the Crossroads News

Matt. 22:42 “What think ye of Christ?” KJ or “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” IV

• Was there really a man called Jesus? Did he really exist?
• Was he just a wise, good man?
• Was he a prophet?
• Was he the Son of God?

Nobody of any integrity could possibly maintain a belief in a mythical Jesus. The evidence is just overwhelming both from a secular viewpoint and from the Biblical accounts found in the gospels. If one does not believe that a person named Jesus existed, then, to be consistent, they would also have to call into question Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and all other historical figures. It is obvious that Jesus existed. We even separate time into Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD—in the year of our Lord)
Of course, now there is a movement to use B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) as society tries to remove Christ from the public arena completely. To say that the founder of the largest religion in the history of the world is a fictitious  character made up by men like the Easter bunny would be to commit intellectual suicide. To believe that there are over two billion Christians in the world who are followers of a fictitious man is absurd. Even the Muslims and Jews believe that Jesus existed except they consider him to be a prophet. Muslims even believe in the virgin birth and Jesus performing miracles.

There have been numerous secular historical writers who mention Jesus. Among them are Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the younger, Epictetus, Lucian, Aristides, Galenus, Lampridius, DioCassius, Hinnerius, Libanius, Ammianus, Marcellinus, Eunapius, Zosimus, and one most people know, Josephus. Listen to what Tacitus, the great Roman historian, wrote concerning Nero’s burning of Rome, “Hence to suppress the rumor (that he burned Rome), he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished with the most exquisite tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated for the enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberi us; but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also.”

He virtually confirms the accounts found in the gospels. Pliny the younger, who was putting Christians to death, wrote in a letter, “They affirmed, however, that the whole of their guilt, or their error, was that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath, not to do any wicked deeds.”

The next important question is whether the historical documents about Jesus, both secular and the gospels themselves, record accurately the events that took place and the statements that were made by the people in those events. Two weeks ago the lesson was on Rules of Evidence. I stated then that according to modem rules of evidence in a court case, that the gospels would have to be accepted as believable testimony in a modem court. Some people argue that the time between when the events took place and
the time the gospels were written were of such a long duration that legend had developed turning Jesus from a wise, good man into the mythological Son of God. So even if the writers were good men, over the years memories distort reality.

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1. Let’s make an observation. If you were trying to convince people to follow Christ based upon
   written gospels would you have Matthew, a hated tax collector, write one of them. Wouldn’t you
   have Peter write one of them instead of John Mark, a companion of Peter who wrote the Gospel
   of Mark? Why would you have Luke, a physician and friend of Paul, write one of them instead
   of one of the original twelve like James, a member of the inner circle to Jesus?
2. Even the liberal scholars say that Mark was written in the 70’s, Matthew and Luke were written
   in the 80’s, and John was written in the 90’s. Assuming Christ was crucified in 32 or 33 A.D.
   that puts the writing of the gospels only 40 to 60 years after the death of Jesus. This means that
   people were still alive that could have stated that the events found in the gospels never happened.
   On the other hand, the two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and
   Plutarch more than 400 years after the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. Most historians believe
   that these biographies are trustworthy.
3. There is strong evidence to suggest that the gospels were written earlier and within 30 years of
   Jesus death. For one thing, the synoptic gospels do not mention the destruction of the temple by
   the Romans in 70 A.D. Luke had to be written before Acts since Acts is a sequel to the gospel of
   Luke picking up where the gospel of Luke stops. Acts stops before the death of Paul in Rome which occurred in about 62 A.D. Therefore since Mark was written before Luke and Matthew,
   and since Acts was written before the death of Paul in 62 A.D., we can actually assume the three
   gospels were written before 60 A.D. which is less than 30 years after the death of Christ.
4. Paul, many of whose writings predate the gospels, shows a strong support for the content of the
   gospels. For example, in I Cor. 15 he writes, “For what I received I passed on to you as ‘of first
   importance: That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he
   was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to
   the twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time,
   most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then
   to all the apostles.” If there were not these hundreds of people who could attest to the fact of
   what he said was true, his writings and the gospels writings would have been quickly attacked as
   untrue and the fictitious writings of a group of men who had collaborated to promote false
   documents which would encourage people to follow them in establishing a new “sect.”

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So the gospels were written while many people who had witnessed the life of Christ were still alive. Any
mistakes or gross exaggerations would have been exposed particularly by men prominent in the Jewish
religion, who had sought to have him crucified, and the Romans, who wanted to stop the spread of this
new “sect.” The problem is most of the secular historians of the time confirmed what is written in the
gospels as shown above and did not deny its truthfulness.
A serious question anybody must ask is “Why would a group of men and thousands of followers be
willing to be tortured and die rather than admit that they had just fabricated the story?” The height of
folly would be to die rather than recant something you knew to be fabricated. It would have been the best
kept secret of all time with thousands being willing to die rather than admit that what they believed wasn’t
true.

CHRISTIANITY—A REASONABLE FAITH
Crossroads       Evolution—Evidence for the Existence of God  (cont.)      October 27, 2013

Two weeks ago we started looking at why the theory of evolution (regardless of what is taught in the high schools and colleges of America) has significant problems that are becoming more and more evident to the major scientists in the field.  Rom. 1:18-22; Psalms 19:1; Gen. 1:24  “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds….”

1.        The early earth atmosphere was composed of methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia as Miller assumed for his famous experiment found in all of the biology textbooks.  He started with the ingredients needed to make amino acids.  Recent research by NASA, etc. has shown that the early earth atmosphere was not composed of those ingredients and therefore amino acids would not have formed.

2.       Even if amino acids were somehow to form, amino acids combining to form proteins by chance is virtually impossible due to the extremely low probability.

3.       The smallest living thing (a simple one cell organism) is anything but simple and contains DNA and RNA.  The Nobel Prize Winner for discovering DNA (Crick and definitely not a Christian) realizes how impossible it would be for the chance formation of DNA on earth and therefore believes in panspermia—life developing someplace else in the universe and being somehow transported to earth by intelligent life forms.

The conclusion is that microbiologists have been unable to determine a way that life could begin on earth starting with basic raw materials and combining by chance and time to produce the first one cell organism, let alone the gradual evolution from the one cell organism to man.  The problems the theory of evolution faces at the cellular level are insurmountable according to many of the main secular biologists which have made them hypothesize such way out theories as panspermia and multi-universe theories.  Francis Crick, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA and a signer of the Humanist Manifesto, stated, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

Today, we want to look at the fossil record that Darwin thought would substantiate the theory of evolution.

Darwin, himself, realized that the fossil record posed a big problem for his theory of evolution.  He wrote, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”  Although he believed further fossil discoveries would show that his theory was true.  Unfortunately, time and additional fossil discoveries have proven just the opposite.  The fossil evidence just does not support the gradual evolution of one species to another.

Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard paleontologist and a strong evolutionist, stated, “The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:  1) Stasis.  Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth.  They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; Morphological change is usually limited and directionless.  2) Sudden Appearance.  In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’”.  Because of the fossil evidence, Gould rejected the gradual change of Darwinism and formulated a theory he called “Punctuated Equilibria”.  He could not, however, explain any mechanism by which accelerated evolution could occur, but thought that that his theory would explain the huge gaps in the fossil record.

What scientists have found is that all of the major groups of animals known to exist appear suddenly and fully formed in strata from the Cambrian period (600 to 300 million years ago).  This fossil evidence is strong that the scientists have a special name for this event.  It is called the “Cambrian Explosion.”  Some scientists call it “Biology’s Big Bang.”

Another major problem for scientists using the fossil record to support evolution is that all they have to work with is the skeletal remains—the bones.  There are two major problems with this:

1.       They don’t have complete skeletons.  Sometimes they create, through a lot of imagination, what the animal must have looked like from very few bones.  For example, Java man was created from just four bones (a skullcap, a femur, and a few teeth which may not even been all from the same animal).

2.      Most of the biology of any organism is in the soft tissue and not in the bones.  There are no soft tissue remains to be found.

Jonathan Wells has received two Ph.D.s, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale and states, “The fossil evidence is open to many interpretations because individual specimens can be reconstructed in a variety of ways, and because the fossil record cannot establish ancestor-descendant relationships.”  Basically, evolutionists take the little (some say as little as one percent) that the fossil record can tell them and use their mind (predisposed to evolution) to fill in the gaps in such a way as to use the evidence to support Darwinian evolution.

Henry Gee is a British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist and a senior editor of Nature, the scientific journal.  He wrote, “To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

Dr Michael Denton, M.D., Ph.D. is a molecular biologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is not a biblical creationist, however, he wrote Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and has exposed thousands to the overwhelming scientific problems of Darwinian belief. He describes himself as an “evolutionist”, but he is more open-minded than most.  He writes, “The universal experience of paleontology…is that while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life… what they have never yielded is any of Darwin’s myriads of transitional forms.  Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin.  The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record.”

CHRISTIANITY—A REASONABLE FAITH

Crossroads From Design
to a Designer September 29, 2013

Last week we looked at one of the most basic piece of evidence for a belief in
God — Since the universe has a point of creation, there must be a CREATOR.

This week we will look at the evidence for God
from the fact that — The universe is so well designed and “fine
tuned”, there must be a DESIGNER.

This fine tuning of the universe is called the Teleological Argument from the Greek word telos which means design.
The teleological argument can be stated in the form of a syllogism:

Every design had a designer.

The universe has a highly complex design.

Therefore,  the universe had a Designer.

Yet who made all the constants in nature so that
the universe could come into existence as we know it and produce man? The idea that the universe and the earth in particular are fine tuned
for the existence of man is called — The Anthropological Argument for the existence
of God. Some people call it the Anthropic Principle which comes from the Greed word meaning human.

Stephen Hawking
stated in his book Brief History of Time, “The odds against a universe
like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous.”
His addition of “I think there are clearly religious implications.”
is interesting. He also wrote, “It would be very difficult to explain
why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act
of a God who intended to create beings like us.” Even with these types
of statements, Hawking is definitely an atheist and I have no idea why
he would even make these statements without there still being a part
of him that is unsure.

So what do
we mean by the fine tuning of the universe? There are numerous constants that are just right
for the universe to exist as we know it. The gravitational constant, Coulomb’s constant,
Planck’s constant, the size of the proton, the size of the electron,
the electrical charge on the electron and proton, etc. must all be precisely
as they are in order for the universe to be the way it is.

Astrophysicist Hugh Ross has calculated the probability
that 122 constants would exist today for any planet in the universe
by chance without divine design as one in one with 138 zeros after it.
There are only 10^70 atoms in the entire universe. In other words there
is zero chance that any planet in the universe would have the life-supporting
conditions that earth has without an intelligent designer.

Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias, co discoverer of
the radiation afterglow of the Big Bang stated, “Astronomy leads us
to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately
balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life.
In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations
of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural
plan.”

Ed Harrison considered the Anthropic Principle
and believed “the fine-tuning of the universe provides prima facie
evidence of deistic design.”

I don’t want to go into a science class too much
in order to understand the idea, but I will present several examples
of the fine-tuning of the universe and the earth itself. Many were presented
in Norman Geisler’s book, I don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

1. The oxygen level
on earth is just right for life at about 20%. Any more oxygen and fires
would erupt spontaneously, but any less and humans would suffocate.

2. The carbon dioxide
levels are just right for plant growth but not enough to cause a run-away
greenhouse effect.

3. Atmospheric transparency
is just right. Any less transparency and not enough solar radiation
would reach the earth’s surface, but any more transparency and too much
radiation would hit the earth.

4. The gravitational
constant is just right to have kept the universe from collapsing in
on itself. If the gravitational force were altered by 10^-38 percent,
even the sun would not exist — neither would we.

The gravitational pull
between the earth and the moon is just right due to the constant, the
masses of the earth and the moon, and the distance between the earth
and the moon. If there was more gravitational pull, then the tidal effects
on the oceans, atmosphere, and rotational period of the earth would
be too severe. If less, then orbital changes would cause climatic instabilities.

An interesting book written
by a non-Christian What if the Moon Didn’t
Exist? concluded that the earth
“would be a much less hospitable place in which to live.”
The author, Neil Comins, astronomer and physicist, states that the “broader
question that cries out for consideration…..is, just how ideal a planet
did we inherit?”

6. If the centripetal
force of planetary movements did not precisely balance the gravitational
forces nothing could be held in orbit around the Sun.

7. If the universe has
expanded at a rate one millionth more slowly than it did, expansion
would have stopped, and the universe would have collapsed on itself
before any stars had formed. If it has expanded faster, then no galaxies
would have formed.

8. Many of the laws of
physics can be described as a function of the velocity of light. Even
a slight variation in the speed of light would alter the other constants
and preclude the possibility of life on Earth.

9. If water vapor levels
in the atmosphere were greater than they are now, a runaway greenhouse
effect would cause temperatures to rise too high for human life; if
they were less, an insufficient greenhouse effect would make the earth
too cold to support human life.

10. If Jupiter were not
in its current orbit, the earth would be bombarded with space material.
Jupiter’s gravitational field acts as a cosmic vacuum cleaner, attracting
asteroids and comets that might otherwise strike the earth.

11. If the thickness of
the Earth’s crust were greater, too much oxygen would be transferred
to the crust to support life. If it were thinner, volcanic and tectonic
activity would make life impossible.

12. If the rotation of
the earth took longer than 24 hours, temperature differences would be
too great between night and day. If the rotation period were shorter,
atmospheric wind velocities would be too great.

13. If the atmospheric
discharge (lightning) were greater, they would be too much fire destruction;
if it were less, there would be two little nitrogen-fixing in the soil.

14. If there were more
seismic activity, much more life would be lost; if there was less, nutrients
on the ocean floors and in river runoff would not be cycled back to
the continents through tectonic uplift.

15. The fact that
there is a just so massive moon, with just the right diameter and at
just the right distance from the earth allows for life on the earth.

16. The fact that water
uniquely expands as it approaches its freezing point allows lakes to
freeze from the top down instead of the bottom up which would prevent
life from occurring.

Fred Hoyle, steady state
theorist and atheist, concluded, “A commonsense interpretation of
the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics,
as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces
worth speaking about in nature.” “The Universe: Past and Present
Reflections.” Science Mag., Nov., 1981. Also, “Hoyle was stunned
by the discovery of carbon in stars, for to him the presence within
the roaring heat of stars of an unlikely substance, without which there
could never be planets or organic life, seemed to suggest a guiding
hand. He pronounced himself “greatly shaken” – meaning his
atheism was shaken by an indication of purpose.”

Hugh Ross, astrophysicist
and Christian apologist who believes in an old earth and old universe,
has calculated the probability that these and other constants—122
in all—would exist today for any planet in the universe by chance
(without divine design). Assuming there are 1022 planets in the universe, his answer is shocking: one chance
in 10138.
There are only 1070 atoms in the entire universe. In effect there is zero chance
that any planet in the universe would have the life-supporting conditions
we have, unless there is an intelligent Designer behind it all.

Paul
Davies, a renowned, non-Christian physicist, stated that cutting-edge
science is now telling us that the building blocks of our world—the
laws and physical constants that govern all the matter in the universe—-appear
to be precisely balanced and finely tuned for life to occur and flourish.
He also has stated, “Many people envisage God as a sort of cosmic
magician who existed for all eternity and then, at some moment in the
past, created the universe in a gigantic supernatural act. Unfortunately,
this scenario raises some awkward questions. What was God doing before
he created the universe? If God is a perfect, unchanging being, what
prompted him to act then rather than sooner?”

Paul
Davies was forced by his scientific beliefs to say, “Like the theologians’
God, these laws enjoy an abstract, timeless existence and are capable
of bringing the universe into being from nothing. But where do they
come from? And why do these laws exist rather than some different set?
Science is based on the assumption that the universe is thoroughly rational
and logical at all levels. Miracles are not allowed. This implies that
there should be reasons for the particular laws of nature that regulate
the physical universe. Atheists claim that the laws exist reasonlessly
and that the universe is ultimately absurd. As a scientist, I find this
hard to accept. There must be an unchanging rational ground in which
the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted. Is this rational
ground like the timeless God of Augustine? Perhaps it is.”

Many
scientists try to answer the impossibility of this universe having just
the right fine tuning to allow the earth and life by simply suggesting
that we may be just one of an infinite number of universes and, however
improbable it is, we may be in the one universe that has that fine tuning.

Richard
Dawkins makes a multi-universe
argument against the Teleological
Argument in his book “The God Delusion” when he argues that there
may be trillions of universes. Given the enormous number of universes
existing over enormous amounts of time and space, it is inevitable that
some of them are fine-tuned to sustain our kind of life. This is actually
a result of quantum mechanics that suggests a possibility of a multiple
universe theory. Actually this theory can be used to suggest that anytime
you make a decision to do one thing versus another, another universe
is formed. Physicist Paul Davies wrote, “One may find it easier to
believe in an infinite array of universes than in an infinite Deity,
but such a belief must rest on faith rather than observation.”

Paul
Davies states, “Meanwhile, the popularity of multiverse cosmological
models has prompted a dramatic reappraisal of the very concept of physical
existence. Once one embarks on the slippery multiverse slope, it is
unclear just how far from the familiar universe that we observe one
must be prepared to go.”

Another
idea to refute the need for God in creating just the conditions
for life here on earth is called Panspermia and was proposed
by Fred Hoyle of steady state fame and suggested that, since
it was a virtual impossibility for life to originate on earth, life
must have been placed here from elsewhere.
In 1983 Fred Hoylepublished
a well-illustrated popular book for nonscientists in which he attacked
the whole idea that life originated and evolved on Earth and replaced
it by ‘intelligent cosmic control’. This probably cost him a Nobel
Prize since his collaborator received one for their work and he was
apparently snubbed because of his attack on evolution.

The
problem with Panspermia is that the problem of
how life began still remains but is simply put someplace else in the
universe. He wrote in his book The Mathematics of Evolution “The
Darwinian theory is wrong and the continued adherence to it is an impediment
to discovering the correct evolutionary theory.” He is famous
for his Boeing 747 analogy. Hoylewould state, “the
probability of life originating at random (on earth) is so utterly miniscule
as to make the random concept absurd.”

Wolfgang
Pauli commented about the atheist physicist Paul Dirac, “There is
no God and Dirac is his prophet.” Yet Dirac used theological
imagery when he said, “God is a mathematician of a very high order.”
For Dirac, the greatest English physicist since Newton, the greatest
mystery of the universe was that its most fundamental laws can be expressed
in terms of beautiful mathematical equations. Dirac often said
that mathematical beauty “is almost a religion to me.”

Einstein
saw the concept of God as an underlying unity of the universe, something
so wondrous that it can command a spiritual awe.

The Teleological Argument is sometimes called the watch argument.
If you find a Rolex watch while walking through the mountains, you don’t
say to yourself, “Wow!!! Look what nature produced by chance—a perfectly
designed, high precision watch.” No, you would immediately
realize someone designed it and made it. The universe is even
more complex, with an extremely fine tuned design with incredibly minute
tolerances and even less likely to just happen by chance.

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