What the World Needs Now
6 The Genesis Conflict - Creation to Restoration
(upbeat music) - All right, we're going to talk now about a very sensitive issue which causes many, many questions to arise in the minds of men. Creation to restoration, I have titled this lecture. In the book of Genesis chapter one, verse 31 we read, and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. So whatever God had created, he said it was very good. Verse 26 to 28 says, "And God said, "Let us make man in our image after our likeness. "Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, "and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, "and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing "that creepeth upon the earth. "So God created man in his own image. "In the image of God created him." Do you think God wants to tell us something? Male and female created he them, and God blessed them. God said unto them, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth, subdue it, have dominion of a fish sea, fowl, every living thing that moves with upon the earth. So here is a definite plan to this creation. It was very good, it was perfect, and man was to control the environment. Why did he create him? Isaiah chapter 43, verse 6 and 7 says, "For I have created him for my glory. "I have formed him, yea, I have made him." So man is not just some afterthought. He is not some chance random thing that happened here on the earth. He was created in the image of God, and he was created for the glory of God. Well, some people today don't seem to want to reflect that heritage at all. Genesis 1, 29 to 30 says, and God said, "Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, "which is upon the face of all the earth "and every tree in which is the fruit "of a tree yielding seed." All right, so that was the original diet of man, according to the Bible, everything that had seeds, so that would include the grains and the legumes and the nuts and all of those things and all the seeds, and then every tree which is reelding fruit. So fruits, grains, nuts, seeds, that was the original diet. Well kids, there was no broccoli there that you had to force down. Nothing about the vegetable kingdom is mentioned there. To you it shall be for me, that's Old English for food, and to every beast of the earth, every beast of the earth, and to every foul of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat food, and it was so. So according to this text, all animals were what? Vegetarian, now hang on a second, are you crazy? Obviously we have creatures up there that are designed to kill other creatures, but the Bible says there was no death in the beginning. So is this an allegory, is this a fairy tale? What is the story here? Well, what did Charles Darwin have to say about this? In fact, this very issue is the reason why Charles Darwin opted for evolution. This is the very issue that confronted him. Darwin wrote to his friend Dr. Arza Gray, "I am bewildered. "I have no intention to write atheisticly, "but I own that I cannot see so plainly as others do, "and as I should wish to do evidence for design "and beneficence on all sides of us. "There seems to me too much misery in the world. "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent "and omnipotent God would have designantly "created the Ichnomunidai with the express intention "of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, "or that a cat should play with mice." So Darwin looked at the animal world and he saw creatures parasitizing. He saw creatures killing and he says, "Well, this ain't good. "This is not good. "This is not something that a good kind loving God "would create. "There's too much misery here." He wrote in 1844 in his initial draft of "The Origin of Species." It is derogatory that the creator of countless universes should have made by individual acts of his will, the myriad of creeping parasites and worms, which since the earliest dawn of life have swarmed over the land and the depths of the ocean. Now, when he thinks of it in terms of evolutionary principles, he says, "We cease to be astonished "that a group of animals should have been transformed "to lay their eggs and the bowels "and flesh of other sensitive beings "that some animals should live by and delight in cruelty, "that animals should be led away by false instincts "that annually there should be an incalculable waste "of the pollen, eggs and immature beings." So, Darwin looked at the world as it seems to be today and as it is today and concluded, there is no loving God in any of this. That was his conclusion. Well, you see, it depends how you look at it. It depends on what you allow yourself to see. Obviously, if the Bible is right, then something changed. Is that correct? Obviously, if the Bible is right, then something must have changed. And what we see today is not what there was, but science will say, what we see today is so obviously adapted for what it is doing that it must have been there from the beginning. So a carnivore must always have been a carnivore. There's no other way out. So, evolution is a better solution to the problem, they say, than the creation account. Again, it depends on which set of glasses you are wearing. For example, Genesis 3.9 and the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, where are thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And he said, who told thee that thou was naked? Has thou eaten of the tree? Whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat? God knew that he had eaten of it, but he just asked him. And the man said, the woman whom thou gave us to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. So what happened here? He started blaming. So means, now means you. We've been blaming ever since. And, and then the Lord God said unto the woman, what is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, the serpent beguiled me and I did eat. We still do the same thing. Everybody blames each other. And in fact, we find the solution to all our problems by blaming someone else. Kids ask you because the parents were bad. The parents were bad because their parents were bad. And they were bad because they got kicked by an uncle. Oh, what, you know? It just carries on and on and on and on. If there's something wrong with my character, well, it's my upbringing or it's my background or it's my environment or it's my this or it's that. We blame ever since that day. And the Lord God said unto the serpent. Because thou hast done this, thou hast cursed above all the cattle. That means animals and above every beast of the field, upon thy belly thou shalt go and dust, shalt thou eat all the days of thy life? Who say the scientists? What rubbish, serpents don't eat dust. Well, this could be a reference to death. You see, dust thou art and dust thou shalt be. So, death came into the equation. But besides that, when an animal without hands to lift something up eats, he eats dust with it as well. But that's besides the point. But I believe it's a reference to death. So, something changed and this creature, obviously didn't walk on its belly before. It must have been somewhat different. Do we have creatures today that have legs but don't walk on their legs? Yes, here is a kept dwarf burrowing lizard. There are the rudimentary legs. Here's another one, a burrowing skink with rudimentary legs. There's another, there's another. There are snakes which have rudimentary legs. So, obviously the genes for legs must be there, right? The genes must be there but they're not fully expressed. Is it possible that the genes were just switched off? That is not evolution. That is deactivation of something that is no longer there. That's like putting a plank over some of the keys on the piano so that you cannot play them anymore. And then that repertoire is just gone. So, that is change. Is it evolution? Not necessarily. It's just deactivation of genes. Well, what about a snake has fangs? Surely they were designed to kill. What is a fang? A fang is just a mechanism to inject a secretion which we call a poison. Didn't have a poison in the beginning? Well, what is that secretion that comes out of this fang? All it is, is a saliva secretion. So, the enzymes in the saliva glands are slightly modified by the expression and now when they are injected instead of being dissolving and digesting enzymes, they are toxins, neurotoxins or blood toxins or whatever variety depending on the shape of the protein. Any foreign protein injected into us will cause a reaction and this one is just more vehement. Does it mean that it was designed to kill in the beginning? Well, could it mean that whatever it ate in the beginning, it injected something to digest it as to spiders? Spider the same when a spider bites and all it does, it injects digestive enzymes which can in some cases be highly toxic. So, a spider has an it. Some spiders actually eat pollen. For some part of their life cycle or can survive on pollen, is it possible that there were seeds or some form of flying seeds, dispersed seed that today no longer exists because we only have a fraction of the kingdom of plants and animals left that used to exist in the past. Our circumstance is different to what they were in the past. Cursid is the ground for thou's sake. So, when sin came in, the ground was cursed. Cursid is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow, shall thou eat of it all the days of their life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth. Well, here's a change. Henceforth, there will be thorns and thistles and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. So, something was added to the diet. Well, why? The ground has suddenly been cursed. Does this mean that the ground does not yield what it yielded before? What if seasonality started coming in and for a certain part of the year or whatever you were eating suddenly was gone? Let's say you were an animal adapted to eating apricots and then for three months of the year, there were the apricots and then the season changed and for the next nine months, no apricots. What would you do? You have only two options. You either die or you do what? You change your diet. Those are your two options. You either die or you change your diet. And if the ground does not yield what it yielded before, then what you have to add is a greater variety of the food that you would normally eat. So, some things were added because of this. Now, what is a thorn and a thistle? Now, here's a thorn in this case. This thorn on this occasion, all that it is is a modified stem. It's not something new. It's a stem, the genes for stem that are expressed so that it develops a thorn. The stem starts growing and then dries out and sharpens and forms a thorn. In this case, for example, the stem has been modified in the succulent to be a water reservoir and to actually act as a leaf itself. And so, the leaves which would only serve for evaporation and loss of water disappear and the spines that you see on these prickly plants are actually modified leaves. All that that means is that in a normal leaf, the gene unwinds the leaf and it folds out. Here, instead of unwinding, it winds up the leaf and it forms a hard point, dries and becomes a spine. Is this something new or is something just differently expressed? Something is just differently expressed. Here you have a rose and here it also has thorns and in this case, it's an epidermal or a cortical outgrowth. So, this is just something that is activated there to cause this outgrowth which happens to be a thorn. So, a thorn is not something new. It is a modification of something that already existed. The same with a thistle. Instead of the leaf of the flower unfolding, the petal unfolding, it folds in upon itself and dries and forms a sharp thistle. So, this is a modification of the expression of a gene. It's nothing new, it's not evolution, but it's a consequence of a changed environment. These organisms now can survive in dry areas and they can survive under circumstances less favorable than they were before. Now, what is a parasite? Darwin said, did God create parasites? The Bible says everything was perfect. There was no death. Surely one animal wasn't eating another. So now, you had millions and millions of varieties of worms probably doing their thing in an original environment and now some of them suddenly are parasites. Well, here's a tapeworm, for example. A tapeworm doesn't have a digestive tract. No. Do we have free living flat worms that do have digestive tracts? Yes. So now, if the ground is cursed and doesn't yield what it yielded before, then somebody has to give up something. Now, what if these creatures by chance, when ingested, managed to survive in a host and then eventually, because they were covered by something which protected the particular, which protected them from enzymes, they could survive and so they survived in the intestines of other creatures and because everything was predigested for them, they didn't need an intestine. So how did they lose the one that they had? Just deactivate the genes and switch off intestine and there you have a parasite. And these parasites weren't there originally to be parasites, but became parasites because their original intent had been taken away. So if we have a look at the merriads of pathogens that we have like, here's a normal E. coli cells and pathogens are just translocated species. Very often, if you take a normal E. coli, which is the normal bacteria in your intestine and you translocate it into the wrong place, another part in the body, suddenly its environment is different and it responds by secreting compounds and all of a sudden it is highly pathogenic and you get very sick from it. All it is is a translocated organism that is now surviving in the wrong place. Now, plasmids, small DNA fragments are known from almost all bacterial cells. Plasmids carry some two to 30 genes. Some seem to have the ability to move in and out of a bacterial chromosome. So here's a little plasmid and there's the bacterial chromosome and these little pieces of DNA can move into a DNA. So what you can have is you can have something like this happening. There's a plasmid, there's a donor, plasmid and off it goes into a recipient and there it is and then it gets incorporated into the DNA and it's a recombinant. Question, is there any new material there or has the old material been put into a new situation? What's happened here? There's nothing new here, the plasmid existed in the beginning, it's just this piece of DNA has now been incorporated into this creature. So this one now has an extra piece that it didn't have before but it's not evolution, it's a process, certain types of bacteria can donate a piece of their DNA to a recipient cell. The recombination is a bacterial equivalent of a sexual reproduction, it's like take a piece of mine. Note that the entire DNA is not usually transferred only a small piece. So for example, acquired immunity, resistance to pesticides, antibiotic resistance is not based on new genetic material, it's material that has been spread around. So there's nothing new here but a creature can suddenly become a pathogen, can become a dangerous organism and that is why every year the flues and the sicknesses change because they exchange information but there's nothing new, this is not evolution, this is the redistribution of existing material. Here's an interesting creature, this is a barnacle. Now a barnacle is when you walk on the rocks by the seashore and you get all these sharp little things, actually it's a little crab-like creature within the shell. Now there's a certain parasite barnacle that looks very different to this, of the genus Sacculina, it's a barnacle that parasitizes other crabs, bigger crabs. Similar to other barnacles. So what happens, the adults are internal parasites called the interna and tumors grow inside the hosts and these tumors can develop a system of branching roots that ramify through their host bodies and absorb their nutrients. And the life cycle of such a creature comprises two stages and endo in an ectoparasitic stage. So like normal barnacles, there's a normal lava that swims around and does whatever it does so that all the genes are there for the development of this whole thing. And I believe all the genes are there for the development of a barnacle, but it's in trouble competing with other barnacles. And so either because the resources are less, it dies or it changes its lifestyle. So what it did is it went into a climb into another crab and then it loses everything. It doesn't develop any of its features. Doesn't look like a crab at all anymore. Doesn't have little legs, doesn't have anything like that. No filtering system, nothing. It just develops a sort of a web and a reproductive system and that's all it is. Just reproductive organs and for the rest, it gets everything from the host. Was it designed to do that in the beginning or did it happen because circumstances change? Isn't that possible? It's like a look of a creature that's closer to home. You have mosquitoes here, don't you? Obviously you do, living in this environment. Now the mosquito has this wonderful little proboscis over here that serves like a drill. And there we go. Inside and then you fill up with blood like that. Rather scrumptious meal. Now obviously the mosquito was designed to suck blood. Yes or no? Answer is probably no. You see, it is only the female that sucks blood. Isn't that amazing? Only the female, what does a male do? Like all males on this planet, it is extremely timid and sucks only what? Plant juices, that's right, plant juices. So the male takes this structure and goes to a plant and takes some plant juice. Now what if at some stage in the past, the ground was cursed. And now everything started changing and that plant doesn't produce enough energy for the mosquito female to develop her eggs. Isn't it then useful to take the same structure that was designed for one purpose and use it for another? Having discovered that blood is relatively rich in nutrients, she just changes the place where she puts it in and then she can do what she has to do. So was this designed to be a blood sucking insect or was it designed to be a plant sucking insect? Probably the first. And what about these creatures? The hornets and the bees and all these stinging fellows that are so mean. Surely that is a structure designed to inflict great pain and damage. If you look at all these wasps over here with their interesting features. Well, if you see them, you stay out of their way. That sting is nothing other than a transformed ovipositor. That's what it is, a transformed ovipositor. So when a bee stings you, it actually pays with its life because there's a barb on it and it stays behind and then, oops, there's the sting. Was it designed to use this as a sting or was it originally there to be a ovipositor? Ovipositors can consist of a number of portions and so even those that are capable of laying eggs can sting as well today because the ovipositor has been transformed. But originally the function was not necessarily there for stinging and the secretions that are produced over there are the simple protein secretions that were used to lubricate the eggs and form the various components, proteins that are injected to which we are highly allergic and cause these reactions. So this doesn't mean that they were designed like that from the beginning. Surely it was not designed that they should kill caterpillars and live by these means. They could have lived on other things but if that original diet is now no longer available and surely you must change. For example, ladybirds. Ladybirds are a pest in South Africa. They are a pest in apricot orchards and they will eat apricots and eat little holes in them so they have to be controlled in the apricot season. And then the apricot season is gone so now what does the ladybird do? It has to either adapt or die and so it becomes a ferocious carnivore feeding on plant lice, a highly useful creature to have around. And so the diet has changed because the food source has dried up. Now, the Bible says that plants will bear their fruit how often in the new world. The tree of life the Bible says will bear its fruit how often? Every single month. So why should not all the other plants bear their fruit every single month? They just cannot do so now because of a change in season, et cetera. For behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth and the former shall not be remembered nor come to mind, Isaiah 65, 17. Nevertheless, we according to his promise look for a new heaven and a new earth were in dwelleth righteousness. And Romans tells us that because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God, for we know that the whole creation growneth and travaileth in pain together until now. So something changed in the environment. As Isaiah has this amazing thing to say, the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. The calf and the young lion and the fatling together, a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed. Their young ones shall lie down together. No more destruction, no more death. The lion shall eat straw like the ox. It'll become a vegetarian. The suckling child shall play on the whole of the asp and the wean child shall put his hand in the cockrous den. Then shall they not hurt, nor destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So kids are gonna play with snakes. Without any fear, but the snakes probably won't look like that anymore. Now surely that's a fairy tale, right? Carnivores are designed to be carnivores because they have these powerful teeth, these canines and they can rip you apart. Here are some foxes, a Russian scientist by the name of Demitri Balayev studied a process of domestication of foxes. What he did is he took a number of foxes and then he started domesticating them and he chose the offspring that were more at home with the humans. And then within a few generations, about eight generations, he had some fox letters where the young ones would actually socialize with the human. And after about 13 generations, they were just like dogs. They would lie at the feet. They would ask for food when they were hungry. They would lick their handlers. And an amazing change took place in these creatures. Not only that, when he analyzed the hormone levels, the adrenal glands had become smaller. Adrenaline levels were lower. The animals were no longer as aggressive and the serotonin levels in the brain rose by more than double. That's very interesting. Now, in schizophrenia, the serotonin levels are very low. So a psychiatrist will give a medication to increase the serotonin levels and then the patient is calm. If the serotonin levels are low, then he's very violent. So the social change in the animal was that evolution. Surely, in art, if you could change it just by a selection of what the gene capacity was within just a few generations, that's not evolution. That's deactivation of some systems and activations of others to bring it more in line with what it was like original. Now, if you take carnivores, here's a bear, that's classified as a carnivore, and here they will eat fish. But in the north, the salmon run is over very quickly and fortunately for the bear, when the salmon run is on, it's just when the snow melts and there are no other food sources around. But what will the bear eat during the rest of the year? There you go. Berries and grasses and succulent grass, that's its diet. In fact, over 80%, sometimes 86% of a bear's diet will be green, vegetation and berries. He's actually called a bear because he eats bears, singular for berries. Now, what if those seasonal changes that we have today did not exist? Would the bear ever have to eat anything else than the berries and the grasses and the foods that he has? Yes or no? Obviously not. So because he has the equipment to kill, does that mean he was designed to kill yes or no? No? Yeah, the panda bear. That's classified as a carnivore. What does it eat? Bamboo, that's its diet. Now, there were many different kinds of grasses in the past that don't exist today. Many kinds of cycads, many kinds of ferns that don't exist today. We find them only in the fossil record. Suddenly, a huge variety of foods is gone. What do the animals do? If they have this problem, they either give up living or they change their lifestyle. And those that have the equipment to cope, those are the ones that survive. So the koala bear, he eats only eucalyptus. And he gets by just fine. In fact, he sleeps 80% of his life. So he's obviously getting enough and then he has another snoo. And if you don't give him eucalyptus, he dies. That's it. That's all he'll eat. Here's a red panda in an Australian zoo and the sign said red pandas are classified as carnivores, meat eaters. But most of their diet is bamboo. That must be very discouraging for the scientific world because here all of a sudden, the creatures are not doing what they're supposed to do. Here's a fish. Very interesting. If you look at a fish, you'll see that it has a urinary bladder, intestines, livers, heart skills, kidneys, all kinds of interesting structures. Now in this kidney, they have a structure which is called the glomerulus. Now this is a nice little filtering machine and the blood goes and pumps us in there and the pressure is high so it filters the liquid out and the liquid gathers over here and is removed, you remove the salts and then you urinate it out. Very nice structure in the kidney of the fish. Now fish in the sea have a big problem because their salt concentration is lower than that of the sea so they're constantly losing water by osmosis. So now this structure to them is a calamity. So what they do is they switch it off and it's deactive and it doesn't work. So fish in the sea have structures in the kidneys that they never use. Why would they develop a structure that they never use? And science is constantly battling with this idea. Now did fish evolve in fresh water or did they evolve in salt water? Well the sea is so much bigger, they must have evolved in salt water but if they evolved in salt water, why are they going to glomerulus? A fish in fresh water has another problem. Its salt content is higher than that of the water in which it lives so water is constantly moving in by osmosis, it has to get rid of it. If you drink five glasses of water one after the other, eventually you have to run away. Yeah why? Because the kidney is pumping it out through your glomerulus. So a fish in fresh water needs that structure. But some fish have so deactivated the structure that if you take it from the sea and you pop it into the fresh water, it dies. Others have managed, like the salmon, to switch it off in the sea and switch it on in the fresh water and can swim up the rivers and into the sea and do all these interesting things. But most of the fish in the sea cannot use it at all, it's a total oxymoron for them. Isn't that interesting? So this tells me that if all of them have it and most of them don't use it, then maybe conditions were different in the past. Does that make sense? Maybe all was fresh water and salt water as we know it today is a consequence of the subterranean water which is often high in salt that came up during the flood. Very interesting. So if we look at our own kidneys, we have something else. We can even concentrate our urine so that when we are walking in the deserts and we need to conserve water, we have a structure which is called the loop of Henle in the kidney which now through a counter-current concentrating system concentrates the urine. So eventually I have a highly concentrated urine. Do you know that the structure won't work unless it is exactly like that? Any halfway measure won't work, it has to be perfect. This is what we call irreducible complexity. It either is perfect or it doesn't work. Natural selection cannot create it. It has to come into existence just like that. Chants are designed. Those are your options. And I believe conditions change. Now there's a lion, obviously that is a carnivore. Yes, he's a great killer. Do you know that lions have been raised vegetarian in zoos, many of them, and that they are highly docile when they are raised vegetarians? And what is interesting is animals that are raised vegetarians, carnivores live longer, much longer and have less disease. Do you know that the vets will tell you not to feed your cat milk because it causes kidney failure? And these carnivores, the strongest one, gets to eat first. And when they catch an antelope, what do you think the numero uno lion will eat first? What do you think he eats? He opens up the stomach, he rips that open and the first thing he eats is the contents of the rumen. So he's actually getting all those plant materials and vitamins and things into him. And he is then the strongest. The rest get everything else and they are slightly less strong. Of course he eats the other things as well, but he survives better on these things. So having found these things out, I actually did quite a fair amount of research in my laboratories with my students and I sometimes drove my students nuts with the things I asked them to do because they couldn't understand why someone would want to even do things like that. Here is a female lion from the Kalahari. These are some that we looked at, this creature as well. Is it possible that it was not designed originally to eat meat, although it has the capacity to do so now? There are a tiger's teeth and it has like blades over here that act like shears cutting something. Now that's perfect for cutting meat and the canines are perfect for killing organisms. That is correct. But the same cutting is also perfect for cutting plant material. So it could be used for either. It doesn't mean that it had to be used for what it is used. If you look at the wolves and which give rise to the dogs, we had a dog and this dog, of course, eventually died of hip displacement. And so you realize that your dog has a specific lifespan because eventually everything starts giving way. If you feed this animal, vegetarian lifestyle or more vegetarian things, giving him the foods generally from the table, you extend the lifetime, you extend the healthful period of the animal and there is less loss of calcium. We will be doing some lectures where we did experiments on animals, where we fed them different diets and we looked at the calcium loss and the rate of bone loss in the organisms and amazing differences when they were fed plant proteins versus animal proteins. We'll be looking at that in a later lecture. Isn't that interesting? That the further away from the original, the uglier the animal gets. Here is a hyena that's a scavenger. That's pretty ugly and one wonders, was it so ugly in the beginning? I've done quite a study of these creatures and I'm always surprised when I go into the wild and I look at them that those that are scavengers normally have are uglier and sometimes even though they are larger, they have a lower rank than something that is smaller. That's quite incredible. So there's some interesting things in nature over here. Jackals, some of them, they're pretty but they still look sly. Look at this creature. I mean, this is a proud eagle and you look at this magnificent beak. Surely that's designed for killing or the beak of an owl or the talons that they have, these creatures. Surely they are designed for meat eating, all these birds of prey, magnificent creatures. Well, here's a parrot. It's called the key parrot. Lives in New Zealand. There you can see a little bit of his claws and there's his beak. And what does he eat? Well, he actually digs up the root of a particular plot and then it breaks this root with a sharp, strong beak and that's his diet. And then one day in New Zealand, they were doing housing complexes. And what did they do? They just ripped all the trees out and built houses. And all of a sudden, the diet of this key parrot was no longer available. And guess what happened? It died out, no, it changed its diet. What do you think it ate? Well, it actually used this beak, which is like a blade, to kill sheep. It climbed on the back of a sheep and would rip open the back of the sheep and feed its way into the sheep from the back and eat the fact around the kidney. And it became a pest and killed so many sheep that there was a hue and an outcry. New Zealanders love their meat. Don't mess with their meat. They're the biggest meat-eating nation in the world. And what happened? Well, very quickly they decided when we bit a plant these trees again, so they planted all these trees and when the diet was back, guess what the parrot did? It wasn't interested in the sheep anymore. So the original food source, if that had not been there, when some enterprising first person came to New Zealand and let's say this creature was killing other animals, wouldn't he have believed? Well, he's designed to do so, yes or no. Obviously, well, here is a cute parrot and we entice this parrot with this handbag over here and he put his foot through to try and grab it. Can you look at that? That's pretty neat structure for grabbing onto a prey, if you wanted to, and I'll tell you that that beak is capable of 10 tons of pressure. You put your finger in there, he'll take it off with one bite, gone. Isn't it possible that this creature has the equipment to kill, yes or no? Certainly has, but what does it use its peak for? Cracking nuts, that's what it uses it for, but if the nuts weren't there, wouldn't it eat something else? Well, parrots are probably there to look cute. Here is a paku and there's a piranha. This is a ferocious meat eater. That's a very close relative, the paku, and that eats only seeds that fall into the water. Now, what if the earth was suddenly not yielding what it did before and they want the varieties of seeds to feed also the piranha? Well, maybe you change your lifestyle and become a killer. There are, in fact, species of paku that have teeth very similar to piranhas and piranhas have been known to eat the seeds as well. So they weren't originally necessarily designed to be what they are today. Here you have all kinds of interesting creatures like chipmunks and ground squirrels and all of these, and they eat seeds and plants. So what happens when acid rain destroys their forest and the seeds no longer are as abundant as they were before? What will chipmunks do? They will actually eat road kills. They will actually go and eat dead animals. Were they designed to eat dead animals? Yes or no? Obviously not, but they can certainly change if the times change. So animals like shrews that are now insect eaters, insectivores, bats are basically insectivores, but some eat nothing other than fruit. So obviously, the capacity to eat something else is there. These are herbivores, obviously they are designed to eat only plant materials. Do herbivores sometimes eat something other than plant materials? Yes or no? Anybody know? Put an antelope, go and eat a dead animal? Yes or no? Well, the answer is actually yes. You find in desert environments, like in the namap, for example, where you have antelopes. And very often, the season gets very dry and there's not enough food around. And then the calcium needs of the animals change. They will actually go and gnaw at carcasses and get calcium and other needs from these, which they would not do under normal circumstances. You see, creatures change according to the circumstances. Rodents are very interesting. They will eat plants, but they are cup-proof eggs. That means they will eat their own excreta. Rabbits are cup-proof eggs. They pass the food twice through their intestines because maybe it didn't yield what it did originally. And now in the fermentation, which takes place in the second, they have a problem with that because they have to recycle it. And so they are cup-proof eggs. So we did a little experiment because the scientists were saying, well, that's all fine and well. But a lion is not only different in terms of its teeth. It's also different in terms of its intestine. You see, a carnivore generally has a short gut. And lions and dogs and all of these, the gut length is approximately six times the trunk length. Whereas in a human, for example, it's 15 times the trunk length. And in a herbivore, like a cow, it's 22 times the trunk length. And so I was wondering where the diet could infect the gut length because this was used as an argument. So I said to my student, fine, let's do a study. And we did a study with plant and animal diets, which we fed broiler chickens. Now, you know that in the industry, they feed the chickens. Some chickens get fed fishmeal. Some chickens get fed what they call poultry byproduct, which is the feathers and the heads and the other things crushed up. And some are fed grains. So there are different feeds in these chicken industries. So what we did is we took a complete plant protein diet. And we took a diet that contained animal protein, for example, fishmeal as part of the diet. And then we also tested the effect of antibiotics. So we took a plant diet, no antibiotics, and a diet with antibiotics, because antibiotics would affect the bacteria. And we wanted to know, what is the effect of just changing the bacteria in the organism? Would that affect the gut length and the anatomy and all of those things? So we did the same with the animal diet. And so we had four different diets. What did we find? A is plant diet, only plant food. B is plant food plus antibiotics. C is animal protein in that food. And D is animal protein plus antibiotics. Now, as far as the carcass mess was concerned, no difference statistically. So it really didn't affect their growth very much in terms of what we did. Gut mass, whoa, there was a difference. All of a sudden, those that had only plant food had bigger guts. When we added antibiotic, it became smaller. When we added animal protein, it became still smaller. When we added antibiotics to that, it became still smaller. Very interesting. Gut length. So we actually took these chicken guts and stretched them out and then measured their length. People thought we were totally nuts. But this is the result. The gut length, when it had only plants in the diet, was the longest. That's interesting. So there was more space to absorb food. When we added antibiotics, there was a significant drop in gut length. So obviously, when the bacteria died, the gut wasn't as happy and it didn't develop as it did before. When we took meat protein, in other words, fishmeal, added that to the diet, the gut length was still shorter. When we added antibiotics to that, it was still shorter. So just the diet alone affected the gut. That is why, if you have a dog, for example, and this dog is becoming diseased and he has all kinds of problems like gut and all of these pains from old age, then you can put your dog on a healthier diet, more plant protein and plant foods than the other. First, the dog goes thin. And then after a while, after a few weeks on this new diet, he starts picking up and he's perfectly normal. Why? Because the gut has probably regenerated some and he has got more absorptive sites that have developed. So within one generation, you can get that. How much more so over several generations? So there are quite a few publications up which show that gut length is related to what you actually eat. What we found very fascinating, which we didn't study further, but we really need to be investigated, is hot mess was also affected. So if we had plant foods, the hot was strong and small. When we added antibiotics, boom, the hot mess increased. So the hot was actually more of a sack, fat here and unhealthier. The animal protein, there was no statistical difference between those two, but when we added the antibiotics, the same thing. And we were just wondering, is it possible that we have this increase in hot disease amongst young people because of the diet that they're eating today and all the antibiotics they get in their lifestyles? Well, something that needs to be investigated. So really, the point I'm trying to make is what you eat really determines what your anatomy is going to be like and how you react and what you look like. Liver mass, exactly the same thing. The livers were enlarged when we added antibiotics. So antibiotics, I believe, should be used when you are sick, really sick only. And avoidance would be the best. So omnivores and creatures like that, they have teeth structures which could be used for either. So we say, well, they must be carnivores. Well, look at this creature over here. Those massive, massive canons surely looks like a killer, but all he eats is plants. So that doesn't necessarily mean anything either. Vestigial organs. Science will tell us, ah-ha, but we have evidence of evolution because the appendix is a vestigial organ, and this is a vestigial organ, et cetera, et cetera. So there is one. And embryos have so-called gillslitz, and there are membranes in the eyes. You know, that the list of vestigial organs that was made by the German anatomist Videsheim in 1895 included about 100 organs, including the appendix, the cocquix, and all kinds of structures, which today have been removed from the list. For example, the thymus was on his list, but it triggers the immune system and activates the T-cells. The pineal gland was on his list. The pineal gland is very important for melatonin regulation, day-night cycles, hormone control. The thyroid was on, we know today, they're without thyroxine, you're in big trouble. The pituitary gland, the master gland on the body, was on there. Ignorance was bliss in those days. So today, when we look at all these structures, then we know that the appendix and all of these structures have an immune function. We can live without it because there are others that can take its place, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a function. And as far as these so-called gill slits are concerned, that supposedly appear in the early stages of human embryo, in fact, initial phases of the middle ear canal, the parathyroid development, the thymus, and all the necessary structures that we have. So there is no evidence of all this so-called evolution. George Gaylord Simpson, one of the founders of Neodarvinism wrote, "Heckel," as the scientist who said that the embryos we see recapitulate everything, misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny. That's a very important statement. You see, they believed that we can see in the embryos that we pass through a fish stage and then at this stage and then at that stage until we get to a human. In actual fact, that's a load of nonsense because if evolution were really true, then the fish would have given rise to something else and the fish would have been gone. And that would have given rise to something else and those genes would have been gone, et cetera, all the way down. You cannot have your cake and eat it. You cannot change the gene and still have the original. So it doesn't work. In an article published in American Scientists, we read, "Surely the biogenetic law is dead as a doorknail. It was finally exercised from biology textbooks in the 50s as a topic of serious theoretical inquiry. It was extinct in the 20s, but you still find it in the textbooks to this very day." So to sum up for you, I would like to propose the following. The world was perfect when it was created and there was a food source for every single creature under the sun. Then, sun came in, things changed, food sources declined, many animals went extinct, those that could adapt to something else did, but that doesn't mean they were designed to be like that in the beginning. Those that eventually had no other option but to survive in other creatures became the parasites, but they weren't originally designed to be the parasites. So now with this new knowledge, put yourself in Darwin's shoes. What would you say? I would say, wow, one day the lion will eat just like the panda bear. His food source will be restored and he will eat what he was designed to eat because it will be there again. One day, all that we see today that reminds us of pain and suffering and all of these things will be gone. Because the earth will be restored and it will be made new. And I have no scientific reason whatsoever to doubt that what God said is true. And unlike Darwin, who looked at the dark side and said there is no love here, I can look at the dark side and say things have changed because of sin. And to remind us of sin and to create a hope in us for a better world so that we might look to God and ask God to cleanse us so that we can be part of that new creation. It's just a different outlook using the same information and the choice is yours. You can walk through the field and you can study the thorns and the thistles or you could choose to look at the rose. The choice is yours. You can look at the dark side, you can look at the light side. God has left everything there for us to remind us of the beauty of the past. But he has also permitted the negative to create a hunger for something better. Choose. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (dramatic music)