Truth trumps theory

Theories are funny things. Whenever we observe something, we might theorize how such a thing can be. That’s all theories are, our attempts to explain things.  That’s all they can ever be.  We can have very elaborate theories and as we discover new things, we can tweak our theories to explain the new information. When we’re done, our theory might seem to explain the observation so well that we become convinced that our theory must be true. But we should always keep in mind that even the most well thought out and seemingly sound theories could be wrong.

We should never fall into the trap of circular reasoning. If I invented a theory to explain some phenomenon, should I then cite the phenomenon as evidence for my theory?  For example, if I find a black rock with purple dots painted on it, I might claim that Martians painted the dots on the rock. If you ask me how I know this, I might reply, “Here’s the rock. See for yourself!” So you see, my theory might explain the rock but the rock doesn’t prove my theory. Likewise, people have invented an elaborate theory, the theory of evolution, to explain changes in animals. Then they point to the changes in the animals as evidence for their theory.  It’s very bizarre.

Let me give you a hypothetical situation that might open some eyes about how theories work.  Imagine a man comes home from work and finds broken glass all over the living room floor.  Of course he would wonder where it came from.  He immediately begins to theorize.

He knows only his wife, his teenage daughter, and his toddler son would have been the only ones home so he immediately concludes one of them broke something.  

What was broken?  He looks around at a vase, the window, and a mirror that are in the room and they are all there so it wasn’t one of them.  He starts to reassemble some of the pieces of glass and sees it was a drinking glass that was broken.  There’s no liquid on the floor so the glass must have been empty when it was dropped.  He also notices a little bit of dust that seems to have already accumulated on the glass.  He looks in the kitchen cabinet and no other glasses have that much dust on them so the glass must have been on the floor for a while.  It wasn’t there when he left for work so it must have happened very soon after he left.  

His wife is a compulsive cleaner who would have never left broken glass on the living room floor all day.  He son is too small to even reach the cabinet so it must have been his teenage daughter who broke the glass. 

Having gathered all these facts, he concluded the following:

Everyone was still in bed when he left for work so his wife must have gotten up soon after he left and took their son out somewhere.  A little later, his daughter gets out of bed and heads toward the kitchen, maybe carrying an empty glass she had in her bedroom from the night before.  She accidentally drops the glass and, being a typical teenager, leaves the broken glass in the floor all day.  

The man stands there for a moment, admiring his own sleuthing skills when his wife walks into the room.  He was a little surprised to see her and asked where she’s been.  She tells him she’d been home all day.  The man was totally puzzled as his wife began to explain what really happened.

She was cleaning the house and noticed some men standing in their driveway.  Not knowing who they were, she watched them for a while and saw one of them drop a glass he’d been drinking from and it broke in the driveway.  Being worried about her own safety, she was afraid to go out and confront the men so she waited until they left.  Then she went out and swept the broken glass up into a dustpan.  It was a hot day and whatever was in the glass must have already evaporated.  As she was bringing the glass inside to throw it away, she dropped the dustpan.  She was getting the vacuum from the basement to clean up the mess, and that’s when her husband arrived home.

We see that the man’s theory was wrong on nearly every point.  The glass wasn’t empty when it was dropped.  It wasn’t dropped in the living room.  It wasn’t dropped by anyone in the family.  It wasn’t even their glass.  It wasn’t dropped in the morning.  The dust on the glass must have come from the driveway or the dustpan.  Finally, the wife had not gone anywhere.

The man’s theory might have explained all the facts but very little about his theory was actually true.  What was true is what was told to him by the eyewitness to the events.

The man had conceived his theory using all the facts that were available to him.  Parts of his theory seemed blatantly obvious - like that someone in his family must have broken the glass with his daughter being the most likely culprit.  If he’d had more details, he might have tweaked the theory here and there to include the new details but he was wrong on even the most fundamental details, namely that it wasn’t someone in his family and it wasn’t even their glass.  No amount of tweaking could have ever led him to the truth because he started from a foundation that wasn’t true!

When theorizing about the origins of life and the universe, some people start with the wrong premise.  They begin looking for a natural explanation when the true cause is supernatural.  Until they realize that, no amount of research or tweaking to their theories of evolution or the Big Bang will ever lead them to the truth.

What was true about the glass is what was told by the eyewitness. When the man was told the truth by the one who was there, he could then understand why things were as they were.  When we look at the creation of the world, we can speculate and make theories about how it happened but our theories are evidence of anything.  The Creator of the world has told us what He did and He was indeed the only eyewitness to the events. The truth of His words trumps our theories.

News or propaganda?

It seems like nearly every day, there’s another sensational headline written about some major discovery that “proves” evolution.  Fans of evolution hoot and holler and thump their chests, doubling down on their complaints that creationists are just science deniers who don’t even understand evolution.  It’s been my experience, though, that most of these headlines age like milk.

I started my first blog on October 19, 2007.  I was very passionate about what I believed but wasn’t necessarily a great blogger.  I feel I got better over time but, after several years, I took a break from blogging.  A couple of years ago, however, I plunged back into blogging because I am just that passionate about my beliefs.  I still don’t know how good of a writer I am but I feel like some of my old posts were more interesting than others.  I decided to take some of my better posts from my old blog, rewrite them to make them a little more precise, and publish them on my new blog.  I did notice something, though - a lot of the old links I had to news stories were broken.  Hmmm.

I try to use links to secular sources whenever I can.  I do this because I’m usually commenting on claims made by evolutionists and I don’t want to just repeat (or, worse yet, plagiarize) things being said by other creationists.  I want to talk about current issues and give original thoughts - my thoughts - about the matter.  Anyway, in a post I had written 3/27/2015, I cited a National Geographic article titled, Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree.  I would link you to the original article but it’s not there anymore.  My first thought was that it’s a little odd that the story wasn’t available any more.  I mean, this was supposedly the oldest human fossil and redrew the family tree of human origins so you’d think that’s kind of a big deal, right?  Why would the article not still be available?

Of course, we’re talking about National Geographic which offers a lot of content online.  I could understand it might not archive every story they’ve ever published online.  After all, the article is over 9 years old as I write this so maybe they have no articles that old available anymore.  But this was a major find, right?  It was claimed to be the oldest human fossil and would “redraw” man’s family tree!  Surely there would be more recent headlines written about it that I could use on my blog.  Alas, there are not.  I did a Google search under the term ‘jaw “Chalachew Seyoum”’ and there’s been remarkably little said about it since 2015.  The find made a splash, only to find itself later piled onto the heap of fake news published by evolutionists.  In my day, we called this “a flash in the pan.”

I did find a paper published in 2023 titled, Ledi-Geraru strikes again: Morphological affinities of the LD 350- 1 mandible with early Homo.  From that paper, we can read the following:

Due to [the fossilized jaw fragment’s] age and location, it has been suggested that the mandible might represent a young specimen of Australopithecus afarensis. However, despite its primitive traits shared with australopithecines, Villmoare et al. (2015a) discarded this interpretation based on the presence of a set of derived features shared with Homo. Furthermore, the LD 350-1 mandible is at least 0.2 Ma younger than the most recent known A. afarensis specimen. Therefore, Villmoare et al. (2015a) assigned the LD 350-1 to the genus Homo…  A subsequent study led by Hawks et al. (2015) contested the Homo assignation and drew attention to the fact that the Ledi-Geraru mandible also presents significant similarities with A. afarensis, A. africanus, and A. sediba. They emphasized that LD 350-1 is an isolated and partial remain, making a genus assignation unwise. This interpretation, however, was rejected by Villmoare et al. (2015b), who maintained their original position. 

So what was found was the jaw fragment of some creature which, even after years of studying it, scientists still can’t even agree if it was an ape (A. afarensis) or a human (Homo).  What was reported is that someone had found the oldest human fossil and that it would redraw the human family tree!  

Now, I get it.  Online sites, magazines, and newspapers are trying to earn clicks.  They use hype to draw views so they can sell ads.  They’re just trying to put a little sizzle on the steak as the saying goes.  But what is happening is they’re reporting fake news.  I’m fairly confident that most of the eager readers of the sensational headlines, never went on to read and “peer-reviewed” scientific papers about what was actually found.  The average person will never read much past the headline because he already believes evolution is true so why bother?  

I’ve written before (here) about a sort of “conspiracy” going on in the scientific community.  Evolutionists are happy for the lay public to believe half-truths and misleading headlines.  Have you ever heard that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar?  Did you know that this amazing similarity only occurs in 82% of the genome?  I’ll bet you didn’t.  I’ll bet you also didn’t know that chimp DNA is about 10% longer than human DNA.  If you have two, written sentences with one being 90 characters long and the other being 99 characters long, how can they ever be 98% similar?  It’s a joke.  

When people hear that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar, they assume it means 98% of the entire genomes.  The evolutionists who should know better, won’t bother explaining exactly what’s being compared because it undermines their theory.  Like I said, evolutionists are happy for the confusion.  Likewise, they’re happy for the sensational headlines even though they know how misleading they are.

Of course, there have been many of these pop-science stories written since 2015 - all of them being  just as sensational but also just as forgettable.  I see them all the time and I have to endure the chest thumping and name calling displayed by militant evolutionists every time.  Deep down, though, I know I will have the last laugh in just a few years when the remarkable find they report today will be all but forgotten.

Why do bad things happen? The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares

If you've read my blog for a while, you will know that I talk a lot about the creation account in Genesis. I do this because I think it's important. It's important in a lot of different ways but perhaps it's most important to understand how Genesis is foundational to the gospel. There are some compromising Christians who “reconcile” their interpretation of Genesis to fit with secular science. This usually takes the form of theistic evolution. That is, they say God created us via evolution. He also created the universe over billions of years via the Big Bang. Now, since these interpretations aren't compatible with a plain reading of Genesis, the genre of Genesis is assigned to the category of metaphor or – even worse – to myth.

One problem that I see with theistic evolution is that it would mean the world is the way that God intended it to be. Death, therefore, is not the judgment for sin; it is the tool by which natural selection drives a species to evolve. Millions of years of struggle and death and struggle and death is how God turned microbes into men. It was His plan all along.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that theistic evolutionists see death as part of God's plan. Here's a quote I've used before made by a self-proclaimed theistic evolutionist who used to frequent my blog. While commenting on John 12:24, The Paleobabbler said:

Jesus describes a process of change, the bringing about of something new. This can be applied to Christ himself, where his death on the cross changed everything and brought about new life - this alone should be ample reading for seeing the death in the John verse as intended. Evolution by natural selection is a process which involves death, but it does not stop there. The death is instrumental in bringing about change, in bringing about new life. It is an act of redemption, which is small in scale compared to Christ on the cross, yet large in scale with regards to cosmic history. Many scientifically minded theologians have noted that evolution is a cruciform process. It redeems death into new life. What better way for Christ to create?

By the way, The Paleobabbler’s post has since been deleted.  It seems all of his posts about Christianity have been deleted.  Instead of a “theistic evolutionist,” perhaps now he’s simply an “evolutionist.”  I might say that’s interesting but not surprising.  Regardless, I don’t intend this post to be about him so back to my point in citing him.

I must say that I rejoice in knowing that Jesus died to give us life. However, when I look around at the world we live in, I see hunger, famine, disease, and misery everywhere. When tragedies like tsunamis or earthquakes kill thousands of people, it's sad. Yet theistic evolutionists would have us believe these things have been happening for millions of years and it's how God intended it! How awful it is that they would malign the character of God this way. Such a view of God seems ineffective in winning people to Christ. It seems to me that a skeptic would rightly ask, “if there is a God, then why are these bad things happening?” As I was doing a Bible study on the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24-30), I saw that Jesus had already brought up that question and answered it.

I strongly encourage you to read the parable for yourself (of course, I strongly encourage everyone to read all of the Bible. Often). Here's the dilemma: a landowner sowed wheat in his field. When his workers were sleeping, an enemy sowed tares (weeds) among the wheat. When the plants began to bear seed, the tares became apparent. Then the workers asked the landowner the million dollar question (v. 27):

“Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?”

Wow! That's the same question everyone asks God now. “God, if you made everything, where do the bad things come from?” It's a legitimate question. I believe it's perhaps among the most important questions Christians must be prepared to answer if they seek to evangelize in this modern world. The “problem” of evil is a major stumbling block preventing people from coming to a saving knowledge of Christ.

How does theistic evolution answer that question? Very poorly, I think. People who subscribe to TE would have to say that bad things happen because God always intended them to happen. Death was the plan all along. But the landowner in the parable correctly pointed out that this wasn't the plan. He didn't want there to be tares in his good field of wheat. He explained to the workers, “An enemy has done this!”

When God created everything, it was all “very good” (Genesis 1:31).  There was no death and God never intended for things to die. It was only through Adam's disobedience that death entered into the world. And now, death has also passed on to all men because all have sinned (Romans 5:12).  Death is the penalty for sin (Romans 6:23). Death is an enemy that God will abolish when He restores His creation (1 Corinthians 15:26).

Our beliefs have consequences. The understanding of our origins directly impacts our understanding of the gospel. The word translated as “gospel” in the Bible literally means, “good news.” What is the good news? When someone dies, do we comfort their loved ones by saying, “Sorry for your loss but that's just the way God made things”? That doesn't sound like good news. This is not how God intended it.

In John 8:44, when Jesus was confronting the Pharisees, He has this harsh condemnation:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

We have brought His judgment through our own disobedience.  We have willingly believed the enemy and have allowed him to draw us away through our own lusts (James 1:14).  Bad things happen because we have chosen to do bad things and we receive the just recompense of our own sins.  God didn’t do this - the enemy has done this.  

God intended there to be no death. But God is not only just but He is also merciful.  When men disobeyed God and earned death, He sent His Son to pay the penalty for our disobedience.  He also has a plan to fix everything that sin has spoiled and in the new creation.  At that time, there will be no more death or curse or tears (Revelation 21:1-4).

Now that sounds like good news! 

What Does Noah Have in Common with Barney?

Do you remember Barney the Purple Dinosaur?  My daughter loved watching Barney while she was growing up.  I mean, she really loved it. She would dance, sing the songs, and be mesmerized the entire ½ hour the show was on. My wife and I didn't mind so much because Barney was a decent show. It taught lessons like sharing, playing nice together, picking up after yourself, and other things kids need to learn. I guess a lot of parents felt the same way because Barney, at least at that time, was enormously popular.

So what does any of this have to do with Noah? I'll tell you. Have you ever been in a kids' Sunday school class where they told Bible stories about Noah, or Daniel, or David? They sometimes color pages with little cartoons of Bible characters. They sing songs and play Bible themed games. They hear life lessons about being nice to other people, obeying your parents, and worshiping God. These are all things that Christians parents should want their kids to learn. It's a lot like watching Barney.

My daughter is 31 now and doesn't watch Barney anymore.

I think Churches sometimes do a disservice to kids by talking about the Bible the same way they talk about a fairy tale. They might not say it's a fairy tale, but they teach it with the same trappings and trimmings as kids see on Barney. It has the music, the games, and it always seems to end with “a moral to the story.” In their little minds, I'm not really sure how kids can be expected to distinguish between Bible stories taught in this manner and other fairy tales like Barney, Mother Goose, or Aesop's Fables.

When these same kids start school, what might happen? Ask yourself this question: If I wanted to learn about science or dinosaurs or the universe, where might I look? Really. Think about it for a second. Name some places where you might learn about science. Next ask, If I wanted to learn about morality or religion where might I look? The answers seem obvious. Like it or not, if people want to learn about science or “facts,” the first places they think to look are schools or text books and if people want to learn about religion, only then would they look to the Bible or the Church. People tend to only think of the Bible as a book about religion. If they want to learn about the “real world,” then you have to go to school or turn to science.

We are telling kids that schools are important and will teach them things they need to know about the world. We believe it ourselves. So when these kids go to school and hear that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, there really was no Flood, and men used to be apes, I think they're apt to believe it. Worse yet, these things directly contradict the “stories” they heard in Sunday school. On Sunday, they sing songs like, “♪Oh God said to Noah, 'There's gonna be a floody floody....'♪” Then they go to school on Monday and hear that there really was no Flood. Which do you think they'll believe? The nursery rhyme or the “facts” they learned in school?

Simply telling children that we don't believe in evolution isn't enough. Imagine a group of kids going to a museum and seeing the fossils of dinosaurs, seeing stone tools used by “ape-men,” and reading that these things lived hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago. To them, these are “facts.” This is “evidence.” When a confused child asks his Sunday school teacher if dinosaurs really lived millions of years ago, the well-meaning teacher might answer, “Oh, we don't believe that.” Then the child might ask, “No? Then what do we believe?” and the teacher answers, “We believe that, '♪God said to Noah there's gonna be a floody floody....'♪” You can see how that's not convincing.

Christ called us first to preach the gospel. He then commanded us to make disciples. Preaching the word is only half the job; we also must be teachers. When we teach the Bible to children, I think we should approach the task in much the same way that kids learn in school. We don't just talk about a man named Noah. Instead, we explain that he was a person who lived in history. When they find a fossil (probably of a shell), it's evidence that this place was once under water – just like the account of Noah tells us. Instead of showing cartoons of Noah's Ark with Noah standing on the deck of the Ark in a raincoat surrounded by a menagerie poking out of every window, we need to show them scale drawings of what the Ark might have looked like. When they ask us about fossils of dinosaurs or Neanderthals, we need to show them how these things are explained by the Bible.

Making lessons interesting and understandable to kids is fine. But above all else, we need to be sure that they understand that the “stories'' from the Bible are real events that happened in history. David, Daniel, and Noah were real people just like their moms and dads are real. We need to explain that Barney is just a character like Sponge Bob.

Kids grow up and they stop believing in Barney.  We don't want them to grow up and stop believing the Bible.  Noah is really nothing like Barney.

Five quick arguments for the existence of God

My blog is mostly apologetics – with a little politics and theology thrown in once in a while. I try to write in such a way that I cover my points pretty well, while still keeping my posts reasonably short. It occurred to me, though, that even two, typewritten pages can contain a lot of material and if people want to use some of my points in discussions with non-believers, they might need some quick bullet-points that are even shorter and easy to remember.  To that end, I thought of what might be the five simplest, yet still effective arguments Christians could use when talking with atheists. If you remember only these five points, you'll find they'll go a long way.

Let’s get started.

1) The existence of matter and space

There is a law in science called the conservation of matter. It basically says that matter can never be created nor destroyed. If you took all the matter and energy in the universe at the moment it was created and assigned it a value of 1, today, the value would still be 1.  There is no matter/energy being created or lost.  This begs the question: if matter is not being created, where did it all come from in the first place? Logically speaking, nothing can create itself so the universe must have been created by something outside of itself - something “super natural.” There has to be a supernatural, eternal, First Cause for the universe. I call Him, God.

2) The origin of life

Once upon a time, people believed maggots sprang out of rotting meat through a process called spontaneous generation. Through experimentation, though, all examples of spontaneous generation were shown to be false. In every case, another living organism was determined to be the origin. In the case of maggots, for example, it was flies laying eggs on the meat. Darwin, however, still believed that spontaneous generation could occur in single-celled animals. That's because he believed uni-celled creatures were “simple” blobs of goo – a fortunate arrangement of amino acids. We now know that even single-celled creatures are incredibly complex. In spite of all of our efforts, we've never been able to create a living thing nor seen one rise spontaneously in nature. The true origin of life is a bona fide miracle.  God created life!

3) Absolute morality

Is it wrong to lie? Is it wrong to steal? Is it wrong to rape? We all know it is but why? Among animals, we can find numerous examples of deception, cunning, or forced mating. Why are these things wrong for humans but not animals? Some people think society decides for itself what is right and wrong. If that is true, then we could hardly condemn Germany for the holocaust since that is what they thought was best for them at the time. It just seems we instinctively know that some things are always wrong but again, why? Obviously the universe doesn't care what happens. Objective right and wrong can only exist if there is a moral code that transcends human opinion. If good and evil exist at all, it is only because God exists.

4) The historical fact of Jesus

Pick any person from the past and try to prove – scientifically – that he ever lived. You will soon find it's an impossible task. When we study historical figures, we look at historical evidence. What was written down about them? In the case of Jesus, we have the gospels and the letters of Paul. We have the extra-biblical writings of historians like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the younger. We have eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus and His promise of eternal life to those who believe in Him. We have eyewitness accounts of people who saw Him die and saw Him alive again. We have accounts of the empty tomb, the martyrdom of the apostles, and the explosion of the first century church. We have more evidence for the historical fact of Jesus than any other person of antiquity. Jesus lived, died, and rose again.

5) The lack of evidence to the contrary

This is where the rubber meets the road. You see, atheists proudly boast that they’ve never seen compelling evidence for God.  If you run down the above four reasons why there must be a God, they will merely shake their heads and say it's not enough evidence for God. Next, they accuse Christians of believing in a god-of-the-gaps and wherever we lack scientific understanding, Christians want to just say, God-did-it. I think they have a weak argument. How can they say God didn't do it unless they can provide strong evidence to the contrary? Let me show you how this applies to the above points:

• Point #1: Suppose I'm walking through the woods with a friend and we come across a crude log cabin. I might wonder who built it but my friend says, “No one built this. Look at all these sticks lying around here. I'm sure they just arranged themselves into the shape of a cabin – we just need to look for some natural mechanism.” Before I abandon the obvious conclusion that the cabin had a builder, my friend has to convince me that no one could build something. Furthermore, he has to convince me that his explanation is more likely than mine. You see? He has to provide evidence to the contrary of the most reasonable conclusion. I'm willing to listen but I don't think any story he could invent would convince me yet atheists believe that nothing created everything!

• Point #2: The origin of life poses a similar problem for atheists as the origin of matter. Atheists still cling to spontaneous generation only now they call it abiogenesis. Regardless, it's still the idea that life can arise from non-living matter. What compelling argument can the atheist make that would have me reject everything we've learned up till now and consider an idea that was discarded not long after blood-letting?

• Point #3: If atheists believe there are such things as good and bad, they need to show how they transcend human opinion. Atheists often ridicule the Bible, for example, saying that it endorses things like slavery. What makes the atheists' view of slavery more “right” than the societies who thought it was OK to own slaves? If they have no alternate, objective standard of morality, they need to stop using their personal opinions of right and wrong to criticize the Bible's standards.

• Point #4: Atheists often attack the Person of Jesus saying He was a myth or an embellishment. They say the Scriptures are of dubious origin and have been corrupted through centuries of translating and editing. So where is their evidence for these claims? Where are the uncorrupt autographs that I can compare with our modern Bibles to see the differences? How do they impeach the testimonies of people who claim to be eyewitnesses to the miracles of Jesus – including His resurrection? What am I to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls or the thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts? It's fine that they choose to ignore the evidence but I would ask them what other historical figures have as much evidence and which of those with less evidence do atheists dismiss as myths?

There are compelling reasons to believe in God. Atheism, on the other hand, suffers from a glaring lack of evidence. I've never heard a sound argument for why atheism is true and correct. I only hear criticisms of Christian arguments.  Atheists can say they reject the evidence for God. They just can't say why.