Tag: John N. Clayton

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Atheism and Translation Issues

Elisha’s Spring Fountain at Jericho
Atheists do their best to make the God of the Bible seem to be a heartless, ruthless, barbaric, evil God. We have reviewed many of their attempts over the years. Recently an example cited in an atheist blog demonstrates the difficulties that occur when an old translation is read carelessly. The story is in 2 Kings 2:23-24. The King James translation tells us that as the prophet Elisha was walking a group of “little children came out of the city” and mocked him ridiculing his bald head. According to verse 24 Elisha “cursed them in the name of the Lord” and two bears came out of the woods and tore up 42 of them. If you stop at this point, you could think that the God who caused this was heartless, ruthless, barbaric, and evil. Why should God be so vindictive when all the children were doing is making fun of an old bald preacher?

The truth is that God is not any of those things. The Hebrew word translated “little children” in the King James Version of the Bible is also used to describe Joseph when he was 17 and Joshua when he served in the tabernacle. It is also used to describe David when he fought Goliath and Solomon in 1 Kings 3:7, even though he was married. We aren’t talking about a bunch of six-year-olds, but rather a large group of young warrior-like juveniles who could have done great harm to Elisha. The city they were coming from was Bethel which was a center of idolatry in Israel. In 2 Kings 10:29 we read that Jeroboam established golden calf worship in Bethel. In this story, 42 young thugs come out to attack a prophet of God. That is a far cry from innocent children making fun of an old man. Another important fact in this story is what the young men are saying, “go up you baldhead,” is not about Elisha’s hair line. In verse 11 Elijah was taken up into heaven, and Elisha was left to carry on. In verse 3 the pagan prophets had jeered Elisha because his mentor was going to leave him. They said, “Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head today?” They were saying he would be powerless because Elijah who gave him his authority would be gone.

The rest of the story is that Elisha showed his authority by using the abilities given him by God including miraculously purifying the water from the spring at Jericho. Whenever there is a biblical event that looks foolish or contradictory, we need to examine it more closely. We need to consider who wrote the account, to whom it was written, why it was written, and how the people of the day would have understood it. If you do that, you will find that the Bible is a true, factual, and logical guide that we can rely on. We also learn that the God of the Bible is patient and shows His wrath only when humans refuse to accept anything else.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

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What Is an Eyewitness Account and What Isn’t?

Kids Riding a Triceratops

The DOES GOD EXIST? ministry tries very hard to focus on evidence, and not scientific or biblical speculation. In 1 Timothy 6:20 Paul tells Christians to “avoid profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called…” The Greek word used here for “falsely” is pseudonumos which has a close connection to the modern phrase “pseudo-science”. So much of what dominates the headlines of the media today is not science at all, but wild speculation much of which is not testable or falsifiable. There is no way to test most of these proposals, and so they fall outside the realm of science. String theory, brane theory, multiverses, parallel universes, and even some versions of quantum mechanics fall into this category. These areas of study rely on equations and interpretations of those equations. In string theory, for example, there are 10 to the 500th power different equations to choose from, and no one can maintain that one equation has been observed to work.

This same problem occurs when one looks at the fossil record and what we can observe from the fossils or from the remains of human drawings and accounts. There is no valid evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, but some apologists continue to crank out claims that eyewitnesses of the dinosaurs exist. Andrew Snelling who works with Ken Ham in his amusement parks in Kentucky claims that Norwegian and Chinese writers provide eye-witnesses of dinosaurs and humans living together. To do that he makes references to Chinese scrolls showing dragons pulling the chariots of emperors, and a Norwegian fictional story called Beowulf in which a king slays a dragon.

The reason that these are not eyewitness accounts is that the scrolls and fictional stories cited also have stories and pictures of centaurs (horse bodies with human torsos), and a variety of spirit creatures. Superheroes are not a modern invention. Characters that would make our video game and movie heroes look pale in comparison dominate all of these ancient cultures. Claiming that these records contain “accurate historical information” as Ham does in his Creation Museum is very misleading and certainly not what should be called “an eyewitness account.” We set up children to have their faith destroyed when we give them bogus information that an informed atheist can quickly refute. We have solid evidence for what the Bible actually says, but not for denominational claims of things the Bible doesn’t say.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

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Welcome to Something New!

Since 1972 the Does God Exist? Ministry has had a journal that contained articles showing the compatibility of science and faith, examples of design, book reviews, and a discussion of current events that affect faith in God and the Bible as God’s Word. The journal started as a ditto mailed to 30 or so interested people and gradually evolved to a 32-page four-color periodical mailed to over 10,000 people in print as well as in an audio format to the visually impaired. By the end of 2016, it was obvious that we had to make a change in the periodical. One problem was that news was coming so rapidly that the time between what happened and when we could discuss it was in months. The second problem involved cost factors in both printing and in mailing the periodical.

Many of our readers do not have access to or do not want to read the material online, so we intend to continue to mail it, but will do so quarterly, not bimonthly. For everyone else, we intend to supplement the quarterly issues with this website we call DOES GOD EXIST? Today. We hope you will find it more useful, more current, and more practical than just getting the quarterly printed copy. There will be some duplication, but there will be much here that will not be in our quarterly mailed version. As has been our policy, there is no charge for either of these, but any donation to this ministry is greatly appreciated.
–John N. Clayton © 2017