Here’s What Makes Me Think The Bible Can Be Trusted Unconditionally, Part IIIA

Posted on April 21, 2011 by falcnjet

The Great Flood

In rereading my entry of March 22, I realized that I had promised to include a discussion of the great flood of Noah in my entry regarding the scientific accuracy of scripture. Not wanting to be unfaithful to my promise, I figured I’d better sandwich this entry in before I discuss the final category of evidence, fulfilled prophecy.

The account of the flood in world history is so fully evidenced in the present time that it is quite amazing that modern man chooses (generally) to insist that it couldn’t have happened. On this matter more than any other, I think, secular mankind loves to employ the fallacious “argument from incredulity.” In other words, “I can’t imagine how such a thing could occur, so it couldn’t have occurred.” One commonly hears arguments, usually put forth with a good deal of sarcasm, about the insane amount of water that it would take to cover all the mountains of the world (where did it go?), and about how the staggering number of known species makes the idea of housing specimens of each in a boat completely beyond possibility.

These are reasonable questions for a person not familiar with the full picture, and they deserve an answer. But secularists, knowing full well the implications that follow if the flood account is true, go much further than asking a couple of obviously valid questions. Because they know that questions like those above actually have easy answers, they are forced to claim that there is no evidence that such a thing ever occurred! No evidence? What about the worldwide sedimentary rock layers that extend thousands of feet deep? This type of formation, which accounts for the majority of the rock formations of our planet, is most easily explained in the context of the massive hydraulic effects of moving water. Sediment, when stirred and mixed by rapidly-flowing or surging fluid, tends to sort itself into layers of similar density as it settles. This is what we see all over the globe. These strata, which show no sign of interlayer erosion or biological disturbance, sometimes contain poly-strata fossils. These are indications of rapid formation in a single water event.

What about coal seams thousands of feet thick extending great distances and found all over the world? Coal is formed by the effect of high pressure and temperature on decomposing organic material. Obviously, if thick coal seams are present in a given location, there was once a great deal of organic material deposited there. This is, of course, also true of our planets extensive oil and natural gas reserves. Oddly (some think), the bible describes an event where massive quantities of plant and animal material were buried in a worldwide catastrophe. This is an historical record that fully explains why we find what we find. Yet much of the world discounts it in favor of a plethora of poorly supported, just-so explanations from the imagination of modern man.

What about massive erosion features found all over the planet? We find huge, majestic canyons extending sometimes hundreds of miles; grand river gorges thousands of feet deep; mesas, spires and table rocks that are clearly the lone survivors of flood waters that swirled away the landscape around them and evidence of long-forgotten lakes covering thousands of square miles. Again, one historical account offers an obvious explanation. But we, in the excellence of our intellect, cannot allow it to be true.

No evidence. What an incredibly blind and arrogant assertion! What about clams found in their closed (i.e., still living) position at the top of Mt. Everest, or the enormous store of fossils of other sea creatures left high and dry well above sea level? What about the flood legends catalogued from the study of more than 250 different cultures? What about the fact that the world’s geology is a graveyard for millions of creatures trapped, killed and buried in some sudden event? This is what passes for a “lack of evidence” to a world that the apostle Peter said “deliberately forget[s] that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. [And that] by these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.” (2 Peter 3:5-6)

The bible is scientifically accurate in everything that it claims. Even things that we, in our finiteness and with our limited perspective, find hard to believe. It turns out that there is enough water on our planet to cover its land masses by thousands of feet if those land masses were flattened out instead of compressed into the vast elevation changes from sea floor to mountain peak that we see today. Yes, the peak of Mt. Everest was once under water ⎯before it was a mountain peak.

The pre-flood world was very different from the one we see today (a fact clearly described in scripture and evidenced by today’s understanding of geology). It was also very different biologically. God never told us that He preserved a remnant of every “species,” so implying that there are too many to preserve on an ark is a straw man. God’s word tells us that He preserved a remnant of every land-dwelling, air-breathing kind of creature. We invented the word species and applied it to many different representatives of the same genetic kind. Some think there may have been as few as several thousand kinds of animals on the ark which have, over the millennia since, branched off into the millions of species we have catalogued today. But in any case, there is a vast store of good, solid, and often obvious, reasons to believe that what is laid out for us in the great book of history called the bible can be relied upon even when we have no evidence that it is true, or when we can’t imagine how it could be.

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Here’s What Makes Me Think The Bible Can Be Trusted Unconditionally, Part III

Posted on April 10, 2011 by falcnjet

Scientific Accuracy

It has long been claimed by critics that the bible contains numerous statements that indicate a lack of scientific knowledge by the writers. If every word of the bible is inspired, the argument goes, how could God allow error to creep in among His truth-claims and accounts of history? According to the most common litany of complaints, the bible contends that rabbits chew their cud, that pi equals 3.0 exactly, that bats are birds, that the earth is flat, that unicorns actually existed, that our solar system revolves around the earth (geocentrism) and quite a number of other questionable ideas. If any of these alleged errors are true about scripture then I would have to agree with the skeptics that the bible cannot be trusted for any truth-claim that it might make about any subject. If some things are not true, then by what method could I determine what is true? Surely, if an all-knowing God is behind scripture, then it cannot contain error in its original form.
It’s certainly reasonable for us to question things that we see in the bible that don’t seem to make sense or to square up with the doctrine of omniscient inspiration at first reading. But fairness requires that we understand the matter fully before deciding upon a conclusion. (Side note: “fairness” is a concept that originates in the very scripture that secularists debunk. If there is no ‘Establisher’ of fairness outside of the mind of each individual, how can we claim it as an objective measure? But that’s a digression into another discussion entirely.) The problem with atheists and the like is that they are not motivated to fully understand what they read before commenting on it.
Each of the claims above, when looked at in the way that all scripture should be interpreted (that is, its plain meaning in the light of the linguistic and cultural context), is understandable as a true statement. Rabbits do, indeed, re-chew partially digested food, though they do it in a different way than our modern expression, “chewing cud” describes. They actually re-ingest their droppings in an effort to squeeze all possible nutrients out of them. The ancient Hebrew word translated “cud” may simply refer to partially digested food.
The complaint about the value of pi stems from an old-testament account of the casting of a great metal basin for King Solomon. This ludicrous criticism complains that the dimensions given result in a diameter 1/3 the length of the circumference, which yields a value for the mathematical constant of 3.0, rather than 3.14159… This ignores the fact that these dimensions are expressed in cubits, an ancient measurement based on the length of a man’s forearm. Any reasonable reader would not expect such a measurement to reflect 14.159…% of a man’s forearm. The expression, “Give me a break,” comes to mind.
The “bat vs bird” issue has to do again with the translation of Hebrew to English. In reality, the text does not refer to the bat as a bird but as a “winged creature” when properly translated. The good King James’ translators chose the word bird and their modern counterparts have not seen fit to change it. For the most part, translators don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what an atheist is going to think when he reads the text.
The “flat earth” idea doesn’t even come from scripture. It is a claim against the early church leaders who, allegedly, preached the idea during several of the early Christian centuries. It represents a misunderstanding of the events of the time, but it is not a biblical issue. As a matter of fact, the prophet Isaiah referred to the “circle of the earth,” as early as the eighth century b.c. (the word translated “circle” would be better translated “sphere”).
Like most of these “problems,” the descriptions of unicorns in the bible result from translation issues. The word translated unicorn in several passages is a word that had no direct meaning in the English language and seemed to imply ‘one horn’ in Hebrew. Accordingly, the translators chose the word unicorn to express it in English. If one isn’t predisposed to debunk scripture, there could be a number of explanations for it. But it is unreasonable to infer from the passages in question that the inspired writers believed in unicorns.
And finally, the idea that the bible teaches geocentricity arises from simple statements that the sun rises and circles the earth. Claiming error here is no different that accusing every person who’s ever referred to a sunrise or a sunset of being scientifically backward. Apparently, describing something from the perspective of an observer is allowed everywhere but in the bible.
Far from being inaccurate about the physical world, the bible makes many completely accurate statements about nature that were not known empirically for long periods after they were made. Did you know that the bible described the expansion of space thousands of years before Edwin Hubble came along? The earliest written document known to mankind, the book of Job, makes the statement that God “…spreads out the northern skies over empty space.” Sounds like a pretty accurate description to me. And if that’s not enough, Job makes it clear that “He suspends the earth over nothing.” As late as 1,500 b.c., it was a common belief that the earth sat upon a large animal or was upheld by a giant. Some think that Job was written long before that time.
Here are some of the other accurate scientific statements made in the bible:

THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
Isaiah 51:6 – “Look up at the skies, ponder the earth under your feet. The skies will fade out like smoke, the earth will wear out like work pants, and the people will die off like flies.”
Psalm 102:25-26 – “In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded.”

We now know that all systems move from organization to disorganization unless acted upon by an outside intelligence.

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE OF WATER ON THE EARTH
Ecclesiastes 1:7 – “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from where the rivers come, there they return again.”
Amos 9:6 – “…he calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land— the LORD is his name.”

This worldwide cycle of moisture was not understood by science until the seventeenth century.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BLOOD TO ADVANCED LIFE FORMS
Leviticus 17:11 – “For the life of a creature is in the blood…”

This was not well understood by science until much later.

THE UNIQUENESS AND FINE TUNING OF THE EARTH FOR LIFE
Isaiah 45:18 – “For this is what the LORD says— he who created the heavens, he is God; 
he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited— he says: I am the LORD, and there is no other.”

We now understand the incredibly tiny limits within which many parameters must be maintained for life to be viable on Earth and in the cosmos.

THE PATHS OF THE SEA

Psalm 8:8 – “The birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, all that swims in the paths of the sea…”

A nineteenth century scientist, Matthew Maury, taking God at his word, set out to discover the “paths of the sea” and ultimately found that dominant and stable warm and cold continental currents exist in our oceans.

MICROSCOPIC ELEMENTS OF MATTER
Hebrews 11:3 – “…the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

Even the great father of evolution, Charles Darwin, didn’t know about the microscopic elements of matter such as atoms and molecules.

Atheists and liberal theologians are fond of repeating the sound bite: “The bible is not a science textbook.” That’s certainly true, but the bible is a truth book about every subject on which it touches, science included. God wasn’t trying to teach us science when He moved His chosen men to write His word, but in every case, once we fully understand it, we find that He is always telling us the truth. We have every reason to trust in this fact whenever we don’t fully understand it.

What do you think?

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Here’s What Makes Me Think The Bible Can Be Trusted Unconditionally, Part II

Posted on March 22, 2011 by falcnjet

 

Historical Accuracy


Last time, I talked about the incredible consistency and unity of message of this ancient book written by around 40 different authors in 3 languages in different countries over a period of sixteen-hundred (or more) years.  That alone should capture the imagination of any honest person who is truly open to knowing the truth.  But if a person still doubts the veracity of this extraordinary compilation of writings, he could further allay his hesitation by looking at the historical accuracy of it.

Over the centuries, there have been many claims made by secular and theologically liberal entities that accuse the bible of containing stories of places, people and events that never existed or took place.  Because of its importance in the age-of-the-earth debate, the Noahic flood has always been a favorite target, but I’m going to reserve that analysis for the next discussion (the scientific accuracy of the bible).  There are, though, a lot of other events that for long aeons of time remained unverified by archeology or other extra-biblical sources.  A century or two ago, those who didn’t trust God’s word had a lot more ammunition than they do now.

Throughout most of modern history, it has been popular to question one of the most important accounts in the biblical record, that of King David.  The bible records that in the early part of the eleventh century BC, a great king, chosen by God himself, ruled the united kingdom of Israel.  He was a great warrior, a gifted ruler and, although flawed, a “man after God’s own heart.”  He is of particular importance because it is from his genealogical line that the Savior was prophesied to come.  But until the early 1990’s, there was very little evidence of his existence outside of the biblical record, so many claimed it was mystical fantasy handed down by generations of ignorant ancients.

As the record of history has so often shown, however, God has provided us with many preserved physical evidences to back up the truth of His word.  There will always be honest doubters for whom faith is difficult, and The Creator knew that some, like the disciple Thomas, would need to see physical confirmation.  So He has provided it for us to find and given us the driving curiosity that continually leads us to it.  And so it is with King David.

In the opening years of the 1990’s, in northern Israel, an archeologist was excavating a site called Tel Dan, a mound of land where an ancient city once stood.  There, his team uncovered broken pieces of a small monument, called a “stele,” whose inscription refers to the “House of David.”  This find has been studied and verified by many scientists with different world views, and it is almost unanimously agreed to be from the ninth or tenth century BC, and referring to the biblical monarchy of David.

This type of find is far from unique.  For instance, until the mid 1800’s, most “scholars” denied the historicity of the story of the prophet Daniel’s encounter with a Babylonian ruler named Belshazzar.  All physical evidence then known chronicling the fall of Babylon to Darius of Persia in 539 BC indicated that a king named Nabonidus had the dubious honor of losing the great empire to the Persians.  Since the biblical story claims that Belshazzar made Daniel “third ruler” of the empire on the eve of the key battle that toppled it, and since no mention is made in the bible of King Nabonidus, the story became easy fodder for critics and remained so for centuries.  But in the same way as with King David, supporting evidence was preserved for mankind to discover.  This time it was in the form of a unique cuneiform cylinder inscribed with records of many of the activities of King Nabonidus.  Within the text, Nabonidus expresses a wish of long life and health for his son, Belshazzar.  With time, more evidence made it clear that Belshazzar served as a co-regent with his father, especially during Nabonidus’ long absences.  So suddenly, after centuries of cynical dismissal, all doubt was erased concerning the historicity of Belshazzar and it was finally made clear what was meant by the bible’s claim that Daniel was made “third ruler.”

These two examples merely scratch the surface of the litany of finds and discoveries that support the claims of this amazing book.  If you want more, google or wikipedia some of the following:

  • The Meesha Stele
  • The Caiaphas Ossuary
  • The Pilate dedication stone
  • The Hittite Library
  • The pool at Bethesda
  • Solomon’s mines
  • The cities of Arad, Bethel, Capernaum, Dan, Ephesus, Gaza, Hezor, Hezbon, Jericho and Ninevah (regarding the time of their archaeological discovery)

And there are many others.

Time and time again, man has questioned biblical history at every possible turn.  But as history marches on, we see repeated verifications from archaeology and other sources that what God has allowed to be written in the bible is unquestionably true. Surely this provides a strong basis for any reasonable person to have faith in the truth of whatever biblical truth-claim that they may not, as yet, see verified.  But if you still need more, look in my next post for the amazing consistency with modern science that the bible reveals.

Let me know what you think.

 

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Here’s What Makes Me Think The Bible Can Be Trusted Unconditionally

Posted on March 1, 2011 by falcnjet

[The Bible is] “so majestically deep that scholars could swim and never touch the bottom. Yet so wonderfully shallow that a little child could come and get a drink of water without fear of drowning.”   –Adrian Rogers

 

In the next few posts, I’m going to discuss why I believe the Bible can be fully trusted as infallible, bedrock truth. There are a number of fairly simple reasons why I look to scripture to understand my world before looking anywhere else. It’s not because I’m some super “churchy” person who goes around blessing everybody and beating my unfortunate acquaintances over the head with evangelistic christianese. I don’t carry a copy of the Bible with me everywhere I go (almost nowhere, in fact, since it’s on my computer and my smart phone) and I don’t lecture my friends or look uncomfortable every time they let a swearword slip (sadly, I hardly even notice anymore). I’m not even particularly looking to be a “good” person, though I’d like it if most people thought of me as one.

The reason I love the Bible is because I love the truth. If there is anything in this world that I want to be completely open to, it’s truth. I want to know that I see the world in a mostly-correct way. If I believe certain things are objectively right and others wrong, I want to be able to articulate why. And I don’t want my reason to start with, “I think…” Contentment, for me, is having a settled, confident understanding of the environment into which I was born. After a lot of years of searching, I can say that I know the Bible to be the first and best place to look for that.

Here’s why…

  1. Continuity, Consistency, Unity of Message and Durability
  2. Historical Accuracy
  3. Scientific Accuracy
  4. A Staggering Amount of Accurate Prophesy

 

This time, let’s talk about

 

Continuity, Consistency, Unity of Message and Durability

 

The Bible was written by over 40 different men. This alone should guarantee a convoluted, contradictory presentation of history and a confusing proffering of doctrine. Do you know of any organization or group of individuals numbering 40 or more that’s capable of presenting a unified, consistent message, especially about philosophy?

But that’s only the bare beginning. These 40+ men lived in different eras spanning 1,600 years! Not only did few of them know each other, but many of them didn’t even know about one another or have access to each other’s writings. They wrote in three different languages in several different countries on three different continents. The only reasonably-expected result of such a collection would be chaos.

If the number and diversity of writers isn’t enough, consider the fact that the book is more than 2,000 years old. It was written by men that we would consider ancient, and since it was finished, it hasn’t been added to, corrected, or deleted from. That’s twenty centuries. Surely some discovery or wisdom has been gained since then that would correct or contradict these writings. Yet no one has ever found a single error in fact in the hundreds of thousands of words and thousands of pages written by these men. Of course, over the centuries, many have tried, but no one has definitively shown any contradiction (once fully understood) among the claims of this amazing tome. Even if you accept the claims of some that there are minor contradictions, how unreasonable is it to expect none, given the circumstances. And there are certainly none that effect any weighty matter of truth.

But I think the most compelling evidence in this category is in what this book has accomplished over the centuries. If the scriptures were not convincing, there would be no Judaism, no Christianity, and many other religions would at least be very different. In the twenty-first century, this book is still a runaway best seller, vastly out pacing second place (write me if you know what book comes in second!). The accuracy, continuity, consistency and compelling reliability of the Bible is one of the main catalysts for the explosion of several religions on our planet. It has been estimated that the beliefs of fully 85% of mankind are influenced by this book. I have no problem believing that more than five-and-a-half billion people could be wrong, but if this book were in error or inconsistent in any significant way, I can’t see that many being influenced by it.

No, there is no explanation for the unified, consistent message of the Bible other than the inspiration of the Creator God. But there is far more to it than this. Next time, I’ll discuss the Bible’s amazing historical accuracy.

 

Let me know what you think.

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Making Sense of Dinosaurs

Posted on January 29, 2011 by falcnjet

No animal kind, extinct or living, evokes as much interest and awe in us humans, especially young ones, as the Dinosaurs. The luckiest of young boys have toy boxes full of plastic and rubber replicas of these awesome animals that no living person has ever seen. What could spark the imagination of a child better than the idea of such huge and scary beasts? And children are not alone. Everyone wonders what it would have been like to see Dinosaurs and what caused them to go extinct.

In the mid 19th century, naturalists began finding strange teeth and pieces of bone that clearly belonged to some kind of species unknown before that time. Before long, more had been found and Dr. Richard Owen, a naturalist in the truest sense (that is, he studied nature with an understanding of the truth of creation), was led to name the new category Dinosauria (“terrible lizard”).
As time went on, with the advent of secular dating methods and ancient-earth paradigms, great stories and ideas were born that gave Dinosaurs a sort of hyper-mystical place in our view of deep history. They ruled the planet for more than a hundred million years, we’re told, and had they not been wiped out by some catastrophic natural phenomenon about 65 million years ago, human kind would not be here today. Of course, these kinds of stories further deepen the arcane reputation of these great brutish creatures and make them even more mysterious.

But putting aside all the mystery and based on a rational look at what we actually know about these extinct species, what is the best guess as to their true place in pre-history? And is it possible to definitively solve the mystery of what happened to them? Well, let’s see. What we know is that we find fossilized (and lately, not-quite-fully fossilized) bones of a wide variety of creatures, varying in size from very small to great behemoths. We find these buried in stratified sedimentary rock layers at varying depths below the modern-day surface of the earth. They are mostly found within a limited range of depth.

So from this we know that there was a family of animals that we have never seen living, all (or mostly all) of which died within a short time in the past. This is basically all we know about Dinosaurs in truest sense of knowing. Animals that seem strange to us once lived and now they don’t. After stating this undeniable empirical truth, all we can do is to try to infer more about these creatures by applying what we hope is rational speculation. And so we do. It is from this speculation that we get the compelling, mysterious stories of a world ruled by lizards and ever-changing dogma about their sudden demise.

While many Christians reject the idea that these animals ruled a primordial Earth, Christians can really do no more than can secular analysts of various stripes in terms of explaining Dinosaurs. Like the areligious analysts, we were not there to see the events and circumstances that culminated in vast stores of buried, fossilized bones that we see today. Based on their worldview, secular historical scientists construct what they hope is a plausible story about how events conspired to bring the evidence into the present in the form in which we find it. They see their jobs as explaining reality based on natural sequences of events only, so the possibilities, for them, are limited by their worldview. Christians are no different in that way. We also see the possibilities through the glasses of our worldview.

But for Christians, differences in worldview from the rest of mankind are, or should be, an understood norm. We expect the secular world to disagree strongly with us on a wide variety of subjects and to reject our claims about God and the role of Jesus Christ in explaining reality. They don’t understand the world based on the truth of scripture as we should. Many don’t even allow for the possibility of a world outside of their five senses. So it should not be at all surprising that they propose possibilities that we know, from the revelation the Creator has given us in scripture, couldn’t be true. But somehow, secular truth-claims about pre-history are harder for us to reject than irreligious claims about spiritual matters. Over time, our society has elevated the family of disciplines we call “science” to a level of trust that renders disagreement with it ludicrous. How, after all, can a layman disagree with a vast fraternity of men and women who have studied and worked at their particular discipline for years, and in the aggregate, for centuries? Surely it is arrogant for any lay person to question such people.

But as Christians, we should ask ourselves where the arrogance really lies. When we face a disagreement between the claims of thousands of natural scientists over more than a century and the declarations of the Creator of nature, is it arrogant to reject the human opinions in favor of the Entity that spoke those same humans into existence? Or are the humans, however educated, who place their intellect above that of their Creator the truly arrogant ones?

The truth about Dinosaurs is only one example of this conflict. Dinosaurs are land animals and the bible clearly states that all land animal kinds were created on the sixth day of creation week. So we have the truth-claim in scripture that man and Dinosaurs did, in fact, cohabit together in the past. In addition, we have the scriptural truth-claim that all land-dwelling, air breathing creatures were destroyed by a great flood covering the entire earth at one point in history, except for a small sampling of each kind that were saved on the ark. Now, either these claims are true, or they are not. If not, I can’t tell you the number of problems that arise with the whole Christian faith. Most importantly, if these accounts are not true, then how do I determine what exactly is true among the truth-claims of scripture?

What happened to the Dinosaurs is that they were created by God and lived harmoniously with humankind for awhile, then most of them were destroyed in the Noahic flood. Those that were preserved through the flood were ill suited for survival in the changed environment that followed, and over time, they became extinct. Nothing mysterious. No asteroids or poisonous methane gasses needed. We find their bones fossilized in hardened sediment because they were catastrophically killed in a global flood. We find their images carved into rock faces in many parts of the world, and we hear of dragon legends handed down over the centuries because many of them survived for many centuries following the flood before going extinct, like so many other species. We need only to look at the truth of scripture to get a reasonable idea of what dinosaurs were, what their place was in the saga of history, and why we don’t see them today. It is only those who deny the possibility of a God of creation who must imagine great stories of awesome, world-dominating beasts who were ultimately wiped out by some imagined catastrophe.

As always, the truth can be found in the truth book; the Word of God.

What do you think?

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Our Moon: A Nightly Testament to Special Creation

Posted on January 12, 2011 by falcnjet

(Excerpted from my book, Because I Think, I Believe, available at www.becauseithinkibelieve.com)

Many have tried to explain how it could be that a body such as the moon could be orbiting our planet at the distance and in the type of orbit that it does. The origin of a nearly perfect, circular orbit of one rocky body around another is hard to explain by natural forces over time. Also, given current theories about how such rocky bodies are formed in space, it’s hard to come up with a plausible theory about how the material got there and formed a planetary body in the first place. Some have thought it was leftover matter from the formation of the earth that accreted into a moon rather than a planet. (The accretion by gravitational attraction of solid objects in space to form planets and other bodies seems intuitively reasonable, but due to the laws of motion in a vacuum, the possibility is questioned by many.) Others postulated that the moon was formed as a small planet in the same way earth supposedly was, but elsewhere in the solar system, and that it was trapped gravitationally in orbit around our planet as it passed by.

But because of many physical difficulties with these theories, they were overturned in favor of the “Mars-sized impactor theory,” which proposes that the earth was hit by a huge object. This object basically tore some of the material off of the earth, and after a long period of accretion, it ended up as our moon. Over time (the evolutionist’s favorite ally), the earth healed of the wound. This is today’s “theory du jour.” But because this theory has insurmountable problems of its own, another will be along shortly to replace it (as soon as some imaginative scientist can think of one).

Such theories are not empirical science; they are attempts to theorize about unrepeatable events in the past by extrapolating backwards from what we see today and inserting theoretical events that might have caused the current situation. To espouse theories like these assertively is to step out of the proper realm of science and into the realm of dogma. If these theories were presented as ideas, or even “educated” conjecture, then we the public would know them for what they are. Instead, we are confidently led to believe that these are “discoveries” rather than speculations. Christians are admonished to test, or question, the spirit in which facts are presented to us to see if they comport with what God has told us about reality (I John 4:1.) It would be nice if all students were taught to test what they are told against common sense and logic (in other words, what they already know intuitively about reality).

Because of the difficulties with the various proposed naturalist explanations, it’s curious that I’ve never heard of an article published in a secular peer-reviewed journal saying that all conceivable naturalist theories are riddled with problems, so the moon probably has a supernatural origin (although at least one has come close). If scientists were truly unbiased truth-seekers, they would have to allow for such a possibility. The moon, like so many other natural objects and circumstances, is critical to allowing life on earth. Why couldn’t the moon have been placed there at the perfect distance and the perfect speed to create the required orbit to support life on our planet by an entity completely independent of natural limitations? Where secular science is concerned, it is because such an explanation is eliminated by the presupposition that all things have a natural explanation. And this presupposition exists primarily because an extra-natural explanation smacks much too plainly of the existence of a deity.

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Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause

Posted on December 17, 2010 by falcnjet

From the editorial page of the New York Sun, 1897
By the editor: Francis P. Church

Dear Editor—
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to have men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest men, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernatural beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

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I wish so much that it was possible in today’s Western society to see an occasional article as wise and well written as this one.  While I wasn’t around in 1897, I do miss the time when people weren’t afraid to express their faith in the public arena.  This eloquent author is telling young Virginia that it’s okay to believe in a world beyond her senses; that some of the things most worth knowing can’t be studied in a lab beaker or held in her hand.  I envy Virginia.  She lived in a world where many possessed a great gift ⎯a gift that is so very hard to find in my world.

I hope that during this holiday season you will let yourself be drawn into Virginia’s world.  Let your inborn sense of truth have full sway over you.  Open a crack in the veneer of cynicism that the 2010 world has created in you, and let in a little 1897.

Merry Christmas!

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Who’s More Religious Than Whom?

Posted on December 1, 2010 by falcnjet

In talking about the so-called science-versus-religion debate several posts back, I mentioned that all assumptions about reality require faith. If that’s true, then aren’t we all religious? But who’s more religious than whom?

World views require assumptions about the past. No one alive today was present to see how our reality came to be the way we observe it in the present, so we can only speculate based on some narrative viewpoint in which we place our faith. In other words, because observing unrepeatable past events is out of the question, we decide what events would have been possible based on the general beliefs about reality that we bring to the question. Many think that if they opt for mainstream science’s interpretation of the past (far and away the loudest and strongest voice in the debate) they are basing their beliefs on empirical evidence. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had secularists of one kind or another declare to me that science has “proven” this or that theory about the past (big bang, star formation, biological evolution, etc.).

First of all, “proven” is a really big word. It’s a measure no one really wants to be held to, not even dogmatic secular scientists. Proof is the removal of all possible doubt. In the case of deep history, I think we all understand, when we think about it, that we are talking about defending possible scenarios that we believe are inferred by present empirical evidence. The critical word there is “believe.” Science can no more prove that there was a real event similar to their big bang theory than I, as a Christian can prove that Adam and Eve were real people in time and space. There are certainly inferences in nature that, if you accept numerous unprovable supporting assumptions, could point to all the matter in the universe being originally contained in a single, tiny, ultra-dense locality that might have exploded, spewing everything that we see today into space ⎯if your common sense will allow you to believe such a thing. Of course, you’re going to have to add to that many stories about matter condensing into stars against any reasonable understanding of explosive dynamics, heavy elements being created in stars somehow, and a litany of other impossible accidents over eons. Onto that you’ll have to add an accidental origin of life that no one has remotely shown to be possible and another millions-of-years-long string of accidental mutations (somehow increasing complexity and adding new information to cell DNA). And there is a lot of other “‘splainin’ to do” along the way.

On the other hand, you could opt for the more logical viewpoint. The universe exists, therefore it had a beginning. It is complex beyond measure, therefore there is intelligence behind it. A thing cannot create itself, so whatever created it is not a part of it. An infinite regression of causes is unintelligible, therefore this intelligent creator-entity must pre-exist our reality and must be eternal. If the foregoing is true, then the following is inescapable. This entity is more intelligent than its creation, it is more powerful than its creation, it is a personal entity because it requires a personality to choose to create, and it is not bound by the laws that it created.

This simple train of thought, which follows iron-clad logic, leads a thoughtful and honest person to believe in a Creator God. True, it doesn’t “prove” anything. But which scenario takes more faith?

If religion is having faith in unprovable or unknowable things, we are all religious. Secular viewpoints about reality require a great deal of faith in truth-claims that would be laughable to most sensible people if they weren’t so imperiously stated as truth by those who we trust to know. Sure, it’s not intuitive to believe in a supernatural Creator being, but it IS logical. Can the same be said about naturalism?

Next time somebody says or implies that we’ve gotten religion out of our schools and the public arena, remind them that religion is a faith-based belief system. We haven’t removed religion, we’ve just replaced it with a state-supported one.

What do you think?

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The Moral Yardstick

Posted on November 18, 2010 by falcnjet

A couple of entries ago, I talked about the existence of logic in a world that supposedly arose from accidental, chaotic events of nature. Events themselves, of course, require the existence of something before they can occur. If there is no matter or energy, then what would describe an “event” in such a reality? The only possible event that could occur in a state of “nothingness” would be the emergence of “something.” But that’s another discussion.

I promised at the end of that previous entry to discuss how right and wrong, or good and evil, could exist in such a world. In other words, how could objective morality have arisen in a purely natural, accidental world? For any kind of order to arise from chaos, some sort of force must act on the disorder, forcing it to conform to some disciplined condition. Objective ethics and morals (just like logic and laws of nature) are disciplined conditions imposed upon reality. We know instinctively that we must respect human life, treat others with dignity, love our family and friends, be truthful and fair, work hard and sacrifice for others. But in an accidental world, why would we “know” such things?

Evolutionism makes the claim that ethics grew out of various pressures over eons. The need to work together to achieve ends ⎯provide safety, obtain food, build shelter and so forth⎯ necessitated societal rules and cultural standards which were honed over endless centuries, becoming more instinctive with each generation. Maybe. But no matter how much of this magical ingredient called time is applied to the problem, natural man is still natural man. In a world where there is no Law Giver, there needn’t be any law. The idea of teaming up to achieve common goals does little to explain the largely voluntary “goodness” that most people try to display.

Healthy and mature individuals don’t murder just because they don’t like somebody (and would not even if they knew they could avoid punishment.) They don’t abuse children, they’re not mercilessly cruel even when they can easily get away with it, they don’t betray their loved ones, they don’t steal (much), and if they can, they’d rather tell the truth than lie. People who do at least this much we consider decent folks. If they go further by being notably kind, generous, altruistic and more, we label them “good” because, well, we just know that they are. Imprinted in our psyche is a yardstick of good and evil by which we measure everything that we encounter in our world. And this yardstick is essentially universal among humans. If pollsters were to ask a vast number of people across a wide spectrum of cultures and backgrounds to label various behaviors good, bad or neutral, the results would show a strong agreement on many of the most important behaviors. Under naturalism, there is no explanation for this. If there is no Law Giver who impacts the conscience of every person, then every person should have his or her own view of ethics and morality. The word “good” should have many definitions relative to the individual using the term. Yet running through the core of every culture in the world is a strong tendency to value many of the same things.

The existence of objective morality is a strong indicator that its source lies outside of mankind. By placing it in us, our Creator points us toward Himself. He knows that open, reasonable people will easily see by this and myriad other indicators that some powerful force outside themselves must exist.

What do you think?

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Did Comets Play a Part in Forming Our Planet?

Posted on November 5, 2010 by falcnjet

I’m always entertained by headlines and their associated stories about “discoveries” or notable events in the areas of physical or historical science. If any occurrence or new information implies (or can be spun to imply) support for a billions-of-years old universe or for an accidental origin of life, it is always a newsworthy story. Such was the case today when I picked up my USA Today newspaper.

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In it was an article entitled, “NASA Probe Beams In Close Encounter with Comet.” It described the passing of a space probe by the Hartley 2 comet and the pictures it returned to Earth. Nestled within the inspiring descriptions of gas jets sublimating from its surface (which the paper incorrectly described as “melting”) were dogmatic declarations such as this:

“Comets are essentially frozen leftovers from the dawn of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They may have delivered water and life’s early ingredients — organic chemicals — to Earth’s oceans in a period of frequent impacts more than 3.9 billion years ago.”

Later on in the article, this statement is made:

“As comets go, Hartley 2 is quite small, and its jets are quite active. Nearly 5 feet of its surface depth melts away each time its orbit takes it into the warmer inner solar system, A’Hearn says. “It won’t be around for long.””

Hmm. So here we have very short-lived objects in our solar system (most agree that the longest-lived comets could last no more than 100,000 years) that are “frozen leftovers from the dawn of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.” I don’t know about you, but for me, that raises a question: Why do we still have comets hanging around our solar system if it’s 4.6 billion years old?

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Enter the well-used tactic of inventing a rescue theory. In this case, cosmologists and astrophysicists invoke the so-called “Oort Cloud.” This is a supposed collection of comets hanging around outside our solar system that remain intact indefinitely because they don’t orbit our Sun. Occasionally, these comets are disturbed by passing space objects or debris and are jostled into a position where the Sun’s gravity overpowers the balanced forces of the cloud and they are pulled into a solar orbit. This provides an endless supply of new comets.

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There, problem solved.

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The only thing that rational people would want to know (and are never told) is that the Oort cloud is an imagined entity. It’s named after a guy who made it up in order to answer the problem of young comets in an old solar system! There is no empirical or implied evidence of such a collection of comets whatsoever. The theory exists because it needs to exist to solve the problem. Please feel free to check this out with any reputable source of astronomical information about comets. No one denies it.

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This is the kind of thing that passes for “science” in the origins and age-of-everything debate ⎯ dogmatic truth claims that have no reasonable support. Be careful what you believe. It matters.

What do you think?

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Referenced article may be found at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2010-11-04-deep-impact_N.htm

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