God Archives

August 21, 2019August 20, 2019

Inconsistency of Abortion Issues

There are so many problems with the inconsistency of abortion issues in America that it’s hard to know where to start. Where does a woman’s right concerning her body stop and where do the baby’s rights begin? When is abortion infanticide? When is it murder to kill a baby?

On August 2, 2019, a 29-year-old woman in Anderson, Indiana, was shot in the head by her boyfriend. She was 21 weeks pregnant, and her twins died before she did. The boyfriend has been charged with the murder of his girlfriend, and two counts of murder and feticide for killing the twins. The dictionary defines feticide as the destroying of a fetus or the causing of an abortion. In Indiana knowingly or intentionally killing a fetus in any developmental stage is murder. As we pointed out in our earlier post, in some states, a baby can be put to death at the time of birth.

The inconsistency of abortion issues is very obvious. It is compounded by the refusal to deal with the evidence and the facts of conception and birth. You cannot defend the position that the fetus is an extension of the mother’s body. Morning sickness is because the woman’s body knows that the baby is a foreign entity.

When the sperm meets the egg, an individual is formed with a unique genome. Before birth, the unborn child is aware of much of what is going on in the world outside the mother’s body. There are other options available to a woman who has a baby inside her that she doesn’t want to raise. As the father of three adopted children, I know the joy that any child can bring to those couples who want to be parents but are unable to do so for medical reasons.

The emotional, mental, and physical cost of infanticide and abortion is enormous at the time of pregnancy and in the future for all individuals involved. Following God’s Word in marriage, sex, and family would solve the inconsistency of abortion issues. When we fail to follow God’s instructions, compounding the damage by a violent, destructive solution is not wise.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

August 16, 2019August 15, 2019

Keeping Balance in Nature

Keeping Balance in Nature with Bears Among the design features built into the creation is that of avoiding over-eating of plants by herbivores or over predation of herbivores by carnivores. Sometimes there are surprising ways of keeping balance in nature.

Did you know, for example, that bears help control the production of caterpillars? A January 29, 2019, posting by Yellowstone National Park staff reports that Yellowstone bears in August eat an astonishing 40,000 moths a day. The moths are migrating from grasslands over the mountains in Yellowstone, and they are actually above timberline. This allows the bears to climb up and get easy nutrition as they prepare for hibernation in the coming winter. From an ecological standpoint, it limits how many caterpillars are produced, preserving plants for many animals in nearby grasslands.

One of the things science continues to learn about is how many factors are involved in keeping the balance of any ecosystem. The design of all ecosystems is so complex that knowing how many checks and balances are required is almost impossible.

Frequently humans have upset the balance God built into the creation with catastrophic results. The problem of controlling insect swarms is as old as recorded human history. Who would have thought that bears above the timberline in Yellowstone National Park would make a massive contribution to the ecology of nearby grasslands? Keeping balance in Nature requires intelligent planning and design.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

August 14, 2019August 12, 2019

Gallup Poll on Evolution 2019

Gallup Poll on Evolution 2019 The latest Gallup poll on evolution was conducted June 13-16, 2019, with 1015 adults 18 and above in all 50 states. Gallup used the same questions they used in a similar poll in 1952, and others since then. Here is a summary of what they found this time:

40% of those in the survey said they believed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

33% said they believed that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.”

22% said they believed that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Atheists have made a point of the fact that the report of the Gallup poll on evolution stated that the 40% group were “associated with lower educational levels, Protestantism and weekly church attendance.” The message that atheists are putting out from this Gallup poll is that those who believe in God are poorly educated recluses who hide in their church buildings and refuse to look at the evidence.

There are so many mistakes in what is being popularized that it is hard to know where to start. The poll was conducted by “telephone interviews.” The sampling of what kinds of telephones the pollsters used radically alters the numbers. The results for landlines will be different from that for cell phones. “Protestantism” is a very poorly defined term. The Young Earth view that humans have been unchanged in the physical history on this planet is not held by most of the major Protestant denominations. Assuming that the 40% represented all those who attend church weekly is a very bad assumption.

The most critical problem with the report of the Gallup poll on evolution is that it only focuses on the development of the physical characteristics of humans without defining what those characteristics are. The phrase “less advanced forms of life” is so ambiguous that we don’t know whether they are talking about an amoeba or Homo erectus. The report includes a graph of the changes to the way these questions have been answered since 1952. Whether the changes are because people have more facts or because the media have indoctrinated them is open to debate.

The Does God Exist? Ministry is an effort to show that science and faith are friends and not enemies. We do not represent any denomination and try to be open to all kinds of evidence – scientific and biblical. We have materials at all educational levels, and our college-level correspondence course is available on our doesgodexist.org website. You can watch our video series covering questions of creation and God on our doesgodexist.tv website. All of these materials are free.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

You can see the report on the Gallup website.

August 13, 2019August 12, 2019

Abortion and Infanticide in Virginia

There seems to be confusion between abortion and infanticide in Virginia today. State Delegate Kathy Tran introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature that would permit abortion through the moment of birth, even when the mother shows signs of being in labor. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said this about a baby born with significant physical problems: “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Webster’s Dictionary defines abortion as “the expulsion of a fetus before it is viable.” It is obvious that in Virginia – and also New York – at least, it is now legal to kill a viable fetus. That is not abortion – it is infanticide. Matthew 2:16-18 tells of Herod practicing infanticide to try to avoid the political consequences of the King of the Jews surviving. In ancient Rome, unwanted babies were simply thrown into the street to die. In some nations today, male babies are preferred, and the females are eliminated.

In America, babies are now viewed by many as commodities, and only the best are fit to survive. The unfit – those with physical problems or perhaps the wrong physical features – can be destroyed. Abortion and infanticide are the tools to accomplish that. Science has sequenced and analyzed the human genome and developed techniques to modify the genome. That means we are close to being able to design a child with the features we want. Then we can discard any child that has the “wrong” features.

Christians believe that what defines a human is not their appearance or a set of physical characteristics. The Bible defines humans as beings created in the image of God. No, we don’t look like God physically because God is not a physical being. If God had a physical body, and we were all in created in God’s physical image, we would be identical. God is a spirit, and we are in God’s spiritual image. That means all humans have value, no matter what our physical body is like.

Some of the world’s greatest thinkers, artists, musicians, and political leaders were people who had physical problems. Before America today is the question, “What do we believe about the worth of a human being?” Do we want to create the super race of physical beings manufactured by human intelligence and designed to be the most fit of all life on Earth? Or do we believe that every human has value and worth? If we want the super race, then abortion and infanticide are the methods by which we can achieve that goal.

Let’s understand it is not only abortion that we are endorsing, it is the killing of infants. If every human has value, then let us work to eliminate the causes of physical problems. Let us focus on life in all of its variety and value, realizing that every human being bears the image of God. That image allows all of us to express beauty in an amazing variety of ways.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

Reference: Susan B. Anthony List

August 11, 2019August 10, 2019

Who Created God?

We have often heard the question, “Who created God?” One of the main arguments we make for the existence of God on our websites and in our courses and books is a logical sequence of choices. Each of those choices has scientific data to support the argument we make. It is very simple.

All evidence indicates that there was a beginning to time, space, and matter/energy. Atheists have tried for a very long time to avoid that conclusion, but all of the new data supports it. From quantum mechanics to astronomy, science shows there was a beginning. You can read this discussion on our websites, in our books, or in our video series on doesgodexist.tv.

If there was a beginning, one has to decide whether it was caused or not caused. To maintain that the beginning was not caused throws the discussion into areas outside of science such as virtual reality. It also violates all conservation laws of science. Discussions about why there is something instead of nothing have not resolved this issue for most of us.

If there was a cause, then remaining discussions are about the nature of the cause. The evidence for design in the creation and the statistical improbability of chance as a causal agent strongly suggest that intelligence was the causal agent.

If you say that the cause was God, then the logical come-back is to ask, “Who created God?” The problem here is a failure to understand what the nature of the causer has to be. If there was a beginning, then everything associated with the beginning had to be created as well. That would include time, space, and matter/energy in some form. We have a hard time wrapping our minds around how there can be any kind of existence in which there is no space and no time. That is because we live in a three-dimensional world.

In our math classes, we learn about x, y, and z axes. In basic physics, we learn that we can plot time against each one of those. Time is referred to as the fourth dimension. Modern scientific discoveries are telling us that apparently there are dimensions beyond the four we can comprehend. String theory, for example, shows us mathematically that there could be eleven spacial dimensions. However, there are some 500 different possible solutions to the equations presented by that theory, and they seem to be un-testable.

For those of us who have some science background and believe in God, the notion of a God outside of space/time is easy to comprehend. We can also document it biblically. Old Testament passages like Jeremiah 23:23-24 describe God as filling heaven and earth. Second Chronicles 2:6 tells us that the highest heavens cannot contain God. In the New Testament Acts 17:28 tells us that “..in Him we live and move and have our being.” Passages like 2 Peter 3:8, Psalms 90:4, and Psalms 102:27 tell us that God exists outside of time.

So the bottom line is that God was not created. God is a being who exists in dimensions far outside our own. He created space, time, and matter/energy and did much of this before time began. (See Proverbs 8:22–36.) He will ultimately stop time and dissolve the cosmos. (See 2 Peter 3:10-11.) Those of us who have become obedient followers of Jesus Christ accept the statement of Revelation 21:4: ”He will wipe away every tear from their (our) eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has (will have) passed away.” The limitations of time and the physical dimensions we experience now will be gone.

We have two booklets on the doesgodexist.org website that go into this in more detail. One is “A Help in Understanding What God Is” and the other is “Who Created God?”
— John N. Clayton © 2019

August 10, 2019August 8, 2019

Another Gun Issue to Consider

There is another gun issue which we rarely talk about. It relates in some ways to meteorites.

Many years ago, a lady in Alabama was sitting on her couch with her leg up on the coffee table. Suddenly a large chunk of rock came crashing through the ceiling striking her on the leg and continuing through the floor. It turned out to be a meteorite, a piece of rock from outer space. The rock survived its journey through Earth’s atmosphere and reached the surface to land in the woman’s home. We have had sporadic meteors striking our atmosphere at 79,000 to 130,000 miles-per-hour. Atmospheric drag slows these hunks of rock to 200 to 400 miles-per-hour. Our atmosphere is designed so that larger meteoroids break up about 10 miles above the surface, and the fragments produced rarely get to the ground.

So there is another gun issue in which humans in celebration fire a gun straight up into the atmosphere. That action poses great danger. In Puerto Rico alone, two people were killed and 25 injured on New Year’s Eve because of celebratory bullets that come down on their heads. A bullet has to achieve a velocity of 157 miles-per-hour to penetrate human skin and damage organs. Bullets fired into the air can reach a speed of 400 miles per hour upon their return to the ground.

In Los Angeles between 1985 and 1992 doctors at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center treated 118 people for random falling bullet injuries, and 38 of them died. A 1994 study published in the Journal of Trauma showed that of those 118 people, 77% were hit in the head and had a mortality rate of 32%. Rifle bullets of .30-caliber fired straight-up reach altitudes of 10,000 feet and descend at 300-600 feet-per-second. Even bullets from handguns fired straight-up return to the ground at speeds between 150 and 250 feet-per-second.

So we have another gun issue. Almost always, your safety is more endangered by what humans do than the dangers of the planet God created for our home. I am reminded of the very old line from the Pogo comic strip: “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
— John N. Clayton © 2019

Data from an article in Astronomy magazine, September 2019, page 14

August 8, 2019August 6, 2019

If God Should Go On Strike

If God Should Go On Strike Today we want to share a little poem we found. It was originally published in “This England” by an anonymous author.

IF GOD SHOULD GO ON STRIKE

How good it is that God above has never gone on strike.
Because He was not treated fair in things He didn’t like.
If only once He’s given up and said, “That’s it, I’m through
I’ve had enough of those on earth, so this is what I’ll do.
I’ll give my orders to the sun ‘Cut off the heat supply!’
And to the moon – ‘Give no more light, and run the ocean dry.
Then just to make things really tough and put the pressure on,
Turn off the vital oxygen til every breath is gone.
You know He would be justified if fairness was the game,
For no one has been more abused or met with more disdain
Than God, and yet He carries on supplying you and me
With all the favors of His grace and everything for free.
Men say they want a better deal and so on strike they go.
But what a deal we’ve given God to whom all things we owe.
We don’t care whom we hurt to gain the things we like;
But what a mess we’d all be in if God should go on strike.

We think the message is worth considering.

August 6, 2019August 5, 2019

Your God Is Too Small

Many years ago J. B. Phillips wrote an excellent book titled Your God Is Too Small. The thesis of the book was that there are things we consider impossible because we think we are too small, or too weak, or too poor. The problem with that line of thinking is that we are not figuring God into the equation. That thinking is still alive. Because of our own limitations, we believe that God is incapable of doing great things in America today. Sometimes we have more confidence in Satan as the destroyer than we do in God as the creator.

Judges chapters 6-8 tell the story of Gideon. He was a man who had huge doubts about God. He wanted to believe, and he stepped out on faith a time or two. When Satan opposed him, he backed away, and his father had to save him. Then Gideon tested God. When one test that he devised worked, he refused to accept it, and he gave God a bigger challenge. Don’t you know that the people around Gideon thought the whole thing was nuts? “You’re looking at 135,000 soldiers, and you’re going after them with an army of 300? That’s insane!!” Read the story. Gideon didn’t win; God did.

So here we are surrounded by a sea of hate, violence, war, abuse, and poverty. At the same time in America, God has blessed us with enough to eat, comfortable places to live, and enough money to make a difference in the world. Do you say that you aren’t rich? Americans are rich by the standards of most countries in the world. Instead of pouring money into selfish toys and paying for expensive entertainment to support the lavish lifestyles of Hollywood icons and athletic heroes, we need to use what we have to solve the world’s problems. Those who believe in the “survival of the fittest” mentality will oppose this, but following the teachings of Jesus Christ can make it happen. We can, with God’s help, change the world.

You say, “That’s crazy.” My response is, “Your God Is Too Small.” We need more Gideons, fewer Nebuchadnezzars, and a greater faith that God can do anything.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

August 3, 2019August 3, 2019

Richard Dawkins Description of God

Yesterday we quoted the Richard Dawkins description of God from his book The God Delusion.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – Richard Dawkins

For the past two days, we have looked at the misunderstandings involved in the statements like the one above that are made by atheists to justify denying God’s existence. We want to make it clear that an argument based on not liking something the Bible says about God ignores the positive evidence that God does exist. In spite of that fact, the Dawkins description of God reflects a level of theological ignorance that is quite astounding. We examined some of the points yesterday, but here are some more examples:

RACIST– It is essential to distinguish between the Old Testament and the New Testament in terms of the system that they teach. The Old Testament was a political system as well as a religious one. Israel came out of Egypt as a new nation with a leader and a code of conduct that was political as well as religious. When Jesus came, He brought a new system. It was not a political system, and Christ made that clear many times. When Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” people had a hard time comprehending what He was saying. The Crusades were a product of not understanding that Jesus taught a non-physical kingdom. What is more significant is that Jesus lived what he taught. The classic example is the incident with the Samaritan woman in John 4. The writer even points out that fact (John 4:9), and we see Jesus staying in that Samaritan city for two days.

SADOMASOCHISTIC – The notion of getting sexual pleasure by hurting someone else is the exact opposite of the biblical teaching. Genesis 2:24 introduces the concept of “one flesh” and 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 refers to women’s sexual needs being met on the same level as the man’s needs. The Bible does report the history of horrible human violence against women. For example, Judges 19:25-20:7 reports a gang rape that ends in the death of a woman. We have pointed out previously that reporting on a historical event doesn’t mean endorsing it.

Throughout the ages, God has given humans a guide for how to live. To get the best of life, sex, food, friendship, family, and peace, we must all make the right choices. In the Old Testament, those choices were couched in the teachings of Moses and were designed for a primitive people in a wild and difficult environment. The Dawkins description of God misses the point.

With the coming of Christ, the situation in the world changed. It was time to break down political fences and build a system that would include all humans, all cultures, and all physical circumstances. The concept of love that was not self-serving and not sexual in its expression became a part of the message of Christ. The human tendency to act selfishly and violently means that the teachings of Christ are always up against a world of sin and rebellion. Rational human beings, however, will see the wisdom in what Christ taught. They will understand that this wisdom is a product of the Creator, not an accidental experiment in human behavior.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

August 2, 2019August 3, 2019

Theological Atheism

Biologist Richard Dawkins expressed his theological atheism in his book The God Delusion.

Yesterday we discussed atheists’ use of the Bible to defend their denial of the existence of God. We pointed out that they are ignoring all of the scientific evidence of a Creator. Bad theology dominates the other biblical arguments to reject God’s existence. Not separating the history of human actions from the commands of God is bad theology. Sloppy reading of what God tells us about hell and the human soul is another cause of theological atheism. The above statement by Dawkins highlights some other errors of those who reject the existence of God because they don’t like biblical statements about God’s actions and attitudes. Some examples are these:

JEALOUS – God is a jealous God. Passages like Exodus 20:5, 34:14; Deuteronomy 32:16 and 21; and 1 Kings 14:22 state that fact. All of those statements are in the context of infidelity and are statements of a broken heart. None of them show a childlike “you have something I want” context.

UNJUST ETHNIC CLEANSER- The usual reference to this claim is 1 Samuel 15 n reference to the destruction of the Amalekites. The question, in this case, is what was the cause and why was such drastic action needed? The Amalekites were a bloodthirsty pagan tribe that attacked Israel as they came out of Egypt (Exodus 17:8). It is a historical fact that these people participated in everything that violated God told His people not to do. They participated in cannibalism, bestiality, pedophilia, all kinds of immorality. The result of this hygienic catastrophe was clear. We have seen HIV decimate human populations in places today where similar actions have taken place. In a primitive society, there was no remedy available outside of complete sterilization. This was not a political situation, but a hygienic one. Even the livestock were burned to stop the spread of disease.

MISOGYNISTIC- To suggest that God is a woman-hater is to ignore not only human history but also the changes brought by the teachings of Christ. In the Old Testament, many women were honored for their heroic roles – Sarah, Deborah, Ruth, and Esther are just a few examples. In the life and teachings of Jesus, women were elevated beyond any other religious or political system on Earth. Christ stated in Matthew 19:4-8 that it was the hardness of men’s hearts, not God’s will, that caused the demeaning of women. Galatians 3:28 clearly states what Jesus practiced, that there is: “no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Dawkins is a brilliant biologist, but he is not a theologian. His theological atheism shows his lack of understanding of the Bible and God as revealed in the Bible. A better-informed atheist like Michael Ruse has said that Dawkins makes him “embarrassed to be an atheist.”