The Bible Has the Answer
Go to Questions The following material was included for two reasons: 1) To show the absolute folly of compromising God's Word to accommodate scientific or archaeological theories. If we find a supposed contradiction in the Bible with these theories we should not doubt the Bible but find the logical fallacy in the theory. Without exception, the theory will be based on indirect evidence. You should ask the questions, "How do you know?", and "Where you there?". If you cannot harmonise the Bible with these theories, just wait. Science has a way of correcting itself. Never, ever doubt the accuracy of God's Word. The final authority is the Bible, plus nothing else.
The Anvil of God's Word
Last eve I paused beside the blacksmith's door,
And heard the anvil ring the vesper chime;
Then looking in, I saw upon the floor,
Old hammers worn with beating years of time.
"How many anvils have you had," said I,
"To wear and batter all these hammers so?"
"Just one," said he, and then with twinkling eye,
"The anvil wears the hammers out, you know."
"And so," I thought, "The Anvil of God's Word
For ages sceptic blows have beaten upon,
Yet, though the noise of falling blows was heard,
The Anvil is unharmed, the hammers gone."
--John Clifford D.D.
1)Has modern science discredited the Bible?
2)Are there intelligent beings on other planets?
3)Should a Christian believe in evolution?
4)Is the creation story literal or allegorical?
5)Is evolution a scientific fact?
7)Will man ever be able to create life?
These materials are taken from the book:
They have a large selection of creation based materials. Write them for a free catalogue. If overseas, contact them for the address of the distributor in your country. The topics disk containing this material may be freely distributed, provided it is not altered in anyway.
If
you would like to learn more about creation and the Bible, contact your
country's creation organisation. If you do not know the address, write ICR for
information.
Institute for Creation Research,
P.O. Box 2667,
El Cajon, CA
92021
or
visit their website http://www.icr.org/
or call (619) 448-0900.
An excellent magazine on creation is "Ex Nihilo". You can find out how to get a copy by writing:
Creation Science Ministries
P.O.Box 6330,
Florence, KY
41022
In the US call 1-800-350-3232.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. (Ge. 1:1)
===================================================================== 1.Question: "Has Modern science discredited the Bible?" Answer: Probably the most basic reason for the modern widespread Rebellion against traditional values in every realm--social, moral, political, educational, religious--is the widespread impression that Biblical principles have been outdated by the discoveries of modern science. Our constitution and our entire American culture were permeated in their origins with a strong national faith in God and His Word. The gradual undermining of confidence in the Scriptures, resulting from the rise of uniformitarianism and evolutionism in the nineteenth century, inevitably was followed by a revolt against the social and political institutions erected on that faith. It is no accident that religious liberals are almost always moral and political liberals, and vice versa.The fact is, however, that true science has always confirmed the Bible! It is not science but scientism (that is, the extension of the scientific theories to a supposedly complete philosophy of life and meaning) that has attacked the Bible.
"Science" means "knowledge" and therefore includes only that which we actually know, by direct observation and experience. It is the organized body of factual knowledge and relationships. The "scientific method" necessarily involves experimental reproducibility and verification. Thus science, in its proper sense, can deal only with the processes of the world as they now exist. It can tell us nothing for certain about prehistoric events and processes, nor can it predict future events and processes with certainty.
Many scientists (not science as such, but scientists--men who are just as biased, fallible, sinful and human as any other men) have assumed that these present processes are eternal processes, and therefore that they can explain everything that ever has been or ever will be in terms of what exists now! This is the philosophy of "uniformitarianism" and is the ruling philosophy in the modern scientific establishment. It necessarily leads to "evolutionism," which seeks to explain the origin and development of all things in terms of present natural processes. But this assumption itself violates the two most fundamental laws of science, the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics! These laws deal with the all-embracing entity known as "energy," which includes all the phenomena of the physical universe. All processes are basically interchanges of energy--even matter itself is fundamentally a type of energy, which can, under the right circumstances, be converted into other forms. The First Law of Energy Conservation, which states that nothing is now being created or destroyed. The Second Law is the Law of Energy Decay, which states that in all real processes there is a net loss of energy available for further work. All natural processes, without any exception whatever, operate within the framework of the Two Laws.
Thus all processes are conservative and disintegrative, not creative and integrative.
The Bible, instead of being discredited by science, has actually anticipated modern science. The Two Laws were stated in the pages of the Scriptures thousands of years before their recognition by nineteenth-century scientists. In fact, the institution of the First Law by God is commemorated every Sabbath Day. "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day" (Exodus 20:11). All of His "works were finished from the foundation of the world" (Hebrews 4:3). He is now "upholding all things by the Word of His power" (Hebrews 1:3). Thus, He is not now creating anything, but neither is He allowing anything to be annihilated.
The Second Law expresses in a formal way the fact that something is intrinsically wrong with the world. Everything gets old, wears out, runs down, and finally dies. In all processes, some energy becomes degraded to low-level heat energy and can no longer be used. Every ordered system, left to itself, tends to become disorganized. Complex structures tend to break up and become simpler. The "entropy" (that is, the disorder, or randomness) of a system tends to increase, and this tendency can only be superseded, locally and temporarily, if there is an excess supply of ordering energy brought in from outside the system.
In the Bible, this Law is called the "bondage of corruption" (literally, "decay") under which the "whole creation is groaning" (Romans 8:21, 22). It is nothing less than God's primeval Curse on man and his entire dominion (Genesis 3:17), which God invoked when man first brought sin into God's originally perfect creation.
This Second Law teaches that, unless God Himself intervenes, the universe is proceeding inexorably toward an ultimate "heat death," when all available energy will have been degraded to low-level heat and no more work can be done. Since this state has not yet been reached, the universe is not infinitely old and thus must have had a definite beginning!
The First Law states that, since all present processes are conservative, not creative, the beginning of all things required by the Second Law must have been accomplished by means of creative processes which are not now in existence {1 The biblical, theological, and scientific implications of the First and Second Laws are treated more fully in the author's book, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984), pp. 185-215.} Therefore, they are inaccessible to science, and anything we are ever to learn about them must come by revelation from the creator Himself.
Thus the basic framework of science, confirmed by Biblical revelation, leads us inexorably and irrefutably to the first words ever written and the most profoundly important truth ever comprehended: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1:1).
Goto top2.Question: "Are there intelligent beings on other planets?"
Answer: It is impossible to prove a universal negative, but there is not as yet even the slightest evidence, either biblical or scientific, that there are men like us inhabiting other planets or star systems. There is an abundance of pseudo-scientific speculation of this sort, but the hard evidence is against it. Life, at least such as we know it, requires a very complex combination of environmental factors to be possible, and only this planet, so far as is known, provides this combination. Water must be abundant, for example. Little if any water exists on the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or the other planets, and certainly not in liquid form. The temperatures on all the other known planets are either too cold or too hot for life in any higher form comparable to the earth's human life. In addition, many complex chemicals must be present in abundance in order to support the life process. An atmosphere essentially like our own would also have to be present. In general, life in any form comparable to human life would require a planet essentially the same as our own planet in every respect. There is no evidence, however, other than speculation, that such a planet exists anywhere else in the universe. The main reason that men keep wishfully searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life is that this would give support to their evolutionary philosophy. That is, if life is just a product of natural chemical developments here on earth, as the leaders of evolutionary thought insist, then the same chance developments should also have taken place in other places in the universe, they feel, in view of the almost infinite number of other stars. Nevertheless, the actual evidence remains massively negative. As far as the Scriptures are concerned, they teach unequivocally that the earth is uniquely the abode of man. "The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord's, the earth hath He given to the children of men" (Psalm 115:16) "God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation" (Acts 17:20). It was to this earth, alone among all the uncounted billions of heavenly bodies, that God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, came down to suffer and die for man's salvation. "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven" (John 3:13). The earth may not be the center of the universe (though no one knows, of course, where such a center might be), but it is certainly the center of interest of the universe! "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him" (I John 4:9). It seems grotesque and blasphemous to suggest that the tragedy of Calvary's cross should be repeated on millions of other planets, for the benefit of other unknown and hypothetical members of God's creation. The earth, as the astronauts observed, is uniquely beautiful and uniquely equipped as man's home. Though it is small, it is of infinitely more complex organization and variety than even the largest stars, composed as they are mostly of the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium. Since the sun and moon were made specifically to "give light upon the earth" (Genesis 1:15), it may be possible that the moon, and even the solar system, were within the "dominion" which man was commissioned by God ultimately to "subdue," by his science and technology (Genesis 1:28). This is uncertain, but it is at least clear that the other stars, the nearest of which is four light-years away, are well beyond man's power ever to explore directly, or to control, in the present order of things. Why, then, did God create them? What is the purpose, in God's wisdom, for the tremendous number and variety of stars, and perhaps a still greater number of planets (though the existence of these is speculative, based only on analogy with the solar system) throughout the vast universe? We can only give tentative suggestions, of course, but it is well to remember that God is still the Creator, and there are endless ages of eternity ahead of us. Even though, for the moment, the only obvious function of the stellar heavens is to reflect the infinite power and grandeur of their Creator, it may well be that they are awaiting more specific uses by Him in the ages to come, after the completion of His redemptive program for the earth and men. It is also possible, that, even now, they have some relationship to the angels of God. This may be implied by the fact that angels are often called "stars" in Scriptures (e.g., Job 38.7; Isaiah 14:12, 13; Revelation 12:4, 9; 9:1; etc.) and that the phrase "host of heaven" is applied both to the stars and to the angelic hosts (e.g, Jeremiah 33:22; II Chronicles 18:18). The worship of the stars, which has always been a characteristic of polytheism, has, in reality, been a worship of angels (or "gods"), especially those angels who have followed Satan in his great rebellion against the true God (note II Kings 17:16; Colossians 2:18; I Corinthians 10:20, etc.). It seems possible, at least, that this frequent identification of stars and angels is more than mere poetic imagery; possibly angels, who are mighty spiritual beings created by the "Lord of hosts," have their primary sphere of operations in the heavens, in the stars. The Bible says, "(He) maketh His angels spirits and His ministers a flaming fire" (Psalm 104:4; Hebrews 12:22) that "do His commandments" (Psalm 103:20). Thus, although it is all but certain that no other man-like creatures {9 See The Troubled Waters of Evolution, pp. 168-171. Also see King of Creation (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1980), pp. 6-17.} inhabit other worlds, it is true that in God's universe, and possibly on the stars themselves, there exists a vast host of intelligent and powerful beings, the angels of God. Though it is futile to try to establish contact with them by such devices as space-ships and radio telescopes, we can communicate with God Himself through prayer and through His Word, by faith, and the angels are "sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation" (Hebrews 1:14). Go to top If you have a question not mentioned here (there are hundreds of them) please do not hesitate to mail the question to me at