 How do creatures track all kinds of environments? What innate features enable them to adjust? Today's program will introduce you to Continuous Environmental Tracking, or CET. We'll reveal a designed-based explanation of adaptation that God engineered into creatures. These abilities detect changes in myriads of external conditions and make suitable self-adjustments. Coming up on today's edition of Origins, Creation Engineering Part 1 with Dr. Randy Galloosa. Hello and welcome to Origins. I'm Ray Hypal and it's an honor to be your host today. During this program we showcase interesting guests who present evidence from science, along with other important facts validating the truth of creation and the accuracy of the Bible. Today's guest, Dr. Randy Galloosa has undergraduate degrees in engineering and theology. He has earned an M.D. and also a master of public health from Harvard University. Dr. Galloosa is a registered professional engineer. In 2008 he retired as Lieutenant Colonel from the U.S. Air Force. Now he's the president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Texas. Welcome to the program, Dr. Galloosa. Thank you so much, Ray. So we're going to be talking about creation engineering. What does that mean? Creation engineering is a way to study creatures that looks for the evidences of engineering or the principles of design that we would see in a man-made thing that was actually engineered. We see evidence of those, but when we look at creatures, we see the exact same evidences. We see the exact same engineering principles in creatures that we would find in man-made things. So what is it that's stopping scientists today from seeing that? How are they looking at creatures or not looking at creatures? Well, before Darwin, people used to look at creatures and see these features of engineering, but Darwin changed all of that. And so in many ways, creation engineering is doing biology as if Darwin had not been born. And I love that quote. That's not mine. That's actually from another guest that you've had on this program, Dr. Paul Nelson. He coined that phrase, but that's really what we're after. We're after going back to looking at creatures as if Darwin had not been born and seeing the very clear evidences for them that the Bible says are right there all along. I'm sure you're quite familiar with this verse in Romans chapter 1, verse 20, where the Bible makes it very plain that there are certain things we can see about God that are manifest plainly to everybody. As it says, for invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made. And I know you'll appreciate this, that that Greek word for made that's translated there in Romans 1.20 is used only one other time in the New Testament in Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10, where it says, for we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus. So in many ways it says these things are clearly seen being understood by His workmanship. So when I look at you or you look at me and we look at creatures, we should be seeing evidences of workmanship. That's fascinating because we do that with everything else. We look at a product that's been made and we learn something about the maker. We learn something about the designer, right? Ford Cars tells us something about those engineers who are making those cars and why shouldn't it be the same when we look at creation since God Himself is the author, well then looking at what He has made should tell us something about Him. It does. And the fact that we can actually study it and understand it also tells us something because God has total freedom. He could have made creatures in a way that we just could not figure out. I mean they operated in some ways that are very different than this computer or very different than the car you're talking about. You could have said, well they were made by magic or an evolutionist could have said they evolved, which is not much different than saying magic in many ways. And I could say, well they were actually engineered and if you couldn't figure out how they operated, which one of us is right? But since we can figure out how they operate, since we can figure out how they work, that is strong evidence because as it says right on the screen, it's the engineered workmanship that we see in creatures that corresponds to the engineered workmanship that we see in man-made things. The fact that they operate by the same principles, only God-made things are much more complicated. But in terms of their basics, they operate by the exact same principles that that is the basic revelation of the incredible wisdom and genius of the Lord Jesus Christ who made them because they do operate by the same principles, it's strong evidence that they were in fact engineered and that they didn't evolve and it wasn't magic or anything else. That is a really, really powerful point. That is a great point because it shows us not only that there is a creator but that he wants us to see his handiwork in the creature. And as you said, he could have made things inscrutable so that we could look at it and there would be no way that we could even begin to take it apart mentally and get back to the cause as we always look at effects and we can determine the cause. And yet God didn't do that. God made things so that we could look and see, oh, wow, this is made up of this and this is causing this and we can go from one to the other. But in each step, we really should be thinking of the creator, the designer who made all of that possible. Exactly. And not only that, we can even copy. We can even copy a lot of his designs and use it into technology. We can't copy it to the extent that we can make one of these little babies here. I hope that when that baby came on the screen, it didn't steal your thunder because once a baby pops up, everybody fixates on that. But I wanted to just put this little picture up because all creatures do these things. These are their functions. They grow, they metabolize, they reproduce, and they adapt. In fact, those are definitions of living things. These are biological functions. Now that little baby has life. That life is a gift of God. That life is immaterial. And we're not gonna be able to explain life by engineering. We're not even gonna be able to explain life by biology. But we can explain growth by engineering. We can explain metabolism by engineering. We can explain adaptation by engineering. And those things point to the fact that they were created. So the question then comes up, particularly for a theologian or somebody else, if the workmanship seen in living creatures that corresponds to the engineered workmanship in man-made things is one of the strongest evidences that creatures were in fact engineered. And that's how people saw them before Darwin. How in the world do evolutionists who hold the natural selection, how in the world do they even explain that? You know, in theology, we speak of natural theology that the creation or nature itself shows that it has a maker, shows the handiwork of its creator. And what we're saying here is that somehow, selectionists, evolutionists have been able to look at the creature and say there is no creator. And when you begin to think of that, you think, well, how can they do that? But you're about to show us that, right? You better believe it, because it's really, really important. We have to look at the evolutionary back story behind all of this, and it begins with a realization that what Darwin was after, he was not trying to explain the diversity of life. As we've already talked about, he had to explain something far more difficult. He had to explain why creatures looked so incredibly designed without a designer. And the man you see on the screen is Francis Hiale. He was the president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences. He wrote an important paper. We'll look at that at one of these other programs right here. But this is what Darwin was after, is how to devise a fundamentally anti-design way of explaining things. And he went to an approach which was called externalism, an externalistic approach where he's now looking at nature as if nature is crafting these organisms here. The man we see on the screen right here, his name is Stephen J. Gould. He's passed away now, but at one time, he was probably the world's leading evolutionary theorist. He wrote this huge tome before he passed away called The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and it explains evolutionary theory probably better than anybody else. And he's going to explain Darwin's externalistic approach, and he gives a lot of emphasis here. He says, I proceed in this way for a principled reason and not merely as convenience. All major evolutionary theories before Darwin, that's kind of amazing, there were other theories before Darwin, were presenting a fundamentally internalist account based on intrinsic and predictable patterns set by the nature of living systems for the development of unfolding through time. In other words, if you want to know how I worked, you looked inside of me, but Darwin said we're going to look outside of the creature. It makes sense, if we want to figure out how a computer works, you look in a computer. If you want to figure out how a creature works, you look inside the creature. But Darwin went outside. Gould goes on to say, Darwin's theory in strong and revolutionary contrast presents the first externalist account of evolution. Darwin overturned all previous traditions by thus granting the external environment a causal and controlling role in the direction of evolutionary change. In other words, the environment is going to set the course. One of Gould's colleagues, Richard Lontan, who was also just passed away just last year, he said, for Darwin, now he explains it even a little better than Gould did. For Darwin, the external world, the environment acting on organisms was the cause of the form of organisms. The environment, the external world with its autonomous properties, was the subject and the organism was, again, the object acted upon. So he's seeing organisms as somewhat passive. And he says, it is from this view of environment as the cause of organism. In other words, the environment gives birth to life. The environment shapes the diversity of life. The environment is doing everything. That the entire corpus of modern biology arises. That's what we're all being taught. All of us are being taught in that way. And therefore, he accepted the view, this is from two other researchers, that the environment directly instructs organisms how to vary. And he proposed a mechanism for inheriting those changes. In other words, the organism was like modeling clay. And remolding of that clay meant each of the billions of little grains was free to move a little bit in any direction to generate new form. That's really important. He doesn't see organisms as basically acting and changing themselves. He sees the environment as the shaper. He sees the environment as the molder of all of these organisms there. You know, it's fascinating because the Bible actually speaks of God as the potter. Right. They're the clay and they're turning it around. And well, in a sense, they're not turning it around. They're just taking that same model and they're getting rid of God and they're saying the environment is the potter. Right. The world outside the creature is the potter and everything else is the clay. Exactly. It is this personification of nature that nature gives life, nature molds life, nature creates life. And that externalist of you, I don't think many people even know that they hold to it. I held to it. And I was even kind of subconscious there because I saw the environment as active. And that's how the entire corpus of biology is basically being taught in school today. All of the schools in Pittsburgh here would see it that way. However, and this is a big however, real science is not seeing it that way anymore. As you see on the screen here, research is finding that adaptability, and these are words that are right in the scientific literature. Adaptability is not being characterized as random, slow, and gradual. Those are words that are like anti-design words. When you read technical literature today, adaptability is being described with these words, regulated. In fact, it usually says highly regulated. Not slow and gradual, but generally rapid. Not random, but repeatable. And not only repeatable, the responses of organisms are so targeted to the change in the environment, so targeted as you said earlier to solving a problem that they can even be predictable. Now when you're seeing words like regulated, rapid, repeatable, sometimes even reversible, and predictable, you're seeing words that are characterizing something that has been engineered. I think immediately of a computer that the computer is going to respond the same way when you put some kind of data in, because of the programming that's inside that particular computer or that particular program, and it will be a regulated response, you'll be able to predict it, that's how we can develop programs. We make them so that they're repeatable. Exactly. So the evidence is coming in on the side of something that has really been engineered. So let's do biologies of Darwin had not been born, and let's replace it all together with an engineering-based approach of adaptation. And I've put together a model called continuous environmental tracking, which posits that organisms are tracking environmental changes just like a man-made tracking system would also have those track, would also track changes. So how does that differ from what we just talked about in terms of what Darwin was saying? Well, first of all, an engineered approach would look at the organism and not the environment. So number one, CET, or continuous environmental tracking, is an organism-focused explanation. If you want to see how these fish, these are blind cave fish, can get into a cave and go blind, you must look inside the creature, focus on the organism and not the cave. The cave is just a variable, they're either in it or they're not, but we need to focus on the organism, and this leads us to interpreting things in very different ways. First of all, if it's internalistic, we assume that all operation arises from within the creature by highly-regulated systems. And it is the organism as a whole, not just the genes. The organism as a whole, which is controlling things, that both the internal form and its adaptability are governed by the innate systems, and that adaptability appears to be the engineered control of the organism-environment relationship. In other words, it's the organism which is controlling it by its innate systems on how it is going to adapt. So we're going to look at the organism, and it's going to be internalistic. You know, because of this approach, it seems to me, we don't have to study every single one of the cave fish, you just have to study one, because you recognize, again, what's in the organism is going to be the same. Exactly. That's a great observation. Well, we're going to have to stop right here. I hope you'll stay with us. We'll be right back after these messages. We hope you're enjoying Origins TV. It all started at Cornerstone Television in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We've been producing new episodes for over 37 years now. We praise God for the success of the program, and are excited to introduce you to Origins and to us. If you're interested in watching more episodes of Origins, you can find them on our YouTube page. Simply go to YouTube and search Cornerstone Television Network. Click the like and subscribe buttons, then you'll find the best episodes of Origins in our playlist. You can also visit our website at ctvn.org slash Origins. One more way you can stay connected with us is to subscribe to our free monthly Hope Today newsletter, which you can do from our website. And if you have any questions, call us here at Cornerstone Television at 888-665-4483. We'd love to connect with you. Thank you for watching. In Origins, we're talking to Dr. Randy Galuza, who's been sharing about creation engineering. Randy, before the break, you said that there were two features of CET. One of them is that we look at the internal of the creature. What's the second? The second is that we treat creatures as if they really were engineered. In other words, continuous environmental tracking is an engineering-based approach to the creatures, which is very, very different than obviously Darwin's anti-design-based. So as we're looking at the picture here on the screen, we're talking about adaptation, and we see a car which has adaptable features. One of them is cruise control. And in order for that car to stay at the constant speed, it has to have a speed sensor. It has to have some internal programming that says if the speed begins to slow down, then push on the throttle, and it has to have an output response. We're going to see creatures with the exact same type of engineering, that they have sensors, that they have internal programming, and they have very, very specific, targeted output responses. And it is these type of engineering principles, as we look at creatures, which are going to guide us as we move forward. And this has some very important implications. Because we can look at creatures as if they're engineered, we can make some pretty good predictions. First of all, we can predict that a man-made thing, and a God-made thing, that are doing similar functions, that have similar functions, we can predict that they might have similar operating systems to produce those functions, and that those systems will have similar elements. So the car on the left-hand side of the screen has all kinds of sensors, and it can drive itself from Los Angeles to New York City because it can detect what's happening in the environment, and it go around those different conditions. And then you see on the right-hand side of the screen, it says that guinea pigs can beat climate change by tweaking their own DNA. Well, how in the world would they do that? If these creatures can live in hotter environments, how might they do that? Well, this was an experiment, this was a great example, where they took these guinea pigs, and they put them into a hot condition for the entire time it makes for one cycle of sperm. Then they mated these male guinea pigs with female guinea pigs, which had not been under hot conditions. And lo and behold, in one generation, the offspring were able to live in hotter conditions, and they had self-adjusted their own DNA. So there was an adaptability built into this creature that when the circumstances changed, it wouldn't have done anything if there wasn't already this ability within the creature. And I think that's the thing that really the evolutionists are overlooking, so the environment might change. But you put nothing in the creature, and it doesn't respond. How could something outside a creature make something in it? That's exactly right. It doesn't happen that way, which brings us to the next really important point. Boy, what a great setup for that. That engineered adaptability is an upfront capability. In other words, as it says there at the bottom, solutions precede the challenges. So if you and I were engineers and we're going to design a space shuttle to go into space, we would brainstorm, along with a lot of other people, all of the challenges that it's going to face as it goes through all these different environments, and we would build upfront the solutions to those challenges before we ever put a person in that space shuttle. And those astronauts want us to build the solutions before they face the challenges. You know, evolution says that the solutions are due to the challenges. So when we go with an engineer-based approach, we begin to look at creatures in entirely different ways. And we can begin to contrast what we're beginning to say and what we're beginning to talk about with what Darwin has been teaching us. You know, it's interesting, scientists don't just shoot rockets into space over and over again, expecting that the different environments to change the rocket and then studying that. I mean, there's a sense in which the science that we have that's been successful, whether it be in technology or medicine or anything else, they're already sort of assuming this, right? They're already thinking in terms of, well, we have to put it in the creature already, whether it's the spaceship or the body, you know, in terms of medicine or something like that, they're already assuming that it's what's inside the creature that counts, it's not the environment that's going to make. You're right, you know, they're assuming all of that, but they're giving the environment the credit. So in kind of as we wrap up here, we can actually contrast these two different approaches. First of all, Darwin sees organism as non-designed and he sees that they're operating under random adaptive processes because his random view and his random approach is the opposite of what an engineer would actually do. And it's externalistic. And these are actually quotes from evolutionary literature. He sees passive organisms shaped by the vicitudes of nature and that adaptation would be characterized as undirected, copious in extent, or in other words, hit and miss and trial and error. And he sees that the changes would be iterative, gradual and linear, or as Darwin said himself, numerous successive slight modifications. What we wanna do is we wanna replace that altogether, lock, stock and barrel with an approach which is designed and sees adaptation as very, very purposeful. And so it's the exact opposite of what Darwin said. It's an internalistic approach where we see active organisms shaping themselves to solve problems. We see adaptation characterized as it really is in the literature, highly regulated, with targeted solutions that are predictable if need be and that changes can be variable in extent. Whatever they need to be, if they need to be faster or slower, the organism has mechanisms which can detect those things and adjust itself. This slide is very important for everybody who's watching us. It contrasts Darwin's approach which is like the anti-designer approach with a designer approach and Lord willing at our next program, we'll talk about some more of those types of adaptations. Well, I can't wait until you're back and we can do that because just what we've talked about today, it's not only the way we function as human beings in everything we do when we see a problem we, as we've talked about, we look at what we need to do internally to make something or to put something in ourselves, medicine, food, whatever, to give us the result. And we do that. And yet what scientists are doing, what evolution scientists are doing is saying, well, you know, that shouldn't work. What we should just be doing, just throwing random stuff at ourselves or at a problem and eventually the environment will allow the right one to thrive and then it will reproduce itself which really kind of boggles the mind that anybody would hold on to that. But I think there's an underlying reason. Randy, this has been fascinating. I hope you'll be able to come back and we can pick up where we've left off. Oh, I'd love to. I look forward to it. And I hope you'll be able to join us because as we saw today ever since Darwin, biologists and other scientists studying living creatures have looked to the environment what is outside the creature in order to determine its characteristics, growth and adaptability. However, the fact of the matter is the environment has no causal, creative or selective power to know and produce anything in the creature. Only the creature's internal, intentional engineering and design can do that. And it just goes to show you once again that we know what the Bible says is true and the proof it's all around you. If you enjoy origins, we sure could use your help to keep this creation television program on the air. Your support both prayerfully and financially make a big impact. So let's work together to reveal how awesome our creator truly is and we'll see you next time. Thank you for watching this edition of Origins. 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