God’s Word is still reliable and trustworthy.

They love to tell us that the God of the Bible is as much of a myth as Zeus, Superman and Mickey Mouse.  Do those characters have an ancient history book like the Bible that describes their acts over more than a thousand years?  Take for example that,

• God created man and animals, but not in the same way.  When He created animals, “…God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds….'” ¹
• When God created man, ‘…the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.’ ²
• The difference is obvious.  It is only into man that He breathed the breath of life.  So man was made completely different from animals.  The breath of God gave man a spirit and he became a living soul (mind, emotion and will).

The mind

• Do animals have a mind?  Not at all.  Does the chimp have one, since they are supposedly 99% identical to humans in their genetic make-up?  Even children can see the difference as they marvel at why chimps don’t have to go to school, cannot draw pictures, write stories, or create technological marvels.
• The Bible describes an important function of the soul, ‘Love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ ³  Animals don’t do that, since they have no sense of Almighty God who is to be loved and cherished.

Is our descent from ape-like ancestors a fact? 

• If there was any evidence that we evolved from ape-like ancestors, we would not have a mind.  Evolution is a material process, so it cannot ‘produce’ a spiritual, invisible, but real thing like the mind.  The ‘evolution’ of the mind, an immaterial ‘thing,’ cannot happen according to the idea of evolution.
• How a mind can evolve remains a mystery to evolutionists, unless they want to deny that people have minds.  They are welcome to do that, but the dilemma is that a person needs a mind to decide people do not have minds.
• The evolution of man remains a mystery, as all aspects of evolution do.
• An interesting article for the BBC is titled – We still have not found the missing link between us and apes.⁴   Logically if the link hasn’t been found, then the evolution of man from ape-like creatures is a myth.

Conclusion

If God is like Superman, Mickey and Zeus, is there evidence that they are Spirit and Creator like God?

• The Bible tells us, ‘God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.’ ⁵   
• God’s Word is reliable and trustworthy when it explains how special God created people, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our likeness.…’ ⁶

References

1. Genesis 1:24
2. Genesis 2:7
3. Mark 12:30
4. The Human-Ape Missing Link, Evolution News/@DiscoveryCSC, July 18, 2017
5. John 4:24
6. Genesis 1:26

God, gods and others

We live in a world with many different deities. There is the God of the Bible, Allah of the Koran, the Mormon deity, and others like Odysseus, Odin, Dionysius, et cetera. This can be a problem, since only one can be true. How does one determine which one it is?

 

The standard way that any deity will reveal him or herself would be through a written document. Since the God of the Bible’s document differs from all the rest, let us take a look at some of its characteristics.

• The Bible was written over a period of 1,500 years (1,400 BC – 100 AD). It consists of 66 books written by about 40 writers. It is important that the many different writers over the long period of time, had one central theme: God’s plan to establish an eternal Kingdom of peace. Also, there is one main person who is central to the whole plan, Jesus, the Son of God.
• The Bible is filled with history. God promised the land Canaan to Abraham.¹ Subsequent events focus mainly on Canaan, though the Israelites became a nation in Egypt. After the Exodus they settled in Canaan. Later they were exiled by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Though both world powers are no more, we have ample evidence that they existed. Many events in the Bible can be traced to the places they happened, like King Saul who died on Mount Gilboa in Israel.

 

From the above, we can expect that the testimony of a deity should be accompanied by a history which took place in a country. That is the minimum requirement. It proves that the deity can control history and is therefore omnipotent. It is easy to write an account of some god or of his sayings, without any historical references. Yet how can one prove that it is the product of a supernatural agent and not of men?

 

Let us look for instance at the difference between the God of the Bible and the ‘God’ of the Koran (Allah). How can one determine which one is the true God?  Let us apply the above standards to the Koran.

• Mohammed  claimed that an angel called Gabriel (not the Biblical Gabriel) gave him revelations over a period of 23 years around 609-632 AD. After his death they were collected and became the Koran. That is vastly different from the Bible’s about 40 writers over a period of 1,500 years.
• Is the Koran a book of history?  There is little original history in the Koran. We find many references to mainly Biblical historical people and events. Why did Allah think it is wise to let Mohammed quote Biblical history, which differs from the Bible’s in quite a few cases? ²
• Notably absent in the Koran, is Allah’s own country. Since Mohammed was an Arab, we expect that it could have been some part of Arabia. Yet in this aspect, the Koran fails to measure up to the Bible and its historical setting in Israel.

 

Summary

When we discuss or compare different religions and have to decide which one to believe, we have to compare their books. It is especially important to compare them to the Bible’s unique characteristics. That is because all of the other gods and deities are in opposition to the God of the Bible. The uniqueness of the structure and revelation of the Bible tells us that it is not a human, but a supernatural product.  The other gods and deities should do the same before we take them seriously.

 

References

1. Genesis 15:7
2. J Gilchrist, The Qur’an, The Scripture of Islam, Life Challenge Africa, 1995, 2003, p 32-36, 89-100

Easy to prove God doesn’t exist!

We live in a time when people increasingly ask if the God of the Bible is real? Why does He not give us one conclusive indication that He is alive? Well, maybe He did give us a clue that He is an intelligent Creative Being, but science does its best to disprove that specific sign.

 

God’s sign that He is alive and well lies in the DNA of living organisms. The origin of the genetic information (a recipe) is closely tied to the origin of life. Without the DNA recipe there can be no living organism. DNA is a code that needs intelligence to write it. So all science has to do is to disprove that the information on the DNA was created supernaturally. Then it has proven that the Creator God of the Bible does not exist. Until then, He seems to be the only cause of all of nature we see around us. That means He is real.

 

Let us take a concrete example, to explain it.

• The illustration of the Egyptian hieroglyphs obviously conveys a message. Can science prove that the message was not written by an intelligent person (supernatural creation), but the marks were made by a natural process (natural evolution)? Then there logically was not an intelligent hieroglyph writer.
• Let us say it is one of the subdivisions of modern science to prove the natural origin of such a hieroglyph. When we ask how much progress has been made, we are told, MUCH. There are many hypotheses on how the marks were made without the interference of an intelligent person. The stone could have lain in a river or pond and water carved the patterns on it. It could have slid from a rock, so the scratches were made. Some parts of the rock could have eroded and formed the specific ‘letters.’  Or whatever.
• We are assured that the researchers are making progress. The final solution is in sight. We live in the exciting times of modern science. The solution to the riddle of the hieroglyphs will soon be cracked (maybe not immediately, but in the next 5, 50 or 500 years).

 

This example reminds us of the donkey and the carrot. The donkey keeps running after the carrot, but it remains elusive. In the same way an easy solution to the problem of the hieroglyphs is promised. So people believe it, while time goes by and the answer remains a riddle. People die and they are not prepared to meet the supernatural intelligent God who wrote the recipe for the DNA code in living organisms. They don’t realise that history has proven that a written message always has an intelligent source.  There are no exceptions to the rule.

 

This applies to God as the intelligent Creator of the DNA code. When it comes to plants and organisms, we are talking about millions of  different ‘hieroglyph’ messages and they are long and complex.

 

Conclusion

People are eager to get rid of the Creator God and to disprove the Bible.  Science is supposed to help with it. Unfortunately, there is no progress, only promises. Such is the cleverness of the devil who keeps people waiting for the final solution, the final death thrust of God by naturalism.  It will never happen, since it can never happen that non intelligence can write a hieroglyph or a DNA code.