(Slide one) Book by Ken Ham, Already Gone, Starts: “Look around you at the youth here – 2/3 will be gone by the time they are adults. Interviewed 1000 in their 20’s

We are not immune.

 

Why? Ham says, basically, Church provided Bible stories – not belief system. Outside world – bombarded by science, kids doubt, disconnect – it happened to me.

 

(Slide 2) Book – starts with Europe – since  1969, 1500 churches have closed down. 2.5% now attend Bible based church. U.S. is next.

 

Problem – why kids leaving – first mentally, then physically. Were told Bible stories not real, no solid belief system. Don’t have answers to tough scientific questions – so they disconnect.

P. 123 – not relevant

p. 109-110 Placebo effect

p. 113 – crux

 

1. Majority – Catholics, mainline Protestants – Genesis 1-11 Allegories, not historical, believe evolution is true, but God-guided—Pope – apes evolved, finally given a soul.

2. Recent creationists – lump all within 7-10,000 yrs. – the 40 tests astronomy, physics – expansion rates, echo, geology, radiometric dating, ice, corals, fossil layers, etc.  Believe trilobites, dinosaurs and Adam all created within a week some 7,000 years. 250,000 fossils – 15 major layers – layer cake – no fossils of dinosaurs and man, or mammals. Plant life as well.

3. Third camp – ancient earth creationists – two groups – day/age, literal day/destruction.

(Slide 3 & 4)

 

When you study both sides evolution – takes more faith than to believe in a Creator.

4 unanswered questions:

1. Where is the evidence from non-life to life? Greatest step of all. (Slide 5)

The Miller-Urey experiment were the equivalent of using chemical reactions to come up with some crude organic building blocks. But how do you get those loose blocks to form an elegant and functional house--with all the blocks in the right places? This comparable house would also include a foundation, walls, doors, windows, roof, electrical power, and a sewer system. Additionally, it needs to create a variety of materials besides the blocks that have to be precisely formed and fitted, and then it must have the ability to reproduce itself. The utter complexity behind this simply defies the imagination.

 

Yet, the most primitive cell is far more complex than even the most sophisticated of houses.

When scientists do the math, Darwinism just doesn’t add up to anything probable or possible.

Sir Fred Hoyle, the late British astronomer, notes about the Miller-Urey experiment: “The...building blocks of proteins can therefore be produced by natural means. But this is far from proving that life could have evolved in this way. No one has shown that the correct arrangements of amino acids, like the orderings in enzymes, can be produced by this method...A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe" (The Intelligent Universe, 1983, pp.18-19, emphasis added throughout).

Features: living things possess DNA; metabolic system, reproduce, growth, stimulus response; goal directed interaction w/environment.

2. Solve chicken or egg dilemma. DNA & Protein –

3. DNA info. in volume of pinhead equivalent pile of books from earth to moon 500 times. Distance is 250,000 miles from earth to moon. Circumference of earth is 25,000 miles so pile of books 10 times around earth.

4. Evolution – two basic mechanisms – mutations & N.S. – so where all species in process mutation?

 

Slide 6 -- Cambrian Explosion

32 of 33 phyla – body types appear. It’s like the early forms appearing of  refrigerators, air conditioner, car, submarine, airplane. Trilobites, etc. Filled oceans – then wiped out white board

Progressively adding more advanced species – eliminating, making space.

 

So I don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution.

 

Biblical account of creation of Universe: Solid basis? Yes it does. Scientists have come to accept the “Big Bang” model of the universe, in which the universe has a starting point, and that nothing existed previous to that moment. The universe is now expanding from that initial moment, and the background radiation emissions from the original “explosion” can still be detected. Perhaps George Sim Johnston sums it up best, “The book of Genesis has held up well under the scrutiny of modern geology and archaeology. Twentieth-century physics, moreover, describes the beginning of the universe in virtually the same cosmological terms as Genesis. Space, time and matter came out of nothing in a single burst of light entirely hospitable to carbon-based life. A growing number of chemists and biologists agree that life had its origin from clay templates…I would say all this is a curious development for Darwinists” (Reader’s Digest, May 1991, p. 31).

 

Arno Penzias, Nobel Prize in Physics 1978– about the Big Bang: “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses (Bible), the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.”

 

·      Do animals really reproduce after their own kind, as Gen. 1:21 says, or do they evolve as the Theory of Evolution teaches?

 

Darwinian evolution, as taught in schools, claims all animals evolved from an originally tiny and primitive ancestor. This theory asks you to believe that microscopic kinds of creatures, such as amebas, eventually evolved into fish, then amphibians, then birds, then mammals and finally--to human beings!

 

Yet the two principal laws in biology about the origins of animals, the laws of biogenesis, which have never been known to have failed, directly contradict evolution! They are: 1) Living matter only comes from living matter; and 2). Living things reproduce according to their own kind. Chickens produce eggs that produce more chickens—not something else.

 

Microevolution, or the changes within a species, does occur. But macroevolution, or the change from one animal kind to another, has never been found in nature.

 

Lions keep making lions, bears keep making bears, and rabbits keep making rabbits.  So science actually backs the Bible and not evolution in this regard!

 

·      A young man recently asked, “The bones or fragments of bones like the skull cap of what is called a caveman have, from what I have found, been discovered a long time ago-- some bones being of 80,000 years ago.  The question is, if men were created 6,000 years ago how could these bones exist?”

 

First, we should point out that theories based upon paleontological findings often include speculation (paleontologists might say "educated guesses") and the common approach of overlaying them with the theory of evolution often corrupts their value. Remember, man’s recorded history only dates to less than 6,000 years ago—so what happened before is not a precise science.

 

The Bible records the history of mankind from the creation of Adam and Eve. It does not deal with what we might call "manlike creatures" that lived on the earth before the creation of mankind as we know it. Without divine revelation, and with so many past geologic upheavals of the earth, there's no way of knowing for sure what these creatures were, what they actually looked like, when they existed or what purpose they served.

·      Did Adam and Eve actually exist?

 

Some think Adam and Eve were fictional characters, yet Jesus Christ certainly believed they were real. He said about Adam and Eve, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4-5, Emphasis added).

 

In fact, Jesus Christ’s own genealogy is recorded all the way back to Adam and Seth (Luke 3:38).

 

Also, written language dates back to around 4,000 B.C., about the time biblical chronology indicates Adam and Eve lived. From 4,000 B.C. to 2,000 B.C., history records an amazing advance of technology, art and culture.

 

For instance, pictographic and then cuneiform writing appears. Elaborate architecture using mathematics arises, metallurgy using copper and then bronze is mastered and music and art reach sophisticated levels. This all is faithfully recorded in the Genesis record, where cities are built (Genesis 4:17), musical skills are noted (Genesis 4:21) and metalwork appears (Genesis 4:22).

 

As Henry Halley explains about the region where Adam and Eve first lived, near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (Genesis 2:14), “Ethnologists quite generally consider this region to have been the original home of all the present races of men. It was the region from whence came the ox, goat, sheep, horse, pig, dog, apple, peach, pear, plum, cherry, quince, mulberry, gooseberry, vine, olive, fig, date, almond, wheat, barley, oats, pea, bean, flax, spinach, radish, onion, and most of our fruits and vegetables. [It is] the cradle of the human race” (Halley’s Bible Handbook, New Revised Edition, 1965, p. 64). 

 

• Garden of Eden: Where is the Garden of Eden today?

No one knows for sure, because it was located in a pre-Flood landscape, but the Bible leaves some geographical clues about where it existed.

 

The Bible states the Garden of Eden was situated where four rivers branched out (Genesis 2:10-14). Two of the rivers mentioned in the Garden of Eden are still known today—the Tigris [Hiddekel] and the Euphrates (Genesis 2:14). The other two rivers, the Pishon and the Gihon, are not readily identified.

 

It is possible, though, that two great dry river beds revealed in that area by satellite imagery could turn out to be these two ancient rivers--the Pishon and the Gihon (see Smithsonian, “Has the Garden of Eden Been Located at Last?” Vol. 18, 1987). It seems that the Garden of Eden was located close to where the Tigris and the Euphrates converge and empty their waters, in the northern tip of the Persian Gulf.

 

It was in this region of the upper Persian Gulf where the Sumerians, probably the first writers of history, mention their origins was the land of Dilmun, a paradise where all the animals were tame and neither sickness nor death existed. They wrote, “It is a pure, clean and bright place…where the lion does not kill, nor does the wolf devour the sheep” (Samuel Kramer, History Begins in Sumer, 1974, p. 228).

 

The Babylonians called this paradise, Eridu, where “Adapa” or the Babylonian Adam, lived. They said he was the seed of mankind, but later offended the gods by obtaining secret knowledge and was made mortal, thus bringing sickness upon the people. They wrote that, “Near Eridu was a garden, in which was a mysterious Sacred Tree, a Tree of Life, planted by the gods…protected by guardian spirits, and no man enters” (Halley, p. 66).

 

Archaeological evidence shows this area to be heavily populated from the beginning of civilization, and it is the region where the most ancient forms of written script--pictographic and cuneiform--have been found. Ur, the home of Abraham, was only 12 miles from Eridu, and Farah, the traditional home of Noah, was 70 miles away.

 

Why is the Garden of Eden not found in that region? Very simple--the garden was part of the pre-Flood world that was completely covered with water and destroyed during the great Flood. No remains of the Garden of Eden would have survived when Noah, his family, and the animals disembarked and began to populate the newly transformed terrain.

 

Isaiah 11:9 -- World tomorrow – God’s kingdom – knowledge of God & from God cover entire earth. Look forward to it – Thy kingdom come!