You're saying this Gospel is for Receiving, but not for Sharing?

In 1999 in Mozambique a group of sixty-five pastors and a handful of missionaries got together for several days to discuss how to overcome unhealthy dependency. During one of the presentations, they began to discuss when the Gospel was first preached in that region of their country. After some discussion the church leaders decided that the Gospel first came there about 1915. The next question was natural: “How many of your own missionaries have you sent out since that time?” The answer was, “None”.

I responded by saying, “So apparently this gospel is for receiving, but not for sharing. Is that right?”

The question I asked startled my translator to such an extent that he asked if he could speak with his fellow pastors. I agreed and stepped aside. The translator then suggested that they all needed to confess the sin of being receivers, rather than givers in relation to the Gospel. Before the conference ended, the sixty-five pastors appointed a committee to send out their first missionaries. They sent several workers to a ripe mission field in Northern Mozambique. Later, they sent one couple to Brazil and another to Portugal where they could use the Portuguese language they already knew.

It was local initiative that took hold because of an idea that was planted in the hearts of the pastors.

(for more, see Glen Schwartz, Ideas Can Be More Powerful Than Money, Mission Frontiers, November-December 2011)

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"Natural Selection" - Idol worship updated for the modern age

Charles Darwin displaced God as a supernatural cause for the origin of species. He replaced God with a mystical agent, "natural selection."

The mystical quality of natural selection is evident when you try to unpack  statements that evolutionary scientists make, such as this one: “The remarkable diversity of life on Earth stands as grand testimony to the creativity of evolution. Over the course of 500 million years, natural selection has fashioned wings for flight, fins for swimming and legs for walking, and that’s just among the vertebrates.”¹ Some Darwinists are somewhat troubled by the awe that they devote to the concept, such as geneticist John Sanford. He admits:

“It is obvious that the omnipotent power of natural selection can do all things, explain all things….” The above statement came from an early Darwinist, but I have lost the source. It could have come from just about any Darwinist. In fact, just a few years ago I might have said it myself.²

When websites show a subterranean water table “selecting” trees with longer roots, intelligence-based power has been ascribed to the inanimate water table—so why not attribute it to some god?

If someone held up a statue and ascribed to it powers to select, naturalists would see this as mysticism and Christians would see this as idolatry. But, in a mental disconnect, in place of a statue they make an identical but more subtle attributions toward an agent like a water table. The trick is to use descriptions such as an “operative force” that can “favor,” “act on,” “pressure,” or “punish” organisms.

Natural selection’s intrinsic spiritual problem was derided by non-theist observers from the outset. In 1861, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences described Darwin’s Origin of Species as “metaphysical jargon thrown amiss in the natural history.”³ “Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly naturalistic—indeed a thoroughly atheistic—theory of phenotype [trait] formation; but he didn’t see how to get the whole way there. He killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudoagents got away scot-free.”⁴

What is really explained scientifically by merely saying that a trait was “selected for” or “selected against”?Those magical phrases cannot truly be expected to reveal why certain traits originate and exist in populations. A mysterious power that “positively selects,” “operates on,” “punishes,” or “favors” ...  try to imagine what evolutionary literature could explain without using them—it would be starved of its mechanism and life. Selection-based accounts end up with mystical forces granting “favor.”

But explanations that honor the Lord will be based on the abilities that he designed into his creatures. So instead of the "god" of the subterranean water table “selecting” trees with longer roots, we recognize that trees have an innate capacity to produce longer roots enabling them to live in areas with deeper water tables.

Selection is idolatrous in the basest of ways. Not only does it ascribe intelligence-like powers to unconscious environmental features, like any other idol, but it induces people not to give the Lord credit for the incredible intelligence and machinery He has built into His creatures that enable them to adapt to environmental features.
 
(extracted from Randy Guliuzza, Darwin's Sacred Imposter: Natural Selection's Idolatrous Trap, Acts & Facts, November 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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References (selected)

1. Jones, D. 2010. Evolvability: How to cash in on the genetic lottery. New Scientist. 2766: 46-49.

2. Sanford, J. 2008. Genetic Entropy. Waterloo, NY: FMS Publications, 161.

3. Huxley, T. H. 1894. Darwiniana. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 65.

4. Fodor, J. and M. Piattelli-Palmarini. 2010. What Darwin Got Wrong. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 162-163.

Jesus speaks to the heart of a Muslim - through Internet Chat

Sinan is a young Muslim lawyer with a passion for truth and justice. When Sinan found the evangelistic Internet chat room, he was quite skeptical. He would get on and make comments defending Islam. He was defensive and argued strongly for his points. But God's Word began to speak to his heart, and last December, Sinan received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

Some time later, Sinan made a trip to see his family. By faith he told them that he had decided to follow the teachings of Jesus. His family's reaction was extreme, but not surprising. His elder brothers pointed guns at him and demanded that he denounce Jesus and become a Muslim again. Sinan refused. They did not kill him, but asked him to leave right away and never come back - unless he became a Muslim again.

There are many others throughout the Middle East and Europe, like Sinan, who are getting answers to their questions about the Bible and Jesus Christ on the Internet. They know that Islam does not offer assurance of salvation, and yet they long to be right with God. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can give them the assurance they desire. And they are willing to face the persecution of family and friends to find it.

(from a Christian prayer letter, November 2011)

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Evolutionary thinking doesn't do much for the Economy

If natural selection were both real and as important as evolutionists claim, then it would be reasonable to predict that there would be numerous studies actually measuring its significant influence. But, this is not the case. Evolutionary thinking hinders research—especially in medicine.¹

One initial challenge is that anything being measured must first be defined. For example, “Fitness” has variably been defined as relating to number of mates, fertility, gross number of offspring, number of offspring living to reproductive age, offspring in specific environments, or any combination of these. The eminent evolutionist Leigh Van Valen sums up the conundrum:

Yes, fitness is the central concept of evolutionary biology, but it is an elusive concept.... There are literally dozens of genuinely different definitions, which I won’t review here.... Is it that we can’t define it because we do not fully understand it.²

The American Naturalist published in 2001 the largest analysis of the degree to which selection of changes of specific physical traits in an animal group affects their fitness—as measured by survival, mating success, and offspring.³ It tabulated 63 prior field studies covering 62 species and over 2,500 estimates of selection. The highest median correlation of trait selection to fitness was a low 16 percent. This means 84 percent of changes were not explained by selection. It found that in studies with species sample sizes greater than 1,000, the correlation of selection to survival was essentially negligible.

Even the University of Chicago’s expert on evolutionary biology, Jerry Coyne, is forced to admit the contrast between natural selection and aritificial selection:

In contrast, artificial selection has been stunningly successful. Virtually everything that we eat, grow or pet has involved transforming a wild species, through selective breeding, into something radically different.⁴

But Coyne then goes on to the illogical conclusion that "Artificial selection constitutes a true experimental—as opposed to observational—test of the hypothesis that selection causes evolutionary change"! If it is not evidently illogical, please also note that artificial selectors have always observed limits to variability (after millennia of breeding for speed, there are no 100-mile-per-hour horses). Second, scientists have never created two fundamentally different kinds of organisms from a common ancestor. If intelligent selectors cannot obtain fundamentally different kinds due to innate limits to change, what evidence exists that environments can?

Supporters of selection should consider that the reason for selection’s irrelevance is not that it is weak beyond belief, but that there is, in fact, nothing tangible to measure.

"Natural Selection" induces people not to give the Lord credit for the incredible intelligence and machinery He has built into His creatures that enable them to adapt to environmental features.

Marko comments: yes, evolutionary thinking doesn't do much for the Economy! Except that it guarantees publically funded jobs for all the evolutionary scientists who are tenured at thousands of universities around the world. If we measured evolutionists by the tangible improvements that they make to peoples' lives, they would be found to be a bankrupting effort....

(extracted from Randy Guliuzza, Darwin's Sacred Imposter: Natural Selection's Idolatrous Trap, Acts & Facts, November 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

References (selected)

1. Guliuzza, R. 2009. Darwinian Medicine: A Prescription for Failure. Acts & Facts. 38 (2): 32.

2. Van Valen, L. 1989. Three Paradigms of Evolution. Evolutionary Theory. 9: 2.

3. Kingsolver, J. et al. 2001. The Strength of Phenotypic Selection in Natural Populations. The American Naturalist. 157 (3): 245-61.

4. Coyne, J. The Improbability Pump: Why has natural selection always been the most contested part of evolutionary theory? The Nation, May 10, 2010

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Could a good God work through evolution?

Most compromise positions attribute the origins of biological life and humanity to evolutionary processes, whether through naturalistic processes alone or as directed by God. But, could God have used the processes of evolution in His creation? Evolutionary development by definition requires billions of years of chance, chaos, confusion, and death. Evolutionary processes are incompatible and inconsistent with the nature of God (holy, perfect, ordered, and good). God could not have used processes contrary to His nature as He is not the author of death.

Even evolutionists will not compromise to say that God created through evolution. A noted evolutionist astutely stated:

The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror….[Theistic evolution’s God] is not a loving God who cares about His productions. [He] is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.¹

The Gospel Message

Evolutionary processes (Big Bang and the origins of biological life and humanity) are all predicated upon long ages of time and death, requiring that death reigned as a creative force for billions of years before the existence of humanity.

Death before the Fall cannot be reconciled with the gospel message. The biblical message is clear. God created a perfect world (Genesis 1–2). Evil and death are a result of Satan and man’s sin, a result of the Curse/Fall (Genesis 3). Death is an intruder into God’s perfect creation and will be conquered by Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:16; Revelation 21:4-5). If death existed before sin, then death is not the judgment for sin.

Reference 

1.Hull, D. L. 1991. The God of the Galápagos. Nature. 352 (6335): 486.

(from Brad Forlow, Genesis Under the Microscope, Acts & Facts, October 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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