Darwin admitted that Natural Selection is a false term!

After 150 years, Darwin’s sacred imposter—natural selection—is presented in most schools as absolutely true in spite of its ill-defined basis, its invisible operation, and the fact that there is no real “selector”—because attributes inherent to organisms actually do all the work. These warnings should influence creation scientists to step back and re-evaluate this convoluted evolutionary idea.

In Darwin’s 1872 edition of Origin, he responded to those calls for him to justify use of the word “selection.” Darwin admitted, like all evolutionists will when challenged, that calling the process of how organisms fit environments “selection” was not true. He confided, “In a literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term.”¹

The same disconnect from reality is acknowledged in recent work focused on accurately describing evolution. For example, Harvard’s leading evolutionary authority, Ernst Mayr, in What Evolution Is disclosed the same veiled truth, “The conclusion that these favored individuals had been selected to survive requires an answer to the question, Who does the selecting? In the case of artificial selection, it is indeed the animal or plant breeder….But, strictly speaking, there is no such agent involved in natural selection.”² Then in 2009, Jerry Coyne wrote in Why Evolution Is True, “And while I said that natural selection acts, this is not really accurate. Selection is not a mechanism imposed on a population from outside.”³

Though all of these authorities concede that tying “selection” to some real agent is “false” and “not really accurate,” they still minimize the magnitude of this inaccuracy through persistent use of words describing natural selection as if it really is “a mechanism imposed on a population from outside.”

But the power that selection has to captivate a mind must never be underestimated—as it is only in the mind that this kind of “selection” actually takes place. As a result, they have ascribed intelligence to something inanimate, thereby raising serious scientific and theological implications.

Those who extol the Creator must at some point reject any idea that robs God of His glory.

(excerpted from Randy J. Guliuzza, Darwin's Sacred Imposter: Recognizing Missed Warning Signs, Acts & Facts May 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

References (selected)

1. Darwin, C. 1872. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. London: Senate, 63.

2. Mayr, E. 2001. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 117.

3. Coyne, J. A. 2009. Why Evolution Is True. New York: Viking, 117.

Invited by a dead Muslim saint, or the Son of the Living God?

The music booms over the loudspeakers calling everyone to worship and prayer. The fragrances of jasmine and incense linger in the air as the women make their offerings at the darghas, the shrines of the Muslim saints. In South Asia, women regularly gather together to pray at these sites, which has provided some exciting opportunities for Christar missionaries Jodi* and Louise* to share the gospel. "Women love to chit chat, so given the choice of saying a rote prayer or talking to white ladies, the choice is obvious," said Jodi.

Moira* is just one of the women Jodi and Louise have reached out to at a dargah. She invited them back to her home, where they were able to share with her and where Moira explained that she goes to the tombs when the saints invite her. Jodi then told her about another invitation. She opened a Bible in Moira's language and read John 1:12 to her: "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." Only this time, the invitation was not to worship a dead saint, but to become a child of the living God.

(from Christar "Light to the Least Reached" prayer bulletin, May 2011)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

How did Fish Survive the Tsunamis of Noah's Global Flood?

A question many people have about the Flood is how did both freshwater and saltwater fish survive? The Flood certainly involved tectonically induced tsunamis that traveled at great speeds and pummeled the land with towering walls of water, and fish are very sensitive to shock.



Fish Fossil, left over from the Flood.

 Obviously, fish weren’t taken on board the Ark. So how did they survive? As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t. Over 95 percent of all fossils are marine creatures. They died and are fossilized by the trillions. Many are buried in great fossil graveyards, tightly packed together, choked with sediments, buried before they had time to decay. Obviously, they didn’t live in the environment in which they died. They were transported by rapidly moving water and then buried in sedimentary deposits. But how could any at all have survived?

In the complex of events and conditions that made up the Flood, certainly there were pockets of fresh water at any one time. Remember, it was raining in torrents, and we can expect that the rain water was fairly fresh. Many studies have shown that waters of various temperatures, chemistries, and sediment loads do not tend to mix; they tend to remain segregated in zones. It would be unlikely for any one area to retain such zones for very long during the tumult of the Flood, but on a worldwide scale, some such segregated zones would have existed at any given time.

There is also the possibility that great amounts of vegetation were dislodged from the pre-Flood continents and remained intertwined as floating mats during the Flood. Many creationists feel that the decay and abrasion of these mats are responsible for our major coal seams, but underneath these mats the turbulence of the surface waters would have been lessened. Perhaps many fish found shelter and nutrition under them, as insects may have on the mats themselves.

We can see that there is at least a plausible answer that can be proposed to such questions. There is no reason for Christians to doubt the truth of the great Flood.

(excerpted from John D. Morris, Fish in the Flood, Acts & Facts May 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

Muslims turning to Jesus in the Algerian Sahara

Muslims in Algeria first started turning to Christ 25 years ago in the region of Tizi Ouzou. Today there are more than 100,000 Protestant Christians who live in this area, which is also home to the indigenous ethnic group known as the Kabyle (ka-bee-li). 

More than 900 miles away from Tizi Ouzou, the Sahara Desert looms large in southern Algeria. Yet "Hamid" and his wife "Imane" left the comfort of their Kabylie village to take over an abandoned church in a southern Algerian city in the Sahara.

The couple began to hold prayer meetings. At first it was just the two of them. Then three members of the nearby Catholic church, which is open only to foreigners, began to come. After the new church's third meeting, the police showed up.

"They ordered me to leave the city and said no more meetings should be had." Days later, Hamid and Imane were startled from their sleep by crashing noises. Muslims were throwing coffee cups, glasses and stones at the church door. Later, Imane and another Christian woman were assaulted by a group of teenagers in the city. About 20 teenagers appeared and began shouting at them, calling them "kafir" (unbeliever) and throwing trash at them.

"One of them took an iron rod and began beating the woman who was with me," Imane says. "I tried to defend her and they hit me too. They hit me in my arm, and as I began to run away they began throwing stones at us. I went into a shop, and the owner defended us and got a taxi for us."

Imane arrived home without serious injury, but the incident terrified her. She and her husband were in the lion's den, sharing Christ in the heart of Muslim territory. "I started thinking this was impossible," she says. "Then God told me in Acts 18:9, 'Do not be afraid, keep on speaking, do not be silent.'"

After nearly three years of restoring the church, being harassed by police, fighting off attacks by Muslim mobs and repairing vandalism, Hamid and Image were becoming very discouraged. They asked God to show them the fruit of their labor. The couple climbed up on the church's roof and kneeled to pray. "We said we need five souls for Christ," Hamid says. "We needed five Arab souls by the end of the year, ,and that would let us know that God was with us.

Just months after that prayer, a young Arab walked to the gates of the church. "I'm a Muslim," he said. "I just want to know about Christ." Within three months, five Arabs had come to Christ.

Now Hamid and Imane have a vibrant church congregation of about 40, with Bible studies, baptisms, outreach activities and discipleship training for new believers. The police no longer harass them, and the couple says the persecution they suffered helped them to bear their fruit.

"We are hoping that a strong wave of persecution comes to the Kabylie area so Christians will be pushed out from that area and come after the Arab souls," Hamid says. "We have a big vision about southern Algeria; we pray that God extends our territory more. Please pray for our protection and that the Arab believers who are with us now will be encouraged and share their faith with others."

(from Voice of the Martyrs, May 2011)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

Terrible Violence Towards Tribal Believers In Southern Mexico

Some disturbing events from late 2010, all from Mexico in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca:

* Pastor Armando Lopes is waylaid and killed as he travels back to his village after a doctor’s appointment in Comitan, Chiapas.
* Three pastors are killed in Santa Maria El Tule, Oaxaca.
* Four families of believers are expelled from the village of Chilil, Chiapas.
* The church in Llanos, Chiapas, was destroyed last June, and believers put on notice. This month, six homes are destroyed and the families expelled from the community.
* In Mitziton, Chiapas, the church and many homes are destroyed and fifty families are expelled from the community.
* In Nachug, Chiapas, 86 families are expelled.
* At the end of 2010, 498 Indian believers were living as street people, homeless in the city of San Cristobal, where they had sought protection.

“Almost all of this persecution is the result of the conflict which develops when new believers decide they can no longer go along with the rest of the villagers in their practice of drunken fiestas to saints housed in the untended Catholic church, but which have really come to represent ancient pagan gods,” he said. “The responsibility for funding the fiestas are passed around to families in the community, and the conflict begins when an evangelical family is supposed to buy the liquor but refuses to do so.

“Pray for these ‘suffering saints’, many of them very new believers! Some will eventually establish new villages and gradually build their homes again, usually after first building a new church. But the days ahead will be very hard."

Dr. Dale W. Kietzman, founder of Latin American Indian Ministries (www.laim.org), reported in Terrible Violence Towards Tribal Believers In Southern Mexico, International Press Association


(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)