All posts tagged General Thoughts

My Fake Fireplace

by Alpha Omega Institute on February 6, 2013 in Nuttings from the Front with No comments

 

This winter, I got an electric fireplace. It operates as a “fake fire-light show” merely for ambience, but also has a great infra-red heater when that portion is turned on.

I was talking with my son as I took the traditional pose of backing up to the fire and warming myself by fake flames. The heating unit was turned off. However, even though there was no heat, my mind was trying to tell me there was. After all, past experience has taught me that fireplaces and campfires produce heat. I laughed at the moment of living in unreality as I realized what I was doing. My son was also about to say that I should stand back from it as I was blocking the heat.

Oh, how our minds play tricks on us.  My 3 year old grandson, Samuel, gave us another example of that this morning. He came out dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. He said he was tired of winter and liked summer better. So maybe if he wore this it would make it be summer.  I like that and wished it would work, as I also prefer warm over cold.

All this is to say that some evolutionists believe in evolution in order to get around the reality that there is a Creator God. Their reasoning is frequently in contradiction to the obvious evidence for Creation. For instance, the chance of evolving a cell by accident is worse than producing a jet airplane by a tornado sweeping through a junkyard. Also, evolutionists should weigh carefully just how nothing, or no information, could produce all of the encyclopedic and precise information contained in our DNA. It is not reality, but If you don’t really think about it, you can trick you brain into believing it was possible by using “if- maybe” arguments. If you can do that without flinching, then make sure you buy an electric fireplace. Perhaps you can even turn off your furnace and the heating element and save a lot of money on fuel bills. Then as you bask in the fake “flames” and conjure up just so-so evolutionary arguments, make sure you put on shorts and a T-Shirt.

 

Dave Nutting

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Response to a Common Argument

by Alpha Omega Institute on February 1, 2013 in Nuttings from the Front with 1 Comment

 

University professors, who should really know better, state that “evolution is everywhere,” referring to minor changes in coloration, nose size in family members, or whatever change you might notice. So how should one answer that line of reasoning?

First of all, it is appropriate to point out that you have to start with something to get any changes at all. So, how do we get the genetic pool in the first place that spells out coloration, nose size, etc. It is an amazing faith to believe that “no” genetic information existed, and suddenly, out of that “nothing,” without any higher power, all of the genetic information arose which would fill billions of encyclopedias.

Secondly, those who hold to the argument that minor changes or “micro” evolution surely leads to major changes or (what used to be called) macro-evolution must have a great deal of faith in time, and chance. Even many evolutionists (including a major conference of several hundred) have concluded that micro-evolution does not necessarily translate into macro-evolution.

The type of minor changes usually presented to us as evidence of evolution are almost always a recombination of genetic information that is already present in the originally created genetic pool.

Recombination of what is already present will never explain the origin of genetic information in the first place. You have to start with something!

Let me explain it another way. Think about taking the 5 colors of paint that artists usually start with: black, white, red, yellow and blue. By mixing black or white with any one of the other colors, or by mixing the other colors together with varying amounts of each, you can get an endless variety of colors and shades. You might say you “evolved” a new color, but it is only a combination of what was there originally. If you don’t have all of the basic colors, it certainly limits the potential. For example, if all you had were black, white, and blue, all you would get are shades of blue.

This is the problem with macro-evolution. Micro-evolution uses the colors of ink that are available to choose from; macro must get new basic colors. In fact, macro-evolution starts with nothing and somehow, mysteriously all the basic colors appear (of course, with the magic evolutionary wand of time and accidents). If yellow and red pigments are not present, you only get shades of blue. Try as you like, you can’t get any shades of yellow or red, so evolutionists will be left singing the blues. You might assume that some lucky “mutations” produced yellow and red colors from black, white, or blue, but that is only an assumption.

To sum it up, macro-evolution starts with no colors and ends up with every color. This is supposed to happen by micro-evolution. However, micro-evolution has to have something there to begin with to even get minor variations. Since you can’t get something from nothing, evolution is shot down.

 

Dave Nutting

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Does Yom Convey a 24 Hour Day in the Creation Account?

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 30, 2013 in Johnsons from the Front with No comments

 

In the Bible, the Hebrew word for day is Yom. By looking up the word yom in a concordance you will see that it can have a variety of meanings:  a period of light as contrasted to night, a 24-hour period, time, a specific point of time, or a year.1

As I shared in my last blog (Compromising the Word of God) the meaning of the word yom or “day” is understood by its context. In the Genesis account of creation, God gave us parameters by defining the word day with ‘evening and morning.’  “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Gen. 1:5) [Emphasis added]. Every day of creation thereafter – ending with, “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” (v. 31) – always use the term “evening and morning.”  Also note that the Genesis creation account always uses a number with the word “day.” (Genesis 1: 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31)

Outside Genesis 1, yom is used with a number 359 times, and each time it means an ordinary day.

Outside Genesis 1, yom is used with the word “evening” or “morning” 23 times, and each time it means an ordinary day.

“Evening” and “morning” appear in association, but without yom, 38 times, and each time it means an ordinary day.

Outside of Genesis 1, “night” is used with yom 53 times, and each time it means an ordinary day. Even the usage of the word “light” with yom in this passage determines the meaning as ordinary day.2

The plural of yom can be used to communicate a longer time period, such as “… all the days of Noah.” (Gen. 9:29) However, the plural of yom does not appear in the Genesis 1 creation account. Also, there are words in biblical Hebrew (such as olam or qedem) that could have been used to convey long periods of time, or indefinite time3 … however; none of these words are used in the creation account.

Dr. James Barr (Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University), a skeptic on the historicity of Genesis, had this to say: “So far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Gen. 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience …” 4

When we look at how the word yom is used in the creation account and its use outside of Genesis 1, it seems clear to me that the days God was describing were literal 24 hour days.

 

Lanny Johnson

1.  Online Bible Edition, Version 4.08.04, Mar. 20, 2011, 10.13, Copyright ©1987-2011, Larry Pierce, 11 Holmwood St., Winterbourne, Ontario, Canada, NOB2VO, Archaeology, Creationism and Science Archaeology, Creation, The New Answers Book, Could God Really Have Created Everything in Six Days?, Ken Ham.

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ibid.

4.  Ibid.

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Evolution and a Matter of Degrees

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 25, 2013 in Nuttings from the Front with No comments

 

Brrrr… It’s cold here. So far this year, it warmed up once above 30 °F.  One month ago, Mary Jo & I stepped onto an airplane in Mexico saying goodbye to temperatures in the 80’s. About 5 hours later, we landed at home and immediately began a month of saying, “Brrrrrrrr, it’s cold!”

From highs of 85 down to a low of -5 is huge. But it’s a matter of degrees! Dave Harper, the president of our Board, came down recently for our last Board meeting.  The temp was 15 degrees and heading downward. Dave had the gall to say how balmy the temperature was and that it felt like spring time. OK, he lives in Pinedale, Wyoming.  Someone told me the coldest winter they ever experienced was the summer they spent in Pinedale. Yep, it’s a matter of degrees and what you get used to.

One morning in Mexico it was about 70 degrees — to me, quite balmy. However, to the family with the little boy all bundled up in a full snowsuit, 70 felt cold. I thought that family was ready to enter a snowmobile race in the arctic the way they were bundled.

Someone recently posted on Facebook  that it was  a -20 degrees. Wow!  It didn’t seem that cold to me. Maybe, I was starting to get used to cold again. Then I realized  they meant -20 Celcius,  not Fahrenheit. A -20°C is actually -4°F.  Still too cold, but at least I felt warmer. Perhaps, I should consider reporting temperatures in degrees Kelvin, which refers to how many degrees it is above absolute zero. So a  -4°F would be 253°K. It is still the same actual temperature, but I sure could deceive myself into feeling much warmer. In fact, I might even grab my swimsuit to sunbathe in a snow drift! Defining terms is really important.

All of this relates to the evolution debate. We have to define our terms.  Students are taught that evolution is merely change. They even become comfortable with believing that minor degrees of change is actually evolution (such as color variation in moths). In reality, this is nothing more than simple genetic variation in a created kind (such as big dogs and little dogs). We point this out to students who are hot about evolution. It is a matter of the degree of change and type of change, rather than merely change that is important. You might deceive yourself into thinking it is evolution, but minor variation certainly does not explain the broader degree of evolution – how goo changes into you by way of the zoo.

 

Dave Nutting

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Compromising the Word of God

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 22, 2013 in Johnsons from the Front with No comments

 

In my last blog I showed that to understand all the different meanings of the word UP you needed to know the context, which is derived by the word or words before the word UP. If you take a word out of context, it will have a different meaning.

In the Bible, the Hebrew word for day is Yom. In the creation account, Yom has been taken out of context by those believing that those days are not literal 24 hr. periods.

In the Genesis account of creation it says “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Gen. 1:5) [Emphasis added]. Every day of creation week thereafter – always ends with the term “evening and morning.”

I have worked with children and adults for over 20 years, and one of the questions I have asked many of them is, “What is a day?” The three main responses to this question that I hear repeatedly are: “A period of dark and light”, “Morning and night” or “24 hours”. Notice that God gave us parameters (or context) by defining the word day with “evening & morning” … just as we describe a day today – 24 hours.

One of the great problems with adhering to the idea that each of these days were long periods of time – say a thousand or even millions of years – is what do you do with the vast amount of time of dark and vast amount of light that would make up one day? How would the plants that God created on day 3 of creation survive 500 years of darkness (assuming your day is 1000 years) without the Sun, which was not created until day number 4?

To get around this problem (and scripture I might add), progressive creationist Hugh Ross states that the sun, moon and stars were not created on the fourth “day” of Creation. He explains that most of the stars existed long before earth’s creation; approximately 10-15 billion years of stellar evolution occurred prior to the Creation Week.1 Therefore he not only contradicts the days of creation account but also Exodus 20:11, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them…”.

“Dr. Ross claims that Genesis 1 describes Creation from the point of view of one standing on the earth; and that the sun, moon and stars did not become visible until the fourth day. He believes the stars were not created instantaneously; rather, they evolved by the physical laws of nature put into place by God.

‘This entire process of stellar evolution is by natural process alone. We do not have to invoke Divine intervention at any stage in the history of the life-cycle of the stars that we observe.’- Hugh Ross” 2 [Emphasis’ added] [Notice that he takes God out of the picture of Creation!]

“According to Hugh Ross, the Creation week has taken billions of years. He claims that ‘…each of God’s creation days is several hundred million years long.’ He says earth was created about 4.6 billion years ago, and that some (or all) of the creation days partially overlapped. …” 3

When you begin to take the words of God out of context, you compromise His authority and begin to stand on the words of man … fallible man.

 

Lanny Johnson

  1. https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c014.html
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid

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One man’s junk is another man’s treasure!

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 18, 2013 in Stepaneks from the Front with 1 Comment

 

Junk DNA, vestigial DNA, and leftover DNA from our animal ancestors are evidence for evolution… right?  On the contrary!  God doesn’t make junk!  Everything has a function, even though it has been corrupted by Adam’s fall.

Continued research on Junk DNA reveals the complexity of our bodies.  Our bodies are composed of about 100,000 different proteins, but there are only about 20,000 protein-coding gene regions.  How can this be? This is where the Junk DNA comes in.  Both exons (protein coding DNA) and introns (non-coding DNA) work together to make the extra transcripts needed to code all the body’s additional proteins, by splicing and sometimes reassembling RNA.

A quote from the article: “Wang further observes that splicing ‘is a tightly regulated process, and a great number of human diseases are caused by the ‘misregulation’ of splicing in which the gene was not cut and pasted correctly.’ This implies that important protein products are produced by splicing, meaning that the splicing code plays an important functional role in cells.”

No random chance and accident in your genetics!  Everything is designed and planned, but it has been corrupted and this corruption sometimes causes disease and death.  Sounds like I have heard this before.  We had a perfect creation and then came corruption.

 

Rich Stepanek

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Magic-Wand of Naturalism

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 17, 2013 in Nuttings from the Front with No comments

 

I just read an article about a young man who is campaigning to make sure all schools, including private and Christian schools, that receive any state money such as vouchers, would not be allowed to include creation in science. This person was arguing that only evolution fits the criteria of science: observable, naturalistic, testable, falsifiable, and expandable… which he thinks “is everything that creationism is not.”

Notice that he added and subtracted from the classical criteria of science, which is: Science is observable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable.

Naturalistic is added: Just by adding that word to a definition of science, he has already defined creation, intelligent design, or anything except atheism, totally out of science. This is a frequent ploy to try to discredit our position and everything we say. Since we are not “naturalistic,” we can’t be scientists and must have a religious bias. That redefinition of science has mainly surfaced in the last 30 years. Today it is regularly used as a bludgeon to keep creation and intelligent design out of the science classroom.

Repeatable is left out. Evidently he is well aware that evolution is not repeatable (but neither is creation), so he left that out. Why? We can’t wait millions of years to see evolution repeat itself.

For the same reason and since no one was around to see it happen, neither cell-man evolution or creation is observable, testable, or even falsifiable.

Expandable is added. I find that interesting since it is not usually mentioned as an earmark of science. However, it is very fitting for evolution since a new fix-it-patch has to be applied to evolutionary theory frequently as new anti-evolution data surfaces. This has been especially true with much of the latest data on the genome project causing evolutionists to scramble faster than someone dodging bullets in a war zone. (See DiscoverCreation.org for those articles.)

By the way, I suggest that all four of the classical tests for science certainly “is everything that evolution is not.”  “Naturalistic” and “expandable” are the only ones he listed that would qualify for what evolution “is” all about. However, even “expandable” would not often be naturalistic, because it frequently takes a “magic wand” to explain the anti-evolution data away.

 

Dave Nutting

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The Context of a Word

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 16, 2013 in Johnsons from the Front with No comments

 

Below is something I found interesting on the internet years ago. Please read the conclusion at the end to see the point of my sharing this on a blog.

 

This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is ‘UP.’  It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].

It’s easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and fix UP the old car.

At other times this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing:  A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.  We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don’t give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaks UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on & on, but I’ll wrap it UP, for now  ……..my time is UP! NowI’ll shut UP about the word UP.

 

Conclusion: As I read this, I realized that to understand all the different meanings of the word UP I had to know the context, which was derived by the word or words before or after the word UP. If you take a word out of context it will have a different meaning.

So why am I making this point? In the Bible the Hebrew word for day is Yom. In the creation account, Yom has been taken out of context by those believing that those days are not literal 24 hr. periods. I will address the problems doing this in my next blog.

 

Lanny Johnson

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Water, Water Everywhere!

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 15, 2013 in Stepaneks from the Front with No comments

 

Water, water everywhere!  New discovery - 100 times more water on the moon than originally thought.  Ice discovered on Mercury.  Comets are made up of water and dirt, and they have layers like an onion… could these layers be sedimentary layers?  Scientists find evidence of a huge deluge on Mars.  Water shooting out of a star! Wow!

And where did all the water on the earth come from when the earth started out as a molten blob of rock?  Some say from comets, but I think the evidence tells us otherwise.

I find all this information interesting in the light of Genesis.  What does Genesis have to do with water?   As I study Genesis chapter one, it seems God made everything out of water.  The earth in Genesis 1:1, 2 was without form and so I do not think God is talking about the earth we inhabit today, because the earth we live on currently has form.  Also in Genesis 1:2, God mentions water and then out of this water He makes the earth we inhabit… along with the stars, planets, moons, etc.  So it is no surprise that scientists find water, water, everywhere!

 

Rich Stepanek

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The Horseshoe Crab – a “Living Fossil”

by Alpha Omega Institute on January 11, 2013 in Johnsons from the Front with No comments

 

Recently while walking along a Florida beach on the Gulf of Mexico, I found the remains of several horseshoe crabs. I was quite excited, because just a week before I had been able to observe live horseshoe crabs at the Florida Aquarium in Tampa. Here on the beach I had an opportunity to actually hold and study them.

The outer body of the horseshoe crab consists of a hard shell in three sections. The front section protects the soft parts on the underside – the eyes (2 primary compound eyes, and 7 secondary “simple eyes”, 2 of which are on the underside), legs (5 pair used for walking, swimming or moving food into the mouth), pincers, mouth, brain, and heart. The middle section is hinged to the front section and protects the gills and reproductive organs. The third section is the long, straight, rigid tail it uses to flip itself over when turned upside down.

Horseshoe Crab Trivia:

  • It is not a “true crab” (it’s not a crustacean), but an arthropod and is classified with scorpions, spiders, and extinct trilobites.
  • Although they scurry around on the shallow ocean floor, they swim upside down, inclined at about 30° to the horizontal.
  • They find their food (worms, mollusks, crustaceans and small fish) on the soft and sandy or muddy bottom.
  • Rather than hemoglobin in their blood, they have hemocyanin, which contains copper, making their blood blue in color.
  • Their blood contains a protein used to screen drugs and vaccines for contaminants.

 

Evolutionary scientists call the horseshoe crab a “living fossil” because fossils of the horseshoe crab (supposedly 450 million years old) have been found that are identical to the living horseshoe crab we find today. Hmmm?  Supposedly millions upon millions of years of mutations and natural selection and yet there is no evidence for evolutionary change in this critter.

The horseshoe crab is not a unique “living fossil”. We also find hundreds of other animals and plants that have stayed the same over supposed millions of years. A few examples are sharks, crinoids, Wollemi pine trees, ginkgo trees, tuataras, crocodiles, alligators, coelocanth fish, squids, shrimp, chambered nautiloids, brachiopods, clams and dragonflies.

The evidence of “living fossils” shows very little to no change in these living creatures. “Living fossils” make no sense for the evolutionary model or the long ages required for evolution.

 

Lanny Johnson

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