WEBVTT 00:00:01.380 --> 00:00:04.600 It is the 27th of February, 2026. 00:00:04.600 --> 00:00:05.700 I am Corey J. 00:00:05.700 --> 00:00:09.800 Moller, and this is At Any Cost. 00:00:09.800 --> 00:00:21.460 Before I begin tonight, just, I guess, a little bit of almost housekeeping, but not really, just a question for those of you who are actually watching the video instead of just listening to the audio. 00:00:21.460 --> 00:00:26.040 I can take off these headphones here, speaking of which, since I'm no longer listening to anything. 00:00:27.300 --> 00:00:33.680 Do you care about the fact that I have a microphone and a boom arm obstructing part of the field of view? 00:00:33.680 --> 00:00:37.160 Because I do have lavalier mics I could use. 00:00:37.160 --> 00:00:46.860 They are marginally less good in terms of sound quality, but for anything like YouTube or streaming, I highly doubt it could be noticed by anyone. 00:00:46.860 --> 00:00:50.100 It's really only noticeable on my end, listening to the raw audio. 00:00:50.100 --> 00:00:54.460 So anyway, if you care, comment in the comments and the replies. 00:00:54.460 --> 00:00:58.800 And I will consider that setup going forward, because I do have the hardware here. 00:00:58.880 --> 00:01:02.740 I just have not bothered to hook it up, partly because of that audio quality difference. 00:01:02.740 --> 00:01:05.820 But again, it's not going to matter for streaming. 00:01:07.980 --> 00:01:11.100 So getting right into the questions, then. 00:01:11.100 --> 00:01:14.600 The first question is about the Dead Sea Scrolls. 00:01:14.600 --> 00:01:17.780 And then the second question is sort of tangentially related. 00:01:17.780 --> 00:01:22.520 And so I will go into greater depth about that specific aspect when I get to that. 00:01:22.520 --> 00:01:28.040 But to first read the question, should we believe anything about the Dead Sea Scrolls? 00:01:28.120 --> 00:01:29.700 Or are they unreliable? 00:01:29.700 --> 00:01:38.100 If they are reliable, do they provide any insight on the Septuagint or the Lost Original Hebrew Text? 00:01:39.400 --> 00:01:49.160 And so there are a number of things here that need to be drawn out of the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls first, and then are they reliable or not? 00:01:49.160 --> 00:01:52.880 The baseline answer is no, I would not rely on them for anything. 00:01:53.720 --> 00:01:59.400 But the reasoning is important, because just the bald answer isn't really sufficient here. 00:01:59.400 --> 00:02:18.320 And so the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to a number of mostly fragmentary pieces of supposedly scripture and some other things found in various caves in what was part of the territory of Jordan, not the modern nation state of Israel at the time. 00:02:18.320 --> 00:02:19.400 That comes into play as well. 00:02:20.820 --> 00:02:28.300 The initial discovery was supposedly by a Bedouin who was just grazing his flocks in the area. 00:02:28.300 --> 00:02:30.440 He took a stone and tossed it into a cave. 00:02:30.440 --> 00:02:32.340 This is the narrative, they say. 00:02:32.340 --> 00:02:38.180 He took a stone, tossed it into a cave, heard pottery shattering, and went in to investigate. 00:02:39.300 --> 00:02:48.020 That should probably already raise some alarm bells, because it's kind of odd that something would be that accessible and have been completely ignored for a period of centuries. 00:02:49.020 --> 00:02:54.780 But beyond that, the narrative changed over time. 00:02:54.780 --> 00:03:06.360 They were not always completely consistent about how it had been discovered, who had discovered it, who had been brought in to look at the materials after it had been discovered, and a lot of other things like that. 00:03:06.360 --> 00:03:15.240 So an inconsistency in the narrative does raise some questions, because something like this should have a consistent narrative. 00:03:15.240 --> 00:03:23.580 Yeah, I threw a stone, heard some pottery, I went and got my cousin who knows these things, and he came out and looked at it, and then you go from there. 00:03:23.580 --> 00:03:28.540 The narrative was not always consistent, it tended to evolve over time. 00:03:28.540 --> 00:03:40.200 And so part of it is you have that unreliable discoverer, and then part is you have subsequent individuals who were themselves also unreliable, and the narrative changed. 00:03:40.200 --> 00:03:44.840 Some of the men who were involved very early on were in fact antiquities dealers. 00:03:46.200 --> 00:03:52.880 For those who are familiar with this part of the world, alarm bells are already going off in your head. 00:03:52.880 --> 00:03:57.460 You know how Arab and Jewish antiquities dealers are, and how reliable they are. 00:03:57.460 --> 00:04:03.560 And the baseline for that is that they aren't at all, because they're usually trying to pass off forgeries. 00:04:03.560 --> 00:04:09.120 And so the early involvement of those men also raises some very severe questions. 00:04:10.740 --> 00:04:19.460 The part that I want to get into with the next question, because it's tangentially related, is that these were dated using radiocarbon dating. 00:04:20.580 --> 00:04:21.760 That is unreliable. 00:04:21.760 --> 00:04:26.260 I will get into some of the specifics of that with the next question, because it is more directly related. 00:04:26.260 --> 00:04:38.420 But it is worth mentioning that some of the early dating by various individuals, including a number of Jewish scholars, incidentally, for whatever you want to value that, said that, no, these are medieval forgeries. 00:04:38.420 --> 00:04:41.460 These are not from whenever they're supposedly claimed now. 00:04:42.420 --> 00:04:45.740 Usually, the oldest claim now is 250 BC. 00:04:45.740 --> 00:04:56.420 But the problem there is that if you're relying on something that is itself unreliable to date them, well, I think we can all see the problem. 00:04:56.420 --> 00:04:59.800 The next part of this would be what I mentioned earlier. 00:04:59.800 --> 00:05:03.220 This was Jordanian territory at the time. 00:05:03.220 --> 00:05:05.700 And you should also bear in mind the timeline here. 00:05:05.700 --> 00:05:08.540 The first discovery was 1946. 00:05:08.540 --> 00:05:11.400 Kind of convenient for reasons that are very obvious to this audience. 00:05:12.560 --> 00:05:19.940 These subsequent discoveries were basically over the period of a decade, up through about 1956, in various caves in the same general region. 00:05:19.940 --> 00:05:34.740 But like I said, Jordanian territory, and I say it in the past tense, because it became territory controlled by the modern nation state of Israel, which is not Israel, in 1967, after the Six-Day War. 00:05:34.740 --> 00:05:47.500 And in fact, part of the argument that Israel used for saying they should have this territory and be allowed to keep it, is they said it had historical and religious ties to Israel. 00:05:47.500 --> 00:05:51.520 And they used the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of that justification. 00:05:51.520 --> 00:06:03.660 Again, highly suspect that they just so happened to find something in a region where they wanted to take that territory, and then use the thing they found as warrant for keeping that territory. 00:06:04.840 --> 00:06:15.760 On top of that, and this is going to sound familiar to some other historical things, many of them were not released to the public for 40 years after they were discovered. 00:06:15.760 --> 00:06:28.720 In fact, they were not made widely available until 1991, when the Huntington Library in California released copies basically of them, scans of all of these. 00:06:28.720 --> 00:06:33.000 And so, that raises some more red flags. 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:42.220 If something is held for that long, that of this level of importance, why did you not release pictures at least to the public? 00:06:42.220 --> 00:06:49.260 Why did you not allow other experts to come in and look at these during this period of up to 40 years? 00:06:49.260 --> 00:06:54.840 Why did you hold them in secrecy and only let your hand-selected experts look at them? 00:06:54.840 --> 00:07:02.940 You can think, for instance, about the Gerber's diaries that were held right after World War II by Russia until today. 00:07:03.480 --> 00:07:06.880 Only very recently were some scholars allowed to come in and look at them. 00:07:06.880 --> 00:07:11.000 I don't consider them reliable because I consider the source. 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:28.720 If the source holding this thing is itself hostile and has gated access in that way for this long period of time, and in fact both sources are known for forging documents and other things, you should probably be hesitant to rely on anything they are trying to sell you. 00:07:30.100 --> 00:07:42.840 As a tangent here, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles is very worth visiting, so if you happen to be in the area, if you happen to vacation there, that is worth at least half a day of your time. 00:07:42.840 --> 00:07:47.020 Great, beautiful grounds, lovely museum, all sorts of great artwork. 00:07:47.020 --> 00:07:51.920 Some of the memes that some of us know and love, the original artwork is actually in that museum. 00:07:51.920 --> 00:07:57.160 You'll walk around a corner and walk right into it, so a bonus for those who have spent perhaps too much time on the Internet. 00:07:58.260 --> 00:08:13.120 But continuing on with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the relationship now to the Septuagint, the oldest dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls places the oldest ones in the collection at about 250 BC. 00:08:14.220 --> 00:08:16.900 The Septuagint was completed in 280. 00:08:16.900 --> 00:08:21.720 For those who don't remember, BC is backwards, so the Septuagint is in fact older. 00:08:22.580 --> 00:08:31.880 So even if these were reliable, even if these were true, the Septuagint is still the older copy that we have on hand. 00:08:31.880 --> 00:08:38.480 And as we went over in the Septuagint series, God preserved his word in the Greek, he didn't preserve his word in the Hebrew. 00:08:38.480 --> 00:08:51.280 Also worth mentioning here, not everything found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this should also go to comments with regard to the timeline and other things like that, not everything was in Hebrew. 00:08:51.880 --> 00:09:13.080 And in fact, the things that were in Hebrew were not in ancient or biblical Hebrew, they were in a, not modern Hebrew, because modern Hebrew is a separate, totally separate thing, but in sort of the second temple Roman occupation period Hebrew, of the the sects that were out in the desert basically. 00:09:13.080 --> 00:09:17.060 So you had that Aramaic Greek, and in fact some Latin as well. 00:09:18.060 --> 00:09:39.580 But the Hebrew text, by and large, the majority of them were written in the Babylonian script, which is the same one that is used by modern Hebrew, not in the Paleo-Hebrew script, which is what would have been used originally for the original versions of scripture that are no longer extant, because God preserved his word in Greek. 00:09:39.580 --> 00:09:42.660 He did not need to use the Paleo-Hebrew anymore. 00:09:42.660 --> 00:09:49.500 And so most of them aren't even in the Hebrew that would have been the relevant one for copies of scripture. 00:09:49.500 --> 00:09:51.480 There are some that are in the Paleo-Hebrew script, though. 00:09:51.480 --> 00:09:53.640 There are a few of those in there. 00:09:53.640 --> 00:10:01.420 But the fundamental problem is, you have something that is younger, still has all the problems Hebrew has. 00:10:01.420 --> 00:10:05.300 It's an abjad, you don't have the vowels, you need the vowels in order to... 00:10:05.300 --> 00:10:06.520 So on and so forth, right? 00:10:06.520 --> 00:10:10.720 Because you don't have until the Masoretes are the one who gives you the vowel pointers. 00:10:10.720 --> 00:10:14.220 You have all these same problems we brought up in the Septuagint series with regard to Hebrew. 00:10:15.200 --> 00:10:23.100 Again, they're younger, they come from an unreliable source, they were held in secrecy for years, even after they were discovered, supposedly. 00:10:23.100 --> 00:10:27.760 You have all the irregularities surrounding the discovery and the subsequent handling. 00:10:27.760 --> 00:10:29.340 I just don't find them reliable at all. 00:10:29.340 --> 00:10:46.960 My baseline conclusion on them would be that at the absolute best, they're a product of Jews going out in the desert and larping around the time that they were occupied and destroyed by the Romans, and they should be taken with a grain of salt and probably just ignored. 00:10:46.960 --> 00:10:48.120 Why would we use them? 00:10:48.120 --> 00:10:49.180 We have the Septuagint. 00:10:49.180 --> 00:10:52.140 Of what value are these documents? 00:10:52.140 --> 00:10:57.440 Maybe they're of some value with regard to the groups that were out in the desert being weird and what they were doing. 00:10:57.440 --> 00:10:57.980 Okay, fine. 00:10:57.980 --> 00:10:59.460 Maybe it's a document. 00:10:59.460 --> 00:11:01.840 It's a narrative of what they were doing. 00:11:01.840 --> 00:11:03.800 But is it scripture? 00:11:03.800 --> 00:11:05.560 My basic answer is no. 00:11:05.560 --> 00:11:06.980 And so we should not rely on them. 00:11:06.980 --> 00:11:07.760 We shouldn't use them. 00:11:08.400 --> 00:11:11.640 The people who bring them up generally know nothing about them. 00:11:11.640 --> 00:11:21.920 And I won't say they're doing it in bad faith, though, because I think generally the people who know almost nothing about them hear Dead Sea Scrolls and think that's proof that scripture is really old and we can rely on it. 00:11:21.920 --> 00:11:23.680 They just don't know the reality. 00:11:23.680 --> 00:11:29.400 They don't know that, no, the Greek is older, and we have the Greek, and God preserved his word in the Greek. 00:11:29.400 --> 00:11:34.320 If they knew the reality in the actual history, I think they'd be happier to have the Greek. 00:11:34.320 --> 00:11:38.280 Not least of all, because Greek's actually a proper language, and Hebrew's awful. 00:11:38.280 --> 00:11:43.800 But that's the basic answer to, in the history for the Dead Sea Scrolls. 00:11:43.800 --> 00:11:54.540 And now the second question, where you'll see why radiometric, radiocarbon dating, really radiometric, not specifically radiocarbon here, is more relevant. 00:11:54.540 --> 00:12:03.880 Do you believe that dinosaurs ever roamed the earth, or do you believe that God created dinosaurs, bones, fossils, etc., due to creating the earth with age? 00:12:03.880 --> 00:12:10.200 Which I've explained in an article, and I will make a little note to myself to add that article in the show notes. 00:12:10.200 --> 00:12:17.080 Do you think dinosaurs are a tool that Satan may be using to get people to doubt that God created the earth in six literal days? 00:12:17.080 --> 00:12:21.180 Do you think believing that dinosaurs once roamed the earth can be problematic? 00:12:22.260 --> 00:12:26.480 And so obviously, radiometric dating comes up here. 00:12:26.480 --> 00:12:29.140 The baseline answer here is that yes, I think dinosaurs were real. 00:12:29.140 --> 00:12:38.500 And in fact, we have recovered some corpses from dinosaurs that were weirdly fresh if they are extremely old. 00:12:38.500 --> 00:12:41.600 Notably, those have typically been the sea-dwelling ones. 00:12:41.600 --> 00:12:45.500 Kind of obvious why perhaps some of those could have survived after the flood. 00:12:45.500 --> 00:12:50.760 God didn't kill all the fish, which is something people tend to overlook in the flood narrative. 00:12:50.760 --> 00:12:53.520 God killed all life on the earth and in the air. 00:12:53.520 --> 00:12:54.860 He didn't kill all the fish. 00:12:54.860 --> 00:13:01.620 And so anything in the ocean could very well have survived because it was not part of the judgment that was the flood. 00:13:01.620 --> 00:13:05.560 But the basic answer is that yes, dinosaurs did exist. 00:13:05.560 --> 00:13:10.680 A great deal of the stuff regarding sediment layers and things like that is explained by the flood. 00:13:10.680 --> 00:13:16.720 And there are men who have gone into the physics and all those things, the geology of that in greater depth than I'm going to here. 00:13:16.720 --> 00:13:22.480 I'm not as familiar with geology in that field, so it's better if other men more versed in it do that. 00:13:22.480 --> 00:13:24.960 But the flood does explain these things. 00:13:24.960 --> 00:13:27.180 There's some very good books that do that. 00:13:27.180 --> 00:13:29.160 I don't know that I have my shelves in here. 00:13:29.160 --> 00:13:30.260 I have to look up those titles. 00:13:30.420 --> 00:13:38.820 But the fundamental problem, as I already mentioned, is that radiometric dating is unreliable. 00:13:38.820 --> 00:13:45.340 And that's where you wind up getting this narrative of, you know, the dinosaurs were 65 million years ago, right? 00:13:45.340 --> 00:13:48.820 Or depending on which particular period and which dinosaurs. 00:13:48.820 --> 00:13:54.960 You get people who are really into it and love to say, no, that dinosaur can't be in this film with that one because they were 10 million years apart, right? 00:13:54.960 --> 00:13:55.540 Stuff like that. 00:13:57.820 --> 00:14:07.760 The issue is that men are going to use whatever they are handed from whatever source, if they don't want to believe in God, they're going to use these things as an excuse. 00:14:07.760 --> 00:14:13.360 And dinosaurs become an excuse for men when they aren't really a proper excuse. 00:14:13.360 --> 00:14:32.360 And so, you'll have Christians who try to reconcile it and try to say, oh, well, we'll go with, you know, God created the earth over time using these methods, and so, it's an old earth in the sense of an old earth chronologically, not in terms of how it was created, which is the distinction I've drawn, and I'll again link that article. 00:14:32.360 --> 00:14:34.800 I recommend reading that for that distinction. 00:14:34.800 --> 00:14:36.700 God made the earth mature. 00:14:37.780 --> 00:14:45.380 The short version of that is just God didn't put Adam in the garden as a zygote, or an infant, or a five-year-old. 00:14:45.380 --> 00:14:47.420 Adam was a fully mature man in the garden. 00:14:47.420 --> 00:14:48.320 God made him old. 00:14:48.320 --> 00:14:49.360 He did the same thing with the earth. 00:14:49.900 --> 00:14:55.780 God didn't make a primordial earth that was covered in lava, and then wait for it to cool, and then bring life. 00:14:55.780 --> 00:15:06.900 But to go back to radiometric dating, the fundamental point here that I want to make, the biggest issue with it is that they assume the starting conditions. 00:15:06.900 --> 00:15:16.780 And for those who don't know, a quick rundown of how radiometric dating works is that you have elements, and then you have isotopes of those elements. 00:15:16.780 --> 00:15:20.700 And so an element is basically determined by the number of protons in the nucleus. 00:15:20.700 --> 00:15:24.040 You have protons, neutrons, and then obviously the electron circling it. 00:15:24.040 --> 00:15:25.520 That's the rough model. 00:15:25.520 --> 00:15:30.120 And isotopes are determined by the number of neutrons. 00:15:30.120 --> 00:15:33.400 Different number of neutrons, different isotope. 00:15:33.400 --> 00:15:40.080 And so what you can end up with is that some of these are not stable, which means they decay over time. 00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:42.040 These are what we call radioactive. 00:15:42.040 --> 00:15:53.100 These are the ones that we use for these dating practices, because we contend, in this time, I'm speaking as the scientist, of course, I don't believe that this is accurate. 00:15:53.100 --> 00:15:59.220 We contend that we can not only predict the rate of decay, which is somewhat accurate. 00:15:59.220 --> 00:16:08.180 It's one of those things that can be stochastically assessed, because it is not, in a sense, it's not like a metronome, right? 00:16:08.180 --> 00:16:10.200 It's not tick, tick, tick, tick. 00:16:10.200 --> 00:16:21.060 It doesn't happen like that, but it happens with a statistical regularity that, given a large enough sample, you can basically say what has happened in the past. 00:16:21.060 --> 00:16:34.900 The fundamental problem is that you don't know the starting ratio, and that you also can't predict, in some cases, various things, cosmic rays, things like that, that can influence your results, particularly in talking large spans of time. 00:16:34.900 --> 00:16:38.200 Fundamentally unpredictable, absolutely no way to account for that. 00:16:38.200 --> 00:16:47.140 You can make a rough guess statistically, but a rough guess statistically over a course of millions of years is not accurate. 00:16:47.140 --> 00:16:50.280 And in fact, your error compounds. 00:16:50.280 --> 00:16:59.580 But if you don't know the starting conditions, which are fundamentally unknowable, then you can't actually know where you are in that line of decay. 00:16:59.580 --> 00:17:02.320 Let's say the decay is absolutely predictable. 00:17:02.320 --> 00:17:15.960 We know that if you started with this percentage of carbon-14 in your sample, and you have this percentage today, then because we know the rate of decay, we know the amount of elapsed time. 00:17:15.960 --> 00:17:16.800 That's all true. 00:17:16.800 --> 00:17:17.840 I'm fine with that. 00:17:17.840 --> 00:17:19.620 That is good enough. 00:17:19.620 --> 00:17:23.380 Statistically, we can rely upon it. 00:17:23.380 --> 00:17:25.540 You can't know that starting condition. 00:17:25.540 --> 00:17:35.280 If you don't know how much of it was in the sample proportionally at the beginning, then you can't draw that out. 00:17:35.280 --> 00:17:38.680 You cannot figure out how much time has elapsed, because you don't know the starting conditions. 00:17:39.840 --> 00:17:47.100 And yes, I know that they use all sorts of statistical models and assumptions and things to try to do that, but that's the issue. 00:17:47.100 --> 00:17:48.640 They are assumptions. 00:17:48.640 --> 00:17:50.040 They are projections. 00:17:50.040 --> 00:17:53.900 They are not known facts, and so they're not reliable. 00:17:53.900 --> 00:18:03.860 And this has been demonstrated, for instance, by sending samples off to a lab and getting it back dated 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 years ago. 00:18:03.860 --> 00:18:06.340 Radiocarbon dating is for relative things. 00:18:06.580 --> 00:18:10.980 It's 58 to 65, I think, it is 1,000 years, supposedly. 00:18:10.980 --> 00:18:15.500 For the rate of decay, it's 5,700-ish for the half-life of carbon-14. 00:18:15.500 --> 00:18:16.080 Don't quote me on that. 00:18:16.080 --> 00:18:17.540 I don't remember the exact number. 00:18:17.540 --> 00:18:18.460 I believe it's right around there. 00:18:19.040 --> 00:18:22.380 So 50-ish thousand years, give or take a little bit. 00:18:22.380 --> 00:18:34.000 And they sent things off that were very recent, like garbage produced in the last 50 years, and it's come back dated 5, 6, 7,000 years old. 00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:34.780 That's not great. 00:18:35.460 --> 00:18:40.640 Now, a fudge factor of 5,000 years, if you're dealing with 65 million, that's not so bad. 00:18:40.640 --> 00:18:45.740 But it's a different kind of decay, and the fudge factor again compounds. 00:18:45.740 --> 00:18:51.140 So you could be off by absolutely enormous numbers, and you have no way of knowing it. 00:18:51.140 --> 00:18:53.580 So is it a useless tool? 00:18:53.580 --> 00:19:00.760 I wouldn't go that far, but is it a tool that is so reliable we can say this is definitively 60 million years old? 00:19:00.760 --> 00:19:01.520 Absolutely not. 00:19:02.660 --> 00:19:11.680 So the dating of dinosaurs is a fundamental unknown, because we do not have the tools to actually date it in that way. 00:19:11.680 --> 00:19:14.920 We do have the bones in things, though, and those aren't false, those are real. 00:19:14.920 --> 00:19:16.320 We know what a bone looks like. 00:19:16.320 --> 00:19:18.100 We know what happens when it calcifies. 00:19:18.100 --> 00:19:22.400 We know what happens when you have these things in the ground, when it fossilizes. 00:19:22.400 --> 00:19:24.960 We know those processes. 00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:28.020 And so did these creatures exist? 00:19:28.020 --> 00:19:29.820 Yes, certainly they did. 00:19:29.820 --> 00:19:31.040 How much do we know about them? 00:19:32.060 --> 00:19:37.860 That's very debatable for almost all cases, because we've usually only recovered small fragments. 00:19:37.860 --> 00:19:41.660 In some cases, we have full skeletons, so we know more about those. 00:19:41.660 --> 00:19:47.720 But we're relying again on projection and reconstruction. 00:19:47.720 --> 00:19:55.680 Go look at the skeleton for some modern creatures and tell me that the people who've reconstructed dinosaurs would reconstruct those correctly. 00:19:55.680 --> 00:20:05.360 A good example would be any number of, say, turtles, tortoises, the hippo, in particular, looks like a cyclops. 00:20:05.360 --> 00:20:07.960 The skull of a hippo is very weird looking. 00:20:07.960 --> 00:20:09.700 They would never reconstruct it correctly. 00:20:09.700 --> 00:20:11.800 So do we know what the dinosaurs looked like? 00:20:11.800 --> 00:20:13.640 I don't think that we do. 00:20:13.640 --> 00:20:18.740 For some, certainly, because some we have more of them, but for most of them, we don't have very much. 00:20:18.740 --> 00:20:21.980 This is an ongoing problem in this area of science. 00:20:21.980 --> 00:20:32.760 For instance, some of the supposed missing links, they have one bone, and they reconstructed a whole creature, supposed ancestor of humanity, out of one bone. 00:20:32.760 --> 00:20:38.780 The point that I've always made when that gets addressed, when someone brings that up and starts saying, no, we have a missing link, we know. 00:20:38.780 --> 00:20:40.060 No, you don't. 00:20:40.060 --> 00:20:42.380 Look at the skeleton of the elephant man. 00:20:42.380 --> 00:20:45.560 Tell me that science would reconstruct that correctly. 00:20:45.560 --> 00:20:50.720 They wouldn't, because they just, they fundamentally would not know, right? 00:20:53.300 --> 00:21:07.420 So, the issue that we have with dinosaurs is that we don't have enough of the material to reconstruct it, we don't have the methods to reconstruct it, and we don't have reliable date methods, dating methods. 00:21:07.420 --> 00:21:10.260 So, are they a tool of Satan? 00:21:10.260 --> 00:21:12.080 Not explicitly, but does he use them? 00:21:12.080 --> 00:21:16.440 Absolutely, because he'll use anything he can to try to deceive you. 00:21:16.440 --> 00:21:19.020 That is just how he does things. 00:21:19.060 --> 00:21:30.500 And so, the next question here, question three, I guess, sort of tangentially related, but not really in the same way. 00:21:30.500 --> 00:21:41.180 I believe that you have mentioned that the left stole the issue of the environment from the right, but that whenever they try to help the environment, they always end up making things worse. 00:21:41.180 --> 00:21:44.420 I was wondering if you could expound on this point. 00:21:44.420 --> 00:21:49.440 Do you believe the left may also be using environmental issues for political purposes? 00:21:49.440 --> 00:21:57.780 For example, I believe the left is using the notion of man-made global warming as a massive wealth transfer and a way to hurt white people economically. 00:21:57.780 --> 00:22:04.060 At least for me, a less clear-cut, no-pun intended example is microplastics. 00:22:04.060 --> 00:22:13.840 There have been several studies claiming that humans ingest microplastics from the environment —eyes are watering a little bit because I tried to suppress a sneeze there— which cause health damage. 00:22:14.180 --> 00:22:19.900 Other studies have recently shown that these original studies likely contained several false positives. 00:22:19.900 --> 00:22:25.420 Is there any harm in taking precautions, for example, using wooden cutting boards, in light of such studies? 00:22:25.420 --> 00:22:33.940 How are we to discern which environmental issues are legitimate, and which ones are used by the left for political purposes? 00:22:33.940 --> 00:22:39.380 So the issue here is that yes, absolutely, these things are used by the left for political purposes. 00:22:39.380 --> 00:22:42.740 Particularly global warming is one that has been used by the left for. 00:22:43.600 --> 00:22:47.320 Like you said, a wealth transfer, that is exactly how it's been used. 00:22:47.340 --> 00:22:50.780 Climate change is real. 00:22:50.780 --> 00:22:54.260 Anthropogenic climate change is not. 00:22:54.260 --> 00:22:55.740 That's the contention here. 00:22:55.740 --> 00:23:02.220 They contend that human, which is that's all anthropogenic means, is human originated, human caused, right? 00:23:02.220 --> 00:23:06.140 Anthropos, human, gen, source, seed. 00:23:07.380 --> 00:23:13.020 So they're saying that climate change is a role of human activities, and that's simply not true. 00:23:13.020 --> 00:23:19.620 Our activities are not of such a scope and scale that we have changed the global climate. 00:23:19.620 --> 00:23:22.380 Now, have we changed the global environment? 00:23:22.380 --> 00:23:23.300 Absolutely yes. 00:23:23.300 --> 00:23:26.860 We have done some rather bad things to the environment in many places. 00:23:26.860 --> 00:23:31.940 China's fishing fleet is a great example currently, basically killing the oceans. 00:23:31.940 --> 00:23:36.520 So it is possible for human beings to cause damage on a global scale. 00:23:37.380 --> 00:23:44.960 I don't believe that what we have done with regard to the atmosphere has actually changed the climate of the planet. 00:23:44.960 --> 00:23:46.760 I disagree with that. 00:23:46.760 --> 00:24:00.360 Does that mean that we shouldn't take measures that are good for the atmosphere, like for instance, banning CFCs, which did have negative consequences for the ozone layer? 00:24:00.360 --> 00:24:01.760 No, I think that's a good measure. 00:24:01.760 --> 00:24:04.220 We're supposed to be good stewards of the environment. 00:24:04.880 --> 00:24:12.920 And so, we shouldn't just reflexively disagree with everything the left says about the environment, because every now and then, they're right. 00:24:12.920 --> 00:24:18.940 You know, if they're out there saying that we shouldn't be littering, we don't disagree and start littering because we don't like the left. 00:24:18.940 --> 00:24:20.140 That's stupid. 00:24:20.140 --> 00:24:25.020 That would be at least as stupid as the left is on these issues, because they'll do things because they just hate the right. 00:24:25.020 --> 00:24:28.600 So they'll do something because, oh, the right does the opposite, right? 00:24:28.600 --> 00:24:29.360 We shouldn't do that. 00:24:30.400 --> 00:24:42.240 But insofar as the environmental issues are concerned, and how do you determine which issues are fake versus which ones are real? 00:24:42.240 --> 00:24:48.400 Which ones are being used as a political cudgel instead of as an actual concern? 00:24:48.400 --> 00:24:52.060 The left is always going to use things as a political cudgel because that's just how... 00:24:52.060 --> 00:24:53.120 Everything for them is politics. 00:24:53.120 --> 00:24:54.140 I've explained this before. 00:24:54.140 --> 00:24:56.280 Their whole life is politics. 00:24:56.280 --> 00:25:01.420 They don't have things that are more important to them than politics. 00:25:01.420 --> 00:25:03.220 Politics is their world view. 00:25:03.220 --> 00:25:05.000 Politics is their religion. 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:08.240 Politics is their reason for living. 00:25:08.240 --> 00:25:14.600 And so they're going to treat these things as a knife fight in a bar, right? 00:25:14.600 --> 00:25:16.720 Absolutely anything is a weapon to them. 00:25:16.720 --> 00:25:21.140 So do not use them as your index of morality. 00:25:21.140 --> 00:25:24.380 Now, you can take cues from them, signals from them, right? 00:25:24.380 --> 00:25:26.960 If they support something, be skeptical, that's fine. 00:25:27.920 --> 00:25:32.840 But the fundamental answer, the baseline answer, is look at the data. 00:25:32.840 --> 00:25:36.680 Look at the things that are incontrovertibly true. 00:25:36.680 --> 00:25:39.180 And so can you play games with statistics? 00:25:39.180 --> 00:25:40.740 Absolutely. 00:25:40.740 --> 00:25:52.360 But if you have the ability, this is one of those that's going to depend personally on you, but if you have the ability to look at their data and run the analysis yourself, do that. 00:25:52.360 --> 00:25:56.460 Look at their data, see if their data support their conclusions. 00:25:57.060 --> 00:26:00.240 If not, go ahead and reject it. 00:26:00.240 --> 00:26:04.940 These days, sure, you can run some things through an AI. 00:26:04.940 --> 00:26:16.020 To what degree you trust the AI not to have been programmed to give you a specific answer on a politically controversial issue, but run it through three, four different AIs, see if they all agree. 00:26:16.020 --> 00:26:20.880 Maybe that helps a little bit if you don't know how to run the analysis yourself, or find someone who does. 00:26:20.880 --> 00:26:28.600 If you have someone you trust who is good at statistics, have him run the analysis and then use that to draw your conclusion. 00:26:30.080 --> 00:26:38.060 But to address the specific issue here, other than, of course, manmade climate change, which I just addressed, microplastics are an issue. 00:26:38.060 --> 00:26:40.880 I think that is incontrovertibly proven at this point. 00:26:40.880 --> 00:26:50.920 I don't think really anyone with any actual credentials and believability has said they are not a real concern. 00:26:51.820 --> 00:27:01.380 And one of the horrible things is that we actually can't run sort of the usual experiment we would, because usually you need control, right? 00:27:01.380 --> 00:27:16.820 If you're running a drug trial, say for instance, you have one group you give a placebo, you don't tell them because then placebo effect, and it winds up getting complicated, but you try to do a double blind, which just means that neither the individual receiving it nor the individual administering it knows, right? 00:27:16.820 --> 00:27:26.740 But you have a group that's given the drug, a group that's not given the drug, and then you compare the results, and you run that a number of times, you randomize things, you have all these safeguards in place. 00:27:27.760 --> 00:27:41.120 Our issue, we obviously can't run that experiment because that's considered human experimentation and unethical, generally speaking, partly due to IRBs and things like that after Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment. 00:27:41.120 --> 00:27:51.040 But we can't find a group of men anywhere in the world who do not have microplastics in their blood and elsewhere. 00:27:51.040 --> 00:27:55.920 We can't even run the experiment because we don't have a control group. 00:27:55.920 --> 00:28:00.440 Now, of course, we can look at magnitude of harm because we can look at people who have more microplastics. 00:28:00.440 --> 00:28:08.000 So the people who are warming things in plastic and then drinking them, those men are going to have more microplastics. 00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:18.040 So if you're a tea drinker, for instance, I don't have my tea tonight, I have coffee, but if you're a tea drinker, please do not use plastic for anything in the process. 00:28:18.040 --> 00:28:20.220 Heat your water in something metal. 00:28:20.220 --> 00:28:29.860 Drink your tea from something that is made of ceramic or glass, or mine is Pyrex, it's glass, so do not involve heat in plastic. 00:28:29.860 --> 00:28:36.140 That is a great way to introduce as many microplastics into your blood as you possibly can. 00:28:36.140 --> 00:28:38.060 Not great. 00:28:38.060 --> 00:28:40.060 Don't drink water out of plastic water bottles. 00:28:40.060 --> 00:28:40.900 Those are terrible. 00:28:41.200 --> 00:28:44.540 Not just for you, for the environment as well. 00:28:44.540 --> 00:28:46.240 Single-use plastics are not a good thing. 00:28:46.240 --> 00:28:49.680 We should be trying to avoid those where we can. 00:28:49.680 --> 00:28:52.960 This is not a leftist issue where tree-hugging not... 00:28:52.960 --> 00:29:00.380 Which, quite frankly, that even is almost an insult, because saying someone cares about trees should be something with which we agree. 00:29:00.380 --> 00:29:01.580 That should be a right-wing issue. 00:29:01.580 --> 00:29:13.240 We care about the forests and preservation of the environment and the green areas and making environments that are fit for human habitation, not just for cockroaches living in 15-story buildings, right? 00:29:13.240 --> 00:29:20.000 But microplastics are decidedly an issue, and they are endocrine disruptors. 00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:23.000 We know that for an absolute certainty. 00:29:23.000 --> 00:29:27.640 And so they do cause problems, not just for human beings, for other animals as well. 00:29:27.640 --> 00:29:29.100 They're particularly bad for fish. 00:29:29.100 --> 00:29:35.940 Fish and amphibians are very vulnerable to environmental pollutants in a way that some other animals are not. 00:29:36.980 --> 00:29:42.180 Of course, there is the issue of concentration, as you go up the trophic levels, and humans are pretty high up. 00:29:42.180 --> 00:29:53.360 So predators can wind up getting very high concentrations of certain pollutants that are in the environment, and have greater negative consequences because of that concentration effect. 00:29:55.500 --> 00:29:59.700 So, yes, we have a very real problem with regard to microplastics. 00:29:59.700 --> 00:30:03.480 If you can avoid them by all means, do avoid them where you can. 00:30:04.800 --> 00:30:07.120 You can't avoid them completely. 00:30:07.120 --> 00:30:09.580 Because let's say you don't use any in your kitchen. 00:30:09.580 --> 00:30:12.040 All of your food was still shipped using plastic. 00:30:12.040 --> 00:30:13.920 It was processed using plastic. 00:30:13.920 --> 00:30:22.380 Unless you're growing absolutely everything at home, and it never has any inputs from anywhere else, and even then, it's in the soil. 00:30:22.380 --> 00:30:25.780 So it's one of the things where you do what you can. 00:30:25.780 --> 00:30:27.320 Don't become neurotic about it. 00:30:27.320 --> 00:30:28.480 Don't let it control your life. 00:30:28.480 --> 00:30:38.720 Don't become someone who is so crazy about the idea of plastic that, you know, you would have to retreat to the woods and live in a wood cabin, and even then, can't really avoid it. 00:30:38.720 --> 00:30:43.840 So the thing that you mentioned, absolutely, that's completely reasonable. 00:30:43.840 --> 00:30:47.480 And that's not just because the cutting board is what I'm speaking of here. 00:30:47.480 --> 00:30:50.180 That's not just because wooden cutting boards are better. 00:30:50.180 --> 00:30:53.300 They're better in terms of bacteria and things like that. 00:30:53.300 --> 00:30:54.800 They're actually better than plastic. 00:30:54.800 --> 00:30:56.900 That's been clearly demonstrated now. 00:30:56.900 --> 00:30:58.780 They're also better for your knives. 00:30:58.780 --> 00:30:59.900 Plastic's terrible on your knife. 00:30:59.900 --> 00:31:03.500 You're just gonna wear out your knife and wind up cutting with a dull knife, and that's dangerous. 00:31:03.500 --> 00:31:05.280 Keep your kitchen knives sharp. 00:31:05.280 --> 00:31:07.880 As best as you can, keep them sharp. 00:31:07.880 --> 00:31:09.300 Excuse me. 00:31:09.300 --> 00:31:15.060 But definitely go for the wooden cutting board, or if you're so inclined, you can go for the glass or the steel, right? 00:31:15.060 --> 00:31:19.340 But for the sake of your knives, wood is probably the way to go. 00:31:21.220 --> 00:31:29.220 But the overall issue of how do we discern what is real and what is not is that we look at it for ourselves. 00:31:29.340 --> 00:31:34.140 We trust men on our side who have the competence to look at the issues. 00:31:34.140 --> 00:31:40.080 And we use what our enemies say, particularly the left on environmental issues. 00:31:40.080 --> 00:31:41.540 We use it as a signal. 00:31:41.540 --> 00:31:44.960 It's not irrelevant, but it's not decisive. 00:31:44.960 --> 00:31:48.860 Just because they advocate for it doesn't mean it's bad. 00:31:48.860 --> 00:31:52.400 Just because they advocate against it doesn't mean it's good. 00:31:52.400 --> 00:31:55.000 But it can be a strong signal. 00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:01.080 So maybe part of it is you're just looking at the general standard when you're looking at anything in politics. 00:32:01.080 --> 00:32:03.800 Cui Bono, who benefits, right? 00:32:03.800 --> 00:32:05.940 Who benefits from this? 00:32:05.940 --> 00:32:21.900 If the only people who are benefiting from a policy are special interests that are aligned with the politicians enacting it, so say wind power or solar power, probably be a little bit hesitant, a bit skeptical of those projects. 00:32:21.900 --> 00:32:23.860 I don't think solar power is bad. 00:32:23.860 --> 00:32:24.960 I think it's overhyped. 00:32:24.960 --> 00:32:26.820 I don't think it's ready for mainstream deployment. 00:32:27.340 --> 00:32:34.420 Wind power has severe negative consequences, particularly for birds and bats, and so I think it should generally be avoided. 00:32:34.420 --> 00:32:42.440 Also, it's an eyesore, and the return on investment period is so long that many of those will simply never see a return on their investment. 00:32:42.440 --> 00:32:45.740 So things like that, you can definitely discern. 00:32:45.740 --> 00:32:48.080 These are just pork barrel. 00:32:48.080 --> 00:32:53.520 In some cases, pork barrel, in some cases, a wealth transfer, because sometimes we're funding those things in other parts of the world. 00:32:54.620 --> 00:32:59.280 But another rule of thumb, when it comes to environmental issues, this is one I've long employed. 00:32:59.280 --> 00:33:10.680 If you are dealing with someone who talks about environmental issues, but never critiques China, India, various other countries like that, the person is a political operative or a hack. 00:33:10.680 --> 00:33:12.440 The person is not serious. 00:33:12.440 --> 00:33:22.760 Because those countries are causing such a magnitude of harm in excess of what any Western country is doing, that unless you address what they are doing, you're not serious. 00:33:23.860 --> 00:33:25.140 You're just anti-Western. 00:33:25.140 --> 00:33:35.900 You're just anti-modernity, which not in the negative sense of the cultural and social things, but in the sense of just, you want everyone to live in a mud hut without air conditioning. 00:33:35.900 --> 00:33:39.080 And those people, you can ignore. 00:33:39.080 --> 00:33:46.360 Again, it doesn't mean the issues that they are raising are wrong, but it means that you don't want to use that person as a strong signal. 00:33:46.360 --> 00:33:57.100 This is a matter of wisdom, but you do have a lot of information at your fingertips, and you do have ways you can filter and process that to make an informed decision. 00:33:59.240 --> 00:34:15.560 And I guess there's also worth noting, if you have issues where the experiments themselves and the conclusions are physical, the conclusions follow necessarily from the data, that's a little more reliable. 00:34:15.560 --> 00:34:17.280 Microplastics will be one of those. 00:34:17.280 --> 00:34:25.420 Like, we can measure the effects on the endocrine system of these microplastics, and that's just math. 00:34:25.420 --> 00:34:27.260 The math is not political. 00:34:27.260 --> 00:34:29.720 Until you give it to a statistician, of course. 00:34:31.360 --> 00:34:35.460 The next question, this is question number four. 00:34:35.460 --> 00:34:39.540 I may have been ambitious with 13 questions, but we will see. 00:34:39.540 --> 00:34:44.200 Question four is about culture and race. 00:34:44.200 --> 00:34:48.220 Can you explain how culture is downstream from race? 00:34:49.400 --> 00:35:01.660 This is one of those questions that, of course, is quite broad in scope, so I won't get into everything here, but I'll give sort of an outline of it, a basic answer. 00:35:01.660 --> 00:35:09.540 You know, you could think of the classical problem posed about evil, right? 00:35:09.540 --> 00:35:22.500 The question that particularly atheist, agnostic, smothers will pose, usually to Christians, but to most theists, they'll pose the question of whence cometh evil, right? 00:35:22.500 --> 00:35:25.140 What is the source of evil if God is the source of all things? 00:35:25.140 --> 00:35:28.300 And I won't get into that now, because the answer, of course, is free will. 00:35:28.300 --> 00:35:33.200 I've got it in that previous episodes, but they think it's a gotcha. 00:35:33.200 --> 00:35:37.520 You can actually ask the same question here, and it is a legitimate question in this case. 00:35:37.520 --> 00:35:40.780 Whence cometh culture, right? 00:35:40.780 --> 00:35:48.360 If they want to say, usually this is the left, someone like that, that race has nothing to do with culture. 00:35:48.360 --> 00:35:51.000 Okay, where did culture arise? 00:35:51.000 --> 00:35:53.060 What caused culture? 00:35:53.060 --> 00:35:55.660 What is the source of culture? 00:35:55.660 --> 00:36:03.260 It has to be something innate, because culture is something constructed to some degree. 00:36:03.260 --> 00:36:06.640 It's not like skin color, right? 00:36:06.640 --> 00:36:09.280 You don't have to say, where'd skin color come from? 00:36:09.280 --> 00:36:12.660