Secularism is the new religion taught and worshipped at the highest level in our land.
Are you willing to learn how to dismantle these high places?
Secular Humanism is the religion of atheism.
Its Myth of Origins is now being enshrined in our Laws, our Politics and even our Churches.
Let God be true and every man a liar!
Deuternonomy 4v19
And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshipping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.
This section of scripture deals with the great problem of the human race… IDOLATRY. When we bow down to things and worship them we don’t just make a mistake, we enter into a relationship with the objects, things, people who are worshipped and we subject ourselves to them allowing them to teach us things. Worship of something allows that thing to shape and mould our thinking. Christians in Romans 12 are exhorted in our reasonable worship … to allow our minds to be transformed by God’s word.and not to be shaped by this world and its teaching.
Romans 12v1,2
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Now when we take the very clever and sophisticated thinking of men about the stars etc and put it over against the Word of God we have swopped allegiance and are guilty of IDOLATRY. In this piece of scripture Moses emphasises again and again.. not what we see and observe but what God says. The battle is in the mind and the method is vital.
Methodists originally understood this and John Wesley said,
“we are surrounded with those (we find them on every side) who lay it down as an undoubted principle, that reason is the highest gift of God….they make it little less than divine. They are wont to describe it as very near, if not quite, infallible. They look upon it as the all-sufficient director of all the children of men; able, by its native light, to guide them into all truth, and lead them into all virtue.They that are prejudiced against the Christian revelation, who do not receive the Scriptures as the oracles of God, almost universally run into this extreme: I have scarce known any exception”
THE CASE OF REASON IMPARTIALLY CONSIDERED
John Wesley SERMON 70
This topic is another vital area in the strategy of Secular Humanism. The concept of the earth being millions of years old is essential to their world view. The system depends on assuming mechanistic processes which take millions/billions of years to accomplish the features of the earth. The recent boldness and confidence of Secular Humanists to push their agenda in Education and the redefinition of marriage is in part due to the feeling that they have all the right things in place which back their claim to be telling the truth with origins, the nature of humans and subsequently our destiny.
An issue of New Scientist (8th October 2011 article ‘The Dating Game’) declared that scientists were happy with the present age of the universe and the earth. They felt that they had a watertight case for their view of origins with enough time for biological evolution etc. ‘Happy’ of course signifies an attitude which is hardly scientific in outlook but does reflect something of the human weakness in this enterprise.
Significantly in the same article in New Scientist the author was also honest enough to admit that the present age of the earth was based on hundreds of assumptions. (my emphasis)
This is the nature of the debate.
When we are looking at these issues it is good to keep in mind that your expertise like mine is probably totally inadequate to swap arguments with a trained geologist.
Failure? Not at all!
Because when they look at the age of the earth these scientists, as above, leave off straightforward observable, testable ,repeatable science and start to make ASSUMPTIONS.
That is the cue for your effective participation. Jesus said that the first thing a person should do is to believe in the one whom God has sent. Belief! Every Christian begins a journey of belief and refining of beliefs and this is your area of expertise.
That Geologist is in your territory when they begin to make assumptions about conditions in the past. The Bible is very specific about God’s actions in the past and how they affected the earth. You as a Christian assume that God is able to have recorded accurately not only the events in the past but also the reason for them. The Bible makes this claim repeatedly and vitally so. God is no God if this is not so!
But there are other voices and claims in this world. Most noticeably in Western culture of ‘naturalism’ which is that all things and events can be traced back to the laws of nature operating. No supernatural person or event is allowed in this system and rigorously they define this particular philosophy as ‘proper science’ They effectively claim that any other viewpoint is non scientific. But they have defined science for themselves. They keep repeating it and shouting it and getting laws passed about educating children on the basis of this self serving definition of science.
Naturalism is a religious assumption. Not Christian religious. It does not honour Christ. Those who make it press in hard harnessing all available data and interpreting it according to their assumption of naturalism This is the intellectual and moral basis for Secularism and Secular Humanism.
Learn how to recognise beliefs and the origin and history of those beliefs. This is your business as a Christian. Recognise when those beliefs even when cloaked in scientific language are opposed to the teaching of Jesus in both Old and New Testaments. You don’t swop your beliefs for ancient pagan beliefs just because a scientist says so.
The Guardian newspaper ran a series of extracts in 2013 from a poem written in BC95 ‘On the Nature of the Universe’ written by a Greek called Lucretius. In it he proposes, in the technical form of the time, an ancient age for the earth, the emergence of life from a primeval soup, and the development of more and more complex forms of life until we arrived at man. He was an Epicurean and Paul the apostle made short work of his ideas in Acts 17 and Romans 1.
The early church too was vigorously opposed to these ideas and would not tolerate them understanding their pagan nature and the bad effect on people’s thinking. People become impervious to the gospel because the teachings invalidated the power and goodness of God and ignored sin. This is why Greeks think the cross is ‘foolishness’. No need to save people from the penalty of sin since we arrived in this world through a process of death and suffering in their belief system.
John Wesley who was trained in classical Greek thinking and the scriptures, saw the re-emergence of these Greek pagan ideas in the Deist movement in the Church in Britain and declared them evil. He particularly named Lucretius in his New Testament commentary (Romans 1v20) as a man with a ‘dark heart’. He understood the destruction which these ideas would bring to the church and nation and would not tolerate them in his meetings.
Methodists unfortunately have declared John Wesley ‘unintellectual’ in these matters and discarded his teaching with devastating results in the church and nation.
Matthew 24v35-39
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of man.
Yes you don’t get very far in the Bible regarding the history and geology of the earth without coming across the flood. Crucial to the story of man’s increasing rebelliousness and God’s response in judgement yet with grace, it shapes the story, the reasons for and the nature of salvation.
Importantly it also has left its mark on the earth. At one time emerging disciplines of geology were essentially catastrophic, flood based and timed on a roughly 6000 year timescale.
Greeks like Pythagoras (mathematician) and those who followed the Epicurean belief system suggested tens and hundreds of thousands of years for the age of the earth and Lucretius (95BC) had an early form of what we now call evolution which depended upon long periods of time. Those long periods of time were speculative, but crucial, to a new view and a new history of the world.
The New Testament writers and Jesus in contrast confirmed the history written in the Old Testament. Genealogies formed a vital part of that Biblical History. Genealogies are recognised as a reliable and vital ingredient in any history today whether personal or national.
2Peter 3v4,5
First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, "Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.
Some really crucial information in this passage of Peter’s letter. The larger context of this letter is the confidence we can have in God’s word, the events recorded in scripture and sequences of events which will bring all things to a final conclusion.
The immediate context is the unbelief which people have with respect to the return of Jesus to bring everything to the conclusion:. “he’s definitely not coming back because he hasn’t bothered doing anything with this world anyway .. just a myth” In particular the idea that all things continue the same as they have from the beginning might be called the principle of uniformitarianism.
This was the idea which early geologists used who were seeking to displace the Biblical picture of catastrophism in the historical geology of the world. To do this they had to deny in the face of massive evidence Noah’s flood. They persisted and won the day in the early 19th century but recently some backtracking has had to be done in the face of overwhelming evidence from live geological sites. In this particular context click here for a video on the catastrophic effects of rock layering taking place in three hours and canyon building in three days at Mt St Helens.
But the effect of such cyncism over the last 200 years on the Biblical history of the earth has led to an equal amount of cyncism, even within the church, of the return of Jesus.
Isaiah 44v24,25
“Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb: "I am the LORD, who made all things, who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread out the earth—Who was with me?— who frustrates the omens of liars, and makes fools of diviners; who turns wise men back, and makes their knowledge foolish;”
There is something very basic here. God was present at the beginning everyone else was not. When someone speaks as if they think they know what happened at the beginning and it contradicts the Bible, treat them like a liar.
That is how much authority they have compared to God.
As soon as a Christian who has signed up to follow Jesus and believe in Him starts to think something other than what Jesus confirms and makes room for it in their thinking, then they are denying their Lord.
No fancy amount of talk and sophisticated words can get round that. They have changed their God.. They now subscribe to a different kind of Creator and have begun the process of accepting that new authority in a vital area of belief. The other areas of belief will be tested very soon.
The Church compromises constantly and significantly in this area and wants to call it intellectual integrity. God calls them (us) liars and diviners. Not a happy position to be in. No wonder we are disappearing from the face of the earth in the Western World.
We cannot trust God to say clearly how He created and the consequences.
Technical, scientific details are found here. Formed indicates an intensive creative action like that of a potter not a distant disinterested Creator leaving inane laws to develop you.. Made all things; the inference here is that God is intensively involved in all that He has made. Not simply the law maker setting a mindless process into being which produces everything but the intensity of an artist and carer for the things which He has brought into being. Stretched out the heavens and spreads the earth; both activities speaking of the deliberate creative involvement of God in the detail and overall intent. This is no disinterested mechanistic system but the highest expression of beauty and personality.
Job 9v7-10
“who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heavens, and trampled the waves of the sea who made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south who does great things beyond understanding, and marvellous things without number”.
Always central to faith in God is the understanding of God as the creator. A creator who is completely in charge of everything. Particularly the things we find most complex and awesome.
This type of Creator is what allowed Job to be able to keep going in the middle of his distress. His faith was firm and allowed him to hang in there when he was feeling really bad to get an answer from his Creator…. The only one who could give him a reasonable answer.
Notice too the statement from Job about the sun and its not rising. What prompted such a statement?
Ephesians 6v1
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”
A reminder from the Apostle Paul that the stakes here are very high. These matters are not just about neutral science and straight observational, testable and repeatable matters. This is the insight into the situation behind the contentions in human affairs and the affairs of the whole universe. This knowledge is what was revealed to Paul but withheld from Job.
We should now be aware of the problems here. We must hold fast to the truth but be aware of the spiritual battle which is waged for the minds and hearts of people which will encourage or discourage them from trusting in their Creator:
Heb 11:6 “ Now without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who diligently search for him.”
Theophilus of Antioch (AD 177)
“There are not two myriads of myriads of years, even though Plato said such a period had elapsed between the deluge and his own time, .. . The world is not uncreated nor is there spontaneous production of everything, as Pythagoras and the others have babbled; instead the world is created and is providentially governed by the God who made everything. And the whole period of time and the years can be demonstrated to those who wish to learn the truth. . The total number of years from the creation of the world is 5,695”
“On the fourth day the luminaries came into existence. Since God has foreknowledge, he understood the nonsense of the foolish philosophers who were going to say that the things produced on earth came from the stars, so that they might set God aside. In order therefore that the truth might be demonstrated, plants and seeds came into existence before the stars. For what comes into existence later cannot cause what is prior to it”.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com. Theophilus, 3.25,28. Theophilus, 2.15
An extraordinary piece of writing. Theophilus stands in a great tradition here. It was to a man named Theophilus that Luke addressed his gospel and the book of Acts. Antioch was the city in which existed probably the most vibrant Christian community of the time. One could speculate that this Theophilus was a descendant of the one addressed by Luke!
However what is perfectly plain here is an engagement with issues with which we are still debating or sadly not, in the case of many churches, theological colleges, Bible Colleges and Christians The majority of the church has come down on the side of those whom Theophilus said had ‘babbled’
Notice the mention of Plato and Pythagoras. In the matter of origins the church has more respect for their teaching than that of Jesus. This is the reason for the powerlessness of the church and its recession in the Western World. We not only adopted the reasonable mathematics of Pythagoras (although the theorem for which he is famous was known and used a long time before him) but we adopted his philosophy or belief system of origins also. What a mistake!
Did Jesus not know how he made the universe when he said ‘in the beginning God created them male and female….”
We have followed the beliefs of sophisticated pagans and have effectively changed our ‘Teacher’. Jesus is no longer our Teacher or God. We have broken the first and second commandments, institutionalised those pagan teachings in our churches and colleges and still want to call ourselves followers of Jesus.
No wonder marriage has been redefined in our society. It was always the fault of the Christian believers who had left off following and trusting in all of Jesus’s words.
How up to date is the argument of Theophilus. We thought it was only recent ‘scientific’ arguments from observational data that suggested that ‘we came from the stars’. Brian Cox and the secular humanist cohort are only arguing what has been in the public domain for thousands of years. But the Christian Church so despises the scriptures and the efforts of the early Christians that they don’t realise that this is so! Instead our theological leaders and pastors are bowing to the perceived wisdom of these commentators rather than holding fast to that which has been delivered to us by the Spirit of Christ.
Those commentators today who are saying that the sun and the stars were only revealed on the fourth day don’t even come near the understanding of Theophilus. He realised the theological implications of that type of argument fell foul of the interpretative method defined by Jesus:
Mat 7:18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
The capability of most theological commentators today to see the effects of what they teach as truth is unbelievably miniscule ….or maybe not?
An Early Christian Writer and Theologian
This next section below reveals the interdependence of modern Geology and the cosmological assumptions which are currently held.
The Graph below is a simple and classic representation of the red shift coming from the furthest reaches of our universe. It has however been reinterpreted. In this case the astrophysicist concerned Barry Setterfield, building on the work of other cosmologists Harp and Tift, has interpreted the red shift not in the classic understanding of revealing the motion of expansion of the universe but in a completely different way. He has interpreted the redshift as resulting from the slowing down of the speed of light. This would have exactly the same effect in terms of what we see but to the traditional view of the universe related derived from the work of Einstein, Hubble etc is extremely controversial and was not considered seriously when Setterfield published his work in 1987.
However some other more mainstream (to the secular mindset) have realised some of the big problems associated with the evenness of temperature found throughout the universe. These could be solved by having a much higher speed of light at the beginning. A paper produced in 2002 by João Magueijo and Andreas Albrecht indicated that a similar initial velocity for light to Barry Setterfield’s, but dropping much quicker, might be a solution to their problems.
A more recent development of the idea of inflation suggests the same thing. That for a very brief period after their scenario of the Big Bang the universe expanded billions of times faster than the speed of light. It should be realised that we are looking at ‘strap up’ jobs here adding on bits to a theory that is in serious crisis. In fact realising that having called ‘wolf’ and got away with it there are now suggestions of a second period of extremely fast inflation which would get them out of another problem.
The scenario depicted below, is premised on the idea that since there is evidence of stepping or periodicity in the red shift coming from the furthest stars, then it cannot be due to the motion of expansion. That means that light coming from the edge of the universe depicted here in a reverse drawn exponential curve would have reached the earth in a sub ten thousand year old universe within the first day of that lights creation ie the fourth day because it was 1012 faster then than now.
Also relevant to this idea is that the atomic constants are linked to the speed of light. When first mooted by Setterfield he was simply laughed at. Recently evidence has shown that decay rates of atomic substances are affected by the presence or absence of sunspots.
What we have in the normal decay rates, producing millions of years of history, as measured by radio dating methods is a frequency measurement. This is then justified as real time by the application of the idea of ‘everything continuing the same’ over the history of the universe.
But the exponential curve of the graph shown here is of the decay of that rate which then gives a different relationship to real orbital time. Much, much faster at the beginning and slowing down to its present rate with a few oscillations in between.
The graph below is then populated with real historical events showing that radio dating confirms biblically recorded events on the adjusted time scale.
For details and a fuller understanding of this mechanism and comprehensive questions and answers on this subject see this link for Barry Setterfield.
“Furthermore, the overall redshift function should be a smooth curve. The results that Tifft had obtained indicated that the redshift went in jumps from one plateau to another like a set of steps and stairs.”
“In the early 1990's two astronomers in Scotland decided to prove Tifft wrong once and for all. Bruce Guthrie and William Napier from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh used the most accurate hydrogen line redshift data. By the end of 1991 they had studied 106 spiral galaxies and detected a quantization of about 37.5 km/s, very close to Tifft's quantum multiple of 36.2 km/s
[Schewe & Stein, 1992a, No.61]”
“Because the prevailing wisdom said the quantization only appeared because of small number statistics, the referees asked them to repeat their analysis with another set of galaxies. This Guthrie and Napier did with an additional set of 117 other galaxies. The same 37.5 km/s quantization was plainly in evidence in this 1996 data set, and the referees accepted the paper [Matthews, 1996, p.759; Corliss, 1996, No. 105, Arp, 1998, p.199-200]”
Sourced in: Is The Universe Static Or Expanding? Barry Setterfield, 4th August 2002.
https://www.barrysetterfield.org/static_universe.html
This is one of those cases where little or nothing is known about this significant study. Challenging the work which Tift had done, they ended up proving his thesis by the experimental work they did. The conclusions from such work are immense! They are so controversial to the standard big bang cosmology and understanding of origins which underpin the present secular world view that they had to be disproved.
Why?
The conclusions which follow from Barry Setterfield’s work were confirmed by this information. The age of the universe was much younger than suggested by the standard model. That meant that the Biblical timescale is very much confirmed by the experimental results. God’s word is proven again to be consistent, with all data, in a straightforward reading.
In the ten years following this publication there was a flurry of work done in ‘standard cosmology’ circles to overturn this finding. The stakes are not small here. We are not just talking about some one’s pet theories. We are talking about billions of dollars and people’s careers, research budgets, government funding, university's and individual’s reputations. We are talking about justifications for lifestyle choices, government spending in social services and most of all the requirement to acknowledge the authority of and the responsibility to Jesus Christ as the Alpha and the Omega.
Read the Wikipedia article on this topic and you will see the brevity with which they report the overwhelming gravity of this topic. They do acknowledge periodicity as being fatal to the ‘red shift distance correlation’ whilst not mentioning the time involved which is the real problem. What is not reported in the Wikipedia article nor in any other literature on the matter is that the Tang and Zhang paper, which is taken as the last word on this matter, was shown to be totally inadequate.
Note also the data which referenced in the studies by Napier, Guthrie, Tifft, Bell etc although not mentioned specifically by these authors also indicate the centrality of the earth in the universe. That is the same data which Lawrence Krauss is so upset regarding data revealed in the WMAP satellite and now confirmed in the Plank satellite data. The evidence keeps piling in that God is the designer and the earth was designed for habitation. Romans 1 is so accurate;
“ the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,
since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
Red Shift Peculiarities
Many Christians today think the Flood of Noah’s time was only a local flood, confined to somewhere around Mesopotamia. This idea comes not from Scripture, but from the notion of “billions of years” of Earth history.
If the Flood was local, why did Noah have to build an Ark? He could have walked to the other side of the mountains and missed it.
If the Flood was local, why did God send the animals to the Ark so they would escape death? There would have been other animals to reproduce that kind if these particular ones had died.
If the Flood was local, why was the Ark big enough to hold all kinds of land vertebrate animals that have ever existed? If only Mesopotamian animals were aboard, the Ark could have been much smaller.
If the Flood was local, why would birds have been sent on board? These could simply have winged across to a nearby mountain range.
If the Flood was local, how could the waters rise to 15 cubits (8 meters) above the mountains (Genesis 7:20)? Water seeks its own level. It couldn’t rise to cover the local mountains while leaving the rest of the world untouched.
If the Flood was local, people who did not happen to be living in the vicinity would not be affected by it. They would have escaped God’s judgment on sin.3 If this happened, what did Christ mean when He likened the coming judgment of all men to the judgment of “all” men (Matthew 24:37–39) in the days of Noah? A partial judgment in Noah’s day means a partial judgment to come.
If the Flood was local, God would have repeatedly broken His promise never to send such a flood again.
Belief in a world-wide Flood, as Scripture clearly indicates, has the backing of common sense, science and Christ Himself.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v21/n3/flood
Here is a very succinct and common sense understanding of a world wide flood. The church has been receding from a world wide flood to a local flood for many years. It doesn't make sense. The scriptural account is only sensible on the basis of a world wide flood. Again many sections of the church have adopted the pagan/secular ideas of history preferring the Gilgamesh epic as a more true rendering of the occurrence of a great flood.
Moses received his information in two ways. Tradition through his people and face to face from God on the mountain. Moses’ science and history is God’s. For the church to renege on this position is to change their God. Jesus said if you didn’t believe Moses then you won’t believe in me. John 5. Again on the road to Emmaus Jesus began with Moses and all the prophets to show why the Christ had to die. The fall out from many sections of the church who have rejected the world wide flood as talked of in scripture is that they are not sure why Jesus had to die. Suffer, yes they say, but not die!
Notice the graph on the red shift item. This shows that the Cambrian era experienced a world wide flood dated in the secular system as 600 million years ago. Making adjustment on this exponential curve because of the slowing down of the speed of light and the effects on decay times this equates in real history to Noah’s flood.
Alongside this Dr Colin Mitchell (Soil Scientist Cambridge, Harvard, Consultant United Nations, Author of Physical Geography..a standard University Textbook) in his book Creationism Revisited pointed out that pipecasts from earthworms in the lower Cambrian strata in Scotland indicate that this whole strata was laid down in two and half days. The maximum speed of the earth worm is known and its burrowing upwards, to avoid being buried completely, in a continuous pipe, measures the time scale involved.
Thank you little earth worm!