Professor Major Coleman Takes On Evolution, Noah’s Ark and the Flood

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0:00 In the studio with us today Dr Major G Coleman is a law professor at the North Carolina Central University School of Law he has a PHD in political science from the University of Chicago and a law degree from the University of Maryland he has practiced law for many years with the federal government and is an expert on the political economy of race evidence the scientific method formal argument critical thinking and logic let's welcome to Hope at night major sweet Dr Coleman thank you so much for being here with us thank you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background uh I grew up uh in New York I flunked out of high school in New York and then I went back to school wow wow now we also have a special guest here with us who else do we have here with you my wife is here with me okay wonderful now where did she just come from she just came from Brazil she just flew in from Brazil wonderful wonderful now we've just been hearing the story of Alise and Mark now how in the world did you come into their lives tell us about that my uh I was teaching as just as Mark said I was teaching a class on African-American religion and Mark was there in his freshman year at the State University of New York what amazed me about him was his intensity we spent a lot of time talking about the Cross of Christ and how the atonement process works and Mark had no end to questions he in fact I got tired of him coming to office wow so he kept asking question after question wanting to understand and and investigate this more now what did you present that was so compelling well the first thing we showed them was how the Cross of Christ works and how the Salvation process works and then we also told them that the Bible was true and the and that they could know and understand the evidence for the Bible now how did the other students feel about what you were presenting we presented the the evidence not only to our classes we had a university-wide

2:03 Program for the entire 8,000 students on the University campus wow wow what was the name of the program we called it the origin series okay what did you present can you break that down a little bit sure sure we gave them the evidence that the Bible was true we also had an evolutionary studies program on campus that was teaching our students that the Bible was myth and I took it as my personal job to demonstrate that that was not true and to challenge The evolutionary studies program to come forward and meet me in public public and sign a document that they would engage in a public debate we offered them $20,000 if they would come forward signed the document in front and I had two cashier checks $10,000 each that we were going to offer them on Saturday morning if they showed up and I really wanted to give the money away I' been trying for 30 years without success wow and and what was the response then from the the school body with all this that was happening well on Saturday morning when we had our program and I had my two Cashers checks there we waited for somebody from The evolutionary studies program to show up and no one did no one did was Mark there also at that time yes yes Mark was there every year helping me to set up our backbreaking display now let me ask you a question with with all this that's being presented was there any uh issues with the administration or anything like that oh yes absolutely the president of the University who was a trained PhD biologist took issue with our program and they published in the student newspaper that they wanted our program to be stopped what happened well we didn't stop I I wrote a response to that and I said we believe in academic freedom if you have the evidence come forward and demonstrate it if you want to shut down our program there's no better way to do that than to come forward show that this is mythology show that the facts are wrong and certainly I'll be so embarrassed so humiliated I wouldn't dare to present this again what better place to do this than Academia you you presented a challenge you say hey look prove me wrong I'm I'm willing to admit up wrong wrong if you can prove it to me I I said come forward with all the science that you've got because I'll be there Saturday morning wow that must

4:07 Have been a remarkable time Mark do you remember this experience vividly it it was it's I I remember it like it was yesterday it was it was a challenging time we were waiting I was expecting someone to come forward but no one came forward wow wow now how did Elise come into the picture from your perspective well elely came in as Mark's girlfriend and uh you know uh she was sweet and cute you know she didn't say a whole lot you know I didn't really know a great deal about her but if she was Mark's girlfriend that was good enough for me and she was involved with with our programs too I was surprised at how intense she was and the questions that she had and that she wanted answers to them wow wow so let me ask you this uh if a skeptic an honest skeptic was coming to you and say hey look I'm on this investigation for truth I want to understand reality true reality where do I start what would you say to them in that that few moments that you have with them I would say that we really as human beings we really only have four tools for knowing and understanding what truth is okay formal argument science critical thinking and strong Theory um actually as human beings there's another way that we can learn truth and we call that Revelation and that comes directly from God but even that has to come through our senses and we call that science and you've been presenting this uh when you were at that school for how many years that's you're going backways we we I was there for for almost 15 years and we presented that every year wow every year on campus so we had and we took surveys every year so we know the impact that we had on students okay Mark and Elise your life has been changed by the way God Ed this man where are you guys at in life right now well right now it's been quite a journey so I went from going to the State University of New York uh studying to be a teacher got my bachelor and Masters in teaching and then Midway through my grad school I just felt this

6:13 Uh I would say personally it was God calling me to the Seminary actually after a phone call that I had with major sometimes he just calls me randomly he's like hey Mark I have something to tell you he just so he just said I just see you at Seminary you know and I was like you know this one time that you mention it I do too so I just so that's where we are we're we're in Michigan and in the Seminary wow so now you guys are studying for ministry right now wow that's fantastic this is what mentorship is all about fantastic well it's time to go to a break but in our next segment we're going to find out more about something major Coleman has brought with him this is sitting right here on stage a full tocale replica of Noah's Arc can the biblical story be true we'll find out out more in our next segment so don't go away welcome back to Hope at night in our earlier segment we met Mark and Elise who recently made the transition from not really believing in God to having a firm belief in him we also met major Coleman the professor they encountered who had a major impact on their lives in this segment we're going to take a closer look at a story from the Bible one that has challenged people of faith for centuries and see if it could possibly be true now major I've been itching to get to this what in the world is this in my stage this is the largest scale model of Noah's Arc in the world uh what's the story behind this thing well I needed a way to show students on a secular campus that the biblical story of creation and Noah's flood was true and I figured that the best way to do that was to actually build the ark so they could see with their eyes how big it was and that it would easily contain every kind of

8:16 Animal in the world Professor Coleman say someone has never ever heard of the story of Noah and the flood could you could you break down for us really quickly what is that story all about well it was after the world had been in existence for 1656 years and God decided that because of their wickedness and their violence that he was going to destroy the world and he ordered Noah to build an ark and as you can see that Ark was four 540 ft long on its launch platform it would have stood 100 feet wide and been 80 100 feet high and been 80 feet wide and this is its size compared to Modern objects that you can see today the the entire flood lasted for over a year and it covered all the land on the entire planet wow you know prior to me becoming a believer in the Bible I had learned even in Hinduism about the story of a worldwide flood and how a family was preserved during that worldwide Flood now I heard this story exists in many different cultures how do we know that the biblical story is the most accurate story okay well the best way to test that again is with science and understand exactly how the flood happened um before Noah's flood there was a Subterranean water chamber 60 Mi down beneath the earth's crust which is 60 Mi of granite that water was under tremendous pressure and increasing temperature until it reached about 1,000° once the crust cracked it bursted forth with a power of a trillion billion atomic bombs Dr Walter Brown is the one who invented hydroplate Theory and he has shown us exactly how the flood happened what's so amazing is not that all living life was destroyed what's so amazing is that eight people and the Animals inside the ark actually survived and it would take a boat like this for them to survive so if I'm hearing this correctly what you do in your presentations and in your course is you

10:19 Take this replica uh of a story that's found in the Book of Genesis and and you present the reasonableness of this story yeah we show that it was actually could work that it that it did work the first boat in the world that was actually built larger than Noah's Ark was probably the most famous ship and that was the Titanic it was the first boat that was ever built that was larger than Noah's arkc and that boat sunk yes and it sunk but Noah's Arc did not sink it it actually survived and when you can see this when I say this is the largest authentic model of Noah's Arc Noah's Arc was not made out of lumber it was made out of Hune logs and put together with wooden posts um the walls were 3 feet thick okay there's no such thing as a 540t long tree today so you cannot build a full fullsize model of Noah's Arc this is the largest correct to scale model that exists so uh I'm sure a lot of Skeptics ask you this question and that is this wait a minute all the life that exist in our world today that's all the animals uh that's all the the birds the the the the land animal all of that came from Noah's Arc how in the world did God fit all those animals upon this boat well if you if you look at an encyclopedia of life forms there are eight there are 90 genus forms of life that exist now the average size so 90 90 different kinds if you count those 90 different kinds of animals and you take the largest species in every genus by the time you get to the middle one one number 45 you're down to the size of a rat there were 15,000 animals on the ark and the average size even if you include Brachiosaurus um almost 70 feet long 110,000 lbs the average size on the animal of an animal on the size of the Ark was the size of a rat so um Noah could have had 15,000 rat siiz animals

12:24 And cages on the ark the total volume of the Ark was two 2 .2 million cubic feet um 15,000 cages 4 cubic feet would take up about um about 25% of the space on the ark so most of it was empty wow wow that's incredible most of it was empty and so when when Noah's Ark landed in those mountains what I'm hearing from you is those kinds or those uh family groups they went out and they begin to multiply and fill the world is that correct yeah so after you have if you have different kinds of animals or genus of animals that is um they can you can have different species that come from that so for instance wolves coyotes Dinko foxes they are all dogs okay so you would only need one type of dog on the ark that would be four dogs two males two females that could produce all those different species and the same things with the other animals let me ask you this question with is why are you so interested in this biblical story as opposed to any other biblical story well there that is because first of all Jesus believed in the flood model and it's the it's the basis for the entire authenticity of the Bible if you can prove that the Genesis story is false you have destroyed the entire belief system that on which Christianity is based so that's why we use this model to show people that Noah's Arc was real and that the story is true well couldn't the story have been symbolic metaphor for other kinds of events that took place how about creation couldn't that have been symbolic or or metaphorical in in the language that's there well it it is possible but when we look at the uh four postulates of creation and we compare them with the four postulates of evolution only the postulates of creation have been observed evolution is based on four major ideas none of them

14:27 Have ever been observed number one that life comes from non-life we have not one single example of Life coming from non-life number two that all the life forms that we have today came from single cell life forms many people do not know that while we do have single cell life forms that we call bacteria we have no two cell life forms we don't have three cell life forms we don't have four cell life forms we don't even have five cell life forms that is we go from single cell bacteria to complex life forms so there's no evidence that all life comes from single cell life forms this the the third postulate of evolution is that time and Chance Drive Evolution forward of course and time works against Evolution the chance of one simple 100 unit protein coming together by accident is this is a very big number time and chance make Evolution absolutely impossible the fourth postulate that evolution is based on is that um what we see today minor genetic variation in species is evidence of macroevolution so because cats are different colors dogs are different sizes that means that fish turned into cows and of course we know that that's not true because uh Mandel proved that all the genes that exist today you can shuffle them around but there are no new genes that created were created let's let's think about the four major postulates of creation number one where there's a design there must be a designer we see codes in DNA codes are EV evidence of intelligence because you have to translate from one language to another we have not a single example of that happening by accident number two that the Earth the solar system the universe and the Galaxy are young measured in thousands of years not millions or billions of years many times people ask me they say well major you believe in a young Earth a 6,000 year Earth can you show me that that's true without using the Bible and I say absolutely what's the oldest living thing on the planet the oldest living

16:29 Thing on the planet trees how old are the oldest trees 4,500 years that takes us back almost exactly to the year of the flood okay in 2500 BC number two I'm saying look at the sky uh uh we call solar nebuli a solar nebuli is uh what we see from a supernova when a star explodes it leaves a gas cloud because of our radio telescopes that we have now today we can look deep into space and we can actually count the number of solar NE Uli that are there and how many are there a supernova uh takes place about once every 26 years how many solar nebula do we have 6,000 years worth that's impossible in a universe that is billions and billions of years old and we have other evidences such as alpha decay that we do in our program that most people don't understand that also shows that the Earth is 6,000 years old so that's the second postu that proves that the biblical story of creation is true life that we see today are the basic kinds of animals and plant life that we originally created so we can test that you can breed dogs you can breed cats but you can't breed cats with dogs so there are limits to how far we can go and lastly that is Earth experienced a worldwide flood in approximately 2500 BC 1656 years after the world was created the world is filled with Limestone Li limestone is sedimentary rock it precipitates Out of Water the entire Earth was filled with water every mountain chain in the world including Everest has sea life on top of that mountains the mountains rose out of the water so we know that there was a worldwide flood let me let me pose a question to you and Mark and least feel free to jump in in this that is this most people who don't believe in God aren't card caring members of The Atheist Club they haven't studied molecular bi ology yes why don't they believe in God what is the struggle

18:33 There um NE I'm going to tell you that's a very good question my answer to that is probably because most of them has not actually seen the evidence that supports the Bible and that is my job to actually show them you're right most people are somewhere drifting somewhere in the middle this is a war for ideas and it's my job it's it's my job to combat these forces of error particularly in secular campuses in in universities which is where I work and teach and show that the evidence supports God's word God is a god of science that's fantastic mark leas would you like to add to that I think that even if you're not into all of the science it's in the media and it's just like little subtle things here and there it's just like we grow up watching dinosaur cartoons and just watching Disney Channel it's just like of course the world is billions of years old and so like when you get introduced to the biblical stories you're just like that's myth that's just like Zeus and Poseidon or like okay maybe there's some reality to it but that must be metaphor like you were saying and why because that's just what we grew up on and that's what we were indoctrinated to believe okay let me pose this question to you guys say someone grows up going to a Christian Church say they have been surrounded by by you know a church community and uh pastors who preach sermons are there wrong ideas of God that exists wrong ideas of the Bible exists well certainly certainly certainly they do exist and the exist in church many people don't know that some of the largest religious denominations actually support evolutionary theory and I'm I'm really sorry to hear that um it is important that people test any church that they go to against the Bible to make sure that it is it is accordance with the truths of the Bible

20:35 Jesus believed in the flood story and he said that he was coming again and it would be just as in the days of Noah so if Jesus believed it it's very difficult for me to understand how you could call yourself a Christian if you don't understand or accept the story of Noah's flood and the creation story and of course it's important to understand the science that goes along with that we have to do as Educators I'm an educator I have to do a better job in making sure that people understand and that they know the science that it's not just based on faith God never asks for Blind Faith it's always based on evidence I really appreciate this discussion I think what I'm hearing here is that with the evidence that you are presenting you are providing a space for Faith you are giving people a reason to believe and I think that's fantastic yes absolutely uh major Coleman you see that camera right there there are people who are watching right now there are people who are struggling with their faith in God if you were to look at that camera right there and you were to talk to someone who was struggling who maybe a skeptic someone wrestling with doubt what would you say to them I would say hold on the evidence is there God is interested in you he respects who you are if you read if you study if you seek him with all your heart you will find him he has promised you that the evidence is there and I am here to help wonderful if if someone want to find out more about what you're presenting where would they go they can go to post.org that is my website you can just send me an email major power station. org and you can find me post.org that is right post.org that's beautiful well it's time to go to a break but when we come back we'll get to hear some questions from our live audience for the guest tonight so don't away welcome back to Hope at night we've

22:44 Heard some mindboggling facts and I'm sure you got questions I'd like to turn to our live in studio audience and see what questions they have for our guests so let's find out does anyone here have any questions right there thank you hi I was just wondering is it possible that any other humans or animals could have survived the flood that basically took over the entire Earth the answer to that is absolutely not I've been asked that question many times before and usually it comes because people don't understand how powerful Noah's flood was the explosion of that Subterranean chamber ripped around the planet at 12,000 mph it was faster than the speed of sound if you saw it you would hear no sound the next thing you know if you saw it less than a second later you were dead that's how fast it was it was it was moving it buried everything under 10,000 ft of water what actually happened was that the continent sank okay if it would destroy a Brachiosaurus all right the most powerful land animal that ever lived 52 tons 110,000 lb believe me there's no human being that could survive that de Devastation Dr Walter Brown has said the the power of that explosion was a trillion billion atomic bombs absolutely not wow wow that's that is intense yes Wow Let's go to our second question do we have anyone else right over there when you're checking the truth of things against the Bible how can you be sure you have the correct interpretation when there are so many different interpretations and translations going around um most biblical Scholars encourage people to use several different translations of the Bible and I certainly do um just about all of them are good translations and they can give you different perspectives you can use

24:47 Some direct translations from the Greek and Hebrew you can use paraphrased versions if you want to try to gain understanding and of course today with the computers and we have uh transliterations of the Bible in Greek and Hebrew you can look for the Greek and Hebrew words and find out exactly what they mean I like to tell people if you take the widest particularly when we're talking about dates in the Bible which are the most controversial if you take the widest Divergence of all the translations the Bible is from 6,100 years to 7,300 years that's how that's just a little bit over a thousand years difference no matter which translation you use I any translation shows that evolution is not true um for me I take the Short age the youngest 6100 years why because that matches the scientific evidence that we have solar nebuli helium Decay and the ages of trees and moondust all of those we can measure fairly exactly we're right almost at the 6,000 year mark But I recommend that you use different translations to try to whatever will help and increase your meaning for for the Bible has there been any evidence to substantiate the accuracy of the scriptures we have today oh uh AB absolutely we have many old documents that predate Christ okay we don't have any the original Books of Moses that Moses wrote with his with his actual hand but again some of the best evidence that I have found is that supporting to the flood to show that the Bible is true okay um we have we have found uh uh the uary that is the bone box of Caiaphas Jesus's brother James okay so um we for many years um archaeologist refused to believe that Pontius Pilate existed until they found his name carved on a stone that was part of the wall of the temple so all the Bible the evidence the more evidence that we find we find that the Bible is true I heard a quote someone said that

26:50 The Bible is an anvil that has worn out many hammers yes it has it has Mark are you studying any of this in seminary yes in Seminary especially specifically with this with this topic in particular because in the Seminary that I go to at least Andrew's University we have a high view of scripture so that they make sure that in our program that we're dealing with the Greek and the Hebrew specifically um so what would happen is we would also say that adding on to what major perfectly put there are so many references we have more we have thousands upon thousands of manuscripts specifically Greek manuscripts in particular that would point to the validation of the authenticity of scripture um and we treat textbooks as if they were a Bible so um that is if something like a textbook where we all seem to learn from uh can be viewed in that way surely the scriptures can be seen in that way as well fantastic do we have a third question anywhere right there uh this is for the professor as a law professor do you sometimes find some conflicts between your spirituality and the laws that you have to teach and practice and if so how do you handle that there are many conflicts between the things that I know are true as a Christian and uh the laws that we have some of them are contemporary laws some of them are past laws probably one of the greatest people that had to deal with that was Martin Luther King Jr that is the laws of him of his day in the Jim Crow era were counter to the laws of God and he made it very clear when a human law is not supported by the law of God I have a duty we have a duty to disobey such laws okay and that's a hard thing to do it's a hard thing for many people to do so I teach that to my class that is there is a higher law to human law and what's most important is that we know what those higher laws are so that's what I teach in my jurist Prudence classes that's amazing you know during the nberg trials after World War

28:55 II when the Nazis were brought onto the stand for with criminal charges they were asked why did you do this why did you uh Slaughter these Jews and they said we're just following the laws of their land but the prosecutors and the court appealed to what they called the higher law and they said look there's a higher law that's above the laws of the land so that's really remarkable yes I like the way you you put that Martin Luther King Jr he said everything that the Nazis did was legal according to their law Hitler broke no law in Germany okay um so but that that is there are laws and then there are God's laws and we must always obey God rather than men that's right all right do we have another question right over there were there any insects on the ark and if so why did Noah choose to bring them on well now I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to be honest we don't have biblical evidence of that but and however insects are very party and just like the the Giants of the sea which you can see here down in front of the Ark the giant a coronasaurus a pleaus blue whales the Giants of the sea were not on the ark and certainly while many of them died sufficient survive for them to exist today so we're probably fairly certain that there were insects on the Ark on the animals at that time and they survived the flood seeds survived the flood okay even though they could have bought them on the ark a seed can survive in salt water for over a year yes and and be carried in the air yeah that's right that's right so they survived do you have another question right over there so um if they were transported how would you say fish sharks dolphins whales how are they stored on the ark um one of the things we like to do is we of course we have the largest animal that ever lived a blue whale um in front of the AR dark there a blue whale um is about

31:01 300,000 lb 100 ft long and you can easily see that if you had the desire if you were crazy enough to do it you could actually fit four fullsize blue whales on the ark um there'd be no real reason to take a full-size blue whale on the ark for for two reasons number one it can survive in the water and number two if you wanted to take a blue whale on the ark why would you take a full-size one that it'll die sooner even though they live to be 90 years you would take a small one okay and that would save space you can see here on the top of our Ark we have a full siiz brachiosaurus and right beneath it we have a baby brachiosaurus a full-size Brachiosaurus is 110 thou 110,000 lb all right 50 tons um if you wanted to take one and you wanted to care for it certainly it would fit four of them would easily fit on the ark and it would only take up 310 of 1% of the volume of the Ark a full-size brosaurus but again it will die sooner it has lots of waste why take a full-size one when you can take a baby you can see how small it's about the size of a large cow a small brachos a baby brachiosaurus so um so you wouldn't need to take the Giants of the sea the giant coronos surus um which is probably what was described in job as the Leviathan you wouldn't have to take a Brachiosaurus which again described in job probably the behemoth with a tail like a cedar you wouldn't have to take the Giants of the Sea on the ark and the Giants of the land you could take as babies if you just wanted to conserve space and all of the animals all of their food all of their water fit on the first deck of the Ark the other two decks were empty major com but where are dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible Well I just I just mentioned that in job that is we have Behemoth it says that he had a tail like a cedar he saids he has bones like bronze and legs like iron and I'm saying that certainly looks looks pretty close to a Brachiosaurus to me the Leviathan in job it says can you put a hook in its nose Can you capture it

33:04 With a harpoon it says its scales are like iron and you can see the size if you look at a coronos surus down there low on the ark you can see its size compared to a human being it could swallow you right in one gulp all right probably wouldn't even have to chew so they were certain and and the equivalent size of a of a Brachiosaurus so they there are there are not only dinosaurs many mentioned in the bible but we have descriptions of dinosaurs all right and we even have we even have not petrified dinosaur bones we have mummified dinosaurs that we have found that is where it's still skin so they absolutely had to be the Giants of the land had to be on the ark um uh that's different from saying that all of the different genus of dinosaurs were on the ark that doesn't mean that but certainly some of them were because we have evidences After the flood that they survived um the lack of vegetation probably is why they went extinct After the flood wow wow that's remarkable it helps you recognize that the story of Noah is very much a reasonable story based upon all the evidence that's being found I think we got time for one more question right there yes I was just wondering um How did the animals that were on the ark what made them not be able to eat Noah and his family like how did that um that's the it it it says after the After the flood that Noah and his family now you have to get all these animals out of the Ark and of course um they were very powerful and very Fierce and Noah was afraid of them that's why God put the fear of man in all of the animals so there was danger of that and of course we have an example of a full size cage that would have been on the that would have been on the ark probably after the flood the animals were so anxious to get off of that that they didn't have time

35:06 For Noah they had they wanted to eat something more than the grain that they had been fed for over a year on the ark so I'm sure that they had better things to do the good thing is is that Noah and his family did survive and you can see here how small the eight people that we have next to the white van how small a human being would be compared to the ark so they did survive and the of course they were on the third deck we have 20th century evidence his family they had housing on the third deck you could easily keep all the animals on the on the first deck and this is an automatic cage it's automatic watering automatic um Waste Control they didn't have to do much maintenance so they could let them go by themselves wow wow this has been fascinating thank you so much Mark Elise and major for being with us today and for sharing with us such insightful things you know we've been examining the topic of Truth and take a closer closer look at the story of Noah's Ark some people look at the story of Noah's Ark as a story of Destruction but it's a story of Grace and salvation anyone can be saved if they want to be I'm sure this episode has given you lots to think about on the topic of what is truth and whether or not we can truly trust the Bible as a source of Truth so what do you think please follow us at Facebook on Facebook at Hope at night and send in your comments and questions to us there and be sure to join us next week week for another episode of Hope at