Monthly Archives: September 2017

Memories of the Flood

Science, , ,

I think, overall, it was mostly two things in high school that pushed me towards Atheism. First was the Miller-Urey experiment. When I read (falsely) that life could have arisen by chance, I began to think science and religion were in conflict. (For a detailed explanation of why life could not have arisen by chance, see Chapter 10 of Counting To God.) Second was the Genesis account of Noah and the flood.

The flood story seemed crazy. A global flood covers the highest mountains? Noah and three sons are warned and build a large boat, an ark? Land animals of every kind come two-by-two onto the boat, and stay on it for months? Noah sends a dove out to see if the land is dry? The animals repopulate the Earth, and all people are descended from the sons of Noah and their wives?

I had many questions, and no one to talk to. I thought that, if the flood story wasn’t true, why should I believe other parts of the Bible? Perhaps nothing in the Bible has been attacked as strongly as the flood story of God’s judgment. It is rejected by most secular scientists. It is often mocked.

I am now absolutely convinced, for many reasons, that it is true. I was astonished, blown away, to learn there more than 500 different memories of the flood. In at least 300 of them, it is clear the flood is global. This from the NW Creation Network:

Native global flood stories are documented as history or legend in almost every region on earth. Old world missionaries reported their amazement at finding remote tribes already possessing legends with tremendous similarities to the Bible’s accounts of the worldwide flood …. Ancient civilizations such as (China, Babylonia, Wales, Russia, India, America, Hawaii, Scandinavia, Sumatra, Peru, and Polynesia) all have their own versions of a giant flood.

These flood tales are frequently linked by common elements that parallel the Biblical account including the warning of the coming flood, the construction of a boat in advance, the storage of animals, the inclusion of family, and the release of birds to determine if the water level had subsided.

Ken Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, which features a full scale replica of the Ark. He writes:

I met two missionaries who visited the Creation Museum while on furlough from their missions work. They are missionaries who are the first contact with certain tribes in the Amazon. At the time, they were the first in contact with two different tribes. I asked if those tribes had a flood or creation legend. They said the tribes did and they even had a legend where the languages split apart too!

(The splitting of languages is a memory of the Tower of Babel.)

Flood memories can be found on many websites. Parallels to the Bible are stunning. Hawaiians have a memory of a time when the world became a wicked place, and only one good man, Nu-u, was left. Nu-u built a great canoe with a house on it and filled it with animals, and only Nu-u and his family were saved. Chinese have a memory that Fuhi, his wife, three sons, and three daughters escaped a great flood and were the only people alive on Earth. Ancient Babylonians have a memory in the Epic of Gilgamesh, stone tablets discovered in 1853 that mirror many features of the flood story in the Bible, including sending out a dove to see if the waters had receded.

When you read these stories, you know they are based on real events. You just know. Unrelated tribes and cultures from around the world could not possibly have this memory if the flood did not occur. Differences in the details of the flood stories are exactly what you would expect when cultures pass down memories for thousands of years. Associates for Biblical Research date the flood at around 3000 BC.

Imagine a world that was much flatter. Imagine that world rocked by enormous volcanos as the “fountains of the great deep burst forth.” (Genesis 7:11). The fountains may have included water from underground oceans in addition to massive amounts of lava. Huge tsunamis washed over the entire Earth, and the volcanic activity and rapidly shifting tectonic plates created the mountains we see today, either during the flood or shortly after.

I recommend Ken Ham’s easy-to-read book: A Flood of Evidence. He provides solid answers to the most common questions and objections. He notes the many flaws and inconsistencies of radioactive dating. All fossils, coal, and diamonds contain Carbon 14, an isotope with a half-life of 5,000 years, which could not possibly be detected if those items were more than 100,000 years old. Fossils, coal, and diamonds cannot be millions of years old!

The flood of Noah explains a great deal. It explains why sedimentary rocks and fossils are found all over the world. It explains the Ice Age. You don’t get an ice age if the Earth just gets colder; there isn’t enough moisture to build sheets of ice miles high. You need warm oceans for evaporation and cool summers so the snow doesn’t melt. After the flood, perhaps for centuries, the oceans were warmed by volcanic activity but the summers were cool because of volcanic dust.

As I noted in an earlier post, human DNA provides strong evidence that all men are descended from Noah. Here’s two other items. First, if humanity is tens of thousands of years old, why don’t we find stories of people who lived more than 5,000 years ago? Second, if the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon were laid down over tens of millions of years, why are they so level with no sign of erosion?

Jesus spoke of the flood, and compared it to his second coming:

For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

Matthew 24: 38-39. The flood is noted in the letters of St. Paul and St. Peter. Peter predicted that “scoffers will come.” “For they deliberately overlook this fact … that the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.” 2 Peter 3:4-6.

I never ask you to believe despite the evidence. I ask you to believe because of the evidence.

Thanks for reading. Please ask others to consider the truth. It could change their life.

The Finch’s Beak

Atheist Pseudo-Science, , ,

I’m working on a new, easier-to-read book about science and God. As one example of how natural selection has never created new kinds of creatures, I discuss the finch’s beak. One of my “test” readers was surprised: “Isn’t that one of the key examples given to support evolution?” She’s right, it is, which shows how distorted the evolutionary literature has become. Let’s look at the real facts about changes in the beaks of finches, and you can decide for yourself.
Finches are smallish birds found in most parts of the world. According to evolutionary myth, Charles Darwin noticed differences in the size of the beaks of species of finches when he visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835. He supposedly concluded that the birds had adapted, by natural selection, to different diets. Then, a mere 24 years later, in 1859, he was inspired by the beaks of finches to conceive and publish his theory of evolution.

Horse manure. As historian of science Frank Sulloway states, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Darwin never mentioned finches in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (yes, Darwin was a blatant racist). Sulloway writes:

Thus the point of real historical interest is why Darwin, who surely wanted to bolster the text of the Origin with his most convincing scientific evidence, chose to omit any specific reference to a group of birds that he supposedly thought were so important for his evolutionary argument.

The finch myth, the myth that Darwin had an “eureka” moment while studying the beaks of finches, is nonsense. Darwin largely stole the theory of evolution from an 1858 letter written to him by Alfred Russell Wallace. For the story of how Darwin did that, and managed to take credit for the theory ahead of Wallace, I refer you to Tom Wolfe’s recent book The Kingdom of Speech.

Of course, facts don’t stop evolutionists. The National Academy of Science, a Darwin propaganda machine that tries to silence all discussion of design, claims finches are “a particularly compelling example” of the origin of species. The Washington Post (not my favorite newspaper) recently wrote an article on the “iconic Galapagos finches.”

Historical embellishments aside, what are the facts? In the 1970s biologists studied finches on one of the Galapagos Islands during a severe drought. The drought restricted the diet of finches to mostly large, hard-to-crack seeds. 85 percent of the finches perished. The average beak size of the survivors was 5% greater than the average beak size before the drought.

Don’t get too excited. When the rains returned, the average beak size returned to normal. To be clear, there were always finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks. There were finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks before the drought, there were finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks during the drought, and there were finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks after the drought. There was never a new kind of finch. There was no new technology created. There was only a temporary change in the relative sizes of those two populations.

What do you think? A “compelling example” of how new species are created? If you want to learn more about the myth of the finch’s beak, I would refer you to this article by Jonathan Wells. Wells concludes “never in the history of science was so much based by so many on so little.”

No one has ever found any new technology that was created by natural selection. Since 1988, scientists have watched a common type of bacteria “evolve” in the lab, grown in flasks with nutrients the bacteria eat. The bacteria reproduce more than six times a day and there have been over 60,000 generations of bacteria. The main change was that the bacteria turned into couch potatoes, fat bacteria that can’t swim. Because of mutations, errors in coding, some of the technology they used to have no longer works. Because the flasks are shaken, and the bacteria don’t need to swim to get food, the bacteria got fat and more couldn’t swim.

There is also the itsy bitsy scientific fact that, mathematically, the theory of evolution is a disaster. It is nowhere near powerful enough to build new technology. The odds of getting by mutation a new piece of technology, a new functional protein not related to another functional protein, are so hard to overcome that it may never have happened in the history of life on Earth. I give an overview of the science/math on this in pages 105 to 112 and 136 to 138 of Counting To God. Getting dozens of new pieces that work together just right to build new technology, like legs, eyes, ears, bones, or the human brain? Ridiculous almost beyond comprehension.

So the next time someone makes the absurd claim that “evolution is a fact,” you might ask that person to look at the real facts, and you might start with the finch’s beak.

Thanks for reading. Please spread the good news of true science.