Podcasts

‘Our view is that Adam made a good decision’, a Mormon replied when I asked him about Adam and Eve partaking of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. My Mormon friend also told me that he believed that Adolf Hitler would be saved along with Mother Teresa. When interacting with Mormons, Christians would do well to focus on the Fall, since it is foundational to the Gospel.

“Archaeology team finds 9,000-year-old artifacts in NewBo [Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA] neighborhood” declares an article from a recent edition of The Gazette. According to the Bible, there was no death or bloodshed of nephesh chayyāh life before Adam and Eve sinned. But what of claims of civilizations that, according to the biblical timeline, would pre-date the Flood?

Adorning the walls of Krakow Castle, Poland, is a magnificent display of royal tapestries from the 16th century. Within the eight pieces telling the story of the Flood are two tapestries showing the animals going onto and coming off Noah’s Ark. Many of them are easily recognizable as good depictions of their living counterparts today: lions, camels, cows, and various types of birds. But there are also animals that look distinctly like dragons. Why would the tapestries’ designer have included dragons going onto Noah’s Ark?

It was the foundational account of the Creation (which New Testament writers attribute to Jesus (e.g. John 1:1–3; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2), the subsequent Fall of Adam, with the entrance of sin and death into the human race, which explains the reason for a substitutionary atonement for sin. Jesus explained why He had to die. Similarly, we, too, should explain to people today not just that all need a Saviour, but why, and why He had to die for us—foundational concepts established in Genesis.

A novel ‘giant virus’ has recently been discovered in a Japanese hot spring. Medusavirus as it is called has several very interesting genetic features. It is still a question as to what Medusavirus is exactly. All we know is that we have a new species of NCLDV, distinct from all other NCLDV species, implying its special creation. Genetics again vindicates the Bible.

Secular biologists, who claim that the common ancestor of today’s two sloth genera lived 35–40 million years ago, admit the evolutionary history of the two living sloth groups is not well known. Interestingly, though, they believe that despite the extensive similarities between the two genera, each is much more closely related to some of the extinct ground-dwelling sloths than to the other living sloth genus. They are forced to consider living sloths as stunning examples of ‘parallel evolution’—repeat evolution of similar traits, by sheer chance, in multiple lineages.

Even the simplest living creatures need topoisomerases before they can read their DNA instructions to make proteins or pass them on to their offspring. These are complex, well designed machines that cut, move, then reconnect the DNA. Since reproduction is impossible without them, Darwinian evolution—random mutation + natural selection—could not have produced the first topoisomerases.

Unlike evolutionists who have an incentive to prove that dinosaurs evolved into birds, creationists have no problems with God creating dinosaurs with feathers. We just do not believe the evidence currently leads us towards such a conclusion. Besides, birds have feathers all over their body, yet birds that fly only have quill knobs on certain parts of their wings, and these are the parts where particular feathers need to be strongly attached-on for flight. But dromaeosaurs had small arms and did not fly, so why should we interpret their tiny bumps as quill knobs?

Originalism is a legal philosophy that the words in documents and especially the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted as they were understood at the time they were written by those that framed and ratified the Constitution and its various amendments. Many evangelicals have embraced a non-originalist approach to Scripture. It is little wonder, then, that like the retreating morality of the Western world since becoming unglued from its biblical worldview, the church also finds itself on foundations of quicksand as it tries to defend Christian values.

Recently CBC News released a story about a device made between 150 bc and 100 bc that was discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. So, while there may not have been laptop computers on the Ark, this new find, for those without the veil of evolutionary thinking and ‘millions of years’ clouding their thoughts, highlights that the ancients were in no way more ‘primitive’ or less intelligent than we are today.

Accepted theories of evolutionary science say our Earth and our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago. On the other hand, the Bible implies Earth is only several thousand years old. Biblically, the Earth and the universe are roughly 6,000 years old. As the exploration of our solar system continues, more and more evidence is discovered that points to a young solar system, consistent with the time scale recorded in the Bible.

Leonardo Da Vinci was well known for his contributions to science, history, engineering, architecture, drawing and especially painting, with his most famous painting being the Mona Lisa. One of Leonardo’s drawings is causing a stir. Entitled ‘Cats, lions, and a dragon, drawn circa 1517–18’, you may begin to guess what the fuss is about.

Noah’s Flood matters. As the Church watches cultural collapse, a few Christians have begun to understand how pivotal Noah’s Flood was to this process and have begun trying to recover its historical reality to counter the forces of contemporary chaos. As we look at the implications of its importance, we see how it has become one of the most powerful historical narratives in human history.

The discovery of two “remarkably complete” flowers beautifully preserved in amber has excited experts. “These flowers looked like they had just fallen from a tree,” said Professor Poinar. When these amber fossils are considered in tandem with the many others in the scientific literature showing equally exquisite preservation, a ‘big picture’ emerges that is absolutely ‘deadly’ to evolutionary chronology and long-age ideas of amber fossil formation.

“Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.” However, this is problematic because the chimp genome was not built from scratch. But even with this evolutionary bias, the actual differences are much bigger than 1%.

Even though the Bible makes it clear that all people are descended from Adam and Eve (so they must be very closely related), there are still misconceptions among some Christians surrounding ‘race’. Any concern has no basis in either science or the Bible. Science has finally caught up with God’s Word in affirming how very closely related we all are at the genetic level.