Tag: God

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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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Time as Creative Agent

Time as Creative Agent - PlatypusOne of the major misunderstandings of many creationists and naturalists alike is the belief that, given enough time, anything can happen. Those who believe in naturalism deny that God had anything to do with creation. They promote the idea that evolution by natural selection can explain everything as long as there is adequate time for it to act. Time as creative agent does not work for many reasons.

We can all agree on what will happen if you have two animals in identical environments and one of them can run very fast and the other one cannot. When a predator comes to eat them, the one who cannot run fast is more likely to get eaten. This process cannot explain how a platypus could be produced from animals that have existed in Australia now or in the past. Atheists would maintain that given enough time such a change would have happened naturally, excluding God’s role in the production of every form of life on the planet. Time as creative agent cannot replace the role of God the creator.

Some creationists seem to agree. They assume that the only rebuttal to the atheist belief is to maintain that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. They argue that such a change couldn’t happen in that short of a time. The reality is that natural selection cannot explain the creation, no matter how much time has been available for life to evolve.

There are a large number of reasons why natural selection and time as creative agent do not explain what we see in the creation. Here are just three simple ones:

1-Natural selection only deals with what has already been created.
Any theoretical explanation of how a living thing has come into existence starts by assuming the existence of an ancestral form of life. Not only is it assumed that the life-form existed, but its properties are also assumed. To explain why the male platypus has a poisonous spur on its back leg, one has to assume that it evolved from an animal that had a spur which served some other purpose. One must also assume that the ancestor used venom in some way. To explain the “radar” unit in the platypus’s nose, one has to assume that there was some kind of appendage that housed the nerve cells. Then one must assume that nerve endings with a frequency equivalent to the electromagnetic signals of the platypus’ prey were present in some primitive form.

Those oversimplified proposals are just the start. The baby platypus has to lick the milk off the mother’s stomach because she has no nipples. One can say that the nipples never evolved from the ancient ancestor, but the skin has to be porous enough for the milk to come through. The mammary glands also have to be in the right place, and the system has to be selective enough that milk can get out, but toxins cannot get in. With a good imagination, you can propose ways each of these things could happen. However, they would all have to happen simultaneously or they would be of no use and could, in fact, be life-threatening for the animal.

2-Natural selection does not propose the formation of organs with unique chemical properties, nor does it explain the chemicals themselves.
We have discussed the bombardier beetle, where a lethal combination of chemicals produces a spray that protects the beetle from predation. This is one of many specialized organs in the natural world that demands an organ that has no other function than the one the beetle uses. For natural selection to work, a previous organism would have to exist with a different a chemical having a different purpose from which this animal could evolve.

3-Natural selection ignores catastrophic extinctions. The more we study the geological record of the Earth, the more we see that massive changes have happened in the past that put an end to biological processes. Asteroid collisions, massive volcanic eruptions, massive flooding, global cooling which resulted in the freezing of all bodies of water, and solar eruptions are all well documented. These changes have been so violent that they terminated most life-forms and their development. Natural selection demands a uniformitarian past for traits to continue unabated and ultimately be incorporated into the genome of a new species.

Those are just three fundamental reasons why time as creative agent would not work. Those are only three hurdles that evolution by natural selection would have to cross to create all of the living things on Earth. Tomorrow we will look at three more.
— 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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Handicaps Do Not Warrant Death

Handicaps Do Not Warrant DeathThere is a growing belief in our world today that there are situations in which euthanasia should be used to eliminate people who have a severe handicap. We are not talking “pull the plug” cases, but handicaps due to injuries or birth defects. As the father of a child who was born blind, mentally challenged, with cerebral palsy, a form of muscular dystrophy and schizophrenia, I have a personal interest in this issue. Handicaps do not warrant death.

This issue was highlighted in the 2019 ESPY Jimmy V Perseverance Award. The winner was coach Rob Mendez. Mr. Mendez was born with no arms or legs because of a rare disease called tetra-amelia syndrome. In spite of his handicap, Mr. Mendez had a great interest in football and a desire to become a football coach. He is 31 years old and for 12 years has been an assistant coach at 12 different high schools in California. He is now the junior varsity football coach at Prospect High School.

Mendez coaches his team from a wheelchair, which he controls with his shoulders. He has learned how to write with his mouth and maps out plays on a smartphone attached to the wheelchair, drawing diagrams with a stylus or using a pen on a whiteboard. He is also a motivational speaker and has as his theme “Who says I can’t?” He is living proof that handicaps do not warrant death.

Our interest in this story is that it shows loud and clear that “survival of the fittest” is a poor choice of how to approach struggles in life for human beings. Those who would kill a person because of perceived physical limitations are using an atheist belief system. They are saying that humans are just animals and that the unfit should be eliminated. We have written previously about Peter Singer and other scholars at major universities who support such atheistic views. The biblical view is that humans are created in the image of God and have special value and purpose no matter what their physical situation. Handicaps do not warrant death. Having a son with multiple handicaps has altered my life in a positive way, so I know that sometimes the collateral benefits go far beyond the individual.

We have two books on this subject available on loan or at cost. One is Timothy, My Son and MyTeacher, which is my personal story. The other book by Chet McDoniel titled All He Needs for Heaven is the story of a young man born with no arms and no thighs. This book is a Christian family’s story of what they have learned and how this issue fits into the concept of a loving God who wants the best for His children. Contact us if you are interested in either or both of these books. The books are also available for purchase HERE and HERE.
— 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.

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Seeds Are Alive

Seeds Are AliveWhen you walk into the forest and look up at the trees, it’s easy to realize that all of those structures towering over your head are alive. What you may not think about is that their seeds under your feet are alive also.

Many trees produce seeds to grow new trees. There are maple seeds with their familiar “helicopter” method of blowing in the wind. There are cottonwood seeds that look like “summer snow.” Those seeds and others are carried far away by the wind.

Oak trees produce seeds we call acorns. They’re too heavy for the wind to scatter them, so that’s the job of squirrels. Squirrels gather acorns and store them to eat later. When later comes, the squirrels have often forgotten where they stored their treasure. Instead of being eaten, the acorns grow into new trees to produce more acorns. Both the trees and the squirrels benefit from that arrangement.

The seed of a coconut tree is the coconut. The wind can’t blow coconuts around, and squirrels can’t carry them. They often grow near water, such as a stream or an ocean. A coconut falling into the sea can float to an island thousands of miles away, where it can take root and grow. Cherry trees produce their fruit with a seed we often call a pit. Birds eat the cherries and drop the seeds over a wide area.

The key to a seed beginning to grow is the breaking of the shell surrounding it. Many things can cause that to happen, such as moisture, temperature, fire, mechanical abrasion, or a combination of methods. Some seeds have to travel through the digestive system of birds or animals for them to begin to grow into a new plant.

Most seeds wait a year before they start to grow. Cherry seeds can wait for hundreds of years. Scientists discovered a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifer) in a bog in China. They cracked the shell and started it growing. When they carbon-dated the shell, they found that the seed had been waiting for 2,000 years to sprout into a lotus plant.

Seeds are alive, waiting in dormancy to grow into what God created them to be. The amazing quality of life shows design by intelligence, not chance.
— Roland Earnst © 2019

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What Is Hell?

What Is Hell?What is hell, and why does God threaten to send us there? For the past two days, we have been looking at the challenges of this email we received:
“How can you expect me to believe in a God who created me against my wishes and without my consent, and then because I don’t do things the way he thinks I should, sends me to eternal suffering in hell? That is a product of a twisted mind and is not something I can believe in or serve. I didn’t ask to be born, and I won’t spend my life worshiping an evil, abusive God who rejoices in bringing pain to everything he touches.”

The emailer’s understanding of hell is traditional, not biblical. No one can answer all the questions about hell with authority, because no one has been there and returned to tell about it. Works like Dante’s Inferno have influenced us. Preachers who have used hell as a scare tactic to control their audiences. Misconceptions abound.

So what is hell? We tend to portray hell as a place of eternal punishing rather than a place of eternal punishment. There is a difference. When Jesus talked about hell, He used clearly symbolic words. He spoke of hell as a place of flames and burning sulfur (brimstone). Another time he called it a place of darkness (see Matthew 8:12; 22:13). Sometimes we hear hell explained by the story Jesus told of the rich man and Lazarus. The description of hell is presumed to be taken as literal. However, no Christian sees it as an instruction to pray to Abraham or that Abraham is the judge. Those things are presented in the story.

What we can say about hell is that it is total separation from God. An atheist who never wanted anything to do with God in life is going to be granted that same wish in hell. God never forces himself on any person. We are always free to reject God if we so choose. The only problem is that we must also suffer the consequences of that rejection of God. God is love, light, good, compassion, justice, etc. All of those things will be a part of heaven. None of those things will exist in hell. Being lost is frequently described in the Bible as “the second death” (see Revelation 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8). Theologians argue endlessly over what this means, and whether the soul can die. I certainly have nothing to add to the discussion, but I know that being separated from God and all the blessings of God is not something I wish even to consider.

The emailer states everything in diametric opposition to the truth. God is good, not evil. God is love, not hate. Hell is simply the separation from God that the emailer claims to desire. God clearly says that He does not want anyone to be lost, but for all to inherit eternal life (2 Peter 3:9). However, God also allows us to reject Him and all He offers. This is like the parent who painfully releases a child to travel a road the parent wishes they would not travel, hoping they will learn from the wrong choices and return to the parent’s loving embrace. The Prodigal Son story in Luke 15 makes this so obvious that no one can miss it.

Our rejection is not what God desires, and He always is there to welcome us back. What is hell? Our wrong choices can bring us death and eternal separation from God. That is hell, and you do not want any part of it. Come to God, obey His love and blessings. Enjoy eternal life with love, peace, joy, compassion, forgiveness, and freedom from pain that we can only dimly imagine.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

-May/June 2006