Author Archives: ApoloJedi

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About ApoloJedi

Reading and healthy competition. People. Sharing the Good News!

Evolution is a Religion

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DarwinStatueDon’t believe me? Listen to the words of the UCONN Biology teacher when he decides to stop berating the preachers and begins indoctrinating the students. (WARNING!!! Profanity from evolutionist)

Not only do the atheist elite want to indoctrinate the masses with their message of naturalism, they cannot believe that anyone would disagree with them. To them, you can have any opinion on origins as long as it’s the same as them. Unfortunately (for them), their own worldview cannot account for good/evil, science, reason/logic, beauty, or truth.

If anyone tries to speak out that naturalism/evolution has some shortcomings in explaining everything, they are excommunicated. Those who do not worship at the alter of naturalism lose their job (David Coppedge) or career (Guillermo Gonzalez.)

What Could Persuade You?

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What Could Persuade You that evolution were not true?
If archaeologists found a rabbit in the Cambrian layers of soil then evolution would be disproven…right?
Well, as it turns out, proverbial rabbits are found all of the time in layers much “too old” for them. The problem is that people do not change their view based on conflicting evidence…they evolve their interpretation of the evidence to fit their view.
In an article entitled Radiometric Backflip, Volume 37, Issue 1, Creation Magazine describes just such an example. Here’s an example where the “science” (based on absolute radio metric dating) proved suggested that the rock layers of the Santo Domingo rock formation were 200 million years old (Nature 417 (6892):936-938, 27 June 2002).  But when footprints of sandpipers were found in layers of soil underneath the 200 million year old layers, scientists were able to scrub away 175 million years to make the data fit with the idea that sandpipers evolved about 37 million years ago. It must have taken quite a bit of soap to scrub away 175 million years that fast.
And this is not an isolated case. A hominid fossil, KNM-ER 1470 was found beneath soil that had originally been absolutely dated at over 200 million years old. Once the fossil was found, Richard Leakey requested a re-test. Not surprisingly, the NEW absolute dates of between 2-5 million years fit perfectly in the range that was needed to perpetuate the evolutionary myth. What happened to the original 200 million years? They were donated to a local charity for all we know.
So no amount of evidence will change someone’s mind regarding origins. This is why it is so important for Christians to be familiar with presuppositional apologetics. Everyone has presuppositions that define how we interpret evidence. So, the argument is not over evidence; the argument is over which presuppositions can correctly account for the preconditions of intelligibility. Only Christianity can account for intelligibility
Christians presuppose that there is a Creator God and that he revealed himself through the Bible, through creation, and in Jesus. Those who presuppose that there is no God are reliant on billions of years and a creative mechanism (evolution by natural selection and random mutation) to explain the origin and development of life.
So to convince someone that there is a God and that his word is infinitely reliable, you have to show how their atheistic presupposition contains contradictions.
We can trust God’s Word about history, and since it is a reliable history book (and the revealed Word of God), we know that we can trust God at his word regarding salvation and our future hope (Romans 8.)

Global or Local Flood

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Today’s mantra of global warming has grown tedious since the “evidence” turns out to show exactly the opposite of what those who would have us give up our rights are advocating.

But there are all kinds of interesting websites showing the new coastlines if the polar ice caps melted. Gone would be New Orleans, Florida, the East coast, and most of England. It would be sad to see Disney World submerged, and I so enjoy watching the English Premier League (it just wouldn’t be the same if it were the English Premier Water Polo League.) And I didn’t even mention the lost habitat of the lovable polar bears. This terrible scenario would all be as a result of the waters rising just 70 meters.

WaterLevelRise

It’s been said by the old earth movement that the flood of Noah’s day was a localized flood. They have put up reasons like, there’s not enough water, the writer of Genesis would not have known about the whole globe, and there’s no evidence of a global flood. All of these objections have been answered and shown to be false multiple times. A serious objection to the old earth theory of a local flood is God’s promise never to flood the earth again. Genesis 9:8-17 records God’s repeated covenant that he would never again flood the earth like he did when he destroyed all life and the earth. If we are to accept the old earth proposal that this was a local flood, then God would have broken his word because there have been many catastrophic local floods.

One argument that I have never heard used to counter the old earth local flood heresy is the water level above Mt. Ararat argument. Today, Mt Ararat stands almost 17,000 feet above sea level. Many volcanic eruptions have been recorded from this mountain, so it’s safe to say that this mountain has been much taller in the past. Mt. St. Helens lost over 1000 feet to its overall height when it erupted in 1980, so it’s not beyond reason to believe that Mt. Ararat would have been much taller the further back in time we go towards the catastrophic flood of Genesis 7-9. But for the sake, of argument, let’s say it was at its current height of 17,000 feet.

We know from Genesis 7:19-20 that “all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.” Some translations have cubits calculated at about 20 feet. We also know from Genesis 8:4, that the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters would have had to cover Mt Ararat to be in accordance with scripture, so what would happen to the coastlines if the seas were to rise about 17,000 feet? Our four memorialized Republican presidents on Mount Rushmore would be over 2 miles below the surface of the water. The Eiffel Tower would be three miles below the surface. And remember this is if we assume the waters to ONLY be as high as the old earth people tell us. If we take the Bible at its word, we know that it covered all of the mountains however high they were at the time. At the very least, we know that the flood covered the high mountains of Ararat, so if we take the old earth view of a local flood seriously, we have to assume that God put up some kind of imaginary boundaries at the edge of his flood area…but why would we want to do that. Why not take the words of scripture to mean what they actually say rather than trying to inject one’s pet theory into the text?

An ardent old earth advocate might say, “Well what if the ark landed at the base of Mt Ararat? The local flood waters could have just carried the ark to the base of this mountain.” Nice try, but the text says that the waters covered the mountains to a depth of fifteen cubits. So, it doesn’t matter at which point on the mountains of Ararat that the ark landed; the only highest mountain in the only range mentioned in the text is surely covered by more than 15 cubits of water. That’s a minimum of 17,000 feet.

We can trust God’s Word to be the authoritative source for interpreting evidence. We can trust what God’s Word has said about history, so we can trust what God’s word tells us about salvation and our future hope! You are valuable because you are created in God’s image, and he purchased your future with the death of his precious Son.

It’s a Curse

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Hypocrisy is difficult to deal with. When I observe it, it tends to make me mad. When my wife observes it, she can hardly contain herself with righteous indignation. When I think of hypocrisy, I most often think of it as being applied to Christians, who have claimed to have a moral stand against something “wicked” but have then proceeded to be involved in exactly that. As a Christian, I’ve been a hypocrite…not intentionally, but usually with my kids, I’ll find that I’ve failed on a moral level. It usually comes in the form of me yelling at my son, “You should not react with anger when you don’t like something!!!!” Um…unless you’re a parent…no that’s not right either. Ok. So Christians are hypocrites…forgiven and (hopefully) letting God’s Spirit guide our actions in accordance with His will.

What about Jesus? Jesus was not a hypocrite. Going way back in time, before Twitter, before Y2K, before Walmart, before Prohibition, before the Battle of the Alamo, before Columbus’ famous voyage, before Guttenburg…well, you get the idea…back at the very beginning, there was freedom in the Garden of Eden. The only guideline was to avoid eating from a single tree. There were no other boundaries. Adam and Eve had a chance to show the Creator that they trusted him completely by obeying this single guideline and enjoying fellowship with Him. But when they thought they knew better than Almighty God…with a little deceit and doubt thrown in there by the serpent (“Did God REALLY say…?”), the repercussions were catastrophic. To quote from Genesis 3 when God had to enter his newly tarnished creation after the prideful sin of Adam and Eve,

Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it’, Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

So death, that terrible enemy, made itself prevalent within creation. Why are thorns and thistles mentioned in the curse? In the same sentence that describes Adam’s inevitable death, God declares that mankind will face the problem of thorns. Odd.

Looking ahead to the fulfillment of God’s promise to crush the head of the serpent through the offspring of the woman, Jesus lived a perfect life, but faced the final enemy (I Cor 15:26) with purpose and resolve. About the events just prior to Jesus’ death, Mark records this:

They put a purple robe on him, then  twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him.

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The curse of sin was explicitly stated in the garden as thorns and death. Jesus took both of these upon himself and decisively defeated them both with his resurrection. Thankfully, the perfect Messiah, who did not come to restore Israel’s political dominance in worldly affairs, took the curse of sins upon himself so that we could be restored to life.

Book Review: Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds

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Phillip E. Johnson lays out a crystal-clear presentation for understanding the case against Darwinism. Not quite as comprehensive as Darwin on Trial or Reason in the Balance, this book was written as somewhat of a primer for those interested in learning about the scientific case against naturalism without being overwhelmed with scientific jargon.

The book was easy to get through and thoroughly compelling. Knowing that atheists would be resistant to arguments involving the Bible, he does not use it as an one of his arguments. The book’s main focus is on showing that naturalism as a foundation for Darwinism is the main problem. He quotes a letter that he received to show some very common mistakes from those that try to engage in this debate.

  1. Wrong definition of evolution – In the letter, the student tried to say that it was possible that God could have used evolution to do his creating. As I have shown here, here and here, this is not possible. But Johnson continues to explain why evolution as understood in the classroom is not a part of God’s creative plan when he shares the definition of evolution from the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), “The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.” <in 1997 the NABT removed the words unsupervised and impersonal>
  2. God started everything and then retired – The student tries to redefine the God of the Bible for a first cause (remote god) of deism.
  3. Faith vs. Reason – This is a very common intellectual error. Many people mistakenly think that naturalism is a result of reason, and anything that is not naturalism is faith. Firstly, naturalism cannot account for reason, and secondly, assuming naturalism is a faith position.

Johnson does a great job at correctly framing the debate. It is not a debate of science vs. faith, but it is one in which those in power of the “microphone” have overstated their case and suppressed any dissent. He has clear insight into the irony of the Darwinian position with regards to the media. Johnson correctly shows the hypocritical position of the Darwinists by describing the 1960 movie release, Inherit the Wind. The movie is based on the historical 1925 Scopes Trial in which a Kentucky high school PE teacher is convicted of teaching evolution in the classroom, which at the time was against the law in Tennessee. The movie stereotypes the Christians as evil monsters bent on suppressing knowledge, and it stereotypes the evolutionists as heroes of reason and humanity. What Johnson is able to do is show that this movie is actually a representation of what is happening in today’s science classrooms…just the reverse of the heroes and villains. In the movie, Mr. Cates is the persecuted hero, who “righteously” stood for reason by teaching evolution. During the scene described below, the prosecuting attorney takes the stand as a witness for creation while the defense attorney grills him:

“Suppose Mr. Cates had enough influence and lung power to railroad through the State Legislature a law that only Darwin should be taught in the schools!”

That possibility may have seemed remote in Hillsboro, but of course it is exactly what happened later. The real story of the Scopes trial is that the stereotype it promoted helped the Darwinists capture the power of the law, and they have since used the law to prevent other people from thinking independently. By labeling any fundamental dissent from Darwinism as “religion,” they are able to ban criticism of the official evolution story from public education far more than the teaching of evolution was banned from Tennessee schools in the 1920s.

But how was this reversal accomplished in a voting democracy? Given that a majority of Americans still believe that God is our Creator, how have the Darwinists been able to obtain so much influence and lung power?

The play answers that question too. In the final scene of Inherit the Wind, when the jury returns to the courtroom to deliver its verdict, a character identified as “Radio Man” appears in the courtroom carrying a large microphone…

The microphone (that is, the news media) can nullify <Darwin Dissenters> power by (in effect) outshouting him..There is only one microphone in the courtroom, and whoever decides when to turn it on or off controls what the world will learn about the trial…When the creation-evolution conflict is replayed in our own media-dominated times, the microphone-owners of the media get tot decide who plays the heroes and who plays the villains. What this has meant for decades is that Darwinists – who are now the legal and political power holders-nonetheless appear before the microphone as <heroes>.

The rest of the book builds the real scientific case for intelligent design and the wedge strategy. Johnson refers to the wedge strategy as the idea of not accepting the presupposition of naturalism. People should be allowed to question this unprovable axiom without having to face Darwinist persecution.

I highly recommend the book for those who would like a start in understanding the creation-evolution conflict at an introductory level. It is a quick read at only 119 pages.

Holy Matrimony

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Marriage is a hot topic in today’s culture. Whether it has to do with seeing your bride walk down the isle, your friends avoiding marriage, your friends getting married, gays trying to redefine marriage, or the government trying to define marriage, marriage is on our minds today.

Wedding

Well, Oklahoma has taken steps to get the government out of the marriage business. The reason is that the government should not be in the marriage business at all. In Genesis, God invented the institution of marriage, so it should be his followers that engage in it.

House Bill 1125, which would effectively ban all secular marriages in the state, was passed by a Republican majority and will now go to the state Senate for consideration.

“Marriage was not instituted by government. It was instituted by God. There is no reason for Oklahoma or any state to be involved in marriage,” said one of the bill’s Republican supporters Rep. Dennis Johnson, though marriage is a legal contract.

Marriage is not just a legal contract, it is a picture of God’s love for his church. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells husbands how to love their wives,

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy by washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.

So, without redefining marriage to mean something that God never intended, how can atheists participate in marriage or fulfill its purpose? Marriage is a continual act of selflessness, and while an atheist can be selfless, there’s no reason for them to be selfless. High atheist, Richard Dawkin, even praises the virtue of selfishness at the expense of sacrifice in his book The Selfish Gene. This is the exact opposite of marriage.

The good news is that everyone can participate in marriage, because God can redeem anything. He has mercifully given his Son so that our sins can be paid. We can all enjoy fellowship with Him knowing that our debt is paid.

The Best Evidence

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The best evidence for evolution has been shown to be incorrect…or at best outdated.

Citing the lack of support among students for embracing the Grand Theory of Evolution, two political science professors from Penn State, Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, have decided to help remedy the situation. They gathered science teachers from across the country into focus groups in an effort to find possible solutions. In the article that reported on their progress, the title photograph was Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine’s textbook, Biology.

Evolution News reports that this Biology textbook is filled with information that could best be described as misleading.

I have a copy of the 2000 “elephant cover” textbook, which features (1) a drawing of the 1953 apparatus used by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, accompanied by a caption stating that their experiment “first demonstrated how organic matter may have formed in Earth’s primitive atmosphere” (p. 344); (2) drawings of vertebrate embryos that look most similar in their early stages, showing that they evolved from common ancestors (p. 283); and (3) photographs of light- and dark-colored peppered moths resting on light- and dark-colored tree trunks, illustrating a story about natural selection in action (p. 297).

But these icons of evolution misrepresent the evidence. Among other things, the “atmosphere” used in the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment was almost certainly unlike that of the early Earth; vertebrate embryos actually look very different from each other in their early stages; and peppered moths rarely rest on tree trunks in the wild. The moth photographs were staged.

If the best evidence for evolution has to be fabricated, perpetuated, or assumed, then it’s time to try a different foundation for one’s worldview.

Swim Party on Mars

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At least that’s what scientists would have you believe the Martians used to put on birthday invitations long long ago.

The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet’s surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found.

Did they find this body of water? How do they know how deep it was? These scientists were speaking with presumption unimpeachable authority, when discussing details with such exactitude, a history that they claim to be 4.5 billion years ago. And yet here on Earth it would be remarkable for someone to know for certain the contents of the Lochness Sound.

Scientists with a passion for finding extraterrestrial life are so desperate that they have postulated these huge floods Mars even though the planet has no liquid water. These same scientists join with old earth creationists in denying the Biblical worldwide flood as told in Genesis 6-9 and confirmed by Jesus (Luke 17:26-27) and Peter (I Peter 3:20, 2 Peter 2:5, 2 Peter 3:5-6).

You really can trust God’s Word when he tells us about history. Since we can trust God about history, we can also trust him about the future too.

Hitch Your Wagon to a Star

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Just make sure it is the right star. I first heard this phrase (Hitch your wagon to a star) in Kenny Tamplin’s 90’s release, Get Out of My Sun. At least now you know some of my obscure musical tastes. Anyway, the idea is that if you know someone who is rich or smart or famous, then maybe you can get something that you didn’t necessarily earn. I’m going to take this on to a logical conclusion with the recognition that if you got your riches, fame, or information based on a falling star, then you too are doomed.

If you’ve hitched up to a falling star (or foundation) then your wagon (or worldview) is also bound to fail.

Titanic_OldEarth

Old Earth Creationists have been shouting the mantra of the necessity for Christians to embrace Big Bang Cosmology and other naturalistic-based ideas (evolution, deep time…) One of the more famous groups to have done this is Hugh Ross’s outfit, reasons.org. They claim that the Bible introduced the Big Bang cosmology to the world. One of the many problems with the idea of the old earth creationists is that the Bible does not have anything at all to do with the Big Bang. As noted in Genesis 1, God created dry land on day 2, plants on day 3, stars/planets on day 4, birds/fish on day 5, and land creatures on day 6 (including mankind). But the Big Bang theory describes something totally different in a totally different order in a totally different time frame. The two creation stories are completely different.

Despite the obvious differences, the old earth creationists continue to hang onto the idea that naturalistic assumptions about the universe should form the basis by which Christians should interpret scripture, and from a cursory look at their websites, they have grown adept at this method of interpreting the Bible.

Unfortunately, for them, like phlogiston, abiogenesis, and leech-blood-letting before, the Big Bang model has been tossed aside by secular scientists. In this article, the naturalistic thinkers no longer want the universe to have a beginning because this would seem to imply that there were a Higher Power, to whom they might be responsible.

Big Bang? What Big Bang? In a new theory, researchers suggest that the start of the universe may have involved no bang at all.

There’s no need for Christians to compromise the revealed Word of God to try to accommodate naturalistic assumptions about creation…especially as they have a tendency to be discarded as more information is discovered.  You can trust God’s Word as revealed in the Bible to be true and unchanging.

UPDATE:

“The science is settled! It is beyond dispute that the Big Bang never happened.”

“What?! New evidence is in, and the Big Bang never happened?”

“The science is settled! The universe is eternal. The Big Bang never happened. Those who cling to the Big Bang are science deniers!”

http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/02/10/watch-the-big-bang-never-happened/

Starlight, Star bright

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Stars are utterly fascinating to me. Whenever I get out into the country on a clear moonless night, I love looking up into the heavens to look at these wondrous creations. One of my favorite memories was seeing the Milky Way as clearly as I could imagine while traveling away from the city during my trip to Belize. It was so beautiful. As the Psalmist said, “The Heavens declare the glory of God.” – Psalm 19:1

stars

But there is an alternative view on the origin of the stars. Actually the most widely held view of the origin of stars is that they formed and continue to form as a result of natural forces. There are all kinds of problems with the naturalistic assumption that stars have formed on their own. To name a few of these problems, naturalists say that the original stars, Population III stars, formed with special conditions that no longer form stars. The problem is that none of this is observed. No one has ever even seen a Population III star. They are not scientific evidence; they are a required figment of the evolutionist’s mind. There’s no evidence that they ever existed, but for the evolutionist, they are necessary to have existed, so that the Population III stars could supernova and create Population II stars.

Population II and Population I stars have their own set of difficulties as they require high pressures from exploding supernova to compress debris and gases enough to trigger nuclear fusion. As of July 2014, astronomers estimate that there are an 7 billion trillion stars (7X10^22). If each of these stars were formed by the pressure of supernova explosions, why is the universe not saturated with the supernova remnants (SNR)? Instead of finding billions and trillions of SNR that would have been needed to form all of these stars, what is actually observed fits almost exactly within a biblical time frame.

SuperNovaRemnants

Even today evolutionists say that stars continue to form in stellar nurseries, but this is simply wishful thinking in order to perpetuate the deep time worldview. There is no evidence that stars continue to form.

We have historical records of the creation of the stars in Genesis 1

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day

Truly the Heavens declare the glory of God!

At no charge, I have done the math for you. If there are 7X10^22 stars, and (for the sake of argument) we accept the unbiblical age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, then every year 5,109,489,051,095 stars would have to form. That’s 9,721,250 stars every minute and 162,020 stars EVERY second for almost 14 billion years. This is completely unfathomable and beyond credibility.