Archive for September, 2010

World Mission Society Church of God

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Yesterday, I had two women approach my wife and me in our front yard to witness to us.  I was bringing in groceries, so my wife talked to them first.  When I was done, I joined in.  I thought they were Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses.  They were neither.  They from a church I had never heard of: World Mission Society Church of God.  They are worldwide church with a website dedicated to the USA.  Here is a link to their basic history.

From what I could gather from just talking to them, they believe in Mother God.  I could not believe their basis for it. First they showed me a verse
Genesis 1:26-27 - Then God said, “Let …

God’s Covenant was with Noah and Noah’s Descendants

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

 12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come:
So, having established that the flood was not global, that there was human life throughout the world, and that only Noah’s part was completely wiped out, some peculiarities in God’s statement suddenly become more clear.  God was not making a covenant with those alive in Egpyt, China, India, Australia, or the Americas.  He was making a covenant with Noah and his descendants, and the animals on the ark and their descendants.  However, in a practical sense, these descendants have spread throughout the world, and so I believe …

Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 4) - Conclusions and Amazement

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

 8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
I have been on these verses since August 31.  I have been trying to move on to verse 12, …

Scientific Dating of Sodom and Gomorrah Supports Flood Date

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

According to an article about Marie-Agnès Courty, she has found that soil samples mapping to 2200 BC correspond very well to when the Earth apparently experienced cometary debris.  According to the article, the affects would have been quite similar to the fire from Heaven that Biblically destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.  If the flood really did take place 2800 BC, then this time-frame could make a lot of sense.  It dates Abraham to around 2200 BC. 

Now many Christians have used the genealogies within scripture to derive a date for Abraham of around 2000 BC, but such dating is inexact, and does not account for potentially skipped generations.  Still, getting within 200 years seems pretty good to me.

What is cool about this is that it …

Dating the Flood… when Science Meets History

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

In Dating the Flood… May 10, 2807 B.C.?, I reported on possible scientific evidence for Noah’s flood.  Whatever else is true, it would seem that a meteor struck the Indian Ocean around 2800 BC, leaving what is known as the Burckle Crater.  But here’s the thing.  The size of the resulting tsunamis would have caused massive flooding up and down the entire Indian Gulf, including Africa, India, and the Middle East.  This would explain why so many traditions have stories of a flood.  Then, as Noah’s descendants met up with other populations throughout the world, it would seem the stories morphed to the point where some they had a suprising number of similarities, going beyond just the idea of a flood.  This would also …

Dating the Flood… May 10, 2807 B.C.?

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

One powerful piece of evidence that Christians who believe in an Old Earth would love to add their arsenal would be if contemporary science could tell us when the flood occurred, and if it could date the flood to around the time Young Earth Christians generally think.  Well, you can’t get more maintstream than the New York times, and they published an article in 2006, suggesting a meteor impacted Madagascar around 4,800 years ago.  According to the Holocene Impact Working Group,the discovered crater appears to have been created by a meteor large enough to have caused a 600 foot tsunamis up and down Africa and the Middle East.  This article does not appear to be written by Christians (could be …

Carbon Dating and the Earth’s Magnetic Field

Monday, September 6th, 2010

One of the unfortunate arguments that Young Earth scientists make is that carbon dating is not accurate much beyond 5,000 years.  One of their arguments is that the ratio of C14 to C12 is not constant, and that scientists know it is not but conveniently ignore it.  Here is one such article: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible.  In it, the author makes several reasonable-sounding statements, which taken together would seem to be an indictment of radio-carbon dating.

The author accurately explains the basics of carbon dating before going into his criticism of the method.  In making the criticism however, he gets into trouble almost right off the bat…
A critical assumption used in carbon-14 dating has to do with this ratio. It is assumed that the ratio of …

“The Grand Design” - Stephen Hawking - Some questions I hope he will answer

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

I just read an interesting article about Stephen Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design”, which goes on sale next week.  According to the article…
He wrote in A Brief History … “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”

In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.
Whereas Hawking previously believed that God simply did not have to interfere with the Big Bang, but had caused it, he now …

What Came First, Sin or Original Sin?

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

As I wrote about in Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 3) - The others were in God’s image, too, most of the world today is not descended form Adam.  They were created in God’s image long before Adam.  Adam however is the first person to have been given a command to believe and obey from God, and so the first person to actually fall from grace.  The rest of the world was given no law from God, and so had no law to fall from.  What does that say …

Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 3) - The others were in God’s image, too

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

As wrote in Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 2) - Who else was there?, it would seem that most of the modern world did not initially descend from Adam, let alone Noah.  My list was not exhaustive, but according to fossil records, the following major populations of people have been around since before Adam:

China - 67,000 years
India - 30,000 years
Africa - 200,000 years
Native Americans - 16,500 - 40,000 years
Australia - 40,000 years
Middle East - 60,000 years

Adam descended from the Middle Eastern population, after it left Africa.  He lived somewhere around 6,000 to 10,000 …