Most of us have asked God the same quiet question at some point: why isn’t my prayer life working the way Jesus said it would? We read the promises, we pray the prayers, and still find ourselves stuck in what feels like hit-or-miss belief. In this episode, Kim sits back down with Dr. Patrick Briney for the continuation of a testimony that started as a personal study on prayer and turned into a decade-long walk through two battles with stage-four Hodgkin’s lymphoma: battles that God used to teach him exactly what he’d been praying to understand.
We are a lot like Pat standing in that kitchen, feeling for a lump he never expected to find. We want answers we can hold onto, and God is often kind enough to give them to us in the middle of the mountain we didn’t choose. Kim and Dr. Pat trace his journey from a single verse in Mark 11 — “have faith in God” — into a fuller understanding of what that phrase actually means, then move into the second half of the conversation: the scientific case for a Creator. Dr. Patrick Briney, a PhD immunologist and lifelong skeptic-turned-believer, breaks down how the laws of thermodynamics and the law of biogenesis point unmistakably to a supernatural origin, and how the Bible recorded truths about the shape of the earth, the paths of the sea, the water cycle, and the expanding universe long before science caught up. This episode isn’t just a science lesson: it’s a reminder that life was not created by accident without a purpose. Life was created by God with a purpose he has already written, waiting for us to trust Him enough to walk into it.
Dr. Patrick Briney earned his Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Arkansas. He specialized in immunology and infectious diseases doing research in vaccine development and virulence investigation for Campylobacter jejuni.
Dr. Patrick Briney is an author, speaker, and Bible teacher for practical Christianity. Dr. Briney serves as the First Associate Pastor at Mission Boulevard Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He is also the Founder and President of Leadership Training Institute of America and Life Changing Scriptures. Pat and his wife, Colleen, live in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They have two married daughters and three enjoyable grandsons. You can reach Dr. Briney through his website, https://patrickbriney.com.
Jacob Paul: Welcome to the Truth in Love podcast with your host, Kimberly Faith. The Truth in Love podcast seeks to present God’s timeless truth through the lens of his remarkable love.
Kimberly Faith: Welcome back to the podcast, Pat. I’m really glad that we’re doing Part Two. Part One was just, you have a fascinating and powerful testimony, and thank you so much for sharing that. And so I’m looking forward to this second segment where you finish your story, and then let’s get into some of the science after that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. So we kind of ended the last podcast with your story of how you knew that you were saved. It’s a great story. And so let’s kind of, if you don’t mind, I know that your website, you talk a lot about prayer and what kind of, can you kind of tell us what led to that? The incidences in your life that led to that?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, much like my salvation experience, I was looking for something real to believe in. And once I was convinced that Jesus Christ was God, I experienced salvation, and established a real relationship with him. When I started reading the Bible and studying it, I wanted to learn from Genesis to Revelation everything I could, as so many people do, I wanted a real experience. Well, when I come across promises of Christ in the scriptures there, in the Gospels, it’s got to be true.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And Mark 11:22-24, that’s where Jesus talks about prayer. And he says, You pray believing without any doubt. You say to this mountain, Be thou cast into the ocean. It will be. Well, I’m going to take it literally. In fact, I prayed for Boston Mountain to be cast into the ocean. Yeah, I wanted to see. I’m a scientist, I’m a skeptic. I put everything to the test. Okay, what does this really mean or not mean? Are we talking about hyperbole here or are we really talking about something to be taken literally? But here’s the bottom line. I have real experiences with God. I want the Word of God, the inspired Word of God. I want to understand it. And if it says something and Jesus makes a promise, then it ought to happen. And if he says you can pray, and what he says specifically is, Whatever you pray for, it shall be done. And I’m thinking, Lord, I don’t know this prayer.
Kimberly Faith: Interesting.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Because whatever I pray for doesn’t happen.
Kimberly Faith: So let me just stop you there. Because when I find, whenever I pray something like that, God says, okay, Let’s go. And I feel like your story is what God did, your story that what happened in 1989 and 1994 is kind of what happened to you.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Oh, it was. God gave me a mountain. But here I was praying and I usually set a major goal, a one year goal among other goals, but I usually have one big goal that I work on. In 1988, I had set up a goal to understand prayer and find out why I’m not experiencing whatever I pray, some things, how do I get out of the hit and miss type phenomenon of prayer, a little here, there’s an answer, not an answer, and then interpret it as God’s will. I wanted to get out of that mess. And so I started my yearly goal and I started praying and I looked up every verse, got my concordance out, looked up every verse with pray, prayers, prayed, praying, all the different innuendos about prayer and I did my study on prayer. That was in March of 1988. I remember it very well. We were doing discipleship conferences at the time. I asked a good old friend, preacher friend of mine,to pray with me about that. And then in May, I was invited to do a number of seminars throughout the Midwest. And so I started my circuit and I was gone for about six weeks. And when I was coming back down through Illinois and then Indiana, I was coughing my way through the seminars. I was developing a bad sinus infection. And I couldn’t get rid of it. I was taking medicine, doing whatever I could, trying to control it and being an immunologist. I figured, I have this figured out. I know what to do.
Kimberly Faith: Let what to me stop you real quick. At this point, what year is this? ‘eighty eight?
Dr. Patrick Briney: This is ‘eighty eight.
Kimberly Faith: So what is your education at this point, your background?
Dr. Patrick Briney: By that time, in 1986, I had graduated with a PhD in microbiology. And my specialty was immunology and infectious diseases.
Kimberly Faith: I don’t think we covered that. We kind of left out your education which I meant to include in the first podcast but here we are, so.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, medicine, disease, health and body, that was my expertise.
Kimberly Faith: Okay.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I didn’t go to medical school but I did get the research side of health. And it was a great fantastic time in the 80s to be in microbiology. But I had been on this lecture series and I was developing this bad infection. When I got home later in May, I was starting to have chills at night while sleeping. And pretty soon developed into sweats and chills. And I went and saw the doctor and I would get antibiotics and that would help me. And then that went on all summer, every other week, every two weeks. And this was what was deceptive about this. Yeah, I was treated, I’m sure I had this drainage, this sinus infection was a problem. And it was getting worse as the summer was progressing. It got to the point where I had to sleep in the other room because I was just shaking the bed so much, Colleen couldn’t sleep.
Kimberly Faith: Wow. Oh my goodness.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And then we were putting the mattress out on the porch to dry out during the day because I was just sweating and soaking.
Kimberly Faith: Wow.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And I was going through a pneumonic, what is called a pneumonic crisis.
And the doctors were treating me and back then I did not trust doctors. They always tell you, come back in two weeks if you’re not getting better. I always wait my two weeks and then they say the same thing anyway. And so I was rotating around doctors. I didn’t see any one doctor consistently. And then we got into the school year. I was a volunteer teacher in biology and chemistry that year at Fayetteville Christian School. And so I was picking up all the diseases coming through the school and it was just keeping me drained. Sometimes I’d get home and I just collapsed in bed, go unconscious. Anyway, in the midst of all that, I’m doing radio programs and teaching Bible studies and doing my study on prayer. We went out to California to visit family and I had another episode where I was just sweats and chills and drained and we went to see the doctor, emergency room doctor. And he’s the first guy who said, after I told him my history, he said, if this doesn’t clear up, you need to go see a head and neck specialist when you get back to Fayetteville. I said, okay. He gave me medicine, and I felt better. Two weeks go by and I seem to be a whole lot better. March comes along, we had a campus fellowship, we’re playing volleyball. And that Wednesday, that was a Friday night, the following Wednesday, Fayetteville had a snow, about four inches of snow, it shut the city down. And I’m sitting there at the kitchen table and my shoulder is still sore from the game. And I thought, man, usually I’m getting better instead of sore during the week. I’m recovering. And then I’m rubbing my shoulder and I noticed this huge lump at the base of my neck and I thought, what is that? So I went and pulled back my collar in the mirror there and man, that would look like a grapefruit sitting there.
Kimberly Faith: Oh my goodness.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I couldn’t figure out how did that happen? How could I miss that?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So Colleen saw it and she started calling around. There happened to be a doctor just two blocks down from where we were, about two blocks. He came to the office on that cold snowy day. So I went down there and I remember he comes walking into the room after the charts are done and paperwork and he said, well, let’s see, I’m reading here, you have a lump on your neck, Let’s see it. And I pulled back my collar. I still remember his face. He said, woah, that is a lump. And so we ended up talking about it and I gave him my evaluation. I think I have a bad sinus infection. I haven’t been able to knock out this bacteria. So then that led into fungus, it might be fungal. Maybe that’s what’s causing it, got it in the lymph system. We went through all this analysis and he said, I’ll tell you what, if this doesn’t go down in two weeks, come back.
Kimberly Faith: Oh, my goodness.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Turned out, I think it was about four or five days later, it wasn’t getting any better. And I remembered what that ER doctor told me. And so I called Doctor Fincher in town, who was the head and neck doctor, and went and saw him. And that man is the first guy who said, you know, we ought to biopsy this. And so within two days, he biopsied that. And when I came out of surgery, he had already looked at the cells under the microscope and said, now this has to go down to Little Rock and get confirmed but I already see what are called Reed Sternberg cells. You have lymphoma. And I said, what? So driving home was a very interesting experience because I had to go home and tell Colleen and think about how do you tell people you have cancer? I was, at the time I was, what, about 30 years old or so. And it was like melodrama, it was like slow motion. It was just a very strange phenomenon.
Kimberly Faith: And you had children at that time?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Lisa had been born in August of ‘eighty eight. So we’re into ‘eighty nine now, gone into March ‘eighty nine. Colleen had quit her job and we had plans about what we were going to do. And she’s going to stay home and take care of the baby. Well, then in March, I got this diagnosis on my birthday and her birthday is the next week. And we started all the therapies on her birthday.
Kimberly Faith: Goodness.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So that was a very memorable year for our birthdays.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah,I imagine.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And we did have our baby at the time in the house. Colleen had a very good boss and he said, we haven’t filled your position, you’re welcome to come back. And not only that but let her work remotely at home when needed.
Kimberly Faith: Before remote was a thing.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s exactly right. See this was a big deal. And throughout the institution, at the university she was working at, she was known as the lady who works at home. That was unheard of. You don’t do that.
Kimberly Faith: But this was definitely your mountain.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, it was. When I met Doctor Hayward, Malcolm Hayward, he was the only oncologist in Fayetteville at the time. I was doing a lot of research myself on what to do, steps to take. And I had come across a new procedure, what is called a regimen of ABVD, for treating.
It didn’t have the track record yet at the time to just be used. Doctor Hayward was very flexible, a very innovative guy. He had been using MOPP which was MOPP. Nitrogen mustard is what that m stands for and that’s what they used to kill guys in World War I.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I was doing interviews, I interviewed a guy up in Tontitown who went through MOPP treatment and he said, he’s still in bed ten years later. We went into the bedroom to talk to him. He said, his wife came in afterwards when she came back from work. She said, yeah, I check on him every day to see if he’s still alive. That MOPP was really bad stuff. So I didn’t want that and that’s why I was looking for something else. I had come across this at the hospital’s library and I brought it to Doctor Hayward and he said, well let’s go down to the office and talk about it. So we went into his office and he got some books out. And he said, I’ll tell you what, why don’t we do this for three months and if it doesn’t look like you’re responding, then we’ll go to the MOPP. I said, that sounds great. Well, I responded so quickly, so well. Even ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after that first treatment which Colleen said, You’re not supposed to do that, you should be in bed. When we got through those three months, he said, We’ll just finish out with ABVD. And so we did. Now, I had a, when they diagnosed me, the reason why we went through chemo was because I had all, remember, I had been suffering these symptoms for about a year now.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So by that time, I was already at a stage four, what they call nodular sclerosing type B Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Kimberly Faith: Wow. What is the outcome for most people who are diagnosed at that stage?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, for Hodgkin’s it’s a very high rate of cure, particularly if you’re at stage one. Back in ‘eighty eight, when I had ‘eighty nine, at stage four, it had escaped the lymph nodes and the reason why I didn’t notice it, it started under the sternum. So it wasn’t presenting itself. And by the time we caught it, it had escaped the lymph, it went on both sides of the diaphragm throughout the lymph system, escaped the lymph system, was filling my body.
Kimberly Faith: Was it in your bones?
Dr. Patrick Briney: It was in the bones.
Kimberly Faith: Wow.
Dr. Patrick Briney: He did the bone marrow to start out. He said, we’ll just start backwards. And so he did bone marrow, he said, you’re full of it, both sides of your hips. There’s only one course of action. So we did the chemo. Well, there’s only a 45% chance of survivors at that stage.
Kimberly Faith: Wow. So how did this tie into your prayer, your mountain you were talking about earlier?
Dr. Patrick Briney: All right. I had finished up my prayer in March of ’89, a year’s worth of study. And I started teaching about prayer on my radio program called Life Changing Scriptures.
Kimberly Faith: Uh-huh.
Dr. Patrick Briney: One week later, I was diagnosed. And I think to this day, I wonder if I had finished that study sooner if I would have been diagnosed sooner. How the Lord works. But it’s timing. God was making sure I knew that there was a correlation between my answered prayer for understanding prayer tied into my study of prayer, I completed my studies, and now he was going to take me through the school of prayer.
Kimberly Faith: Right. You don’t read about how to ride a bike without getting on it and crashing a little bit.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right. So I had read the book.
Kimberly Faith: It’s so interesting that it happened a week after you had finished the study.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right. Because the diagnosis was constantly, it wasn’t wrong, I was suffering from pneumonia, I was suffering from diseases picked up. But that’s because my immune system was getting knocked out by all this cancer.
Kimberly Faith: So what did you pray?
Dr. Patrick Briney: I prayed, Lord, teach me about the prayers that move mountains. Teach me how to experience the reality of this, of your promise. You said that I can pray anything. Well I, even up at the university in my office, in my lab, I would be praying and I’d pray for things to happen. You said, whatever Lord. So I started thinking of whatever I could and started praying for it. And it wasn’t happening.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So it’s funny, I was in the lab doing that because that’s where you do your experiment. Well I was putting God’s promises to an experiment and I kept testing it.
Kimberly Faith: It’s interesting that you’re, because I think most people would think, okay, I have, you know, Hodgkin’s, you know, stage four. My most reasonable prayer will be if God you’re going to promise to do anything, make me well.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Oh, well, okay, that’s an interesting story too because after I was diagnosed, I had to tell different people what was going on in my life. And I had to think about, I had to struggle in myself, how do I pray about this? I didn’t want to pray against God’s will.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Because I had prayed over the years, well Lord, whatever your will is, let it be done because it can’t get better than that. And I had even prayed, Lord, if it takes taking my life to win a soul or whatever it might be, family members I had in mind. I said, whatever it takes, do whatever has to be done. So I wasn’t, initially when I was diagnosed with cancer, I wasn’t convinced that this was something that God wasn’t doing. Double negative.
Kimberly Faith: You were convinced it was a part
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, He was going to use this in my testimony to get someone saved or to
Kimberly Faith: Part of your story.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, it’s part of my story.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So I thought, okay, well I’m willing for that. But I was praying at the same time. I’ve got a baby and a family and how should I pray? So this is the first prayer I prayed. God, show me how to pray.
Kimberly Faith: I love that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: What should I pray for? Because I don’t know.
Kimberly Faith: Right, that kind of reminds me of the verse that talks about the Holy Spirit interceding with us in our prayers with groanings when we don’t even know how to pray how we ought. I’m mangling the verse a little bit.
Dr. Patrick Briney: It’s so true.
Kimberly Faith: It’s so true.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, I remember talking to our pastor, Brother Brian, down at the radio station and I told him, that’s where I told him about the news. He said, well we’re going to pray for your healing. I said, okay, but I’m not sure how I should pray. We’re going to pray for your healing, okay. So anyway, it went two weeks where I was praying and asking God, how should I pray? And then two weeks later, it was very clear in my mind. I felt strong conviction in my heart. You need to pray for your life. And I wasn’t really linking it to because I’m answering your prayer, but it was you pray for your life, period.
Kimberly Faith: Interesting.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So I’m going to pray for my life. And I had people praying all over the world, missionaries and pastors and churches and people were telling me they’re praying for me. And that first chemo treatment, I’m telling you, I ate that peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It sounds like such a small thing if you haven’t been through that experience. But I was what is called a sleeper. Because in the chemo treatments in those days at Hayward’s office, and like I said, he was the only one at the time. Carol would hook me up, she was the nurse and hook me up and I’d get treated. Well they knocked you out because the chemicals themselves are so caustic and you just have uncontrollable vomiting going on. And so he would knock you out. Now that wasn’t true with everybody who got treated in those days, and some horrific stories going on. But I was a sleeper. He’d knock me out, and then someone, I could hear shuffling. But I don’t remember anything. I lost two years of my life as far as memory. People tell me what was going on but I don’t remember people. I actually conducted weddings and all kinds of things, I don’t remember.
Kimberly Faith: But you remember being able to pray what God taught you about prayer during that time period.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah. And that’s because it stayed with me. I was praying and asking God to, well, besides the healing, I was studying more about prayer and questions would come to my mind. I would ask them, well, what about this or how do I interpret that prayer? But it went beyond that. It was just scripture. I was asking Him about the Garden of Eden and the experience of Adam and Eve and their creation. I was immersed in the Bible.
Kimberly Faith: You know what’s interesting about what you’re talking about is, I had COVID four times really bad. And I’ve struggled with my lungs since then. I’ve just had these periodic times where I was just down and out for weeks. And it’s been during those periods of time that God has taught me the most profound doctrinal things. It’s like I have this peace, I can’t go to work. So the Lord’s finally got me where I need to be so I can pay attention. Does that make sense?
Dr. Patrick Briney: It does.
Kimberly Faith: Is that kind of what you’re talking about?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, especially the second time around. Because I went through this twice.
Kimberly Faith: How much time was between the two
Dr. Patrick Briney: Five years.
Kimberly Faith: Five years?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Here’s what happened. The first time, I had a 45% chance of survival rate based on statistics. We went through that and I would say that was more like an inconvenience. The chemo treatments and so on. It was an inconvenience. Knocked me down for a few days in the first week and then I’m recovering. And every other week I was getting treated. And it probably sounds very odd to people when I say this, but I was thinking, Lord, it wasn’t that bad. And 45% survival rate, I’m still in the, I could
Kimberly Faith: You beat the odds. Not necessarily answered prayer but beat the odds.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, the odds are still pretty high when I’m talking about moving a mountain.
Kimberly Faith: Right. You’re thinking that you maybe had the bulldozer out helping out a little bit.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right. It was, Lord, thank you. It wasn’t as big of a mountain as I was expecting. Well, I wasn’t expecting, let me put it that way. I did not pray for this.
Kimberly Faith: Right, right, yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I didn’t know what was happening. I was doing my study. In fact, I had prayed that God would just help me understand without having to go through an experience.
Kimberly Faith: Yes, we all pray for that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, now, I get a clean bill of health. We’re in remission. I’m going through checkups every year and so we go through our five years. Colleen and I are planning to celebrate my five year mark. We’re on the river for a canoe trip and a couple of the campus girls got stuck on the embankment and some logs and so I was pulling branches out and I hit my side and boy, that stung. That was very painful, unusually painful. I thought, well, that’s really strange. Didn’t think anything more of it. Well that evening, when I was showering, man, I had internal bleeding under the skin that was going down from my side down to my knee.
Kimberly Faith: Oh.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I was black and blue. Now that’s not normal and I thought, oh boy. And I was pressing there, oh man, I have this big lump right here, right above the hip bone.
Kimberly Faith: I bet you just, oh.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, you know I thought, I’ve got a hernia.
Kimberly Faith: Oh my goodness.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I hope it is. Well, I went and saw Doctor Hayward and I love that guy. You develop a special relationship with someone who’s administering lifesaving
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Techniques on. But anyway, he’s pressing on me and he says, oh no. What do you mean oh no? We’re going to have to do it again. I said, what do you mean we’re going to have to do, what are we going to do again? Get off the table and we’re going down to x-ray. So anyway, we walked down to the x-ray. That’s the type of guy he was. So he took me down to the X-ray Room, we did x rays, we had immediate results within an hour. And he said, yeah, we’re going all over again, you relapsed.
Kimberly Faith: What were your odds at that point of recovery?
Dr. Patrick Briney: There were no odds. There weren’t enough survivors to have survivor stats.
Kimberly Faith: And that was in 1994?
Dr. Patrick Briney: That was 1994.
Kimberly Faith: And here we are.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So there, that’s right. See, this was the mountain.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: This was against all odds. And this wasn’t five years ago, it was 1994.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: See, we’re talking about a complete and total cure the second time around.
Kimberly Faith: It’s crazy.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And recurring cancers are more difficult because those are the resistant cells that survive the first go around.
Kimberly Faith: So what was your prayer then?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well my prayer, really it wasn’t , by the way, we had our second baby. I told Colleen, we’re going to have to stop having babies.
Kimberly Faith: Oh gosh.
Dr. Patrick Briney: We can’t go through this anymore. Because they were born and then I’d get sick. No my prayer, it wasn’t a question of how to pray. I knew that I need to pray for my life. Partly because of the first go around, some of the reasons.
Kimberly Faith: So you learned some things from the first
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So I need to pray for my life. Now, I was at complete peace, let thy will be done. And that’s always been my prayer. Just like Jesus said in the Garden Of Gethsemane.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Lord, if this cup pass, nevertheless not my will but thy will be done.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That is a very, very important part of prayer. And the lesson in prayer, having gone full circle, and I ought to add this too, Kim. That second time was not a matter of inconvenience, that was debilitating.
Kimberly Faith: How long did you have treatment?
Dr. Patrick Briney: That was eight months.
Kimberly Faith: Eight months.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And that go around, I was definitely at death’s door. It was around Christmas time one night, one Sunday night, Colleen was going to church. I was debating all day. My eyelids were completely white. My heart rate was about 160. I was shallow. And I didn’t know if I was going to, I didn’t know if she’d come home and I’d be alive still. I was really bad.
Kimberly Faith: Wow.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And I’d been doing that for weeks, but I thought, boy, this could be the end. And I debated over and over in my mind, what do I say to Colleen? Do I, oh man, I need to be careful about, can’t just say you might find me dead. I think I asked something like, Oh Colleen, have you ever thought about coming home and maybe I’m just sitting in the chair and not breathing or something, you know?
Kimberly Faith: That’s pretty casual.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I don’t know.
Kimberly Faith: What did she say?
Dr. Patrick Briney: She didn’t say much. She was a real trooper. I mean, she really showed a lot of strength during that time.
Kimberly Faith: What did you pray?
Dr. Patrick Briney: During that time?
Kimberly Faith: Uh-huh.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I was just, I was comfortable. There wasn’t any particular prayer because I was comfortable, whatever God’s will was, that was my prayer. And most of my prayers were dominated with, Lord, teach me this, show me this, help me understand this. That’s where my thrills were, were just the insights God was sharing with me. That’s when I started writing a lot of materials and books. But Colleen went to church that night and talked to a good friend of mine who just got out of med school. He was on the AHEC program over here. And he stopped by the house and did a blood work up on me and said, you don’t have any blood. We need to get you to the hospital and get a blood transfusion. So we did that right away. And that helped quite a bit. Then there were the experiences, the pains, some of the things you go through, some of the chemos, by the way, I was on MOPP.
Kimberly Faith: Oh wow.
Dr. Patrick Briney: We went on MOPP. That’s another thing.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah, that’s a miracle.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I mean, I survived MOPP, too.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Well, it sounds like to me this was the real mountain that God prepared you for with the smaller mountain. And then you had this great testimony for his glory that has then given you almost not just the journey and the foundation for so many things that you’re doing today, but the experiential walk with God that a lot of people never get to have because they never pray, Lord, teach me to pray.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I did have that desire but it’s always been a part of my life even before I found God. I want to believe in something that’s real. So even after becoming a Christian, I don’t want to just be a Christian. I want to experience God. This brings us back full circle to Mark 11:22, 23 and 24. You see, we do, whatsoever you pray, is prefaced by a very important small three word phrase Jesus used in verse 22. And he said, have faith in God. Four words. Have faith in God. Now, that is oftentimes overlooked and misunderstood. And so it’s hard to believe, it’s hard to understand what Jesus is saying in that passage. When we think that faith is what we believe. But Hebrews 11:1 says, faith is the evidence of things not seen. Well, that hits right at my heart because I’m all about evidence.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Faith is God’s evidence, spiritual confirmation of the Holy Spirit to confirm that what you’ve heard or what you’ve come to know is true. That’s the evidence that’s there. So faith is the revelation from God, direct revelation from God that we believe in. So faith is what we believe in, not believing. That opens up that whole verse and gives clarity to what he’s promising. Because when you have faith in God, pray whatsoever ye will. In other words, whatever God has revealed to you, pray whatever he has revealed to you, whatever it might be. It will happen, it can’t not happen. It can’t be prevented. You see, that opens up the door to 100% answered, granted prayers.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. The way you explain that is really, really good. I am kind of a simple person. I don’t have a scientific mind. I tend to be more Socratic, which is the legal side of it, right? But the way I like to understand that is you have supernatural faith and you have physical faith. Physical is the evidence that we see, we smell, we hear, all those things that we perceive with our senses. But the supernatural faith and I use that word loosely, you know, I mean spiritual comes from God, not the evil supernatural part. But that comes from our spiritual sense as being in tune and awakened through salvation and also the pursuit of the relationship. Because then you do see that person’s ready to hear the gospel. You do see, I need to go here and give this tract. You do see, because you’re seeing with your, I call it night vision goggles, right? And then your prayers are answered. I love the way you explained it. That’s just the way I understand it, you know?
Dr. Patrick Briney: You know, it is what I teach my students. It is a subjective truth. We know it’s true because God’s revealed it to us.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Like I know I ate oatmeal for breakfast last week.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I can’t prove it to you.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s subjective truth. It’s not false. It’s 100% true. And when God confirms to us subjectively, that’s 100% truth. My truth and what is true does not depend on my ability to prove it to someone else like in a court of law like you would have to do
Kimberly Faith: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: But I don’t have to prove it to know that it’s true.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: But then see, that opens up the door to objective truth because that’s where creation science comes in.
Kimberly Faith: That’s a great segue into the scientific case for a creator which is what we want to talk about now. And thank you for setting that up. I couldn’t have done it better myself.
Dr. Patrick Briney: I saw where it was going because here you have objective truth where I can show it to somebody else, a third party.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So what I know to be true subjectively, I can demonstrate objectively to others.
Kimberly Faith: Right. And of course we have the origins of the universe only happened once. So it doesn’t meet the criteria for scientific method because it’s not
Dr. Patrick Briney: We can’t go in the laboratory and
Kimberly Faith: We can’t repeat it, right?
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: But we can’t control it, we can’t observe it, we can’t repeat it. But what we can do is look at the scientific laws that we know exist and say this is why it happened. In the Bible concepts, we talk a lot about the physical laws representing the spiritual laws and showing us those spiritual laws. So I’d really like to, you know, if you were to just to relate the top two or three scientific laws that you think reflect a creator. I just want to stop and say, you know, your whole testimony about prayer is a great proof all by itself of our creator. But since you’re this skeptic and you are probably talking to a lot of skeptics in this podcast, I really, that’s one of the reasons I wanted, I actually have to say unexpected bonus to have your story because I think that is, our testimony, when I talk about biblical archaeology, you know, archaeology proving the Bible, because in the bible concept study I teach, my second chapter after what is your source of truth is what is the Bible? I always emphasize that the most important proof of the Bible is the transformed lives. And your testimony, in my opinion, is the most important proof or the most powerful proof of a creator. But I’d like to go ahead and draw down now and kind of, okay, what are some of the most powerful, you mentioned the laws of thermodynamics earlier, proofs, scientific proofs of a creator?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, there are the objective truths which I always go to the laws of science. And the reason for that is, the laws of science are the closest thing we have to proof. In science, you won’t hear scientists say, we have proven anything. Because in order to prove something in science, you’d have to assume that you have infinite knowledge and infallible rationality. But you always have to leave the door open. I could be wrong. Even though all the evidence supports it. So this is where we get into forensic science. Forensic science, like a murder, you’re not going to repeat that in the lab either.
Kimberly Faith: Right, right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: But you can still use the principles of the laws that we understand to be consistent and then put together the case. And we can do that with creation as well.
Kimberly Faith: I like that parallel. That’s a really great example, yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, what it does is help, oftentimes when you get into creation evolution debates and arguments, you hear things that are stated that are sort of misleading or add confusion like, creation science is just as scientific as evolution, but evolution is just as unscientific as creation. And I’m thinking, which is it?
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Are they both scientific or are they both unscientific? No, it’s a different approach, it’s how you approach things.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Forensic science is a science. We understand its limitations and we understand that we’re not going to be able to reproduce it in the laboratory. But there’s certain things that we can look at and understand about our world that helps us put the pieces together and figure out what has actually happened. So I’m going to raise the four fundamental questions again. Is there more than a physical world? Well, first and second laws of thermodynamics are excellent to make that point to a supernatural creation rather than natural creation. Because these are known laws. The laws of science are, they are the end result of a hypothesis. Laws of science are the most important thing we can use and the more, weightiest things we can use as far as evidence for creation. Because even though we can’t prove things, a credible, legitimate scientific explanation must never contradict a known law of science.
Kimberly Faith: That makes sense.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Otherwise, it’s incredible.
Kimberly Faith: It’s not even relevant.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: In the legal system, it wouldn’t be relevant evidence.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right. It wouldn’t be relevant. And it’s even worse than that because if your theory contradicts a known law of science, what you’re saying is, I’m contradicting the experiences and the established laws and principles that govern the universe that are irrefutable as of today. They’re irrefutable. That’s why I say they’re the closest thing to proof. As far as we know, they’re consistent for all the predictions and they can’t be proven wrong as of today.
Kimberly Faith: Right. So it’s a big fat lie.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well no, it’s not a lie. What they’re saying is, Oh yes, yes, you’re right. The theory is wrong.
Kimberly Faith: The theory is a big fat lie, if it contradicts the known laws of the universe. I’m sorry.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, you would
Kimberly Faith: That’s what we would call it in the courtroom.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s what you would say in the courtroom. Now here’s what they would say in the laboratory. In fact, let me give you a story. There were particle physicists who used this on me. I was doing a lecture in Bell Engineering over here on the origin of the universe, supernatural origin the universe. And Doctor Harter was part of the crowd and a particle physicist and also a member of the Fayetteville Freethinkers here in Fayetteville who are the Richard Dawkins, neo Darwinian, belligerent, obstinate, nasty evolutionist.
Kimberly Faith: Well, they don’t have Jesus in their hearts, so how do they have love
Dr. Patrick Briney: They don’t.
Kimberly Faith: It’s hard. You can feel compassion for them.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, well, I don’t feel compassion for them. They need to get saved they,
Kimberly Faith: That’s what I’m talking about.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, I know. But anyway, I was talking about the first law of thermodynamics and Doctor Harter yells out and says, Well, laws are meant to be broken. Okay see..
Kimberly Faith: Oh my.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Now see, it’s not a big fat lie, as in a courtroom. What he’s saying and what I pointed out was, yeah, that’s fine. You can test anything. You don’t have to accept it as true.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Of course, in engineering, you wouldn’t want to try to make things that defy those principles.
Kimberly Faith: Well walk on a bridge, it was going to break.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s exactly right. But I said, science is all about testing things. And so you can continue to test it and try to disprove it. That’s what science does. That’s the nature of science. Try to disprove rather than prove. Disprove it. And if you can’t disprove it, it might be right.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: A good chance it would be right. So it becomes a law after a while. Well, the first law of thermodynamics is that way. It has been demonstrated over and over again, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times in labs. No known exceptions, irrefutable as of today. And it’s also called the law of conservation of energy. And that is that energy cannot create itself within a closed system by natural means. Now I stick that little clause in there to emphasize that we’re dealing with natural science. Plus, it bugs the philosophers that I have debated because they hate me putting that tag on there.
Kimberly Faith: Well, it’s true though. It’s true. It’s been proven.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Exactly. So what’s wrong with it? Is it not true? It’s true.
Kimberly Faith: The truth bothers us when it conflicts with what we want to believe is true.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right. And it brings attention to the whole point of the argument.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That if energy cannot be created by natural means, well look, we live in a world filled with energy. That’s what reality is, it’s energy. It exists. And what does the first law of thermodynamics tell us? It didn’t get here naturally.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Hey, if it didn’t get here naturally, it must have gotten here
Kimberly Faith: Supernaturally.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Supernaturally. I mean, it’s so obvious.
Kimberly Faith: And what about the second law? What does it say?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Second law, it leads to the same conclusion, the second law of thermodynamics is also known as the law of entropy. Or entropy is like disorder and chaos. In other words, over time, everything becomes more disorderly, more chaotic, everything falls apart.
Kimberly Faith: Like your body.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Your body. That’s right. We’re aging
Kimberly Faith: Aching.
Dr. Patrick Briney: When you’re aging, you’re getting worse, you’re not getting better. Buildings get old and you have to remodel them. The universe is experiencing what is called heat death. Because the ultimate form of energy is heat. It’s just uncontrolled energy floating around. That gives us our three Kelvin temperature for the entire universe. It’s just that that’ll be our lowest state of heat energy. Well, here we are in the second law of thermodynamics. Everything is winding down. I described the universe as a giant clock. And I always think of the clock in Prague, the Orloj. You got all these moving gears and they’re circular and hey, that’s just like the galaxies.
Kimberly Faith: I’ve seen that clock.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Solar systems. Yeah.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And there it is. There’s a lot of complexity in there and organization and all this movement. Organization is a key word, right? Because entropy is tending towards this giant clock we call the universe. It’s slowing down and it’s wearing out and everything is ultimately heading in one direction, heat. That’s the end point of the universe, heat death. That’s where everything will end up.
Kimberly Faith: That’s interesting because the Bible talks about the final destruction of the earth being by fire.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, it does.
Kimberly Faith: I just thought of that. I don’t know if that’s even relevant to the discussion.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, not in this case.
Kimberly Faith: Well okay, just correct me.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Because when God destroys everything, he’s going to put it all back together. But he’s bringing all of it to a quick end. Heat death is, we’re going through the slow process of billions of billions of billions of billions of billions of years towards heat death. And I haven’t even reached the end. I mean, we’re probably talking about 10 to the billionth of the billionth of the billionth power.
Kimberly Faith: So you’re talking about if the progression were natural, it would be over billions of years, the death of the earth.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: Okay.
Dr. Patrick Briney: The earth won’t even exist. It’ll be a form of heat.
Kimberly Faith: Right, right. That makes sense.
Dr. Patrick Briney: There won’t be any organization or anything. So here’s the whole point. We’re sitting in the middle of a giant universe that is headed towards heat death, entropy, and it can’t wind itself up because the second law of thermodynamics says that energy will always tend towards greater disorder and chaos by natural means. Now, the other side of the coin is that energy cannot organize itself by natural means.
Kimberly Faith: Right, right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, we’re sitting in the midst of a giant orderly organized energy mass here, we call the universe. It’s winding down. The clock can’t wind itself up according to the second law of thermodynamics. If the clock can’t wind itself up naturally, it must have been wound up
Kimberly Faith: By somebody else.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Supernaturally.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Now, the beauty of these is that you have the laws of science that are irrefutable. It means that that argument is irrefutable as of today.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: It doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer or a rejection.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Let me give you an example. After a creation science lecture I did at the University of North Dakota, a geneticist caught me out there in the parking lot and for two hours, we went around on these very things. You think, well, laws of thermodynamics, I mean, what more can you say?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: But we were into everything. After two hours, this is a smart guy, two hours later, this is what he said. I see what you mean. It makes sense, you’re right. I can’t accept it but I see what you mean. You see what was going on. You see, these laws are irrefutable.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: You can try to give an answer and this was for two hours.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: We went around and around in circles until finally, we’re talking about smart people who understand these things, but the mind is so darkened and so biased.
Kimberly Faith: The foolish heart was darkened. That’s right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: What is so obvious is outside of their grasp.
Kimberly Faith: And because the natural man does not receive the things of God. I mean, that’s what the Bible says.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s exactly right.
Kimberly Faith: And it’s, yeah. It’s really, that’s so interesting. And, you know, I tend to be very, very simplistic when I’m talking to the person that’s not really a scientist because I think it’s easier to talk to people who don’t have their minds so tuned in on rejecting God through science that they can accept. Like, my usual thing is to pick up my cell phone and say, hey, how many years do you think if I took all the parts and put them in a jar? How long would it take for that cell phone by itself by natural causes, you know, to put itself back together? And most people go, well, it’ll never happen. I said, do you think the universe is more complex than this cell phone? Well, yeah. And it’s not that hard to figure out for the regular person who doesn’t use science to matriculate themselves out of reason, you know?
Dr. Patrick Briney: You’re absolutely right. There is the training, when your mind is trained and conditioned to go down a certain path, it’s hard to get out of it. And this is why Jesus said, If the light that be in you is darkness, how great is that darkness?
Kimberly Faith: Yeah. You know, it’s so funny you mentioned that verse. I just was studying that the other day and thinking about how the enlightenment, in quotes, was such a dark place. Because the enlightenment didn’t take us into more light, but into even deeper darkness. And that is the person you’re describing. So you, just, you’ve talked about the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Before I move on to what the Bible says, I really want to get to that. Is there another physical law that you can point to that just blows a lot of these theories of not having a creator or supernatural force that created everything? I’m not saying this very well, but supports that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, absolutely. In fact, just to follow-up on those first two laws that, in the four fundamental questions, that establishes there has to be more than a physical world. The laws, and there’s so many great illustrations for that, but the point is that there’s more than a physical world. Then the next question, if they’re supernatural and spiritual, is there a God?
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: But we can reason that out just by looking at the design, the complexity, the orderliness of the universe like you were referring to, that the very nature, the very design of earth to sustain life suggests that this is a supernatural force that has empathy. It cares enough to know how to make conditions possible for life.
Kimberly Faith: Not just possible, but pleasurable.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, that’s right.
Kimberly Faith: I mean, think about just the variety of food that we enjoy.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: The variety of climates that we enjoy. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: See, that means that that supernatural is not just a stream of electrons energy flowing, we’re talking about something that has a personality feature called empathy, care, compassion,iIntelligence, obviously, because of the design complexity, we’re talking about an intelligent, empathetic personality that’s ever present and of, as far as we’re concerned, infinite power. What do you call such a thing? God.
Kimberly Faith: Going back to the guy who questioned you for two hours after your lecture, you know, when I’m talking to people who use logic to reason away God, one of the things I like to bring them back to is, okay, this is your truth. You are in your truth. You’re operating under your truth. How well has that satisfied you? And how well is that giving you peace and taking away your anxiety? Because you know, we talk about the anxiety mechanism and we know from reading the Bible that the only way that is satisfied and that is relieved is through relationship with God. But I find when logic fails, when reason fails with people, you go right to the heart and this is to your point that God is compassionate. Because we were created for a relationship with God, that question often is the question that makes people question the most whether their version of truth, their source of truth, is serving them well.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, that’s right. And that’s why you have so many of the philosophers who have been the leading thinkers promoting atheism and no God. Why they have lived such miserable lives.
Kimberly Faith: And ended so miserably.
Dr. Patrick Briney: They do, because they have concluded there really is no point to life.
Kimberly Faith: How could there be?
Dr. Patrick Briney: There’s no point. I mean, why should there be any happiness? I mean, why should there be anything?
Kimberly Faith: What is love even? Why do you desire to be loved when there’s no reason for it?
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: So that’s where the, these guys who are at the forefront of this thinking, their lives reflect exactly the endpoint and really illustrate where their emptiness leads to.
Kimberly Faith: Well at least they’re consistent.
Dr. Patrick Briney: They’re consistent, exactly. From our perspective, we can say, man, they’re really missing out on what God intended for them. But from their perspective, there isn’t any God, there is no expectation, there’s no nothing to evaluate this based on it is what it is and life is miserable.
Kimberly Faith: You know, the more that I dig into my relationship with God, the more I feel like the Holy Spirit gives me compassion, very natural compassion for people who have decided on that path. Because like you said, it’s miserable. And you can see their misery even if they won’t acknowledge their misery. But it’s kind of like when you have a flashlight or you flip on a switch in a kitchen where the cockroaches, they scatter. You know, it’s like that light that we have that we show, even when we show compassion, true compassion towards people who have decided to live that life of misery, it draws them to the light if they’re really starving to death. Back to my question.
Dr. Patrick Briney: There’s so much to talk about and it’s a lot of fun to talk about. There is an interesting law that has really bothered atheists considerably. And evolutionists to the point that they’re redefining evolution in the textbooks now. And that is dealing with the origin of life. Life from lifeless molecules. Louis Pasteur was involved in the debates back in the mid eighteen hundreds with the spontaneous generation crowd we call evolutionists today. They believe that life just spontaneously came about for some reason. Louis Pasteur came up with this brilliant experiment with the swan neck flask. He designed it in such a way that it would answer all the criticisms and questions that the spontaneous generation crowd would have. And demonstrate that germs come from germs. They don’t just pop out of the air out of nothing. And then John Tyndall, years later, came afterwards and showed that the reason why germs, if your experiment doesn’t have the swan neck or filtration, the reason why you have contamination and growth is because there are germs floating around in the air on the dust particles. Oh, well, he demonstrated that. So there were a lot of things that, it’s interesting to look at the history of science because there’s so much that we take for granted and is obvious to us today that no one had a clue about. They didn’t know such things. And they didn’t even know what a germ was.
Kimberly Faith: Right, right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Until Van Leeuwenhoek comes along and says, you know, there seems to be animalcules under the microscope here. They didn’t know what to call these things. All of this is, we are the benefactors of years, centuries of discovery.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Now, this brings us to what was eventually coined and phrased after Louis Pasteur’s experiment and that is the law of biogenesis. And the law of biogenesis is irrefutable as of today, never shown to be any exceptions. No reason to think it won’t be this way. And it states that all living things come from a previous living state. All living cells come from a living cell. All right, we’ll take that all the way back to the first cell in evolutionary thinking and where did the first cell come from?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: The law of biogenesis says all living things come from living things. But wait, at some point there had to be a transition from non life to life. From abiogenesis to biogenesis.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Now this is an established law, it used to be a law that was taught here at the University of Arkansas in biology in the Helena Curtis textbook of biology, page ninety three and ninety four, somewhere around there. I recorded that because at a lecture that I was giving in the union, Doctor Kramer was there from the zoology department, a number of her students, and then there were some philosophers and some literature professors there as well in the audience. I found out because they had made themselves known. But Doctor Kramer was objecting all through my lecture. And being quite a, she was making quite a spectacle of herself. But she challenged me on this law of biogenesis and I pointed out, Doctor Kramer, you sat on the committee that approved this book that’s being taught. And this is not something I’m making up. Well, after that lecture, that book has never been seen again in the classroom. It’s been censored. And not only that, but a year later when I was doing a seminar in the union with another group, I had two philosophy professors who were scouring the university library for this law of biogenesis I was talking about. And they came back the next night and said, that law doesn’t exist, we can’t find it.
Kimberly Faith: Wow.
Dr. Patrick Briney: They removed all the books.
Kimberly Faith: Wow. Well, kind of sounds like some things that happened in Nazi Germany.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s exactly right.
Kimberly Faith: You know?
Dr. Patrick Briney:This is the danger of a controlling ideology. It’s a monopolizing ideology in academia. It’s very, very dangerous. And the best film, best film ever to demonstrate that is Ben Stein’s Expelled No Intelligence Allowed. It’s not a film of creation versus evolution, it’s a film that exposes the dangers of a monopolizing ideology in education. He does an excellent job.
Kimberly Faith: I’ll have to look that up.
Dr. Patrick Briney: It’s an old film now, but yeah, it is great. And he ties it to Nazi Germany.
Kimberly Faith: Oh, I didn’t even know that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: What’s going on, oh yes. Because the principle is still there, and the danger is still there. This is how Satan works in the world as the god of this world, blinding the hearts and minds of them lest they should see the light of the glorious gospel.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Is to censor information, to twist information with misinformation, disinformation, malinformation. Satan is trying to control people with information because information is what determines how we think.
Kimberly Faith: Well, that’s what’s so glorious about the Internet right now. We have these podcasts, we don’t have to wait to be on CBS and be interviewed by some person
Dr. Patrick Briney: And then filtered out.
Kimberly Faith: And then filtered out. You know, I think about, to your point, before we move on to segment three which we’re going, or this next segment, which we’re going to talk about the Bible’s track record, I think about how in Nazi Germany that not only did they filter out the information, but then Hitler actually used the church, and I won’t mention the particular doctrine, but the church to promote his theories about the race, the master race, and he twisted it all.
Dr. Patrick Briney: You’re absolutely right. And you know, this propaganda still goes on. Every year I take a group of students for our Leadership Training Institute of America up to DC. Every year we go to the Holocaust Museum. And this is how the propaganda is so embedded. When you go up the elevator to the 3rd Floor, you’re coming down, there’s two kiosks. When you go into the second kiosk, it’s going to be showing a film blaming Christianity for the holocaust. And then at the end you have a whole list of
Kimberly Faith: Credits?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Credits. All the churches offering apologies to the Jews for the Holocaust. When you walk out of the kiosk and you start going through the hallway that shows how to identify the inferior races, there’s not one Bible scripture in those enclosed cases. You know what’s there? Evolution.
Kimberly Faith: Interesting.
Dr. Patrick Briney: They’re identifying, how do you identify an inferior race? You see, Hitler and the Holocaust is based on inferior race theory of evolution.
Kimberly Faith: Wow.
Dr. Patrick Briney: In fact, Darwin’s book is not just called The Origin of Species, it’s The Origin of Species and the Struggle, it’s about the races. They don’t tell you what the full title of
Kimberly Faith: The superior race or something?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah. They don’t tell you what the full title of the book is. And the reason for that is because if they were to do that, Darwin would be labeled a racist. We would have to remove all his statues, we would have to remove every book and every mention of Darwin. So that’s why they won’t
Kimberly Faith: Here’s the full title. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of the Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: That is so interesting.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Hitler took that, he read Darwin, so did Huxley and a lot of philosophers and they applied that. We used it in The United States in the Oneida Colony and under Roosevelt, President Roosevelt. He was all about evolution and sterilizing the inferior races here in the United States. All of that fell out of, all of that went underground, it didn’t stop. It all went underground. It’s still being practiced today under the label of genetic engineering. But in Germany, when it was discovered what they were doing with people and it was so horrific, no one wanted to be associated with eugenics.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s what was practiced in the United States. It’s still being talked about today.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Just in a more sophisticated way. But see, here’s the point. We’re talking about deception and lies. This is what’s going on at the Holocaust Museum and at all levels of our society, whether it be law or education or museums or science or whatever. You have a blaming of Christianity for the Holocaust at the museum. And then after you leave that kiosk, your mind’s already been biased and poisoned. The whole rest of the three floors, you go through that holocaust museum, you’re thinking Christians are responsible for this
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: When its evolution, atheism, skepticism was responsible for that holocaust, not Christianity.
Kimberly Faith: So interesting. Well, I appreciate that because I don’t think I realized that was, I’ve been to the one in DC, I’ve been to the one in London, and it’s, yeah, never even thought about that. But you know, I too go into this with a foreknowledge of what really happened because I’ve read the history, so it’s not impacting me like somebody who maybe has a blank slate, you know?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Right.
Kimberly Faith: Well, let’s kind of finish this podcast up by looking at the Bible’s track record. And I want to kind of go through this rather quickly because I know we’re kind of going long here, but I think it’s been really, really good. And I’ve learned a lot for sure. And this kind of goes to the idea that the Bible gave us scientific principles before science even understood that these principles existed. And just starting with the idea that the shape of the earth being spherical. And Isaiah 40:22 says, It is he who sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like the grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. And we know history, we know that people believed the earth was flat for years and years. But this is Isaiah twenty seven hundred years ago.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Right.
Kimberly Faith: I don’t know, have you done a study of this in this verse? What do you
Dr. Patrick Briney: I have looked at, in fact, it’s part of lecture series that I do on the inspiration of the Bible. Because what we’re seeing here is that the Bible, though it’s not a science textbook, what it states is scientifically credible. It doesn’t contradict science. Whether we’re starting with Genesis Chapter One or anywhere, through Revelation 22. It’s consistent with Scripture. When we see that there, in this case, we’re talking about the earth being spherical. See, when that was written in the Scriptures, that was written not only at a time when that was not understood or popular in its day as far as scientists and magicians as they would call them back in the day. It was contrary, contrary to popular opinion of the day, and yet it was recorded in the Bible. Where did that novel revolutionary thought come from?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well see, this is evidence of a supernatural involvement in putting things into the Bible, whether it be the roundness of the earth rather than the flatness of the earth or the squareness of the earth. Whether it be, one of my favorite is Captain Mowry, Matthew Mowry, who is a lieutenant naval officer. And he was reading through Psalm 8. And he was reading about the paths in the sea. Now I like to use him as an example because here is a man who read the Scriptures and then went to look for the paths of the sea. He was using things like the drift bottle. And you throw a bottle out, it’s got markers on it, and you watch and see where it drifts. And you could actually chart out the paths through the sea.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Now see, back when the Bible was written, ocean waters were homogenized. The idea that there would be separate distinct paths, rivers within water. Rivers on land, yes, but rivers in water? That doesn’t make sense. You have water in water. But see, we even have the Gulf Stream that comes from the Gulf Of Mexico, the Gulf Of America now. And it goes up, goes around Florida, up along the East Coast and then shoots across as a stream, as a river, a path, all the way to Europe, it prevents, it’s very important.
Kimberly Faith: Well, you’re referencing Psalms 8:8, which is the birds of the air and the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the seas.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right. Paths.
Kimberly Faith: And that’s, you know, that was written, you know, years, centuries before Matthew Lowry
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes, that was thousands of years. That’s why it’s important to understand that the thinking of the ocean seas was a homogenized mix of water. I mean, you don’t have separate and distinct waters. This is why I’m describing the Gulf. The Gulf Stream has its own temperature, its own solidity, its own osmotic concentration that’s different from the rest of the Atlantic Ocean shooting over to England. In fact, its warmth is what prevents the harbors in England from freezing during the winter.
Kimberly Faith: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, it’s the temperatures coming from the Americas here.
Kimberly Faith: That’s interesting. Well, there’s also, you know, talking about water, Ecclesiastes 1:17, which is written in 935 BC where Solomon writes, all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the places from which the rivers come, they return again, which is explaining the hydrological cycle, which we didn’t figure that out till when?
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, that was thousands of years afterwards too because, and I think that was the 1700s. As late as the 1700s. It just seems remarkable. It took so long.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah.
Dr. Patrick Briney: But that’s when the tests and experiments were done on evaporation.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And rivers and lakes and demonstrate that, hey, you don’t have to have subterranean waters to explain the build up of oceans and lakes and rivers. But rather, the rains themselves are sufficient. So where is it coming from? Well then they develop the water cycle.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Now one of the remarkable things that is in the Bible, see, this was not only not known, it was contrary. I want to emphasize the word contrary. It’s not only unknown, it was contrary to the thinking of it.
Kimberly Faith: To popular opinion.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Popular opinion. Why would you write down something so ridiculous?
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Because, everyone knows that can’t be true, and yet it’s recorded.
Kimberly Faith: Well, to your point earlier when we talked about the earth being a sphere, that also reminds me of Job 26:7 where it says, he stretches out the north over empty spaces. He hangs the earth on nothing. And at that time, which was thousands of thousands of years ago at this point, four or five thousand years ago, you know, in Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek, cultures, they had, you know, the earth was on an elephant or it was on the back, you know, it was being supported by
Dr. Patrick Briney: Atlas.
Kimberly Faith: By an atlas. Right. Or the god Atlas. And it kind of reminds me of the way the Bible is written throughout in, people who are used as witnesses, for example, for the you know, in the New Testament. Women, shepherds, women weren’t allowed to testify. Shepherds were considered complete liars. But yet, you know, the gospels records these people because God is bigger than popular opinion.
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: And I also wanted to bring up a couple other verses that I think kind of just along these points, and one of them is, about the stars being uncountable.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Abraham’s promise.
Kimberly Faith: Abraham. Genesis well, both Genesis 15:5 and Jeremiah 33:2. Genesis says then he brought him outside and said, look now toward the heaven and count the stars if you are able to number them. In the book of Jeremiah, it says, as the host of heaven cannot be numbered nor the sand of the seas measured. And, you know, if you look at the ancient philosophers in early, you know, like 150 BC cataloging the stars and claiming maybe there were a thousand of them. And now we know there’s, that it’s not even observable.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yeah, we keep every time the telescopes look further and further out, now we have the James Webb telescope out there.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney:They have to keep changing their understanding and explanation of the universe and the galaxies. Not just the stars and the billions of stars in the galaxies, but the billions of galaxies is just endless. It keeps going on and on and on.
Kimberly Faith: From what I also understand, this kind of goes back to our earlier discussion, but with the Hubble in 1990, that’s when they discovered the galaxies are receding, which kind of goes to our earlier point that everything started from one point and is moving outward.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes. There’s a cosmological principle, or the anthropic principle, which is rather interesting to think about. But the way everything is expanding, it has the appearance, And I say it has the appearance. From earth’s perspective, everything is getting further away from us. Nothing’s getting closer to us.
Kimberly Faith: Right, right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Everything’s getting away from us. That’s why it’s called anthropic or human centered perspective. Everything is shifting away. That is what they call steady state theory. The universe is expanding. The expansion and the reasoning for why everything, it wouldn’t matter what planet you’re on, nothing’s getting closer. It’s like a balloon. If you have a bunch of dots on the balloon, you blow it up, every dot’s getting further and further away.
Kimberly Faith: Right. That’s a good example. And that confirms Job 9:8.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Yes.
Kimberly Faith: And Isaiah 42:5 that says, He alone spreads out the heavens.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Spreading it out.
Kimberly Faith: And treads on the ways of the sea. And Isaiah says, Thus saith God, the Lord who created the heavens and stretched them out. So it’s just so interesting. I know we could go on and on about that but
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, it’s a testimony to God inspiring his word. He is a God who wants to be known.
Kimberly Faith: Right.
Dr. Patrick Briney: And he makes sure that his message is known by the word of God, the Bible, the spirit of God that he sent, and the church of God that he established. And these are three critical resources that we have available to us, God’s given to us, each one with a promise that they’ll never fail.
Kimberly Faith: Yeah, and that’s you know, talk about living life with confidence. I think about, you know, even as a born again believer how when I stray from, even just faithfully studying God’s word with passion, pursuing my relationship with him, and having the holy spirit guiding every compartment in my life. How much less confidence I have to even do the things I have to do, much less the things that God wants me to do. And that’s one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on this podcast because I appreciate your study, your education, the way you’ve used the skepticism that God has given you to change that into an amazing tool to persuade people, with the truth, really, because it is the truth that sets us free. And when we are able to articulate the truth with not just, we call this podcast Truth in Love for a reason because one without the other is just cruel on either side of the equation. And I love to talk with people and hear people who have really studied and lived that out. And you’re one of those people that has lived both those principles out. And so I just really appreciate you coming on today and explaining, first giving your testimony in the last podcast, but also explaining some of these things that there’s no way I could explain them. Iron sharpens iron, right?
Dr. Patrick Briney: That’s right.
Kimberly Faith: I’ve learned a lot today. And, so you were to, is there a thought that you would like to leave people with as far as just whether it’s prayer or whether it’s just your own insights and encouragement, what would you like to leave people with?
Dr. Patrick Briney: It all comes down to trusting God. People need to simply trust God. No matter what circumstances there are in life, you put your trust in God, you will experience the peace of God, the rest of God and you will come to understand how to fulfill the first and great commandment, which is to love him with all your heart, soul and mind. Trust. And there’s no reason not to trust him. It is a strange phenomenon that people say, I believe in God, but I don’t trust him. Well, they don’t say it, but they live in distrust and they’re robbing themselves of a great experience with God.
Kimberly Faith: I love that you bring that up because my law practice is my best mission field. People come in, they don’t come see a lawyer because they’re having a great day. But they say, most people come in and say, I’m a Christian. And one of the things I ask them is, are you living a satisfied and peaceful life? And 100%, the answer is no. And then the next question is would you like to close that gap? Would you like to learn how to close that gap? Because that’s where trust is evident. And I know this from my own experience, you know, I’ve lived the hypocritical Christian life, and now the Lord has been gracious and merciful to me and allowed me to close that gap. Not that it’s not an everyday struggle, of course it is. Read Romans Chapter Seven and you know it’s a struggle. But I just, really if you’re listening to this podcast today, I mean, you’ve been given a load of information that is so helpful in helping not just yourself, but maybe others who are struggling to see the fingerprints of God. Because they’re all around us. I mean, they’re evident across creation, it’s so obvious. But to peel back that layer of unbelief is a supernatural thing. And that’s where the gospel, Jesus, you know, Jesus came and he died a terrible death. He became incarnate, and he rose again all for one purpose. So that we would be reconciled to him. And if you do not know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and you don’t understand what we’re talking about, reach out to us on our website. We have an email you can reach out to. Brother Pat’s website, which is patrickbriney.com, has a ton of resources as well on how to come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and savior. But you know, it’s not that hard. If you know that you’re a sinner in need of salvation, and you have heard the gospel, that Jesus Christ came and lived a perfect life and died and rose again, that’s the gospel. And all you have to do is trust it. And so, I hope that this podcast has been educational but also motivational and motivating. It’s motivated me, Pat, and I appreciate you so much coming on and spending two hours or a little better than that, going through your testimony and this information.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Well, thank you for the opportunity. It’s a great blessing for me and just always enjoyable to talk with you, we always have a great time when we talk.
Kimberly Faith: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. To God be the glory.
Dr. Patrick Briney: Amen.
If today’s episode stirred your heart, we want to invite you to go even deeper. At gofaithstrong.com, you’ll find a growing library of faith based resources designed to encourage, equip, and strengthen your walk with God every single day.
Whether you’re searching for meaningful devotionals, real life testimonies, Christ centered blog posts, or soul stirring music, it’s all there, created to meet you where you are and lead you closer to where God is calling you to be. We believe that walking in faith doesn’t just happen on Sundays. It’s a daily pursuit. That’s why everything we do at Go Faith Strong is focused on helping you live boldly for Jesus Christ. Our podcast is just one piece of the journey.
There’s so much more waiting for you, resources to inspire your prayer life, deepen your understanding of the scripture, and help you share the gospel with others. So visit us at gofaithstrong.com and explore, read, listen, worship, and be encouraged. Your life matters. Visit us at gofaithstrong.com.
