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A
Brief introduction to by
Dennis Petersen, President of the Creation Resource Foundation "Always
be ready to give an answer (Defense) The
Apostle Peter (quoted above from 1 Peter 3:15) must have had to address
untold thousands of questions in his time, raised by honest skeptics as
well as cunning adversaries. Today,
the subject matter may be more diverse, but the need to provide salty,
thought-provoking answers is just as needed as ever.
Our children and grandchildren are flooded with secular teaching,
designed to intimidate even the most faithful Christians.
More than ever we need to be equipped with answers that urge
people to think critically about the issues. God
is the one who endorsed the sacred invitation to "let us reason
together" (Isaiah 1:18). The
irony today is that many Christians feel so unsettled when confronted by
seemingly educated people who have been trained to rationalize against
the authority of the Bible. So,
our goal is to provide answers. Answers
from simple observations... answers from profound questions... answers
that reach deep into the motives of the human heart and open the channel
to God. Consider the
challenge of the Hebrew Psalmist: "We
will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to
come the praises of the Lord, and His strength and His wonderful works
that He has done. For He
established a testimony... that the generation to come might know
them... that they may arise and declare them to their children, that
they may set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but
keep His commandments..."
Psalm
78:4-7 God
Formed The Earth... To Be Inhabited The
more we learn about our earth and the harsh realities of other planets,
gives us cause to thank our Creator for His special care in making our
planetary home such a wonderful world. Even
secular (non God-fearing) scientists have often recognized and pondered
the many unique features of our planet that seem to have been
coincidentally designed to facilitate human life so providently.
How many can you think of? Earth
has just the right atmosphere to allow easy breathing.
No other planet comes even close. Earth
has ideal gravity, ideal air pressure, ideal temperature, and ideal
global size. As no place in
the universe, earth alone has life sustaining liquid water in abundance.
Earth has a day and night cycle perfect for adequate human work
and rest. The delicate
balance of nature provides astounding reliability for human life. This
marvelous display of design has been called the "Anthropic"
principle in science; things just seem to be built to satisfy the needs
of man. Can you imagine if
horses got no larger than sheep? What
if dogs were as big as cows? Wagging
tails and slobbering tongues could do us in.
And what would life be like for cat lovers without our
affectionate feline friends? And
look at the food we have. Imagine
if grain had husks as hard as walnut shells.
If watermelons had thin skins.
If bananas were as big as banana squash!!
Yes, it's easy to see the marks of an ingenious Designer.
Indeed, He
has created the earth TO BE INHABITED! What
Was The Very Good Earth Really Like? When
God completed the creation and declared it was all "very
good," we may be prone to look around us and wonder if He could
really mean what He says. What
we may be forgetting is that we live in the remnants of a devastated
paradise. Since the
creation of a perfect earth, man's willful disobedience to his Creator
has brought not only a curse that has plagued the world ever since, but
ultimately the world shattering flood and other devastating catastrophes
that left few survivors. To
adequately make sense of the observable world around us we must
understand two absolute truths that God invites us to investigate: #1.
The world was created perfectly by God, and
#2. The world has suffered terrible upheavals of judgment because
of mankind's gross wickedness. No
doubt this is why Peter warns us that in the last days, men will have a
wholesale disregard for the truth of creation and the reality of the
global flood, as well as the inevitability of coming judgment by fire
(see 2 Peter 3:3-7). "Speak
to the earth and it shall teach thee," said Job 4,000 years ago,
encouraging a scientific investigation of our environment.
And what shall we learn? Job
answered, implying it would be patently obvious, that "the hand of
the Lord has made this" (Job 12:8-9). It's
impossible for us to imagine a perfect world with no death, but just try
to imagine the world before the flood with people living for hundreds of
years! For that kind of
longevity many conditions must have been much more ideal than today.
Could there have been a healthier level of oxygen in the
atmosphere? We know oxygen
is a natural enemy to harmful disease germs as well as the restorer of
overall health. But too
much oxygen would be dangerous, so what's the ideal?
Curiously, a few years ago the content of some bubbles trapped in
ancient tree sap were analyzed. These
chunks of AMBER contained fossilized insects and were buried beneath
layers of flood deposited sedimentary rock strata.
They certainly lived in a very different world than ours.
Could the great deluge have been the agent of their entombment?
Amazingly, the analysis of the gas in the bubbles had oxygen
content of almost 30%! If
that means the atmosphere on earth once had half again as much oxygen as
we now depend on, what would that contribute to reducing disease and
increasing overall vitality? The
giant sizes of animals, insects and sea creatures that are commonly
found in the fossil bearing sedimentary strata certainly cause us to
wonder what other conditions were different in the "very good"
earth of long ago. In other
articles we will examine a variety of curious evidences that provide
clues to "the world that perished." Come
See The Awesome Works of God Providence
is simply an acknowledgment of God's care and orchestration in His
creation. There must be
untold myriad examples of God's providential care.
Consider the wonder of water.
How many benefits can you list to be grateful for water?
Not only is it the universal solvent making up 75% of our bodies,
it is such a rarity in the universe we should marvel as we would at a
miracle. A virtual liquid
mineral, water is exceptional for its habit of expanding when it
freezes, enabling it to float. If
it didn't do that, the lakes would freeze solid in the winter and kill
most marine life. Yet it
also vaporizes at an ideally low temperature, permitting millions of
tons of water to float in the sky as clouds, offering welcome shade and
a refreshing shower on a hot afternoon, not to mention the maintenance
of earth's river systems to refresh and feed our planet. Few
things are so needed and yet so taken for granted, and even ignored, as
water. Recent medical
research indicates that much of the disease and chronic illness today
could be avoided if people routinely drank 8 to 10 glasses of pure water
a day. In a future article
we will dig into some of the details.
But how does water fit into the plan of creation? According
to Genesis, water existed at the dawn of creation.
The first time water is mentioned in the Bible, we learn that
God's Spirit moved (or brooded) over the surface of the waters.
Isn't it interesting that God correlates His Spirit with physical
water? Just
as liquid water is absolutely essential for physical life to exist so
God's Spirit is absolutely essential for spiritual life to exist.
The fact that Jesus said "it is the spirit that quickeneth
(makes alive)" and that "the words I speak unto you are spirit
and life" heightens our respect for His life-giving Word (John
6:63). The
waters of creation were divided on the second day by the firmament.
The apparent global protective canopy thus created gives the
inquiring mind many exciting ideas to explore.
A recommended introduction to the study is found in the book,
UNLOCKING THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION.
For starters, just imagine the physical benefits of a high
atmospheric ceiling of water to filter out harmful cosmic, gamma and
x-rays. Purifying the
environment on that scale would certainly enable creatures to live
longer. Put that together
with the fact that there was no rain on earth before the flood!
That's right. Genesis
2:5-6 explains that God designed an ideal watering system to assure
moisture on the face of the whole earth.
No deserts, no storms, and no frozen wastelands...just a
"very good earth," with waters rising as fountains (or mists
as in the King James version) to irrigate the ideal soil He also
created. That brings up
another topic of interest: the replenishment of soil minerals that are
vital to make vegetation the nutrition by which God designed all His
creatures to thrive. As we
can see, there's no end to the fascinating topics we can explore in
future articles. Questions
That Point People Toward God If
you don't believe the eternal Creator God miraculously designed the
tangible world, how do you propose that natural elements existed forever
and organized themselves with no external plan? “Who
does not know that the hand of the Lord has made all this?
Since
DNA is a most complicated molecule inside living cells and essential to
orchestrate the development of life, how could living cells originate
through any natural process before the DNA existed? Things
that are made declare God’s awesome power and nature! If
genetic information is required to compose complex living systems, how
could simple chemical elements (which amounts to less information)
randomly create complex integrated systems in even a single cell, let
alone the extraordinary complexity of the human brain and nervous system
(i.e. more information)? You never get more information from less information!
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