thigh bone not matching their sequence, but also finding, you know, again, DNA that's 400,000 years old.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow. Right. And I love this next one. This is from PLOS, Public Library of Science Biology. about the tree of life, how evolutionists are surprised. Now, that's not a very strong word, but if they were more honest, they would say they were baffled because they looked at 1,400 groups of organisms. 1,400 groups. And they said some are ancient in their Darwinist worldview. Some are like hundreds of millions of years old. The old groups. And some are more recent. Well, they said what surprised them is the pattern that it didn't matter if the groups were very old or relatively young. They had the same amount of diversity of species.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, the same amount. Now, if you're a lot older, common sense tells me you should have a lot more species because you've got a lot more time to diversify and do that whole natural selection and mutation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, you have 100 million years of extra evolving. And so why would the new groups have as much diversity as the groups early on in evolution? And Fred, that reminds me exactly of the astronomers. They have the same problem with stars and galaxies because they say, you know, galaxies after billions of years disappear. They cluster. They said, but the problem is the clustering of the nearby galaxies is the same as the clustering of the most distant ones at the beginning of the universe. It's the same problem. Same problem. From biology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, if you want the rest of this broadcast, we are out of time here on KLTT Radio. Head over to rsr.org slash shocked. RSR, that's for Real Science Radio. rsr.org slash shocked for RSR's list of shocked evolutionists.
In this action-packed episode of Real Science Radio, hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams break down the startling discoveries of carbon-14, a short-lived radioactive isotope, in ancient specimens. They argue against traditional scientific explanations, offering a creationist view that aligns these findings with a younger Earth timeline. Whether you are a skeptic or a believer, this episode provides fascinating insights and challenges contemporary scientific explanations regarding our planet's history.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and your live today we're getting into part four of the real science radio show series on carbon 14 carbon 14 is everywhere it's not supposed to be according to the old earth evolutionary time frame. And because we find so much carbon-14 everywhere in diamonds, in dinosaur bones, in coal, in oil, in all of these places, we know that the Earth cannot be as old as the evolutionary and old Earth can. scientists are telling us, but rather these discoveries of carbon-14 in these materials and these dinosaur bones, it shows that the timeline that's more likely to be accurate, it fits in nicely with the timeline of the Bible, of Genesis, of creation. So you don't want to miss this episode. Really enjoyable. Intelligent design and DNA.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I'm Bob Enyart.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I'm Fred Williams, creation speaker and software engineer.
SPEAKER 02 :
You're back from your assignment, Fred.
SPEAKER 03 :
I completed my assignment.
SPEAKER 02 :
I didn't think you'd be back till next week. Welcome. And welcome to part four of our list of carbon-14 everywhere it shouldn't be.
SPEAKER 03 :
Carbon-14 doesn't lie.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, it doesn't.
SPEAKER 03 :
In fact, it is so short-lived. that any specimen with original radiocarbon, it can't possibly be millions of years old, right, Bob?
SPEAKER 02 :
Only thousands. And by the way, all physics professors, all chemistry professors, they would all agree with that statement. Carbon-14 is so short-lived that... that any specimen with original carbon-14 cannot be millions of years old. It can only be thousands of years old.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, virtually all scientists, like 99.9999, agree with that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And those who don't, they're probably drooling.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, right.
SPEAKER 03 :
So you can't really hold that against them. No, you can't. Maybe they got elected president.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's not argued or debated. If there's original carbon-14 in a specimen, it's only thousands of years old. And that's why carbon-14 is the creationist's best friend. But here's the part that most scientists don't like. They don't like that carbon-14 is everywhere it shouldn't be. And quickly, here's the list we've presented. It's in a centrosaurus, a dinosaur fossil, and that's published by the journal eLife Sciences.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. And it's published in the journal Plus One. It's in a mosasaur bone.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yep. And the journal Radiocarbon, that's carbon-14, radioactive carbon. Yep. That journal has reported that you'll find 14C in natural gas, coal, oil, and other petroleum products, all of which are supposed to be millions of years old, but they're obviously not, Fred. They're loaded with carbon-14.
SPEAKER 03 :
They can't be because they've got carbon-14. Right. And other careful studies have reported carbon-14 in limestone from the Mesozoic layer, so that's way down there, fossilized wood, coal, marble, deep groundwater, geological graphite, And here's a kicker, in many dinosaur bones.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, now we've talked about this, but I'd like to give a little more detail. In 2012 in Singapore, at the American Geophysical Union Conference, 10 dinosaur bones were presented with the results from four labs around the world that they have loads of carbon-14 in them, But then later in 2015, in the CRS Quarterly, this was a paper co-authored by one of the friends of Real Science Radio. Yeah, Dr. Brian Thomas. Yeah, he's awesome. He is a PhD paleobiochemist. I love saying that. If you can say that, that proves you know something about science.
SPEAKER 03 :
Paleobiochemist.
SPEAKER 02 :
Brian is a paleobiochemist with a PhD from the University of Liverpool. Yep. So his paper that he co-authored with Vance Nelson, another friend of Real Science Radio, listed 60 carbon dated specimens, but he only listed seven and not 10 dinosaur bones the way the Singapore team had done. So the question is, why didn't Brian list at least the remaining three dinosaur fossils, Fred? That's the question I'd like us to answer.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Well, you know, there's a crisis with science journals.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, secular science journals.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, secular science journals of original data that's no longer available. You know, like, remember the global warming hockey stick?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, yeah, there's a big lawsuit about that. And that Michael Mann, that scientist, he's at Penn State, but he should be in the state pen. I knew where that was going, yeah. But he's at Penn State, right? Should be in the state pen because of all the fraud. Oh, absolutely. And after 10 years of his own lawsuit... claiming slander, he's refused to provide the data for that famous fraudulent hockey stick showing the climate has always been even, and now all of a sudden it's shot up like crazy.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so in this crisis among these secular journals, the tests also, they're not repeatable.
SPEAKER 02 :
Very often.
SPEAKER 03 :
Because the specimens aren't available.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, so what paleobiochemist Dr. Brian Thomas did was, was that he wanted to only report on carbon-dated bones that have accession numbers. Accession, that is like museum acquisition numbers. And whether private or public museums, at least that particular fossil can be identified It's tracked. And so at least in theory, these tests are repeatable for these dinosaur fossils. So that's why Brian listed seven, not 10.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, very careful, very good science. Yeah. You know, according to published papers, tens of thousands of secular science papers with unavailable data and inaccessible specimens.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
So here comes along, you know, young Earth creationist Dr. Brian Thomas to show how it should be done.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, exactly. So we just quickly presented the list of specimens that have been carbon dated that indicate they're relatively young. And one last item needs to be added to the list. And that's diamonds, even though supposedly they're billions of years old. They're 1 billion or 2 billion years old diamonds, it's claimed. But as reported by a mainstream secular outlet at Science Direct, diamonds have short-lived carbon-14 in them.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and they're the hardest substance on Earth, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. So how do you get contamination into a diamond? And bacteria, they don't eat diamonds.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. And then, you know, Dr. John Baumgardner.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
So with the RATE Project.
SPEAKER 02 :
Young Earth. He's a young Earth geophysicist.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep.
SPEAKER 02 :
And the RATE Project, Age of the Earth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep. So they tested 10 diamonds and they found carbon 14 in all of them, as we would expect.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. So this cannot be an anomaly, as the secular world claims, because it's not here and there, but it's everywhere it shouldn't be.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep. So, Bob, last week you covered Dr. Walt Brown's article on carbon-14. And, you know, we were talking before the show. Walt Brown, he's, I think, the most brilliant scientist of our day. I know you think the same thing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, the Isaac Newton. He is.
SPEAKER 03 :
He's the modern-day Isaac Newton. But yet he writes in such a way that is so easy to understand. I really appreciate how great a writer he is.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, he's an educator. He was a professor at the Air Force Academy, and he just does this brilliant job. I mean, after all, in the last 30-some years, Fred, he's had one job. One job, make this a good book. Yes. And the eighth edition is out. You and I on our desk here, I've got the sixth edition. You've got the sixth special edition. People don't know there were two editions back in 1995-96. Right. But yeah, he has done a fabulous job within the beginning, and it's now out of print. And it costs around $100 online to get used copies. So we've been buying them for about $100 just so they're available. We just sent one to a federal inmate this week, just three days ago.
SPEAKER 03 :
I gave my last copy to my daughter up at CSU, put it on her coffee table because she gets some interesting debates with friends and roommates.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that's awesome. So our store does list Walt's book available for $120. Yeah. The 8th edition.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it's very well worth it.
SPEAKER 02 :
It really is.
SPEAKER 03 :
And you can go to rsr.org slash c14.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
And you can read Walt Brown's, you'll find his article is listed there. I highly encourage people to read it because it really is an easy read. He uses a great analogy that you covered that, you know, the swimming pool and the bathtub and just helps you understand why the carbon 14, why it's going to give incorrect dates, you know, for things because of the flood.
SPEAKER 02 :
And how these specimens can't be millions of years old. So both things.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah. Right. Absolutely. And the interesting tidbit, by the way, that carbon-14 isn't just formed by the atmosphere.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. Isn't that amazing?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. It's so cool. So Walt Brown, at the end of his carbon-14 article, made a prediction. And so here's what that prediction is. Specimens with carbon believed to be older than 100,000 years will have plenty of carbon-14.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that was published. And you've got the special edition there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, we both have the sixth edition.
SPEAKER 02 :
Here's mine. See how it sounds. Sounds like a good book. Actually, it's a lot thicker than it was back in the 90s. So this is hardcover sixth edition. You have a softcover sixth edition, but this is a special edition. And since this, they were all hardcover.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. And I know, let's see here on page 157, he has this prediction. And you know what, Bob, this book was published in 1996. So this prediction wasn't yesterday. So it's been about 15 years.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, in fact, the book I have is the special edition, 1995, 16 years, and in this book it happens to be on page 152. Okay. So Walt made this prediction, and this prediction has since been confirmed, as we've covered, with carbon-14 everywhere it's not supposed to be. Yep.
SPEAKER 03 :
So once again, Walt Brown made a prediction in his book, and there's so many of them, and then they proved to be true.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. And it usually doesn't take that long. In fact, there's a Mars prediction Walt made that we'll get to. And Fred, later in the show, let's give our own RSR spin to a carbon-14 prediction. Okay. And back to a Mars prediction. We've got to try to keep up with Walt Brown. That's not easy to do. But before we continue with carbon dating, We'd like to announce two new Real Science Radio YouTube videos this week. Well, one is brand new, the short one, and the other is now a standalone segment from part of our flood video.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and that's super cool. I think a listener requested it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it's day two, the firmament, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
So what is the firmament described in Genesis day two?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that is such a fun video. And like you said, a listener requested said, Bob, could you guys please pull out this segment of your flood video, because it's such a powerful presentation on the firmament, and is the firmament of day two the earth's crust? Is that what it is? I think this video, Fred, will blow people's minds if they're not aware of the biblical material.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, because I kind of fell for the standard version. This is not the standard version of what the firmament is. But if you watch it, it presents a very compelling case of what it is. And it's the Earth's Cross, by the way, so that's a teaser. Yeah, so go out and watch that video.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, if you'd like to, I think you'll love it. All right, now here's a 40-second video we just put up. And there's only a music soundtrack. So there's no words. Fred, I'd like you to watch it for the first time. We'll see it together. And we'll have to describe it for the audience. A Mars landscape. And Fred, look how desolate it is, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
So I'm looking at Mars. Panning shot.
SPEAKER 02 :
Debris strewn all over the place. Surprising shaped rocks. Foothills and a mountain in the background. And then, maybe just coming into view, what's that? Wait a minute. It looks sort of rectangular, somehow held up on a stick. What? That looks like a, that's a sign. It's an old wooden sign.
SPEAKER 03 :
It's an old wooden sign that says, Walt Brown was here. Walt Brown.
SPEAKER 02 :
Walt Brown was here, rsr.org slash Walt, hashtag Mars.
SPEAKER 03 :
So you see this panning of the Martian landscape, and then it pans in on a sign that says, Walt Brown was here.
SPEAKER 02 :
We have all these great scientific discoveries where when... They're discovering things that Walt wrote about in his book decades ago. We just plant a sign into the image and say, Walt Brown was here. Pluto, Walt Brown was here. Comet 67P, Walt Brown was here. On and on.
SPEAKER 03 :
Kudos to the producer who put that together. That's great.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that was actually one of our producers, Larry Wolf.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
I love bragging about Larry. He got a couple patents to his name on laser technology. Oh, wow. As an engineer for IBM. That's cool. So, yeah, he's extraordinary. All right. So, WWB, right? All scientists work for Walt Brown. And we love to talk about yet another WWB discovery. NASA finds water on Mars. Now, this is really an old story. In fact, it's become... a joke among planetary scientists. And Walt mentions this in his book. And in fact, we did a show years ago, a long time ago, titled Water on Mars, France on Drugs. And we quoted out of Walt's book, Congratulations, you've discovered water on Mars for the thousandth time. So that is fun, right? Even though it's basically bone dry, the way we would look at a desert, we'd look at it and say it's dry, but there is water there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. But what is significant about this, though, is Walt Brown predicted the presence of salt water on Mars.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
And guess what? That's been confirmed.
SPEAKER 02 :
That has been confirmed. So that's quite the prediction. And Walt's theory comes loaded with predictions, not only the ones he's identified and marked in bold as these predictions have been confirmed.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. In his book, there'll be predictions scattered here and there, and they're all in bold.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right. And then he collects them all at the end of the book. Yep. And the bold ones are the ones in the list. that are actually confirmed already. The others are expected to be confirmed. And you and I, Fred, we've benefited because we've made all kinds of predictions, many based on Walt's theory, others just based generally on young Earth creation science. And we have an uncanny track record of predictions being confirmed. Yep. Where are those myth busters when you need their confirmed? Well, there you go. Yeah. You just need that sound effect. So at the end of the show, Fred, let's add our own prediction on carbon 14 and we'll let the audience in on something coming up about Mars.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
But back to carbon 14, there are two lists on our website for today's show. that we are going to only look at the last item in each list.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so if you want to read the full list, just go to the website.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. The first is six problems with the contamination explanation, right? Evolutionists, atheists, they got to do something if they're not going to be humble and say, we're going to reconsider this because there's short-lived carbon-14 everywhere it shouldn't be. Maybe dinosaurs lived not that long ago because we even have dinosaur soft tissue everywhere we look. But if they're not going to reconsider, then they come up with a rescue device. And one is contamination, and the other, as we've discussed, is neutron capture. And so we have a list of six problems with the contamination explanation and six problems with the neutron capture explanation. And now you and I will only look at the last, the sixth item in each of the two lists.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Okay. So the sixth one for problems with the contamination explanation. So remember the inventor of radiocarbon, Dr. Walter Libby? Yes. He was actually born in Colorado. Yes. He stated in the journal Science, there is no known natural mechanism by which collagen may be altered to yield a false age.
SPEAKER 02 :
No known natural mechanism. And we talked about this briefly, Fred, maybe in our first show, that collagen, if you look at it as a molecule... It's sort of like a chain link fence. And the manufacturing process, this is all done by cells in a living organism to build collagen. It's a stunning process. And if you took a chain link fence... And let's say one of the links was a carbon-14 atom and it decayed into a gas. Now it disappears. It's now a nitrogen gas. It's nitrogen-14. Well, then how are you going to get that fence repaired? Let's say there's a new carbon-14 atom floating down out of the sky. It's not going to take the place of that link in a chain or a link in a chain link fence because to get in there, it has to be manufactured. Yeah. It can't just fall and take the place of a carbon-14 atom that had decayed. So Libby's point is if you find carbon-14 – In collagen. That is original carbon-14.
SPEAKER 03 :
It can't be due to contamination.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
It can't be. So as of 2021, there is still no known mechanism to contaminate collagen with modern carbon.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right. And the evolutionists were really taken to the cleaners by one of their own journals, the journal Nature in 2017. Fred, so many of them, their heart must have sunk when they opened that edition and found this paper titled Carbon Fixation from Mineral Carbonates. This was so depressing because here's what they hoped. Here's what they imagined. When you're measuring how much carbon-14 is in, say, a dinosaur bone, if it's in collagen, it has to be original. But let's say there's something in a bone, maybe humic acid, maybe the collagen and other biological material is breaking down, and there are some carbon atoms there inside the bone, and they hope... that it must be contamination from bacteria if they find carbon-14 in there. They just hope, beyond hope, because the bacteria must be transporting, the bacteria, if it's alive or if it died just yesterday or 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago, the bacteria, they hope, would be bringing carbon-14, modern carbon, from the atmosphere in, In with it into the bone. Into the bone. That's what they hope.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Well, guess what? This 2017 paper in Nature, again, it's called Carbon Fixation for Mineral Carbonates. It confirms that cyanobacteria in fossils gets... Virtually all of their carbon from the bone substrate they are feeding on. So wait a minute. So it did not transport the carbon-14 in. From the atmosphere. It's chewing on the carbon-14 on the bone, basically.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER 03 :
The carbon-14 is in the bone. That's what this Nature article confirmed.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, it's basically eating the bone. And if you think about how tiny bacteria is, the paper says, and I forget the exact percentage, but like a 40th of a millimeter or a hundredth of an inch or something into the bone. That's as far as you can go down into the bone to hope that the carbon-14 was brought in by bacteria. These bacteria are tiny. They're boring bacteria. I don't mean in biology class after lunch when you're falling asleep. I mean boring as in a mine boring a hole into the ground. They drill a hole into the ground. They don't drill it. But basically, chemically, they eat holes through bones like a whole mining system. and they're not setting up a transportation system where they're shipping in carbon-14 from the atmosphere. They're getting all their carbon atoms from the bone itself. That means if a dinosaur bone is riddled with bacteria, So that, let's say, 5% of the mass of the bone, the interior of the bone, it's all bacteria and biofilm. That's all it is. If that were the case, it wouldn't change the carbon date of the bone at all because the bacteria is getting its carbon from the bone, not from the atmosphere. Exactly. So that is like a death knell to this rescue device of contamination. Now, we've talked about the other kinds of contamination, like maybe it's from the laboratory equipment or the processing. And that's where if they have a quarter of a quadrillion carbon atoms in a specimen, a quarter of a quadrillion, They would have, if it's a recent specimen, 250 carbon-14 atoms. 250 out of 250 trillion carbon atoms. Only 250 would be carbon-14. And by laboratory contamination, they have it to where they know they're going to add approximately one atom, one atom of carbon-14 to the 250. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
They could blame on contamination.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right. One atom. Right. So when they're hoping for contamination, they're hoping for something way more than laboratory processes and equipment.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Like that Lawrence Krauss said, it's an anomaly. But the problem is it's everywhere. Like we'd said in the earlier show. Yes. There's no way this contamination is happening.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right. This isn't happening. And so when these scientists, like the famous Mary Schweitzer, the Iron Maiden, and Lindgren and all these guys, when they have mentioned carbon-14 in these ancient fossils, they hope it's microbial contamination- But this Nature paper, which was an isotope study, it demolishes their hope that bacteria is changing the carbon dates of these dinosaur fossils. For them, it was horrendous. Horrendous. Horrendous results. Okay, so now let's go to the six problems with neutron capture explanation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so that's their other one that they try to use.
SPEAKER 02 :
Their rescue device. And we've talked about the science behind that. But we're only going to look at the last of the six problems. And basically, this rescue device is, if there is a lot of radioactivity in the neighborhood, then neutrons flying out as an element is decaying, a free neutron might slam into the nucleus of a carbon atom. Yeah, and turn it into carbon-14. Yeah, through its process that's well known. But how common is... Is that how commonly might that happen? So what we do is we take arguments from Dr. Gehm, who we've mentioned, who is an expert on specimens being carbon dated. And we have a future show with him, right? Yes. Coming up. Let's let's plug that more at the end of today's show. And Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, who is a world-renowned creation scientist, PhD physicist. He's been published in the journal Nature, which is the world's number one secular science journal. Yeah, he plays chess, like blindfolded, multiple people. He was the New Zealand chess champ for some years. Yeah, he's stunningly brilliant. IQ off the charts. So Dr. Sarfati, physicist, he built upon Dr. Gehm's work. And basically, this is the argument, that if you have a specimen that is in any kind of standard environment in the Earth's crust... There's not going to be nearly enough radioactivity to account for all the carbon-14 in diamonds, for example, just in diamonds. So here at Real Science Radio, since we're not scientists, we're talk show hosts, you're an engineer, software engineer. I'm a Bible-thumping pastor posting 95 COVID theses, nailing it to our front door. Thank you. LifeSite News reported on that this week. Just so exciting. That was fun. But so we're not scientists. So when scientists say to one another, well, there's, relatively speaking... radioactivity is generally scarce in the Earth's crust. So scientists say that to one another. They know what they mean. We didn't know what they meant, so you sent me searching, and I found a report from the USGS, the United States Geological Survey, and they document, we link to this report, that generally speaking, radioactivity is very scarce in the crust of the earth in, for example, coal, basalt, shales, granite, fly ash, et cetera, et cetera. So if you look at the amount of neutron capture that could account for carbon-14 in diamonds, Jonathan Sarfati, physicist, does the calculation. Yeah, he does.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so he documents that neutron capture could account for less than one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you want to get the rest, check out rsr.org slash carbon 14. You don't want to miss it. Hey, may God bless you guys.
As we reflect on the Christmas story, this episode of Real Science Radio offers a thought-provoking journey into the celestial phenomena recorded in the Bible. Electrical engineer and astronomy enthusiast Gil Buller explains the astronomical activity that aligns with the nativity story, revealing the harmony between biblical narratives and the universe's choreographed dance. Tune in for an inspiring exploration of faith and science.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hi, this is Bob Enyart. At Real Science Radio, we have a great science store. You can get great science materials from us online, realscienceradio.com. Click on the store or by calling us 1-800-8ENYART. DVDs from Illustra Media, The Privileged Planet, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, and Darwin's Dilemma. And then there are the two fabulous DVDs from Dr. Carl Werner on Evolution, the Grand Experiment, Living Fossils, you'll want to see those. And then Spike Pissarro's What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomy. And then there's Bob DeBates and Evolutionist, Dr. Eugenie Scott on DVD. We also have our debate on the age of the earth. And finally, my favorite science book, In the Beginning by Dr. Walt Brown. Just call us at 800-8N-YARTS or check out our online store in the science department, either at kgov.com or realscienceradio.com.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to Real Science Radio. As we spend time with our families to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior please enjoy this Real Science Radio holiday classic. May the coming year bring you and your family the joy and peace of Jesus Christ. 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 01 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keepin' it real!
SPEAKER 02 :
And I was so excited to find out that at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CU on the Boulder campus, there is a program at their planetarium titled The Astronomical Star of Bethlehem. So we looked into it, and it turns out that Gil Buller is the author of the program, The Astronomical Star of Bethlehem. And what in the world? At CU in Boulder, a Christian program honoring the birth of the creator of the universe as our Savior, Jesus Christ. Well, what an honor that we have in studio. Gil, welcome to Bob and Garrett Live.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's such a thrill. Let's talk this through because the Bible says that the Magi from the east saw a star and then they traveled and then it came to rest over Bethlehem. Could you tell us what does the Bible say and what does this all mean? And then we'll get into the particulars of what astronomy can tell us about the star of Bethlehem.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, the star from the story in Matthew has some rather peculiar behavior. When does a star ever stand over a place where someone is? Stars do that every night, if you will. Right. But why would one be so unique that it would get attention in Matthew's account like that? Mm-hmm. Well, there's an ancient tradition that says that the wise men saw the star reflected in the water of David's well when they arrived in Bethlehem. Now, in the program, I demonstrate how this is totally plausible. The event that I highlight as the star that they saw in the east and then the star that stood over the place where the young child was happens to be a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. Wow. Ten months, five days separated. Two conjunctions, the same astronomical phenomenon. The Greek word that Matthew uses is aster. It's much more general than our word star. The word aster refers to almost anything that you see in the sky. It could be a lightning or a strange cloud formation.
SPEAKER 02 :
And that's where we get, of course, astronomy and that room. And even disaster is where we get. Disaster. Right. From the stars, a fear that, you know, who knows? Comets, asteroids, meteorites, showers.
SPEAKER 03 :
Comets were always considered omens of evil. Right. and catastrophe. In fact, the Chinese called them room stars because they looked at it as sweeping out the old order and making way for the new.
SPEAKER 02 :
And even catastrophe is Esther in there. Right. Okay. So in your presentation, you end up giving a series of dates of conjunctions. And I don't want to get you off on the track that you're on, but I'll just point out one thing. We made this DVD back in the 1990s. We aired it in 80 cities. And there was a date that we highlighted, which was September 14, 3 B.C., with a conjunction of Jupiter and Regulus. And in your presentation now, I was using software that was published in the 1980s. And we confirmed its validity in the 90s. And sure enough, the software you're using today, which is more modern than what I had, gives us the same date for that particular conjunction. Because we're doing what Johann Kepler did, who was the Christian creationist, young Earth creationist, who gave us the laws of modern astronomy, the three laws of planetary motion.
SPEAKER 03 :
He gave us the solar-centric model of the solar system.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, with Copernicus and Johann Kepler explaining that the planets move in an ellipse and all that. Right. So great. And then he actually began to calculate backwards to determine what was the star of Bethlehem. So his efforts and your software and my software, it's all based on the same orbital mechanics. That's correct. And we could actually know what the night sky looked like to the magi before they left on their journey and at the time of Christ's birth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Because of the regularity that God has built into the solar system. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 02 :
And as Kepler said, we're thinking God's thoughts after him. Yes. Because look at this. The planets move the way God intended them to move, which is also what Isaac Newton said. And that Descartes was wrong when he thought the solar system just formed naturally by a condensing nebula, a gas cloud. And Isaac Newton said, no, gravity would not cause this formation of the planets and the sun. Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
However God did it, he did it. Right. And it's got his fingerprints all over it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And the Star of Bethlehem program just is just absolutely littered with God's fingerprints. Wow. I highlight a list of nine events that form a mirror symmetrical image list that's mirror symmetrical. Wow. That happens in one calendar year.
SPEAKER 02 :
In one year. So the first thing on the list is... Is also repeated as the last. As the last. So Mercury in a conjunction with Regulus. Now, some people... I went to public school. I didn't even know what a conjunction was until I was an adult. Well, I explain all of that in my program. Well, I know, but for the audience. And we can't see the beautiful ceiling of the planetarium right here. We're on radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So what's that conjunction?
SPEAKER 03 :
Even for all of my audiences, I go through the basic astronomical concepts that we need as we go through the study. Yes. And I define a conjunction, and that is when a star and a planet or a couple of planets share the same celestial longitude in close proximity. All right, now that's way too complicated for me.
SPEAKER 02 :
So in other words, when it looks like they touch.
SPEAKER 03 :
When they get close together, maybe as far as the moon apart. Okay. Anything that close or maybe even a little further apart, several degrees, wherein two planets are several degrees within several degrees of each other.
SPEAKER 02 :
When it looks like they're coming together, like they are talking to each other or something. Right, right.
SPEAKER 03 :
When they're coming together for a meeting.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, for a meeting. And by the way, Gil Buller, you are an electrical engineer, right? I'm retired. Your specialty was semiconductors?
SPEAKER 03 :
Semiconductor modeling. Well, that's just great. Oh, that was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Telling the engineers how far they could push the process when they designed chips.
SPEAKER 02 :
And you retired what year?
SPEAKER 1 :
2001.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. So that's a decade ago. Yep. Would you say they've pushed it further since then? It's astounding.
SPEAKER 03 :
I was glad to retire because I couldn't keep up with technology anymore. My brain was slowing down.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's so stunning.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, it is. And since I was a kid, I have been absolutely fascinated with astronomy, just enchanted with planetaria. So I decided after I retired, I was going to study this thing about the Star of Bethlehem. And it blew my socks off. Absolutely blew my socks off.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, New York City's Museum of Nature and Science, they've got a famous planetarium. Hanging planetarium? Growing up as a kid, we'd go there. And then more recently, I went to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis in Kentucky. They have their creation museum. And what a beautiful digital projector, the whole bit. It's just gorgeous. Have you been there?
SPEAKER 03 :
No, I'd love to go. I heard Jason Lyle speak a couple of years ago.
SPEAKER 02 :
Dr. Jason Lyle has been on the show. He has his PhD in astrophysics from CU. Right. So does he know about your program? I'm not sure. Whoa. Well, we're going to have to let him know about it because what you have come up with here, this mirror image in Hebrew poetry, it's called a parallelism, but it's an inverted parallelism where the first matches the last. Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
It's a very similar structure as you see in Psalm 19. Because there, the first half of the psalm speaks about astronomical. Astronomy. And uses literary terms.
SPEAKER 02 :
Words about grammar and language. Right. Whereas the second half.
SPEAKER 03 :
Second half talks about literary concepts. The word of God. The word of God, literary concepts, and uses astronomical terms.
SPEAKER 02 :
That is just stunning right there. If the audience can put on their thinking caps and realize what Gil Bullard just said, Psalm 19 that talks about the heavens declare the glory of God. The first half of the psalm is about the heavens, astronomy, but it uses literary terms. The second half is about the word of God, but it uses astronomical terms. Yes. That shows the cohesiveness of the psalm.
SPEAKER 03 :
And if you look in the detailed structure of the outline, it's got that listing of A, B, B, A kind of structure as well.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's a form of poetry. Yes. Like couplets, where you'll have two lines that sort of make the same point or contrasting points, then two more lines and two more lines. But sometimes if it's an inverted Hebrew parallelism... The first and the last go together, and then the second and the second and the last, and you come to the center. Right. And the center could be, for example, the birth of Christ. Right. And so you're saying that not only does the Bible contain parallelisms and inverted parallelisms, but so do the motions of the heavens.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. It's God's fingerprint.
SPEAKER 02 :
I think you're the first person to observe this, Gil, because I've been reading about this. D. James Kennedy did a great job with how God wrote the message of salvation in the stars. Yes. Bullinger, E.W. Bullinger, one of my favorite authors, wrote a book called The Witness of the Stars. Yes. I have the book. You have the book.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Tremendous book. But I have not seen in 20 years of studying the Star of Bethlehem, I have not seen anyone recognize that there are a series of conjunctions in a single calendar year that are a parallelism in this inverted mirror image like you're pointing out.
SPEAKER 03 :
I have not seen it in any of the references I have found either. So this is... I just decided when I saw some of this going on, I said, well, let's see what's going on before and after.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I just started looking with my astronomy program. Everything happens in the constellation of Leo except the central event, which occurs in the constellation of Virgo. In Virgo.
SPEAKER 02 :
In Virgo because it's Virgo, the Virgin. The Virgin. And the three constellations that go with... virgo right one of them is coma the child yes and this is ancient the desired one the desired one so why would the virgin have a child normally a virgin wouldn't have a child right but here it is and leo the lion the bible presents the messiah as the lion of the tribe of judah the lion is the king of right the animal kingdom the lion is the king
SPEAKER 03 :
The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh come.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's Genesis chapter 49, a prophecy by Jacob over Judah. And that the Messiah would come through the tribe of Judah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. And the scepter, who carries the scepter? The king. And what star is there right between the front paws of Leo the lion? Regulus. Regulus. Melech in Hebrew. The king.
SPEAKER 02 :
Melech is the king.
SPEAKER 03 :
In Hebrew.
SPEAKER 02 :
In Hebrew. And this is Regulus. Of course, the title Regulus, even today from the Latin, we realize is king. The royal one. Yeah, the interregnum. Right. Right. And then Jupiter. How about the name Jupiter?
SPEAKER 03 :
Jupiter in Hebrew is tzedek. Tzedek, which means righteousness. Righteousness. If you put Melech and Tzedek together, you get Melchizedek, king of righteousness.
SPEAKER 02 :
King of righteousness. And Melchizedek was in the book of Genesis, even though there turns out to be a priestly tribe in Israel from Abraham, the Levitical tribe, the sons of Aaron. There was a greater priesthood, Melchizedek, who was a type of Christ, and his beginnings are evolved from everlasting in a sense. And so pointing to Christ, the king of righteousness, this conjunction.
SPEAKER 03 :
What did Melchizedek do when he met Abraham? He brought bread and wine.
SPEAKER 02 :
Bread and wine symbolizing the body and blood of Christ. The sacrifice. He came. He was born. He came in the flesh in order to give up his life so that we could be forgiven of our sins.
SPEAKER 03 :
And Melchizedek served communion to Abraham.
SPEAKER 02 :
He did. Wow. And so Abraham tithed to Melchizedek, showing that the priesthood of Christ is even greater than the Levitical priesthood.
SPEAKER 03 :
And as part of the Star of Bethlehem program, tzedek, righteousness, Jupiter, actually forms a circle above throughout the winter and spring of 3-2 BC. Jupiter draws a circle above Regulus.
SPEAKER 1 :
Hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
I call that righteousness crowning the king. Wow. Righteousness crowning the king. And that started in the eastern sky early in the morning, was the first one of those conjunctions of Jupiter and Regulus. And then they proceed earlier and earlier through the night, leading the wise men westward toward Jerusalem.
SPEAKER 02 :
So that what we read in the Bible actually can be shown to have its foundation in real astronomy. Absolutely. The actual movement of the planets against the backdrop of the stars.
SPEAKER 03 :
The Lord has given us the tools that we can now go back and verify the accuracy of God's word in describing what the star was. Mm-hmm. And I think, although it's only my suggestion, I can't prove it rigorously, but as far as we can, this reproduces all of the characteristics that are described by Matthew of the star in the story of the wise men coming to see the young child, Jesus. Oh, wow. Now, it's interesting. Matthew uses the word padion in the Greek, which means young child, whereas Luke uses the word brephos, which means infant. So Matthew is saying that Jesus was a toddler when the wise men came, not an infant in the manger.
SPEAKER 02 :
Let me ask you this, Gil. When you have noticed that there's a dozen events... that these conjunctions in this one calendar year and they form a mirror image Have you attempted to calculate how often do these things happen? What's the likelihood of this?
SPEAKER 03 :
This list of events that I highlight in my program, just the two Jupiter-Venus conjunctions that are second and second last item in the list, the repetition rate or period interval for that to happen in a period of 10 months, 5 days, That happens only once every 1.2 million years.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh my, so just this, just the B and B prime. B and B prime. The second and the second to the last events happening in a calendar year. would only happen once every million years. We know that the universe and the earth is young, as described in the Bible. In other words, just those two things happening in a calendar year happened only once in history.
SPEAKER 03 :
And then we've got this mirror image of nine events. Four in the beginning and four in the end around the Virgo configuration that is described in Revelation chapter 12, the great sign in heaven, the woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet. Mm-hmm. For all of these to occur in one calendar year and in mirror order, mirror image order, even if you grant that the universe may be 13, 15 billion years old, it would still be a once in the life of the universe.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Wow. So that the creator of the universe... recognizing that if Adam and Eve sin, he's going to come to earth to provide for our forgiveness. If we trust in him, if we humble ourselves, he set up the orbit of the planets to announce his birth at the proper time. Absolutely.
SPEAKER 03 :
In the fullness of time, God sent forth his son born of a virgin.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Now, there's a DVD that was produced by Stephen Vodano, which is called The Star of Bethlehem. And if I recall, I got a wonderful note from Stephen some time ago thanking us for producing our program on The Star of Bethlehem back in the 90s, which motivated him. So we really have three resources we could recommend to our listeners.
SPEAKER 03 :
There's another one, a DVD put out by Barry Setterfield, who is an Australian astronomer who is... director of the observatory at Grants Pass, Oregon. He has done a DVD as well on the Star of Bethlehem.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. So there's that. There's Stephen Vodano's The Star of Bethlehem that you get online from us here at Bob and Yart Live, KGOV, KGOV.com, or just call us, 800-8N-YARTS. 800-836-9278. You could get the planet stars in the Bible. And that shows you the night sky over Jerusalem. So these are all different resources people could use. And then next year, come next year, you're ready. And you could share this DVD with your friends and family. And you could use this information during the year as you tell people about the Lord and the signs in the heavens. And, of course, the scriptures and the prophecies pointing toward the Messiah. So, Gil, you said that when you were young, you were fascinated by this story of a star, of this unusual behavior. Could you describe that a little bit more?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I was wondering, you know, how does a star stand over a place? And how does it disappear and then reappear? Things like that. And all of it fits together. And I demonstrate how it's so absolutely logical in the program. Because in other words... To use the world's equipment to do some pre-evangelism.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
To get people to thinking the Bible is, even when it sounds way off base and wacko, it's right on target.
SPEAKER 02 :
It sounds way off base because I had these same thoughts as a kid. that you had. But it didn't impress upon me the importance of resolving it like maybe it did to you until I was an adult.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, me either. I didn't take the time to really research it until I retired.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, all right. So we have a similar story. But I thought, what does it mean that they saw the star in the east? And then what does it mean when they were there and the star appeared And I thought, is this a supernatural star that God created and then months later created again? And it didn't seem right because everybody would see it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Herod would see it. Herod would have known about it. Everybody in Israel would know. Right. But these magi, they're also astronomers, which is typical.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I believe they got information from Daniel.
SPEAKER 02 :
From Daniel, absolutely.
SPEAKER 03 :
I bring that out in my program.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, and we mention that in our DVD, Planet Stars in the Bible. We mention the book of Daniel and the tie-in.
SPEAKER 03 :
Persian court records that have been excavated indicate that Daniel had a young student named Zoroaster. Whoa. He founded the religion that was the state religion of the Parthian Empire, of which the Magoi, or the wise men, were some of the kingmakers in that empire. Wow. And being hereditary priests of the religion that Zoroaster founded, they would have undoubtedly had information that had been handed down from Daniel.
SPEAKER 02 :
And there's again the Aster and Zoroastrianism to this day. And Daniel's crucial role... in the history of that part of the world. And then God used him to forecast the coming centuries, four centuries, until the coming of the Messiah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And when Christ rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he expected the Jewish authorities to recognize the day. The day. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. That psalm refers to Palm Sunday. Wow. That was the day the Lord had created. Wow. And they didn't recognize him.
SPEAKER 02 :
And Gil, there is so much evidence for all this. We have just completed in our Sunday night Bible studies, a verse by verse study of the book of Daniel. We have that also. I know I'm mentioning our materials because that's how we stay online and on the air as people get these and they support our radio program. But we have the Book of Daniel. People could download it just automatically, audio MP3, or get a CD from us or a DVD series of the Book of Daniel. And boy, do we go into these. fascinating prophecies about the coming of the Messiah in print, in writing, and even translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek centuries before Christ. And so the world is filled with evidence for the Creator, but now you show that so are the heavens filled with evidence.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, I think Daniel, God used Daniel because Daniel had no heirs. And I think God used Daniel in his fabulous riches to And the gifts of the wise men were his estate that he had put in trust with the Magoi, told them to keep them in trust until the Messiah came and deliver them to his Messiah. So back 500 years before Christ was born, God was already preparing Jesus' college fund. Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
So that when the Magi are in the east, they see the conjunction, speaking of the coming king of righteousness, and they head off to Judea because the Hebrew prophets said that in Bethlehem would come the eternal one.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right, right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So they get to Bethlehem, and here again is the conjunction telling them that they have arrived at the right place, the right day, the right night, and they find the child Jesus.
SPEAKER 03 :
Bethlehem was a small town, and once the star confirmed it, that they were at the right place. They looked for the child. They would have had only a few questions to find where is this young child.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Gil Buller, thank you so much. Hi, this is Bob Enyart. At Real Science Radio, we have a great science store. You can get great science materials from us, DVDs, debates, books, online, realscienceradio.com. Click on the store or by calling us 1-800-8-ENYART. So here's a list of what you can get. DVDs from Illustra Media that we carry, The Privileged Planet, Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Darwin's Dilemma. And then there are the two fabulous DVDs from Dr. Carl Werner on Evolution, the Grand Experiment, Living Fossils. You'll want to see those. And then Spike Pissarro, formerly with the U.S. Military Space Program, What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomy. And then there's the BEL Debates, Bob Debates an Evolutionist, Dr. Eugenie Scott on DVD, and a book, Does God Exist? Bob Enyart Debates Atheist Zaketh, a Psychologist. We also have two DVDs on our seminar, Does God Exist? And then Mount St. Helens, the Explosive Evidence for Catastrophe. We also have our debate on the Age of the Earth, where I got to debate a mathematician from CU up in Boulder and a geophysicist on this MP3 CD. And finally, my favorite science book, In the Beginning, by Dr. Walt Brown. Just call us at 800-8N-YARTS, 800-836-9278, or check out our online store in the science department, either at kgov.com or realscienceradio.com.
Acts: Welcome to our study in the Book of The Acts of the Apostles. To summarize the book of Acts in one sentence: The Kingdom of Israel Fades as the Body of Christ Grows.
To say simply that Acts is the story of the beginning of the church is to give a half-truth, for first, God offers the Earthly Kingdom to Israel and when that nation rejects their own risen Messiah, then God cuts off Israel, and grafts in the Body of Christ, replacing the covenant of law with the covenant of Grace.
Who were the major Apostles?
Jesus chose the 12 Apostles, Peter, James, John and the rest, and as He promised them, they would sit on 12 thrones, and judge the 12 tribes of Israel.
On the other hand, for the Body, Paul is the one apostle for the one Body of Christ, and neither Paul, nor the Twelve Apostles, will rule over us, but Christ alone is the head of the body, whereas Israel, as a political entity, as a kingdom, can employ 12 judges.
The title of the Book, The Acts of the Apostles, could be focused more precisely. It could be the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and Paul. For most of the Twelve Apostles, Luke the author of this book, mentions only their names, and that, only once. Whereas Peter and Paul are the main actors.
In Acts 1 through 8, Peter is the primary actor and through Peter God offers the Kingdom to Israel.
In Acts 9, God saves Paul and sends him to the Gentiles and it is only through Paul’s ministry that God tells us about the Body of Christ and the dispensation of Grace.
As The Acts opens, it’s all Peter and then as God cuts off Israel and grafts in the Gentiles in the Body, the story transitions and as Peter fades out, Paul replaces him as the primary actor.
The Book of Acts is the story of the transition from Israel to the Body of Christ. Get this entire verse by verse Bible study in four parts.
Acts: St Peter's Church Vol. 1
Acts: St Peter's Church Vol. 2
Acts: St Paul's Church Vol. 1
Acts: St Paul's Church Vol. 2
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