Smith Providence

God's Care
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925846-13-3
Verlag: Vivid Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

The first book of my series of 4 books, 'Evidence for Creation: a tour through some east-Australian Zoos', highlights the incredible design and beauty that we see in our animal life. This, I believe, is the most obvious evidence of an awesome Creative mind behind the nature of the world, as opposed to just chance and time forming what we see. Life shows such design that is best described by creation, and not by evolution. My second book, 'A Biblical Perspective of east Australian Geology', refutes the long ages paradigm presently taught in schools and universities as 'fact', and describes our east Australian rocks and landscapes in terms of the global, cataclysmic Flood ... which, obviously, really happened. The third book, 'Contemplating Infinity: A Mathematical Insight into God's Nature', highlights the mathematical (i.e. computational) basis of our Universe and the mathematical impossibility of the Universe occurring by chance. This evidence demands that there is a great mathematical Genius behind our Universe! Finally, this book, 'Providence', gives a medley of apologetics (i.e. answers to the sceptics) and descriptions of some provisions that makes our Universe so finely tuned for enjoyable habitation on Earth. (Please note: I couldn't cover all of the provisions.) It also shows how there are presently two science worldviews (the Biblical and the hijacked versions) and gives some interesting theological insights which I sincerely believe to be correct (but others may disagree). These thoughts are provided to challenge discussion and not to 'teach'. Each book has been written to be academically rigorous and can serve as an upper high school textbook. Each book contains Review Questions at the end of each section, plus Answers, and a Glossary of terms that may be new to the reader.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Fiona

Leseproben

SCIENCE   Science – the Joyous Gift Let’s begin with the concept of science, itself. Science is the systematic study of nature with an expected outcome of finding answers. The Gift of Science “In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.” —Genesis 1:1 If the Universe has been created, as we are told in the Scriptures, we can expect to see design. We can expect to see inbuilt order. We can expect to learn from its hidden gems, embedded there by the Creator. However, if the Universe has not been created there may be order or there may not. What we observe may even be so random (something that you’d expect after an ‘explosion’) that it’s not even worth our effort to investigate. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” —Genesis 1:27 The Bible tells us that God created humans in His own image. Furthermore, the Scriptures tell us that we were created for a purpose. God created us to be stewards of His creation. As such He has given us the ability to understand how He desires us to manage His property, to solve problems that may arise while we tend His land and creatures, and then be able to communicate with Him about His creation with a good level of intelligence. This verse, Genesis 1:27, means that we have been given a mental capacity that allows us to communicate and carry out scientific enquiry and discover relationships and (scientific) Laws that exist. Because of this, we know that we can trust our senses and intelligence enough to rationally carry out repeatable experiments. Since Science is the systematic study of nature with an expected outcome of finding answers, with a Biblical creation, we can do real ‘science’. It’s a blessed gift. Of course, if we hadn’t been created in the image of God but are now just random groupings of atoms that came together by chance (as is taught in modern-day science classes), then we could never really know if we could trust our senses enough to explore our Universe, or, if we could trust the stored knowledge from any previous ‘scientist’. Furthermore, if there wasn’t a Creator, Who has put order into the Universe and holds it together, we could never really know if the outcome of yesterday’s experiments would be the same as today’s or tomorrow’s. So, without a Creator, Who has created us in His image and put order into the Universe, there seems little point in us to start wanting to investigate that which is around us. The gift of science is lost without God. And …Science is a fun challenge! Indeed, traditional/classical science, in the western world, really took off with the advent of the Reformation, when Europe accepted the literal Word of God as God-breathed and the absolute truth. People realised that the ‘apparent design’ they saw in the Universe was real design, and that they had been given a gift to investigate this if they wished. They found, as the Scriptures tell us … “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” —Proverbs 25:2 True science is the honour of kings! The Hijacking of Science Classical science flourished under cultures following the Judeo-Christian God. Men and women, like Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Carolus Linnaeus, Michael Faraday, Marie Curie, Lord Kelvin and many more, all had the basis of the reality of this God of the Bible – and His precious ‘gift of science’. Their joy was invariably similar to the thoughts of Johannes Kepler, who happily stated that science is “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Then came the 19th century – when some in the academic circles moved to divorce science from (what they termed) ‘religion’. First, Charles Lyell (a lawyer turned geologist) championed uniformitarianism, and an ‘old’ Earth (i.e. 4.6 billion years old, rather than the Biblical 6,000 years old). (Uniformitarianism = This hypothesis asserts that today’s slow and gradual rates of processes account for all of the geological features of the world, and that no supernatural input has contributed to what we see in the rock record.) It needs to be noted that a major reason for Charles Lyell’s championing of uniformitarianism was to remove the Biblical basis of science. (Some have suggested that Mr. Lyell saw this religion as the cause of the English dominance over Scotland at the time. That’s why, they say, he disdained it.) On the 14th June, 1830, Charles Lyell wrote to a friend, “I am sure you may get into Q.R. [Quarterly Review] what will free the science from Moses …” (ref. {1}) Cleverly, Mr. Lyell then befriended a young Cambridge student, whose grandfather had espoused a naturalistic (i.e. uncreated) origin of life. The student’s name was Charles Darwin. Mr. Lyell then sponsored this Charles Darwin (a theologian turning naturalist) on a trip studying nature on the HMAS Beagle (1831-1836). Before Darwin embarked on his sponsored voyage, Lyell gave his protege a copy of his publication ‘The Principles of Geology’ to read on the journey. This book championed Mr. Lyell’s uniformitarian ideas. Later, Lyell encouraged Darwin toward advocating his theory of ‘evolution of life’. (Evolution (according to Darwin) = the idea that the fitness of life is improving over time. It proposes that all life forms have come from a single cell by naturalistic processes and have modified themselves by chance, time and natural selection.) To the outsider at the time, uniformitarian geology and evolutionary biology were two seemingly independent disciplines in science that advocated that the Bible was wrong. This independence gave this Bible-rejecting perspective, credence. Incidentally, this ‘independence’ was advanced by Mr. Lyell’s early, public rejection of Mr. Darwin’s mechanism for evolution – i.e. by natural selection. It was a clever ploy devised by a scheming lawyer! As time passed, slowly, the deists and atheists gained ground in the scientific circles at universities and in the positions of influence in government and churches. They slowly came to outrank the Biblical creationists. (Deism is a philosophical position that posits that a God does not interfere directly with the world. It rejects revelation (i.e. Scripture) as a source of religious knowledge and asserts that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a single Creator or absolute principle of the Universe. It is often the first step toward atheism. Atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities/gods exist.) Increasingly, the Scriptures became relegated to ‘a moral code of ethics’, rather than a basis of absolute authority, while the new hijacked science began to enforce that its atheistic perspective were ‘the facts’. Finally, we arrive at the 21st century, where those who wish to claim and show that the evidence we see confirms best with the Biblical account of origins, are often unrecognised, mocked, vilified and sometimes left unemployed. Indeed, this is generally without any scientific evidence to show that the creationist perspective may be flawed, or that the secular worldview can be truly validated. Most atheists in the new hijacked science argue on a basis similar to .. “I trust my evolved brains, and my brains tell me we’ve evolved over time.”, or “All my professors taught me this. Do you think you know more than them?”, or, “We now deal with facts in science, not religion.” Open, objective discussion of original causes, which should be a pillar of science, has been stymied – especially when it comes to universal beginnings. The Creator of the Gift of Science is Ignored at Our Peril We now have the ludicrous situation in this ‘hijacked science’ education where the foundation of the gift of science is ignored. We have removed the basis to think that the ‘apparent design’ that we see is anything more than a chance coincidence. (So, why really bother investigating?) We have removed the basis to trust our senses and reasoning. (So, why really bother using them to investigate?) We have removed the joy of ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” (If Scripture is just a madeup moral story, then so is God, and our present thoughts must be the ‘top of the evolutionary chain’. Also, since evolution just comes by chance – it’s not dependent upon us to inquire. We are either endowed with more brains or we aren’t. It’s just chance whether we find answers to our questions or not.) Finally, since any open objective discussion about original causes is stifled – we learn that no-one is really interested in the absolute truth (as science should be) – just the continuance of the...