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I would say that the Christian wants to know two answers to be able to give the critic
because there's two areas that come up. One, if the critic knows anything about scripture,
they scoff at people living to 900 years old. Is there any evidence that people live to be
these great ages? Gosh, that is a great question and one that, you know, quick backstory.
The Lord really blessed me. I feel personally when I chose to humble myself under his word about
seven years ago and believe as a child, say, Lord, I'm willing to trust your word as written. And it
was only after I had that shift in my spirit that the Lord gave me really an avalanche of
evidence through Noah's flood and dinosaurs that convinced me it was overwhelmingly true.
And then when it was like being born again, again, you know, the 18 inch gap between my head
and my heart got aligned like at a chiropractor and it really made my faith much stronger
than it is today. But that was like the core shift of my belief. But the frosting
that I got on top of that was about six months ago when I ran into the long ages
that Dr. John Sanford talks about, about how did these patriarchs live 912 years?
Because that was a stumbling block for me as a teenager going, I was asking my mom, like,
the Bible's got to be some kind of a myth book because these guys are living 900 years old.
And then Dr. John Sanford, a geneticist who invented the gene gun from Cornell University,
absolutely nails it in his book called Genetic Entropy. I unpacked his science, his statistics,
ran with that stuff myself, reanalyzed it all. And we absolutely know with certainty
what happened with those long lifespans. It was a biological decay curve. You know,
if you follow the Masoretic text exactly, you've got 1656 years give and take between creation
and the flood. So you've got Adam and Eve with the perfect print of human genome.
And then the sin and fall and corruption starts taking over. And then they start gradually
declining in lifespan, getting shorter and shorter and shorter because Adam lived, I think,
930 and Methuselah 969, the average lifespan of these pre-flood patriarchs,
912 years. Then you hit the flood about 1700 years after creation. And the lifespans don't fall
off of a shelf. They systematically and exponentially began declining over the next
thousand years, following down what's called a power law, a power law curve. And you can
throw polynomial or curvilinear regression at this, run the math, and it fits with what's
called an R square of 95%, which is uncanny as a statistician. The likelihood of the model being
built by chance is one chance in a quadrillion. So something's going on with these lifespans that
perfectly fits an exponential power law decline where they get off the boat after the flood.
They live 600 years long, they live 500 years, 400 years, 300 years, 200 years, and it starts
going down all the way through the book of Genesis to the point where we have the lifespans
today. And you can plot it out. And there's only one of these 23 data points that is
slightly outside of what the model would predict. So it's absolutely a biological decay
curve. And what happened is if you take all of the human genome and bottleneck it down to
just eight people after the flood, inbreeding and mutations begin exponentially increasing,
resulting in shorter and shorter lifespans after the flood that didn't happen suddenly but happen
gradually. So talk about icing on the cake. It's amazing evidence that completely
substantiates the Bible. One more thing to say about that, I had to come face to face
as a behavioral scientist who's testified in all these court cases before, I had asked myself this
question. Why in the world would some ancient sheep herder with a quill pan riding on animal skins
want to make this stuff up about these long ages? Why would he be motivated to try to
convince people 3500 years ago that people were living hundreds and hundreds of years long?
And the second question is, how could he have done that? Was this guy trained in exponential
power curves? How did he perfectly fit these data along a systematically declining slope?
He didn't know polynomial math. He didn't know the exponential decay curve. He didn't know
power law regression. But somehow he's just recording these true historical lifespans.
And you can't make this stuff up. It absolutely confirms the Bible is real history.
Wow, that was an incredible answer to a very common question, Dr. Biddle, a question I
had on my mind as well when I first came to Christianity. And it truly is amazing that we
are looking at, as you pointed out, a biological decay curve that's perfectly consistent with
deleterious mutation accumulation that we have today. I typically like to point out,
we can take this point of most accumulating mutational load back to a point of least
accumulating mutational load. And that would be a point of perfection,
a point of Adam and Eve with no mutations. And I like how you pointed this out, Dan,
to accuse the biblical authors of fabricating this story and making up these ages would be to
accuse them of doing so with the advanced knowledge of mathematics and biology to invent this perfect
biological decay curve. Wow. Yeah, we just did a video on this topic. It's on our YouTube channel.
I think it's about six minutes long. But for those interested in that and all the math behind
it, check out that video. I think it's called Long Ages of the Flood, something like that.
Great. I'll watch that video. Highly recommend, highly recommend. Matt, did you have a
couple of comments? Oh, absolutely. Longevity is a great topic of mine. One thing that I think you
will find interesting is one of the leading geneticists on anti-aging is a guy by the name
of Dr. Aubrey de Grey. Now, he's a secularist. He probably believes in evolution. I mean,
I doubt he's a creationist. I would probably know. And he's actually said that we're trying
to go back in with gene editing sequences, have children being born with a better genome
that we have by taking their mutations away. And when they ask them, what's the potential
of the human beings being alive? He said, oh, there's somebody alive today that has the
potential to live for about a thousand years. And what are the odds that he picked the age
and date of the scriptural people being born with perfect genome? We imagine a thousand years.
That's fantastic.
Thank you.