"Things We Know to be True:" "Scientific American" Challenges God (Part 1)

Man’s wisdom is in a constant state of flux.  His truth of yesterday is debunked by his truth of today; his truth of today will be debunked by his truth of tomorrow.  That doesn’t sound much like truth, does it?  Jesus Christ, on the other hand, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), never changes.  He is a constant, immovable anchor of the soul.  For two thousand years, the anti-Christ have railed, but He still stands unaffected and stands the champion of the souls of lost men found.  Have you been born again?  Will today be the day you choose Jesus Christ as the Saviour and anchor of your soul?  Today can be your new beginning—free of sin, shame, and bondage.  Click onto “Further with Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the glorious Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT. 

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

MAN SAID: Anyone with just a smidgen of learning knows the universe and earth are billions of years old!  No educated person would embrace creationists and their young-earth foolishness. 

Now THE RECORD:  Things have changed.  God and His Authorized King James Bible have been banned from public discourse and from the world’s schools and universities.  Now we grope around at noon-day and know not at what we stumble, asking asinine questions like “who am I;” “where did I come from;” “why am I here;” “where am I going;” or making statements like “I need to find myself.” 

Things have really changed.  Dr. Grant Jeffrey wrote the following in his book The Signature of God:

Frederick Rudolph wrote in his book The American College and University that within a generation of their landing at Plymouth, the Puritan settlers laid the foundation of an educational system dedicated to training “a learned clergy and a lettered people.”  These Christians created Harvard College in 1636 as an institution dedicated to upholding the truths of the Bible.  In fact, during the first century of Harvard University’s existence, every one of its professors was a minister of the gospel. 

The initial 1636 charter of Harvard College proclaimed the following essentials:

Everyone shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life.  Seeing the Lord giveth wisdom, every one shall seriously by prayer in secret seek wisdom of Him.  Every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that they be ready to give an account of their proficiency therein, both in theoretical observations of languages and logic, and in practical and spiritual truths…  Every one shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know Jesus Christ which is eternal life! 

It has been calculated that 87 percent (103) of the first 119 colleges built in the United States were established by Christians to educate young people in their faith.  This includes Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia.  [End of quote]

Among the leaders of carnaldom, good has become evil (Isaiah 5:20) and the truth has become a lie.  A last-days sign of God’s soon-coming, terrible, global judgment is what II Thessalonians 2:10 identifies as the “deceivableness of unrighteousness.”  The Biblical coining of the word righteousness takes place in Genesis 15:6 and is spoken in regard to Abraham, who is known as the father of faith:

And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.

Righteousness is faith and the actions that are the result of faith.  Unrighteousness is simply unbelief and the deeds that follow it.  God’s Word calls the results of unrighteousness “confusion of face” (Daniel 9:8). 

Confusion of face is rampant.  Today’s new questions are:  “What am I?  Am I a boy or a girl—or something else?  Now, what bathroom should I use?” 

The deceivableness of unrighteousness is unashamedly ballyhooed in the November 2016 issue of Scientific American.  The headline on the front cover reads: “5 Scientific Facts (That People Often Get Wrong).”  When you arrive at the multi-page feature inside, you find this headline: “5 Things We Know to be True,” with the subhead, “A compendium of irrefutable facts for these fact-starved times.”  A few sentences from the prelude follow:

Scientific truths are always provisional at some level.  We once believed that the continents were fixed on the surface of Earth; now we know they move.  We thought the universe was static; now we know it’s expanding.  We thought margarine was healthier than butter and that hormone-replacement therapy was the right treatment for vast numbers of postmenopausal women; now we know better.  [End of quote]

GodSaidManSaid would just like to point out a few other things they’ve gotten wrong:

• Ramapithecus;

• Australopithecines;

• Peking Man;

• Java Man;

• Neanderthal Man;

• Cro-Magnon Man;

• Nebraska Man;

• Piltdown Man;

• Lucy;

• China’s fake chicken-lizard;

• Rethink fossilization, after soft tissue was discovered in dinosaur bones. 

And, we should add:

• Raw milk;

• Raw honey;

• Whole wheat;

• Olive oil;

• Salt;

• Eggs;

• Circumcision;

• Breast-feeding;

• The U.S. food pyramid;

• And so much more. 

Now, back to the prelude in Scientific American:

We ordinarily report on the latest advances in scientific and technological research, but we thought it appropriate to take a step back and discuss some of the science’s firmly established facts.  There is essentially no debate among legitimate scientists about these truths, which are based on verifiable evidence, which have been accepted for decades, and which have only become more strongly established as new evidence continues to accumulate.  [End of quote]

Pretty bold talk, don’t you think, when the first of the five “facts” they present is the theory of evolution.  Note: That’s theory of evolution—not fact of evolution, by their own admission.  

Another excellent book, by Dr. Grant Jeffrey titled Creation, records the following:

Darwin himself was perplexed and very worried about the lack of fossil evidence.  In his own words:

Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?  Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?  … But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth?

He expressed his fears about his possible error in the following comments:

I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a fantasy…I…am ready to cry with vexation at my blindness and presumption. 

Darwin admitted:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organism existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. 

He asked:

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.  The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.     

[Darwin] honestly believed these fossils would eventually be found in the thousands, and prove his theory to be true beyond a doubt. 

To date, though, every species discovered in the fossil record appears perfectly formed.  Paleontologists have never discovered a fossil showing a partially-formed species or a partially-formed organ.  Despite the fact that tens of thousands of scientists and millions of dedicated amateurs have been searching worldwide for these missing-link fossils to support evolution, they have never found a single example. 

The late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould was an internationally-respected professor of geology and paleontology at Harvard University.  He was a strong and eloquent supporter of evolution.  However, he honestly admitted that the illustrations of evolutionary development found in the university textbooks and television documentaries are actually fictitious inventions of creative artists that do not accurately represent scientific facts. 

Professor Gould admitted that the claim in science textbooks of the fossil record supporting evolution is false:

All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. 

In other words, Dr. Gould admitted that the fossil record does not actually support the theory of gradual evolution (something that creationists have been claiming for many years).  The new “punctuated equilibrium” theory states that evolution proceeded in rapid jumps that left no fossil evidence, followed by long periods with no changes. 

Professor Gould also wrote:

The advent of the theory of punctuated equilibrium and the associated publicity it has generated have meant that for the first time, biologists with little knowledge of paleontology have become aware of the absence of transitional forms.  [End of quotes]

The lead article in “5 Things We Know to be True” is authored by Michael Shermer.  Speaking of the theory of evolution, Shermer writes:

But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or an English naturalist—to understand why a theory on the origin of species by means of natural selection would be so controversial.  If new species are created naturally—not supernaturally—what place, then, for God?  No wonder more than a century and a half later people of some religious faiths still find the theory so terribly threatening.  But in those intervening years, scientists have found so much evidence in support of the theory that it would be truly astonishing if it turned out not to be true—as shocking as if the germ theory of disease fell apart or if astrophysicists were forced to abandon the big bang model of the universe. 

The author attempts to buttress his “truth” with an appeal to radiometric dating.  He writes:

The consistency of dating techniques also gives us confidence that the theory is true.  Uranium-lead, rubidium-strontium, and potassium-argon dating, for example, are all reasonably consistent in their determination of the age of rocks and fossils.  The ages are given in estimates, but the margins of error are in the range of 1 percent.  It’s not as if one scientist finds that a fossil hominin is 1.2 million years old while another one finds it is 10,000 years old. 

Consider the following information on radiometric dating from the GodSaidManSaid feature “Carbon-14 and Genesis 1: In the Beginning:”

The ridiculous long-ages into the billions of years are not a product of radiocarbon dating.  The two most commonly used methods to date rocks and minerals are the potassium-argon and uranium-lead methods.  As in all the radiometric systems of dating, two familiar, false assumptions are in their equation.  Remember, if your computer says 2+2=5, no matter how scholarly, the math computation will always be incorrect.  The following are the two false assumptions.  The excerpt cited is from the book The World that Perished by John C. Whitcomb:

Many scientists claim to have nearly-infallible methods for determining the age of the earth and its various formations.  But all of these methods are built upon two basic and unprovable assumptions:

1. The assumption of starting point or original condition; and

2. The assumption of a uniform rate of change from that starting point to the present. 

Contrary to the evolutionary paradigm and according to God:

1. The starting point of the universe and all life within it has an abrupt beginning that didn’t take “billions of years” to transpire.  The first man, Adam, for example, is created fully grown and fully mature on the sixth day of creation—approximately 6,000 years ago.  Contrary to evolution’s false assumption, Adam had no evolutionary history.  If you had seen Adam one minute after his creation, not knowing the backstory, you would assume history when there was none. 

2. Contrary to false assumption number two, this world has not experienced a uniform rate of change.  A horrific, worldwide deluge took place over 4,300 years ago which destroyed the atmosphere and life as it was once known.  This tremendous disaster is commonly known as Noah’s Flood. 

The following paragraphs are found in a book authored by Morris and Morris titled Many Infallible Proofs:

As in the case of uranium dating, potassium dating also commonly yields great ages on rocks known to be very young:

The radiogenic argon and helium contents of three basalts erupted into the deep ocean from an active volcano (Kilauea) have been measured.  Ages calculated from these measurements increase with sample depth up to 22 million years for lavas deduced to be recent—it is possible to deduce that these lavas are very young, probably less than 200 years old. 

And again we ask how it is possible to be sure that potassium ages are correct when determined for rocks of unknown age when the same method gives ages 100,000 times too great for rocks whose ages we know! 

Evolutionist F.B. Jueneman, in Industrial Research and Development, stated:

The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium.  Such “confirmation” may be short-lived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily.  In recent years, there has been the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences.  And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather within the age and memory of man. 

The following statement is from evolutionist William Stansfield, Ph.D., California Polytech State:

It is obvious that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be.  Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years. There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological “clock.”  [End of quotes]

Geologist Andrew Snelling had this to say concerning potassium-argon dating in Volume Two of Earth’s Catastrophic Past:

After the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, a new lava dome began developing from October 26, 1980, onwards within the volcano’s crater.  In 1986, less than ten years after it flowed and cooled, a dacite lava from this dome was sampled and analyzed.  The lava flow yielded a potassium-argon “age” of 350,000 years for the whole rock, and the constituent minerals yielded potassium-argon ages up to 2.8 million years.  Similarly, the June 30, 1954 andesite lava flow from Mt. Ngauruhoe, central North Island, New Zealand, yielded potassium-argon model “ages” up to 3.5 Ma (million years) due to excess ⁴⁰Ar*.  Furthermore, a separate split of that flow sample also yielded a model “age” of 0.8 Ma, which indicates the variability in the excess ⁴⁰Ar*.  Investigators have also found that excess ⁴⁰Ar* is preferentially trapped in the minerals within lava flows, with one K-Ar “date” on olivine crystals in a recent basalt being greater than 110 Ma. 

Again Snelling writes:

Now several experimental determinations of the helium leakage (diffusion) rate from zircons of several different rock units, including this Precambrian granitic rock, are available and are in agreement.  These experimental measurements all showed that helium diffuses so rapidly out of zircon crystals that it should have all but disappeared after about 100,000 years.  Because the uranium-lead radioisotope decay system indicates that originally there would have been 1.5 billion years’ worth of helium generated in these zircon crystals, the amounts of helium left in them should have long since leaked out.  The measured amounts of retained helium in these zircon crystals, combined with the measured diffusion rate of helium from zircon, can be used to calculate their helium diffusion age.  Indeed, there is so much helium still left in these zircons that, based on the measured rate of helium diffusion from zircons, these zircon crystals have an average helium diffusion age of only 6,000 (±2,000) years.  [End of quote]

According to Shermer, “The ages are given in estimates, but the margins of error are in the range of one percent.  It is not as if one scientist finds that a fossil hominin is 1.2 million years old while another finds it is 10,000 years old.”

Is he correct?   Just one example in this feature is Mount St. Helens.  The volcanic catastrophe began in 1980.  Her rock age was measured by the potassium-argon method.  The results?

♦ Lava rock, 350,000 years old.

♦ Constituent minerals, 2.8 million years. 

When measured, the volcanic rock was less than 10 years old. 

One last point concerning various aging methods is addressed by Ann Gibbons:

Ann Gibbons wrote in the January 2, 1998 issue of Science an unsettling article for evolutionists under the heading, “Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock.”

Gibbons reports:

Mitochondrial DNA appears to mutate much faster than expected, prompting new DNA forensics procedures and raising troubling questions about the dating of evolutionary events.  In 1991, Russians exhumed a Siberian grave containing nine skeletons thought to be the remains of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family and retinue, who were shot by firing squad in 1918.  But two bodies were missing, so no one could be absolutely certain of the remains.  And DNA testing done in 1992—expected to settle the issue quickly—instead raised a new mystery.

The mystery concerned the dates relating to the clock rate.  It appears that mutations occur at a much more rapid rate than had been imagined.  Although there seems to be considerable debate about the cause of the faster rate, the faster rate has been verified by independent investigations. 

Again, Gibbons says:

Regardless of the cause, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate.  For example, researchers have calculated that the “mitochondrial Eve”—the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people—lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa.  Using the new clock, she would be a mere 6,000 years old.  [End of quotes]

Since that feature was published 18 years ago, situations have not improved. [End of quotes]

God’s Word is true and righteous altogether—a place to build a life that will last forever.  This is the real truth, and it never changes. 

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

MAN SAID: Anyone with just a smidgen of learning knows the universe and earth are billions of years old!  No educated person would embrace creationists and their young-earth foolishness. 

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

GodSaidManSaid, “Carbon-14 and Genesis 1: In the Beginning”

Jeffrey, G., Creation, Waterbrook Press, 2003

Jeffrey, G., The Signature of God, Waterbrook Press, 2010

Shermer, M., “5 Things We Know to be True,” Scientific American, November 2016

Snelling, A., Earth’s Catastrophic Past, Institute for Creation Research, 2009

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