1KHO 690: Faith + Science for Kids and a New Way to Talk About Creation | Ryan Frederick, Atom and Iota

March is when homeschool families start looking ahead. You can almost see the finish line. Spring goals, end of year milestones, maybe even testing around the corner. And this is such an important time to reinforce key skills and build confidence before wrapping up the year. If you are thinking about assessments, whether required by your state or simply the benchmarks you've set for your family, it's helpful to have a tool that makes review simple and clear. That's where IXL can really shine. IXL is an award-winning online learning platform that fits seamlessly into homeschooling. It offers interactive practice across math language, art, science, and social studies from pre-K through 12th grade. It personalizes learning for each child, keeps them engaged, and gives parents clear insight into progress. What stands out this time of year is the real-time feedback and progress tracking. Kids get instant explanations when they miss something, and parents can see exactly where growth is happening and where a little reinforcement might help. It takes the guesswork out of finishing strong, make an impact on your child's learning, get IXL now, and 1,000 hours outside listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership. We may sign up today at ixl.com slash 1,000 hours. Visit ixl.com slash 1,000 hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Welcome to the 1,000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Erdj and the founder of 1,000 Hours Outside. And today I have for you bestselling author, top podcaster, family and marriage advocate, Ryan Frederick, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. It's always a bit weird hearing the intro. Girl, wait, have I really done that many, that much stuff? Yeah. You have, you have. I got a bunch of your new books and they're called Adam in Eota. Is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, you nailed it, Adam in Eota. Yeah. Adam in Eota, and these are books that are just teaching kids about life and connected to the glory of God and His creation. And so they're learning science. And I love stuff like that. I love stuff like that because there's just so much that we can connect with nature and our spiritual lives and creation. So I love these. There's four of them, Adam in Eota, the map of life. Each one comes with a parent guide in it. You call it a parent prompt. A life unfolding, the Reddus River all about our blood. And then you've got the initial one. And then there's also a coloring book. So that's kind of fun. So you do a lot with kids. You do a lot with family. You do a lot with marriage. You have the Fierce Marriage Podcast. Can you give listeners a little bit of your backstory? Yeah, yeah. So my lovely wife, Selena and I, we've been married 22 years, which is another one of those. We're the same. Were you 2003? Yeah. Yeah, same. What date? September 6th. Oh, we were June 21st. You almost forgot. We switched our date last minute, but that would be dumb. It's been so many 22 years. Well, listen, we also have birthdays on June 24th and June 28th. So it is quite the month. So we got married June 21st of 2003. So just a couple of weeks before yours. Yeah, we've got, that's interesting. Yeah, so we've been married 22 years. We have four daughters. Our oldest is gonna be 12 here in about two weeks. And our youngest, it'll, she'll be three in January. So a little bit of a spread between the daughters, but they are still young. Yeah, and we've been doing Fierce Marriage for the better. So about the last 12 years, 13 years. Wow. And that started as a blog. If you remember when blogs were a thing? Yeah, yeah, I had one too. Yeah. There's still a thing, but people don't go there as much. But yeah, we started as a blog and then, and kind of, you know, the reason we started it was cause we saw, we looked out of the marriage space and we'd been married at that point, nine years. And we thought, hey, we still love each other. We still like each other. Why are there still friends, why are there friends of ours that we've been in their wedding but they're getting divorced, you know? And we started seeing friends get divorced. And in some cases, I think we had one friend that got married and divorced twice. And we just thought, what's different about us? Why are we still together? Why do we still have a marriage that we enjoy? And we just realized at the center of it's Christ. And so, you know, here I was, I'm not like a pastor. I wasn't a theologian, but I realized we had something to share. And so we just started Fierce Marriage just to share transparently our successes and our failures and just to co-travel, walk alongside other married couples and yeah, the Lord has blessed it. And so we've been doing that ever since. We started the Fierce Marriage podcast when we launched one of our books, I think, about six, seven years ago. And that's the highlight of my week. I'm actually gonna record with my, with Selena after this. I just get to hang out with my wife and talk about stuff that matters. So we still do that on a weekly basis. Yeah, there's a lot more to the story, but that's kind of where we came from and why we started the podcast anyway. Where does the name come from? That was Selena. So yeah, I had, so a little bit more of my backstory. I used to work with publishers around the country. I did a lot of web development for them. And I kind of saw behind the veil and I had kind of a marketing mind. And I thought, hey, these, a lot of these authors are just kind of showing up and we could show up. We could show up as a married couple and just start talking about this stuff. And so I kind of pitched the idea to her. I thought, what would be a good title? And she, I think, came up with it within a few minutes. And I thought, you know, that works because I think we landed on early on the tagline was, because marriage takes a fierce tenacity that never gives up and never gives in. And so we just want to encourage couples to do that, to not give in because it's worth it. So you've had this podcast that's been going since 2017. What are some of the topics that you cover? Man, I can't think of any other marriage topic that we could cover. I think we're like episode 430 something by now. So yeah, everything basically. So we have the kind of the foundational aspects of marriage. We cover those, you know, what is, why does it matter? Why is it worth fighting for? What is covenant? Because marriage is not something that people came up with. It's something that was given to us by God. And so how do we understand it in God's terms? What is love, biblically? Not just happy feelings and making sure everybody feels good all the time, but really love is wanting the greatest, highest good for somebody and being willing to fight through a hard thing, knowing that it's in love. So those are the foundational aspects of marriage. And then we get into communication, which communication is the lifeblood of, if a couple can communicate, there's not really anything they can't work through as long as they just know how to talk about it in a productive way without leaving or becoming, you know, losing themselves in the communication. So we talk about communication a whole lot. And then on top of that, there's just common topics for every married couple. So finances, intimacy, a big one, believe it or not, is division of labor. So priorities and chores. Oh, I believe it. I believe it. We pulled our listeners and said, what do you want to hear about and what do you deal with the most? And communication by far was the highest. But number two, under that was, just how do we manage a household together? So we talk about all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, you've got four young kids. I talked to this woman earlier this year. Oh, Ryan, sometimes the names, they just slide. I'm like, oh gosh, and she wrote such a good marriage book. And it was one of my favorites. But it'll come to me. She was talking about the mental load. The book is called A Better Share. And her name is Dr. Morgan Cutlip. And she talks a lot about division of labor. And she said, one of the things that's unseen is the mental load. And so actually, she gave the story, I think it's funny. So she gave the story at the beginning of her book where she was trying to delegate and she's getting a birthday party ready for one of her kids and she's trying to delegate to her husband. So she's like, well, can you please be in charge of the balloons? And this is what I want. She was like really explicit in the directions. Like it's a baseball theme or whatever the situation was. And I would like primary colors. And she said, the days went by and she felt like in the back of her mind, I don't think he did this. So is that getting really close to the birthday? And she was like, it just, I'm feeling like maybe the balloons aren't, something's going off the balloons. And he was like, what day am I supposed to pick them up? Oh, shoot. Yeah, so it was just a funny story. And she said he gave his permission to share the story. But that sort of mental load piece that is often unseen, the person, if someone's trying to get together, all the details. I mean, I think especially going to the holidays, that's a big one. So division of labor is tricky. I mean, you've got young kids and people working. It can be really hard to sort out. Do you have any like overarching advice there? Well, I mean, in terms of kids or marriage or both. In terms of the division of labor. I think clarity of expectations and clarity of communication is a gift. So being clear is a service to one another. So Selena, one of our ongoing jokes is that she'll say this about any manner of thing that need to be done. But she'll be like, hey, the garbage is full. Or she'll make an, you know, announce like the garbage is full, the garbage needs to be taken out. And I'll think, yeah, you know, that's right. It does. True. True. And, you know, of course I know that she's asking me to do it in that instance. But in other more subtle cases, I don't always know that. And so we use that as kind of the reminders like, hey, if you want it, if you want me to take the garbage out, I'm happy to do that. But I just just ask me. Like don't just talk about the garbage being full, but ask me. And I'm not going to be a jerk and always, you know, technically, you know, drive that point home and make her always ask me overtly. Like I can read into it too. But I think just being clear around communication of those chores is huge. Or even letting your spouse into what that mental load is. Like, so a lot of the stuff that I'm carrying, it really weighs on me. And Selena, whether I articulate what those things are, she sees the weight on me and she feels it in the temperature of our home and the temperature of our relationship. And so sometimes I'll just tell her, hey, this is what I'm facing. I don't expect or think that you can do any of this stuff for me, but just so you know, this is the load that I'm carrying. These are some of the open loops in my mind. Just so you know, but also, you know, pray for me. And I just need you to kind of be, especially because of the season of life we're in right now, I'm currently finishing up a seminary. And so I'm just like, hey, I got all this stuff happening. I just need you to be extra, extra tough, I'll say, extra grace, graceful or grace filled toward me, I should say. It can be tough to be grace filled. Yeah. Oh, it is. I read this book, one of the best books I read recently because I felt like it was so eye-opening in terms of the content, in terms of explaining really how we feel in this day and age with, like, you know, you've got four kids, you're finishing seminary, you've got your podcast, you've got fierce parenting, you've got these books, then you were like, I have more things than that. You know, I'm like, okay, there's a lot to juggle. And I think most people listening, they have all these things they're juggling. And this man named Dr. Mark Berman wrote this book called Then the Mind of Nature, Nature of the Mind, something like that. And he was talking about how we have only a certain amount of directed attention where we can focus on things. And it drains, like throughout the day, it's just constantly draining. And so we have all these, like you said, open loops in your mind. Once you're out, he's like, you can't hardly control any of your impulses. So then it just causes all sorts of problems in your family. He said the solution is to go outside because it helps to fill it back up. I was like, this is great. But to your point, it can be tricky when there's just a lot of things to do and who's supposed to do them. This woman named Casey Davis wrote a book and she talked about how she focuses in their home on equal rest that, you know, your labor is never gonna be equal because it's just so different. It's like, it's like apples and oranges. You can't really compare it. She's like, you know, you prioritize making sure people get the rest that they need. And I thought that was a really good, good. These are good topics to talk about. So the Fierce Marriage Podcast, people can listen to you. And then when did Fierce Parenting come in? Yeah, so we started Fierce Parenting right around when the COVID stuff hit. So I'll say five years ago. And that was something that, parenting is very different from marriage. Like when you talk about marriage, there's stuff you can say that's almost universal, right? Like communication is good, you know, certain things are better than others. You can say that. And there are aspects of parenting that are, I will say, are universal truths as well. But when it comes to the boots on the ground tactics of parenting, I'm just very aware of like, no kid is the same and no, like, they don't react to this, to, you know, the same parenting like our kids will. And so like with marriage, we can be very anecdotal. Like here's what we're facing. Here's how we handled it. Here's kind of what we hope you might learn. So you don't have to go through it like we did. With parenting, it's a lot harder to do that. So we just stick to kind of our three pillars of parenting, which if I'm on my game, I can remember all three of them. What are my pillars of parenting? Yeah. And it's kind of, they're all very broad, but they are foundational. And that's the first one is kids are a blessing, right? They are truly a blessing. Family is God's idea. That's the second one. Family is not just a suggestion. It's not a social construct. Like families are God's idea. If we treat them that way, then we approach our family differently. The third one is all of parenting is discipleship. And that's why I love podcasts like yours, where the decisions you make as parents, to get your kids out into the world and to get them into the right books and to get them into the right situations, all of that, all those are discipleship decisions. Every parent is discipling their kids, whether they're Christians, strong Christians, nominal, or not Christian at all, you're discipling your child. You're teaching them what you really care about. And so if we understand those three truths about parenting, I think a lot of the particulars tend to work themselves out and parents who love their kids can use those foundations to see the particulars in their own instance, in their own, yeah. Oh, I love all of these. Okay, so people can find this at fierceparenting.com, fiercemarriage.com, and also theologykids.com. That's what we're gonna talk about right now. Are these new books that you have came out that are Adam and the Oda? So then this is another iteration where you decided to write children's books. These are children's books that are introducing kids to different parts of theology. Why do you think it's important for kids to know about theology? Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. As R.C. Sproul said, he wrote a book, I think, on this, and it's called Everyone's A Theologian, right? So our kids, whether we acknowledge it or not, like they're making sense of the world. And when you do that, you are doing theology. Like when you're looking at a tree, a pine cone, when you're looking at your sibling, when you're deciding how to handle a situation, we are saturated in theology. And I think a lot of times, especially in the Christian mind, you think, well, theology is something theologians do. It's something pastors do, or it's something laypeople just kind of let it, they get told what to think. But everyone is a theologian, right? And so my hope with these books was to give parents a tool to help their children connect the beauty of creation, which with the deep truth that there's a creator, right? Creation is not just out there on its own. There's a purpose behind it because there's a purposeful creator behind it. And so that's where the characters came from. So Adam is the smallest unit of matter. So it's hard to, if you're not reading it, it's hard to get, it's not the name Adam, but it's Adam as in like cells and atoms and things. And then Yoda is the smallest unit of thought. I designated him as that because Yoda is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. It's also the closest, it's related to the smallest letter, the Yoda and the Hebrew alphabet, which are the languages that we get scripture from. It's where scripture was written rather, the original languages. And so the idea was you have Adam is the, he's going around, he's kind of like the left-brained like logic thinker, he recognizes amazing things. He'll look at, so in the instance of the Reddus River, they're floating in the bloodstream. And so he's looking at the bloodstream and saying, wow, isn't this amazing? You've got these red blood cells and they're carrying oxygen with these proteins. And then you've got these white blood cells and they're attacking the intruders. Isn't that all amazing? And then Yoda will say, yeah, that's amazing. And Adam will explain how it works that way. And then Yoda will say, well, it works that way because someone designed it to work that way. And when we recognize that it not only works that way, but it does so as a miracle and as a gift from a designer, then we can give glory then to the designer and the thing has even more glory in itself because it's pointing us to the creator. And it's not just amazing on its own merit. It's amazing because God is amazing. And so we wanted to give kids and parents the tool and some of the language to, when you go on a walk, a flower is not just beautiful, it is beautiful, but a flower is beautiful because of the creator who made it that way. And if you get even more into the things of, why they're brightly colored. So bees can see them and bees go and get pollen and they go make magical, sweet nectar, honey, right? All of that stuff just shouts the glory of God. And I think the sooner we give kids categories for that, the better and it equips them and gives them more joy. Yes, it shouts the glory of God and the brilliance of God and the creativity of God and the endlessness of God. And this is the total brilliance that all works together. This is such a fun announcement to make. Womb Bikes is officially the 2026 bike partner of 1000 Hours Outside. And if you've been around here long enough, you know that's not a casual partnership. We care deeply about the tools that help families reclaim childhood and Womb is doing exactly that. Womb was founded by two dads in a Vienna garage who simply couldn't find a bike that actually fit their kids. So they built one. And what makes Womb different is that they don't start with engineering, they start with empathy. Every part of the bike from the lightweight frame to the brakes size perfectly for small hands is designed to help kids feel capable and confident. In a screen dominated world, bikes are more than bikes. They are freedom, they are connection, they're miles of memories before the street lights come on. 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And this is such an important time to reinforce key skills and build confidence before wrapping up the year. If you are thinking about assessments, whether required by your state or simply the benchmarks you've set for your family, it's helpful to have a tool that makes review simple and clear. That's where IXL can really shine. IXL is an award-winning online learning platform that fits seamlessly into homeschooling. It offers interactive practice across math language art, science, and social studies from pre-K through 12th grade. It personalizes learning for each child, keeps them engaged, and gives parents clear insight into progress. What stands out this time of year is the real-time feedback and progress tracking. Kids get instant explanations when they miss something and parents can see exactly where growth is happening and where a little reinforcement might help. It takes the guesswork out of finishing strong, make an impact on your child's learning, get IXL now, and 1,000 hours outside listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership. When they sign up today at IXL.com slash 1,000 hours, visit IXL.com slash 1,000 hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. I think about that so much, Ryan. Like, how is it that the hummingbird, you know, I just read a thing the other day about how its heart beats. Oh, I learned it from this woman named Erin Lynam, but it was something like, you know, 1,400 times a minute. I don't know, I don't, it's not that much. I'd have to look back at my notes. It is remarkable in how that it works, you know, it gets the nectar from the flowers and they know where to go. I'm like, come on, how could that have come from nothing? So it just screams, like you said, creator. Okay, so talk to us about the difference between natural revelation and special revelation. Yeah, so I kind of got into it a little bit, but if you think about, and the biblical categories would be like general revelation, special revelation, those terms are somewhat intertwined as far as natural and general revelation go. Those terms are similar. So if you read in Romans, or you know, you just read in Genesis, you see that God created all things, right? He created the heavens and the earth and he designed it in this fashion. Because he's the creator of all things, we can see his fingerprints in creation, whether or not we actually read the Bible, right? And that's what Paul talks about in Romans that we are without excuse because the glory of God is so evident like look at your hand and how your hand functions. Or you know, if anyone who's listening to this probably has had a baby, like how amazing is that? That human child came about the way that that human child did and now is walking among us. These naturally occurring things are not just neutral. Like they are telling us something about God. They're revealing generally who God is as creator as in his power, as wisdom and in his glory. But without God revealing himself specially to us, we wouldn't know how to be made right with him. We wouldn't know what his desire is. I always use this example, but I used to travel to New York for work. And oftentimes you get on the train and you're headed to a certain part of town and someone will get on the train. And you know, if it's a young guy, he's got the kind of hipster glasses, he's got the briefcase, he's got the suit and he gets off on Madison Avenue. Like you know, that guy probably works in creative work somehow. He's probably in marketing because of how he's dressed and where he's getting off. I can know something about that guy, but until that guy opens his mouth and tells me his name, tells me his desires, tells me his thoughts, I will never know any of that stuff about him. Everything will just be completely one side of the assumption based on my observation. And that's where we get special revelation. So special revelation, doctrinally speaking, from a Christian worldview is the idea that God has revealed himself, not only in creation, but especially through his word and there's all kinds of different ways he's done that in the past. You think in terms of visions and dreams and prophecies and prophets, and but namely we have scripture that records all those things. And that's how we know the character, the desires, the will of God, and most importantly, the plan of salvation of God. Because again, going back to Romans one, we know enough to know that we are not without sin. Does that make sense? Like we know that stuff's not always right. Our kids sin against us. We sin against each other in marriage. That much is clear. But we need a path out. We need hope. We need to know where do we go to find the answer to the sin that just seems so entangling in our lives. And that's why we have special revelation to tell us the path to obedience, but mainly the path to salvation in Christ. Because we've tried to obey and failed and we need help to that end. Well, Christ perfectly obeyed. And all of that is revealed in special revelation so that we can trust and believe, repent of our sins and be saved and then live that out in this life. And so when you say general revelation, that's kind of the creation category. Special revelation is God revealing himself through his word, namely his plan of salvation and how to live rightly before him. So what you've done is you've taken both of those and woven them together with these characters, Adam and Yoda, they illustrate both. And there's four options to read about them. And then in each of the books, there's parent prompts at the back. I always love, I love any parent prompt. I was like, come up with anything that can help me talk more about this book or questions I can ask or little activities I can do. All right, let's talk about the Reddus River. So this is a book about your blood. And in this book and also the map of life, you're learning a lot about DNA, really all of them in a life of folding unwell. You're kind of learning about the building blocks of life. And there are a lot of exceptional things in there that you learn about how long things are and the veins and the blood vessels. Is that something that you already knew or something that you became interested in because you were studying it to write the book? Yeah, so I'm kind of always writing lots of books at the same time. And so these ones were the result of just kind of compiling information over years. And I finally, when I had the idea of Adam and Yoda, I thought, this is where I can put this information. I can deploy these kinds of facts that I've learned over the years so that my kids can hopefully learn them and understand them as well. But yeah, so this first series was meant to explore the human body because I feel like that's really easy for kids to wrap their heads around because they have a human body. Yeah, right. They have like blood before, they understand that if they have a sibling that that life happened in mommy's belly, right? And so I would love to take this to other aspects of creation, like the cosmos and even like, if you think about things like water, like water is utterly amazing, just as it is. And then looking out at the stars and obviously like we talked about flowers and stuff like that. And now we decided to do the first books on the human body. And they do kind of build on each other. So if there was an order, the DNA one's gonna be probably the first one that I would recommend. Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, okay. I'm interested if I read them in order. So the DNA one is which one? Oh, the map of life? Yeah. I did not read them in order. That's okay. I read the Reddus River first. They, you don't have to read them in order. Now they would still make sense, but I think I refer to like the map of life in each of the books. Okay. But yeah, so that's the marvels of DNA. Like again, thinking about the nature of information. This is where I could get really nerdy, so I have to apologize in advance. That's right. But what is an idea and what is a true thing? And if you think about like, if you try to describe an apple to somebody and you say, and you point at something on the table, I say that's an apple. From a philosophical perspective, that's actually just something that aligns with the abstract view that we have of what an apple is. Because it's not an apple to somebody who doesn't speak English. It's something else. But the truth about that thing is that its appleness in English makes sense and that appleness idea is detached from language and it exists somewhere else and that's what abstractions are. And so you think about information. Is this what people talk about at seminary? This is what I thought. Is this what you just think about on your own? This is me reading his name, I creeped. I forget his first name, but... All right, okay, I'm tracking. Okay, so like information exists somewhere and DNA is information that's encoded into the physical world. But where does that information even come from? Right? And so where does it come from? Like if you saw the word help written in the sand on a beach, you wouldn't think, oh, that just randomly arranged itself and it just happens to mean help, right? No, there's somebody behind the information. And so, and then you take the idea that this information, which one strand of DNA is as tall as a six foot person, right? If you took all the DNA that's in all the cells in your body, I think that this is the one where it would go across the entire solar system and back. That much DNA is bound up in the cells of a child. And that DNA has the instructions for building that child from the very point that they are conceived. And that to me is just mind blowing. Like how can you look at that and think anything other than we have an incredible designer. And so we started with that idea that this is kind of the foundational aspect of who you are as a person. It starts with this map of life that gives the instructions for how to build who you are. I think in the book, it's just with two eyes in one spot and you're just so high and you have this kind of personality. All that stuff's baked into it. And then that builds into, I think the next book would be the Redist River, which is again, the map of life teaches, tells these cells kind of what to do and how to carry oxygen and where the blood vessels need to go and how to carry it to the various, the fuel, the food and the oxygen to the various organs in the body. And that's another very interesting thing. But then that actually feeds into the fourth book, which is the Life Unfolding, where you get into the map of life is building this child from the point of conception. And then you've got the mother's, so in the womb, by the way, at one point I figured out how to rhyme with the word uterus. Ha ha ha ha! That is a crowning achievement of your life. Ha ha ha! Was that a, that might have been a birth pun, crowning achievement, I don't know. Ha ha ha! What rhymes with uterus? Ha ha! You know, I didn't make the cut. Selena said there's no way you keep that one book. What? It didn't make the cut. It's somewhere in my notes deep on my computer. Is it inappropriate or is it just like it was weird? It was just like, no one wants to read the word uterus in a kid's book. That's kind of like, that's the conclusion my wife came to and I happened to agree. I was like, oh wait, where is it? I'm trying to find it, it's not in here. But if you think about like the placenta, and so how does a baby get fuel? And how does the baby get food and oxygen? Well, through the placenta, but a baby can have a completely different blood type than the parent, which is my role. And that's because the blood never actually mixes. You have these capillaries that come really close to each other. It's almost like something like this. And it's in the book that the bloods never mix. And then at the end, when you talk about the parent prompt, you say, this isn't amazing though, the blood never mixes. And isn't God amazing how he made it this way? And all of that, like I said, with the blood system and the DNA, it all kind of intertwines by the end. But yeah. Oh, what a neat thing that the four books, they go together but have these different topics. I really wanna know what rhymes with uterus. Okay. I do think that that is a special. I might be able to look it up. A special ability that you have to figure that out. Okay, so in the very first one then, the map of life, if you read them in the order that you talked about, one of the things that you talked about was the chances of evolving. This is one of my favorite conversations ever, Ryan, actually. I'm like, gosh, I could talk about this all the time. Because I got really impacted in high school, I've talked about this before, but I got really impacted in high school learning about this. And I listened to a speaker that talked about the, there are animals that could never have evolved. Like there's no way. So an example would be a giraffe. Because the giraffe has some sort of something in its neck that stops the blood from flowing to it. It would die every time it brought its head down to drink. Because the neck is so long, it would be like so much blood rushing to the head. So there's some sort of a mechanism in the neck that either stops the blood flow or slows the blood flow or something like that. And so it's like it either exists or it doesn't exist. It can't evolve. There can be like a middle period where it kind of had it, didn't have it. And so this person went through all of these different types of animals that it wouldn't have made sense. They wouldn't have survived with a middle stage. Like geckos and sticky things on there, whatever they have, gecko hands. Or like there's fish in the ocean that have lights on them. Like we didn't have a partial light. Do you know what I'm saying? Right, right. So you had statistics in here about the chances of evolving. Like we talk about DNA. DNA is truly a miracle molecule. Every person has 300 million base pairs encoding their entire DNA. DNA acts like a map. So this theme of DNA acting like a map is in all of the books. These detailed instructions for how you grow. So then you talk about the chances of evolving this. Do you know what you wrote? I could read it, but you may remember. Yeah, well, I've got it right in front of me. Yeah. So I don't know where you were reading exactly, but I was reading the third paragraph. It's in the parent prompt at the back of the map of life. Yeah, so what is it? One, yeah, your chances are one in 30 raised to the power of five million. That's put in the way of... Which is hard to understand, but you talk about, share the other way. That's not the numbers. Okay, so if you put a billion letters in a hat and you drew them out until you had the completed work of Charles Dickens. That's the chance of that evolving. And so I always say it takes so much more faith to believe that. Then it ever went to believe that there's a creator. I watched The Simpsons as a kid. I wasn't allowed. Probably that's better. But there's one episode, and I think it riffs on this theological or this philosophical question is that if you had a million chimps and a million typewriters typing, would they eventually produce the works of Charles Dickens? And there's a Simpsons episode where Burns is up there. He's like the billionaire guy and he pulls a thing off the the chimps typewriter and says, it was the best of times, it was the blirst of times. And he like, the chimp starts freaking out. And that actually, I was reminded of that. There's a great guy who talks about this exact thing because it comes down to math, right? When you think about, is this probable? Like, the math just does not math. There's no way to make it work. And there's not enough time, even in the most generous evolutionary theories, there's not enough time to get this level of precision. Yeah, from nothing to a giraffe. Nope, and an axolotl, you know. And a kangaroo. And humans and blood clotting, you know. I mean, there's not. And it just doesn't make sense. Like you wouldn't survive in the in-between periods. So I love that. A billion letters in a hat, you draw them out until you have the completed work of Charles Dickens. This person that I heard speak in high school, think about how long ago that would that so long ago for me. And it was so impactful. They said, the chances of evolution are that you put a whole bunch of pieces of into a paper bag, a whole bunch of parts into a paper bag, and you shake it really hard, and it turns into a microwave. I think that's so good. Guess I'm like, well, that would never happen, you know? Well, again, it's the big underlying question is, where's the information to... So there's a guy by my name is Stephen Myers, who does a lot of really good work in this area. And he talks about these things about probability and things. And I think a lot of evolutionists will say, well, you just got to shake it enough times. That's the big thing, like give it enough time and enough energy, and the thing will itself determining. Like the microwave wants to be a microwave, just give it enough time and the mechanism for it. Well, then you get even deeper. Like how does it even, where does the desire come from? Where does this impulse from nothing come to want to be or to have the, you know, to use the energy to become a more ordered thing? It breaks down really quick. And of course, there are people who will give you a run for your money, well, they'll make the arguments, but you just got to like get down to the base, base questions, like does it, it will not math. It's just no way to make it happen. And also, where does consciousness come from? That's what Andy Wilson talks about. I was like, oh, and I've never thought about that either. Where does consciousness come from? You say science and facts may help us explain, but the purpose behind them eludes us unless we can read and think in a way to see beauty and truth and goodness. So it's this combination of knowing the science and the facts, but also really seeing the things that God has done and allowing the nature to speak to us. Because there's the verse that says, the heavens declare the glory of God, the sky above proclaims his handiwork. So it's there, it's just a question of, you know, are we going to allow ourselves to enter into that? Okay, I think you're a homeschooling family. Yes, we are. Yes, okay, so tell us about being a homeschooling dad and tell us about your decision there. Yeah, man, it's one of those things, we made it so long ago, it feels like a long time ago. So our oldest, like I said, it was almost 12, so when she was about five, six, is when we started doing it. And we didn't really have a plan, we just knew that we probably were gonna put our kids in some Christian school somewhere, and then we realized we can't afford that, and we also didn't wanna put them... I kinda love that. Do you know who else said that? Actually, there's this farmer, I love his name's Joe Salatin, and he said the same thing. He wrote, I have a book about homeschooling, and he wrote the forward to it, and he told me that that was his decision too, like they were like, well, we should do Christian school, but they hardly made any money. You know, they were trying to farm, and like get this farm off the ground, and he was like, well, we can't afford that. So he said he heard it on the radio, he heard the word homeschooling, he'd never heard it before, it really didn't hardly exist in like the vernacular of society, I guess this would have been in the 80s. And so they decided to homeschool, and now he's super successful. I mean, he has so many books, and he's been in all these documentaries, he's like a famous farmer. Joe would imagine like they're more wealthy than they were back then, and I asked him, I said, if you had back then the money you have now, would you do something different? And he was like, absolutely not. Like so glad basically that he didn't have the money, because the decision just worked out to be this phenomenal one. So anyway, I related to that. Yeah, and I think I'd probably say the same thing. So my big thing that I harp on all the time with Christian families is we, this might upset some people, I care, but I also kind of don't, is that we need to give our kids a christ-centered education, whether that's at home or whether that's at a school where they are getting the christ-centered education. I think that is where we have a little bit of flexibility. I prefer homeschool, because I get to see my kids a lot more that way, we get to have a lot more FaceTime with them. I think it lends itself to the different learning styles that kids have, they're not assembly line friendly, just because they're five doesn't mean they go in the five-year-old bucket, maybe they're, need to be an older bucket or a younger bucket. So that's my big kind of like hill that I'm willing to fight for and maybe even die on, is this, we have to give our kids a christ-centric education. And what I mean by that, that can sometimes be a term that is not helpful. So what I mean by that is everything makes sense in light of Christ, right? So Christ, who is the eternal Lagos, the word, the wisdom of God himself, the one by whom, through whom and for whom, all creation is sustained, he is the one who gives us sense when it comes to things like logic and math and the principles of physics and the laws of, thermodynamics, things like that, they're held together. And that makes sense because Christ is the central part of that. Even in history, if you think about history makes sense, only if we look at it in light of who Christ is and what he accomplished, all of history, if you go before Christ, all of it is counting down to him and then everything's counting up from him, everything's pointing to him in the middle. And we can't make sense of, in the genocides of the 18th, 19th centuries, if we understand who Christ is because he will tell us what sin nature is and he'll tell us a path out of that, out of that, the death that sin nature brings and everything prior to that. So that's what I mean by Christo-centricity, things like art and music and crafts and things like that, they make sense because beauty is objective. We have a God who transcends this reality, he's given us goodness, truth and beauty and he's told us what's beautiful. And so we can now look at the beauty, that's what these books are doing a lot of, is looking at the beauty of God and creation and letting it point us to Christ because that's where we will find the most sense. And so anyway, you asked about homeschooling, we chose to homeschool because it was mostly pragmatic but now we would probably stick with it just because I echo Joel's thoughts is that, man, it's just given us such a rich home life. I work from home, so we have a publishing company that's kind of the other thing that I mentioned. And so- That's what you said at the very beginning, you were, and you've published a lot of books. We're getting there, yeah. Through your own, have you published a lot of your own plus other peoples? We're ramping up, I think you might know one of our good friends, Rebecca Lovell. Oh yeah, oh you did their books? Yeah, yeah. Both? No, John's book, he released that through I think Sentinel which is I think an answer to Penguin or something. But Rebecca as you did. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's fantastic, that's a fantastic book. Yes, and she killed it in a good way. Yeah, so that's the other side of what we do. So I work from home and that's kind of our family industry is writing and publishing. And so we have our, on our property, we have kind of our warehouse where we actually store and ship a lot of our stuff out of them. So being at home with the girls doing that helps me not just teach them the stuff they're learning but also about what we do as a family. Like this is us, this is who we are, this is what we do. So I wouldn't trade that for the world. But yeah, we've been doing homeschool for about seven years now. And we've helped start up a classical co-op at our, it's part of our church. And actually I think we have 102 kids this year which is nuts. Oh wow, that's fantastic. It's yeah, it's by the grace of God and we're not, I'm not leading it. We're helping a family with it but they're the tip of that spear. And so I, part of that too, and the reason these books are so close to my heart is I teach the, what we call formations, which is theology. And so every morning on a Tuesday when we meet, last year we went through systematic theology. This year we're doing biblical theology. And I think next year we'll try to do covenantal apologetics. So we'll see, we haven't got the board to approve that yet but we'll see. What an incredible community. You wouldn't have that if you would have gone the other route. I mean, you'd have something different but. Right, yeah. Yeah. There's this R.C. Sproul quote that I've always liked and he says, There's no such thing as a neutral education. Every education, every curriculum has a viewpoint. That viewpoint either considers God in it or it does not. To teach children about life and the world in which they live without reference to God is to make a statement about God. It screams a statement. The message is either that there is no God or that God is irrelevant. Either way, the message is the same. If God is relevant, he is relevant to all of his creation. There is no part of life learning or reality that lies outside his reach. That's Sproul, man. And that was the idea that it's not just that, public schools are against God. It's that they treat God as if he's irrelevant. Yeah. And that speaks volumes about God. That's kind of his point there. Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. That's frustrating, to say the least. He's relevant in every way. Yeah. Yeah, there's a really good book called Education, Does God Have an Opinion? by a man named Israel Wayne. That was a pretty eye-opening one for me. Okay, let's move on from homeschooling. You also are on a farm. These things tend to go hand in hand. Yes. And you have a family economy, a family business. Chicken math is a good book. They're subcultures. Isn't that wild? It's because, I think it's just because there's a sharing of a worldview, which is this integration of creation and life and food and farming and homeschooling. And it all just, it's not a monolith at all, but there are definitely threads that run through. And you find that when you rub shoulders with other people that are living similarly, you're like, there's kind of a lot of similarities here. Yep. Yep. And actually speaking of subcultures, I read somewhere, this is not us, we're not Amish, but the Amish population is up over 400,000 people. They grow like they double every 20 years. Wow. And so think about that, like subcultures and there's something there. But yeah, so we, farm is a term that I would use with scare quotes. We have two and a half acres. And on it, we have, I don't know, 30 some chickens, some geese, which I regret. Tell us why. I love birds. I'm writing a book for the kids. It's a fiction book around what are called the bird wars. And so I love birds. I think they're incredible. And I think geese are awesome, but they're just very, very loud and very obnoxious and a little mean. Peacocks are allowed too. Yeah, I was gonna get a peacock, but after having the geese and my wife told me she's like, you know, they're louder than geese. Yeah, they're real loud. But here's the thing. I've heard that you can sell a peacock egg for $50. Really? So that's kind of a lot. Well, how often do they lay? I don't know, that's a really good question. I assume that they laid regularly, gets birds, but maybe not. Maybe I'm thinking they lay eggs like chickens do, but maybe they lay eggs like Robbins. Actually, that's a really good question. I've never considered that. I mean, it's like once a day, I mean, that's a mortgage payment. I know, that's a gold mine. You just have to find people who want to buy peacocks. Peacock, yeah. All right, you've got chickens, you got geese. Yep, and we have a dog and a cat, and then we have a horse that we recently got. So my wife grew up, so she'd never had horses as a kid, but she just loved them. And then when we first got married, before we had kids, we owned two horses. And then when we had our first daughter, again, more backstory, my wife used to do equestrian photography for like in Kentucky, Lexington, and those types of big events, she would go and take the pictures of all the hunter-jumper dressage people, and then she would sell those pictures to them. And so that was kind of her kind of ability, that gave her the ability to stay in kind of the horse scene without owning a horse. And then once we had our first daughter, she stopped doing that and just went full-time, caring for our first daughter. But yeah, so now we finally brought that full circle, and I think about four months ago, we bought this old 19-year-old quarter-horse mare. It was just super sweet, and we can trust her around our two-year-old. She's not gonna step on our kids and we're buying them or anything like that. But yeah. Well, K-rat, that's so exciting, that's so recent. What's the horse's name? So the girl's named her, and she's black, so you might wanna guess what they named her. Oh, black beauty? Yeah. Oh, that was a good guess. Even though black beauty's a male horse, right? Aw. Well, congrats, what a special thing. To be at home and to be doing all of your homesteading together and your homeschooling, you really do have a lot of books. Give us a rundown. I mean, how many are there? You're talking about prayers for your wife, prayers for your husband, wife in pursuit. They're all paired, husband in pursuit. And how a wife speaks, how a husband speaks. I mean, it just kind of goes on and on. There is a fierce marriage book, two as one, connecting daily with Christ and your spouse, see through marriage. Do you know how many there are? So I think there's nine. Yeah, there's nine. There's nine. And then, yeah. Plus these? Yeah, these would be, this would make it 13, if you count the coloring book, 14. And then, we have one. I'll count the coloring book. We have, I think there's one more too, because we have an online course. It's a marriage course, and there's a book that goes with that too, but. Okay. And you said that you're writing fiction, a bird book, bird wars? Yeah, you know, I've never talked about it, but I'd be happy to talk with you about it. Yes, we wanna know. Basically, it's a fantastical world where so I have daughters, and so this book is written around young girls. And the main premise is, if you ask the question, what if birds were so big, we could ride them? And so the first line in the intro is, I remember a time when cats feared canaries. And it's just the idea that, what I loved about it is you have different classes of birds. You can have, you know, raptor class, and like owls and hummingbirds. You mentioned hummingbirds. They blow my mind too. And then there's obviously like things like albatrosses and penguins, and there's just so many different birds you could have fun with. And so this world is all about, at one point, they were always well, then there was a darkness that crept into the world, and it kind of divided into kind of darkness and light. And then the darkness, by virtue of betrayal, infiltrated the light to where these girls, as young kids, were scattered, and there's three of them. And one ended up kind of in a town that I likened to, if you've ever been to like British Columbia, like the fjords of Vancouver, just like kind of a sleepy kind of earth town, but like on the water. So she's there, and they all have these guardians that are with them. I can't get into anymore. I'll go down these rabbit holes, but that is, they have to get back, and they have to kind of reestablish truth and goodness. And the first way they go about doing that is kind of unifying these two halves of this book that were written apart, that were ripped apart. They find the half, and they have to unify it with the other half, which is in this dark tower that's, you know, in one of the main, used to be like the most glorious city, but it's now been taken over by the evil, by the darkness. And so, anyway, part of it's getting back to the birds, because the birds, there's a war, and the birds left. They were cowards, and they left, and now one of the girls has to go get the birds, convince them to re-engage, and it's just telling the whole story. There's like seven books that I have mapped out, so it's gonna take some time. None of them are published yet though. None of them are, only one of them is partially written. So. Okay. So you started on the first one. I love that. I think that there needs to be more books for middle grade, younger grades, whatever. In more books, the better. My kids are always, my kids are always like, what can I read? I ran out of things to read. What can I read? What can I read, mom? Do you have a name for it? No, you probably don't want to share that till it comes out. Okay, keep that secret. This is so exciting, but it has to do with bird wars, and be a set of seven. Oh. Well, that's as a male. That's like every parent's dream. That's my dream anyway. I'm like, I want the whole set, and will this keep my kids occupied for a couple of days. I found the statistics. I want to read them just since it got brought up. Hummingbirds beat their wings up to 70 times per second, around 4,200 beats per minute. A hummingbird's heart beats approximately 1200 times every minute to fuel that constant activity. This is from Aaron Lyonam's book, Nature of Rest. That's 1,400% more than the average human heart rate. Wow. I mean, those are the types of things. You're like, could that have evolved? I don't think so. She also talks about this bird that flies across the ocean, that weighs as much as two quarters. So goodness, I guess I haven't really thought about that too much, Ryan. Like, there's such a great variety in the birds. And they're hilarious, and they're beautiful, and they make- The peacock and the eagle, and I mean, it's wild. Yeah, and there's some really crazy looking ones. I'm out of that headspace, because the seminary stuff I've been working on, but I've got a whole database of like, characters I want to work in. But the hummingbird thing. So that hit me, I used to be part of the Hell Attack crew, I say that loosely, because I worked for the Department of Natural Resources for the state of Washington. We fight wildfire. And even though I was working in the engineering division, I could volunteer as a single resource when wildfires happened and they needed people. And so I trained to be part of the Hell Attack program. And when you're at a hell base for a wildfire, you have these big massive helicopters show up, and they're either taking the smoke jumpers, to the backside of the fire to kind of, to seal off the backside of it, or they're taking buckets of fire retardant water and things like that. And when you're on the hell base, you're just seeing these massive machines come and go. And one thing that hit me is how quickly these machines burn through jet fuel, and what it takes to keep these machines in the sky, and how the smallest thing will be devastating to that machine, mechanically speaking, if something doesn't work, they ground it. And I thought, these hummingbirds operate on like calories of nectar, like probably in the single double triple digit, I don't know, but they're flying around so effortlessly. And without any, and here we are trying to keep these machines in the sky. And this is like, helicopters are like some of the best engineering that we have, right? And it's just, they're amazing machines. But anyway, just the inefficiency, I think is what I'm getting at. We have all this jet fuel that has so much energy in it, it still takes, I forget how many gallons of jet fuel they burn in an hour, but it's an insane amount. And then you contrast that with hummingbirds, it's just man. What an interesting thing, what an interesting parallel that most people would have no idea. I've never even considered in my life how much jet fuel a helicopter uses. Erin Lyon, I'm talking about how the hummingbird goes into a state called Torpor, I think she said it was called, it was TORPOR. And how basically it seems like they're dead. I mean, they have to, like, because they're so, they've used up so much energy. She said, it basically is like they're dead and their claws, I guess, will hold onto the branch. They'll like flip over, they'll be hanging upside down. Is she called it? Yeah, it's a strategy. To fuel their endeavors, hummingbirds can serve energy through a strategy called Torpor. The hummingbird becomes unresponsive and an observer might fear it is dead when in fact Torpor is what keeps it alive. It's like this deep, sleepy state. Isn't that interesting? It's like a strategy of rest to sustain the pace of their life. So basically it's like how you feel as a mom sometimes. Like, I feel like I have died. I'm in my state of Torpor, so I can go on. Yeah, all these incredible parallels, so between nature, between God's creation, and I think that's a gift. I think it's a gift to parents because it allows you to be able to talk about these concepts to your kids. There's just an endless amount of things to talk about to your kids, to be in wonder of it, to be in awe of that God has done. So congrats on these really cool new books. Adam and Yoda, I'll make sure I'll put the links in the show notes. There's four books plus there's also a coloring book, which is super fun. And then you have your podcast, people can listen to you. And there's a bunch of websites, and there's a bunch of books. I mean, it just keeps going and apparently more is coming. So we will look forward to whatever the bird wars are called because I like to read books like that. Ryan, thank you so much for being here. We always end our show with the same question. The question is, what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside? Oh man, camping, and I know it's kind of a broad category, but we never went on expensive vacations. We live in Washington state, and so my parents would take us camping, and namely to a place called the Ohanapakash River. Beautiful blue-green, like almost like Amazon, but the water's like 43 degrees. And we'd go swimming in the water. Man, as a kid, I just, I cherish that. And I take my kids out there, but yeah, camping was probably my number one. 43 degrees, that's what we do in Michigan, in Lake Michigan, same thing. And you know, you go swimming, you can swim anywhere. If you can swim in Washington or Michigan, you can swim anywhere. People are like, what is happening? You know, the kid will be like 56 degrees, they'll be swimming in the ocean. People will be like, what? What are they doing? Yep, gotta have the will. But yeah, it gives you a lot of grit, that's for sure. Ryan, huge congrats on these new books, and really all your books, it's an extensive list of books. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Thank you, it's been a joy. So you wanna start a business. You might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't. You just need GoDaddy Arrow. I'm Walton Goggins, and as an actor, I'm an expert in looking like I know what I'm doing. GoDaddy Arrow uses AI to create everything you need to grow a business. It'll make you a unique logo, it'll create a custom website, it'll write social posts for you, and even set you up with a social media calendar. 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