April 2018 - Page 3 of 3 - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

April 10, 2018September 7, 2018

Life Needs Phosphorus

The element phosphorus is used to make matches. Molecular phosphorus has two common forms. There is white phosphorus which is dangerously combustible and is used to make fireworks and weapons. The more stable red phosphorus is used on the side of any box of safety matches. When you strike the match against the red phosphorus, a small amount of it is changed to white phosphorus to ignite the match. But phosphorus has more important uses than starting fires. Life needs phosphorus. The average human body contains about 26.5 ounces (750 grams) of phosphorus. Most of it is in our bones.

Phosphate is a compound of phosphorus and oxygen. It combines with sugars in living tissue to form the backbone of DNA, which is the blueprint for life found in every living cell. Phosphate is also part of a complex organic chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) found in every living organism. ATP releases energy so that cells can function. Life needs phosphorus and could not exist without it in an abundant supply.

Recent research presented at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science on April 5, 2018, indicates that phosphorus may not be widely available in the Milky Way. The research indicates that it is more random than scientists had previously thought. That means even if one of the recently discovered exoplanets had all of the conditions required to support life, it still might be lifeless without phosphorus.

We have often referred to the many conditions required to make a habitable planet. Here is one more to add to the list. Life needs phosphorus, and apparently phosphorus is less widely distributed than we thought. Phil Cigan, one of the astronomers involved in the study, said, “It’s not a guaranteed thing to have phosphorus abundant everywhere, ripe for the picking. It seems to look like luck plays a bigger role in this.”

Is it just one more chance coincidence that planet Earth has the phosphorus needed for life? We don’t think it is a matter of luck. We think this is another evidence of God’s design for life.
–Roland Earnst © 2018

April 9, 2018September 7, 2018

America’s Founding Fathers and Christianity

America's Founding Fathers
There is a continuing effort by atheists and skeptics to claim that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written by men who were deists, agnostics, and atheists. The fact is that of the 54 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 29 were ordained ministers of established churches and most of the others were deeply religious men involved in the Christian faith. That was the character of America’s founding fathers. Those historical documents came from a Christian heritage based on three fundamental Christian values:

CHRISTIAN VALUE # 1 – The equality of all humanity before God. The Christian notion of equality says that people are equal because (1) God made humanity in His image. (2) He loved us enough to sacrifice His son for each of us. That is the basis of, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

CHRISTIAN VALUE # 2 – Human nature is evil. God holds mankind to a higher standard of goodness based on His law, and because of our fallen nature, we fail to reach this standard. The separation of powers and a system of checks and balances were written into the constitution to limit what the government can do and were written by men who knew the nature of humans.

CHRISTIAN VALUE # 3 – God was willing to sacrifice His Son giving each of us an opportunity for salvation. In America, each individual has the right to participate in electing our representatives. The Bill of Rights seeks to protect the rights of the individual. Only a high valuation of the individual could produce a society that granted all people regardless of race, gender, or social position, inalienable rights that no one, not even a king, could take away.

Today our culture attempts to denigrate Christianity, and society attempts to take away the rights that America’s founding fathers wrote into our historical documents. We must not allow the belief system of the founders of our country to be ignored.
–John N. Clayton © 2018
(This article was based on the writings of Dr. Andrew Stebbins published on Reasons to Believe’s Blog. You can read the article at reasons.org.)

April 8, 2018September 7, 2018

Elder Fraud Schemes and “Psychics”

The United States Department of Justice has filed documents against a group of people who have conducted a scam that has taken $500 million from seniors using what is claimed to be “world-renowned psychics.” The scam involved a promise of the seniors winning money in a lottery and gave them various supernatural objects or personalized astrological services to achieve the predicted wealth. It seems that elder fraud schemes are showing up every day.

U.S Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “We will hold perpetrators of elder fraud schemes accountable wherever they are.” The most common scam is called “the grandparents’ scam.” The elderly person receives a call from someone who claims to be a grandchild. The fake grandchild claims to have been arrested on a traffic charge and needs bail money wired to them. A similar version is a call from a person who claims to be an IRS agent demanding immediate payment of a mythical tax obligation.

Skeptics accuse religion of being the source of the gullibility that seems to exist among seniors. There is literature from atheists claiming that Christianity makes people vulnerable to these scams. The truth is that the Bible has always opposed psychic claims and warned people about the severity of this kind of activity. The old law even prescribed death for those who practiced sorcery or mystic arts. (See Exodus 22:18, Deuteronomy 18:10, and 1 Samuel 15:23.)

In the New Testament, this kind of activity is listed along with murder, adultery, fornication, and drunkenness (Galatians 5:19-21). In Acts 8:9-20 Peter confronted Simon the sorcerer and told him to repent of his wickedness. In Acts 19:13-16 when “vagabond Jews” tried to use Christianity to promote their commercial exorcisms the result was disastrous.

Seniors should rely on Jesus Christ to express their spiritual needs, and on the Church to help them in their spiritual as well as their physical problems. In the Christian system, we help one another. If we are faithful in doing that, the elder fraud schemes will fail.
–John N. Clayton © 2018

April 7, 2018September 7, 2018

We Need Each Other

God has designed humans to have a unique relationship with God and each other. The terms “brother” and “sister” in the New Testament are a reflection of this relationship. We need each other as we face the challenges of life. When God created man, He said: “It is not good that man should be alone, I will make a helper suitable for him” (Genesis 2:18).

Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder conducted a study of 22 heterosexual couples who had been together for at least a year. They wanted to see how the simple act of a human touch affected various scenarios in life. To conduct this test, they divided the couples into different groups at different times. In one grouping they held hands. Another group sat nearby but didn’t touch. In a third group, the people were in different rooms.

The researchers used brain scans to study each of the groups. They conducted scans before applying a mild pain and again after applying the pain. The tests indicated that holding hands reduced the intensity of the pain by 34%. When the couples held hands, their brain waves became synchronized, especially when the women were in pain.

The conclusion of the researchers was: “We have developed a lot of ways to communicate in the modern world, and we have fewer physical interactions. This research illustrates the power and importance of human touch.”

This experiment gives scientific proof of what we probably already knew from experience, that we need each other.
–John N. Clayton © 2018
Sources: ScienceDaily.com and The Week, March 23, 2018, page 19.

April 6, 2018September 7, 2018

Tectonic Plates, Earthquakes, and Volcanos

Yesterday (April 5, 2018) there was a magnitude 5.3 earthquake off the coast of California near Los Angeles. No serious damage resulted, but scientists say there is a one-in-twenty chance that quake could be the foreshock of a larger quake. This brings up the question of why we have earthquakes. Did God do a poor job of designing the Earth?

The answer to that question is, “No.” Earthquakes result from factors that are essential for life on Earth. Earth’s crust consists of tectonic plates floating on the mantle, which is a region of molten rock. Under the continents, the Earth’s crust averages 18 miles (30 km) thick. Under the oceans, the crust is only about 3 miles (5 km) thick. The mass of the crust puts great pressure on the molten rock in the mantle causing it to be very viscous. If a crack opens in the crust, the molten rock will move upward, become more liquid as it is under less pressure. Then it may burst from the surface creating a volcano.

Volcanoes create mountains, and so does the movement of the tectonic plates. The tectonic plates moving against each other also produce earthquakes. Sometimes the plates will move against each other horizontally. We call that a slip-strike earthquake and that is what happens in the San Andreas fault in California. The quake that just occurred was a thrust quake where one side of a fault thrusts over the top of the one next to it. The Rocky Mountains and the Himalayas were pushed up by movement of the tectonic plates.

By the creation of mountains, the Earth has been continuously renewed. On the surface of the continents, erosion, and weathering break up solid rock to produce sand, clay, and ultimately topsoil. Erosion cuts down the mountains and deposits sediment in the lower elevations. Further erosion carries the sediment out into the oceans. In the deepest parts of the ocean, there are trenches. Huge amounts of sediment settle into those trenches, but they never get full. That’s because the sediment sliding into the trenches is finding its way down into the mantle.

The movement of sediment replenishes the mantle with new material which then resupplies the continents with new rock. Volcanoes erupt bringing recycled minerals and nutrients to the surface. Volcanic soils are the richest soils on Earth. This system has also brought the iron and other essential minerals into the Earth’s crust.

This is a greatly oversimplified explanation of the comprehensive recycling system that God designed into the planet on which we live. Earthquakes and volcanoes are destructive when humans build homes and cities close to the fault lines and active volcano sites. But if the Earth’s recycling system didn’t exist, erosion would eventually reduce the land masses to sea level, and Earth would be a water world.
–Roland Earnst © 2018

April 5, 2018September 7, 2018

Prison Suicide Rates Skyrocket

Yesterday we discussed an article by atheist Michael Shermer in which he stated that as atheism replaces belief in God “we should continue working on grounding our morals and values on viable secular sources such as reason and science.” (Scientific American, April 2018, page 77). At the same time Shermer’s article came out, we received a report on prison suicide rates.

NewLife Behavior Ministries issued a report of an increase in suicides in Texas prisons. The data came from the University of Texas Medical Branch saying that attempted suicides in Texas prisons jumped from 65 to 150 in the past four years. Statistics on suicides are very complicated, but every study we have seen has shown a huge increase in attempted suicides. The increase applies to all segments of the population, not just prison suicide rates but the general public as well.

The secular sources for morals and values that Shermer recommends would include people like atheists Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins. They advocate euthanasia for the “unfit” in society including Down Syndrome, mentally ill, and mentally deficient people. Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He advocates for infanticide to eliminate defective children and for animal rights. In his book Practical Ethics, he concedes that the question of why we should act morally “cannot be given an answer that will provide everyone with overwhelming reasons for acting morally.”

The biblical perspective is that all humans have value because they are created in the image of God. That is radically different from the secular view that we are just animals with no more value than any other animal. Suicide is directly connected to what we understand a human to be. The Christian view is that there is no such thing as “worthless human trash” or “unfit people.”
–John N. Clayton © 2018

April 4, 2018June 13, 2019

How Many Atheists?

How Many Atheists?
How many atheists are there in America? This ministry has existed for 50 years, and throughout most of that time, Church members have told us that there is no such thing as an atheist. They have said that we are wasting our time trying to convince people that God does exist.

Atheists claim that as people become better educated they realize that “God” and religion are just products of ignorance. This ministry was begun by a man who came to faith in God through science and did so late in his scientific education. Because of that, our approach has been different from what most Christians can relate to and understand. That difference has its advantages, but it also makes us a lightning rod for some denominational leaders.

In the April 2018 issue of Scientific American (page 77), Michael Shermer devoted his regular column to the subject of how many atheists there are. He concludes that in America alone there are 64 million atheists. Shermer is an atheist himself, even though he graduated from Pepperdine University where he studied religion. We might be suspicious about his claims, but the article quotes a variety of valid data-gathering sources including a Harris Poll, a Pew Research Center poll, the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, and the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Shermer ends his article by saying that the number of atheists in America is:

“…a staggering number that no politician can afford to ignore… we should be thinking about the deeper implications for how people will find meaning as the traditional source of it wanes in influence. And we should continue working on grounding our morals and values on viable secular sources such as reason and science.”

Some of us have already tried reason and science as a source of morals and values. It didn’t work and led us to realize that only Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). I would not wish that rough road of experience for anyone.
–John N. Clayton © 2018

April 3, 2018August 12, 2021

Christianity and Racism

The April 2018 issue of National Geographic is a special issue on race. The history of Christianity and racism has been very bad, and that is unfortunate for many reasons. The most fundamental reason is that it contradicts everything the Bible teaches. The history of science has been just as bad as the Christian denominations in promoting racism and slavery.

Some have called Dr. Samuel George Morton “the father of racism” because he released studies of the skulls of various racial groups and related intelligence to brain size. Morton claimed that there were five races and that they varied in intelligence with Caucasians being the most intelligent, followed by Mongolians, southeast Asians, native Americans, and Ethiopians in that order. When Morton died in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal praised him for “giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Such labeling and poor scientific reasoning contradict all the Bible says about humans. If we all came from Adam and Eve, then obviously we are all created in the image of God and are of equal value. The flood of Noah would have wiped out whatever major variations there might have been in human genes. The reason races exist is because God designed humans to live all over the Earth. Major racial criteria such as skin color, physical structure, and hair are features built into our DNA to allow for adaptation to climatic conditions.

The divisions of humans in the Old Testament were not due to physical differences. Joseph was an Israelite, but became a ruler in Egypt, as did Moses. The things that caused national divisions and conflict were over lifestyles, moral choices, and worship. The separation between the Jews and Samaritans is spelled out in John chapter 4. The Samaritan woman was amazed that Jesus would talk to her (see verse 9) and his disciples also were also amazed (see verse 27). The thing that separated the Jews and the Samaritans were the religious histories of the two cultures.

Christianity and racism should never be connected. The Christian perspective is that all humans are created in the image of God and have equal value. Acts 17:26 tells us that we are all “of one blood for to dwell in the face of the earth.” Galatians 3:28 tells us, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It is sad that people who claimed to be Christians rejected the clear biblical mandate that we are all equal in God’s sight.

Atheists and skeptics will use the National Geographic article to denigrate Christianity, but the fact is that Christianity contradicts racism. A Christian trying to follow God’s word cannot endorse everything that people claiming to be Christians have done in the past. Christ opposed human-created divisions and prayed that His followers would be united (John 17: 20-21). True Christianity and racism are not compatible.
–John N. Clayton © 2018

April 2, 2018September 7, 2018

New Life Behavior Ministries

New Life Behavior Ministries is a project of the Kings Crossing Church of Christ in Corpus Christi, Texas. For years we have worked with Buck Griffith and that ministry.

We refer prisoners completing our courses to them. Their team members visit the prisoners and provide personal needs and baptism if requested. We also refer prisoners with drug problems to their CASA study. CASA is an acronym for Christians Against Substance Abuse. This program has had a hugely beneficial effect on recidivism.

The New Life Behavior Ministries has begun a “Vet Net” program which offers special postage-paid courses (inside the United States) to veterans of all branches of the service and their family members–active or reserve. The top five courses in enrollment numbers are:
Christian Marriage Skills
Attitudes and Behaviors
Christians Against Substance Abuse
Managing My Anger
The “Seeker” Bible Study Series

We would like to make our readers aware of this great program, especially those working with military families. Contact information is:

Prison Ministry
3833 South Staples Suite S-101
Corpus Christi Tx 78411
Phone 361-855-3372 Fax 361-855-7469
email: nlbcasa@yahoo.com
Website: www.kingscrossingprisonministries.org.

The congregation is at:
Kings Crossing Prison Ministries
Kings Crossings Church of Christ
5901 Yorktown Boulevard
Corpus Christi, Texas 78414

April 1, 2018September 7, 2018

Can Death Be Conquered?

Some people say that nothing is certain except death and taxes. The truth is that only one of those things is certain. Not only will every one of us die, but every government that collects taxes will also die. It’s a scientific fact that all things, even the universe itself, will come to an end. Can death be conquered?

There is no escaping physical death for everyone and everything. Since we are limited to the dimension of time, and since there is such a thing as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, disorder will eventually catch up with us and with everything else. Our vehicles wear out. Our clothing wears out. Our bodies wear out. Even the Sun and all of the other stars will wear out.

If you spend your life getting all you can for yourself not caring whom you hurt in the process, you will not take your riches with you. If you devote your life to studying science and adding to the database of human knowledge, that too will go away. If all things in the universe, including humans, are merely accidents of chance, we ultimately have no purpose, no value, and no hope.

If you have read this far, you may be feeling depressed, but I have good news. There is a God who created the universe, and you, for a purpose. Yes, your body will die, and even the universe will die. But by God’s grace, you can choose to live on. God entered the time dimension in human form and conquered death for us. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, yet shall they live.”

How can death be conquered? In the beginning, God created time and space, matter and energy. Since He created those things, God is not limited by them. God had no beginning, and He will have no end. The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus demonstrated God’s love and grace and His power over death. Because of that, you have the choice to believe and accept and live on beyond the universe. “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).
–Roland Earnst © 2018