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Evangelism Using God’s Creation�(5 August 2026)

Michael G. Houts, PhD

houts315@gmail.com

www.apologeticspress.org

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Evangelism Using God’s Creation

Romans 1:20

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse

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Evangelism Using God’s Creation

John 3:12

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

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Evangelism Using God’s Creation

Acts 17:23-24

23for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription:

TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: 24God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.

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Class Will Include at Least One Field Trip

  • Creation Museum / Ark Encounter
  • Friday, August 28, 5:00 pm–Sunday, August 30, 11:30 pm
  • $200/family includes hotel and admission to Creation Museum (Saturday) and Ark Encounter (Sunday afternoon, following worship at Point Pleasant Church of Christ).
  • Please make $200 check payable to “Madison Church of Christ” and provide to Kathy Stephens (noting “Creation Museum/Ark Encounter”) by Sunday, August 16.

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Initial Observations

The idea that the universe and everything in it simply made itself is strongly refuted by true science.

True science is the Christian’s friend.

God has given us tremendous evidence that we should put our faith in Him. But He also lets it be our choice!

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The Fact that We Can Choose Tells Us How We Should Choose!

If we were purely material, i.e. a complex assembly of several thousand trillion, trillion atoms, we could not make choices.

The only way any of us can make even the simplest choice is because we are not simply “material.” God has given us a soul (Genesis 1-2).

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Atheists also Realize that Atheism Does Not Allow for Free Will

William B. Provine

“There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.”

Francis Crick

“...your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells...”

Robert Sapolsky

“There’s no God, there’s no free will, there’s no purpose to anything.”

Susan Blackmore

“There is no stream of consciousness. There is no conscious self. There is no free will.”

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Science

the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. (Google’s English dictionary provided by Oxford Languages)

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The Origin and Evolution of Life

Question:

Is it “scientific” to believe that something happened spontaneously (life arising from non-life) that we have been unable to duplicate given our best laboratories, our smartest scientists, and virtually unlimited financial resources?

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All Attempts to Show DNA, RNA, or Proteins Could Spontaneously Assemble Have Failed

    • Long strings of amino acids don’t exist in water. One percent two amino acids bonded, 0.01% three, 1 in 10140 will have 70 amino acids bonded. Water breaks DNA, RNA and proteins down into building blocks.
    • Building blocks must be “one handed” – spontaneously formed building blocks are an even mix (racemic).
    • The Miller-Urey experiment produced only small amounts of amino acids (2% of product). Products removed to avoid destruction.
    • Miller-Urey experiment also produced tar (85% of product) and Carboxylic Acids (13%). Tar and carboxylic acids poison enzymes in living systems, resulting in death.

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Recent sample return missions confirm racemic (useless for life) mixtures of amino acids found in space

“The team found equal parts left-handedness and right-handedness in their OSIRIS-REx samples, referred to as a "racemic" mixture.”

"I have to admit, I was a little disillusioned or disappointed," Glavin said. "I felt like this had invalidated 20 years of research in our lab and my career. But I mean, here's the thing: This is exactly why we explore. This is why we do these missions, right? If we knew everything in advance, we wouldn't need to do an OSIRIS REx to bring these samples back."

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Sir Frederick Hoyle

(David Purchase, Creative Commons)

“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40 thousand naughts [zeroes] after it. It is enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”

Sir Frederick Hoyle, author of Evolution from Space, quoted in Nature, 1981

Scientists Recognize the Impossibility of Life Creating Itself from Non-Living Material, and Advances in Science have only made the “Problem” Worse!

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Scientists Recognize the Impossibility of Life Creating Itself from Simple Chemicals, and Advances in Science have made the “Problem” Worse!

Carl Sagan:

“Well, it is clear that one could randomly assemble all the elementary particles in the universe a billion times a second for the age of the universe and never get this protein” (commenting on the 1 in 10130 odds of the random formation of a single protein).

Ironically, a few sentences later Sagan goes on to say “There is no doubt about the fact of evolution, but there are still sizable questions on the mechanics of the evolutionary process.”

Sagan, 1973, Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, pg 46, MIT Press

Carl Sagan

(University of Mount Union, Creative Commons)

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The Idea that Life Could Simply Make Itself Has Been Disproven by True Science

  1. Excellent, technically detailed resources available for in-depth discussions.
  2. Resources address claims that life has been made “from scratch” in a lab. Such claims are false or grossly exaggerated.
  3. Resources show that even simple life is vastly more complicated than anything man has ever made. Could a jet airplane simply make itself?

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The Idea that Life Could Simply Make Itself Has Been Disproven by True Science

  1. Formation and concentration of building blocks
  2. Homochirality of building blocks
  3. Solution to water paradox
  4. Consistent linkage of building blocks
  5. Biopolymer reproduction
  6. Nucleotide sequences forming useful code
  7. Means of gene regulation
  8. Means for repairing biopolymers
  9. Selectively permeable membranes
  10. Means of harnessing energy
  11. Interdependency of DNA, RNA and proteins
  12. Coordinated cellular purpose

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We Can Trust the Bible, and God’s Plan of Salvation

Romans 1:16

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.

Numerous examples of people being saved:

Acts 2:36-47; Acts 8:4-13; Acts 8:26-40;

Acts 9:1-20; Acts 10:1– 11:18; Acts 16:13-15;

Acts 16:23-34; Acts 18:8; Acts 22:6-16