Monday, February 18, 2008

The wrath of God against unbelievers

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened."
(Romans 1:18-21)

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Why Evolution persists

"One wonders why, with all the evidence, the (Godless) theory of evolution still persists. One major reason is that many people have a sort of vested interest in this theory. Jobs would be lost, loss of face would result, text books would need to be eliminated or revised."
(Dr. Emery S. Dunfee, former professor of physics at the University of Maine at Farmington)

Friday, February 15, 2008

Atheism needs Evolution

"Polls have shown that about 40% of scientists acknowledge a supernatural power. But the majority of the scientific community, especially evolutionary leaders today, hold an atheistic worldview. As support for their anti-supernatural worldviews, these scientists need mechanisms for the origin of life, especially humans.
Atheism needs evolution to escape from any implications regarding a creator. If one starts with Darwinism, certainly it is easy to escape from any obligation to God. Those opposed to their reasoning are branded as obscurantists who are trying to intrude religion into science."

(Wayne Friar, Ph.D., AIA's Resource Associate for Science and Origins)

Thursday, February 14, 2008

God and Homosexual Celibacy

by Grant Swank
January 20, 2008 12:00 PM EST


“A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday.

“They said methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles.”

“‘Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable,’ said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study” per Reuters.

Yet who encourages homosexual recreational sex?

Included in that hurrah is the Episcopal Church of America, United Church of Christ (Congregational), and the Universalist Society, as well as segments within the Roman Catholic Church, United Methodist Church, American Baptist Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

Included in that support are politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both seeking the highest office in the Republic.

Included in that endorsement are theological liberals throughout the nation’s seminaries, universities and colleges as well as local schools.

Those who denigrate the biblical data regarding God’s abhorrence of homosexual activity thereby aid in the furthering of widespread, deadly diseases. It is illogical; nevertheless, it is fact.

Those who affirm the biblical data are often considered a cultural lag and intellectually inferior as well as bigoted and unChristian.

“According to the study, at this point, homosexual men are 13 times more likely to contract the potentially deadly, drug-resistant strain of Staph infection, but the fear is that, because the infection is spread via skin-to-skin contact, homosexual men may soon spread it to the general population.

“Matt Barber, Policy Director for Cultural issues with Concerned Women for America (CWA), said, ‘The medical community has known for years that homosexual conduct, especially among males, creates a breeding ground for often deadly disease. In recent years we have seen a profound resurgence in cases of HIV/AIDS, syphilis, rectal gonorrhea and many other STDs among those who call themselves “gay.”

‘“The human body is quite callous in how it handles mistreatment and the perversion of its natural functions. When two men mimic the act of heterosexual intercourse with one another, they create an environment, a biological counterfeit, wherein disease can thrive. Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences.

“’In recent years our culture has adopted a laissez faire attitude toward sexual deviancy. Television shows like "Will and Grace" glorify the homosexual lifestyle while our children are taught in schools that homosexuality is a perfectly healthy, alternative sexual “orientation.” “Stay out of our bedrooms!” we’re often commanded by militant “gay” activists.

“’Well, now the dangerous and possibly deadly consequence of what occurs in those bedrooms is spilling over into the general population. It’s not only frightening, it’s infuriating’” per Concerned Women for America.

The Bible is clear:

Leviticus 18:22: "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination."

Leviticus 20:13: "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them."

Romans 1:18-32: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. . .For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools. . .

"Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. . .

"For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire towards one another, men with men committed indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

"God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, malice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. . .without understanding. . . and, although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them."

I Corinthians 6:9: "Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God."

Yet such groups as the worldwide Metropolitan Community Church twists the exegesis of such passages in order to allow for homosexual activity. Liberals in other denominations follow suit with such purposeful misinterpretation in order to satisfy the homosexual practice."

Read: www.cwfa.org

--

Read: truthinconviction.us/weblog.php

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/30311.html

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Is there any confirmation of Biblical events from written sources outside the Bible?

"The most documented Biblical event is the world-wide flood described in Genesis 6-9. A number of Babylonian documents have been discovered which describe the same flood.

The Sumerian King List, for example, lists kings who reigned for long periods of time. Then a great flood came. Following the flood, Sumerian kings ruled for much shorter periods of time. This is the same pattern found in the Bible. Men had long life spans before the flood and shorter life spans after the flood. The 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic speaks of an ark, animals taken on the ark, birds sent out during the course of the flood, the ark landing on a mountain, and a sacrifice offered after the ark landed.

The Story of Adapa tells of a test for immortality involving food, similar to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Sumerian tablets record the confusion of language as we have in the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). There was a golden age when all mankind spoke the same language. Speech was then confused by the god Enki, lord of wisdom. The Babylonians had a similar account in which the gods destroyed a temple tower and “scattered them abroad and made strange their speech.”


More examples of extra-Biblical confirmation of Biblical events:

- Campaign into Israel by Pharaoh Shishak (1 Kings 14:25-26), recorded on the walls of the Temple of Amun in Thebes, Egypt.

- Revolt of Moab against Israel (2 Kings 1:1; 3:4-27), recorded on the Mesha Inscription.

- Fall of Samaria (2 Kings 17:3-6, 24; 18:9-11) to Sargon II, king of Assyria, as recorded on his palace walls.

- Defeat of Ashdod by Sargon II (Isaiah 20:1), as recorded on his palace walls.

- Campaign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib against Judah (2 Kings 18:13-16), as recorded on the Taylor Prism.

- Siege of Lachish by Sennacherib (2 Kings 18:14, 17), as recorded on the Lachish reliefs.

- Assassination of Sennacherib by his own sons (2 Kings 19:37), as recorded in the annals of his son Esarhaddon.

- Fall of Nineveh as predicted by the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah (2:13-15), recorded on the Tablet of Nabopolasar.

- Fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (2 Kings 24:10-14), as recorded in the Babylonian Chronicles.

- Captivity of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in Babylon (2 Kings 24:15-16), as recorded on the Babylonian Ration Records.

- Fall of Babylon to the Medes and Persians (Daniel 5:30-31), as recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder.

- Freeing of captives in Babylon by Cyrus the Great (Ezra 1:1-4; 6:3-4), as recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder.

- The existence of Jesus Christ as recorded by Josephus, Suetonius, Thallus, Pliny the Younger, the Talmud, and Lucian.

- Forcing Jews to leave Rome during the reign of Claudius (A.D. 41-54) (Acts 18:2), as recorded by Suetonius."

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a009.html

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

An exercise in imagination

"I shall discuss the broad patterns of hominoid evolution, an exercise made enjoyable by the need to integrate diverse kinds of information, and use that as a vehicle to speculate about hominid origins, an event for which there is no recognized fossil record. Hence, an opportunity to exercise some imagination." [American Anthropologist, Distinguished Lecture; Hominoid Evolution and Hominoid Origins, by David Pilbeam. Vol. 88, No. 2 June 1986. p. 295.]

Monday, February 11, 2008

Silence

"Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried this question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. - - Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way." Dr. Colin Patterson, Evolution and Creationism, Speech at the American Museum of Natural History, New York (November 5, 1981), pp. 1,2. Dr. Patterson is senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History and editor of its journal, as well as author of the book Evolution.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Debunked years ago

"It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student...have now been debunked." [Dr. Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology, Imperial College, London), ‘The nature of the fossil record'. Proceedings of the Geological Association, Vol. 87 (2), 1976, pp. 132-133.]

Saturday, February 9, 2008

A Pure Mathematician

"A scientific study of the universe has suggested a conclusion which may be summed up in the statement that the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician." — Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 140.

Friday, February 8, 2008

A Mathematical Physicist

"Curious as that seems, it is a possibility worth weighing — against the only alternative I can imagine: Eddington's suggestion that God is a mathematical physicist." — George Wald, "Fitness in the Universe," Origins of Life, Vol. 5 (1974), p. 26.




The geometrical complexity and beauty of a snowflake. Every snowflake is unique.





The geometrical complexity and beauty of a water crystal. Rain water appears as one crystal shape; river water forms another shape of crystal; lake water forms yet another shape.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Is God a Mathematician?

by Mario Livio

"For some inexplicable reason, mathematics does an extraordinary job of explaining the universe.

Many outstanding physicists, most notably Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, and James Jeans, remarked that mathematics appears to be just too effective in explaining the universe. Wigner, in particular, wrote a remarkable paper in 1960 titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences." He wrote, "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

We may wonder, for example, why all the phenomena encompassed by electromagnetism, from the behavior of electrons to the nature of light, can be explained by a set of four differential equations known as Maxwell's equations. Equally puzzling is the fact that some geometrical curves like the ellipse, invented/discovered by the Greek mathematician Menaechmus around 350 BC, were found 2,000 years later to describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. Similarly, group theory proved to be essential in the understanding of both the organization of elementary (subatomic) particles, and the structure of solids. What is it that makes mathematics fit the observable universe like a glove?"



(Above: Maxwell's equations, which represent one of the most elegant and concise ways to state the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism. The first line in the image above represents Gauss' law for electricity; the second line shows Gauss' law for magnetism; the third line, Faraday's law of induction; and the fourth, Ampere's law.)


"The attempts to answer this question fall generally into two broad categories. According to one view, mathematics is in some sense the actual "language" of the universe. It exists independent of us humans, and we are merely discovering it in the workings of the cosmos. Proponents of this philosophy like to point out that even some of the more esoteric areas of mathematics, such as non-Euclidean geometries, were eventually found to provide cornerstones to cosmological models."
http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/32_01/math.html

"It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it . . One could perhaps decide the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe." — Scientific American, May 1963, p. 53.

"The Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician." - James Jeans




God is A Mathematician
By Keith Newman

"The authenticity of the Holy Bible has been attacked at regular intervals by atheists and theologians alike but none have explained away the mathematical seal beneath its surface.

It would seem the divine hand has moved to prevent counterfeiting in the pages of the Bible in a similar manner to the line that runs through paper money. Bible numerics appears to be God's watermark of authenticity.

Vital research on this numeric seal was completed by a native of the world's most reknowned atheistic nation, Russia. Ivan Panin was born in Russia on December 12, 1855. As a young man he was an active nihilist and participated in plots against the Czar and his government. He was a mathematical genius who died a Harvard scholar and a citizen of the United States in 1942.




Panin was exiled from Russia. And after spending a number of years studying in Germany, he went to the United States where he became an outstanding lecturer on literary criticism.
Panin was known as a firm agnostic - so well known that when he discarded his agnosticism and accepted the Christian faith, the newspapers carried headlines telling of his conversion.

It was in 1890 that Panin made the discovery of the mathematical structure underlining the vocabulary of the Greek New Testament. He was casually reading the first verse of the gospel of John in the Greek: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the God and the Word was God...".

Panin was curious as to why the Greek word for "the"' preceded the word "God"' in one case and not the other. In examining the text he became aware of a number relationship. This was the first of the discoveries that led to his conversion and uncovered the extensive numeric code.

Panin found his proof in the oldest and most accurate manuscripts - the Received Hebrew Text and the Westcott and Hort Text.

In the original languages of the Bible, mostly Hebrew and Greek, there are no separate symbols for numbers, letters of the alphabet are also used to indicate numbers.

The numeric value of a word is the sum total of all its letters. It was curiosity that first caused Panin to begin toying with the numbers behind the texts. Sequences and patterns began to emerge. These created such a stirring in the heart of the Russian that he dedicated 50 years of his life to painstakingly comb the pages of the Bible.

This complex system of numbering visibly and invisibly saturates every book of the scriptures emphasizing certain passages and illustrating deeper or further meaning in types and shadows. The 66 books of the Bible 39 in the Old and 27 in the New were written by 33 different people.

Those authors were scattered throughout various countries of the world and from widely different backgrounds. Many of them had little or no schooling. The whole Bible was written over a period of 1500 years with a 400-year silence apart from the Apocrypha between the two testaments. Despite the handicaps the biblical books are found to be a harmonious record, each in accord with the other.

Panin says the laws of probability are exceeded into the billions when we try and rationalize the authorship of the Bible as the work of man. He once said: "If human logic is worth anything at all we are simply driven to the conclusion that if my facts I have presented are true, man could never have done this.

"We must assume that a Power higher than man guided the writers in such a way, whether they knew it or not, they did it and the Great God inspired them to do it''.

The Bible itself states clearly that it is the literal God-breathed'' living word of the Creator. The words "Thus saith the Lord"' and "God said"' occur more than 2500 times throughout scripture.

In 2 Timothy 3:16 it states, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God". Then in 2 Peter 9:20-21 it plainly states: "No prophecy of the scriptures is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost".

Let's take the number seven as an illustration of the way the patterns work. Seven is the most prolific of the mathematical series, which binds scripture together. The very first verse of the Bible "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," (Gen 1:1) contains over 30 different combinations of seven.

This verse has seven Hebrew words having a total of 28 letters 4 x 7. The numeric value of the three nouns "God", "heaven" and "earth," totals 777. Any number in triplicate expresses complete, ultimate or total meaning.

Also tightly sealed up with sevens are the genealogy of Jesus, the account of the virgin birth and the resurrection. Seven occurs as a number 187 times in the Bible (41 x 7), the phrase "seven-fold" occurs seven times and "seventy" occurs 56 times (7 x 8).

In the Book of Revelation seven positively shines out: there are seven golden candlesticks, seven letters to seven churches, a book sealed with seven seals, seven angels standing before the Lord with seven trumpets, seven thunders and seven last plagues. In fact there are over 50 occurrences of the number seven in Revelation alone.

There are 21 Old Testament writers whose names appear in the Bible (3 x 7). The numeric value of their names is divisible by seven. Of these 21, seven are named in the New Testament: Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea and Joel. The numeric value of these names is 1554 (222 x 7). David's name is found 1134 times (162 x 7).
God's seal also pervades creation as though it were woven into the very fabric of nature.

The Bible has declared man's years to be three score and ten (70). The development of the human embryo is in exact periods of sevens or 28 days (4 x 7). Medical science tells us the human body is renewed cell for cell every seven years.

We're told the pulse beats slower every seven days as if it were in accord with the seventh day of rest proclaimed in the Genesis creation week. And God formed man of the dust of the ground (Gen 2:7); science confirms the human body is made of the same 14 elements (2 x 7) found in your average handful of dust.

The light of the sun is made up of seven distinct colors as shown in the rainbow. In music there are seven distinct notes, which climax in a chord or octave at the beginning of a new seven.

In almost all animals the incubation or pregnancy period is divisible by seven. Seven is often referred to as "God's seal" or the number of spiritual perfection.

Eight is the number of new life or "resurrection". It is the personal number of Jesus. When we add together the letter values of the name Jesus in the Greek we get 888. Jesus was called The Christ; the numeric value of this title is 1480 (185 x 8). He was Savior, which has the value 1408 (2 x 8 x 88).

Jesus is also Lord, which again is a multiple of eight being 800 (100 x 8). Messiah has the numeric value 656 (82 x8). Jesus also called himself the Son of man. The term occurs 88 times and is valued at 2960 (370 x 8).

Jesus said, "I am the truth": the numeric value of "the truth" is 64 (8 x 8). The last book in the Bible is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which has exactly 888 Greek words. Eight persons were saved in the Ark at the great Noahic flood. God made a covenant with Abraham that every male Jewish child was to be circumcised on the eighth day of his life.

There are eight individual cases of resurrection spoken of in the Bible apart from Jesus. Three occur in the Old Testament, three in the gospels and two in Acts. It was on the eighth day or the first day of the new week that Jesus rose from the dead. The Holy Spirit also came down from heaven on the eighth day.

Nine is finality or completion. The first example of its use is that infinitely sealed first verse of the Bible: "In the beginning God'' which in Hebrew is: Brayshith Elohim which has the numeric value of 999. The very next statement "created the heaven" is also sealed with 999.

The number nine is endowed with a peculiar quality; it is finality in itself. Not only is it the final single number, but also if you multiply it by any other number, the addition of the resulting figures will always revert back to nine (2 x 9 = 18 / 1 + 8 = 9 etc).

There are nine basic gifts available to the Christian believer through the power of God's Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:8-10). There are nine basic fruits, which should be evident in the life of the believer (Gal 5:22-23). The words "my wrath" have the numeric value 999. The word Amen or verily is valued at 99 and occurs 99 times.

The work on the cross was completed at the ninth hour when Jesus said, "It is finished". The shedding of his blood was final. It saw an end to the old system of animal sacrifice to atone for sin. The word "blood" in this sense occurs 99 times.

Great superstition has always surrounded the number 13 as being unlucky or dark. Perhaps there is good reason. One of the most convincing proofs of the origins of this number can be found by unraveling all the names by which Satan is known. Drakon or dragon has a value of 975 (13 x 75) and it occurs 13 times. Peirazon or tempter has a value of 1053 (13 x 81). Belial, which is personification of evil, has a value of 78 (13 x 6).

Anthropoktonos or "murderer" has a value of 1820 (13 x 40). Ophis or "serpent" is 780 (13 x 60). The phrase used by the Holy Spirit Ho kaloumenos diablos kai ho Satanas or "called the Devil and Satan" is valued 2197 (13 x 13 x 13).

This article is in truth an oversimplification of the work of Panin and others who followed in his footsteps. Panin's work initially involved some 40,000 pages of material on which he had written millions of small neat calculations. It involved volumes.

He often labored up to 18 hours a day exploring the vast numeric structure. By and large it was a thankless task. Panin said "When I first made the discovery I was of course, taken off my feet - I was in the same condition as our friend Archimedes who when he solved a great mathematical problem while in the bath, rushed in to the street naked, crying 'I have found it'. I thought people would be delighted to embrace the new discovery, but I found human nature is always the same. So I quietly withdrew and did my work all by myself".

Although it would appear that his work has been largely lost from popular reading today Panin did accomplish several outstanding works. He published Structure in the Bible the Numeric Greek New Testament and the Numeric English New Testament.

The works of Ivan Panin have been put before the experts many times. Panin once challenged nine noted rationalists and Bible critics through the medium of the New York Sun newspaper November 9, 1899. He dared them to publicly refute or give explanation for a few of his presented facts. Four made lame excuses. The rest were silent.

Panin issued a challenge throughout leading newspapers of the world asking for a natural explanation or rebuttal of the facts. Not a single person accepted. He died at Aldershot, Ontario Canada on October 30th, 1942, aged 87."
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/panin2.htm

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Creation or Spontaneous Generation

George Wald, a prominent Evolutionist (a Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate), wrote, "When it comes to the Origin of Life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous Generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!" ("The Origin of Life," Scientific American, 191:48, May 1954).

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Probability of Spontaneous Formation

"The likelihood (probability) of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." Sir Fredrick Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 148.

Anti-knowledge

"...Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge, apparent knowledge which is actually harmful to systematics..."

-Colin Patterson, from his November 1981 presentation at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Evolution as faith

"...Now I think that many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, you've experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith. I know that's true of me, and I think it's true of a good many of you in here..."

-Colin Patterson, from his November 1981 presentation at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Learning nothing

"Well, here we all are with all our shelves full of books on evolution. We've all read tons of them, and most of us have written one or two. And how could it be that we've done all that, we've read these books and learned nothing from them? And how could I have worked on evolution for twenty years, and learned nothing from it?"

Dr. Colin Patterson, lifelong evolutionist, in a 1981 lecture presented at New York City's American Museum of Natural History

Friday, February 1, 2008

Intermediate links

"...intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic change, and this is perhaps the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory." [Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species," 1859, Chapter 11, "On the imperfection of the geologic record."]

...And this still holds true today!