I picked up a used DVD lately called “Icons of Evolution,” which gives the story of how a high school teacher was barred from teaching any supplemental materials (from secular sources) which in any way cast doubt on evolution. This included telling students how there are long-dispelled myths created to support evolution which are still taught today, such as deceptive drawings of fetal development of different species that were deliberately created to suggest common ancestry.
Something else that was particularly interesting, too, is that they challenge the idea that bacterial “evolution” supports macroevolution. They say that drug-resistant bacteria are actually less fit (referred to as fitness cost, I believe) and as soon as the original bacteria is reintroduced, they quickly die off. Their genetic mutations are not improvements.
In the first sentence we find...
Genesis 1
1 In the beginning ELoHIM created the heavens and the earth.
The total numeration of Elohim, or Aleim ALHIM, being 1 + 30 + 5 + 10 + 600; or avoiding the use of final Mem, we get 1 + 30 + 5 + 10 + 40; neglecting the tens 1 + 3 + 5 + 1 + 4, and placing these figures in a circle, we get the sequence 3.1415, notable as the value of pi, or the relation of a diameter to circumference of every circle. Elohim is both a singular and a plural word.
Numbers, Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtues
http://sacred-texts.com/eso/nop/index.htm
Note: occult simply means 'hidden'
And Yeshua noted...
Luke 12:27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Well it turns out that...
...the Lilly has 100 times the DNA content of Man.
From: http://staff.um.edu.mt/acus1/4genfunction.htm
This will get you started...
Torah And Science Part 1
Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7AIUn8VcjI
Age of the universe see...
The Missing Link in the Debate
Isibiel Myrna Cohen
http://www.yashanet.com/library/missing_link.htm
Clip:
...In the Jewish Midrash, an expansion of the Talmud that clarifies historical and moral teachings, the Sages teach that the creation of the soul of Adam, and the six days of Genesis are separate events (Schroeder).
Still, how do six days of creation equal fifteen billion years? According to the calculations of the 13th century Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac of Acco, the universe is precisely 15,340,500,000 years old.
The calculation proceeds as follows:
According to the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a, " R. Kattina said: Six thousand years shall the world exist, and one [thousand, the seventh], it shall be desolate…". Ancient and medieval Kabbalists such as Nehunya ben HaKanah, in Sefer HaTemunah (written about 100 AD) and Rabbi Isaac of Acco understood these seven thousand years a running parallel to the Jewish Sabbatical cycle. In this cycle the fields are planted and harvested for six years and left unplanted in the seventh year.
It goes on a bit...there's lot's more...
But what does this show? That Chuck Queen reads public opinion polls, and is addled enough to believe that somehow they are revelatory of God's Truth? What other explanation of his motive could there be?
Is he arguing that Christian ministers and priests have to "get hip" and conform their teaching to the current myth du jour, in order for their pews to be filled?
Jeepers, that advice looks to me like it's completely "bass-ackwards."
The Christian Church has not survived and thrived for over two thousand years by cutting itself to the size of the currently prevailing public frenzies, which ever pass away....
Anyhoot, the evolution question is entirely at the root of the current confusion.
As a Christian, I believe in evolution. But that is not to say I believe in Darwin's evolution theory.
On the Genesis account, I see God's Creation as laid down "in the Beginning," according to His Word, the Logos, Son of God, as involving a process that unfolds in space and time. That is, a process that evolves — from a First, to a Last Cause.
The First Cause is God's intention with respect to His Creation, as instantiated according to the Word of the Beginning. [An interesting question: What is the qualitative difference between "Let there be Light!" and the big bang from the singularity that the physical sciences seem to have noticed recently?]
The Final Cause is God's purpose or goal for having created anything in the first place.
What evolves in-between the First Cause (divine Creation) and Final Cause (Judgment Day) is human existence and experience, largely of the natural world. "In-between," an on-going implicit cause governs the world of men and nature, precisely in a temporal, that is to say, an "evolutionary" process.
Evidently, Charles Darwin would have no truck with such ideas. His biological evolution theory has no concept of purposes or goals: There are no first or final causes. Evidently, there is only an "eternal universe" without beginning or end; it just rolls on forever; and everything that happens in it, in the biological realm especially, is merely serendipitous happenstance. Whatever "works" seems to be the criterion of "truth." (Assuming Darwinists care about such a thing.) But Darwin's theory does not address, let alone answer, the question: works for what "truth???" (Or even whose "truth?")
According to Darwin's theory, everything in the biological world is an accident that, by happenstance, might work out "in a positive direction" for a while. Long enough to breed (with luck) a next generation; who then will face the same sheer pointlessness of existence that their progenitors did.
"Natural Selection" by means of "Random Mutation" does not compass the identification of purpose in Nature. Yet every actual biological function is a cause seeking the completion of an effect necessary for the existence and maintenance of the total biological organism. This is purposive, goal-oriented behavior that screams of a final cause at work, mediated by at least some minimal form of intelligence.
In short, to me Darwin's theory is rude, crude and socially unacceptable. But worse, it is totally mindless — both in its methods, and in its presuppositions.
I would think it is the business of pastors especially to point out this sort of nonsense to their congregants, to remind them constantly that man's theories cannot be the measure of God or of what He wrought; if you want to understand what God wrought, best to start with Genesis.
Instead, so many of our modern pastors are rolling over and playing dead in the face of "elite opinion."
Such shepherds are unworthy of their flocks....
Well I'll put a sock in it for now.
Thanks for the great post, SeekandFind!
Not history lessons? Genesis says it is telling the story of earth up to the time of Joseph.
So, this "Baptist evangelical' pastor would have you believe that Genesis is not historical and not scientific but it is parabolic. In short, that means that creation isn't true, the fall isn't true, God's interventions in Genesis aren't true, and none of the details in Genesis are true.
He does say that evolution is true.
So, the creator who didn't create sent his son for a problem that didn't exist to a world that was humming along as happenstance came about.
Wonderful. /sarc
Lost me at that great science journal “Newsweek”.
www.dissentfromdarwin.org
Ridiculous. If a person came out for evolution he/she would cease to be an evangelical. Mutually exclusive.
FTFY
Evolution is science denying!
What a doofus. A minister in the church of great ignorance.
.
It’s time for scientists to prove the theory. That, after all, is what science is supposed to do.
In the last ten years or so science has become faith-based. You are a climate change believer or denier. You an evolution believer or denier.
It’s simple - science is about what you can prove. You come up with a theory, devise an experiment that proves the theory, perform the experiment, and evaluate the results.
If your experiment worked, you publish it so that other scientists in other places can perform the same experiment. Scientists conduct the experiment, record the results and analyze them.
If they get the same results you did, and they concur that it proves the theory, then you’ve made science.
The bar for evolution is simple. Provide one example of a species, say a frog, becoming a lizard.