2 Former Christian Creationists Ministers Now See that Evolution is a Fact

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, welcome to the Timmy Gibson Show. My name is Timmy Gibson.

[00:00:05]This is my friend, you all know him, Kyle Hass, on here to talk about evolution, creation, and and some of those things, but before we get started I'm a former fundamental evangelical Bible thumpin' tongue talkin' Holy Ghost rollin' pastor. Spent 30 years of my life as a minister. Pastored my own church for about 17, 18 years. Previous to that, I was an evangelist. Used to travel around doing crusades and healing the sick, laying hands and casting out devils. And uh did that for a couple years, and then youth pastored. Um and now I'm an atheist and couldn't be happier. Which is you know, for those that are 55% of the audience watching this video are new to my channel. So um some things I like to repeat just cuz people don't know, but um yeah, I I am an atheist, which just means I don't see enough evidence to convince me to believe in God, specifically the Bible God.

[00:01:00]You know, I'm just certain that one is doesn't exist, and if he does exist, he's a genocidal maniac, but anyway, uh so what's your story, Kyle? Yeah, uh got saved in high school, went to the same Bible college as Timmy.

[00:01:15]Uh became a licensed minister in 2017, started applying to the missions field with the hope of being a missionary in 2018, and during the application process had to take account of what I believed truthfully cuz I was actually starting to go out and do ministry, and decided that I really maybe didn't believe as much as I had previously thought, and by 2019 was an atheist. Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:01:41]And we met cuz I did his his wedding, so um yeah, we're going to talk and this is this is where his his knowledge uh is super helpful because I'm still like I'm a new I'm a new evolutionist.

[00:01:54]>> Yeah. I was believing in creation.

[00:01:57]Uh I mean, I'm a new atheist, too, really.

[00:02:00]Um been an atheist for gosh probably 5, 6 years, maybe maybe real more public about it about 3 years.

[00:02:07]Um 9 years I've really kind of 8, 9 years deconstructed. Um you know, it was very progressive or very yeah, it was very slow. It was very gradual, that's a better word, I guess.

[00:02:20]Uh first I was conservative Christian, then I was a little bit more open-minded, then I was a little bit more liberal and accepting, and you know, then I got to that place where I'm like, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual.

[00:02:30]And you know, I went through that phase for a long time, you know, then it was like, I love I follow Jesus, but I ain't a Christian, you know.

[00:02:37]Uh and then finally I was like, I don't know.

[00:02:40]>> [laughter] >> Not 4 and 1/2 Yeah, and then finally it just kept kept going. It's like a ship leaving the harbor. It just went off off to the off in the distance.

[00:02:50]Uh but anyway, so yeah, creation I'm I'm so um just enamored with evolution because it's a new thing for me. It's something I'm learning about. Um cuz I used to say when I was a preacher >> [laughter] >> I used to say this from the pulpit. I'd say, "Well, I don't know about you, but I don't come from no monkey." That was my argument for creation.

[00:03:11]>> [laughter] >> It was always the the monkey thing was always funny to me because I remember I had worked at the Assemblies of God, and we were doing like a CPR class, and they went into like all the little sacs in your lungs that, you know, allow oxygen to diffuse into your blood, and they're like, "But we evolved from monkeys." And I was like, "You don't think monkeys breathe?"

[00:03:31]I don't Yeah, I we did.

[00:03:34]>> [laughter] >> It's like, but >> the same lungs. Well, that goes So this is what Kyle and I were talking about off screen.

[00:03:42]Uh cuz by the way, when we get together, when the camera's not on, this is exactly how we talk. Like literally, this we are non-stop just talking about this kind of stuff, and I finally was like, "Dude, we just got to put mics on us and talk about it." So we were talking about What is that phrase, you know, when you you uh you can't understand it, therefore it's not true. You know, I can't understand how we have little sacs in our lungs, so therefore God did it, and you know, all that.

[00:04:11]And I couldn't remember the name of it, so I looked it up. It's called all argument from incredulity.

[00:04:18]And I've said this before. I think I may have even done a video on it, but I just thought it was funny. A logical fallacy that suggests that because a claim is difficult to imagine or understand, it must be false.

[00:04:29]>> [laughter] >> So that's that's what I used to think about evolution. I couldn't understand and we were talking about this on the couch.

[00:04:36]The the part that has always had been hard for me to understand, and frankly, it's newly becoming more I'm understanding it more and more.

[00:04:46]But it's like, how do we have something from nothing?

[00:04:50]You know, um which is funny. There's God. Yeah. And that's something from nothing.

[00:04:56]>> [laughter] >> You know, so uh I get that now.

[00:05:01]But this What are the What is it? Two?

[00:05:05]There's a couple main arguments, and I think these are related. What are the two arguments for God that are the best ones? I mean, >> [sighs] >> you know, I'm I'm kind of rusty on what they are.

[00:05:19]>> The cosmological, maybe the ontological, and then definitely the teleological argument.

[00:05:24]The teleological argument was one that I used as an apologist.

[00:05:29]Which unfortunately, I don't remember it that well now, but uh yeah, I think that teleological, cosmological, and there might even be the ontological. But that [clears throat] might be something entirely different.

[00:05:41]>> Yeah.

[00:05:42]Yeah, I mean, what is oncology?

[00:05:45]Or Well, oncology is cancer. Okay, I'm I'm not sure. I don't remember that.

[00:05:49]>> [laughter] >> We've all evolved from cancer cells.

[00:05:53]You know what I'm saying?

[00:05:54]>> be an interesting discovery. [laughter] The the whole idea I think the thing that I still laugh at I was a Christian for 48 years. You know, even when you were a Christian an evangelical Christian, you still believed in science. I Most of you that are like me if you're evangelical, if you're Pentecostal, or you know, Baptist, Nazarene Assemblies of God, I can't even think of all the other groups out there, but you know, if you're an evangelical, you know, you believe in this 6,000-year-old Earth BS story. You know, the Earth is 6,000, as old as 10,000, but no no younger than six, but definitely not no older than 10.

[00:06:42]Um Not 4 and 1/2 billion.

[00:06:44]>> Right. And then, you know, Adam and Eve are the first two humans, and and that's a whole 'nother thing. So it the thing that I I was actually an atheist first before I became someone that believed in evolution. I guess call an evolutionist or to believe in it because it was just hard for me to wrap my mind around how we came from a single cell, or how we would have ever evolved from what I would have termed then, you know, from monkeys.

[00:07:17]You know, and just not understanding any of it. You know, that we were a monkey that walked a little bit straighter up, a little bit straighter up, a little bit straighter up until finally you know, but that isn't how it goes, you know.

[00:07:28]>> Yeah, it's really a complex web of, you know, various evolutionary dead ends, and uh Overlapping unimaginable >> species, yeah.

[00:07:40]It's a Yeah, I don't know. The big thing that I'm trying to learn about right now is what they call the the muddle in the middle, which is kind of the middle Pleistocene, I want to say. So from about 100,000 years ago to about 800,000 years ago, some weird things were happening in our evolutionary family tree. Where you have these mosaic specimens with archaic and newer features.

[00:08:05]And we're finding that hybridization was pretty common. We got uh an archaic super archaic uh hominin in our bloodline that we probably diverge from 1.5 million years ago, and it's maybe contributed up to 20% of our genome, I think is what they're saying right now.

[00:08:24]>> Interesting. And this initial interbreeding with this, you know, the offspring were probably not even they were maybe only loosely kind of like a mule. We would have been relatively different from this organism, but we bred enough with them that they still made up quite a bit of our genome.

[00:08:41]>> That is fascinating.

[00:08:43]The webs of evolution are very complex, but Well, and I would assume, you know uh you definitely have a better understanding of this than I do. And as I'm sitting here thinking the things that I struggle with, maybe you can shed some some light on it.

[00:09:00]Because I've been watching a ton of videos trying to understand evolution better. You know, I'm trying to understand it.

[00:09:06]And one thing that I learned new, tell me if this is true if that was if this is right.

[00:09:12]It what you just mentioned, the interbreeding. So it's what led to us, the Homo sapiens, it was not necessarily these particular hominins, but it was like the Neanderthal with a Homo erectus or a a Denisovan with a whatever, then created a new breed, and then they interbred with something else, and then and then it just kept It's kind of like and maybe I'm maybe correct me, but it's like dogs. You know, I had a Pomeranian. You look at a a German Shepherd or a or a Great Dane, and you're like and how is there any How are these even the same thing? That you know, one weighs 175 lb, and the other one weighs 3 lb. Excuse me. You know, like, what is up here, right? So is that in the web of Is that partly how then we Cuz it wasn't like two monkeys got together and they birthed this little baby and it looked like me. Yeah.

[00:10:08]No, it would have been much more gradual. I mean, I I think I've used kind of like an age analogy. Like you're older today than you were yesterday, but the perception how different you are in terms of how much you've aged from yesterday to today is imperceptible. Yet, if you look at yourself over a year, 5 years, 10 years, you can start to see those changes.

[00:10:28]And so Yeah, they were just gradual changes over time that would have been imperceptible to the population at the time that it was alive. Yeah. And Yeah, so there were no changes. Yeah, no one It like in someone's lifetime. This is over millions and millions and millions of years.

[00:10:47]>> And in some scenarios it can happen relatively rapid uh based on overall pressure, competition, gestation periods, and how quick generations can pass, as well as maybe even hybridization, right? If you're interbreeding with species that are closely related to you, any beneficial traits that both populations have acquired can now be shared. And so in that way you can kind of co-opt evolution on a genetic level. Yeah.

[00:11:16]Isn't there Is there Is there some kind of research on the evolution of like fleas or fly or like something to where they've really been able to to to see an evolutionary because it you know these their lifespan is you know one day. Uh they found a new species of mosquito in the subways of London, I believe, that's no longer closely related enough to surface mosquitoes to have offspring.

[00:11:43]But I mean when we look at agriculture, specifically plants, I believe we have not only bred just new species. I think like it with wheat we've bred entirely new genuses of Fascinating.

[00:11:55]>> It's just a plant, so we don't really like we don't really think about it. You know, kind of I mean they didn't even No plants were on Noah's Ark and yet somehow they all survived when they were you know underwater for 40 days. So we don't always consider plants as a living thing.

[00:12:11]But they are and they evolve in the same mechanism that we do. They are eukaryotes like we are, which is just the cellular structure. Yeah. Yeah, they have much of the same DNA we do. Yeah, don't we share like 25% same DNA with banana? Uh 58. 58? That's freaking crazy. Yeah. I just let's talk about the Noah story for just a second. I think it's so interesting. Because my cuz I can still hear my evangelical brain.

[00:12:37]Anything that I could not make sense of I'm like, well the mysteries belong to the Lord. Yeah.

[00:12:43]Like God did it. I mean, who can explain Who knows the mind of God, Kyle?

[00:12:48]You know what I mean? Well, and I think it's okay to say I don't know.

[00:12:51]Um you know, so I don't think that's necessarily a bad answer. It's only bad answer when you use it as I don't know therefore God.

[00:12:59]>> Right.

[00:13:01]If you don't know, you don't know, so therefore not God. It's just you don't know. Right.

[00:13:06]There are going to be gaps in our understanding and knowledge, like how the universe truly began, what its beginning was, if it really even had a beginning, because you know time and space are somewhat tethered together and they're kind of making some weird discoveries right now in astrophysics as well in terms of what our universe is and how it looks and what it's expanding into and I don't know. I think we're going to get some Do you think we're Do you think we're in a simulation? I don't. I don't either. No, I get why >> But I've I've watched very smart people say that it's plausible. Well, it's >> That's trippy cuz I'm like quantum physics, these quantum particles >> [snorts] >> only doing things as you observe them.

[00:13:47]That is the split the split experiment.

[00:13:50]That is crazy.

[00:13:51]>> Yeah, it makes it sound like reality's rendering as it's being observed. And I so I get why they are saying it's a simulation. I don't know what that means. Yeah. And you know, maybe we are in a simulation, but I think that argument's somewhat similar to the God argument in the sense of here's something that we can recognize, so we're projecting our own understanding Mhm. onto the world, right? We create things, therefore the world must be created, therefore there's a God.

[00:14:19]Simulations look like this This kind of looks like a simulation, therefore it must be a simulation. We're projecting our own experiences onto the nature of existence.

[00:14:30]>> Yeah. And it may not be the accurate way to do that.

[00:14:33]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:35]Yeah, man, that I think the the the only piece of the puzzle that I'm still really learning and growing in it is this whole creation evolution.

[00:14:48]Um You know, I 100% believe evolution is a fact. You know, I think it's the research I mean, it is a fact. I mean, the research shows that that this is We just don't have all the answers.

[00:14:58]You know, wouldn't that be cool if we could go like if there was someone had a video from 2 million years ago, you know.

[00:15:04]That would be cool.

[00:15:05]Uh I mean, even this is just how my mind geeks out. Just the evolution of language.

[00:15:13]Like why is this called a pin? You know, because someone decided to call this a pin.

[00:15:21]You know, but then another language is actually not called a pin. It's something else. So I don't understand all that either, how that you know, to us it's a pin and some other There's what? I forget, 9,000 languages? There's a lot of languages out there, yeah.

[00:15:36]And that was >> More than have ever existed.

[00:15:38]>> Uh it's just it's wild, right? Um Yeah, it's just a How did we you know, this is a pin and everybody on planet Earth this is a pin, everybody.

[00:15:51]You know? Yeah, I mean I think >> that just crazy. The sharing of information and languages evolving off each other and cultural interactions, you know, I think that that caused the evolution of language in a certain way because the ability to communicate became much more needed as time went on.

[00:16:11]And so even early sapiens maybe didn't have as complex languages as we do today, is some speculation that I've read.

[00:16:19]And it may not have been until we left Africa or around the same population that left Africa and that also remained in Africa that diverged from other sapiens around 100,000 to 75,000 years ago. There was a bottleneck that all of us alive today originate from. Um That group was the one that took over the world, developed throwing spears, bows and arrows, potentially complex language, complex religion, art.

[00:16:49]How much of that existed beforehand, we don't really know as far as I'm aware. I know Neanderthals have cave art, which is really interesting. Very interesting.

[00:16:58]>> Looks different, too. Like Homo sapiens were painting animals. Neanderthals have like just these like designs. I don't really even know.

[00:17:08]It looks almost more like a graph or you know, I don't know if they were plotting out Yeah.

[00:17:13]>> what they what they were I don't know it I don't know what they were doing, but they also had bone flutes, which was interesting, too, that they had music.

[00:17:20]>> Yeah.

[00:17:21]So there is some question of in my mind, anyway, when some of these features evolved and how, but uh certainly our uh population of sapiens is probably more advanced Yeah.

[00:17:37]>> any other thing that came before, even earlier sapiens. Yeah.

[00:17:41]Yeah, that's I I just wondered to my if So I guess what if Homo sapiens came on the scene maybe 500,000 years ago or 300,000?

[00:17:53]There's been a new thing that they're talking about right now that maybe at least basal sapiens could potentially be up to 800,000 years old. Now, the oldest remains that we have are from Morocco, the Jebel Irhoud. I I probably butchered that word.

[00:18:10]Uh and they were about 300,000 years ago and there's They were thought to be Neanderthal remains.

[00:18:16]They actually found those skulls, I think, in the '60s. They thought to be Neanderthals and so we basal sapiens, they still have the small, you know, forehead, the large brows. Uh but they do have our flat faces and they had the stone technology that eventually Neanderthals adopted or potentially even inherited from basal sapiens because Neanderthals again, according to this new hypothesis, might actually be a hybrid population of uh two populations that split off, the population in Africa, which became our population, and then the Asiatic population, and then about 400,000 years ago, according to this new hypothesis, some of our early ancestors, whether basal sapiens or some sort of pre-sapien, went into Asia, interbred with the populations there, and that pop our ancient population got absorbed and then that hybrid population became Neanderthals. Again, according to a hypothesis that maybe dropped a few months ago. Yeah.

[00:19:18]Yeah, that that I mean, man, that just brings up so many One, I've thought to myself if there was a a baby from 800,000 years ago was brought and to this time, you know, would they speak They won't speak you know, the language. Would they be able to adapt and you know, like my first thought would be, yeah.

[00:19:43]Yeah, maybe.

[00:19:45]It's hard Our brains have changed in overall size. So ancient people, even ancient sapiens, had larger brains than we do today. Okay. Our brains have actually gradually shrunk since the agricultural revolution. It's Christianity that did that to us.

[00:19:59]>> [laughter] >> Religion.

[00:20:04]Uh, but yeah, so it's hard to say what the structures in their brains were, what the language centers were like in their brains, and we don't have any soft tissue to really know what their vocal cords were like, but um I I would imagine that even some of our most ancient relatives, and this is just my personal opinion, I'm not a scientist, I can't say it, but looking even as far back as like maybe even Homo erectus, I you know, I think we are doing things that they weren't, and we do have brain capacity that they don't, but I think that their intelligence and their ability would probably be shockingly human. And then so they very potentially could have had some kind of language. I think from what I've read, it is believed that they probably did have some type of language, whether or not it was complex as ours, whether or not it construed as many ideas, and whether or not it relied primarily on words and not just also hand gestures and body language. They were speaking King James. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:03]Yeah. Homo erectus was actually Adam and Eve.

[00:21:06]>> [laughter] >> You know, that's something that no one's ever been able to to answer. I I had a evangelical friend, and I said, "Well, how do you explain all the different species of humans?" When their first the question was, "What do you mean?"

[00:21:20]And I'm like Yeah, they don't Yeah, they don't they don't Neanderthals are probably the only ones they've heard about. They Yeah, they really weren't aware, and I said, "Yeah, there was like I think maybe a dozen other species of humans potentially. A few that have yet to be identified as a species Actually, our oldest They call them a ghost, right? They're called >> Well, there's the ghost populations in which we have no specimens for, and then they're just known by DNA.

[00:21:43]Uh, and then we have some, like the oldest human specimen is 2.8 million years old, and it's just a jaw bone, and so they don't know what species it belonged to. They just know it's human.

[00:21:53]Wow. So, it could have been Homo habilis, it could have been something entirely different.

[00:21:58]We just don't have enough to know. Yeah, not enough of a specimen to really be able to make a determination, so yeah, I mean, of named, yeah, we probably have 12. They didn't always live together. I don't know if it's actually 12, but yeah, we've probably got about that much.

[00:22:12]>> Yeah.

[00:22:13]Yeah, which is which is so it'd be like getting rid of all I maybe maybe not, but be like getting rid of all the dogs except one particular type dog.

[00:22:24]Um, did you know that a hyena is actually related to the cat more than the dog? What, you knew that?

[00:22:31]>> [laughter] >> I'm really Yeah, they're far I When I heard that, I was like, "What?" And someone else was like, I watched this show, and they were talking about all those things, you know, they're like, "Yeah, and a dolphin's more related You know, they were just going through the I'm like, "Wow." I didn't hear Something funny that you might get a kick out of.

[00:22:47]Uh, so uh you know, like you probably heard how birds are dinosaurs, right?

[00:22:52]>> Right. Because once you've been ascribed a certain moniker in taxonomy, you never get out of that. Well, that's why we're still apes, and technically, because apes evolved from monkeys, we're probably still monkeys. Yeah. But since every terrestrial organism, or vertebrate anyway, evolved from fish, we're all technically fish. Right.

[00:23:15]>> [laughter] >> Well, too, so dolphins are fish. Yeah, cuz isn't it it It's just so stupid. It's so fun though.

[00:23:22]That So I think it's Richard Dawkins that says you go back you know, great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great is a fish.

[00:23:33]Yeah. That is just insane, right? Yeah.

[00:23:37]Uh, well, and you can kind of see some of those fish, and you see how they start to move on to land, and they do almost have more appendage-like arms, but also fish is such a broad category Right.

[00:23:50]>> that encompasses things that are so vastly not related, despite the fact that their form is relative like, you know, there we are closely related to certain fish, and those fish are related to other fish. Wow. So Yeah, there were certain There were certain things about that about things like that, like, you know, we're closer to this than we would be to this, but that wouldn't you wouldn't just think that.

[00:24:18]You know, you would think Well, and that also is There are certain traits that persist in populations that you know, um don't change over time, despite the fact that it may look like may make a population look as related to another population. So, for example, Aborigines in Australia, they have dark skin like people in Africa. However, they're still separated by the same amount of time as Europeans are from Africa. Mhm. It's just that dark skin was beneficial back in that time frame, so ancient populations pretty much all had dark skin. And so, even though Aborigines may on a superficial level look more related to people in Africa based on those appearances, well, they're actually not.

[00:25:03]>> Yeah. They're not any more related than maybe we are.

[00:25:06]>> Okay. But clearly descendants of Cain.

[00:25:09]Yeah.

[00:25:10]Oh, is that one of those Did I remember that taught? Yeah. Where black people were descendants of Cain?

[00:25:16]>> That Yep. Oh, no. They cuz Cain was marked by God because he killed Abel.

[00:25:20]Oh, oh, he was marked. See, I had heard of Ham and his >> from Ham, because I think of the name Ham or something like that meant like black, yeah, but I didn't I I didn't know that Yeah, God made Cain black.

[00:25:34]Yeah, that's not a good idea. That's not I remember hearing that early on, and I remember going, I don't think that's true. No.

[00:25:42]Yeah, there's some crazy things, you know, the the other thing that all of life if is This is a question.

[00:25:52]Is literally all of life, the plant behind me, you know, you, me, the dog, fish, all of it.

[00:25:59]Like it all goes back to a single cell? Like all plant life, trees, butterflies, bees, wasps, all of that you go all the way back, and it's a single cell. Yeah, we have a shared common ancestor.

[00:26:17]That is just fascinating. And again, you know, it's like >> [laughter] >> the the incredulity thing, you know, it's like it's like I don't understand it.

[00:26:28]I trust the experts who do. That Yeah, that's where I Now, I find lots of peace in that. Just because I don't understand how SpaceX can build a rocket the size of a 21 floor you know, building, you know, Yeah. I'm just amazed by that, you know, I never really realized how big some of those rockets were until they, you know, have a car next to it, and you're like, That's just unbelievable.

[00:26:56]Well, yeah, of course I can't understand that. I don't know. I'm not educated in that way. So, when you've been educated all your life that God did it, in the beginning God, you know, put the sun there, put the moon there, and did that, and did that, and made all the animals walk in front of Adam, and Adam named them. That's a giraffe. That's an elephant. That's a tiger. That's a deer. You better hide.

[00:27:20]You know, it's like like that to me now, of course, sounds absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. That sounds actually more ridiculous.

[00:27:30]That literally every flea, every tick, you know, bounced up in front of Adam for Adam to That would be >> is such a tedious >> [laughter] >> the thousands upon Probably Yeah, I don't even know how many organisms are How many different types of organisms >> Yeah, I mean, it'd be beyond our wildest imagination.

[00:27:47]>> Not the dinosaurs though. God had already killed those. Literally, Adam would still be sitting in that [ __ ] Eden Yeah. naming [ __ ] >> Yeah. That seventh day was a long [ __ ] day for Adam. God was just chilling out, apparently. Oh my goodness.

[00:28:03]Yeah, that would be a I wouldn't want that job. So, I guess the the thing that I do I still find interesting is that uh it's because, you know, never has a a male and a female got together, and then the woman birthed a dog.

[00:28:21]>> [laughter] >> You know, birthed a It's like everything's after its own kind, so it's wild to think that we're we all come from initially the same thing.

[00:28:32]That it's just it's that's just does kind of my my mind, you know, it does It's just fascinating. Why why did this cell turn into a fern, and this cell turn into a rose, and this cell turn into a lizard? You know, like that's just fascinating. I've a I've kind of always thought about how I would maybe explain it to people, and you know, you take a hypothetical organism. I don't know if you've ever seen the the movie Gremlins. Oh, yeah.

[00:29:04]You know, the Mogwai. Right, so you got the Mogwai, it lives in the forest here, gets really successful, it starts to expand out, it kind of dabbles in the plains, and then eventually population, climate change, whatever, new predators show up, these two populations, the plains Mogwai and the the forest Mogwai, separate, so now you have the forest Mogwai, and you have the plains Mogwat, you Yeah. [laughter] And so, there's these gradual changes as a species becomes more successful, or as climate changes, or you know, just any change in an environment where it forces some new adaptations, and so then you have maybe the base population that's still around, still fulfilling the same niche that it's always fulfilled, but then as it got too competitive in that niche, some of those members were pushed out and forced to adapt to new environments. And so then that's how you get speciation, and that's also how you get how we're still around today with chimpanzees, even though we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, we share a common ancestor with them. And what, 1.3 million? Seven. Seven million years ago.

[00:30:10]Potentially maybe even further back. I think they're now talking they've found some things I think in DNA that might push it back to 9 million years.

[00:30:19]>> Wow.

[00:30:20]Uh but yeah, so that's just kind of how it happens is that competition breeds innovation and anything that's still within its original niche and it's still doing great at that is probably not going to have as much pressure to change and then yeah, as it's successful, other members have to branch out, figure out new ways to survive because you know, koala the youcalyptus, right?

[00:30:46]But if they're all eating eucalyptus and they get really successful and then there's just not enough eucalyptus eucalyptus for all the koalas, some of those koalas have to figure out something different. Yeah. Eventually as they do so, they become something different. And then the original koalas are still there or maybe they have had some new environmental changes and they've been forced to change too, so it can just it's kind of how I would say it plays out.

[00:31:08]>> Yeah. Isn't the Homo erectus, aren't they the most successful? They were around for 2 million years and >> That is wild.

[00:31:15]>> Probably the first to use fire. They definitely had advanced stone tools.

[00:31:22]There are sites where They're definitely intelligent.

[00:31:25]>> Definitely intelligent. There were sites at least during the reign of Homo erectus in which they were tempering stone and fire to make it harder.

[00:31:33]Uh so that they could use those stone tools without them breaking as much and potentially they even had sharpened wooden spears. So it wasn't stone spears didn't show up I don't think until about Heidelbergensis. Okay. Which is also a fairly old species uh that would have had a brain size similar to ours. Yeah.

[00:31:52]Yeah, that that's that's also So potentially in another 2 million years if the Earth is still here and our president hasn't blown it all up. Um there could be another species, right? I mean in that length of time there could be almost safe it could be a another I don't know what you'd call it, but something other than us. Well, and you know, even if our president does blow it up, the people the hunter-gatherers living in the tropics are probably the ones that are going to survive. So, yeah, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle will probably persist for a long time because it's very it seems to be very adaptive.

[00:32:30]Yeah.

[00:32:31]Yeah, the fact that we still have people on Earth that don't have iPhones and don't engage in like they're still hunting their food, they're still like that living in the wilds.

[00:32:42]And they're the same thing that we are.

[00:32:44]Like, you know, they have the same brain capacity, same they can do all the things that we do and I think we also undervalue what hunter-gatherer lifestyle is cuz if you think of how many skills that they have to be proficient at. Like, I don't have to make my own weaponry, I don't have to, you know, there's a lot of things. I don't have to learn how to track deer through the wilderness Right. So I mean talk about that show Survivor. Yeah.

[00:33:06]>> If they pulled one of those people to be that that did when the game would be over. They're like, "Guys, like this is it."

[00:33:12]>> [laughter] >> Most relaxed competitor. Yeah, he's like, "Guys, this is like easy." Well, I mean also the the the the fact that 98.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, you know, that definitely flies in the face of if God created, you know, with everything with purpose and all that. It's like and called it good and like Well, like that doesn't make any sense.

[00:33:36]Well, that's I think a good point too in terms of kind of looking at the teleological argument which kind of goes into or maybe even inspired or is the fine-tuning argument, right? If you look at evolution through a lens of us being the end goal and then you look at all the things that allowed us to arise, our planet living in the Goldilocks zone, us having a moon at the position it is to affect the tides, uh our star being the right size, us having liquid water, all of these components and you say, "Hey, all that concluded in humans." And you look at us as kind of the the epitome of what evolution is supposed to be, then yeah, I can see how you see that fine-tuning argument, but if you take the view of well, you have a planet in the Goldilocks zone, it has liquid water, it has all these traits that are conducive for life and then you allow life to grow there for 4 and 1/2 billion years, >> It's an unbelievable amount of time.

[00:34:40]>> Right, it suddenly doesn't seem as fine-tuned, right? If it was fine-tuned for us to emerge, then it shouldn't take 4 and 1/2 billion years. And >> Right.

[00:34:49]it's also it's not a coincidence that we're here on a planet that has all of the building blocks for life Yeah. and is in a place where life can inhabit it. Yeah. Right.

[00:35:00]So I think maybe instead of saying, "Well, it's a coincidence it can't be a coincidence that we're here." I agree, it's not, it's just I'm looking at it more from the bottom up as opposed to the top-down, right?

[00:35:12]Our species is not the conclusion of evolution, it's just a product of it and it took us 4 and 1/2 billion years to get here on a planet that was conducive for life.

[00:35:20]>> Yeah. And planets that [clears throat] are conducive for life, maybe we can expect life to be on them. Yeah.

[00:35:25]Yeah, and we're just, you know, and when I think about this, it just, you know, this kind of stuff trips out my mind.

[00:35:30]And I don't even do mushrooms, not opposed to them, but I just don't. Um it it's when I really start to think about that kind of stuff, the fine-tuning argument. Of course, my brain goes different places. I'm like, "Well, if God really designed us, and clearly that's obviously that didn't happen.

[00:35:48]He could have done better.

[00:35:50]You know, like why have us eat food that we only use a certain percentage of it and then crap out the other. Why not make a I mean if you if you're God, you just can make us just make it to where we use everything and then don't put the fun parts right by the poopy parts.

[00:36:08]>> [laughter] >> You know what I mean? And what's the other thing, you know, don't put the the breathing apparatus right by the feeding apparatus which causes I forget what the statistics are, but how many people choke and die at Like what kind of design is that? Besides that, the vagus nerve in a giraffe that, you know, it goes I'm messing this up. Look it up, it's a thing, but the vagus nerve goes from here. It needs to go from here to this thing. But because of the giraffe it goes all the way down, all the way back up and all the way around when it could just go right there.

[00:36:45]If you're designing something, why would you design something so stupid? Yeah. We we have an appendix, what the [ __ ] for?

[00:36:52]We have wisdom teeth, what the freak for? Why do our teeth break? Why does that Like there's so many things like We have wisdom teeth because our teeth break.

[00:37:03]Okay. So it is a ves- vestigial limb. So when we ate a lot more rough food, our molars would grind down and so we would grow in new molars. Now, the vagal nerve, no, yeah, evolution takes the path of least resistance. Right. But there are also features that haven't been removed from us like our appendix which may have had some sort of vestigial uh Yeah, but do we even know what that I think there are some ideas. I should probably know what those ideas are as a nurse, but I don't. Yeah, I'm curious what the Go ahead and keep talking, I'm going to look it up. But yeah, uh and I don't know when the wisdom teeth like how far back in the evolutionary timeline it was relevant for us, but yeah, the whole point is is that our molars would grind down because we ate a lot of rough vegetation and eventually new molars would grow in. Well, I'm going to be honest, the the word that you used, the vegetable Vestigial.

[00:37:58]>> Vestigial, I was like, "Hm, that's a neat word. I've never heard that before." Mhm. So Root word is vestige, kind of like, you know, vestige of the past.

[00:38:06]>> Okay. Well, cuz then it says the human appendix once considered a vestigial organ. Yeah. I was like, "Ooh, look at look at cow."

[00:38:15]Acts as a safe house for beneficial gut bacteria allowing the microbiome to reboot after diarrheal I thought that's not diarrhea, but diarrheal diarrhea illnesses. It also functions as a specialized part of the immune system containing lymphoid tissue that helps produce white blood cells, B and T cells, and antibodies particularly in early life.

[00:38:41]There you go. There you go. But clearly you can live without one. Yeah. You know, I I I have mine. Do you have yours?

[00:38:48]>> I do. Yeah. You know, I have a couple of my wisdom teeth still. I have all of mine.

[00:38:52]>> Do you? Good. But helps that's probably why you're so smart.

[00:38:54]>> Yeah. Why I'm so wise.

[00:38:57]Or I just don't eat enough vegetables.

[00:38:59]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, I I have broken tooth. Yeah. Yeah, it's not awesome.

[00:39:06]God, but it's not it doesn't >> So so the uh the cosmological Do we ever talk about that one? Uh I just more I think I have more reference to teleological. I believe with the fine-tuning argument.

[00:39:18]>> What's the cosmological?

[00:39:19]>> That one I'm not sure.

[00:39:21]>> Let's look at cosmological cuz I want to make sure we cosmological argument.

[00:39:30]I'm so far from my apologetic history that I have >> Okay, here we go. The cosmological argument for God posits that because the universe exists, has a beginning, or contains contingent things, there must be a first, necessary, and uncaused cause And I believe >> identified as God to explain its existence.

[00:39:53]Oh yeah, yeah, I remember. Yeah, I remember we had a professor in CBC, the unmoved mover argument, that there must be an essential origin that is more or less infinite. Mhm.

[00:40:07]But But why does God then get a hall pass for that, and can't the universe just be that? Yeah, I don't know. Huh.

[00:40:14]And also, we don't know we know that our universe as it exists right now, like the Big Bang and the this the uh spreading of it maybe had a start around like 12 billion. I forget how >> Yeah, 13 something. Now they're potentially pushing it up to 20, I think.

[00:40:33]>> Oh, really? Okay.

[00:40:34]>> Potentially. There's some interesting conversations again that are happening in that area. Yeah.

[00:40:40]Due to, I believe, it was either James Webb or the Hubble telescope. One of the telescopes saw some older parts of our universe that they weren't expecting.

[00:40:49]>> That they they shouldn't be there is what I'm saying.

[00:40:51]>> Yeah, and they're not really sure what that means yet.

[00:40:52]>> Yeah.

[00:40:53]Yeah, 13 At this point, the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.

[00:40:58]With a widely accepted measurement of 13.

[00:41:01]79 not whatever. Okay. It's determined by analyzing the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the cosmos. Yeah, and you're right. They with the James Webb telescope they're like, maybe back to the drawing board. Yeah. Well, and that makes sense, too, because we also have what we call the Hubble sphere. So, the universe is expanding at an increasingly fast rate, faster than the speed of light. And so, as it continues to expand it's expanding faster than the light particles can enter our sphere of sight. That is wild.

[00:41:33]>> So, there's pieces of the universe that maybe we will never be able to see, and the pieces of the universe that we can see are going to gradually shrink. Yeah.

[00:41:42]Because it's expanding faster than the light can travel to us. And so, eventually pieces of our universe will just be lost forever. Yeah, maybe. And so, then that also begs question, what came before? Well, maybe this isn't maybe we're expanding into other space that already has other universes expanding, you know, in the universes.

[00:42:02]So, yeah, we don't really know >> be infinite. I mean, it just literally could just go on forever and ever and ever.

[00:42:07]>> continual explosion of matter and energy across a vast space. And so, yeah, who's to say, really, what the start of our universe was, whether or not it really started with the Big Bang, and how And are we the most advanced?

[00:42:23]That's I love that kind of stuff.

[00:42:25]Just the the possibility of I would say probably not.

[00:42:31]Oh, yeah, that we're the top. Yeah, I mean, we might be the uh What I would imagine, again, pure personal speculation, the most common form of life is microbial, and then you go up from there, and as you go up from there, the more complex life becomes less common. And so, things that are more advanced than us are probably rare, and we're probably rare. But rare in a universe filled with billions of galaxies that all have billions to trillions of stars, and only half the stars in the universe are actually galactic.

[00:43:07]It's extremely likely.

[00:43:10]There's probably a lot of advanced societies out there, and I had read an article recently that they had found an interstellar asteroid that had all RNA >> and RNA.

[00:43:22]And so, yeah, the base building blocks for life might actually be more universal than we >> Be common. Yeah, I've heard I heard that. It might just actually be more common in the universe.

[00:43:32]>> Well, and it also it also sort of validates the idea of panspermia, that, you know, if one of those asteroids landed here with all that genetic information, and then Yeah. we had the conditions for life, it maybe helped direct that, who knows. Yeah.

[00:43:48]Yeah.

[00:43:48]>> Cuz clearly those asteroids are falling flying through our own solar system. So, if one of them did land on Earth, you know, maybe that DNA was relevant.

[00:43:55]>> Yeah. Or that those base pairs, anyway, those acids. Yeah.

[00:44:01]Yeah, life I mean, it's precious, you know, the one thing that as much as I like to think about all those kinds of things, you know, I I also have a sense of of of awe of just I'm lucky to be here.

[00:44:14]>> Yeah. You know, like lucky to be here, man. The fact that you know, you trace me back, I mean, obviously, I would go all my lineage goes all the way back cuz I'm here.

[00:44:26]>> Yeah. And I couldn't be here if if there was something missing back, you know.

[00:44:30]Yeah. That is just crazy. In fact, I heard a Mel Gibson uh who's a I love his movies, but dear Lord, um he said something on Joe Rogan that I thought was so funny because Richard Dawkins talked about it. But but Mel Gibson was like, I mean, look around. I mean, this can't be all there is.

[00:44:51]And yeah, and Richard Dawkins like, oh, our universe and all the things that are this can't be all there is. This is unbelievable, you know.

[00:45:01]>> Well, and that was Like, there's got to be more.

[00:45:03]>> Yeah, yeah, my I don't know. My world got bigger when I became an atheist.

[00:45:07]>> Me, too. Me, too.

[00:45:09]>> Because it wasn't just well, God did it.

[00:45:11]Right? There's now a lot of unknown.

[00:45:14]There's a lot more in-depth explanations. Everything's more complex now than just saying, well, God did it, and then everything else is just the mystery of the Lord. Yeah.

[00:45:24]Yeah, that is a I mean I was just an evangelical not too too many years ago, and yeah, my world got a lot more amazing, a lot more beautiful. I appreciate things more. Um and it was just a such a simple-minded you know, God did it. God just did it.

[00:45:44]Yeah. You know, God just created me and and did this. Uh it gave me a sense of uh gave me a huge ego.

[00:45:52]You know, I was handpicked by God. I'm super special.

[00:45:56]Yeah, and I think that when you find out you're not special, and you are connected to the world around you, there is something that's humbling about it.

[00:46:02]>> Mhm. And when you start seeing yourself as something that isn't fundamentally different than those around you, when you share a common ancestry not with every just human on the planet, but with every living thing on the planet, your connection to it changes. Mhm. And you're not just in the authority above it, and you know, if we trash it, who gives a [ __ ] cuz God's going to recreate it. No, this is our planet. This is our relative, you know, this this is us.

[00:46:30]>> Right.

[00:46:31]>> And uh yeah, there's I don't know. There's something spiritual about that to me.

[00:46:36]>> Absolutely. Well, you know, most Christians, at least the Christians that I was around, they didn't they didn't believe in global warming or >> Yeah. any of that. You know, Jesus is going to fix it. Right. And if if global warming was real, he was going to make a new heavens and new Earth. So, why would we Why who who cares? Yeah, the Bible says it's going to all pass away, and a new yeah, new heavens and Earth will be created. So, it doesn't matter. That's such a Well, such a moronic view that I held for a long, long time. It's unfortunate.

[00:47:03]And it was even a frustrating one for me as a liberal Christian, because I'm telling my Christian friends like, hey, no, we're we're here now, though.

[00:47:10]>> We here now.

[00:47:10]>> know when that's going to happen. So, like We should care, [laughter] right?

[00:47:16]I love it. Anything else, brother?

[00:47:18]Uh I don't think so. I think that's good.

[00:47:21]Well, hey, cuss and discuss down below.

[00:47:23]Like, share, subscribe. Do all the stuff. Let us know what you think. I mean, I am curious. Um for those of you that that deconstructed, you know, were you an early adopter into evolution? You know, what was your struggle or what what you may even struggle with now? Um that feels like it could be right, though you know it's not right. You know what I mean?

[00:47:43]Cuz I even have that. As a full-blown atheist, you know, uh there are just times I'll hear something, and I'm like, ooh, why does that feel like that makes more sense, yet I know that's wrong, you know? And so, yeah, it's a it's a weird place to be in um to to know that the argument on the science side, or you know, is is the correct one, but I for 48 years of my life was on the creation Adam and Eve side for so long.

[00:48:15]Um it's weird. It's It My mind moved over to atheist real quick, but something about Does that make sense? Something about what sounds right is still making that journey, you know?

[00:48:30]I don't know if that makes sense.

[00:48:31]>> Well, I think I don't know. I have kind of a cultural studies degree in conjunction with my other degrees, and uh you kind of just learn that the way we understand our world, the way we disseminate information, and how yeah, just how we navigate information and what we believe is really ingrained in us when we're children.

[00:48:54]And so, that becomes what is our framework for understanding reality. And so, there are going to be things that if, especially this was a view that you had as a child, that are going to make more sense to you because they've always made sense to you, and so anything different than that is not going to make sense to you.

[00:49:12]>> Right. Doesn't mean it's not right. And it doesn't mean that it can't make sense to you once you've done the research and actually tried to understand it.

[00:49:20]>> Yeah.

[00:49:21]So, yeah, I think it can be hard in that way, because we are biologically programmed to be socialized.

[00:49:28]So, yeah, it's a we are in some ways combating our own Yeah.

[00:49:33]>> programming. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. All right, guys.

[00:49:37]Peace. Thank you for joining us.