What are you referring to as NEW VERSIONS of the Bible. I have no knowledge of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek original texts having new versions. If you are referring to the many different translations of the Bible then you are being disgusting. People make mistakes even when a group does something. Each and every translation has its problem with the KJV having the added problem of the English language changing since 1611. For instance the word kill in 1611 meant murder. Therefore the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" today is more properly "You shall not murder". Live with the reality that each TRANSLATION of the original languages of the Bible has its flaws. That is why the popularity of the parallel translations side by side.
Is the great biblical flood real or not?
- Thread starter tooldtocare
- Start date
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Atheist based science having the old earth being fact. Tell me why there is Carbon-14 in diamonds. After millions of years that would be gone. There is much more information like this on that site you repudiate. It is obvious that you are not a Christian.
Refute this from that site since you are so smart. Actual refutation of the science instead of another ad hominem attack.
http://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles
Refute this from that site since you are so smart. Actual refutation of the science instead of another ad hominem attack.
http://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles
Last edited:
How do you know what most of the 7.3 billion people alive today look at?
Cognitive people learn as they grow older, and their writing styles may consequently change. However, that is NOT what we find in Genesis 1-11. In Genesis 1-11, we find a collection of stories with the characteristics of epic tales, sagas, myths, and legends.
Cognitive people learn as they grow older, and their writing styles may consequently change. However, that is NOT what we find in Genesis 1-11. In Genesis 1-11, we find a collection of stories with the characteristics of epic tales, sagas, myths, and legends.
1. How do you account for the fact that approximately 3,000,000 scientists who have earned at least one doctorate in a field of science believe that the earth is billions of years old?
2. How do you account for the fact that the approximately 3,000,000 scientists who have earned at least one doctorate in a field of science and believe who that the earth is billions of years old represent every major Christian denomination, and everyone of the worlds major religions; while all of the 45 scientists who have earned at least one doctorate in a field of science and believe that the earth is less than 12,000 years old are radicalized Christian fundamentalists—none of whom can read so much as a little bit of Hebrew, and who know nothing at all about how biblical scholars for the past 150 years have interpreted the first eleven chapters of Genesis?
3. Are you aware that the age of the earth has been VERY reliably measured and found to be 4.54 billion years old?
For an excellent article written from a theologically conservative Christian perspective that explains in detail how the age of the earth has been measured, please follow this link:
Radiometric Dating
2. How do you account for the fact that the approximately 3,000,000 scientists who have earned at least one doctorate in a field of science and believe who that the earth is billions of years old represent every major Christian denomination, and everyone of the worlds major religions; while all of the 45 scientists who have earned at least one doctorate in a field of science and believe that the earth is less than 12,000 years old are radicalized Christian fundamentalists—none of whom can read so much as a little bit of Hebrew, and who know nothing at all about how biblical scholars for the past 150 years have interpreted the first eleven chapters of Genesis?
3. Are you aware that the age of the earth has been VERY reliably measured and found to be 4.54 billion years old?
For an excellent article written from a theologically conservative Christian perspective that explains in detail how the age of the earth has been measured, please follow this link:
Radiometric Dating
ROFL
Radio metric dating is woefully inaccurate. Archaeologists send samples to be dated. They throw away those they know are incorrect. They go by pottery. One example an archaeologist told me was the sample from the front of an animal and one from the rear. The report had them 10,000 years apart. Also when going back beyond a certain number of years they are counting atoms.
Explain why there is Carbon-14 in diamonds!! Millions of years and there should be none!!
Radio metric dating is woefully inaccurate. Archaeologists send samples to be dated. They throw away those they know are incorrect. They go by pottery. One example an archaeologist told me was the sample from the front of an animal and one from the rear. The report had them 10,000 years apart. Also when going back beyond a certain number of years they are counting atoms.
Explain why there is Carbon-14 in diamonds!! Millions of years and there should be none!!
You obviously avoided refuting the 5 atheist miracles. Couldn't refute them so you create red herring issues to avoid refuting them. Here they are in full.
Five Atheist miracles
(or materialists believe in magic)
http://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles
by Don Batten
Published: 21 April 2016 (GMT+10)
Atheists often promote themselves as intelligent, logical, scientific, rational, etc. They even had a proposal to call themselves ‘brights’! The aggressive ‘new Atheists’, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and company, like to portray those of us who believe in a supernatural Creator as irrational, unscientific, unintelligent, ignorant, or even ‘needing help’ (Dawkins). The entertainment industry often reinforces these perceptions by portraying ‘religious’ people (Christians particularly, and especially church leaders) as buffoons or hillbillies (almost never as a university professor, for example).
Reality runs against these perceptions. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific mind of all time, was a Christian believer, as were other founders of modern science. Surveys have consistently shown that people with a strong adherence to the Bible’s authority are the least likely to be superstitious, in contrast to the average de facto Atheist.1 Indeed, one Atheist expressed his chagrin that “some of the most intelligent and well-informed people” he knew were Christians.2
There is much more to say. Atheists believe that everything came about by purely material processes—the universe, life, mind, and morality. However, do they have a rational, logical basis for this belief?
They actually believe in miracles without any reasonable cause for the miracles. That is, they believe in magic, or the occurrence of things without a sufficient cause. What we commonly call ‘magic’ is actually illusion. For example, a rabbit does not just appear from an empty hat; there has to be a logical physical explanation; a sufficient cause. Illusion needs an illusionist. Stuff does not happen without something to cause it to happen. Even young children understand this law of causation. Magic, where things ‘just happen’, is the stuff of fairytales—there is no such thing.
Here are five major examples of materialists believing in magic (and there are more), or miraculous events without any sufficient explanation or cause for those events.
1. Origin of the Universe
Materialists (Atheists) once tried to believe that the universe was eternal, to erase the question of where it came from. The famous British Atheist Bertrand Russell, for example, took this position. However, this is not tenable. The progress of scientific knowledge about thermodynamics, for example, means that virtually everyone has been forced to acknowledge that the universe had a beginning, somewhere, sometime—the big bang idea acknowledges this (ideas like the multiverse only put the beginning more remotely, but do not get rid of the pesky problem)
Man of faith and science, Sir Isaac Newton.
The big bang attempts to explain the beginning of the universe. However, what did it begin from and what caused it to begin? Ultimately, it could not have come from a matter/energy source, the same sort of stuff as our universe, because that matter/energy should also be subject to the same physical laws, and therefore decay, and it would have had a beginning too, just further back in time.
So, it had to come from? Nothing! Nothing became everything with no cause whatsoever. Magic!
“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing—zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere. How is that possible? Ask Alan Guth. His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”
So proclaimed the front cover of Discover magazine, April 2002.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, one of the loud ‘new Atheists’, has tried to explain how everything came from nothing; he even wrote a book about it. However, his ‘nothing’ is a ‘quantum vacuum’, which is not actually nothing. Indeed, a matter/energy quantum something has exactly the same problem as eternal universes; it cannot have persisted for eternity in the past, so all their theorizing only applies after the universe (something) exists.6 Back to square one!
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’ Magic: just like the rabbit out of the hat, but with the universe, a rather humungous ‘rabbit’! ‘Stuff happens!’
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’
There are other aspects of the big bang, the ‘mainstream’ model of the universe’s origin, that are also miraculous. The ‘standard model’ has a period of very rapid expansion called ‘inflation’ (which Alan Guth, mentioned above, invented). There is no known cause for the initiation of this supposed expansion, no known cause for it to stop and no physical mechanism for the extremely rapid expansion (many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light). However, these three associated miracles must have happened or the big bang does not work because of the ‘horizon problem’. More magic!
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is not magic, because God, who is eternal and omnipotent, is a sufficient cause for the universe. And He can exist eternally (and therefore has no beginning) because He is a non-material entity (God is spirit, as the Bible says in many places).
2. Origin of stars
According to the big bang, the ‘only game in town’ to explain the origin of stars, there had to have been two phases of star formation. Phase 1 involved the formation of hydrogen/helium stars (which are called Population III stars7). Here is the first problem: how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together to form a critical mass so that there is sufficient gravitational attraction to attract more gas to grow a star? Gases don’t tend to come together; they disperse, especially where there is a huge amount of energy (heat). Hey presto! Cosmologists invented ‘dark matter’, which is invisible undetectable ‘stuff’ that just happens to generate a lot of gravitational attraction just where it is needed. More magic!
The Bible tells us that God made the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week.
However, we have countless stars—like the sun—that are not just hydrogen and helium, but contain the heavier elements. Phase 2 supposedly comes in here. Exploding stars (supernovas) from phase 1 produced sufficient pressure to force hydrogen and helium together to make new stars that made all the heavier elements (which astronomers call ‘metals’), including the elements of which we are made. These stars are called Population I and II stars.
Now here is another problem: how do exploding stars, with matter flying at great speed in all directions, cause stars made of all those new elements to form? There has to be a coming together of the elements, not a flying apart. Pieces hitting one another would bounce off rather than coalesce. Most hypotheses involve multiple supernovas from phase 1 in close proximity, such that sufficient material collided together to form enough of a proto-star with sufficient gravity to overcome the tendency to fly apart and attract more matter and so grow a normal star. However, supernovas are not common events, especially multiple ones at the same time in close proximity. Thus, this scenario requires a huge number of very improbable events to account for the vast numbers of the heavier stars.
This is more magic; miracles without a miracle worker.
God made the sun and the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week. Again, this is not magic or superstition, because God is able to do such things.
3. Origin of life
Astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies said,
“How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.”
Not only must the DNA code be explained (how can a coded information storage system come about without intelligent design?), but the incredible machinery that reads the information and creates the components of life from that information has to be explained as well.
Former hard-nosed English Atheist philosopher Antony Flew abandoned Atheism/materialism because of the growing evidence for such design in living things. He said, “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
This research, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved”.
That is, only an incredibly intelligent designer could account for the information systems in living things.
Well-known American Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel said,
“What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story [of cosmic evolution] has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?” (See later for discussion of his second question.)
The scientific knowledge of life grows daily, and as it does the prospects of a naturalistic (materialistic/atheistic) explanation for its origin recede into the distance. The origin of life is another miracle. ‘Stuff happens’? More magic.
The origin of life demands a super-intelligent cause, such as the Creator-God revealed in the Bible.
. 4. Origin of the diversity of life (Design? What design?)
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist. Along with other atheistic biologists, Richard Dawkins has spent his life trying to deny that living things exhibit supernatural design. In the book that ‘put him on the map’, he wrote,
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
… how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together?
The diversity of life is a huge problem. How did a microbe change itself into every living thing on earth, ranging from earwigs to elephants, from mites to mango trees? For almost a hundred years, mutations and natural selection, the mechanisms of ‘neo-Darwinism’, or ‘the modern synthesis’, have been said to explain this diversity of life. However, with our modern knowledge of living things, this has proved useless as an explanation.
In July 2008, 16 high profile evolutionists met, by invitation, in Altenburg, Austria. They had come because they realized that mutations and natural selection did not explain the diversity of life, and they had come together to discuss this crisis in evolutionary biology. The only consensus was that there is a major problem, a crisis.
Thomas Nagel (continuing from the earlier quote) put it this way:
“The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?”
Think of the supposed origin of humans from a chimp-like ape in six million evolutionary years. Modern comparison of the genomes shows such large differences (of at least 20%) that this is just not feasible, even with highly unrealistic assumptions in favour of evolution. Actually, it was not even feasible when the difference was incorrectly trumpeted to be about 1%.
Materialists have no sufficient explanation (cause) for the diversity of life. There is a mind-boggling plethora of miracles here, not just one. Every basic type of life form is a miracle.
Genesis 1 tells us that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, made the various kinds of life to reproduce “after their kind”. Here is a sufficient cause, but even the description of the nature of living things to reproduce according to each kind has been confirmed with every witnessed reproductive event (billions of humans alone), and also in the fossil record where the transitional forms are missing and ‘living fossils’ testify to consistent reproduction ‘after their kind’ in thousands of species.
5. Origin of mind and morality
The origin of mind and morality from energy and atoms has long been a problem for the materialist. It is a major theme of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, already referred to.
A fig tree produces figs, not apples. That seems obvious. Likewise, physics and chemistry produce physical and chemical outcomes. However, mind and morality are not just matters of physics and chemistry. Sure, creatures that are physical and chemical have mind and morality, but how did such non-material things arise from the material? This is a serious problem for materialism, and the Atheist Nagel candidly admits it, to the extreme annoyance of his atheistic colleagues.
The famous (and reluctant) convert from Atheism to Christianity, C.S. Lewis, put it well when he wrote,
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist.
The Atheist has no sufficient cause to explain the existence of mind and morality. Magic happens!
Why do apparently intelligent people resort to believing in magic—uncaused events—at so many points? By not believing in God they have put themselves into an irrational philosophical corner. Romans 1:21 in the Bible says that when people deny that the Creator-God exists, they end up with ‘futile thinking’. We have seen plenty of that in this article. Richard Lewontin admitted that (leaving God out of the picture), “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … ” (he confuses ‘science’ with materialism).
Five Atheist miracles
(or materialists believe in magic)
http://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles
by Don Batten
Published: 21 April 2016 (GMT+10)
Atheists often promote themselves as intelligent, logical, scientific, rational, etc. They even had a proposal to call themselves ‘brights’! The aggressive ‘new Atheists’, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and company, like to portray those of us who believe in a supernatural Creator as irrational, unscientific, unintelligent, ignorant, or even ‘needing help’ (Dawkins). The entertainment industry often reinforces these perceptions by portraying ‘religious’ people (Christians particularly, and especially church leaders) as buffoons or hillbillies (almost never as a university professor, for example).
Reality runs against these perceptions. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific mind of all time, was a Christian believer, as were other founders of modern science. Surveys have consistently shown that people with a strong adherence to the Bible’s authority are the least likely to be superstitious, in contrast to the average de facto Atheist.1 Indeed, one Atheist expressed his chagrin that “some of the most intelligent and well-informed people” he knew were Christians.2
There is much more to say. Atheists believe that everything came about by purely material processes—the universe, life, mind, and morality. However, do they have a rational, logical basis for this belief?
They actually believe in miracles without any reasonable cause for the miracles. That is, they believe in magic, or the occurrence of things without a sufficient cause. What we commonly call ‘magic’ is actually illusion. For example, a rabbit does not just appear from an empty hat; there has to be a logical physical explanation; a sufficient cause. Illusion needs an illusionist. Stuff does not happen without something to cause it to happen. Even young children understand this law of causation. Magic, where things ‘just happen’, is the stuff of fairytales—there is no such thing.
Here are five major examples of materialists believing in magic (and there are more), or miraculous events without any sufficient explanation or cause for those events.
1. Origin of the Universe
Materialists (Atheists) once tried to believe that the universe was eternal, to erase the question of where it came from. The famous British Atheist Bertrand Russell, for example, took this position. However, this is not tenable. The progress of scientific knowledge about thermodynamics, for example, means that virtually everyone has been forced to acknowledge that the universe had a beginning, somewhere, sometime—the big bang idea acknowledges this (ideas like the multiverse only put the beginning more remotely, but do not get rid of the pesky problem)
Man of faith and science, Sir Isaac Newton.
The big bang attempts to explain the beginning of the universe. However, what did it begin from and what caused it to begin? Ultimately, it could not have come from a matter/energy source, the same sort of stuff as our universe, because that matter/energy should also be subject to the same physical laws, and therefore decay, and it would have had a beginning too, just further back in time.
So, it had to come from? Nothing! Nothing became everything with no cause whatsoever. Magic!
“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing—zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere. How is that possible? Ask Alan Guth. His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”
So proclaimed the front cover of Discover magazine, April 2002.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, one of the loud ‘new Atheists’, has tried to explain how everything came from nothing; he even wrote a book about it. However, his ‘nothing’ is a ‘quantum vacuum’, which is not actually nothing. Indeed, a matter/energy quantum something has exactly the same problem as eternal universes; it cannot have persisted for eternity in the past, so all their theorizing only applies after the universe (something) exists.6 Back to square one!
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’ Magic: just like the rabbit out of the hat, but with the universe, a rather humungous ‘rabbit’! ‘Stuff happens!’
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’
There are other aspects of the big bang, the ‘mainstream’ model of the universe’s origin, that are also miraculous. The ‘standard model’ has a period of very rapid expansion called ‘inflation’ (which Alan Guth, mentioned above, invented). There is no known cause for the initiation of this supposed expansion, no known cause for it to stop and no physical mechanism for the extremely rapid expansion (many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light). However, these three associated miracles must have happened or the big bang does not work because of the ‘horizon problem’. More magic!
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is not magic, because God, who is eternal and omnipotent, is a sufficient cause for the universe. And He can exist eternally (and therefore has no beginning) because He is a non-material entity (God is spirit, as the Bible says in many places).
2. Origin of stars
According to the big bang, the ‘only game in town’ to explain the origin of stars, there had to have been two phases of star formation. Phase 1 involved the formation of hydrogen/helium stars (which are called Population III stars7). Here is the first problem: how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together to form a critical mass so that there is sufficient gravitational attraction to attract more gas to grow a star? Gases don’t tend to come together; they disperse, especially where there is a huge amount of energy (heat). Hey presto! Cosmologists invented ‘dark matter’, which is invisible undetectable ‘stuff’ that just happens to generate a lot of gravitational attraction just where it is needed. More magic!
The Bible tells us that God made the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week.
However, we have countless stars—like the sun—that are not just hydrogen and helium, but contain the heavier elements. Phase 2 supposedly comes in here. Exploding stars (supernovas) from phase 1 produced sufficient pressure to force hydrogen and helium together to make new stars that made all the heavier elements (which astronomers call ‘metals’), including the elements of which we are made. These stars are called Population I and II stars.
Now here is another problem: how do exploding stars, with matter flying at great speed in all directions, cause stars made of all those new elements to form? There has to be a coming together of the elements, not a flying apart. Pieces hitting one another would bounce off rather than coalesce. Most hypotheses involve multiple supernovas from phase 1 in close proximity, such that sufficient material collided together to form enough of a proto-star with sufficient gravity to overcome the tendency to fly apart and attract more matter and so grow a normal star. However, supernovas are not common events, especially multiple ones at the same time in close proximity. Thus, this scenario requires a huge number of very improbable events to account for the vast numbers of the heavier stars.
This is more magic; miracles without a miracle worker.
God made the sun and the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week. Again, this is not magic or superstition, because God is able to do such things.
3. Origin of life
Astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies said,
“How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.”
Not only must the DNA code be explained (how can a coded information storage system come about without intelligent design?), but the incredible machinery that reads the information and creates the components of life from that information has to be explained as well.
Former hard-nosed English Atheist philosopher Antony Flew abandoned Atheism/materialism because of the growing evidence for such design in living things. He said, “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
This research, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved”.
That is, only an incredibly intelligent designer could account for the information systems in living things.
Well-known American Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel said,
“What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story [of cosmic evolution] has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?” (See later for discussion of his second question.)
The scientific knowledge of life grows daily, and as it does the prospects of a naturalistic (materialistic/atheistic) explanation for its origin recede into the distance. The origin of life is another miracle. ‘Stuff happens’? More magic.
The origin of life demands a super-intelligent cause, such as the Creator-God revealed in the Bible.
. 4. Origin of the diversity of life (Design? What design?)
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist. Along with other atheistic biologists, Richard Dawkins has spent his life trying to deny that living things exhibit supernatural design. In the book that ‘put him on the map’, he wrote,
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
… how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together?
The diversity of life is a huge problem. How did a microbe change itself into every living thing on earth, ranging from earwigs to elephants, from mites to mango trees? For almost a hundred years, mutations and natural selection, the mechanisms of ‘neo-Darwinism’, or ‘the modern synthesis’, have been said to explain this diversity of life. However, with our modern knowledge of living things, this has proved useless as an explanation.
In July 2008, 16 high profile evolutionists met, by invitation, in Altenburg, Austria. They had come because they realized that mutations and natural selection did not explain the diversity of life, and they had come together to discuss this crisis in evolutionary biology. The only consensus was that there is a major problem, a crisis.
Thomas Nagel (continuing from the earlier quote) put it this way:
“The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?”
Think of the supposed origin of humans from a chimp-like ape in six million evolutionary years. Modern comparison of the genomes shows such large differences (of at least 20%) that this is just not feasible, even with highly unrealistic assumptions in favour of evolution. Actually, it was not even feasible when the difference was incorrectly trumpeted to be about 1%.
Materialists have no sufficient explanation (cause) for the diversity of life. There is a mind-boggling plethora of miracles here, not just one. Every basic type of life form is a miracle.
Genesis 1 tells us that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, made the various kinds of life to reproduce “after their kind”. Here is a sufficient cause, but even the description of the nature of living things to reproduce according to each kind has been confirmed with every witnessed reproductive event (billions of humans alone), and also in the fossil record where the transitional forms are missing and ‘living fossils’ testify to consistent reproduction ‘after their kind’ in thousands of species.
5. Origin of mind and morality
The origin of mind and morality from energy and atoms has long been a problem for the materialist. It is a major theme of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, already referred to.
A fig tree produces figs, not apples. That seems obvious. Likewise, physics and chemistry produce physical and chemical outcomes. However, mind and morality are not just matters of physics and chemistry. Sure, creatures that are physical and chemical have mind and morality, but how did such non-material things arise from the material? This is a serious problem for materialism, and the Atheist Nagel candidly admits it, to the extreme annoyance of his atheistic colleagues.
The famous (and reluctant) convert from Atheism to Christianity, C.S. Lewis, put it well when he wrote,
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist.
The Atheist has no sufficient cause to explain the existence of mind and morality. Magic happens!
Why do apparently intelligent people resort to believing in magic—uncaused events—at so many points? By not believing in God they have put themselves into an irrational philosophical corner. Romans 1:21 in the Bible says that when people deny that the Creator-God exists, they end up with ‘futile thinking’. We have seen plenty of that in this article. Richard Lewontin admitted that (leaving God out of the picture), “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … ” (he confuses ‘science’ with materialism).
You obviously avoided refuting the 5 atheist miracles. Couldn't refute them so you create red herring issues to avoid refuting them. Here they are in full. Start refuting. Somehow a double post.
Five Atheist miracles
(or materialists believe in magic)
http://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles
by Don Batten
Published: 21 April 2016 (GMT+10)
Atheists often promote themselves as intelligent, logical, scientific, rational, etc. They even had a proposal to call themselves ‘brights’! The aggressive ‘new Atheists’, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and company, like to portray those of us who believe in a supernatural Creator as irrational, unscientific, unintelligent, ignorant, or even ‘needing help’ (Dawkins). The entertainment industry often reinforces these perceptions by portraying ‘religious’ people (Christians particularly, and especially church leaders) as buffoons or hillbillies (almost never as a university professor, for example).
Reality runs against these perceptions. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific mind of all time, was a Christian believer, as were other founders of modern science. Surveys have consistently shown that people with a strong adherence to the Bible’s authority are the least likely to be superstitious, in contrast to the average de facto Atheist.1 Indeed, one Atheist expressed his chagrin that “some of the most intelligent and well-informed people” he knew were Christians.2
There is much more to say. Atheists believe that everything came about by purely material processes—the universe, life, mind, and morality. However, do they have a rational, logical basis for this belief?
They actually believe in miracles without any reasonable cause for the miracles. That is, they believe in magic, or the occurrence of things without a sufficient cause. What we commonly call ‘magic’ is actually illusion. For example, a rabbit does not just appear from an empty hat; there has to be a logical physical explanation; a sufficient cause. Illusion needs an illusionist. Stuff does not happen without something to cause it to happen. Even young children understand this law of causation. Magic, where things ‘just happen’, is the stuff of fairytales—there is no such thing.
Here are five major examples of materialists believing in magic (and there are more), or miraculous events without any sufficient explanation or cause for those events.
1. Origin of the Universe
Materialists (Atheists) once tried to believe that the universe was eternal, to erase the question of where it came from. The famous British Atheist Bertrand Russell, for example, took this position. However, this is not tenable. The progress of scientific knowledge about thermodynamics, for example, means that virtually everyone has been forced to acknowledge that the universe had a beginning, somewhere, sometime—the big bang idea acknowledges this (ideas like the multiverse only put the beginning more remotely, but do not get rid of the pesky problem)
Man of faith and science, Sir Isaac Newton.
The big bang attempts to explain the beginning of the universe. However, what did it begin from and what caused it to begin? Ultimately, it could not have come from a matter/energy source, the same sort of stuff as our universe, because that matter/energy should also be subject to the same physical laws, and therefore decay, and it would have had a beginning too, just further back in time.
So, it had to come from? Nothing! Nothing became everything with no cause whatsoever. Magic!
“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing—zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere. How is that possible? Ask Alan Guth. His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”
So proclaimed the front cover of Discover magazine, April 2002.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, one of the loud ‘new Atheists’, has tried to explain how everything came from nothing; he even wrote a book about it. However, his ‘nothing’ is a ‘quantum vacuum’, which is not actually nothing. Indeed, a matter/energy quantum something has exactly the same problem as eternal universes; it cannot have persisted for eternity in the past, so all their theorizing only applies after the universe (something) exists.6 Back to square one!
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’ Magic: just like the rabbit out of the hat, but with the universe, a rather humungous ‘rabbit’! ‘Stuff happens!’
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’
There are other aspects of the big bang, the ‘mainstream’ model of the universe’s origin, that are also miraculous. The ‘standard model’ has a period of very rapid expansion called ‘inflation’ (which Alan Guth, mentioned above, invented). There is no known cause for the initiation of this supposed expansion, no known cause for it to stop and no physical mechanism for the extremely rapid expansion (many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light). However, these three associated miracles must have happened or the big bang does not work because of the ‘horizon problem’. More magic!
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is not magic, because God, who is eternal and omnipotent, is a sufficient cause for the universe. And He can exist eternally (and therefore has no beginning) because He is a non-material entity (God is spirit, as the Bible says in many places).
2. Origin of stars
According to the big bang, the ‘only game in town’ to explain the origin of stars, there had to have been two phases of star formation. Phase 1 involved the formation of hydrogen/helium stars (which are called Population III stars7). Here is the first problem: how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together to form a critical mass so that there is sufficient gravitational attraction to attract more gas to grow a star? Gases don’t tend to come together; they disperse, especially where there is a huge amount of energy (heat). Hey presto! Cosmologists invented ‘dark matter’, which is invisible undetectable ‘stuff’ that just happens to generate a lot of gravitational attraction just where it is needed. More magic!
The Bible tells us that God made the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week.
However, we have countless stars—like the sun—that are not just hydrogen and helium, but contain the heavier elements. Phase 2 supposedly comes in here. Exploding stars (supernovas) from phase 1 produced sufficient pressure to force hydrogen and helium together to make new stars that made all the heavier elements (which astronomers call ‘metals’), including the elements of which we are made. These stars are called Population I and II stars.
Now here is another problem: how do exploding stars, with matter flying at great speed in all directions, cause stars made of all those new elements to form? There has to be a coming together of the elements, not a flying apart. Pieces hitting one another would bounce off rather than coalesce. Most hypotheses involve multiple supernovas from phase 1 in close proximity, such that sufficient material collided together to form enough of a proto-star with sufficient gravity to overcome the tendency to fly apart and attract more matter and so grow a normal star. However, supernovas are not common events, especially multiple ones at the same time in close proximity. Thus, this scenario requires a huge number of very improbable events to account for the vast numbers of the heavier stars.
This is more magic; miracles without a miracle worker.
God made the sun and the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week. Again, this is not magic or superstition, because God is able to do such things.
3. Origin of life
Astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies said,
“How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.”
Not only must the DNA code be explained (how can a coded information storage system come about without intelligent design?), but the incredible machinery that reads the information and creates the components of life from that information has to be explained as well.
Former hard-nosed English Atheist philosopher Antony Flew abandoned Atheism/materialism because of the growing evidence for such design in living things. He said, “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
This research, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved”.
That is, only an incredibly intelligent designer could account for the information systems in living things.
Well-known American Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel said,
“What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story [of cosmic evolution] has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?” (See later for discussion of his second question.)
The scientific knowledge of life grows daily, and as it does the prospects of a naturalistic (materialistic/atheistic) explanation for its origin recede into the distance. The origin of life is another miracle. ‘Stuff happens’? More magic.
The origin of life demands a super-intelligent cause, such as the Creator-God revealed in the Bible.
. 4. Origin of the diversity of life (Design? What design?)
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist. Along with other atheistic biologists, Richard Dawkins has spent his life trying to deny that living things exhibit supernatural design. In the book that ‘put him on the map’, he wrote,
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
… how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together?
The diversity of life is a huge problem. How did a microbe change itself into every living thing on earth, ranging from earwigs to elephants, from mites to mango trees? For almost a hundred years, mutations and natural selection, the mechanisms of ‘neo-Darwinism’, or ‘the modern synthesis’, have been said to explain this diversity of life. However, with our modern knowledge of living things, this has proved useless as an explanation.
In July 2008, 16 high profile evolutionists met, by invitation, in Altenburg, Austria. They had come because they realized that mutations and natural selection did not explain the diversity of life, and they had come together to discuss this crisis in evolutionary biology. The only consensus was that there is a major problem, a crisis.
Thomas Nagel (continuing from the earlier quote) put it this way:
“The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?”
Think of the supposed origin of humans from a chimp-like ape in six million evolutionary years. Modern comparison of the genomes shows such large differences (of at least 20%) that this is just not feasible, even with highly unrealistic assumptions in favour of evolution. Actually, it was not even feasible when the difference was incorrectly trumpeted to be about 1%.
Materialists have no sufficient explanation (cause) for the diversity of life. There is a mind-boggling plethora of miracles here, not just one. Every basic type of life form is a miracle.
Genesis 1 tells us that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, made the various kinds of life to reproduce “after their kind”. Here is a sufficient cause, but even the description of the nature of living things to reproduce according to each kind has been confirmed with every witnessed reproductive event (billions of humans alone), and also in the fossil record where the transitional forms are missing and ‘living fossils’ testify to consistent reproduction ‘after their kind’ in thousands of species.
5. Origin of mind and morality
The origin of mind and morality from energy and atoms has long been a problem for the materialist. It is a major theme of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, already referred to.
A fig tree produces figs, not apples. That seems obvious. Likewise, physics and chemistry produce physical and chemical outcomes. However, mind and morality are not just matters of physics and chemistry. Sure, creatures that are physical and chemical have mind and morality, but how did such non-material things arise from the material? This is a serious problem for materialism, and the Atheist Nagel candidly admits it, to the extreme annoyance of his atheistic colleagues.
The famous (and reluctant) convert from Atheism to Christianity, C.S. Lewis, put it well when he wrote,
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist.
The Atheist has no sufficient cause to explain the existence of mind and morality. Magic happens!
Why do apparently intelligent people resort to believing in magic—uncaused events—at so many points? By not believing in God they have put themselves into an irrational philosophical corner. Romans 1:21 in the Bible says that when people deny that the Creator-God exists, they end up with ‘futile thinking’. We have seen plenty of that in this article. Richard Lewontin admitted that (leaving God out of the picture), “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … ” (he confuses ‘science’ with materialism).
Five Atheist miracles
(or materialists believe in magic)
http://creation.com/five-atheist-miracles
by Don Batten
Published: 21 April 2016 (GMT+10)
Atheists often promote themselves as intelligent, logical, scientific, rational, etc. They even had a proposal to call themselves ‘brights’! The aggressive ‘new Atheists’, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and company, like to portray those of us who believe in a supernatural Creator as irrational, unscientific, unintelligent, ignorant, or even ‘needing help’ (Dawkins). The entertainment industry often reinforces these perceptions by portraying ‘religious’ people (Christians particularly, and especially church leaders) as buffoons or hillbillies (almost never as a university professor, for example).
Reality runs against these perceptions. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific mind of all time, was a Christian believer, as were other founders of modern science. Surveys have consistently shown that people with a strong adherence to the Bible’s authority are the least likely to be superstitious, in contrast to the average de facto Atheist.1 Indeed, one Atheist expressed his chagrin that “some of the most intelligent and well-informed people” he knew were Christians.2
There is much more to say. Atheists believe that everything came about by purely material processes—the universe, life, mind, and morality. However, do they have a rational, logical basis for this belief?
They actually believe in miracles without any reasonable cause for the miracles. That is, they believe in magic, or the occurrence of things without a sufficient cause. What we commonly call ‘magic’ is actually illusion. For example, a rabbit does not just appear from an empty hat; there has to be a logical physical explanation; a sufficient cause. Illusion needs an illusionist. Stuff does not happen without something to cause it to happen. Even young children understand this law of causation. Magic, where things ‘just happen’, is the stuff of fairytales—there is no such thing.
Here are five major examples of materialists believing in magic (and there are more), or miraculous events without any sufficient explanation or cause for those events.
1. Origin of the Universe
Materialists (Atheists) once tried to believe that the universe was eternal, to erase the question of where it came from. The famous British Atheist Bertrand Russell, for example, took this position. However, this is not tenable. The progress of scientific knowledge about thermodynamics, for example, means that virtually everyone has been forced to acknowledge that the universe had a beginning, somewhere, sometime—the big bang idea acknowledges this (ideas like the multiverse only put the beginning more remotely, but do not get rid of the pesky problem)
Man of faith and science, Sir Isaac Newton.
The big bang attempts to explain the beginning of the universe. However, what did it begin from and what caused it to begin? Ultimately, it could not have come from a matter/energy source, the same sort of stuff as our universe, because that matter/energy should also be subject to the same physical laws, and therefore decay, and it would have had a beginning too, just further back in time.
So, it had to come from? Nothing! Nothing became everything with no cause whatsoever. Magic!
“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing—zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere. How is that possible? Ask Alan Guth. His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”
So proclaimed the front cover of Discover magazine, April 2002.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, one of the loud ‘new Atheists’, has tried to explain how everything came from nothing; he even wrote a book about it. However, his ‘nothing’ is a ‘quantum vacuum’, which is not actually nothing. Indeed, a matter/energy quantum something has exactly the same problem as eternal universes; it cannot have persisted for eternity in the past, so all their theorizing only applies after the universe (something) exists.6 Back to square one!
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’ Magic: just like the rabbit out of the hat, but with the universe, a rather humungous ‘rabbit’! ‘Stuff happens!’
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’
There are other aspects of the big bang, the ‘mainstream’ model of the universe’s origin, that are also miraculous. The ‘standard model’ has a period of very rapid expansion called ‘inflation’ (which Alan Guth, mentioned above, invented). There is no known cause for the initiation of this supposed expansion, no known cause for it to stop and no physical mechanism for the extremely rapid expansion (many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light). However, these three associated miracles must have happened or the big bang does not work because of the ‘horizon problem’. More magic!
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is not magic, because God, who is eternal and omnipotent, is a sufficient cause for the universe. And He can exist eternally (and therefore has no beginning) because He is a non-material entity (God is spirit, as the Bible says in many places).
2. Origin of stars
According to the big bang, the ‘only game in town’ to explain the origin of stars, there had to have been two phases of star formation. Phase 1 involved the formation of hydrogen/helium stars (which are called Population III stars7). Here is the first problem: how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together to form a critical mass so that there is sufficient gravitational attraction to attract more gas to grow a star? Gases don’t tend to come together; they disperse, especially where there is a huge amount of energy (heat). Hey presto! Cosmologists invented ‘dark matter’, which is invisible undetectable ‘stuff’ that just happens to generate a lot of gravitational attraction just where it is needed. More magic!
The Bible tells us that God made the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week.
However, we have countless stars—like the sun—that are not just hydrogen and helium, but contain the heavier elements. Phase 2 supposedly comes in here. Exploding stars (supernovas) from phase 1 produced sufficient pressure to force hydrogen and helium together to make new stars that made all the heavier elements (which astronomers call ‘metals’), including the elements of which we are made. These stars are called Population I and II stars.
Now here is another problem: how do exploding stars, with matter flying at great speed in all directions, cause stars made of all those new elements to form? There has to be a coming together of the elements, not a flying apart. Pieces hitting one another would bounce off rather than coalesce. Most hypotheses involve multiple supernovas from phase 1 in close proximity, such that sufficient material collided together to form enough of a proto-star with sufficient gravity to overcome the tendency to fly apart and attract more matter and so grow a normal star. However, supernovas are not common events, especially multiple ones at the same time in close proximity. Thus, this scenario requires a huge number of very improbable events to account for the vast numbers of the heavier stars.
This is more magic; miracles without a miracle worker.
God made the sun and the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week. Again, this is not magic or superstition, because God is able to do such things.
3. Origin of life
Astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies said,
“How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.”
Not only must the DNA code be explained (how can a coded information storage system come about without intelligent design?), but the incredible machinery that reads the information and creates the components of life from that information has to be explained as well.
Former hard-nosed English Atheist philosopher Antony Flew abandoned Atheism/materialism because of the growing evidence for such design in living things. He said, “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
This research, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved”.
That is, only an incredibly intelligent designer could account for the information systems in living things.
Well-known American Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel said,
“What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story [of cosmic evolution] has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?” (See later for discussion of his second question.)
The scientific knowledge of life grows daily, and as it does the prospects of a naturalistic (materialistic/atheistic) explanation for its origin recede into the distance. The origin of life is another miracle. ‘Stuff happens’? More magic.
The origin of life demands a super-intelligent cause, such as the Creator-God revealed in the Bible.
. 4. Origin of the diversity of life (Design? What design?)
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist. Along with other atheistic biologists, Richard Dawkins has spent his life trying to deny that living things exhibit supernatural design. In the book that ‘put him on the map’, he wrote,
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
… how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together?
The diversity of life is a huge problem. How did a microbe change itself into every living thing on earth, ranging from earwigs to elephants, from mites to mango trees? For almost a hundred years, mutations and natural selection, the mechanisms of ‘neo-Darwinism’, or ‘the modern synthesis’, have been said to explain this diversity of life. However, with our modern knowledge of living things, this has proved useless as an explanation.
In July 2008, 16 high profile evolutionists met, by invitation, in Altenburg, Austria. They had come because they realized that mutations and natural selection did not explain the diversity of life, and they had come together to discuss this crisis in evolutionary biology. The only consensus was that there is a major problem, a crisis.
Thomas Nagel (continuing from the earlier quote) put it this way:
“The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?”
Think of the supposed origin of humans from a chimp-like ape in six million evolutionary years. Modern comparison of the genomes shows such large differences (of at least 20%) that this is just not feasible, even with highly unrealistic assumptions in favour of evolution. Actually, it was not even feasible when the difference was incorrectly trumpeted to be about 1%.
Materialists have no sufficient explanation (cause) for the diversity of life. There is a mind-boggling plethora of miracles here, not just one. Every basic type of life form is a miracle.
Genesis 1 tells us that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, made the various kinds of life to reproduce “after their kind”. Here is a sufficient cause, but even the description of the nature of living things to reproduce according to each kind has been confirmed with every witnessed reproductive event (billions of humans alone), and also in the fossil record where the transitional forms are missing and ‘living fossils’ testify to consistent reproduction ‘after their kind’ in thousands of species.
5. Origin of mind and morality
The origin of mind and morality from energy and atoms has long been a problem for the materialist. It is a major theme of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, already referred to.
A fig tree produces figs, not apples. That seems obvious. Likewise, physics and chemistry produce physical and chemical outcomes. However, mind and morality are not just matters of physics and chemistry. Sure, creatures that are physical and chemical have mind and morality, but how did such non-material things arise from the material? This is a serious problem for materialism, and the Atheist Nagel candidly admits it, to the extreme annoyance of his atheistic colleagues.
The famous (and reluctant) convert from Atheism to Christianity, C.S. Lewis, put it well when he wrote,
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist.
The Atheist has no sufficient cause to explain the existence of mind and morality. Magic happens!
Why do apparently intelligent people resort to believing in magic—uncaused events—at so many points? By not believing in God they have put themselves into an irrational philosophical corner. Romans 1:21 in the Bible says that when people deny that the Creator-God exists, they end up with ‘futile thinking’. We have seen plenty of that in this article. Richard Lewontin admitted that (leaving God out of the picture), “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … ” (he confuses ‘science’ with materialism).
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Don Batten is one of the 45 men living today who have earned a Ph.D. in some field of science but who, because of their extremely unhealthy obsession with a ridiculous interpretation of Genesis 1-11, insist that the 3,000,000+ men and women who have earned a Ph.D. in some field of science but do not share that extremely unhealthy obsession are “materialistic atheists.” These 45 men know for an absolute fact that their characterization of these 3,000,000+ men and women is maliciously and libelously false, but their obsession has hardened their hearts to such an extent that they are unable to perceive their morally depraved condition.
Don Batten’s formal education is in horticulture as it is applied to agriculture. However, he is not employed as a scientist, but as a business administrator for a creationist organization that shares both his extremist views and his woeful ignorance of both the Bible and science. Because he severed some years ago his relationship with both science and the men and women employed as scientists, and because of his extremely unhealthy obsession with a ridiculous interpretation of Genesis 1-11, he has no comprehension of what either scientists or Christians believe. Indeed, he has become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that the universe and the stars in it “magically” came into existence despite “proof” to the contrary. Furthermore, he has become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that amino acids “magically” formed proteins that “magically” became alive. Moreover, he has become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that the diversity of life “magically” came about even though how it came about is very well understood today by evolutionary biologists. He has even become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that human beings magically became cognizant beings with a sense of morality.
However, it is not his woeful ignorance of both the Bible and science that is most troubling, but it is his abandonment of Christian ethics and biblical morality that is most troubling.
When young earth creationism is commingled with the Christian gospel, the Christian gospel is made to look as foolish as young earth creationism. Moreover, being a Christian is not about believing in a ridiculous interpretation of Genesis 1-11; being a Christian is about a personal, life-changing relationship with Christ in which one dies and is then born again as a totally new man in Christ.
2 Corinthians 5:17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. (NKJV)
Don Batten’s formal education is in horticulture as it is applied to agriculture. However, he is not employed as a scientist, but as a business administrator for a creationist organization that shares both his extremist views and his woeful ignorance of both the Bible and science. Because he severed some years ago his relationship with both science and the men and women employed as scientists, and because of his extremely unhealthy obsession with a ridiculous interpretation of Genesis 1-11, he has no comprehension of what either scientists or Christians believe. Indeed, he has become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that the universe and the stars in it “magically” came into existence despite “proof” to the contrary. Furthermore, he has become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that amino acids “magically” formed proteins that “magically” became alive. Moreover, he has become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that the diversity of life “magically” came about even though how it came about is very well understood today by evolutionary biologists. He has even become so delusional that he thinks that scientists believe that human beings magically became cognizant beings with a sense of morality.
However, it is not his woeful ignorance of both the Bible and science that is most troubling, but it is his abandonment of Christian ethics and biblical morality that is most troubling.
When young earth creationism is commingled with the Christian gospel, the Christian gospel is made to look as foolish as young earth creationism. Moreover, being a Christian is not about believing in a ridiculous interpretation of Genesis 1-11; being a Christian is about a personal, life-changing relationship with Christ in which one dies and is then born again as a totally new man in Christ.
2 Corinthians 5:17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. (NKJV)
What is called “research” in this post is what I call irreverently messing around with the Bible while ignoring all of the relevant facts. For example, the Bible says that on the second day God created a “dome in the midst of the waters,” and that it separated the waters from the waters. Science has never agreed that the earth is flat and covered with a dome!
Gen. 1:6. And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
7. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. (NRSV)
ויאמר אלהים יהי רקיע בתוך המים ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים׃
ויעשׂ אלהים את־הרקיע ויבדל בין המים אשׁר מתחת לרקיע ובין המים אשׁר מעל לרקיע ויהי־כן׃
ויעשׂ אלהים את־הרקיע ויבדל בין המים אשׁר מתחת לרקיע ובין המים אשׁר מעל לרקיע ויהי־כן׃
Gen. 1:6. And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
7. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. (NRSV)
Other translations have it slightly different. So don't you think there is a space/dome/firmament/canopy between the waters of the sea and the waters of the heavens?
(ERV) Then God said, "Let there be a space to separate the water into two parts!"
(ISV) Then God said, "Let there be a canopy between bodies of water, separating bodies of water from bodies of water!"
(KJV) And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
(ERV) Then God said, "Let there be a space to separate the water into two parts!"
(ISV) Then God said, "Let there be a canopy between bodies of water, separating bodies of water from bodies of water!"
(KJV) And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
The Hebrew Old Testament calls it a רָקִיעַ, a dome. In the Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, we find an excellent article (Vol. III, pp. 568-569 [two lengthy columns of fine print per page] on the word רָקִיעַ. Of special importance is the following from the article,
The [cognate] verb רָקַע, raká, means to expand by beating, whether by the hand, the foot, or any instrument. It is especially used, however, of beating out metals into thin plates (Exod. xxxix, 3, Numb. xvi, 39), and hence the substantive רַקֻּעַים “broad plates” of metal (Numb. 16:38). (The italics are theirs).
Furthermore, the Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament by Brown, Driver, and Briggs published by Oxford University gives us the following meaning of word רָקִיעַ in Gen. 1:7, “the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it.” (p. 956). Moreover, John Skinner, the late Principal and Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature at Westminster College, Cambridge, in his commentary on the Hebrew text of Genesis, writes,
For further and much more extensive proof that this word רָקִיעַ is correctly translated as “dome” rather than “expanse”, please see the article for which I provided a link to in a post above. Here is the link again,
https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu /bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/01-genesis/text/articles-books/seely-firmament-wtj.htm
The [cognate] verb רָקַע, raká, means to expand by beating, whether by the hand, the foot, or any instrument. It is especially used, however, of beating out metals into thin plates (Exod. xxxix, 3, Numb. xvi, 39), and hence the substantive רַקֻּעַים “broad plates” of metal (Numb. 16:38). (The italics are theirs).
Furthermore, the Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament by Brown, Driver, and Briggs published by Oxford University gives us the following meaning of word רָקִיעַ in Gen. 1:7, “the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it.” (p. 956). Moreover, John Skinner, the late Principal and Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature at Westminster College, Cambridge, in his commentary on the Hebrew text of Genesis, writes,
6-8 Second Work: The Firmament.—The second fiat calls into existence a firmament, whose function is to divide the primeval waters into an upper and lower ocean, leaving a space between as the theater of further creative developments. The “firmament” is the dome of heaven, which to the ancients was no optical illusion, but a material structure, sometimes compared to an “upper chamber” (Ps. 104:12, Am 9:6) supported by “pillars” (Jb 26:11), and resembling in its surface a “molten mirror” (Jb 37:18). Above this are the heavenly waters, from which the rain descends through “windows” or “doors” (Gn 7:11, 8:2, 2 Ki 7:2, 19) opened and shut by God at His pleasure (Ps 78:23).
For further and much more extensive proof that this word רָקִיעַ is correctly translated as “dome” rather than “expanse”, please see the article for which I provided a link to in a post above. Here is the link again,
https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu /bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/01-genesis/text/articles-books/seely-firmament-wtj.htm
Since you are obviously an atheist why are you on this site?? This post demonstrates your ignorance of science. Big bang evolution violates 5 seperate scientific laws. It is known the universe is expanding therefore it had a begining. Therefore big bang evolution theory was created. The big problem is ignoring the scientific laws for it to happen.
First there was nothing then a massive mass happened either directly or indirectly.
Matter can't be created out of nothing.
Second the mass exploded creating a massive expanding gas of hydrogen.
Third parts of the gas cloud collapsed creating hydrogen stars.
Ignoring Jean's mass limit formula defining the force required for a gas to collapse.
Fourth many stars went nova sending out new elements.
Fifth again ignoring Jean's mass limit clouds of the new elements collapsed creating the universe of today including our solar system.
Sixth on earth with a totally inorganic mass proteins suddenly formed. A protein is an extremely complicated massive molecule. Magic happened. Then in addition to the proteins all of the rest of the parts of a cell magically were just happened to form. Then by more magic a cell was formed. Then somehow all living animal and vegetable were created from that original cell.
Lots of magic happening at every stage.
The simple alternative is "In the begining God created the heavens and earth."
First there was nothing then a massive mass happened either directly or indirectly.
Matter can't be created out of nothing.
Second the mass exploded creating a massive expanding gas of hydrogen.
Third parts of the gas cloud collapsed creating hydrogen stars.
Ignoring Jean's mass limit formula defining the force required for a gas to collapse.
Fourth many stars went nova sending out new elements.
Fifth again ignoring Jean's mass limit clouds of the new elements collapsed creating the universe of today including our solar system.
Sixth on earth with a totally inorganic mass proteins suddenly formed. A protein is an extremely complicated massive molecule. Magic happened. Then in addition to the proteins all of the rest of the parts of a cell magically were just happened to form. Then by more magic a cell was formed. Then somehow all living animal and vegetable were created from that original cell.
Lots of magic happening at every stage.
The simple alternative is "In the begining God created the heavens and earth."
You do realize that you are using the fallacious ad hominem attack instead of discussing the issue. The Alinsky method.
1. Demonize the opposition.
2. Never discuss the issues with the opposition since it humanizes them.
First time I have had to use this on this site. You are the epitome of following Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Please explain Carbon-14 in diamonds since it should be gone after millions of years.
1. Demonize the opposition.
2. Never discuss the issues with the opposition since it humanizes them.
First time I have had to use this on this site. You are the epitome of following Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Please explain Carbon-14 in diamonds since it should be gone after millions of years.
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