Oil painting by Salvador Dali entitled Corpus Hypercubus. It was completed in 1954 and is currently owned by the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue “True - or False” into stuff about the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland - or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine… their belief that a certain amount of ”religion” is desireable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.   

C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, edited by Walter Hooper (1984)

By David H. Rogstad, Ph.D.

Through my career as a scientist, not only has the science itself provided validation for the Christian faith, but also life’s “little” lessons while doing science.

Not long after the Galileo spacecraft began its long voyage to Jupiter in 1989, the controllers determined it would be an opportune time to test its large umbrella-like antenna. When they tried to open it up, several of the spokes refused to expand, leaving the antenna about as effective as an umbrella in a hurricane. Following numerous attempts to break it free, NASA commissioned a “tiger team” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to investigate all possible ways in which the mission could be recovered. If nothing was done, the data transmission rate would be limited to about 10 bits per second at Jupiter, far too slow to accomplish most of the mission goals.

The final recommendations of that team included development of antenna arraying, where several antennas on the ground could simultaneously track the Galileo spacecraft and coherently add the signals together to obtain increased signal-gathering power. This development became the task of my group at JPL, a project that required all of the time of some 25 engineers, programmers, and scientists for about three years to complete. It challenged my team-building skills under conditions that were very stressful due to the time constraint of Galileo’s encounter with Jupiter.

In the gospels, Jesus says more than once that if you want to be great, you must become a servant. I really wanted my group to be successful in performing the arraying development, so I felt compelled to make every effort to practice this principle. Success requires the team players to “jump in” and do what it takes to get the job done. The team leader leads best by being an example. He or she should have no special privileges.

To make a long story short, I had the opportunity to fully demonstrate my willingness to be a servant leader. If there was a “dirty” job to be done, I chose to be the first to do it, even when it meant cleaning up a toilet spill. If something needed to be bought, on occasion I would spend my own money to get it in order to save time. I discovered that others will follow the example of a willing leader and won’t complain when the going gets difficult. The example of other leaders in my life helped me to see that the leader’s primary responsibility is to ensure that the team has the resources and help it needs to accomplish the task. Then success comes naturally.

There is no question in my mind that God blessed our effort and gave us the success we desired. I remember one time when we met a particular milestone with flying colors, that one of my engineers remarked that “we were so successful, there must be a God in heaven looking out for us.” This comment came from a person having no particular belief in God.

If you’ve kept abreast of the Galileo mission, you’ll know our efforts were wildly successful. Our antenna-arraying capability, together with three other modifications to the spacecraft software and other ground systems, led to an improvement of the communications system of up to a factor of 100 in data rate. All of the major goals of the mission were accomplished in the following years. And my team had the privilege of receiving special commendation for our part in this achievement. We were so successful with antenna arraying that we were given the task of expanding this capability for use in all missions.

This personal experience is no earthshaking argument for the Christian faith, but it does substantiate a biblical principle on healthy human interaction and how it promotes human flourishing.

Posted at reasons.org

By Greg Boyd, Ph.D.

Hello blogger friends,

I’ve been reading Volume II of John Goldingay’s excellent two volume work, Old Testament Theology, 2 Vols (IVP, 2006). Among other things, Goldingay highlights an important, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of Old Testament prophecy. In sharp contrast to the standard ancient Greek view of prophecy, inspired prophecies in the Old Testament (and, I would add, at least one in the New Testament, see Ac 21:10-11, cf. 26-33) are not always fulfilled, at least not in the exact way they were originally prophesied.

For example, Jeremiah prophesied that Jehoiakim would die a dishonorable death. It is said that no one would mourn for him and that his corpse would be dragged around and thrown outside the gates of Jerusalem, left unburied to decompose in the sun (Jere. 22:18-19, cf. 36:30). Not only this, but it was prophesied that no descendent of his would sit on the throne (Jere. 36:30-31). As it turned out, however, Jehoiakim received a proper burial and his son succeeded him as king (2 Kg. 24:6). What are we to make of this?

Something similar is true of Jeremiah’s prophecy to Zedekiah. Jeremiah declares to Zedekiah that the Lord says “You will not die by the sword” but will rather “die peacefully.” The Lord adds that people will mourn his death (Jere. 34:4-5). As it turned out, however, Zedekiah was captured by the Babylonians, had his eyes plucked out and died in prison (Jere. 52:8-11). What’s most interesting is that both the prophecy and the record of events revealing that it wasn’t fulfilled are included in the same book, demonstrating that Jeremiah and/or the compilers of this work weren’t at all bothered by the fact that the prophecy didn’t come to pass.

Perhaps most impressively, in Ezekiel 26-28 we find a lengthy prophecy against the city of Tyre. It is said that Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, would utterly defeat Tyre, killing its inhabitants, plundering all its wealth and leveling all its walls so that it ends up being flat as a rock. Indeed, it is prophesied that it would virtually vanish from the earth and never be found again. Well, it didn’t quite happen that way, as Goldingay notes.

Nebuchadnezzar did lay siege to Tyre, but, while he did gain some control of the city, it was “nowhere near as decisive as Ezekiel had implied” (Old Testament Theology, Vol. II, 83). The city wasn’t completely conquered and laid flat until Alexander did this several hundred years later.

Because his campaign failed, Nebuchadnezzar failed to get much of Tyre’s wealth. So, says Goldingay, Yahweh made “ a new decision.” He decided to turn Egypt over to him in order to repay him for his expenses in his “vain effort” to take Tyre (Ezek. 29:17-20; Goldingay, ibid., 84). The amazing thing is that this campaign also seems to have failed! Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt, but “the achievement did not amount to conquest” (op.cit.).

Click here for the full article.

By John McRay

The Bible is a collection of many kinds of documents written over a period of about 1,500 years. Beginning with the composition of the first five books (the Pentateuch) by Moses, the 66 total documents were completed by the end of the first century A.D. They were composed in the Hebrew and Greek languages in various geographical settings and different historical periods. Archaeological discoveries relating to these settings and periods have enlightened the cultural context in which many of the recorded events occurred and enhanced the credibility of the Biblical record, both the Old and New Testament periods. For example, many events recorded in the last 100 years of this period of biblical history, during which the New Testament documents were written, have been illuminated through significant archaeological discoveries. Following are some of these impressive finds. Limitations on the length of this article will not allow discussion of the 1,400 years of Old Testament sites.

Pool of Siloam

Hezekiah, a king of Judah in the Eighth century B.C., built a tunnel through Mount Ophel in Jerusalem southward from the underground Gihon Spring through almost 1,750 feet of rock to channel water to the Pool of Siloam inside the city walls. It was to this pool that Jesus sent a blind man to have him wash his eyes in its water and receive his sight, according to John 9:7.

Until recently, only a small portion of the pool has been accessible. After the site was excavated in the late nineteenth century, the people of the village of Silwan (modern spelling of Siloam) built on the northwest corner of the little pool a mosque with a minaret, which still stands above it. However, excavations at the site in the first six months of 2005 have uncovered the eastern portion of a large pool, fifty meters in length, (its width not yet known) which lies only about ten meters south of the little pool. These two are undoubtedly a part of one larger complex that was called the Siloam Pool (like the Pool of Bethesda which had two sections). It has a series of stone steps for entering the pool, which, being fed by fresh running water from the Gihon Spring through a small channel discovered on the north side of the pool, was probably a major facility for ritual purification before entering the temple. This may be the reason Jesus chose this pool for the miracle. A stone pavement has also recently been discovered, leading from the pool up Mt. Ophel to the Temple Mount.

Rolling Stones at Tombs

In Matthew (see 28:2) it is stated that an angel descended from heaven to the tomb of Jesus, “rolled back the stone and sat upon it.” Many tombs from the time of Christ have been discovered in Jerusalem, and some of them still have these rolling stones by their entrances. A tomb from the time of Jesus was built for the burial of Queen Helena of Adiabene north of the Damascus Gate and has the stone still in place. Another, better preserved rolling stone, still stands beside the entrance to the tomb of the family of Herod the Great, south of the King David Hotel. More than 60 rolling stone tombs have been found and studied in Israel and Jordan in recent years.

Tomb of Caiaphas

In November, 1990, a tomb was discovered in Jerusalem that contains an ossuary with the name of Caiaphas carved into it. The burial cave is located in the Peace Forest, south of the Gehenna Valley, near the Government House where the United Nations was located. The high priest before whom Jesus appeared just before his death was named Caiaphas (see Matthew 26:3,57; Luke 3:2; John 11:49; 18:13,14,24,28). Later both Simon Peter and John appeared before him in Jerusalem (Acts 4:6). Archaeologists have identified the site as the burial cave of the family of Caiaphas.

Capernaum Synagogue

When Jesus began his public ministry in Nazareth of Galilee at about 30 years of age and was rejected in the synagogue there (see Luke 3:23; 4:16-30), he went to Capernaum, a small village on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, where he apparently lived in the home of Simon Peter, one of his disciples (see Matthew 8:14; Mark 2:1), and taught in the synagogue (see Mark 1:21; 3:1; John 6:59). Archaeological excavations conducted in Capernaum have discovered the synagogue under the fourth/fifth century limestone structure still standing there. Portions of the floor and walls of the first century synagogue were found beneath the floor of this later building.

Acts 17:6 and Politarchs in Thessalonica

The credibility of the Bible has been challenged for many years by critics who have insisted that Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, erroneously used the Greek term Politarch in referring to the officials before whom Christians associated with the apostle Paul were taken in the city of Thessalonica (see Acts 17:6). It has been adamantly asserted that no such office existed at that time. However, an inscription containing this term has been found in that city and is now displayed in the British Museum. The inscription, which was attached to a first century arch on Egnatia Street, begins “In the time of the Politarchs…” Thirty-five inscriptions have now been discovered which contain this term; nineteen of them come from Thessalonica, and at least three date to the first century A.D. These inscriptions prove that the office of politarchs existed in Thessalonica in the time of the New Testament and that the Bible is accurate in its use of the term.

Click here for the full article.

PART TWO 

By Daniel Dyke, M.Th., and Hugh Henry, Ph.D.

Our last article reviewed uses of the words kabash (“subdue”) and radah (“rule”) in the Old Testament beyond Genesis 1. In all cases, they imply strong control exerted in the face of fierce resistance—or potential resistance. This helps us understand the true meaning of God’s instructions to man after his creation:

“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over … every living thing” (emphasis added).

Such commands cannot refer to the benign stewardship characteristic of the popular “blissful Nirvana” interpretation of the world before the fall. A command to subdue the earth and to rule over other living things implies conquest and subjugation of creation, as in: defeating and/or brutally ruling a strong enemy; subjugating another into slavery and/or bending slaves to a master’s will; fighting humanity’s sinful nature, and so on. By comparison, these are not the instructions given to a new CEO of a smoothly running company. These are the kind of instructions given to a CEO who must shake up an inefficient but potentially profitable company. God is commanding humans to confront and control a “very good” creation that needs organization and management.

The implication of violence and brutality in kabash and radah does not suggest humans should destroy creation—as some new CEOs will destroy a company to “save” it. The point is that creation will resist humanity’s management like a strong army or like a free man resisting enslavement. Humans are to carry out God’s goal of improving a creation that is already “very good” (tob meod). Creation can only realize its full potential through management by humankind.

Therefore, a logical interpretation of Genesis 1:28 is that men and women are formed in the image of God to continue God’s work of bringing order out of chaos. God gives them the power and ability to complete His work by channeling and directing creation toward maximum productivity. In this way, humans fulfill their destiny as God’s image-bearers. Yet, the task is not easy. God challenges men and women, as a father challenges his children, in order to mature them.

God’s instructions to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” do not only mean to reproduce. Humans are to make God’s creation more fruitful by cultivating the soil, domesticating animals, etc.

It is indisputable that fallen humanity has abused its role as steward of God’s creation; that is called sin. But human sinfulness does not detract from the central responsibility of completing creation by making it more productive. Edible fruits and berries grow on their own, but do so in much greater quantity and quality when they are cultivated. Anything cultivated and harvested becomes plentiful; and this includes both plants and creatures.

What changed with the fall? What was different after God “cursed” the ground with “thorns and thistles,” and man was doomed to procure food “by the sweat of your face”?¹ The options are:

1. A radical system change, including the death of vertebrate animals for the first time (necessitating the transformation of certain creatures into carnivores, which includes modifications to their mouths, digestive systems, and instincts). This is the view taken by many young-earth creationists, as represented by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati in part one of this series.
2. A minor system change, something less than a radical modification of certain creatures into carnivores, but perhaps a hardening of the soil and allowing “thorns and thistles” to grow.
3. A change of venue by removing Adam from a garden with perfect growing conditions to something more typical of the world today.
4. An internal change in man, such that work which was fun or easy before becomes arduous or difficult. This could be a physical and/or mental modification.
5. A combination of two or more of the above.

By using the words kabash and radah in Genesis 1:28, Moses, the likely author, strongly implies that creation was harsh in the beginning. Conditions before the fall did not reflect the popular perception of the “blissful Nirvana.” Hence, the radical system change suggested in the first option seems unlikely.

It is much more likely that the change in conditions after the fall principally represented a change in degree, as suggested by options 2-5. There is substantial evidence for this position. For example, God’s curse on Eve after the fall was “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you shall bring forth children” (emphasis added). A simplistic translation of the Hebrew even reads: “in pain I shall increase your pain.” God does not introduce pain after the fall. Pain existed before the fall; God merely increases it!

The same holds true for God’s warning to Adam about the forbidden fruit: “in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” The Hebrew mot tamut reads “to die you will die,” which implies that Adam is probably familiar with the concept of death.

What is the degree of change after the fall? Which of the options 2-5 is more likely? An important clue is found in the work God tells man to perform before and after the fall. Before the fall, man is to “cultivate the ground”; after the fall, his task is still to “cultivate the ground”. The same Hebrew word, abad, is used in both cases. However, the instruction from before the fall is subtly different from after the fall. (The implications of this difference will be addressed in a subsequent paper.)

Nevertheless, Adam and Eve before the fall were not lounging about eating grapes and drinking nectar like Greek deities, as the “blissful Nirvana” view suggests. Adam had to put out effort for his food. Without humans, the world could be an overgrown jungle, where fast-growing, unfruitful vines crowd out food-producing plants (as the kudzu vine does in the American southeast if not aggressively controlled).

At the very least, the world could not fulfill its potential without human beings. This point is emphasized by the unambiguous statement in Genesis 2 that before humanity, there was “no shrub of the [cultivated] field” and “no plant of the [cultivated] field” (also using abad). One of the reasons for this was the absence of humans to do the cultivating. Without humans, herds of sheep provided easy prey to “a lion or a bear” and other predators. By contrast, with people in control, fruitful vineyards are carefully pruned to maximize production and herds of sheep are led “beside still waters” by shepherds prepared to kill their predators.

Humans sinned at the fall and, therefore, “creation groans” due to mismanagement. But the fall did not usher in a radical system change to God’s creation, introducing conditions such as decay and the death of vertebrate animals where there were none before. Harsh conditions were part of creation in the beginning. Indeed, men and women were created to manage and control those conditions.

Endnotes:

1. Genesis 3:17-19 (NASB)

About the Authors

Daniel Dyke received his Master of Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary 1981 and currently serves as Professor of Old Testament at Cincinnati Christian University in Cincinnati, OH.

Hugh Henry received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Virginia in 1971, retired after 26 years at Varian Medical Systems, and currently serves as Lecturer in Physics at Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, KY.

Posted at Reasons.org

By Fazale Rana, Ph.D.

It never ceases to amaze me what turns up when I clean out our garage: forgotten stuff that brings back memories, and occasionally, old things that still have value.

And this is exactly what some former students and associates of the late origin-of-life researcher Stanley Miller discovered when they cleaned out his lab after his death. Old vials from leftover experiments that bring back memories of his famous spark-discharge experiment may shed valuable new light on how prebiotic materials could have formed on the early Earth.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

Miller’s work, conducted in the early 1950s, was the first experimental validation of the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. Based on the principles of chemical evolution, this model was one of the first scientific theories to describe a mechanistic pathway between simple chemical compounds and life.

To test this hypothesis Miller filled the confines of a carefully assembled glass apparatus with methane, ammonia, and hydrogen after diligently excluding oxygen from the system. At that time, scientists thought the gases Miller used in his experiment existed in early Earth’s atmosphere. A boiling flask of water connected to the glassware introduced water vapor into the headspace and simulated early Earth’s oceans. Miller passed a continuous electric discharge through the gas mix to simulate lightning. The results showed that the primitive atmosphere of the early Earth could, in principle, generate amino acids, one of the key building blocks of life.

Status of the Miller-Urey Experiment

Today, the Miller-Urey experiment is generally considered to be irrelevant to the origin-of-life question. Current understanding of the composition of early Earth’s atmosphere differs significantly from the thinking of the 1950s. Most planetary scientists now believe the Earth’s primeval atmosphere consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. Laboratory experiments indicate that this gas mixture is incapable of yielding organic materials in Miller-Urey-type experiments.

In May 2003 origin-of-life researchers Jeffrey Bada and Antonio Lazcano, long-time associates of Miller, wrote an essay for Science commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Miller’s initial results. They pointed out that the Miller-Urey experiment has historical significance, but not scientific importance in contemporary origin-of-life thought. Bada and Lazcano wrote:

Is the “prebiotic soup” theory a reasonable explanation for the emergence of life? Contemporary geoscientists tend to doubt that the primitive atmosphere had the highly reducing composition used by Miller in 1953.

In his book Biogenesis, origin-of-life researcher Noam Lahav passes similar judgment:

The prebiotic conditions assumed by Miller and Urey were essentially those of a reducing atmosphere. Under slightly reducing conditions, the Miller-Urey reaction does not produce amino acids, nor does it produce the chemicals that may serve as the predecessors of other important biopolymer building blocks. Thus, by challenging the assumption of a reducing atmosphere, we challenge the very existence of the “prebiotic soup,” with its richness of biologically important organic compounds.

Revived Interest in Miller’s Experiment

By sifting through the items left behind in Stanley Miller’s laboratory, his former students and associates uncovered vials of material from his original experiments that they think gives new importance to the Miller-Urey experiment.

Miller actually performed three versions of the spark-discharge experiment. All three permutations yielded amino acids and other organic compounds. Miller decided to focus his efforts, however, on the version that now appears in biology textbooks because he thought that it most closely modeled the atmosphere of early Earth.

Still, Miller held on to cartons of vials containing materials from the other two variations of the spark-discharge experiment along with notebooks that carefully documented the experimental work he performed.

After stumbling upon the vials and corresponding notebooks, Miller’s colleagues decided to re-analyze their contents using state-of-the-art analytical methods not available to Miller fifty years ago.

To their surprise, Miller’s associates discovered that the “textbook” version of the Miller-Urey experiment wasn’t the most successful. The most productive synthesis was one that introduced water into the headspace as a fine mist using an aspirator. This particular experimental rig produced more amino acids with a greater chemical diversity than the textbook experiment.

The design of this forgotten experiment intrigued Miller’s collaborators because it models volcanic emissions that could have occurred on early Earth. Accordingly, volcanic lightning would have served as the energy source that generated prebiotic compounds as it passed through volcanic gases and steam—assuming that the volcanic emissions on early Earth consisted of reducing gases.

Miller’s cohorts now argue that this re-discovery gives new relevance to Miller’s old experiment. Perhaps the sources of prebiotic materials on early Earth were volcanic emissions, not chemical reactions taking place in the atmosphere.

Were Volcanoes the Source of Prebiotic Compounds?

The proposal by Miller’s former associates is not the first time that origin-of-life researchers have appealed to volcanoes as the source of prebiotic compounds. As Hugh Ross and I describe in our book Origins of Life, other scientists have suggested this possibility.

Based on the chemical composition of volcanic emissions today, there doesn’t seem to be much hope that prebiotic materials could form in this environment. The gases spewing from volcanoes today consist primarily of water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. This is a highly oxidizing mixture of gases that will not generate prebiotic materials in laboratory simulation experiments like the ones that Miller performed.

But were the gaseous emissions of volcanoes on early Earth different? Did they consist of gases like the ones used by Miller in his spark-discharge experiments? Research conducted a few years ago indicates the opposite. It appears as if the gaseous emissions of volcanoes 3.9 billion years ago were identical to the emissions today. This result means that the conditions of Miller’s experiment were not relevant for either the atmosphere of the early Earth or volcanic environments at that time.

Miller’s work and his status as a scientist remain fixed in a prominent place in the history of science. However, perhaps it’s best that Miller’s vials are removed from the lab once and for all, and sent to a museum for posterity.

Posted at Reasons.org

By William Lane Craig, Ph.D. 

Back in the mid-1960’s Time magazine ran a cover story for which the magazine’s cover was completely black, except for three words emblazoned against the dark background in bright, red letters: “IS GOD DEAD?” The article described the then current “Death-of-God” movement in American theology. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it seemed that the news of God’s death was premature. At the same time that theologians were writing God’s obituary, philosophers were re-discovering His vitality. Just a few years after its “Death-of-God” issue, Time carried a story with a similar red on black cover, only this time the title read, “Is God Coming Back to Life?” Indeed, so it must have seemed to those theological morticians of the sixties. During the 1970’s interest in philosophy of religion continued to grow. By 1980, Time found itself running a major story entitled, “Modernizing the Case for God,” which described the contemporary movement among philosophers of religion to refurbish the traditional arguments for God’s existence. Time marveled,

In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.[1]

According to the article, the noted American philosopher Roderick Chisholm believes that the reason that atheism was so influential a generation ago is that the brightest philosophers were atheists; but, he says, today many of the brightest philosophers are theists, and they are using a tough-minded intellectualism in defense of that theism.

This volume of Truth attempts to bring to its readers some of those defenses of theism from several of its brightest minds as well as critiques from some of theism’s leading detractors. In this Introduction, I hope to assist the reader by explaining a bit of the debate in which the various contributions find their context and by offering some commentary of my own on a few of the contributions themselves.

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