When Truth is Truth (Part One)

John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Jesus Christ is God’s only begotten Son, and on Calvary’s cross, He paid the price for the redemption of man’s lost soul.  On that cross, He broke the back of Satan’s legal claim to our souls, and, through the marvelous born-again experience, made our way of escape from Satanic bondage.  To the blood-bought, His cross—the tree Jesus died upon—is the very Tree of Life—even eternal life.  Imagine: eternal, glorious life.  Revelation 21:3-5 speaks about eternity promised to the redeemed:

3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

Have you been born again?  Will today be the day you participate in the greatest mystery of all time?  Will today be the day you partake in the greatest miracle of all time?  Make your move for Jesus Christ while His hand is still extended.  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 30:5-6:

5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

GOD SAID, Malachi 3:6:

For I am the LORD, I change not;

GOD SAID, Hebrews 13:8:

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

GOD SAID, Hebrews 1:10-12:

10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:

11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;

12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

MAN SAID: According to Kansas State University professor Dr. Scott Todd, “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”

Now THE RECORD: Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature 771 that will once again confirm the full inerrancy of God’s Holy Word.  All of these powerful faith-building features are archived here in text and streaming audio for the edification of the saved and as a light to those who sit in darkness.  Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one. 

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May the face of our God shine upon you and your house. 

The challengers of God’s Word challenge boldly with the certainty of their “truth,” and each time they do, they reinforce this GodSaidManSaid rule: Man’s truth of yesterday is debunked by his truth of today and man’s truth of today will be discredited by his truth of tomorrow.  It really is that simple.  Carnaldom’s truth is ever-changing.  Now, contrast that to the Word of God in your majority-text Holy Bible that was penned thousands of years ago.  Its truths are still truth.  That, in fact, is the very nature of real truth. 

GodSaidManSaid has published numerous features highlighting man’s truth and its Pinocchian problems.  In this two-part feature, we will excerpt numerous GodSaidManSaid articles and then show man and his “truth’s” latest calamities. 

From the GodSaidManSaid feature, “The Truth Shall Set You Free and Marshmallows:”

Samuel Arbesman, in his book The Half-Life of Facts, with the subhead, “Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date,” points out some disconcerting facts, such as:

1. Medical knowledge about cirrhosis or hepatitis takes about forty-five years for half of it to be disproven or become out-of-date.

2. These results are nearly identical to a similar study that examined the overturning of information in surgery.  Two Australian surgeons found that half of the facts in that field also become false every fort-five years. 

3. John Ioannidis is a Greek physician and professor at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, and he is obsessed with understanding the failings and more human properties of the scientific process.  He has found that for highly-cited clinical trials, initially the significant and large effects are later found to have smaller effects or often no effect at all in a nontrivial number of instances. 
Looking within the medical literature over a period of nearly fifteen years, Ioannidis examined the most highly cited studies.  Of the forty-five papers he examined, seven of them (over 15%) initially had higher effects, and another seven were contradicted outright by later research. 

4. …another way to avoid the surprise of changes in knowledge is to simply recognize that it’s not that surprising.
We are getting better at internalizing this.  For example, many medical schools inform their students that within several years, half of what they’ve been taught will be wrong, and the teachers just don’t know which half. 

Man’s truth is in a very constant state of flux.  God’s truth never changes because it is the truth, and this knowledge is critical and absolutely foundational to the success of the children of God.  Man, and especially the theological crowd, is continually challenging the Word of God and, in the grand scheme of things, destroying the souls of untold millions.  Jesus said in Mark 11:23:

For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

Where there is doubt, the mountain won’t move.  I need to know that the Word of God is “true and righteous altogether.” [End of quotes]

GodSaidManSaid, “Peking Man is Not Who They Say He Is:”

The case in point in this feature is the anti-God’s frenzied attempts to produce the proverbial missing link—the intermediate between man and monkey—and on back, to the hypothesized primordial soup, and ultimately nothing.  Their frustrations will continue.  Their proof will continue to elude them.  Their lives and careers will continue to be wasted because their premise of evolution isn’t true. 

The following excerpt is from the April 11, 2009 issue of Science News, under the title, “Peking Man ups his age:”

Peking Man has suddenly gotten much older.  The Homo erectus fossils from China’s Zhoukoudian cave system that are referred to collectively as Peking Man date to as early as 780,000 years ago, roughly 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, Guanju Shen of Nanjing Normal University in China and his colleagues report in the March 12 Nature.  Researchers first unearthed Peking Man fossils at Zhoukoudian in the 1920s.  This site has since yielded 17,000 stone artifacts and fossils from more that 50 H. erectus individuals.  Along with revised dates for a handful of other Chinese H. erectus sites, the new evidence fits with the idea that H. erectus traveled to eastern Asia in two migrations.  [End of quote]

Before we take a closer look at Peking Man, a proposed intermediate in the theory of man’s evolution, let’s consider the credibility of some of his cousins.  This grouping of individuals is known as Homo erectus, just one step away from you and me, Homo sapiens:

1.  Ramapithecus was originally constructed from a few teeth and a few fragments of a jaw.  As a result of new fossil material, he has been reclassified as an orangutan. 

2.  Australopithecines, a proposed missing link, has lost his credentials.  This creature did not walk upright in human manner.

3.  Java Man.  The original discoverer of Java Man (who was constructed from a femur, skull cap, and three teeth) set him forth as a show piece of evolution.  Many years later, he conceded that Java Man was probably just a giant gibbon.

4.  Neanderthal Man.  All anthropologists now believe he was just as human as you and me.

5.  Cro-Magnon Man.  If he walked down the street clean-shaven and in a business suit, he would go completely unnoticed.

6.  Nebraska Man, made famous in the Scopes trial in the 1920s, was the evolutionists’ proof that their theory was fact.  This Nebraska Man was their missing link.  The proof was a tooth.  But years later, after further digging they discovered their tooth was that of a pig and not an intermediate of man.

The original Peking Man fossil had been discovered in the early part of the 20^th century in a cave in what is now Beijing, China.  Some question the reliability of the reconstruction of Peking Man’s skull.  Unbeknownst to most, the model skull that adorns the textbooks and museums was actually a composite made of a multitude of tiny bone fragments with plaster substituting the missing parts.  The cave contained a multitude of humanoid-monkey-like skeletons.  All of them had their skulls bashed in at the rear.  Evidence of fire use and tools were also discovered.  This prompted the evolutionists to infer that the ape-like creatures were themselves using the tools and fire.  However, a much more plausible scenario would put the monkeys as having the tools used on them instead of by them.  Apparently, the ape-like creatures had progressed enough to create their own tools and used them to bash their own skulls in!  Anyone who has ever seen the Indiana Jones movies knows that monkey brains are a delicacy in other parts of the world.  The skulls were used as a bowl for the brains. 

The evolutionists are searching for the intermediate—a missing link.  The following paragraphs are from the book, Bones of Contention:

[Book reviewer Michael Day] then enumerates the many questions that now embroil Homo erectus.  One is, “Does Homo erectus exist as a true species or should it be sunk into Homo sapiens?”

A number of evolutionists have expressed the fact that Homo erectus, while a bit different, is not so different from modern humans as to warrant a separate species designation.  Gabriel Ward Lasker (Wayne State University) has written:

Homo erectus is distinct from modern man (Homo sapiens), but there is a tendency to exaggerate the differences.  Even if one ignores transitional or otherwise hard to classify specimens and limits consideration to the Java and Peking populations, the range of variation of many features of Homo erectus falls within that of modern man.

William S. Laughlin (University of Connecticut), in studying the Eskimos and the Aleuts, noted many similarities between these people and the Asian Homo erectus people, specifically Sinanthropus (Peking Man).  He concludes his study with a very logical statement:

. . . when we find that significant differences have developed, over a short time span, between closely related and contiguous peoples, as in Alaska and Greenland, and when we consider the vast differences that exist between remote groups such as Eskimos and Bushmen, who are known to belong within the single species of Homo sapiens, it seems justifiable to conclude that Sinanthropus belongs within this same diverse species. 

Milford Wolpoff has been one of the most vocal evolutionists calling for the “sinking” of the taxon Homo erectus into Homo sapiens.  He writes in conjunction with Wu Xin Zhi (Institute of Paleoanthropology, Beijing) and Alan G. Thorne (Australian National University): “In our view, there are two alternatives.  We should either admit that the Homo erectus/Homo sapiens boundary is arbitrary and use nonmorphological (i.e., temporal) criteria for determining it, or Homo erectus should be sunk [into Homo sapiens].”  [End of quote]

In the book The Making of Mankind, Darwinist David Pilbeam had the following to say concerning the proposed intermediate record:

If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meager evidence we’ve got, he’d surely say, “Forget it: there isn’t enough to go on.”  [End of quotes]

How true is man’s truth?  The headline in Science News, October 3, 2015, reads, “Psych Studies Fail Replication Test.”  Several paragraphs follow:

Psychologists have recently bemoaned a tendency for provocative and sometimes highly-publicized findings to vanish in repeat experiments.  A large, collaborative project has now put an unsettling, and contested, number on the extent of that problem. 

Only 35 of 97 reports of statistically significant results published in three major psychology journals in 2008 could be replicated, a group led by psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville reports in the August 28 Science.  Nosek is executive director of the Center for Open Science, which coordinated 270 researchers involved in the replication project. 

“There is a lot of room to improve reproducibility in psychology,” Nosek says.  [End of quote]

Science writer Tina Hesman Saey searches big data in her February 7, 2015, Science News feature titled, “Big Data, Big Challenges.”  A few excerpts follow:

In my quest to explore the unknown frontier inside my own body, I stumbled upon one of the most intractable problems facing science. 

The issue, irreplicable results, is a dark cloud looming over the life and social sciences.  My encounter began when I sent identical stool samples to two microbiome sequencing services (SN Online, 6/17/14). 

The profiles presented by the services showed wildly different results.  For example, they reported almost completely opposite readings on the proportions of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes, two of the major phyla of bacteria found in the human gut.  This was frustrating because the mix of these two may determine whether someone is obese or not and affect other aspects of health.  I thought that, at a minimum, I would learn how many of these major players inhabited my gut (SN: 1/11/14, p. 28).

If two labs couldn’t get my sample right, what does that say for the vast studies cataloging the bacteria involved in human health and disease? 

Yet, as science moves toward big data endeavors, so grows the concern that much of what is discovered is fool’s gold. 

For instance, two groups of researchers applied different analyses to one dataset containing gene activity measurements from mice and humans injured by trauma, such as burns or blood infections.  One group concluded that mice are terrible stand-ins for people with inflammation caused by trauma (SN: 3/23/13, p. 10).  The other group decided that the rodents are excellent human analogs (SN: 9/20/14, p. 14).  Same data, opposite results. 

A study published in Science Translational Medicine in 2011 found that 27 percent of variants identified as the causes of inherited rare diseases either turned out to be fairly common or were mislabeled.  To MacArthur, the implications are clear: “All of us who have done rare disease discovery in the last decade have almost certainly misdiagnosed patients.”  [End of quotes]

The editorial in the June 26, 2015 issue of Science concerning the problem of reproducibility made the following observations:

The reproducibility problem in science is a familiar issue, not only within the scientific community, but with the general public as well.  Recent developments in social psychology (such as fraudulent research by D. Stapel) and cell biology (the Amgen Inc. and Bayer AG reports on how rarely they could reproduce published results) have become widely known.  Nearly every field is affected, from clinical trials and neuroimaging, to economics and computer science. 

Most scientists aspire to greater transparency, but if being transparent taps into scarce grant money and requires extra work, it is unlikely that scientists will be able to live up to their own cherished values. [End of quote]

In the same publication, in a feature titled “The Cancer Test,” with the sub-head, “A non-profit’s effort to replicate 50 top cancer papers is shaking up labs,” you’ll find the following:

Concerns that much preclinical research can’t be reproduced are not new, but the spotlight turned to cancer biology 3 years ago, when a commentary in Nature reported that scientists from the biotech company Amgen could reproduce only six of 53 high-profile cancer papers. (Another firm, Bayer, had reported a 79% failure rate for a set of mostly cancer studies in 2011.)  The Amgen piece argued that irreproducible data contributed to the high drug development costs and failed clinical trials.  Indeed, a year earlier, Amgen had dropped an entire research effort to find drugs targeting a cancer protein called STK₃₃ after it could not confirm key results in a Cell paper. 

REPEAT FAILURES:

• 6 of 53 cancer papers that Amgen could not reproduce.

• 14 of 67 biomedical papers that Bayer completely reproduced.

• 55% MD Anderson researchers who could not reproduce a published study. [End of quotes]

Thousands of years ago, the Word of God was penned, and not one position has changed:

• According to the Bible’s genealogical record and other dating markers, the earth and its universe are still just over 6,000 years old.

• All humans on the earth are still the offspring of one man and one woman.

• Approximately 4,350 years ago, the global flood in the days of Noah destroyed all that had the breath of life in its nostrils with the exception of the population on the Ark.  There are stillfish fossils on every mountain peak.  

• About 3,500 years ago, Moses and the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea on dry group—and numerous accounts still exist of their story. 

• Approximately 3,000 years ago, young David slayed the giant Goliath, and according to the indigenous people, the place where Goliath fell can still be identified to this very day. 

• Around 800 years prior to the birth of Christ Jesus, Isaiah the prophet prophesized in Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”  This virgin-born Redeemerstill and forevermore sits on the right hand of the Father. 

• Very soon now, the Bible declares Jesus Christ will return to engage and destroy the armies of the world at the great battle of Armageddon.  It was prophesied thousands of years ago and still it sits on the world’s calendar of events to come. 

God’s Word never changes.  That is the nature of truth. 

GOD SAID, Proverbs 30:5-6:

5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

GOD SAID, Malachi 3:6:

For I am the LORD, I change not;

GOD SAID, Hebrews 13:8:

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

GOD SAID, Hebrews 1:10-12:

10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:

11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;

12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

MAN SAID: According to Kansas State University professor Dr. Scott Todd, “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

Bower, B., “Psych Studies Fail Replication Test,” Science News, October 3, 2015

Buck, S., “Solving Reproducibility,” Science, June 2015

GodSaidManSaid, “Peking Man Is Not Who They Say He Is”

GodSaidManSaid, “The Truth Shall Set You Free and Marshmallows”

Kaiser, J., “The Cancer Test,” Science, June 2015

Saey, T., “Big Data, Big Challenges,” Science News, February 7, 2015

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