Disciples of Jesus Die Differently

Word is spreading in Southeast Asia that people who believe in Isa Al Masih (Jesus, the Messiah) die differently than everyone else. They don't fear death. Often, before dying, they confess, "He is here to pick me up." People are, for the first time in their family history, forsaking the occult when they feel oppressed. Instead they are relying on Isa to answer the prayers that they lift to Him when they are struggling.

"Our people have always gone to witchdoctors whenever they have proglems. Islam forbids it, but we didn't know what to do with our problems, so we continued to go to the witchdoctors. They always gave us a quick 'solution.' But now we are discovering that Isa is much more powerful at taking care of our fears. Sometimes He takes a long time answering our prayer, stretching our faith and patience. But sometimes He answers very fast and really shows us what He can do."

(from CrossWorld Today prayer bulletin, Summer 2010)

Book Review: Redeeming Science, by Vern Poythress

Vern Poythress is one of the most conservative graduate-level seminary professors of Biblical interpretation. However, he calls into doubt such fundamental Biblical doctrines such as death before the fall and the flood being a global event. It is troubling that he does not recognize the excellent work done by young earth creation scientists in these areas.

(Book Review. Redeeming Science, by Vern Poythress, Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL, 2006, 381 pages, $20.00.)

Vern Poythress, professor of New Testament interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania, authored Redeeming Science, A God-Centered Approach, in 2006. Recently, a copy was sent to all the alumni of the seminary, of which I am one.

It is a long book of 381 pages (including appendices, bibliography and index). In it he gives a detailed theological and scientific interpretation of Genesis chapter 1, Creation, Science, and Intelligent Design. His academic background is evident in his handling of the material - besides a Th.D. in New Testament from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa), Dr. Poythress also holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University.

The book is very readable and persuasive. Toward the end it even has a discussion of quantum equations and the wave operator. However, its erudition is marred by some very questionable assumptions of Biblical interpretation which strongly colors the thought of Poythress and many other seminary professsors of our time. For example, on p. 121, Poythress asks,

"What do we say about animal death? The later scriptural statements are talking about human death. God created man to have fellowship with him and to enjoy life in the presence of God forever.... The animals and plants, however, did not enjoy the same exalted status as man. In fact, later on God explicitly gives to man the authority to kill animals for food, but not to kill a fellow human being (Gen. 9:3, 6).... Psalm 104, a psalm that repeatedly alludes to the creation in Genesis 1, includes details that imply animal death: .... 'These all [all sea creatures, and probably all land creatures as well] look to you, to give them their food in due season [Ps. 104:27] ["food" here must include large fish eating small fish; this verse describes God's continuing providential control over the present order, not a vegetarian past]." (brackets are in the original)

"I conclude that we do not have any firm basis for saying that animal death started only after the fall of man." (p. 122)

This is his conclusion, despite the fact that just a couple of pages earlier, Poythress notes that:

"The presence of death seems in disharmony with the pronouncement that the creation was 'very good' (Gen. 1:31), and with the later scriptural statements that death came through one man, Adam (Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:12; Gen. 3:19)."

Poythress goes on to immunize himself from criticism on this topic with this statement on p. 122:

"Again, we must beware of presuming to dictate to God what kind of world he had to create. It had to be 'very good' in his sight; but that is not the same as saying that it must match what some of us may think ideal". (italics in the original)

In his outwardly balanced approach, it is interesting that Poythress notices the clear meaning of these words from the Fourth Commandment "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day" (Ex. 20:11). He uses this verse to strike down the Day-Age Theory for creation (p. 112), and also the Analogical Day Theory (p. 131ff), however, he chooses to overlook the theological implications of this verse in his discussion of animal death above.

Yet again, Poythress is non-commital in his theological discussion of Noah's Flood (p.129):

"I conclude therefore that Genesis 6-9 by itself does not clearly indicate exactly how extensive the flood was. It covered an extensive area - the ordinary 'world' of the ordinary person in the ancient Near East. Possibly it covered the entire globe, but Genesis does not turn this possibility into a certainty. Consequently, we must go out and look at other parts of the world, alert to what further information may appear there."

One would think from this last sentence that Poythress would go on to the scientific work of young earth creationists who indeed are actively "going out and looking at other parts of the world". However, in his bibliography of over 200 sources, Poythress only includes the pioneering book The Genesis Flood (1961) by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, The Young Earth (1994) by John Morris, and Starlight and Time (1994) by Russell Humphreys (which Poythress dismisses as having a flaw in its physical reasoning). Unfortunately, these are the only young-earth creationist works listed. In fairness, there are a dozen or so books listed from the Intelligent Design movement, including those of William Dembski, Phillip Johnson, and Michael Behe.

Relatively speaking, Vern Poythress is one of the most conservative scholars today who are teaching Biblical interpretation at seminaries which offer graduate theological degrees. However, it is troublesome that this brand of "nuanced" interpretation is raising up yet another generation of pastors and teachers, without providing them the solid Biblical foundation with which they could help believers to strengthen their faith in the Creator God, and thus truly "redeem science".

Marko Malyj
M.S. Physics Drexel University
M.Div. Pastoral Ministry Westminster Theological Seminary

Back to the Future: the Fishy Story of Four-Legged Evolution

The latest Evolutionary news: fish went back in time 17 million years to crawl onto land!

According to standard Evolutionary theory, tetrapods, or vertabrate animals having four legs, evolved from fish. This story has evolved over the last 200 years in more and more detail, as you can tell from the Wikipedia article on tetrapods. 

Colin Brown, a creation scientist in the UK, uncovers an inconvenient piece of evidence for this theory in a recent edition of Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal (2010, 46(4):314).

Brown noticed a BBC News article titled Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers', where evolution scientists have found:

"the oldest evidence of four-legged animals walking on land ... discovered in southeast Poland. Rocks from a disused quarry record the 'footprints' of unknown creatures that lived about 397 million years ago. Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the 'toes' on the animals' feet.... The animals were probably crocodile-like in appearance and lived an amphibian-like existence (although those specific animal forms did not appear until many millions of years later). The dimensions of the prints suggest some individuals were more than two metres long."

"How one of the Devonian animals might have made the tracks"

 All most interesting.

"'This place has yielded what I consider to be some of the most exciting fossils I've ever encountered in my career as a palaeontologist,' said team member Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, Sweden. '[They are] fossil of footprints that give us the earliest record of how our very distant ancestors moved out of the water and moved on to the land and took their first steps.'"

"The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed."

But Brown points out a most vital flaw in the story line. These Polish tetrapods lived 397 million years ago (according to the evolutionary way of measuring time). But tetrapods supposedly evolved from tetrapodomorphs, a type of lobe-finned fish. According to Wikipedia's retelling of the evolutionary tale (as of 20-Aug-2010), the earliest tetrapodomorphs date from 380 million years ago:
Brown's argument is that the newly discovered tetrapods would have needed to go Back to the Future (?) 17 million years somehow to evolve. Brown says they are "so old that they came before the main lines of the lobe-finned fish, making it impossible for evolution to have ever occurred!... This renders the theory of evolution stone dead and creation spot on."

"The crossopterygians apparently took two different lines of descent and are accordingly separated into two subclasses, the Rhipidistia (including the Dipnoi or lungfishes, and the Tetrapodomorpha which evolved into the Tetrapoda) and the Actinistia (coelacanths).... Two of the earliest tetrapodomorphs, dating from 380 Ma, were Gogonasus and Panderichthys."

Brown goes on to say that, Yes, four-leggers and fish have common features. But that's because during Creation Week, our Creator God created both to have similarities. All-life forms remain within their respective kinds, and do not evolve into each other. That's the Biblical story of creation, supported by evidence properly interpreted.

Anything else is a fishy story.

... (Oh, and you should expect that evolution scientists will soon "adjust" their dates to counteract this flaw in their story line. Again...)

{Original version of this blog post with all pictures is available at http://umarko.blogspot.com/}.

Creation Ministries International

Check out this fabulous website at http://creation.com/. Hundreds of great posts, like Romance at the heart of the universe.

Biblical Creation Science around the world in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, U.K., and the U.S.

Their U.S. store is at https://store.creation.com/us/. Creation answers topics arranged by subject category. Ministry programs for your church or organization. You can subscribe to Creation Magazine, with cool science papers such as A River Like No Other.

A River Like No Other...

Fantastic!

"Primordial Soup" - Actually a Most Toxic Brew

Evolution's soup was poisonous! Too much tar and hydrogen, an unusuable mix of amino acids, and more. Yuk.

"...without excuse! The Testimony of the Details", by Timothy R. Stout (Abbreviated version)

(This article digest is by Marko Malyj, of the article published in Creation Matters, Volume 15, Number 3, May/June 2010, a publication of the Creation Research Society, to appear early 2011 at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2003%20low%20res.pdf). {Original version of this blog post with all pictures is available at http://umarko.blogspot.com/. My comments that are not in the original published version are offset in curly braces.}

In this article, we will look briefly at ... Miller's "origin of life" experiment. In 1953, Stanley Miller performed an experiment which is still discussed in almost every introductory biology textbook today. He mixed water vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a spark chamber. When a high voltage arc was introduced across the gases in the chamber, he produced a number of complex molecules including several different kinds of amino acids. Evolutionists claim that this experiment demonstrates how natural physical processes could have produced the building-block molecules which in time turned into the first living cells. Therefore, a Creator was no longer needed as the source of life.

Sorry, this is NOT the "Origin of Life"...

At first glance, it can appear that Miller's experiment helps the case for evolution. That is why the textbooks still talk about it. However, the problems are in the details. There are a number of principles from biochemistry that teach against a natural origin of life....

1. Unusable ratio of amino acids. Many kinds of amino acids are possible: living systems primarily use 20. The different kinds have varying chemical properties. The most important is whether a particular kind of amino acid is attracted to water molecule or repelled by them. In life, the ratio between the two needs to be fairly even. The simplest and easiest to make of the amino acids are water repelling.

Miller's experiments gives skewed results: it produces about 100 times as many water-repelling amino acids as water-attracting (Miller, 1959).... Random processes could never do anything useful with such a skewed ratio.

2. Tar. 80% of Miller's product was an inert tar useless for life. Only 2% was amino acids. The amino acids that he did get would have become tar, except he used his skills as a biochemist to design a method to remove them from the spark chamber before they became tar. This is true of all similar experiments. They produce tar or nothing (Shapiro, 1986). The hypothetical "primordial soup" talked about so frequently by evolutionists has never been simulated in a laboratory.

3. Fatal molecules. Many of the compounds produced by the experiment are poisonous to life, including formic acid. They are very aggressive chemically, and readily attach themselves to and would ruin any complex compound molecules that appear. In fact, the experiments produced twice as much formic acid as the combined amount of amino acids (Miller, 1959).

4. Too much hydrogen. No one has been able to get results comparable to Miller's initial experiment. There is a good reason for this. Miller used a high proportion of hydrogen in his mix. Rocks on earth indicate that such high amounts never existed. However, when the amount of hydrogen is reduced to a more realistic value, the results are severely impacted (Anonymous, 2003).....

{5. A 50/50 mix of right- and left-handed amino acids. (Tim Stout did not mention this important issue in his article!) All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA and RNA, and in the metabolic pathways, are ‘right-handed’. But Miller's primordial soup had a 50/50 mix of right and left handed amino acids. A wrong-handed amino acid disrupts the stabilizing α-helix in proteins. DNA could not be stabilised in a helix if even a single wrong-handed monomer were present, so it could not form long chains. This means it could not store much information, so it could not support life. (Sarfati, 1998).}

Wherever you look, you can find similar examples where the details contradict the claims of evolutions. There is a reason for this. God designed the universe to give testimony of Himself as the Creator. The data of science properly interpreted should lead a person to Him.

References (selected)

Anonymous. (2003, May 14). Primordial recipe: Spark and stir, Astrobiology Magazine. Retrieved June 23, 2010, from http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/461/primordial-recipe-spark-and-stir.

Miller, S. and H. Urey. 1959. Organic compound synthesis on the primitive Earth. Science 130:245-251.

Sarfati, Jonathan. 1998. Origin of Life: the chirality problem. Creation ex Nihilo Technical Journal 12(3):263-266.

Shapiro, R. 1986. ORIGINS: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on the Earth, Summit Books, New York, pp. 113, 208, 302.