Creation Ministries International
Do the Maths!
I have always enjoyed playing with figures; in fact Maths was my favourite subject at school. When I was grounded from flying in 1991 I took a Careers Test to help me determine what alternative career I could perhaps pursue. At the completion of the testing process there were no surprises for me when Accountancy came up at the top of the list. But God had other plans for me and now any ambitions of being a “bean counter” are a long distant memory.
I still enjoy a good mathematical challenge though, and when I came across a magazine article recently titled
Where have all the people gone? I was hooked. The article begs the question that if
Homo sapiens walked this earth a million years or so ago (according to the now-prevailing view), then where are all the trillions of people (or their remains) who should have evolved since then?
As Christians we know that God created Adam from the dust of the ground and then created Eve from his rib. There are enough clues in the Bible, based on the genealogies of Adam’s descendants etc, for us to determine with reasonable accuracy that this event occurred around 4,000BC, or around 6,000 year ago.
The Bible also tells us of the Great Flood when all but Noah and his family perished. This occurred around 1,700 years after Creation, or around 2,300BC or 4,300 years ago.
Knowing that Noah’s family consisted of eight people, and our current world population is around 6.7 billion we can determine that the world population has doubled roughly 30 times (this is easy enough to work out on a calculator).
If we know that 4,300 years have passed since the Great Flood then simple Maths will tell us that the average time taken for the population to double is 143 years (4,300 divided by 30). This seems to be a reasonably realistic figure given that according to the
World Book Encyclopaedia the current population is increasing at a rate of approximately 1.8%, or doubling every 39 years.
If
Homo sapiens were walking the earth around a million years ago, as evolutionists would have us believe, then based on the same calculation of time frame divided by 30 (ie.1,000,000 years divided by 30) it took an average time for the population to double of 33,333 years, to reach what it is today.
I hear people saying, “But that’s a ridiculously high figure!” So let’s pick another figure like say 1,000 years as being a more acceptable time frame for the population to double. The Maths tell us that under these circumstances it would have only taken 30,000 years (1,000 years x 30) instead of 1 million years for the population to reach today’s level of 6.7 billion.
We can look at this result in one of two ways. First, is there any way that humans could have been around one million years ago based on today’s population? Second, if the population was 6.7 billion after the first 30,000 years, then whatever happened to the population over the next 970,000 years? Where are all the remains of literally trillions and trillions of people? The question could also be asked as to whether the earth could have actually sustained such a large population?
I accept that these figures don’t take into account many factors of which I am probably totally ignorant, but the conclusions still represent maybe a ball-park outcome which can’t be denied.
Just on the Maths alone, which is the more feasible scenario to arrive at today’s population of 6.7 billion? The choices are a world population based on a 33,333 year doubling rate, or the more realistic doubling rate of 143 years deduced from the Bible?
Isn’t it amazing that simple Maths can point to the inherent accuracy of the Bible? Even if you don’t believe the Bible, you can’t dispute the Maths. And besides, if the Bible is mistaken in its factual accounts of history, how can it be trusted on its claims concerning our salvation and eternal destiny (cf. John 3:12)?
The complete article referred to is written by Silvio Famularo and is published in the March-May 2009 edition of Creation magazine produced by
Creation Ministries International at
www.creation.com . Ray Dousset
Wings as Eagles
01May09
A Vase of Flowers
by special arrangement
Don Batten
Looking at a vase of flowers, no one would suggest that the glass vase just made itself by natural processes. No one would think that a lightning strike on a pile of sand created the vase. No, the vase clearly shows that a skilled glassblower, using his intelligence, designed it. It would be perverse to think otherwise.
However, we are repeatedly informed in school, at university and on nature documentaries, that the flowers in the vase did make themselves – over eons of time, by means of evolution, ie., mutations plus natural selection. Natural processes created the flowers; no creative intelligence was needed to design the flowers, we are told.
Now the plants that grow flowers are incredibly complex – far more complex than any vase. The complexity of a plant cell far exceeds any machine mankind has ever made or is ever likely to make.
The photosynthesis system alone is astoundingly complex and is still being discovered in its detail. Even the most talented chemists have yet to match the ingenious machinery in the humble plant.
So how logical is it to believe that the vase must have been created but not the flowers? Actually, it is not that the flowers don’t reveal design, because if they could be explained like the vase as coming from a human creator, that would be acceptable.
The problem is that they show too much design – design that has to come from a super-intelligent designer, that is, a supernatural Creator. And that is just not allowed.
The vase of flowers illustrates just how blinkered and illogical modern evolutionary thinking is.
The above article comes from the September–November 2009 edition of Creation magazine, a publication of Creation Ministries International.
Wings As Eagles
15Oct09
Any Belief Will Do (Just Not Creation)
Sergei Golovi is a scientist who runs a Russian-language creation ministry in the Ukraine.
He keeps in close touch with
CMI, and has translated a lot of their material into Russian.
In a recent communication, he wrote:
One of the greatest evidences of the wickedness of the world was a testimony of a National University biology department student.
After reading some of our books she went to her biology professor and asked him directly:
"Is it true that natural evolution theory is based on unproved presuppositions and has many problems?"
He answered, "Yes, but various versions of the theory try to handle all the problems in different ways, so she can decide herself which version of Evolution to accept."
The only thing she should not do, he said, is to read Creation Science books because they will lead her to God.
Wings As Eagles
Posted 17Jul11
Bees Outsmart Supercomputers
One of the most fiendishly complex mathematical computations is the so-called ‘Travelling Salesman Problem’.
(From an article by Carl
Wieland in
Creation magazine
Vol.33,
No.3, 2011)
Given a list of locations (e.g. cities) and the distances between them, it involves finding the shortest possible route in which each location is visited only once.
As the number of locations increases past anything more than a handful, the complexity of the problem increases dramatically to staggering proportions.
Such computations “keep supercomputers busy for days”, says Professor Lars Chittka, from the University of London.
Yet scientists from that university, using artificial computer-generated flowers, have found that bees learn to solve such problems, in effect, and extremely quickly.
They are the first animals found capable of this – and they solve it for hundreds of locations.
Chittka says that bees are able “to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home – not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead!”
Using artificial computer-controlled flowers, the researchers found that bees can do this “even if they discover the flowers in a different order”.
Dr Mathieu Lihoreau, the co-author of the study, says this shows that, despite a limited number of nerve cells in their brains, bees obviously have “advanced cognitive capacities”.
The researchers express the hope that one day it might be possible to understand how such amazing processing feats are achieved with such apparently minimal “hardware”.
But if the best computer hardware engineers and software programmers have yet to design a supercomputer that can match a bee’s advanced computative performance, let alone one with the space efficiency of a bee’s brain, what does that say about the bee’s designer?
One doesn’t need to be good at mathematical computations to work that one out:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities
- his eternal power and divine nature-
have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made,
so that men are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
Our Bible notes to this verse say the following:
What kind of God does nature reveal?
Nature shows us a God of might, intelligence, and intricate detail; a God of order and beauty; a God who controls powerful forces.
That is general revelation.
Through special revelation (the Bible and the coming of Jesus), we learn about God’s love and forgiveness, and the promise of eternal life.
God has graciously given us both sources that we might fully believe in him.
Wings As Eagles
Posted 15Jul11.
Dawkins and Design
Creation magazine June-August 2009 edition.
Editorial
by David Catchpoole
Romans 1:20 states that everyone should be able to understand that there is a Creator from what has been made, “so that men are without excuse”. But in this “Year of Darwin”, there’s no shortage of outspoken Darwin adulators who unashamedly proclaim the world was not created.
Surely the best known of these is Richard Dawkins. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins wrote: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”, then proceeds to argue that they were not.
Dawkins has vociferously continued to proclaim the “no design, therefore no designer” line. But when Ben Stein (in the recent documentary Expelled) asked him, “What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics, or evolution?” Dawkins responded:
“It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilisation evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology – and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet...And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.”
For Dawkins that’s quite a concession.
Actually, scientists have looked and are still looking at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology and finding unmistakable evidence of design. Design so good that scientists would love to copy it if only they knew how.
However, if Dawkins were to accept the evidence of “a signature of some sort of designer”, it would not be the God of the Bible. “No,” Dawkins said to Stein firmly, “nothing like that.”
As Stein said later, “So Professor Dawkins was not against intelligent design, just certain types of designer, such as God.”
Design and the Designer
One of the greatest struggles for many Christians, old and new alike, is the Creation vs Evolution debate. That is, did we all really descend from Adam and Eve as the Bible tells us, or did we simply “evolve” over time.
Many Christians want to believe the Bible fully, but have difficulty in making this "leap of faith" in the face of the supposed existence of dinosaurs and other animals tens of millions of years ago, which pre-dates Biblical truth.
Some Christians go so far as to place their own interpretation on God’s Word by saying that the six days of creation was not based on the “24 hour day” as we know it, and that in fact it really could have happened over millions of years. In other words they try to make God’s Word fit into what is only man’s evolutionary "theory" as to how long the earth has been around.
The Biblical timeframe of our existence of around 6,000 years is totally at odds with claims that the earth was created millions of years ago, and that the dinosaur bones and fossils found serve as evidence to support this.
There is no denying the existence of such evidence, the debate simply hinges on the dating of this evidence in the absence of someone being around at the time in order to verify the very existence of these creatures.
We at
Wings As Eagles have been receiving
Creation magazine for many years now. There are many extremely interesting stories contained within, but every now and then one comes along which cries out to be shared, in an effort to try and put some perspective on the whole Creation vs Evolution debate.
The world is full of doubters,
moreso today than in Jesus’ time when Thomas refused to believe that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead unless he could see His wounds for himself. Below is an extract from a story from the September - November 2008 issue of Creation magazine, produced by
Creation Ministries International, which will hopefully change a few peoples’ minds.
Creation Editorial There is a famous analogy that compares God to the wind—we cannot see the wind, but we can feel and see the
effects of the wind (John 3:18). Similarly, since life originated in the past, neither its design nor its alleged evolution can be observed directly by experimental science. But creation could have left some effects that can be observed.
We can see that living organisms were designed because of similarities to man-made objects that we
know were designed. People detect intelligent design all the time. For example, if we find arrowheads, we can assume they were made by someone,
even if we cannot see the designer. We can tell the difference between messages written in sand, and the results of wave and wind action.
The carved heads of the US presidents on Mt Rushmore are clearly different from erosional features. If it’s unreasonable to believe that an encyclopedia could have originated without intelligence, then it’s just as unreasonable to believe that life could have originated without intelligence.
...While we can’t work out the identity of the Designer solely from His handiwork, He has sent His Son, Jesus of Nazareth, to humanity to reveal exactly what He is like (John 1:1–18; Hebrews 1:2–13). And historical evidence shows that Jesus believed that a collection of books we call the Bible was the authoritative revelation of the Designer’s message to His creatures. This includes telling us
that He created,
when He created, and the
sequence of His creative acts.
He has also told us what He expects from those whom He made, and how their rebellion resulted in death and cutting off from Himself. As a result, the Designer pronounced judgment on His creation, which now groans (Romans 8:19–23). This is the only cogent explanation of the world
as we find it, with
both exquisite design
and the present ugliness. That explains why our genes are degenerating over time—so we could not be millions of years old. Indeed, even beneficial changes generally turn out to be downhill.
(Our) disobedience even resulted in a globe-covering Flood. Again, the effects of this are apparent in the rock records, and in jellyfish fossils that Darwin thought were impossible. So scoffers who deny this global watery cataclysm are willingly ignorant (2 Peter 3:3–7).
The Bible also reveals His rescue plan which is
real Good News for mankind.
Creation magazine reaches over 170 countries, and as shown with this issue, provides ample evidence for design, and who the Designer is.
Wings As Eagles
28Oct08
God on Trial
We were in Australia on holidays recently when we heard of the shocking tragedy of a man who threw his four year-old daughter sixty metres to her death from a bridge. If not for the intervention of other road users, the man’s other two young children could easily have met the same tragic fate.
Whilst careful not to draw any comparison with the above particular case, how often in other equally heinous crimes do we hear the cry of the defence, “The devil made me do it”? The reality is that the devil does not make us do bad things. The devil may tempt us to do bad things, but until we give in to these temptations we have not committed a crime (or sin).
Until Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lead an idyllic existence in harmony with God. There was no sin, and no death. But when Eve was tempted to eat of the forbidden fruit, which she then shared with Adam, sin and death entered the world and man’s relationship with God was broken forever.
Now, it is only through the redeeming blood spilt on the cross at Calvary by Jesus Christ that we have a way to renew our relationship with God, and to secure a place in heaven when our earthly days are through.
The secular world, and no doubt even Christians in a time of grief, may rightly question the presence of a god who could allow death and destruction through man-made and natural causes. To address this issue we came across the following in the December 08 / February 09 edition of Creation magazine.
Wings As Eagles
15Feb09
God on Trial?
Filming has begun in Scotland of God on Trial, a 90-minute BBC drama that depicts Jews in Auschwitz concentration camp putting God ‘on trial’ during WWII. Three judges listen to evidence from both believers and atheists as to whether God is to blame for the terrible acts of humanity.
The film asks, ‘how can there be so much suffering in the world, and what kind of god could let such things happen?’ Executive producer Mark Redhead is reported to have said, “To me, it seemed time that he was called into account.’
Given the humanist stance of so many BBC documentaries, we have little doubt as to what the film’s ‘verdict’ will be. However, we have news for the scriptwriter and producer. The Creator God gave our first parents, Adam and Eve, free choice as to whether they would obey Him or not. They chose not to, and ever since then every one of us has chosen not to also. As a result we all live in a cursed world, with death and suffering (<creationontheweb.com/death>), where men willfully commit evil.
However, God has provided the way for us to be reconciled to Him – through the death and resurrection of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Believers are not promised freedom from harm in this life. We are, however, promised the grace to bear and oppose the evil we encounter.
As to a trial and judgment, God has appointed a day in which He will be the one who does the judging (Acts 17:31; Revelation 20:11-15).
Creation magazine is produced by Creation Ministries International.
Good News for the World
Creation Ministries International seeks to give glory and honour to God as Creator, and to affirm the truth of the biblical record of the real origin and history of the world and mankind.
Part of this story is the bad news that the rebellion of the first man, Adam, against God’s command brought death, suffering, and separation from God into this world. We see the results all around us.
All of Adam’s descendants are sinful from conception (Psalm 51:5) and have themselves entered into this rebellion (sin). They therefore cannot live with a holy God, but are condemned to separation from God.
The Bible says that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and that all are therefore subject to “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).
But the good news is that God has done something about it. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
Jesus Christ the Creator, though totally sinless, suffered, on behalf of mankind, the penalty of mankind’s sin, which is death and separation from God. He did this to satisfy the righteous demands of the holiness and justice of God, His Father.
Jesus was the perfect sacrifice; He died on a cross, but on the third day He rose again, conquering death, so that all who truly believe in Him, repent of their sin and trust in Him (rather than their own merit), are able to come back to God and live for eternity with their Creator.
What a wonderful Saviour – and what a wonderful salvation in Christ our Creator.
From Creation magazine Vol 32 No.2 2010
Wings As Eagles
Updated 18Apr11
Is This the Most Asked Question?
Churchgoers often comment that the most-asked question they get from their unbelieving friends goes something like:
“If God is a God of love why does He allow all the bad things to happen in the world?”
Sadly, when the speaker asks the person how they answered, most gave a kind of ‘non-answer’.
The answer is directly related to the area of biblical origins in which CMI specialises.
‘Bad things’ fall into two main areas.
First, ‘natural’ disasters like earthquakes, fire, famines and floods, birth defects etc.
And second, human acts directly upon other people – for example, rapes, murders and terrorist acts.
Of course, there might be instances where the environment has been affected by man’s actions – for example a dam might breach due to poor engineering etc.
However, we have to go back to Genesis to find the ultimate root cause for both occurrences – Sin.
Of course we can understand sinful humans victimizing others, but in Genesis 3 God pronounces that the ground (the earth) will be cursed because of sin.
In Romans 8 the whole creation is described as groaning under the weight of this Curse. This means the universe and everything in it.
This is why there will be a restoration – a new Heavens and Earth created.
When tragedies occur in the world and make media headlines, the question of God seems to always appear.
It demonstrates that a hurting world is asking, “Why?”
At a time when people are actually asking “Where’s God in all of this?” it is an opportune time to provide answers, and it can be as easy as printing out free articles from creation.com, such as those about:
The terrible earthquake in Haiti
Australia’s recent floods and cyclones
The massive Indonesian tsunami of 2004
The death of the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, by a stingray.
Wings As Eagles
Posted 26May11
Loggerheads are no Landlubbers
“…loggerheads are best viewed as sea creatures, created on Day 5 of Creation Week.”
From
Creation magazine
Vol.33 No.3 2011.
Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) live in oceans all over the world, except in the most frigid waters.
Having paddle-like flippers for swimming, and streamlined carapaces, loggerheads are renowned for their long-distance oceanic migrations (up to 4,800 km), and pin-point accurate navigation.
Adult females often exhibit natal beach nesting, ie, laying their eggs on the very same beach where they themselves were hatched.
Despite their evident aquatic prowess, evolutionists say these sea turtles are “limited by their land-dwelling ancestry”, as they must breathe air and nest on dry land.
But a creationist perspective makes more sense.
Their need to breathe air is no impediment to them at all, being able to dive for up to 20 minutes, and even rest for hours without breathing.
Their ‘attachment’ to land during their lifetime is minimal; no more than two months as eggs buried in sand, a few hours at most as hatchlings journeying from nest to sea, and a few hours again for adult females when making landfall to lay eggs.
So loggerheads are best viewed as sea creatures, created on Day 5 of Creation Week.
Wings As Eagles
Posted 26Jul11
What's It to Me?
Scripture shows that there is a God who created us and therefore owns us. He has set a perfect moral standard of which we fall short (Romans 3:23).
He is perfectly just, so must punish transgressions. Since our transgressions offend His infinite holiness, the punishment must also be infinite.
Either we must suffer such punishment, or else a Substitute must endure it in our place (Isaiah 53).
The Substitute must be fully human to substitute for humanity (Hebrews 2:14), and must be fully Divine to endure God’s infinite wrath (Isaiah 53:10).
To be the mediator between God and Man, Jesus must be both. 1 Timothy states:
“For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”.
We cannot earn salvation by any deeds we do ((Romans 3:24, 4:2, Ephesians 2:8-9).
These verses teach that justification, the declaration of legal innocence before God, is a gift.
It takes place the moment one has faith in Christ (Romans 5:1).
From an article
Should We Trust The Bible by Jonathan Sarfati,
Creation magazine Vol.33 No.1 2011.
Wings As Eagles
Posted 27Apr11