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.
You 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, okay?
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 creepeth 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 creepeth 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,
'cause he was teaching us when we were growing up.
He's saying, 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 kinda looks like a person,
you know, their leg kinda 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 gonna 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 to you, animals don't have much to say.
So you can crack the code, you can learn the language,
you're gonna be real disappointed
because it's not gonna be Shakespeare.
It's gonna 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 gonna 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 P, pulp, it?
Like, this is arbitrary, it's just,
you could call this anything, right?
You could just make up a combination of letters
and then, okay, that's what we're gonna 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 gonna spend time talking about all these
for sake of time, but the one I wanna 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.
Think, this sermon that I'm preaching right now,
if you took all the sentences in the 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 and 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, huh?
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."
[imitates barking]
So, because they don't know.
They're not creative like that.
They just make noises.
[imitates barking]
If only I knew what that meant.
You know, we gotta crack the code.
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."
[imitates barking]
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 gonna keep going like this
'cause 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.
Chimpanzees cannot use language.
Okay, so that, 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're spiritual beings,
you know, 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 gotta be something more than this.
You know, it's like, (growls)
Just like, I just feel like my life is so empty, you know?
I'm looking, I'm searching for meaning.
I'm searching for my purpose.
No, they're just, 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.
And obviously you can look at animals and find similarities with 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 creature, 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
said.
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.