Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

… God made … every kind of bird. God looked at what he had done, and it was good. Then he gave the living creatures his blessing—he told the ocean creatures to increase and … the birds to increase everywhere on earth. Evening came, then morning—that was the fifth day.

Genesis, chapter 1, verses 20 through 23, Contemporary English Version

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re very glad to be with you. Today we are going to conclude the series we started several weeks ago on Anchored by Truth. We called this series “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know.” To help us close our series, in the studio today we have RD Fierro, author of a well-known set of Christian allegories called Doors of Destiny and Prodigal’s Advocate. Doors of Destiny is a great way to begin a discussion with family members and friends about their faith and Prodigal’s Advocate is for anyone who is serious about their faith and wants to develop Christian maturity. RD is also the founder of Crystal Sea Books. RD, this “10 Facts Every Christian needs to Know” series has covered 13 episodes. That’s the longest series we have every done on Anchored by Truth. Why did we spend so much time on it?

RD: Well, I’d also like to welcome everyone joining us here today and just to remind them that anyone who missed a previous episode in this series can find episodes of Anchored by Truth on their favorite podcast app or our website, crystalseabooks.com. The reason we have been so diligent in working out way through 10 facts every Christian needs to know is simple. There’s a lot of disinformation and misinformation that circulates within our culture today. We are constantly being bombarded with narratives about abortion, marriage, politics, social concerns, financial concerns, etc. It can be overwhelming. But most of the narratives that are jammed at us are what I call secondary narratives. We talk about these secondary narratives but we hardly ever talk about the primary narratives that underscore these secondary narratives. Three of these primary narratives are Deep Time, evolution, and uniformitarianism.

VK: Deep time is the idea that the universe is 14 Billion years old and the earth is 4.5 Billion years old. You have said “Deep time is the root of the evolutionary weed.” Evolution needs deep time because without it the whole idea that the random collision of unintelligent atoms and molecules could have produced the biodiversity we see around us – let alone biologists that can study life – is ridiculous. Without deep time evolution dies as an hypothesis even worthy of contemplation. Uniformitarianism is the idea that “the present is the key to the past.” In other words, everything we see going on around us today is the same as what has been occurring during that Deep Time. Geological uniformitarianism explains why the surface of the earth looks the way it does. Biological uniformitarianism explains why living creatures look like they do. But in this series we have pointed out that there are scientific observations that dispute Deep Time. These observations point out that the universe and earth are thousands of years old, not millions or billions of years old. In doing so, these scientific observations are a death knell for the evolutionary and uniformitarian hypotheses.

RD: Well said. Most of our attention gets focused on the secondary narratives. But it is important to note that the secondary narratives emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones. Primary narratives are the overarching paradigms so embedded in the culture that they are not even noticed any more. As we have said in this series, these primary narratives are like the framed art prints on your wall. Initially you see them and think about them, but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only notice them when a visitor comes in and makes a comment about them. Deep time, evolution, and uniformitarianism - among others - are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them.

VK: What these primary narratives have done is to displace the need for God. Without the Big Bang/Deep Time narrative we would all look to God as the creator of the physical universe. Without evolution we would all look to God as the creator of life. And without uniformitarianism we would all look to God as being necessary to sustain the operation of the created order. We wouldn’t think creation was some kind of self-sustaining animatronic that just keep going because that’s always the way it has been. So, the net result of these primary narratives has been to displace the common sense notion that God is necessary to explain our universe, our world, and our own existence. And of course, once these narratives do away with the need for God they have also done away with trust in the Bible as being God’s word.

RD: So, in the first five facts we discussed we pointed out – just scratched the surface really – a few of the empirical observations that point out that these primary narratives have major problems that are rarely acknowledged. And in the next four facts we moved on to demonstrating that there is evidence not only in the physical creation but also in human history, language, and geography that confirm that the book of Genesis is reliable. Then, the 10th fact every Christian needs to know to ensure that they can be secure in their confidence in the Bible is this: while the secular world has doubts about the historicity of the book of Genesis, the book of Genesis has never been disproven and indeed it cannot be disproven. Conversely, while the Big Bang Theory and Deep Time, the evolutionary hypothesis, and the uniformitarian hypothesis are widely accepted they have never been proven to be true, and indeed, they cannot be proven to be true.

VK: And today you said you wanted to move on to another observation that you believe helps put the big picture into perspective. And you said you wanted to call this episode of Anchored by Truth “The Chicken Came First.” That’s a pretty strange title isn’t it?

RD: Well, actually I wanted to call this episode “The Chicken Came First, Silly,” but you objected to me using “Silly.”

VK: Yes. I did. The title “The Chicken Came First” is pretty … strange all by itself.

RD: Maybe. At any rate, the final observation I wanted to make to conclude this series is something my wife pointed out to me on a walk not too long ago. She pointed out that a lot of people don’t understand the fact that when God made the physical creation and life that He created everything in a mature state. That uncertainty or ambiguity is illustrated pretty well by the old question: “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” That question is supposed to be a sort-of philosophical puzzle. You can’t have a chicken without first having an egg. But of course you can’t have an egg without first having a chicken. But for people who are familiar with the Bible it’s not a puzzle at all. God created everything to be fully functional from the moment He brought it into existence. So, the answer is simple. The chicken came first. Or speaking specifically, the first chicken kind came first.

VK: But the Bible says that on day one after God created the heavens and earth that the “earth was formless and empty [and] darkness was over the surface of the deep …” That doesn’t sound like the earth was necessarily functional at that point.

RD: Well, it might be better to say that God initially formed the matter and energy that comprised the heavens and earth. Then, He immediately began conforming the earth so that it would be fully functional to perform its intended purpose – to support living creature including man who would be the pinnacle of God’s living creatures. Let’s not forget that the Bible no sooner tells us that darkness was over the surface of the deep that the Bible tells us that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Said a little differently, right from the beginning God set about conforming the earth for man. On that day one God made light and brought the day/night cycle into existence.

VK: And then on the next five days God began bringing about further changes that would be necessary to make man’s existence on the earth possible. On day two God created waters on the surface of the earth and separated them from those that would make the atmosphere suitable as a protective and supportive covering. On day three God made dry land and brought forth the first vegetation. On day four He made the sun, moon, and stars to give definition to the cycles of time He was planning. Then on day five God populated the sea and skies with living creatures. We heard about part of that in our opening scripture. But I think I see what you are getting at. At each stage when God finished that step in the creation process the product of that step was ready to go. When God created the fish they were ready to swim. When God created the birds they were ready to fly. And both the fish and the birds already had plants available for nutrition and a sun and moon by which to know when it was time to move and when it was time to rest. That’s what you mean when you say “the chicken came first.”

RD: Exactly. And just to finish the thought both the fish and the birds were immediately able to reproduce. Remember God told both the creatures in the sea and the creatures that were to inhabit the sky to begin increasing. And God pronounced the creatures He had created “good” which would mean they must have had the capacity to reproduce. This in turn answers another question that is a real problem for the evolutionary hypothesis – the origin of biological sexes.

VK: What you’re saying is that the evolutionary hypothesis has no real answer of how a gradual, mutational process can produce two different genders both of which are necessary for the continuation of the species. After all there living species on the earth that reproduce asexually. Asexual reproduction is a mode of reproduction that involves the offspring being produced by a single parent rather than two.

RD: The supposed evolutionary answer to why there are a great many species on the earth that require two different, but compatible genders, for reproduction usually attempt to explain how the operation of sexual reproduction is beneficial to the species. But explaining the benefits of the operation of something is quite different from explaining the origin of it. The origin and maintenance of two different genders, the sex process, and recombination of compatible components of separate cells is not easily explained by natural selection. Evolutionary biology hasn’t discovered why animals would abandon asexual reproduction in favor of more costly and inefficient sexual reproduction. In sexual reproduction not only must each gender must possess its own unique physiology to make the process work but the physiologies must match each other.

VK: After all, if there is one thing that is certain, it is that malfunctions or mistakes in reproduction are pretty much guaranteed to eliminate a species. Thinking about what would have to have happened for gender to arise without design or planning pretty much boggles the mind. Random mutations would have to have produced two biologically complementary entities that were both formed at the right time and right location. Those two entities would have to find each other – just in time – and know what to do. Then the cells from each would have to be able to combine in such a way that they would create an entity similar to their parents but also possess a new ability. And if anything goes wrong along the way the existence of that species either goes away or at best this new found regenerative function disappears and the earlier asexual process continues. As I said, the likelihood that all that occurs from random mutational changes boggles the mind.

RD: Yes. And you’re only speaking about what we might term the level of gross morphology. Biological life doesn’t begin with morphology and structural function. It starts at the biomolecular level. Living creatures are similar to computers in many ways. We, they, don’t just have hardware. We have software – our programming that’s contained in our DNA. And, of course, the hardware and software don’t work if there’s not a reliable source of energy that is available in just the right forms and amounts to allow all of the components to work together. And sexual reproduction is just one example of biological systems that must be complete at the point of origin or they are no good to anyone or anything.

VK: Even Charles Darwin admitted in a letter to American botanist Asa Gray in 1860 that "The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder … .” Darwin knew that eyes don’t function without a lot of moving parts all of which must operate together. There has to be a clear outer covering that holds all the parts together but admits the light. There’s a pupil that opens and closes to control the amount of light that enters and a lens that focuses the light. And there have to be a set of pretty finely tuned muscles and ligaments that will allow the eye to have motion within a socket that was specially prepared to hold all the parts. There has to be a receptor pad to receive the photon and generate a chemical signal to be sent to the brain. But that signal doesn’t do any good without an optic nerve to carry it and a part of the brain that has been configured to generate an image. And none of that does any good if the creature doesn’t know what the images mean about its surroundings. When you think about all that it’s pretty amazing that anyone thinks that all that arose by chance.

RD: Yes. And, again, you’re only speaking about the gross morphology. There are dozens of chemical changes taking place at the molecular level that permit all the various functions to occur. When speculating about how eyes could have developed gradually I’ve heard some evolutionists speculate on “light sensitive spots” that became dimples in the skin and were gradually covered by a thin membrane and so forth. But all of that misses the point. Even to have a “light sensitive spot” would have required dozens of biochemical mutations to have occurred simultaneously. And even the evolutionists will admit that half an eye or three-quarters of an ear doesn’t do the creature any good. Biological systems must function all together or they don’t function at all.

VK: So, back to the chicken and the egg. The reason that it’s not a problem for Biblical creationism is because the Bible straightforwardly tells us that God completed a complete creature to start with. The fish in the sea were ready to survive in their environment. The birds were immediately capable of flight. They were immediately able to launch, land, maneuver in flight, and avoid trees. They were also able to lay eggs and they had been programmed with DNA that told them what they needed to do to get those eggs to hatch. The first birds to hatch from eggs had to go through a maturation process but their parents didn’t.

RD: And that’s why, in a simple but powerful way, the Biblical explanation is superior to the evolutionary hypothesis. The Bible explains the puzzle of the complete functionality that must be present for biological systems to work at all. And all evolution can ever provide are pieces and parts that are somehow useless today, but will one day turn into something like an eye, a circulatory system, a flight feather, or the avian lung.

VK: One of the biggest challenges to the idea that dinosaurs turned into birds is that the breathing systems of dinosaurs are completely different from those of birds. Dinosaur lungs work like ours do. They are a sort of bellows where air goes in and out of the same opening and through a series of branching tubes that finally terminate in tiny air sacs. But the breathing system of birds is completely different. In birds the major air passages break down into tiny tubes which permeate the lung tissue that are called parabronchi [PAIR-AH-BRON-KAI]. These parabronchi eventually join up together again so the air only flows in one direction through the bird lungs. Birds are vertebrates because they have a spine but their lungs are unique among the vertebrate world. It’s hard to see how this system could have developed gradually because if an animal can’t breathe that animal is not going to survive very long. And a respiratory system going through a change isn’t going to work very well if it’s only halfway through the change.

RD: Simply put, biological systems don’t work unless they are complete. Now the system may be simple or complex compared to another biological system but biological systems are all enormously complicated when compared to any non-living system. The simplest bacterial cell without a nucleus contains 100 Billion atoms and they are all organized with exquisite precision into a flotilla of protein machines each performing its own specialized function. If one part goes missing the bacteria dies. Same thing with higher order animals. Eyes only work if the entire system is present. Hearts are no good without complicated networks of blood vessels. Birds don’t fly without the feathers that allow them to generate lift, the muscles to move the wings, the brain to make minute adjustments at a speed no human could manage, and lungs that keep air flowing continuously. But evolution is supposed to work with no mind or design. And the problem is that when pressed on how random mutation could produce evolutionists must resort to speculation and guess. They can never say for sure how a complex biological system came into being so that it functioned immediately.

VK: Here’s how Dr. Colin Patterson, the senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum described his realization that the evolutionary hypothesis was speculation, not settled science. “… I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night; and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That’s quite a shock, to learn one can be misled for so long … So, for the last few weeks I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people … Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true? … All I got was silence.”

RD: The chicken and egg question points out something very significant. Eggs will turn into chickens when they are kept in the proper environment but only because they have been programmed to do so. And at each stage of development the developing chicken is still functional at that stage. The system is changing but functioning at every step throughout the transformation. But evolution as a process, by its own rules, is never going to be allowed to know that function is necessary for life – much less the brilliant complete complexity that is present in all living creatures. Evolution holds to the core idea that random, undirected, purposeless atoms collided chaotically and somehow produced protein machines that populate and power each cell. But these purposeless atoms didn’t just produce the protein machinery they went on to organize those machines into a cooperative collective that is more sophisticated than the factory that builds passenger airplanes.

VK: So, the chicken and the egg points out what Michael Denton who wrote Evolution: A Theory in Crisis the “puzzle of perfection.” Living systems must be complete to live at all. Living systems cannot operate with half formed hearts or bits and pieces that may one day become a lung if that mutation survives another five hundred generations. Christians are sometimes criticized as inserting “God in the gaps.” The criticism is that when Christians cannot explain all the intricacies of how a particular thing happened we insert God into that gap. But as we pointed out in our last episode when the math for the Big Bang doesn’t work out secular physicists insert Dark Matter into the gap to explain the need for more gravitation. When evolutionary biologists can’t explain how a permeable cell membrane enclosed a DNA molecule that just happened to be close by enough other protein machinery to make the first cell they say “well, we don’t how it happened but we know evolution was responsible.” So, physicists and biologists insert Dark Matter, evolution, and Deep Time into their gap and then tell us that is what science demands.

RD: Charles Darwin speculated about his now famous “warm little pond” where life must have first emerged. Now some scientists tell us that it wasn’t a warm pond but a deep ocean vent. For Darwin and the others warm ponds and deep ocean vents are like Star Trek replicators that magically convert energy and matter into living molecules that can proceed on their own to craft ever more complicated and sophisticated living creatures.

VK: Warm little ponds are Star Trek replicators – really?

RD: Yes. The idea that undirected, inanimate matter can produce the specified and irreducible complexity of living creatures is like believing a chimpanzee can bang rocks together and produce the space shuttle. There’s a famous story of a woman challenging a evolutionist who was giving a lecture on how evolution works. The woman asked how a single cell could ever turn into a human being. The evolutionist responded, “You did it yourself madam, in nine months.” The evolutionist thought he was being clever but he actually eviscerated his own thesis. A fertilized human ovum grows into a human being because it contains the programming that tells it what to do and guides its growth at every step of the process. Furthermore that developing human must be protected within the mother’s womb and supported by the mother’s body until it is able to function on its own. Any failures along the way and life doesn’t continue. Far from pointing out how evolution could have produced a human from a single ancestral cell the evolutionist pointed out that life would be impossible if it were not designed, protected, and sustained until it can function independently. The chicken had to come first – and it did – because an omnipotent, omniscient, purposeful God sovereignly decided to make it. And He didn’t need any help from warm ponds, deep ocean vents, or Star Trek replicators.

VK: The point of this series and today’s discussion is to help Christians begin to grapple with the narratives that circulate so widely today. As we said in the first episode in this series Christianity is a faith of facts. The culture tells us that the universe sprang into being from nothingness and then life arose without the benefit of direction or intelligence. Those assertions are refuted by facts and logic. But that truth won’t do any Christian any good if they don’t take the time to arm themselves with the facts and learn how to apply those facts to sort out the barrage of false claims that are directed against their faith. To close, since Veterans Day is right around the corner today let’s listen to a prayer for the veterans of our armed forces whose sacrifice built and preserved this nation for almost 250 years.

---- PRAYER FOR VETERANS DAY

VK: Before we close we’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes in this series or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”

(Opening Bible Quote from the Contemporary English Version )

Genesis, chapter 1, verses 20 through 23, Contemporary English Version

Stars don’t form naturally - creation.com

• Cast doubt on God’s goodness

• Deny God’s truth

• Elevate self-importance

• Establish a replacement in the mind and heart for God’s truth

Cultural Narratives

One way to look at narratives is that there are primary and secondary narratives that circulate in our culture. The primary narratives are so embedded in our culture that they are not even noticed any more. They are like the framed prints on your wall. Initially you see them but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only know they are there when a visitor comes in and remarks about them.

Deep time, evolution, uniformitarianism, and the equality of all religious viewpoints are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them. The narratives we notice (such as the prominent social and political narratives) are secondary ones - the acceptability of abortion, same sex marriage, the difference between "green" energy and fossil fuels, "public" education, increased government control and regulation, etc. The secondary ones emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones.

• The Big Bang/deep time does away with the need for God as Creator.

• Evolution does away with the need for God as the Author of life.

• Uniformitarianism does away God as the Administrator of justice (become evil continually and God will wipe you off the face of the earth).

Since we've done away with God we now create our own standards for what constitutes "personhood," family, man's dominion over the earth, etc.

The problem is, of course, we didn't do away with God or His truth.

And the house built on intellectual sand falls when the river of reality hits it.

So, we will proclaim the truth to try to save some and maybe by God's grace many or most. People who doubt the inerrancy of scripture never think about any of this but they should.

The line from that which they doubt the Word to a life they don't want to live is very straight. The line grows even more straight as it uncoils - just like the hangman's rope.