Why Worldviews Matter

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We're glad you're here. We're glad you're here. Fellowship is sweeter, knowing you're near.

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We're glad you're here. Reading from 1 Peter 3, verse 15. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect.

That was 1 Peter 3, verse 15. O magnify the Lord with me, let us exalt his name together. It's Tuesday, October 13, 2026.

Welcome to Mark & Friends. Today we're reaching back into our broadcast archives for a special two-day conversation I had with Pastor Jason Schiffo and astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle, who was then serving with the Institute for Creation Research. We'll explore the biblical account of creation, science, and the assumptions behind our worldviews, and why Dr. Lisle believes Genesis is foundational to understanding the rest of Scripture.

And listening friend, this is a conversation from 14 years ago, but the importance of knowing God's Word and being prepared to explain our faith remains just as relevant today. So let's listen to this special archived presentation, beginning with Dr. Jason Lisle on today's edition of Mark & Friends. I was fortunate to have been reared in a Christian family.

The parents instilled me with confidence in the Word of God that the Bible can be trusted in all matters. And therefore, when I went through the school system and I was taught good science, and when I was taught evolution, I recognized that it really isn't good science. It's something that does not line up with the Word of God.

So I never really believed in evolution. I always found that that was a rather non-credible explanation for life on Earth. I wish I could say that about the time scale.

I think that when I first was introduced to the idea that the universe is billions of years old, I probably bought that hook, line, and sinker. And it wasn't until later on that I searched the Scriptures through and realized, you know what, that really isn't scriptural. In any case, there's scientific evidence against the billions of years, and there's quite a bit of scientific evidence that the universe is thousands of years old.

And that's one of the things that I kind of specialize in now that I'm a PhD astrophysicist. But I do now have full confidence that God's Word is absolutely true. You can trust it from the beginning.

And that's one of the things I try to encourage other people with, to get the information that I really didn't have when I was very young. We didn't have the kind of resources back then that we have today. And so here at the Institute for Creation Research, we do research.

We write books. We make DVDs and other things that gives people the information that they can be able to defend the faith very, very effectively, so that we can see people one to the Lord. And it says in your bio, I think, I'm not sure if it was on your personal blog or it was on the ICR's website, but it says that you developed this passion during graduate school.

So was there a certain moment in graduate school where you... Because a lot of people, I think, look right now. They would look at you and they would say, well, of course he believes. He works for the ICR.

He studies creation. He writes books about this. And they don't realize that I think that most of us who have walked faithfully with the Lord at some point have had a moment where we go, this is tough and I'm really going to have to dig in here and understand who God is and what God is.

Yeah, well, I think early on is when I had realized that creation is true and you can defend it and it makes sense, and I had a passion for it even as an undergraduate. But I didn't think that I would go into full-time ministry. It wasn't until I was about halfway through grad school that I became so passionate about defending creation.

And part of that is I saw how effective it is when you share it with other people and you show people that Genesis really is true and you can trust it. It gave them a renewed confidence in the rest of the Word of God because after all, all those other books in the Bible, they directly or indirectly have their foundation in Genesis anyway. It's only because Genesis is true that the Gospels make sense, for example.

And so as I shared information, particularly scientific information with people that confirmed that Genesis is true and we talked about things like dinosaurs and how the Bible makes sense of them, boy, did that get people excited. When we talked about astronomy and how it confirms the young universe and so on, we talked about biology and how it confirms that cells were designed and so on that haven't evolved, it really got people excited about being a Christian. And that got me excited about telling people this information.

And so it was about halfway through grad school that I became very passionate about defending the faith and rather frustrated with the intellectual handcuffs that would be placed on me in a secular institution. You see, before then I'd always thought that I'd get my Ph.D. and then I'd go out to a university and teach and do research there at a secular school and maybe make some proposals and teach people a little bit about creation. But I wouldn't really be allowed to do that because we don't have academic freedom in this nation and in the universities.

I wish that we did. We do on some issues, but not when it comes to creation. People dogmatically teach evolution and they don't give the creationists a chance to talk about the scientific information.

So that's why I ended up deciding to go into full-time Christian ministry where I would be able to say what really is on my heart and be able to give people the information they really need to defend the Christian faith. It's interesting that you share how excited you are about Genesis and the biblical account as inspired by God. Because yesterday's program, Jason, couldn't stop talking about Genesis and we're thinking about in the future maybe just spending a whole week on just the first maybe few chapters of Genesis because it's just the framework that God began all of His inspired Scripture.

We can always go back to Genesis and study Genesis and be familiar with it and there's so much truth there. But I want to have you take us back to some of your Genesis account. When were you first introduced to the Lord Jesus? What was that point where you knew that you needed a Savior? Did you grow up in a Christian home? Who helped lay that foundation in your life about the Bible and the fellowship that you can have with God through Jesus? My parents are very influential.

They are Christians and I'm very blessed and thankful to have been reared in that Christian home. We went to a good Bible-teaching church and so I was exposed to Christianity very young. It made sense to me and I was probably no more than 6 or 7 when I received the Lord Jesus as my Savior.

I do remember sincerely believing that He died for my sins and rose again and I believed that. That's when I became a Christian, but as I've grown, as I've grown physically, I've grown in my knowledge of the Lord. And so becoming sanctified, that's a process, we'll become more and more like the way God wants us to be and that's been a process and the Lord's not done with me yet.

But I became more and more convinced of the truth of the Bible as I went through school and as I was challenged. You know, a lot of times in a secular school, and by the way, I went through secular school all the way through, all the way from kindergarten to my PhD. I was taught mostly by secular teachers and so on.

And you can either look at that as something that's very discouraging or you can look at it as an opportunity, a challenge to where you can say, okay, here's the information that I've been presented and now let me be a Berean and search the Scriptures to see if this is so. If you're going to be a creationist, a Christian, first of all, and a creationist is an aspect of that, and you're going to go through a secular school system, it's going to be challenging and you're going to have to do more work than you would if you just believed everything that you're taught. But as I went through the school system, I was challenged and I responded to it in mostly a positive fashion, searched the Scriptures, I searched the scientific information, and so I became increasingly sanctified.

I became increasingly convinced of the veracity of the Scriptures as I went all the way from kindergarten all the way through my Ph.D. Well, it says that you graduated University of Colorado with a master's degree and a Ph.D. in astrophysics. How did you arrive at AIG, at Answers in Genesis? Earlier in the week we had Mark Loy on the program and he affectionately talked about ICR and about your time at AIG, and I would love to hear how you arrived there. Oh yeah, I had been helping out with Answers in Genesis for some time.

I guess I should first say I went to an early seminar. This was back when the Answers in Genesis ministry first branched off from ICR. Ken Ham used to work at ICR and then he started his own ministry, and so I've come full circle in a way.

I've come back to the ministry where it all started. But I had met Ken personally and I got to know him a little bit and helped the AIG ministry. Even when I was in grad school, I helped review articles for them and I even wrote some articles, but I wrote them under a pen name because I was a little concerned that if the folks at my grad school found out that I was helping with a creationist ministry, they would fire me because we do know of situations where that's happened, unfortunately, so much for academic freedom.

But I got involved at AIG. As soon as I graduated, I wanted to go right into ministry, and at that time I thought AIG would be the best place to start. And I helped them.

I developed the planetarium shows there at the Creation Museum and so on, which is a wonderful place to visit, by the way. And then I ended up, about six months ago, transferring over here to ICR. At least I moved out to Dallas six months ago and started up here and have been helping out with the research program here at the Institute for Creation Research and have been helping produce resources here as well.

But it was something that really, about halfway through grad school, I realized that I wanted to do full-time ministry. I mean, I've always wanted to do ministry, and I think all Christians should be doing ministry, and we should all be doing it. In a way, we should all be doing it full-time, right? It's just most of us don't get paid for it.

I'm blessed to be in a position where I can be a full-time minister and I can actually get a salary for it, and I'm very, very grateful for that. I really enjoy working here at the Institute for Creation Research. It's been such a blessing, and I just enjoy the responses that we get from people.

Almost every day I'll get somebody that will email in that will say, thank you for the resources that you've produced. It's been life-changing to me. And that's what it's all about.

That's why we do this. And so you and your family, you're married, correct? I am single, actually. Okay, okay.

So it was just you who married. I have friends who live in Texas, and they say that's the biggest country in the world. So we always find that kind of humorous when we joke about that.

But what I'd love to understand, and this is one of the things that really impressed me about you, Dr. Lisle, is that I've watched a number of debates, and I've read your books, and in fact I just reread one of your books yesterday just to get ready for this irrefutable proof. And you seem to be a very logical person, and never in any of these debates have I seen you shaken in terms of, I mean, your answers are always very articulate. You always come across as very knowledgeable, and I think that's because you are, but you've never appeared shaken, where some debates you see the Christian or somebody who's trying to defend that position get shaken.

So I would love to understand how you view logic in terms of Christianity and apologetics, because I think sometimes as Christians we do our argument in injustice because we get so emotional that we lose one of the greatest gifts that God has given us. You know, logic actually stems from the nature of God. The reason that we have laws of logic is because we have a God who is sovereign over the universe, and His thoughts are very consistent.

They're what we would call logical. I would define logic that way. Logic is a reflection of the way God thinks, and therefore the way He expects us to think.

And since all truth, all knowledge, is in God, if anything is going to be true, it must be logical. It must correspond to the mind of God. And God has called us to think His thoughts after Him, as it were.

In fact, in Isaiah chapter 55, God tells the wicked people to repent of their ways and to turn from their thoughts, because their thoughts are not like God's thoughts. And granted, He's infinite, and we're finite, so we can never think exactly like God. That's not the point.

We are supposed to think in a way that is consistent with His nature. And one of the main points that I make for the Christian worldview, and I think it's one of the best arguments, if not the best argument for the Christian worldview, is that the Christian worldview is the only rational possibility. One reason for that is that only the Christian worldview can make sense of rationality.

And that's kind of an interesting way of thinking about it. Only the Christian worldview can account for laws of logic in the first place. And for that matter, the nature of science.

Only the Christian worldview can make sense of the fact that we have this method called science that allows us to discover certain kinds of truth. It can't discover everything. It can't discover historical claims, for example.

But it can certainly help us understand how the universe works today. The reason science is possible is because God upholds the universe in a consistent, logical fashion that the human mind can understand, at least partially. And it's because the universe has that consistency that science is possible.

Imagine if the universe were just really chance, and it weren't upheld by the mind of God. Well, you wouldn't expect to have laws of nature at all, because there's no mind behind it. And even if there were laws of physics and chemistry, you wouldn't expect them to be consistent.

Why would they be the same from one day to the next? Now, I, as a Christian, have an answer to that. It's because God upholds the universe in a consistent and logical fashion that I can understand. And I'll tell you, that's what gives me confidence in defending the faith.

First of all, I have confidence in the Word of God, because I know that the Bible really is what it claims to be. It's God, and He can't be wrong about anything. It's absurd to think that the Creator of the universe is wrong about something.

And then secondly, I have confidence in defending the Bible, because I've learned what's often called presuppositional apologetics, which is basically along the lines of what I've just mentioned, the fact that you couldn't have a logical discussion unless the Bible's true. You couldn't do science unless the Bible's true. And so I'm not particularly worried about some new scientific claim, because I know that that claim couldn't even have been discovered unless the Bible's true.

And when you realize that, boy, does it give you a powerful apologetic method. And just by way of personal background, the person that really helped introduce me to this method of apologetics, Dr. Greg Bahnsen, I never met him in person, but he's with the Lord now, but he was a very brilliant Christian man, and I heard him do a debate against Gordon Stein, the Bahnsen-Stein debate from 1985, and it's called The Great Debate, Does God Exist? And I listened to that debate, and I heard a Christian give one of the best defenses of the Christian faith that I've ever heard. And it was so good, I listened to that thing probably 50 times, without exaggeration.

And it's amazing. If you want to hear a really good debate, that's it. And I decided I am going to learn that method, because I want to be able to debate like that.

And so I've written a book that helps others learn that method of apologetics. It's called The Ultimate Proof of Creation, and it's basically training people to think and debate rationally. And if you can learn that method, man, there's nobody that can stand against you, because basically you're repeating God's argument for himself, and nobody ever wins an argument against God.

In case you just tuned in, we have Dr. Jason Lisle on the phone with us. He's involved with the Institute for Creation Research, and I want to just throw this out right now, Dr. Lisle, that you've created a lot of books, and the Institute has all sorts of resources, and our listeners can find out more. It's a simple website.

It's icr.org, icr.org. And can they purchase this book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, through that website? Absolutely. Go to icr.org, and you can get The Ultimate Proof of Creation, along with all of my other books on that site. I found it interesting that you mentioned a debate, because the first time I was introduced to you, somebody forwarded me, I think it was in six parts, a YouTube video where you and Ken Ham debated Hugh Ross, and I forget the other gentleman.

He was a Hebrew scholar. Walt Kaiser. Yeah, Walt Kaiser.

And I remember just, there are very few times where you talk, Jason, but you said Hugh gave this huge, long dissertation about why something was that way, and you just looked at him, and you said, well, it's all about symptomatic relationships. If you say the house is big, then you've just defined what the house is. And I just looked, and I go, that is so logical and so simple that it just made sense to me, whereas kind of Dr. Ross's thing, like you circled the wagons and you lost me.

And so I just, in terms of debates, I just wanted you to know that I listen to that, and then I pass it on to a number of friends, because I said, you've just got to listen to this. It's a great, great debate. But what I'd love to talk to you about, because you kind of touched on it, is you mentioned worldviews, and I know that you spent a lot of time in the books talking about worldviews, and I have a lot of Christian friends who, when they go to defend the faith, they always want to start with the evidence.

And I know that you have a feeling about that, and I'd love to hear and have our listeners understand why that's not the right direction to begin with. The origins debate, or for that matter, any debate involving religion, is always ultimately about worldviews. And a worldview is your complete way of thinking about the universe.

It's your view of the world, hence the name. And we all have that worldview, and the worldview that we have tells us how to interpret the evidence. And so if you find a fossil in a particular, I don't know, in a particular rock layer, your worldview will tell you what to make of that.

Your worldview will say, okay, well, I believe that there was a worldwide flood, I believe the Bible's true, and so the worldwide flood would kill lots of organisms, bury them in rock layers, and so of course I'd expect to find fossils, and this is evidence of that worldwide flood. But my secular colleague, because he has a different worldview, he's thinking, you know, the chance processes of nature, the world's billions of years old, he's looking at that fossil, he says, oh yeah, that probably was laid down billions of years ago, and so on. So we look at the same evidence, but we draw very different interpretations of that evidence because we come at it from two different perspectives, two different worldviews.

And so it does no good to simply throw more evidence at people. Now, I'm perfectly fine with using evidence, I think evidence is great, but you have to do more than just throw evidence at people, because their worldview will tell them what to make of that evidence. And we really have to discuss, the worldview is kind of like a ruler.

A ruler will tell you how long something is, or maybe a yard. Let's say I have a yardstick here, and I'm measuring, and I'm saying, okay, this is, oh yeah, this is exactly a yard. And my friend comes up, and he's got a different yardstick, and he says, no, no, this is much too long, this isn't a yard.

And we hold our yardsticks up next to each other, and of course his is much shorter than mine. And so I say, well, I'm the one that's measuring it, right? Your yardstick's too short, and he would say, well, no, yours is too long. Now, how would we settle this? I could say, well, let me get another box here.

Here's a box that's three yards, and see, my yardstick measures it as three yards. But if he measures that, he's going to say, no, that box is much too big, because he's using a different yardstick. What's the solution to this? Do we just get more boxes? You see, that's the way most people try to resolve the debate.

They think, well, here's the way I'm looking at the evidence, and here's the way the evolutionist is looking at the evidence. What do we need to solve it? More evidence. Well, no, that's not going to solve it.

We need to discuss how we're looking at that evidence, and what's the right way to look at the evidence. We need to discuss worldviews. And so the ultimate proof of creation, that book, will show people how to deal with worldview issues and how to actually resolve a worldview debate.

And the answer, by the way, the short answer, is that it comes from an internal critique. You have to show that that worldview is inconsistent on its own terms. And that's one of the things that I point out, is that my evolutionist friend is trying to use science, and he's trying to use logic, but in his worldview, science and logic don't make any sense.

Because logic is a reflection of the way God thinks, but my friend, he may not even believe in God. And science is because God upholds the universe in a consistent fashion, as he promised in Genesis, Genesis 8.22, for example. But my friend rejects Genesis, so why does he believe that God's going to uphold the universe in a consistent fashion? He's borrowing on the Christian worldview, and then he's arguing against the Christian worldview, and that is not logical.

But if you learn to debate on the level of worldviews, it's very, very powerful, and I dare say you will not lose a debate if you're doing it biblically and if you're doing it correctly. You will not lose a debate on origins. When you gave the example of the yardstick, I thought you were going to say, so then I went and found all my friends who had the same size yardstick, and then he found all his friends with his shorter yardsticks, and then we still had the same argument going on.

That's right. That's the same thing, isn't it? And people will appeal to authority. They'll say, well, the smartest people are using these yardsticks, but that doesn't settle it.

We could go to France, where they have the standard, I guess it's the standard meter, but they used to before they redefined it based on the speed of light. But we could do the same thing. We could find a standard yardstick, and I could say, see, I'm right.

And he could say, well, obviously somebody swapped that out. The real one's been stolen. I mean, you can't just debate it that way.

You have to show that it's inconsistent on its own terms, and that's what the ultimate proof of creation, the book will help people to do. That's what it really comes down to, worldviews. And that evolutionistic worldview, it operates a lot on assumptions, doesn't it? I think that you've said in the book that the Bible offers us the preconditions for knowing and understanding man's experience and how to reason and rationalize those experiences, correct? That's right.

In fact, a lot of people want to make evolutionists like to pride themselves. They say, well, we're very intellectual. We're very logical.

We're very scientific. But the fact is, you couldn't be rational, you couldn't be scientific, and you couldn't be logical unless the Bible is true, because you wouldn't have laws of logic in a universe that's not upheld by a mind, because you wouldn't have laws. You can't have laws apart from a lawgiver.

And they could say, oh, well, you know, the universe just is the way it is. But that's not an answer. That doesn't explain why it continues to be so logical and orderly.

The Bible does make sense of that. Why would the mind be able to access these laws of logic? Now, I, as a Christian, can answer that. I can say, well, God made my mind and he made me in his image, and so I can think in a limited, finite way like God does.

I can think in a way that's consistent with his nature. But, you see, in an evolutionary world, do you where the brain's just, you know, chance mutations? There's no reason to think that it should be logical. You say, well, that has survival value.

And I say, well, yeah, but so does my opposable thumb. That has survival value, but I don't say that my opposable thumb is rational, that it's capable of logical thought and so on. It may have survival value, but that doesn't mean that it can be logical or rational.

The very idea that our minds can be rational, that there are laws of logic, that they don't change with time, that there are laws of nature, all of these things that we rely upon are Christian concepts that go ultimately back to Genesis. They go back to the fact that God created the way he says he did in Genesis, and they don't make sense in an evolutionary worldview. The etymology I like to use, and Dr. Bahnsen likes to use this, is it's kind of like a debate on the existence of air.

Can you imagine two people arguing whether or not air exists? What would the critic of air say? He's making all these elaborate arguments. Oh, there's no such thing as air. But all the while, he's breathing air.

And in fact, he's using air to make his arguments against air. So the fact that he's able to make his case proves that he's wrong. And so it is with the critic of creation.

He has to use biblical Christian creationist principles in order to make his argument. He's got to use laws of logic, a creationist principle. He's got to use science, which is a creationist principle, in order to argue against creation.

So the fact that he's able to make his case proves that he's wrong. And it'd be fair to say that that first gentleman is full of hot air. That's right.

That's right. Listening friend, I hope today's conversation has encouraged you to become more familiar with God's Word and to think carefully about the foundations of what you believe. One thing I especially appreciate about these older programs is the opportunity to revisit conversations that can still challenge us to study, ask questions, and grow in our understanding.

And we're not finished. Tomorrow we'll continue this interview with Dr. Jason Lisle exploring biblical authority, science, morality, and the different ways people interpret the evidence around them. If you missed part of today's broadcast, want to hear it again or share it with a friend, visit GreatNewsRadio.org or WLUJ.org. Under the Mark & Friends tab, you'll find the audio transcript, scriptures, key takeaways, practical applications, and additional resources to help you grow in your walk with Jesus.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for being a part of our radio listening family. This is Mark Burns with the Ministry of Great News Media.

God bless you and have a great day and night.