Greetings, Fellow Believers!I received an interesting reply to my first letter, and my response to that brought out some ideas I've been meaning to share with some 'good folk'; you know the type :) The indented gray copy is the letter I got, and the outdented black copy is my response. The basic 'theme' is one of literal creation, and some scientific evidence to back it up, also some [wild] theories about the fall of man, the flood, and physical [not necessarily] constants. Some of these are 'pulled out of my butt', so don't be too shocked if they don't sound like your high-school, main-stream 15Billion year-old thinking (I just made that up).
Hi. My name is [changed to maintain anonymity] and I thoroughly enjoyed the newsletter. I too am fascinated by the infinite nature of God and how it is reflected in His Word. When I read your reference to 3 being the number for earth, I got excited.
Any time I find something that inspires me that I can use to inspire others makes my day. Want to hear more interesting things about #3? The #6 represents man, a 'brick short of a load' compared to God, #7, the #666 represents a complete failure of perfection; 3x imperfect, or even imperfect cubed! The Satanists use #666 as their magical number, like we'd use 777 (or 70 x 7), which literally means any number x 7, or without limit, but in public, the witchcraft uses #3 or #333 to 'hide' #666. I forgot the meaning of #4, but I think it's in my report I wrote on the scientific evidence of a literal creation. Here's an interesting note: God himself acknowledges witchcraft, sorcery, and psychics, so I think it's fair we'd ought to as well. I see many people that scoff at mystical shows representing witchcraft, saying that's just Hollywood, and not 'for real'. it's for-real, Jerry, to be SURE. The minute particulars, only witches know, but the general concept it's there, it will be until the end.
I read a book a few years back entitled "Hyper space" by Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist. In case you haven't read it, he states that Einstein's theories have been proven right. Einstein theorized that all the laws of nature could be simplified into one big equation but, he couldn't make the math work. It failed to account for the behavior of light, gravity, etc. Along came quantum theory and Einstein's theory was pushed to the back burner.
I have had some interesting revelations about the science involved with the universe, specifically entropy, and the fall of man. Now, these of course are only speculations, but close the book on the one problem that isn't obvious in the literal creation situation: "If the universe is 6000 +/- years old, than how the heck can we see light from stars that are millions of lights years* away"? I just took on faith that it happened, but recently discovered several ways to solve that problem.
*A light-year is just like a regular year, but with fewer calories.
Insight on the thought process: Before I came to realize a literal creation of all creatures and things, just as Genesis describes, (Basically before some in-depth reading of scripture), I got the mindset from my mom, that just as Adam was not born, but given a body, fully grown, and intelligent, that the earth was created with 'an age'. Including any of the 'truly old' items, i.e. dinosaur bones, etc. I believed this was a likely case, until I started to do an in-depth study on the flood evidence, and the COMPLETE LACK of ANY evidence to really prove an OLD earth*.
*Just theories, folks. The dating** techniques we have are terribly ill-fated. Too many holes, too many assumptions, and to much contradiction with the Word of God.
**I just realized that the word could also be applied to the ridiculous ritual known today as dating; I could write a dozen-page letter on that alone. I love irony, and I LOVE how perfectly EITHER fits to the sentence above.
It doesn't matter too much if you believe me, not part of the salvation plan, but start with this simple premise: The Bible says that's exactly what happened. Why would I ever choose to believe anything else? The bible is meant to be our underlying guide for everything we do and believe. The bible doesn't talk about evolution, it doesn't talk about millions of years ago, and the dinosaurs, but it DOES talk about CREATION, in a literal sense, and has a genealogy with years from the first Man on earth to Jesus. If you believe something else, than you owe it to yourself, and more importantly to GOD, your creator to re-think WHY do you believe something ELSE?
Now, on to the speed of light problem: if you do a search on 'speed of light' and 'slowing', on the 'web, you will find dozens of sites that talk about the possibility of the speed of light not being constant. Boy did my eyes light up when I first stumbled into this. Now somebody went back and found the 160 or so experiments to measure the speed of light over the last 300 years or so, and when they plotted the results, it paints a curve, and a hyperbolic curve, that has an asymptote at roughly 6000 years ago (infinite speed of light). Now, that HAS GOT to be interesting. Now, for the grain of salt, of course as you go back in time, the errors on the measurements basically counter the actual changes over time, so from a purely scientific point-of-view, it's negligible. However, the theological implications are staggering.
The first thing that came to my mind with this, was Einstein's famous equation, that equates energy to mass and the speed of light, and instantly, the word that popped into my head was 'entropy'. Think about this: If the original creation, before the fall of man was meant to go on forever, either God would have to put more energy into the system on occasion, or it would have to be without entropy. Entropy is definable, and measurable, and most certainly exists, but there is no reason to say it was always that way. The naturalist scientist will try to say that he can't see a change, so it must remain constant. That should obviously be seen as bunk from a Christian point-of-view, knowing that God is ALL powerful!
Think along this line of reasoning: If God wanted to have Adam "most surely die that [prophetic] day [within a thousand years (from eating the forbidden [most likely NOT an apple] fruit)]" (930 is within 1000). And all he had to do was add a bit of chaos to the universe in the form of entropy, and if, as my guess above is true, is tied to the speed of light, then "all" God had to do was change that simple physical "constant", and voila, people decay and die. (also the sun, the stars, and our cars).
I was pondering this the other night, when it struck me, in addition to the fall of man concept, that in the Bible, where it says that God gave us the rainbow as a sign of his new covenant, that is usually talked about in the sense, that rainbows existed before that, but were not thought about in a spiritual way (in my NIV Study Bible, the 'notes', say "rainbow: Rain and the rainbow doubtlessly existed long before the time of Noah's flood, but after the flood the rainbow took on new meaning as the sign of the Noahic covenant"). I now see that there is another awesome possibility. Not too many people are aware of this, but the rainbow depends upon a certain speed of light, combined with the index of refraction of water, and certain properties of water that make the droplets form. Speed of light Too slow, and you will only see one color, or no light, too fast, and you only see white light. Well, ponder this, than, When God, at the time of the flood, told us that we were to only live 120 years, and also specifically mentioned the rainbow as his sign. He could have done it again, this time, slowing the speed of light, to increase the effect of entropy with the beautiful side-effect we see as the rainbow.
There can be NO DOUBT that God changed SOMETHING to make life spans drop from infinite to 1000ish years, and then again to 1/8 of THAT.
The beauty of all this, besides the brilliant colors, of course is that we have NO REASON to believe anything else than was is literally mentioned in the bible, since all of our science can not prove otherwise, and now there are theories to explain some other route, that makes science and God tie together, through a bit of faith. Now it's easy to be a Christian AND a scientist. I have heard recently that a growing majority of biologists are becoming Christian, when they are finding out that macro-evolution is NOT taking place in species.
Here is another thought to ponder: There is no mention of rain, (other than one comment that God hadn't caused it to rain in the Bible) before the flood. If, as some have speculated, that the atmosphere of earth was far more humid, and that plants got their moisture from the air, especially as dew, that rain wouldn't have been necessary before the flood.
One other explanation of the light getting to us quick enough has to do with Euclidean geometry, and the possibility of space-time being curved in 'deep' space, and that light could travel trough a short-cut, undetectable in our 4 dimensions, whereas, it could go virtually unlimited distances in 15ish years (obviously enough time), or a simple-minded possibility that the universe just isn't anywhere near as big as we think it is. (i.e. our measurement theories don't hold water past 500 light-years away). It doesn't take too many orders of magnitude in interstellar space to go from a distance that's close enough for the light to just get here from stars, to the unbelievably large universe we've come to know an love.
Then of course, the simplest minded theory*; It just IS; God could have EASILY just strung up all the light-rays from the stars to the earth when HE MADE THEM on the FOURTH day of CREATION. Why do people believe in Creation, but won't believe that God could have done something as simple as putting the rays of LIGHT in for us to see the wonderful stars he made billions of light-years away? (This used to be my theory, and I believe it's a strong contender, however, I have to admit I really like the charm of the speed of light tied to entropy; I would LOVE to hear back from any scientist-geek, God-fearing Christians out there; anybody home?)
*"Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
There are other theories about the shorter life-span, that also, by-the-way easily explains one possibility of the extinction of the dinosaur. If the earth's upper atmosphere was more dense, and absorbed more of the harmful rays, with just the tiny ozone layer—we see a diminutive version of this today, with the incredible increase in the skin-cancer rates, especially in the southern hemisphere, like in Australia! Not to mention the mutated frogs all over the place. Anyhow, back from tangent; if there was a huge increase in the cosmic radiation, that's an easy explanation for shorter life-spans, if the whole entropy, speed of light thing isn't the answer. Back to dino; The evidence shows that there WERE dinosaurs on earth, and it also shows that they didn't stop growing their entire life, ala the crocodile, and the anaconda. This would make for HUGE creatures, if they, like Adam, lived for the majority of 1000 years! NOW, scene 2, post flood, two dinosaurs left (and small ones, of course, probably a few different 'kinds'). These dinosaurs would have similar problems as mankind with long-life now, besides the fact, that they were also 'given' to mankind as FOOD; Ge 9:3, they could have suffered a quick extinction if they tasted good. There have been reports from around the globe regarding odd creatures, with the 'look 'n' feel' of dinosaurs, especially the pterodactyl, who knows? maybe they aren't all extinct. "With GOD, ALL things are possible!"
Of course, there are actually 4 dimensions, as we have to consider time. The big-bang theories point to 10 at the first 30 nanoseconds, breaking down to the 4 today. I just read about this as a proof of the trinity. The biggest problem people have with Christian theology typically is the supposed paradox of the trinity. How can three be one. More dimensions is the simple answer. If you add the inside angles of any triangle, you will find they add to 180 degrees, but do you know how can a triangle can be made with 3 right angles (270 degrees), and still work, and in OUR universe? You can do this yourself.Kaku was studying Einstein's work and decided to experiment. He discovered that if you assume that there are 10 spatial dimensions, the math works out perfectly. This is his idea on how creation took place. At some point in the past the universe was composed of 10 unified dimensions. For some reason, they split unequally...into the 3 that we live in and how many are left? Oh, yeah, 7.
Put it on a sphere; if you go directly South from the north pole, to the equator, than on the equator 1/4 way around the globe, and then back to the north pole, you will have made three exact right-angles, driving (flying) PERFECTLY straight paths (viewed from the top, or your point of reference), and yet you will have done the impossible; completed a loop with 3 90 degree right turns. Imagine now that God has at LEAST 11 dimensions to 'play with'... A very simple example that a child can understand to show that GOD, who has UNLIMITED abilities can do EVERYTHING, and that of what God can do, we can understand NOTHING. This example takes something that is completely impossible in 2 dimensions and makes it a cake-walk in only 3. IMAGINE going from 4 to 11, and that each added dimension has the effect of raising to a power, NOT adding!
I am led to remember the verse in the bible that tells us that if we [Moses] were to see God's glory, we would surely die. Imagine that alone; we must die to be with him in heaven (or be transfigured), God said it himself; we couldn't stand to even SEE him. I also think of the verse that shows that no man has ever talked about, heard about, or even dreamt about the riches awaiting us 'on the other side'. I got a very clear impression, regarding certain desires I have on earth, that, being a good Christian, I refrain from, I got the promise that the reward in HEAVEN is 70 x 7 BETTER than ANYTHING earth has to offer.
The other 7 dimensions expanded and contracted to become so infinitely large and at the same time so infinitesimally small that we can't probe them or even perceive them with our 3D minds. (He went to great pains to describe how we can't "get our minds around" them because they are so far beyond us) Yet, this other "universe" so completely permeates our own that it is everywhere and part of everything. It even holds our own universe together by its very existence.
I see that in the universe where we live: When we want to showcase something do we not find a grand location, say in the center of our house, one the mantle, etc. Think of our solar system as the mantle of God's house (the universe). (note; God doesn't have to stay IN his house). I just remember another significant "oops" in our small-brained thinking: We like to think that the speed of light is the 'maximum speed-limit' of anything in our universe, yet I read of an extremely important experiment that recently disproved this:That gravity acts faster; to the point of not being able to be measured. (ie. infinitely fast!) I lost track of where I saw that reference, or exactly how they did the experiment, but it was an actual experiment done on local planets and the sun, not some theoretical babble that can't be proven.
Let's see what Mr. Genius has discovered so far: A "Universe" omnipresent, omnipotent, and since it is both of those it must be omniscient. I'm at a loss. What possible significance could this discovery have? He's still an atheist. Or at least an agnostic. It's sad. I guess Romans 1:21-22 is right. Just like every other word.
Are you talking about Kaku? Yes, I find it very sad when people will find things that to us scream *GOD*, dammit. (not a swear-word, observe the punctuation). The 'chosen' are exactly that; people meant to be saved, and have the Holy Spirit within them will understand, others CAN NOT. ( 1 cor 2:14 The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.). I have to listen to Matthew's Gospel when it comes to things like this, "Do not worry". It's part of Gods plan, and must be.
Sorry, my education is very limited. Hugh Ross expounds this much more effectively in "Beyond the Cosmos"
You made me think, and to type out some thoughts I've recently discovered and haven't 'bounced off' anybody yet.
I just thought it was cool. btw Have you ever pondered the fact that the earth is the 3rd planet from the sun and the 7th planet from interstellar space.
Now, THAT _is_ interesting. the 3 thing is pretty wild. I had a friend of mine, who I guess is agnostic, say something along the lines of "If the earth was just a tiny bit further or closer to the sun, or didn't have the magnetic field, nor the tilt, it would never support a fragile life-form like humans, who are incredibly limited in the range of environments we can survive, and that there can't be a God, because it's too chancy for this to have happened". Can you even believe how backwards that thinking is. He got everything exactly right except the conclusion, which is that there is NO CHANCE it happened by CHANCE! The odds of earth and her life-forms popping up out of nowhere, (which, by they way, even the big-bang theorists, can NEVER explain away where IT came from; unless they believe in God) is ZERO, there are so many zeros after the decimal point, it'd take thousands of pages to write the odds. Without divine intervention, the Earth could NEVER have been in the right place for US, not to mention a thousand other variables I could never ever list.
There are many forms of skirting literal creation, that people have come up with over the last 170 years or so, including the concept that "God used evolution as part of creation"; doesn't hold water with Ge; out-of-order, and Progressive Creation; ditto; stuff was out-of-order, OR, too much time between steps.
Have you ever used a simple (8 digit) calculator to figure the odds of winning a lottery? If you take 1 (ticket), and divide by 84,000,000, you will get ZERO; plain and simple. If you take 10, 15, you still get ZERO. Well, the chance odds of bacteria forming from the components that make it are something like 10 ^100,000,000,000 to 1 against. You can divide that by the number of milliseconds since the big bang, and it just drops to 10^99,999,999,980. It just plain didn't happen that way, sorry folks. (I may have the numbers off by a factor of 1000 or even 100000, it doesn't matter; ANY scientist doing ANY experiment will use 5-6 significant digits, and will call something over a certain chance, virtually impossible, for example, odds of 1/1000. Do you know that until about 1830, there was NOTHING ever to explain the earth other than God made it, in a complete form, roughly 6000 years ago, or just complete ignorance. Do you know that the "timeline' made for the eviloutionary (satire, not a typo) process was made by a theory about the depth of fossils in a supposed 'geologic' column, that has NO way to date; you can NOT carbon-date, or iso-date this kind of rock; there is NO strictly scientific method to determine these dates, so they used another theory; eviloution, to come up with that timeline. This is based on the supposition that sedimentary rock is built over millions of years, but that should b e seen as bunk immediately by this one reason: You can't slowly bury something and fossilize it: it MUST be catastrophic! Now the paradox starts when you say "how can it be buried catastrophically, over millions of years, since OBVIOUSLY it's buried fast (to make a fossil), and obviously it took thousands of years for each INCH of the height of a fossil?"
I love this line (from Spock, nonetheless); Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter HOW improbable IS the truth. It's obvious from the thought-process above that the rocks are NOT built up slowly as supposed, but quickly, but then, how the hell to the layers get there? Some genius French scientists, after discovering that in a river bed, and then a lake bed, and then a huge lake, and then in the oceans, that the layering is NOT horizontal, but follows the topology of the bedrock it lies on, devised a way to test a theory; that the layers are built SIDEWAYS. They did in fact, PROVE that this happens, and although from a purely scientific standpoint, you can't use that evidence ALONE to prove, for example, that the Grand Canyon was carved in the period of a year or less, you CAN PROVE that it's a strong possibility, which puts the biggest hole in the eviloutionary theories of all time, and also shows that without a doubt, the timeline established by sedimentary rock doesn't hold water, and although doesn't by itself prove the timeline is wrong, it PROVES that is can NOT be held as FACT, hence the timeline used for evolution is based on something that is NOT FACTUAL, but only a theory with more holes every day.
After these theories were put to use in a lab, in one experiment, grinding a stratified rock into the particles with a mortar and pestle, putting it through their experiment, and re-layering it in a matter of minutes, that's plenty of proof enough for me to see that that's likely they way is it (and was). Since those initial experiments, wonderful things, like the Mt. St. Helen's eruption causes amazing things like a mini-grand-canyon, 100x600x200 feet, and with at least 25 FEET of stratified rock, that was created in 90 minutes! Many geologists have been converted to strong Christians from visiting Mt. St. Helen's!
The other truly amazing thing is the 2,000,000 trees floating on and sinking in Spirit Lake, are re-creating a theoretical situation that was used as a master's thesis for a (now) famous geologist, who theorized, that coal was formed by huge floating mats of millions or billions of trees, bumping into a mountain, pushed by the wind, and rubbing against each other, crumbling the bark off, which will fall to the bottom, creating peat, which compressed over time into coal. His theory was based on the fact that a huge percentage of the coal found contains fossilized tree bark (vs. leaves, and other vegetation commonly thought to be the source of coal). The other major find in spirit lake was also pre-thought in the same man's thesis; that there would be vertically partially floating trees, slowly sinking, at different times, so that their bottoms would be at the same depth as others, but not necessarily the nearest trees.
There is a famous 'prehistoric, multi-layered forest' in Yellowstone park, that according to the signs, was something like 17 different forests over millions of years (based on the bottoms of the trees having 17 different depths in the dirt). this concept makes no sense when you start thinking about it; because the 'older' forest would be 'worn down' before the next one could grow. When this EXACT same thing was discovered in Sprit lake, formed in months. It put a brand new light on that situation, including solving the big MYSTERY which was 'why do none of the trees have root systems'? (which was conveniently ignored in the Yellowstone park forest). The reason, of course is that they were catastrophically RIPPED from the ground, and sunk in a huge lake.
I was extremely impressed with the founder of "the SALT"; Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth, Christine, O'Donnell, when she was on Politically incorrect in Oct, and in front of a national audience, simply said "evolution... evolution is a myth". Now THAT takes guts (and a lot of faith). I have always given SOME chance to evolution, even if it's 1/10^100,000,000,000! I have always talked in the voice of "This is what I believe". Although she was poignant in saying that the TRUTH can be known, and the ONLY place to find it is the Bible. Christine is awesome; check out her next appearance on Politically Incorrect (abc, 28 Jan, 12:05 midnight central time (technically the 29th here, I believe)). I personally can't wait. I haven't yet seen a national representative of Christianity that was more humble in their faith, and wonderfully representative of what is a true Christian, so naturally I can't wait for her next appearance. I can honestly say that I was 'blown away', I have never been spiritually 'drawn' to somebody as quickly, I would like to see what the rest of the 'gang' thinks. I will be taping the show, in case somebody misses it, and would like to see it later. I also have a transcript of the show from Oct, and I will put it on a web site for y'all soon. Don't be too shocked when she points a God-loaded finger at you're sinful heart, it will hurt if she's right, and you know it, but apparently, she gave up worrying about 'what other people think', when it comes to defending the Bible, and it's awesome. One of best quotes I've heard anybody say on national TV was when somebody asks "So, x, y, and z won't be saved because they didn't believe in Jesus Christ", her answer "The bible tells us that". John 14:6 to be precise.
Is there any reason to believe in anything other than a young earth, and literal creation of Genesis. NO. (with ONE exception, if that's too taxing on your belief system that it would pull you away from your faith in Jesus the Lord). I'm sure he will forgive anybody who won't believe in HIS* creation being so literal, but I personally have NO reason to believe anything ELSE. (If I turn out to be wrong, so be it, the POINT of my exploration is strengthening the tie between our History, science and the WORD of GOD. I can't see any way that's bad, even if the fine-points are not 100% correct).
*Jesus is the creator of Earth, and the universe as we know it, based on the Gospel of John, and Genesis. It's an often over-looked thing, and I like to make sure he get his due credit. (I had NO idea until about 4 years ago). It's obviously a confusing thing, since God is one, yadda yadda, but from a direct reading of John 1:3, it says that JESUS created the world. The corroborating verses from Genesis are the ones that say "Let US make..." It AWES me to see that in the Hebrew OLD TESTIMENT, there is mention of a PLURAL GOD, yet they won't believe in the trinity! (the current viewpoint from rabbi's is that a singular God was talking to his angels, yet angels have no power to create a universe! AND, the fact that the word is a plural GOD.
May the peace and love of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ shine upon you.
Love in Christ, [changed to maintain anonymity]Why, thank-you. I see that God IS with you, keep it up. Try to find something in my writings that will help you be a witness to Jesus, that IS my goal in these writings.
Technically, my ONE true goal is this, that when I get to heaven, that I will be introduced "this is Andrew, with whom I am pleased"—based on the quote from Jesus' baptism. It's up to me to make that happen, of course. I try almost every day. I've been trying to find a forum, and am starting to weed one out, here in cyberspace.
Good God, it's getting late, ouch. My brother has a 50-disc CD changer, and it's worked it's way up to 19! (from 10). I also listened to one of my favorite movies in the background to start, about 5 hours ago!
I hope you wonderful people get as much out of this as I did while putting in.
-Andrew