Tag: Bible

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Theological Objections to God’s Existence

Theological Objections to GodMany times what we present in this daily column is a function of our mail and what we hear from you, our readers. In addition to believers with questions, we also hear from atheists and skeptics who have theological objections to God. They say they simply don’t like the God they read about in the Bible. Here is an example:

“How can I believe in a God who creates people against their will, doesn’t allow them the freedom to live as they wish, and condemns them to eternal hell when they don’t conform to his desires.”

This is a person who is willing to reject all evidence of God and deny any hope of life beyond our physical existence because of his interpretations of the Bible. This person’s theological objections to God amounts to what I call theological atheism. I would suggest that this person has misconceptions and misunderstandings. Let me highlight a few:

#1) This person is assuming that in a previous existence, people could have had a choice as to whether to be created or not. There is no evidence of a prior existence of any kind. Assuming people would prefer non-existence to life is an assumption that is poorly supported.

#2) Bible events that skeptics attribute to God are often actions of humans. The Bible is reporting the events that transpired, not what God desired to happen. God did not tell Joseph’s brothers to throw him into a pit and sell him as a slave. God used an evil action of men to accomplish good. Most of the Old Testament is a record of the events that happened, not what God caused or commanded to happen. Humans consistently do horrible, stupid, violent, abusive, sinful things by choice. The consequences of those bad choices are not the will of God. The Bible honestly reports what happened, and God’s ultimate response to the needs of humanity.

#3) God gives humans complete freedom. You are free to jump off a cliff any time you choose to do so. What God does not do is to step in and remove the consequences of whatever free choice you make. God doesn’t turn off gravity for you no matter who you are. Actions that you choose have consequences.

#4) Hell is not a torture chamber, and physical interpretations miss the mark. The passage that is misused by atheists and some Christians alike to support hell as a torture chamber is Luke 16:19-31. This is a parable in a series of parables with the name “Lazarus” literally meaning” without help.” We have discussed this previously. People who use hell to portray God as an evil demagogue who takes delight in seeing innocent people scream in agony for eternity misunderstand God, human nature, and what is intended by the descriptions of hell. Matthew 10:28 indicates that the soul can die, and that would mean that a person is put back into the non-existence from which they came. That doesn’t deny the judgment and punishment for those who reject God.

Theological objections to God’s existence are poorly thought out, and they are often based on bad theology. We will continue examining theological atheism tomorrow.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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What Day Was Jesus Crucified?

What Day Was Jesus Crucified?We get questions from people challenging the accuracy of the Bible. One of those challenges is whether Jesus really rose from the grave in three days as Matthew 12:40 states. To answer that, we must ask, “What day was Jesus crucified?”

The problem people point to is that if Jesus died on Friday, the numbers don’t add up. We can solve that problem if we don’t assume that Jesus died on Friday. The word “Sabbath” comes from the Hebrew “Shabbat” meaning to rest from labor. In addition to the seventh-day Sabbath, the Jews were commanded to observe a special Sabbath at the Passover. (See Leviticus 23:4-8 and Exodus 12:16.) Most people are familiar only with the seventh-day Sabbath, so people have assumed that this is the Sabbath associated with the death of Jesus. That would mean He was crucified on Friday.

John 19:31 tells us that the day after the crucifixion was a high Sabbath or special Sabbath. That would mean it was the Passover Sabbath. That Sabbath would have been observed on Friday followed by the seventh-day Sabbath on Saturday. That would indicate that Jesus was not crucified on Friday as generally assumed. He would have been crucified on Thursday. John 19:14 also supports the Thursday crucifixion by stating that it was the preparation day for the Passover.

There is a book titled Prelude to Glory written by Wayne D. Leeper which goes into this in much more detail. Not only does it deal with the question of what day was Jesus crucified, but it also explains many other details of the crucifixion and resurrection. You can borrow a copy from this ministry or purchase it HERE.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Sexual Behavior and Civil Rights

Sexual Behavior and Civil RightsThe political arm of the GLBTQ lobby has caused the media and much of the American public to confuse sexual behavior and civil rights. They are telling us that presenting biblical views on moral issues is a violation of someone’s civil rights. But Christians cannot be silent on moral issues since the New Testament says more about moral issues than it says about religious ceremony.

Attacks on the Bible’s position on sexual issues are increasing and becoming more widely accepted by the general public. Sexual behavior and civil rights are not the same. It is totally erroneous to suggest that skin color is the same thing as GLBTQ choices for the following reasons:

1-Skin color is a biological condition that is not under the control of the individual. Whether you are black or white was not a choice you made. Any sexual act is a choice made by the individual. If it was not a choice, then it was rape or a criminal act made by someone else. Sexual behavior and civil rights for people of color cannot be compared.

2-Sexual preferences and sexual acts are two different things. Some men are sexually attracted to men, and some women are attracted to women. Guy Hammond’s book Caring Beyond the Margins (Illumination Press) deals with this problem. Hammond is a man with homosexual tendencies who is not acting on that preference. No matter what the cause of GLBTQ desires, just as any other sexual behavior, the individual chooses to act on those desires.

3-Racial prejudice is wrong and is condemned by the Bible because it is destructive. The fact that a person is black or white does not affect their life expectancy or quality of life unless violence or neglect results from the prejudice. The data is clear that most of the GLBTQ choices are destructive to people’s health and shorten their life expectancy. Transgender surgery, for example, condemns the patient to a life of drugs to sustain the hormonal condition and those drugs shorten life expectancy. Most homosexual acts have a negative effect on life expectancy. The life expectancy of GLBTQ participants is significantly lower than the national average.

God has given us instructions on how to use the gift of sex in the best and most productive way. Condemnation of alternatives to God’s instructions is because those alternatives violate the design God built into our bodies. Instructing someone in the best way to use a gift they have been given is not abusive. The individual still has the right to decide whether they will follow the instructions.

Passages like Genesis 2:24; and 1 Corinthians 7:1-17 make it clear what God had in mind when He gave us the gift of sex. We must lovingly encourage others not to reject God’s instructions. God has called Christians to love even those who reject and abuse us (Matthew 5:38-48). No Christian should ever practice abuse of a GLBTQ person. Our job is to teach in love.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Rapture Theology and Science

Rapture Theology and SciencePeople sometimes attempt to find scientific support for a teaching of their denomination, such as rapture theology. They write us wanting to use black holes or quantum mechanics to support a doctrinal interpretation. We have used scientific evidence to talk about the validity of biblical statements and the wisdom that we see in the Bible. However, is an error to look for scientific support for a denominational belief that is not biblical. God spoke through Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” ( Isaiah 55:8-9).

People look for scientific support for something called “the rapture.” The word “rapture” is not found in any credible, heavily-used translation of the Bible. The word comes from a Greek term “harpazo” meaning “caught up.” First Thessalonians 4:17 shows that it developed from the Latin word “raptus” and was in the Vulgate a fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible. This use eventually evolved to the middle Latin word “raptura” and to the middle French “rapture.” Promoters of rapture theology refer to Acts 1:9-11 where Jesus was “taken up.” They even identify a place in Jerusalem where they claim this happened, but there is no archaeological support for that. The Greek word used in this verse is “epairo” meaning to be “taken up” not “harpazo” to be caught up.

Other passages where “harpazo” is used are Acts 8:39, 2 Corinthians 12:2 and Revelation 12:5. If you read through those verses you will see that what they describe is not a physical act or condition, but a spiritual one. In the 2 Corinthians passage, Paul expresses confusion about what he experienced, but making clear it was not a physical event. Whatever your view of what will happen when Jesus Christ comes again, you should not look for scientific support for it from archaeology, quantum mechanics, relativity, or any physical process. Rapture theology is not scientific.

Owen Olbricht in his book The Kingdom of the Messiah (ISBN 978-0-89916-853-1) says it well: “Our conclusions will determine what we believe concerning Jesus’ return, the end of the world, the judgment, and the nature of Jesus’ kingdom.” (Page 146).

He also comments on why this should not be an issue for us: “Even if we do not agree on teachings about the rapture, differing views should not divide us; for our understanding of the events that will take place when Jesus returns will not determine our eternal destiny. What will happen will happen, regardless of what we think. Understanding what we must do to prepare to face Jesus, when He comes to judge the living and the resurrected dead (2 Timothy 4:1), is what is important. Jesus said, ‘You too, be ready: for the Son of Man is coming at an hour that you do not expect.’ (Luke 12:40).” (Page 145.)

The message of the second coming is a spiritual message, not one to be investigated from any scientific field. The end of time and the dissolving of the physical cosmos may have cosmological implications, but the message is still spiritual.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Natural Selection as Creative Agent

Natural Selection as Creative Agent - Polar BearsYesterday we pointed out that both evolutionary naturalists and many creationists believe that, given enough time, anything can happen. They assume that once the first life-form came into being (which cannot be explained by natural selection) that time and natural selection would create all the vastly different forms of life. There are many reasons why natural selection as creative agent will not work no matter how much time you give it. We presented three reasons yesterday. Here are three more:

1-Natural selection tends to produce over-specialization. One of the fundamental laws of biology and evolution is Dollo’s Law. The French biologist Louis Dollo proposed that law in 1890. It says that once evolutionary characteristics have evolved, they cannot revert to the form from which they came. We now know why that is true by our advances in genetics. What it tells us is that as natural selection lets an animal become more and more specialized, it can not revert back to what it was before. Polar bears that have evolved by natural selection to their present state cannot return back to the black bear genetics of their ancestors. That may mean that they will become extinct if global climate change continues. Natural selection as creative agent won’t work because it is pretty much a one-way process.

2-Natural selection deals only with survival. The development of beauty does not always involve survival. Some coloration in birds, for example, does not aid their survival but results in incredible beauty. Jesus talked about the lilies of the field and birds of the air as blessed with beauty and function. While this has significant meaning for us aesthetically, sometimes the beauty of plants and animals may actually threaten their physical survival. We have discussed this point many times in our “Dandy Designs” column and elsewhere.

3-Natural selection stands at odds with the concept of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that in any closed system, things tend to move from a condition of order to a state of disorder. One can argue that the Earth is not a closed system because the Sun is adding energy. When living things eat, they add energy in the form of the chemicals in the food they consume.

The fact is, however, that in all biological systems, there is a tendency for life to become disordered. We call it aging. My body continues to produce a higher and higher level of entropy (disorder) as the years go by. All biological systems do this. To suggest that biological systems become more and more specialized by natural processes violates the very basic laws of physics and chemistry. The cosmos itself is moving towards disorder. Unless intelligence can add organizing energy and reverse the natural tendency to age, everything is doomed from our bodies to our planet.

God built the cosmos with laws that function to allow life to exist. He created life itself and built into it certain characteristics that caused Paul to write: “We can know there is a God through the things He has made” (Romans 1:20). Natural selection is one of the things God has made, and it allows nature to function. Natural selection as creative agent cannot explain the beautiful, complex world around us. It only applies to those changes which improve the chances for life to survive. Time is not a friend to aging or complexity. The older my car gets, the more likely it is to break down. That is true of my body and the natural world around me as well.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Being Able to Breathe

Being Able to BreatheI have just gone through one of the most unpleasant physical experiences of life – not being able to breathe. Most of us have had the breath knocked out of us when we got hit in the diaphragm and temporarily were left gasping for air. Imagine that feeling going on for hours, or even days. I am writing this while I am battling pneumonia, and fluid in my lungs has left me struggling to maintain my normal activities.

From a scientific perspective, being able to breathe is one of the most complex things we see in the natural world. Our lungs take in air that is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. The oxygen makes its journey into our vascular system and sustains our lives. Fish take the oxygen dissolved in water and bring the oxygen into their vascular system through gills. The complexity of these systems chemically and physically points to the design the Creator has built into His living things.

While the Bible speaks of God creating breath in all living things, the most commonly quoted statements about the breath of life in humans don’t refer to air at all. Genesis 1:26-27 says that God created male and female in His image. Genesis 2:7 tells us that God formed the man and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.

Beginning in verse 16, we see God’s communication to man centering not around his physical well-being, but his spiritual well-being. The forbidden fruit and the relationship of good and evil, man’s dominance over the animal kingdom, and his relationship to woman all indicate a unique spiritual being with the soul breathed into him by God.

I have been in a great deal of physical distress because of pneumonia. Not being able to breathe fully is painful and frustrating. It has given me a whole new sympathy for those I know who are struggling with COPD or other breathing issues. Most people today are not struggling with the physical breath they take for granted, but the spiritual death that comes from rejecting God and His creation. Look at the evidence and build a dynamic living, breathing faith based on the fact that you are uniquely created in the image of God. That is a pain-relieving act we all can do.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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How Much Does Rain Weigh?

How Much Does Rain Weigh?A friend of mine likes to play with numbers. Calculations which speak of the wonder of the creation are of particular interest. My friend pointed out something that I had never really thought about. As I write this, it is raining, and we are supposed to get an inch (2.54 cm) of rain. How much does rain weigh?

For the sake of simplicity, let us assume we want to know the weight of an inch of rain on a square mile (2.58999 square km) of farmland. There are 5280 feet in a mile, so if an inch of rain, which is 1/12th of a foot, fell on a square mile of farmland the volume of water would be 5280 x 5280 divided by 12. That would be 2,323,200 cubic feet (65,785.698 cubic m). The density of water is 62.4 pounds per cubic foot (1000 kg per cubic m). The question is, how much does rain weigh? To calculate the weight of the water, multiply the cubic units by the weight for each cubic unit. That would come out to be 144,967,680 pounds or 72,483.84 tons (or 65,756,233.54 kg). That is for just one inch of rain. A foot of rain would weigh 12 times that much!

Rain is critical for our existence. We tend to take it for granted since we see it regularly in our day-to-day life. Perhaps we should pause and consider the wisdom build into a system that picks up many tons of water, lifts it high into the sky, and then pours it onto the land. Job said about God: “He does great and unsearchable things, wonders without number. He gives rain to the earth and sends water to the fields (Job 5:9-10).

The psalmist seems to have comprehended some of this design of God when he wrote: “Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise unto our God who covered the heaven with clouds, who prepares rain for the earth, who makes grass to grow upon the mountains. He gives to the beast his food …” (Psalms 147:7-9).
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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50th Anniversary of Apollo 11

50th Anniversary of Apollo 11Every once in awhile, I get to sit back and think about what I have witnessed in my life’s journey. A reminder of one of the highlights of that journey is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

My time of being involved in scientific events of significance began when I was fortunate enough to win the Westinghouse National Science Fair competition for Bloomington, Indiana, in 1954. That program allowed me to spend a few days with some of the top scientists in the country. I got to hear about what they were doing and what lay ahead in their particular disciplines. I was a high school junior at the time and totally entrenched in atheism. I believed that I had two choices. I could reject all of science and immerse myself in the senseless traditions (as I saw them) of religion. The choice I preferred was to be an atheist and participate in the wonderful possibilities of the future molded and made possible by science.

The most distressing part of the National Science Fair was that several of the best-known scientists of that day both publicly and privately expressed belief in God. My science teacher named Wayne Gross at University High School in Bloomington was a man of deep conviction that God was the creator of all things. He believed that science was just a way of understanding what God had done and using that knowledge to improve the lot of all humanity. The seeds of doubt in the religion of my parents (atheism) had been sown.

Many years later, as a science teacher at Riley High School in South Bend, Indiana, I sat glued to the television on July 20, 1969. I was watching Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they traveled to the Moon, landed on it, and returned with massive amounts of data and samples. I had left atheism and started my ministry just a year before the Moon landing, and I had been encouraged and tutored by many people in the space program.

As a teacher, I was able to attend numerous meetings with all of the scientists who contributed to that incredible accomplishment. I was even allowed to give a lectureship at the Space Center in Houston, which was attended by a large number of the people involved in the Apollo success. The man who introduced me at that lectureship was the man in charge of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) from the time it left the mother ship until it returned. He began the program by suggesting that there would be those who would think that I would be talking to a group of atheists since nearly everyone there was involved in a scientific way with the Apollo program. He then asked everyone who worked in the program to stand, and virtually everyone in the room stood. He then asked everyone standing who believed in God to sit down, and only four people remained standing. I know there are all kinds of objections to that action, but it underlined the fact that as Dr. Frank Baxter has said: “The more we know of the creation, the closer we get to the creator.” We don’t have to put our brain in park to be a Christian.

July 20, 2019, is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 moon landing, and we are talking about returning to the Moon. Morgan Stanley estimates that the net worth of the United States space economy by 2040 will be 1.1 trillion dollars (Astronomy magazine, July 2019, page 19). There are good reasons, both politically and economically, to go to the Moon and on to outer space. As we do so, one lesson we must in mind is that every discovery we have made in space has supported the biblical record. Science and faith have a symbiotic relationship in space as well as on Earth. All of this goes beyond astronauts reading Genesis 1 as they orbited the Moon.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Black Holes and God

Black Holes and God
We get a significant number of emails and letters from people who have doubts. The doubts are not just about the existence of God and our claim that the Bible is the Word of God. People also have doubts about the scientific material in our presentations and literature. We have often referred to black holes and their implications for creation and the ultimate end of time. Just as some people reject the idea that there is a God, some also don’t believe in black holes. Black holes and God have many things in common.

Both black holes and God are unseen, mysterious, and frighteningly powerful to the degree that makes some people very uncomfortable. The result is that people attempt to deny the reality of black holes just as atheists try to deny the existence of God. We are seeing literature which claims that scientists are faking black holes and they don’t really exist. The “Does God Exist? Program deals with evidence. There are several lines of evidence that God exists. The evidence for God includes:

1) The creation of space/time and matter/energy from non-physical origins.
2) The cosmological fine-tuning that allows stable matter to exist.
3) Design features in life-forms that preclude chance as a causal agent.
4) The existence of human consciousness and spirituality.
5) Human morality
6) The resurrection of Jesus Christ

In the same way, black holes have several lines of evidence to support their existence:

1) Mathematical arguments such as the solutions to Einstein’s general relativity field equations.
2) The observed behavior of stars and gases around invisible points in space.
3) Explosive multi-band emission from quasars.
4) X-ray and radio emission from galaxy centers.
5) X-ray binaries.
6) Gravitational lensing.

In an excellent article on the American Scientific Affiliation website, Sarah Salviander makes this comment concerning the skepticism about black holes and God:

“The forces at work in the rejection of black holes are also at work when people declare themselves to be skeptical of God’s existence…God is even more of a disruption to the materialistic worldview than black holes. A belief in God demands thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that some non-believers find distressing, perhaps because this group tends to be composed of people who seem to want to set themselves up as minor gods of their own universes.”

You can read the entire article HERE.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Bible Age of Earth

Bible Age of Earth - Misleading ClaimsOne of the most destructive teachings of denominational creationists is teaching that the Bible says the Earth is a very young planet. That is a human denominational tradition that has no biblical basis. The Bible gives no age of the Earth.

Let me repeat that nowhere in the Bible is there any statement about the age of the Earth. Those who twist the Bible to force an age on the Earth ignore references that suggest the Earth is old. In James 4:14, for example, we read, “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for an instant and then vanishes away.” If the Earth is 6,000 years old and Methuselah lived 969 years, that is hardly a vapor. The Bible is not a clock, and twisting scripture to support a human belief system always results in misleading teaching.

Young people who are well-educated about the scientific evidence, have a massive problem with “scientific” claims made to support Young Earth denominationalism. Recently a publication carried five “global evidences” that the Earth is very young. All of them have glaring scientific weaknesses. Very briefly, they are:

Continental erosion. It is claimed that the rate of the erosion of the continents is so great that if the Earth were more than 6,000 years old, all of the land would have been eroded away. Dirt erodes quickly, but rock does not, and new land can be formed quickly, as recent volcanic activity in Hawaii demonstrates.

Ocean salinity. Salt is continually added to the oceans, so it is claimed that if the oceans were old, their salt content would be huge. The salinity of the world’s oceans is remarkably constant at 35 parts per thousand. This is accomplished because marine life removes sodium and calcium at a rate that maintains the constant ratio. The fact that the beaches in Florida are all made of seashell material demonstrates how efficient this system is.

Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic field of the Earth is decreasing and would be zero in an old Earth. There is copious evidence that, like that of the Sun, Earth’s magnetic field reverses periodically. There are over 20 magnetic reversals preserved in the rocks of the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Radiocarbon. Carbon 14 exists in fossils, and it has a short half-life. There is no carbon 14 in any of the fossils that I have personally studied. I have read that contamination has been an issue in some fossils. Scientists never use carbon 14 to date ancient specimens, and they never use radiometric dating for mineral specimens.

Helium in zircon crystals. Creationist Russell Humphreys published a study on this topic indicating that the Earth could not be millions of years old, but no peer review has verified the work.

Since the Bible gives no age of the Earth, the issue is not whether the Earth is old or young. God doesn’t need time to do what He has done. The real issue comes when someone makes a human denominational claim about the Bible and tries to support that claim with invalid evidence. That wounds the faith of intelligent, seeking, well-educated young people. Unfortunately, that is what is happening in the world today.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

Reference: Acts and Facts, July 2019, pages 10-13.