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Guest (Male): Okay, so what we're going to talk about next, we're doing a whirlwind tour here. It's kind of drinking from a firehose. What we're going to try to do next is talk about not just what apologetics is, but immediately apply that to one of the most pressing questions in modern society: the relationship between Christianity and science.

I've had the privilege of knowing some world-class scientists. I serve in a congregation with some world-class scientists and professors who are very committed Christians. The thing I want to say at the outset about the relationship between Christianity and science is that the conflict you hear so much about today between the two is largely imagined. It's not real because if you look back through history, and we'll touch on this at the end, science and Christianity kind of went hand-in-hand. You don't get science as we know it today without Christianity.

There wouldn't be lights, there wouldn't be medical procedures, I wouldn't have been able to get up here from South Carolina in under a few hours on an airplane without science. And I will argue at the end, you don't get modern science without Christianity. But let's do it this way. Let's start off with worldview. Let's look at the worldview of scientism, which I would submit is the dominant worldview of the opinion makers, academics, and popular-level unbelief that you see all around us today.

People can have all kinds of different opinions about religion and spirituality, but one of the things that everybody kind of just stops at is, "Well, if science says it, that settles it." I want to challenge that. And I want to do so using a way to understand worldviews that a guy named James Anderson developed in a wonderful little book called *What's Your Worldview?* He breaks down a worldview into five components.

First, there's the theological component. So what does it take for a worldview? What is a worldview? First thing, there's a theological component to every worldview. And with the worldview of scientism, this is their view of theology: there is no personal God, and the universe is ultimately meaningless. Now, take your pick in academic disciplines: medicine, law, biology, psychology, physics, astrophysics, astrobiology, molecular biology. Hand-pick somebody teaching that, hand-pick a leading research scientist, and ask them what they believe about God. More often than not, you're going to hear this: there is no personal God, and the universe is ultimately meaningless.

Then the second aspect of a worldview is anthropology, a doctrine of man. So every worldview has a theological component, it has a doctrine of God, and it has an anthropological component, a doctrine of man. And in this worldview of scientism, man is a biological machine. To quote the late atheist scientist and writer Carl Sagan, he said, "Man is nothing more than $7.20 worth of chemicals." Adjusted for inflation, he wrote that in the 80s, I think we're at about 12.60 or so, I don't know, somewhere around there. But the bottom line is he says we're nothing more than $7.20 worth of chemicals. That's all we are.

Or to quote another atheist, Richard Dawkins, he said we're "meat robots." That's what you are. That's what I am. When we die, that's the end of everything. There is no personal you that continues after death. We're purely physical beings. Your soul or your consciousness is simply a physical phenomenon. There's no separation between body and soul on this worldview; there's just the body.

Then the "K" component of a worldview is knowledge. What does a worldview think about how we know what we know and what is true? In this worldview, all knowledge comes from the natural sciences. Truth and falsehood are ultimately meaningless; whatever is, is. On this worldview, the sciences are the final authority in knowledge, and whatever they deliver is what is true. That's how we know what we know. We don't know things through a book like God would give because there is no God.

What is the Bible? It's some ramblings by ancient Jewish and early Roman Empire people, that's what it is. It's certainly not the Word of God because there is no God. And it certainly doesn't give us knowledge of this God in any sense. And then the "E" component here is ethics. What does a worldview teach about how we know what is right and wrong? How do we live every day with standards of morality, doing the right things, avoiding wrong things? On this worldview, good and evil are arbitrary social constructions which change with the times.

For example, when 9/11 happened, there were a number of ethics professors I read who said, "I don't think that was evil. It was evil what we did to lead people to get that angry at us to run planes into the buildings." Or to quote Peter Singer, who has been an ethical advisor to a number of U.S. presidents, he's a professor at Princeton University, and here's how he reasons, very consistently with evolutionary naturalism: he said, "A cat is a rat is a dog is a pig is a boy."

You see what he did there? All species are interrelated, all is one, we are no different than a cat or a rat or a dog or a pig. When you believe that about people, you have very definite beliefs about what is right and wrong and good and evil, which is one reason Peter Singer has gone on to argue for abortion up to 18 months postpartum. Let me translate that for you: you can kill children up to 18 months after they're born if you decide that they're not working out for you. That is true, look it up, he's argued for it.

My point of telling you that is not to scare you about the evil mean guy up in Princeton. My point is, when we live in a society where that guy is giving advice to presidents, we've lost our way morally. And one of the reasons we've lost our way morally is because of the worldview that grips so many of the opinion makers, so many of the institutions around us that says there's no really such thing as ultimate good and evil. There's what we like and what we don't like.

The Bible has some things to say about that as we'll see. Last thing, salvation. Every worldview has a doctrine of what's wrong with the world and how do we fix it. For scientism, technology. So there is the 2045 Project, financed by a Russian billionaire. Google's in on it, Apple, all the usual suspects. And what this project, termed the 2045 Project, is that by the year 2045, you will be able to download your personality, upload your personality into the cloud, and have avatars so that you can live on after death.

Your personality will be in the cloud. So you may die physically, but you will live on. We can chuckle; they are deathly serious and devoting billions, billions of dollars towards this end right now. And what we see today is the firm belief, which is bolstered by an illusory, I would argue it's an illusion, that we're just always going to keep progressing technologically to the point where we can beat death. And that's the point of all this. That's the salvation is by technology.

So there's our worldview of scientism. This is the worldview that is predominant today. I hope I haven't caricatured it; I think this is what we'd see all around us. Now let's shift over and talk about some presuppositions of science. What are some assumptions that have to be in place for science as we know it to work that we cannot prove scientifically? Everything I'm going to mention here, all these presuppositions, have to be assumed for science to work, and yet you cannot use the scientific method to prove them.

What does that look like? When scientists make fun of believers, they say, "You guys are a bunch of faith heads," to quote another atheist. Well, guess what? All of us have faith. The question is: what is your object of faith and is it true? So here are the presuppositions, the assumptions of science. First, the existence and knowability of a mind-independent world. What do I mean by that? How do you know there's a world that exists outside of your own thinking, that this isn't all just a construction?

I know it sounds like we're getting into kind of science fiction here when we ask that question, but as we'll see in a moment, the way physics is showing us things, especially at the quantum level, reality is a lot stranger than it appears to be. Not that chairs are just hard and this is light, there's a whole lot more going on there. And the question of how much we contribute to what we know in terms of perceptions and everything else has been a longstanding question in philosophy and modern science is only increasing it.

But in order to do science, you have to believe there's a world outside of your mind. And yet you cannot prove that strictly speaking by the scientific method. Second thing is the uniformity of nature. In other words, when we do an experiment in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2019, we can replicate the results in 2020 in sub-Saharan Africa if we have the right tools and everything else. So across time and cultures and space, nature remains the same: that the sun rose today, it's going to rise again tomorrow.

We kind of all assume that. Problem: you cannot prove that with the scientific method. Nobody has seen all of nature to say that it's uniform. No one's been to the furthest reaches of the galaxy to see if the laws of physics that we use here on Earth apply there. So you have to assume that nature's going to work the same way in order to do science. And that is an assumption that we have to take on faith.

The other one is laws of logic. Science has to use logical reasoning to replicate results, to teach us results, to draw out implications from results. And yet a law of logic is not something you can put under a microscope. Has anybody in here ever seen the law of non-contradiction? No. You can't touch it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it, you can't feel it. It's not a thing that way. And yet everybody in here, as you're listening to me speak, are using the laws of logic, whether you've had any training in logic or not.

You're thinking through, "Does that make sense or that doesn't," and all of us do that. You've heard bad arguments, you may not be able to parse it out technically but you go, "Something smells fishy there." And with science, it has to use these laws of logic that are elemental and basic, and yet the scientific method can't prove them; it has to assume them. Another assumption: the existence of abstract objects like numbers.

Here's a major problem for somebody who believes that the physical world is all there is. Numbers are extraordinarily important for science. And a specific kind of number, Arabic numerals. You cannot do modern physics with Roman numerals. You've got to have a very definite system that begins with zero. That's one of the revolutions in world history was mathematics that began with a zero system. Now we won't get into, I don't want to glaze you over, it's late, we won't go into philosophy of mathematics.

I don't want to lose you all tonight and have nobody show up tomorrow. But what we do want to realize is that, think about it this way: if you were to erase every instance of number two in the world you found, every single time number two has been written down and you erased them all, would number two cease to exist? No. You could think number two. You can think of two things: two apples, two Tastykakes, whatever it is. You can think of two things, and those things, that the number two is still there.

You still use those numbers even in your head because they're abstract objects. Where do those come from? Christianity could answer that. A scientistic worldview like we saw can't. Then the fifth assumption here is the existence of moral values. How does that come into play with science? These moral values, that there are such things as truths and falsehoods, there's right and wrong. Where does that come into play in scientific reasoning?

Well, one of the most eye-opening articles I read when I was doing research up here in Philadelphia was published in the *Stanford Journal of Medicine*, I think that's where it was. The name of the article arrested me when I was doing research and came across it: *Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.* That'll catch your attention. And it wasn't like this guy going, "I think everybody's wrong, bah." He had footnotes and research and a lot of argumentation.

And here's the thing that it opened my eyes to: how do moral values come into play with science? Well, we expect scientists to report true results. We expect them to adhere to a code of ethics that says, "Look, if you get a result and it can help people like with drugs or medicine and things like that, you should report that result truthfully," right? You can't prove that scientifically. And as a matter of fact, as we're seeing all over the place, there's massive cases of fraud going on in scientific research.

I don't know if you heard about this group of scientists or academics in Oregon, I think it was, that cut and pasted sections from *Mein Kampf* and submitted them, without obviously telling them they were from Hitler, to major academic journals as theses for articles that were accepted by peer-review journals. And their point was the system's broken. This system that's supposed to safeguard science and scientific research is broken. It's shot through with politics and moral values. So these are things that have to be there for science to work that the scientific method can't prove.

Now I want to quote this guy next who was for I think around 20 or so years the chairman of the biology department at Harvard University, one of the great scientists in our land. And in 1997, he was reviewing Carl Sagan, who I mentioned earlier, he was reviewing one of Carl's books in the *New York Times Review of Books*. And here's what he said at one point in this article, and it's kind of one of those things where he pulled back the veil and said, "Let me just put it all out there for you."

He said this, "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life (think 2045 Project), in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories."

Pause there. Here's what he's saying. Why do we go with science every time? When it doesn't fulfill its promises, when it is giving us all these promises of health and life that it can't fulfill, when it looks patently absurd. Why do we keep going with science? Listen to what he says: "Because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism." Materialism is a variation of what I described in scientism. Materialism is simply the belief that the material world is all there is. It's the whole show.

We have a prior commitment to materialism. Translated: doesn't matter what evidence you give us, we're going to believe this. That sounds more like faith than science. He continues, "It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world." People will say, "Well, the more scientific training people get, the less religious they become." He's saying, "No, not at all. It's not that the methods, what we do with research, what we do with learning, what we do with technology, compels us to accept materialism and Darwinism. It's not that the institutions make us do that. None of that stuff makes us materialists."

Here's what he says: "But on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori" (roughly Latin for "beforehand") "adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations." Before I look at the evidence, before I look at everything presented to me, my mind is made up that the only thing that's there is the material world. Now, if I came as a Christian and said, "I'm not even going to listen to your case, Dr. Lewontin, I'm not even going to listen to your case because my mind's made up for the Bible," and I said that on national TV if we're debating each other, what do you think people would say to me?

"How could you get any more backward intellectually? What is this guy? He doesn't deserve to be up here talking to this Harvard professor, he's made up his mind beforehand." And yet he's sitting here saying, "This is what we all do. In this atheistic scientific establishment, this is what we do: before we look at the evidence, before we look at reason, before we go through all of these things, we have our minds made up." This is kind of the pièce de résistance here at the end. "Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door."

Do you hear what he's saying? Why do we accept all these things before we look at the evidence? In spite of the evidence to the contrary, why do we keep holding on to materialism? Because we don't want God. We cannot allow a divine foot in the door. Now, again, I appreciate this because it's so honest about what we see all around us. There's so much evidence against this worldview, and nobody considers it in the professional establishment. Why? Because their minds are made up.

And by the way, the Bible talks about that. Romans 1, one of the most amazing pieces of psychology ever written because God's the author and He tells us how we work. Listen to what Paul says: "For although they knew God" (Romans 1:21), "they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened." Although they knew God, they became futile in their thinking. What do we see today? We see a blind alley with this kind of worldview.

We see a morality that says might makes right. We see a worldview that gave us in the 20th century the bloodiest century on record. If you took all the people killed in 19 centuries previous to the 1900s, it wouldn't even equal to what were killed under Communist and Fascist regimes in the 20th century. Think about that. And those had worldviews behind them. There's a movie that depicts this well that was banned, I think, in Germany. It's a movie called *Downfall*.

It's in German with English subtitles. But it is basically two German writers that wrote the script, basically took the last few days in Hitler's bunker from the transcriptions we have and put it into film. It is hard to watch, I will warn you, it is hard to watch. But there's a scene in there where Hitler is—right before he took his own life, he was going ballistic on his generals for failing to win the war, and they're just getting hammered from the Russians and from the Allies. It's just going to be awful for Berlin.

And he starts going off about how they have not evolved enough. And right there you get a key and a window into what Hitler's thinking was. And he was a master politician, he would use Christian terminology, he roped the churches into his cause. But make no mistake, as one Holocaust survivor said, "The Holocaust and the Final Solution were not concocted in 20th-century Germany." He said they were concocted in the lecture halls of Vienna in the 19th century. What was he referring to? This kind of worldview that began to take root after the rise of Darwinism. Ideas have consequences.

Now, here's another scientist, George F.R. Ellis, one of the great physicists in the world. He said this, "You cannot do physics or cosmology without an assumed philosophical bias." Science requires philosophical reasoning, it's not just purely scientific. "You can choose not to think about that basis; it will still be there as an unexamined foundation of what you do. The fact you are unwilling to examine the philosophical foundations of what you do does not mean those foundations are not there; it just means they are unexamined."

Do you hear what he's saying? When there's scientists and atheist scientists particularly who posture themselves as unbiased, just coldly looking at the facts and deducing other facts from those facts, he's saying that's a myth. Everybody's got an assumed basis. We talked about those assumptions that have to be in place for science to work. Stephen Hawking, some of you all know that name, just died not too long ago, one of the great physicists of the 20th century.

Here's what he said in his book *The Grand Design*, written with Leonard Mlodinow, I think. He wrote this, "Most people believe that there is an objective reality out there and that our senses and our science directly convey information about the material world." Here's what he's saying. This lectern is hard, it feels comfortable in here in the air, it was raining outside, external world, sense perception. He's saying that's how most of us go about our daily lives without a second thought.

Then he says, "The way physics has been going, realism is becoming difficult to defend." What is realism? The view that this is really hard, the view that your mind gives you information in the outside world and doesn't influence it at all, that we're just all kind of coldly doing science. He says, "No way, physics is challenging that reality." And then let me finish with Charles Darwin. This is what he said towards the end of his life: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."

What's his horrid doubt? His horrid doubt is if I'm just an evolved monkey and I've got these convictions, how do I know they're true? If I'm just evolved from a monkey and I've evolved from the lower animals and I've got these convictions now, maybe somebody else will evolve beyond them. Maybe I'm totally wrong. That's why it was a horrid doubt for him. It wasn't just gamesmanship for Darwin; everything hung on this. "Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

You see his question? If we're all this, then how do we know it's true? How do we know his theory's true? There's no way to know it, that's his horrid doubt, and he was saying this is racking me towards the end of my life. Now, the next thing that always comes up is, well, what about all the evidence for evolution and the evolutionary naturalistic scientific worldview has the answers? Here's one of the leading evolutionary paleontologists, Henry Gee, from *Nature* magazine.

He wrote this: "Fossils are never found with labels or certificates of authenticity. The attribution of ancestry does not come from the fossil; it can only come from us." If you were to go to Penn State, over to Temple, go to the bookstore, pull off the Geology 101 textbook, the Paleontology 101 textbook, and the Biology 101 textbook, you would find evolutionary trees in there, supposedly from fossil evidence. Did you hear what he just said?

This guy teaches at Cambridge University, one of the finest universities in the world, one of the most accomplished scientists in the world. He goes, "Fossils don't come with labels. We tell them their stories." That's what he goes on to say: "Fossils are mute; their silence gives us unlimited license to tell their stories for them, which usually take the form of chains of ancestry and descent." Like I just mentioned that you'll find in almost any high school and college science textbook being used today.

He's saying their silence gives us unlimited license to tell their stories. "Such tales are sustained more in our minds than in reality and are informed and conditioned by our own prejudices. If there are missing links, they exist only in our imaginations." So what's he saying about evidence? You look at fossil evidence, he's saying you've got bias just like we saw George Ellis talking about. You've got a philosophical presupposition here and that's what's going to determine what you see in fossils.

So he says these tales take forms of chains of ancestry. When you see that in a textbook, he's saying, "Yeah, that's one story. It's not *the* story. We don't know the story," as he goes on to argue in his book *In Search of Deep Time*. I want to take what we've seen so far and apply this. I want to show why I think the scientific naturalistic worldview is false, and we're going to go to morality. A number of other authors and thinkers have used this argument, so it's not original to me, but let's outline it real quick.

Here's an argument from morality against this scientistic evolutionary naturalistic worldview. First, if the standard evolutionary story is true, then we are the product of impersonal, non-moral, undirected, natural evolutionary processes. I think any evolutionist, if you hear that, I don't think I'm caricaturing that side of the argument. I think that is fairly well established: this is what they believe.

So second step of the argument: if we are the product of impersonal, non-moral, undirected, natural evolutionary processes, then we have no moral obligations and no moral responsibilities. Let me tease that out. If you and I are simply, as one author put it, "goo to you via the zoo" evolution, if that's what we are, then I don't have any moral duties to $7.20 worth of chemicals. I don't have any duty to do right by you or to make your life comfortable.

If I've got more power than you, I can do whatever I want to you. I had a friend who was a martial arts instructor in Greenville, a brilliant fighter. His specialty was multiple combatant training. So our special forces actually brought him in a number of years ago to help them with this. So he was short and not would look like a guy that you would go, "I'm not messing with that guy." He's about 5'10", maybe weighs 120 pounds soaking wet. He was a great boxer and fighter and an amazing martial artist.

And he would open his gym up, and he was a very committed Christian believer. When I would sit there and kind of box and spar with him, and then he'd say, "Okay, what we're going to do at the end of class here is 10 of you come at me. Let's see what you got." In years of watching him do this, nobody really even landed a punch on him. Ten on one, you like those odds? I don't like them. I wouldn't take those. And so what he would do at the end of class was wonderful with evangelism.

He would say, "Okay, I've demonstrated I can pretty much have my way with you. Why should you walk out of here with your wallet? Why shouldn't I just take it? I'm stronger, I'm faster. Why shouldn't I take your wallet?" And you watch people who weren't Christians going, "Well, it's just wrong." And he'd say, "Why is it wrong?" "Well, because it just is, you shouldn't be—" "Why should I be nice to you? It makes me feel better if I have your wallet, especially if you give me your PIN number and you've got more money than I do."

And here's the point. It's a really good illustration of this second premise here: when you believe that people are not image bearers of God and they're just animals, you will start to treat them like that. When we teach children that they are nothing but animals, they will start to live like that. And all we have as a safeguard against total anarchy is a cultural memory of Christianity that provides us with some moral basis and that is fast eroding.

And it's being replaced by an ethic that says, "I can do whatever I want if I have the power." And that's called tyranny. And that has brought untold misery upon the human race for generations and millennia. And it scares me. And it should scare you too. And most importantly, it should make you furious because it is a direct affront to the Creator who made us in His image. Everybody in here has inherent worth and dignity and value because you bear the image of God. Every human being has that.

And if the standard evolutionary story is true and we're just the product of impersonal, non-directed, non-moral forces, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. And you can do whatever you please because there really is no such thing as lasting moral values. People have tried to make the argument for it; they've all failed. And therefore, the conclusion of this argument I want to present is: we do have moral obligations and moral responsibility.

All of us get that. And you can't make your way through daily life without assuming that. So when I read writers going, "We have no, morals are illusions, they're products of evolutionary forces," I think to myself, "You know, what would happen to this guy if, let's say, they're renegotiating his contract at the university? And let's just suppose a scenario here that the president of the board goes, 'Hey man, I read your book. And I totally get your argument. We are animals and we don't have any moral obligations to each other.

Here's my argument, here's what I've deduced from your book, Professor: if that's the case like you argue so persuasively in your book, we don't have any moral obligation to pay you. So we're going to count your contract null and void because we don't have to tell the truth about contracts. There's no moral responsibility here for us to pay you for teaching at our university. There's no such thing as moral values.'" Do you think that would go over very well? Nobody lives like this. That's my point.

You can argue in the abstract all day long that we don't have moral obligations and moral responsibility. Nobody wants to live in a world like that. Nobody wants to live in a world where truth and falsehood don't matter, right and wrong are dismissed as illusions. And nobody in fact does live like that. It's hypocrisy to argue otherwise. Therefore, the simple conclusion is: the standard evolutionary story is false just based on this argument.

I think it's a simple argument, I don't think it's too hard to follow here, and if I've got everything right there, I think it's true. And I don't do that to say I've got some sort of logical prowess here, I just think it's a pretty simple way of reasoning through what they're giving us and seeing that it's false. Let me finish up saying a couple of things here. One of the things that I want to make clear is that Christians should be the most interested advocates for science the world has ever seen.

And we should love the natural sciences because they show us the glory of God in the natural world. And Romans 1 tells us and Psalm 19 tells us that God is shouting at us every day that He's there. The moment we are self-conscious, we are God-conscious, to quote one theologian. The moment that we wake up tomorrow and see the sun, if it's not raining, even if we don't see the sun, the day breaks and we look around us and see this amazing world God has made, we should be interested in it.

We should love to study it. We should want our studies and our sciences to bless others around us. We should love to have our children become scientists. There should be no fear here. And people say, "Oh, Christians just are so afraid of what the sciences reveal." I'm not afraid of anything, in fact. When we do science well, all of it, all of it shows that everything God has told us about Himself is true in His Word. One of the founding professors of the seminary I went to over in Philadelphia said this, "Never fear: God's world will never contradict God's Word."

Isn't that right? So the first thing is Christians should love science. Nothing I've said here should suggest that apologetics is anti-science. It's anti-godless science. It's anti-science that leads us to ridiculous places and arguments that say we don't have any moral obligations. It's absolutely opposed to that because I would argue that's not science at all but philosophy and philosophical bias. That's why I wouldn't even call evolution a theory so much as a philosophy.

Theories are testable and replicable and can be proved by evidence. You can't do that with evolution because it's a philosophy, it's an assumption, it comes at the evidence from a bias as we've heard from the lips of one of its greatest proponents. And so the other thing I want us to be clear about is that these ideas have consequences. I'm not up here just because I feel threatened, and I don't, from those who disagree with me or those who think that Christianity is false or those who think evolution has been decisively proved.

Let's have that discussion. What I am, and I hope all of us are concerned about, is the implications of some of these ideas particularly when it comes to our humanity and our world. I had the privilege of growing up in the South, and one of the things that that taught me was kind of rhythms of life. And I love to hunt, and I love being out in the woods, and I love seeing what God does. If you want to know where my happy place is, it's on a golf course or sitting up in a tree waiting for the deer, looking for the deer, looking for the turkeys in the spring.

Because when I'm out there, I pray, I read the Bible, I try to commune with my Lord and Savior, and then I look out and see His amazing design in nature. And then, yeah, then I take its life because God tells us to do that and take dominion. And venison's delicious, and when you smoke it at about 125 for eight hours, it's delicious. But what you see there is God's design in the world that ought to bring us to our knees. And what else it should do is when we see other people who are not Christians, the first thing they are are people, not non-Christians.

The first thing they are are image bearers. And we should fight for all image bearers to be protected regardless of their creed, of their race, of their age. Boy, that's scary. That's not being talked about a lot. Right now, these ideas are that if you're young and healthy and can produce in society, then you're worth living. If not, you're not worth having around. That's the implications, those are the consequences of these ideas, and as Christians, that should terrify us and sicken us and turn our stomachs and say, "No, I don't care if somebody disagrees with me, I don't care if they don't believe what I believe, I will fight for the right for them to be protected as image bearers of God, period, full stop."

And so what's at stake in these arguments is nothing less than a right view of ourselves, the world, and most importantly, God, who owns this world, who reveals Himself in this world. And so the last thing I want to say here and want to close with is a quote from a scholar named Rodney Stark. And this is from his book *For the Glory of God*. And here's what he's arguing here, it's fascinating. He surveys all the ancient societies: the Chinese had the maritime technology about 600 years before Columbus sailed to get across the Atlantic.

Think about that. Or at that point, the Pacific. They had the ability to circumnavigate the globe before Columbus did it by about 600 years. There was a Chinese navy that was the finest in the world that accomplished feats on the open seas that are still talked about today. And yet Chinese society doesn't do anything with that. And Rodney Stark goes through why certain societies used technology and others didn't. Here's his central argument: there's only one time in history and in one place in history where science has arisen.

Science that has built our modern world happens once and one time only in history. Here's what he says: "Isn't the rise of science a normal aspect of cultural progress of the rise of a civilization? For example, although in full possession of the Greco-Roman corpus of Greco-Roman scholarship and having made some impressive advances in mathematics, Islamic scholars did not become scientists. The enterprise of science arose only once. It is indisputable that modern science emerged in the 17th century in Western Europe and nowhere else. The crucial question is why."

He's not saying Europeans are awesome and everybody else is awful. He's not a racist. He's not that at all; don't hear that. This is after about 200 pages of argument, okay? He's documented it, he's done his homework. He says this, "Why? Why Western Europe in the 17th century? My answer to this question is as brief as it is unoriginal: Christianity. Christianity is the reason science arose." Quoting him again, "Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being, and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure awaiting human comprehension. These were the crucial ideas. And that's why the rise of science occurred in Christian Europe and not somewhere else."

Isn't that fascinating? That he looks around all these other societies and says they don't have this worldview. They don't have this theology, they don't have this anthropology, they don't have this view of knowledge, they don't have this view of ethics, they don't have this view of salvation. And when it is put in place, it unleashes the modern scientific revolution. It's indisputable is what he's saying. All because of ideas, all because of a worldview that says there is a God, you can trust Him, He will save us, He is making all things new.

And that worldview makes all the difference on whether or not you have a smartphone in your pocket or you die in this country. Think about this: 100 years ago, your life expectancy was 48 if you were a male, 50 if you were a woman. That's 1912. 107 years ago in this country. What's the difference between having a smartphone and living longer and all the good stuff we enjoy from modern science? Christianity.

Father, thank You. Thank You for giving us Your world to show us who You are, for allowing us the ability to investigate it. And we pray for advances to be made in science. We pray for You to raise up a generation of scientists who love You and love studying Your creation. As You tell us in the Psalms, "Great are the works of the Lord, delighted in by all those who study them." And so, Lord, we would do that tonight. We would delight in You and exalt Jesus as we think about these things. We pray in His name, Amen.

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