So the Bible says in verse number 22, God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth, and the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.
I think he's trying to make a point here. I wonder if God knew that someday people would say that things don't bring forth after their own kind.
And that's why he put this over and over and over again to preempt that thought.
And say, No, this is how it is.
And look, everything that we actually see, everything that we can actually test and repeat and observe and experiment shows animals bringing forth after their own kind every time.
That's what we can actually observe. That's what we've actually tested.
Digging up fossils of old animals doesn't prove that those animals changed from one to another.
Kind is variations within a kind, is what you're seeing.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and the beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind and cattle after their kind and everything that creep upon the earth after his kind.
And God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creep upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image and the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.
Now we see here that human beings are not animals.
He created the animals and then he says, Let's make man in our image.
The animals are not in the image of God.
And notice he does not call man a beast of the field here, a land animal or something.
No, no, no. Man is a separate class that is made in the image of God uniquely.
He created them and he told them to have dominion over all of the animals.
Dominion comes from the Latin word for Lord, dominus, right?
And so we are to dominate this earth.
We are the lords of this earth.
We are to rule over the animals and subdue them.
They exist for our benefit.
We do not exist for their benefit.
They are here for us.
We are to subdue them, dominate them, use them, enjoy them.
They belong to us.
We are the lords of this earth, not the animals.
And so we need to understand that there is a colossal difference between humans and animals.
And here's again where evolution falls apart.
Because there's no animal that's close to being a human.
Where you could say, well see, you know, this is the missing link.
This is the intermediate form.
You know, here's a guy who's a lot like a monkey, but he's also human.
Now look, you might see somebody that looks kind of like a monkey.
But there is just a huge amount of difference between that person and a monkey.
I remember when I was growing up, my dad would always talk about how he went to church in the 70s.
And there was this guy at his church that he went to in the 70s.
And he said, this guy's head was shaped so weird.
He said, if they dig this guy up, they will say it's the missing link.
And he wasn't saying that to make fun of the guy.
He was saying it to rebuke evolution.
Because, you know, he was teaching us when we were growing up.
He said, and look, when they dig up these weird shaped skulls, I've seen it in real life.
You don't even have to dig it up.
He's basically saying, I've seen that weird skull.
I've seen a guy with a funny shaped head.
If they dig it up, they say, this is a new, whole new species.
You know, homo, whatever.
And it's like, look, even that guy with the weird shaped head, even if he looks funny,
or even if you have somebody that looks somewhat like a monkey or something,
which I'm not saying anybody does look like a monkey.
But the point is, that person would still be just so far from the animal kingdom
when it comes to the mind and the soul and the spirit.
The animals just don't even come close.
So there's no, you know, and you can sit there and look at chimpanzees and apes
and orangutans at the zoo and be like, I don't know, this kind of looks like a person.
You know, their leg kind of looks like a human leg.
Or, you know, that arm, that hand, you know, I don't know, that face.
I mean, look, yeah, God created a lot of animals on this earth with two eyes
and a nose and a mouth and two ears, okay.
But here's the thing.
Human beings are so different than animals.
Now, a lot of people will try to play up the intelligence of animals, won't they?
Oh, man, dolphins.
I mean, they have so much to say if we could just communicate with them.
Yeah, I'm sure that dolphins are just going to explain to us the mysteries of the universe
if we could just crack the code.
And people are trying to figure out how to communicate with animals.
Let me explain this to you.
Animals don't have much to say.
So you can crack the code.
You can learn the language.
You're going to be real disappointed because it's not going to be Shakespeare.
It's going to be something real basic.
And in fact, animals do not use language.
Now, animals communicate.
But there's a big difference between communicating and actually using language.
Now, if you actually study linguistics, even just from a secular point of view,
I'm not talking about a Christian view, even from a worldly point of view,
just go pick up a worldly linguistics book.
It will tell you that animals don't use language, okay.
In fact, just right before the service, I pulled a linguistics book off my shelf
and wrote down some of the differences between animal communication and human language, okay.
And some of the differences are that language has the feature of displacement,
meaning that we can talk about things in the past and the future.
You know, your dog doesn't come and bark about stuff that was cool an hour ago.
You know what I mean?
And tell you about how cool yesterday was.
And it doesn't bark about things that are going to happen in the future either.
That's called displacement.
Also, arbitrariness, where basically there's no reason in the world why we call things the things that we call them.
I mean, this is called a pulpit.
Is there anything about this shape or this object that has anything to do with, like, a P, a U, an L, a pulpit?
Like, this is arbitrary.
You could call this anything, right.
You could just make up a combination of letters and then, okay, that's what we're going to call that now.
And a lot of new words, that's where they come from.
People sometimes just make up words, and that's how they come into the language.
Arbitrariness, duality, cultural transmission.
I'm not going to spend time talking about all these for the sake of time,
but the one I want to focus on is what's called productivity, and this is the most important one.
The difference between communication of animals and actual human language is that human language has no boundaries.
It's productive, meaning that we're constantly coming up with new sentences, new words.
This sermon that I'm preaching right now, if you took all the sentences in this sermon,
most of these sentences have never been spoken before in the history of mankind.
Like, the sentence that I just spoke was brand new.
Nobody's ever said that exact combination of words before.
Does everybody understand what I'm saying?
So throughout my sermon, 99% of the sentences in my sermon were sentences that have never been spoken by anyone in the history of mankind
because human beings are constantly coming up with new ways of saying things.
They're taking the raw material of words and they're arranging them in an infinite number of possibilities
to come up with new ideas and new thoughts and new sayings.
There are new stories being written and new poems and new sentences being composed all the time,
whereas animals will just have a set number of noises that they make and they don't come up with a new noise.
It's like, these are the noises we've got to work with, guys, and they've got, like, a danger noise,
they've got a mating noise, they've got an I'm hungry noise,
they've got just a certain set number of noises, and they're not combining these in new avant-garde ways
to create these new sentences of, you know, hungry mating danger.
You know, and that has some deep meaning.
You know, and then another dog's kind of like, ooh, ooh, kind of like, oh, I wonder what she's getting at, you know, ah.
So, because they don't know, they're not creative like that.
They just make noises.
It's like, woof, woof, woof.
Man, if only I knew what that meant.
Oh, man, you know, we've got to crack the code.
Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep.
These are just simple noises.
They're not language. They're communication, yes, but they're not language.
See the difference?
Say, well, I saw where the chimpanzee was taught sign language and whatever.
The chimpanzee would never use those signs to create new creative sentences or new creative thoughts.
There's no productivity.
It's just repeating the sign that it was taught, push the button, the light bulb comes on.
I go like this and somebody hands me an apple, so I'm going to keep going like this because I want an apple.
You could teach someone how to use a vending machine without them knowing any language.
You could just be like, huh, huh.
You don't need any language to teach someone to use a vending machine.
You can teach a chimpanzee how to ride a bicycle.
But chimpanzees cannot use language.
And look, I could go on all night explaining the differences between humans and animals.
Hopefully, you know the difference.
But people are not even close to animals as far as their level of understanding, the way that they think,
not to mention the fact that we are spiritual beings, that we communicate with God.
We're in the image of God.
We communicate with God.
We seek God.
Animals aren't even seeking God.
They're not out in the field just, you know, there's got to be something more than this.
It's just like, I just feel like my life is so empty.
I'm searching for meaning.
I'm searching for my purpose.
They're just putting out a lot of methane and eating a lot of grass and they just live and they die.
And you say, well, what about my dog?
What about the dolphin?
Folks, they're light years from humans.
So, no, we are not evolved from animals at all.
We are created by a special divine act.
God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
and man became a living soul.
That's where humans come from.
We are specially blessed by God.
We are the lords of this earth.
We are the crowning glory of his creation.
You know, and obviously you can look at animals and find similarities to humans.
Like I said, two eyes, nose, mouth.
And then now they get all sophisticated by saying, you know, we looked at the DNA
and, you know, it turns out that the DNA between humans and chimpanzees is like 90% the same.
It's like, well, I could have told you, forget the DNA.
We can just look at a chimpanzee and find 90% of things the same.
You know, five fingers, two feet, two legs, two arms, shoulders, a head, a mouth, a tongue.
I don't need DNA.
Folks, you know what DNA is?
DNA is basically just a blueprint of what you see.
It's a blueprint for the organism.
So if I look at the organism, if two organisms are similar, they're going to have similar DNA.
It's like, oh, wow, what a shock because of the fact that they're similar organisms.
So here's the thing, DNA didn't provide some new smoking gun proving evolution
because that's what Richard Dawkins was like, well, now that we have DNA, we know evolution is true.
What does DNA tell you?
Similarity between animals and humans?
Well, I could have told you that they both have eyes and a nose and a mouth.
So I could point out, but you know what, what about the dissimilarities?
That's what matters.
It's that 10% that's different.
And don't quote me on that.
I'm just throwing that number out there.
But the point is it's the difference that matters, the mental difference, the spiritual difference,
the intellectual difference, not just the fact that, you know, oh, look, it's standing on its hind legs or something.
I'm not impressed by that.