Answers in Genesis
On May 5th I had a dream and wrote about it in my blog here. This dream was more literal (or prophetic) in meaning than purely symbolic as I had interpreted it. It’s good to journal dreams because God may later reveal more and give you a better understanding. I spent some time looking into the meaning of the dream but it didn’t hit me until May 23rd that this dream was about the class we started attending the day after my dream. I had been praying for a way to teach our kids more about the Lord and there was a flyer for a class for kids to teach them about Genesis. I thought this was an answer to my prayer—and it was—but what God was showing me through this dream was that this class would have just as big an impact on me as it would our kids.
This class introduced us to Answers in Genesis (AiG). To say this class has rocked my preconceptions about creation, the solar system, and the dinosaurs is a gross understatement. AiG is nothing other than God’s own divine truth revealed. I have read the whole Bible twice but this class has taken God’s Word to a whole new level for me. It has removed the deception that the secular world had brainwashed me with, and shown me how God’s creation really happened.
The biggest impact for me is about dinosaurs because it’s so obvious in the Bible. AiG explains the dinosaurs in the Bible as the Leviathan, the Behemoth, and dragons. “Job 41 describes a great animal that lived in the sea, Leviathan, that even breathed fire. This ‘dragon’ may have been something like a the mighty 55 foot long Kronosaurus, or the 82-foot long Liopleurodon.” (Ken Ham, What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?)
“Take a look at Behemoth, which I made, just as I made you. It eats grass like an ox. See its powerful loins and the muscles of its belly. Its tail is as strong as a cedar. The sinews of its thighs are knit tightly together. Its bones are tubes of bronze. Its limbs are bars of iron. It is a prime example of God’s handiwork, and only its Creator can threaten it. The mountains offer it their best food, where all the wild animals play. It lies under the lotus plants, hidden by the reeds in the marsh. The lotus plants give it shade among the willows beside the stream. It is not disturbed by the raging river, not concerned when the swelling Jordan rushes around it. No one can catch it off guard or put a ring in its nose and lead it away.”
Job 40:15-19-24
Some Bibles say the Behemoth is an elephant, hippo, or mythical creature. However, you can certainly catch and lead an elephant and I’m sure that God wouldn’t be talking to Job about a mythical creature so only dinosaur fits the description. Dragons are mentioned in the books of Job, Psalms, Isaiah, and Revelations and in the legends of many cultures. It makes sense that these dragons are what we today call dinosaurs. In addition to the other evidence presented by AiG, I have no problem now believing that the dinosaurs were created on the six day with all the other animals and thus are only 6000 years old and became extinct like so many other plants and animals in this fallen world we live in.
As I read my Daily Bible for the third time this year, I thought God was going to take me deeper into Revelations but He took me the exactly opposite direction. Instead of the end of time He showed me the beginning of creation. This has so much meaning on so many levels. First off, I don’t consider myself a man of science—I find it very interesting but I don’t base my beliefs on it. I take God’s Word as truth based on the miracles he has done in my life. But God wanted to show me His Glory even deeper and He gave me the scientific explanations even when I wasn’t asking for them. And He gave them to me on a level that I could understand and even explain to my kids. This is how my prayer to teach my kids about Him was answered. Also, I believe He is taking me farther in the direction of teaching and He showed me ‘creation science’ because He wants me to share it with my future students.
Why did it take until May 23rd, eighteens days after my dream, for me to understand what my dream was about? I didn’t read all the packets they had given us in the class until after I was intrigued by the third weeks session on dinosaurs. Then it became clear to me as I was reading the one of the packets on the solar system. There was an article from a Ph.D. astrophysicist (from my home state of Colorado no less), who explained the fallacy behind the big bang theory: “Despite claims to the contrary, we’ve never seen a star forming. Star formation seems to be nothing more than a secular attempt to explain the universe without invoking God.” (Dr. Jason Lisle, The Stars of Heaven Confirm Biblical Creation) This is when I recalled my astrophysics dream. I mean how often do I do anything with or read anything about astrophysics in my life? Never!
One question I raised during a couple sessions of the class was about carbon dating. One theory is that carbon could have been different before the flood (Doesn’t Carbon-14 Dating Disprove the Bible?). I didn’t realize that carbon dating is just used for living things and radioisotope dating is used to determine the age of rocks. In my mind (and probably in many others) this carbon/radioisotope dating was key to my belief about the millions of years of creation. “The world is awash with evolutionary propaganda centered on dinosaurs. This has resulted in the thinking of even Christians being permeated by evolutionary philosophy.” (Ken Ham, What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?)
The problem with ‘historical’ science is that we really can’t tell how things age over many years—it’s just guesswork and theories that are presumed to be fact. “All radioisotope dating methods assume (among other things) that the decay rate of a given isotope (an atomic nucleus with a given number of neutrons) is constant—that it has always been what it is today. The RATE researchers have uncovered several independent lines of evidence that strongly indicate that nuclear decay was much more rapid in the past.” (Dr. Jason Lisle, RATE research reveals remarkable results—a fatal blow to billions of years).
Here is my own thought: Adam lived 930 years (4000 BC to 3000BC?) and Moses lived to be 120 (approx. 1500 BC), and now we live to be about 80 years old (2010 AD). God changed mans life-span after the flood (3000-2500BC). Noah lived 950 years but after him each generation had successively decreasing life spans. This was a fulfillment of God’s Word (Genesis 6:1-3) to make man’s life-span 120 years. Decay began with the first sin but it sped up after God’s pronouncement to decrease man’s life-span and His judgement with the flood. And today the average life expectancy has fallen much lower than 120 years. If God radically changed the decay of man how can we make any assumptions about nuclear decay over six millenniums?
Nuclear engineering obviously involves nuclear decay. Once again how often do I have anything to do with nuclear engineering in my waking life? Yet, God prophesied to me in my dream that I would be studying that along with astrophysics. I believe God gave me this dream to confirm the truth that He was about to reveal to me and the effect it would have on me. It was truly like in my dream where the astrophysicist unexpectedly became a nuclear engineer. I had no clue what He was about to show me through a class I thought was for my kids.
As Christians we must speak the truth about the fallacy that’s at the core of the evolution “science” and philosophy. Ken Ham states, “A non-Christian is not Neutral. The Bible makes this very clear: ‘The one who is not with Me is against Me, and the one who does not gather with Me scatters’ (Matthew 12:30). Evolutionary science scatters theories around presuming to be fact and ends up deceiving children, adults, non-Christians and Christians alike.
“Down through the ages, people such as the Egyptians have worshiped the sun. God warned the Israelites, in Deuteronomy 4:19, not to worship the sun as the pagan cultures around them did. They were commanded to worship the God who made the sun—not the sun that was made by God. Evolutionary theories (the ‘big bang’ hypothesis for instance) state that the sun came before the earth, and that the sun’s energy on the Earth eventually gave rise to life. Just as in pagan beliefs, the sun is, in a sense, given credit for the wonder of creation.” (Ken Ham, Six Days or Millions of Years)
