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Part 6 - SCIENCE & THE BIBLE
There is a famous quote by a philosopher called Friedrich Nietzsche where he asks - ‘Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?’
Voltaire said of the Bible in the 18th Century that ‘…in a hundred years, this book will be forgotten and eliminated...’
In his autobiography, Charles Darwin described the Bible as ‘no more to be trusted than the beliefs of any barbarian.’
The Bible is under constant attack from all quarters. Despite this, the Bible has weathered all these storms and is still the number one selling book of all time – so much so that it no longer appears on any top ten lists because it would win every week. The works of Shakespeare have been translated into over 70 languages – the Bible has been translated into over 2000 languages and dialects over the ages.
I doubt if Voltaire would appreciate the irony that his home, a very large estate by anyone’s reckoning, is today one of the largest distribution points for the Bible in the world.
Another famous atheist, Bertrand Russell, was working on a book called ‘Antichrist’ which was designed to demonstrate how ridiculous the Christian faith was. During the course of writing his book, Russell became gravely ill and knew he was going to die. One of the last things he wrote was "What this world now needs is 'Christian' love and compassion".
As I have already mentioned, no statement in the Bible has ever been disproved despite the constant barrage of attacks – including the science-based statements.
THE NUMBER OF STARS
“I will make the descendants of David my servants and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky…”
Jeremiah 33:22
In the area of astronomy, we started to make serious attempts at quantifying the number of stars in the sky at around 130 AD with a guy called Claudius Ptolemy.
Ptolemy declared that there were one thousand and fifty six stars in the sky and he arrived at that figure by simply counting the ones that he could see.
As time and technology moved on, the count duly went up and today the scientific community generally agree that, in reality, they will never really know the true figure but guess it to be something around the 100 billion mark.
But the Bible verse was written in 640 BC., many hundreds of years before any attempt to count a single star had been made.
The author of Jeremiah could not possibly know this.
THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH
“It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth…”
Isaiah 40:22
The word ‘circle’ in the original Hebrew is ‘khug’ which also means sphere or globe. This is saying that God sits above the sphere of the planet. But the accepted wisdom of the time, around 700 BC, was that the Earth was flat
It wasn’t until the time of Archimedes and Aristotle that it was proved, in theory, the Earth was round using mathematics. This was around 300 BC, some 400 hundred years later.
It wasn’t until over a thousand years later, in the 1400’s, where we could put the theory into practice and discovered we could navigate our ships around the globe.
THE TURNING OF THE EARTH
“Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; That it might take hold of the ends of the earth …It is turned as clay to the seal;”
Job 38:14
This compares the earth to being like clay on the potter’s wheel. This clearly speaks of the earth revolving. This runs completely against the wisdom of the day where the clear belief was that the Earth was completely stationary and everything else moved around it.
GRAVITATIONAL FORCES
“He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”
Job 26:7
In the days of the Old Testament, people believed that their gods physically supported earth and kept it in place.
The Greeks believed that Atlas was a giant of a god. He possessed immense strength but grew arrogant with his abilities. The king of the Greek gods punished Atlas by making him carry the world on his shoulders.
Various other religions and ideologies believed the world was supported by elephants, serpents, gods or dragons.
To state that the Earth hung upon nothing would be incredulous statement to make back then.
The earth ‘hanging’ on nothing is technically correct, as gravity is the only thing holding the entire 6,000 trillion ton mass of the earth in position but the concept of gravity was not scientifically discovered until Galileo in the early 1600's.
Even then, Galileo caused such a stir; he was put under house arrest - for the rest of his life.
THE ORBIT OF DISTANT STARS
“...canst thou guide Arcturus…?”
Job 38:32
This is referring to a star called Arcturus. Back then it was believed by many the stars were all stationary and this clearly implies movement. But Arcturus has another point of interest. The Sun is roughly one and a half million times the size of the earth and moves at around 12.5 miles per second.
Arcturus is estimated to be 25,000 times the size of the Sun and moves at an incredible 257 miles per second. God was telling Job he had the power to do anything.
THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE
There is a cluster of verses which perfectly describe something called the hydrologic cycle. This is the cycle water goes through in our environment and it works like this:
Sunlight warms the surface of the ocean causing evaporation in the same way you get steam when you boil a kettle. This ‘steam’ rises because hot air is lighter than cold air. Once it gets to a certain height it cools and turns back to a liquid through a process called condensation. But these drops of liquid are so small and light that the wind currents keep them airborne. These droplets are so small that they are impossible to see until lots of them gather together to form clouds.
A similar effect can be seen with dust. You would not notice a single speck of dust but blow on a dusty surface and you see a clearly visible cloud that just seems to float in mid air.
When there are too many water droplets all crowding the same space, they begin to combine and form larger droplets that are too heavy to stay airborne, so they fall back to earth in the form of rain, a process called precipitation. The wind currents blow the clouds all over the world so rainfall is distributed across as wider an area as possible. This cycle provides us with drinking water, enables us to grow crops for food and to farm animals.
Without this cycle, life would quickly perish.
It wasn’t until early-to-mid 20th century that we discovered this process and fully understood its importance to life on earth. However, in 1400 BC, the following verses clearly revealed it:
“He causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings for the rain; he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries”
Psalm 135:7
“For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof: Which the clouds do drop and distil upon man abundantly.”
Job 36:27-29
“Also by watering he wearieth the thick cloud:”
Job 37:11
“He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds;”
Job 26:8
AIR PRESSURE
“For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven; to make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure.”
Job 28:25
This would have been written around the 1400 BC mark and talks of wind having weight. This statement would have been nonsensical to the people of the time.
It’s not like you can put wind onto a pair of scales and get a measurement. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that we got a handle on what wind was and the way it worked.
Wind is the rapid movement of air molecules and when you feel the wind blowing in your face, you are actually feeling the resistance of all these molecules as they hit you.
So the air that moves has mass and that mass has weight. This is a concept well beyond the people of 1400 BC.
BIOLOGY
“And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you…”
Genesis 17:12
According to the Old Testament, circumcision was to be performed on the eighth day of a newborn male's life.
Why the eighth day?
In 1935 Professor H Dam proposed the name "Vitamin K" for the factor in foods that helped prevent haemorrhaging in baby chicks. We now know that Vitamin K is responsible for the production of prothrombin by the liver.
If Vitamin K is deficient, there will be a prothrombin deficiency and haemorrhaging may occur, since both Vitamin K and prothrombin are necessary for proper blood clotting. It is only on the 5th through to the 7th day of a newborn male's life that Vitamin K begins to be produced (usually produced by bacteria in the intestinal tract). It is only on the eighth day that the percentage of prothrombin climbs to the highest it will ever be in the entire life of the child.
Therefore, the best day for circumcision is the eighth day!
PHLEBOTOMY
George Washington was one of the greatest Presidents America has ever had. One day he developed a severe sore throat – and the proposed cure?
A process called bloodletting.
Doctors literally drained your blood away, believing that they would drain with it the disease you were suffering from. Washington lost five pints of blood this way and died as a result but he was by no means alone.
This was a widely accepted practice for many years stretching back into the middle ages. It was so wide spread that your doctor could prescribe bloodletting for your particular condition and you would then go along to your barber, of all people, and he would perform the process for you.
Barbers who offered this service would place a pole outside their premises or above the door which had red and white stripes around it. The red represented the blood, the white represented the tourniquet tied around the arm and the pole was the thing you gripped as tight as you could while the barber performed the process. These poles are in widespread use today as they have become so synonymous with gentlemen’s barbers.
This process wasn’t really stamped out until the very early 19th century by which time your friendly neighbourhood GP had a device at his disposal called a scarificator which featured small rotating blades.
How did they know when they had taken enough blood? Simple – it was standard practice to keep removing blood until the patient passed out. The loss of consciousness was seen as good for you!
Once knowledge of human biology really began to take off, the procedure was quietly stamped out rather hastily and not generally practised at all after the late 1870’s.
But in the book of Leviticus it makes it abundantly clear that the life of a person is in their blood. That was written by Moses in 1445 BC – again, he could not possibly have known about this himself.
HELMINTHOLOGY
Leviticus contains several references to what we understand today to be basic medical biology.
At the time of Moses, the Egyptians used dung a great deal to put over wounds. Crying babies were fed it mixed with water as soother. Needless to say the infant mortality rate was rather high.
There was also another problem the Egyptians were suffering from which they couldn’t find a cause for. We would understand it today to be a disease called trichinosis.
They were getting sick from a disease, which gave them fevers, headaches and stiffness of the muscles and resulted in many deaths - and not just in Egyptian times either. Many have fallen victim to this disease over the ages; it’s widely believed that it claimed Mozart’s life amongst others and the cause of this disease? A parasitic organism called Trichinella spirallis, or roundworm to its friends.
Roundworms particularly like to grow in pigs, humans, rats and shellfish. You acquire this parasite by eating the larvae laid in infected meat. You eat the pork from infected meat, the larvae hatches in your stomach, drills through your intestinal wall to get into your blood stream and lodge itself in a muscle of its choice. More larvae are produced and cocoon themselves in the walls of your muscles, causing all manner of symptoms, some of which are fatal.
These parasites were discovered in 1808 by a man called Karl Asmund Rudolphi and he gave birth to helminthological biology – the study of parasites – and pork was discovered to be the main harbinger of this condition. And, written in 1445 BC, in the book of Leviticus, there is a warning to avoid pork.
MICROBIOLOGY
There are also verses regarding keeping your living quarters clean and personal hygiene. It’s made clear that people were to wash their hands under running water. And the Bible was very specific about the fact it had to be running water. It wasn’t until relatively modern times that science discovered this to be an essential for high standards of hygiene.
In 1845 a young doctor called Ignaz Semmelweis started work at a maternity hospital. Most hospitals back then had a mortality rate of around 30 per cent. This was considered a perfectly reasonable and unavoidable figure. But Semmelweis wanted to see if he could improve on that and studied the habits and methods of other doctors as they went about their daily routine.
The routine of his fellow doctors were to examine the dead mothers in the morning and perform a rudimentary autopsy, then wash their hands in a basin of cold water which all the doctors shared between them, dry their hands on a small towel, which they all shared between them, and then go and examine the expectant mothers.
Semmelweis wondered if the mortality rate had something to do with the bowl of water. After all, this one container of water would have washed blood and who knows what off the hands of all the doctors on duty that day. So he changed the practice. He had the doctors under his charge wash their hands vigorously under running water. His peers derided him and his belief that the water was contaminated with something they couldn’t see. But the mortality rate dropped from 30 per cent to less than 1 per cent.
Within six years the practice was adopted across Europe. In the late 19th century, sterile instruments began to appear in hospitals as the science of defeating bacteria was born.
We were nearly a staggering 3,500 years behind the Bible in revealing the value to human health as something as simple as running water.
GENETICS
Since learning how to manipulate the genetic code of living organisms, man has managed to open a real can of worms for himself that has often, and usually unreported, back fired on him.
You get to hear about the good things – new skin grown from pigs, life saving organs grown from human cells grafted onto mice – we have grown human ears onto the backs of mice which were then removed and transplanted to a human patient. Isn’t genetics great? Isn’t it a fantastic tool to save lives and improve longevity?
But you don’t get to hear about the genetically altered bacterium that unexpectedly kills important soil nutrients and have spontaneously mutated to attack plants – something the pure form of the same bacteria was never capable of doing.
You don’t hear about the genetically altered crops that have caused severe allergies when eaten by animals.
Then there is the wealth of experiments going on all the time that are swapping and mixing genes, a process referred to as ‘transgenics’.
A company called Nexia Biotechnologies in Canada has produced transgenic goats that produce spider silk in their milk.
Researchers in a hospital in Ohio, USA managed to create a transgenic monkey that glowed after re-sequencing its DNA with that of jellyfish. Many facilities have produced glow-in-the-dark animals – usually rabbits and dogs. One dog was altered solely to be exhibited as a work of art by Eduardo Kac, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Space doesn’t permit me to list the hundreds of examples of the misuse or dangerous application of this technology of mixing genes from one species to another.
Genetic manipulation of animals poses serious risks to the environment and human health, according to a report issued by the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2002.And the report warns that the Government's efforts to manage the risks are ‘disorganised’ and ‘probably inadequate’.
The latest race is currently on from several biotech companies to perfect an efficient way to mass produce transgenic pigs. Pigs could lend themselves to xenotransplantation – imagine a pig but with human organs so that those organs can be harvested for later use.
The Bible doesn’t directly talk about genetics or transgenic experimentation – it just says this:
“Do not mate different kinds of animals”
Leviticus 19:19
THE BLACK DEATH
The plague, or Black Death as it became known, struck Europe in 1347 in a huge outbreak, which spread very rapidly.
Merchant shipping brought rats carrying the disease to Western Europe. Rats have a natural immunity to the plague so carry it without ill effects. European fleas fed from these rats and then went on to bite humans too, thus spreading the disease to the population and people have no immunity to the plague whatsoever.
Rats and fleas existed in Europe at that time in huge numbers because there was refuse and raw sewage littered throughout the streets, a perfect breeding ground.
Because of the dirty living conditions and lifestyle of the people of that time, it was not uncommon to see rats scampering from home to home, foraging for food amidst the filth.
As the rats moved from street to street, house to house, infected fleas jumped off them and onto to people... and the result was that, in only four years, the whole of Europe was infected and 23 million people died.
The economy was destroyed, law and order had broken down and those working in the medical field fled Europe entirely, realising they had no chance in defeating this.
But there was one group of people in Europe who suffered very few casualties. For them, death from the plague was a rarity rather than the everyday reality it was for everyone else.
The Jewish community, which strictly applied the Bible to their lives, was relatively untouched by this human catastrophe. They kept their living quarters clean, bathed regularly and washed under running water. The rats and the fleas, attracted by filth and decaying rubbish did not trouble them so nor did the plague.
Amidst the horror and carnage of Europe at that time, some very unscrupulous people in positions of authority saw a chance to make a quick buck.
The Jews were very hard working people and, as a result, many of them were very wealthy. A guy called Amadeus VI; Count of Savoy declared the plague had been caused by the Jews deliberately, taking the opportunity to seize their assets. But his money making scheme got out of hand as the masses, or at least those who were left, killed many Jews in their anger and ignorance
OCEANOGRAPHY
Matthew Maury was a naval officer in the American army. He was also a Christian who attended church every Sunday and knew his Bible. He entered naval service in 1825 but, in 1839, he had an accident where he was struck by a stagecoach. This left him badly injured and many thought he was going to die from his injuries.
While bed ridden, Maury devoted himself to studying the bible further and saw the following verse;
“…The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas…”
Psalm 8:8
Talk of ‘paths of the seas’ stimulated his curiosity. People back then knew of currents but Maury felt that this reference of paths was something totally different. He determined that if he survived this injury he would devote himself to finding what these paths were. Sure enough, partially disabled but still able to walk, he recovered and was given the naval equivalent of a desk job.
He was put in charge of a department, which dealt with mapping and navigation. First thing he did was make captains fill out a logbook and then from that he compiled detailed maps of currents – not just sea but wind also. He then put weighted bottles into the sea – known as drift bottles - which floated slightly beneath the surface of the water so they wouldn’t be affected by air currents.
He put instructions in them that anyone finding the bottle should return it to him. From these different methods he was able to determine that the sea does indeed follow a global path. These ocean maps led to the first underwater telegraph cable being laid and Maury wrote a book on oceanography which to this day is still taught in universities.
For thousands of years people thought the ocean floor was completely flat, covered with sand and bowl shaped being deepest in the centre. But in the 1900s, and partly due to Maury’s work, the new science of oceanography was making its presence felt.
They found the seabed was anything but flat and had many deep valleys or canyons. The Marianas Trench in the Pacific is so deep that if Mt. Everest (29,000 feet high) were dropped into it, the peak would still be a mile below the water’s surface. There are also underwater mountains. The Atlantic Ocean contains an undersea range of mountains 10,000 miles long.
But over 3000 years earlier, the Bible seemed to have had this covered too.
“Then the [valleys of the sea were exposed], and the foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils”
Psalm 18:15
"Have you walked in the recesses [valleys] of the sea?"
Job 38:16
JONAH AND THE WHALE
The prophet Jonah was thrown off a ship and spoke of falling to the bottom of the mountains in the sea (Jonah 2:6) after being swallowed by a great fish. Speaking of which…
“Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”
Jonah 1:17
A man being swallowed by a ‘great fish’ for three days and living to tell the tale seems a little far fetched but there are true life accounts of this happening to fishermen, even in relatively modern times.
A man called Sir Francis Fox, who was an English civil engineer and had a large hand in the bridge built over Victoria Falls, the Mersey Tunnel and extensions to the London Underground, wrote a book published in 1924 called ‘Sixty Three Years of Engineering’.
In this book he recounts the case of a sailor called Bartley. Bartley was a Seaman aboard a whaling ship called ‘The Star of the East’ which was hunting whales off the coast of the Falkland Islands.
They spotted a large sperm whale and launched smaller boats that were armed with harpoons. They got shot off and hit the whale that then turned on them and rammed the smaller boats, throwing all the sailors into the sea. In the resulting confusion, Bartley disappeared, presumed drowned, although no body was found.
The following day, the same whale was killed and dragged on board the larger whaling vessel. The whale was then cut open and Bartley was found alive in the creature’s stomach.
It was said that Bartley was suffering from what we would understand to be post traumatic stress and took him several weeks before he was able to talk about his experience.
Physically, Bartley was unharmed except for the areas of skin which had been bleached white by the gastric juices of the whale.
Bartley said it was hot, dark and dank but the atmosphere was breathable. The surrounding area shrank from his touch when he reached out and then he realised where he was and passed out, not regaining consciousness again until he was released from the creature’s stomach.
HYDROTHERMAL VENTS
"Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?"
Job 38:16
In this verse we find reference to ‘springs of the sea’. The springs of the sea are what we call hydrothermal vents, underwater fissures that spew heated water. We didn’t discover those until 1977.
PHYSICS
“Where is the way where light dwelleth? And as for darkness, where is the place thereof…”
Job 38:19
The ‘way’ means path – what path does light take when it goes from point A to point B? Darkness doesn’t have a path – just a place. It’s stationary. So, therefore, light travels and darkness doesn’t.
We didn’t think about the concept of light travelling until Galileo in the early 1600’s. It wasn’t until 1926 that we could measure the speed of light.
“By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?”
Job 38:24
Light scattering wind – what’s that all about? Sunshine causes the surface of the planet to warm up, this heats the air near the surface and warm air rises. When you get enough warm and cold air mixing with each other they push each other out of the way – and it’s these changes in air pressure which causes the wind to blow.
Any meteorologist or climatologist could tell you that… but not until the late 19th century.
FLOODS & DINOSAURS
If we are to accept the Biblical account of creation then we must also answer the following question:
What about the dinosaurs?’
To understand what happened to the dinosaurs, we have to understand a little about one of the biggest events in Genesis – The Flood.
God sent the flood because society was descending into a real, highly destructive mess. So God decided to wipe the slate clean. But of all the people on the Earth at that time, God looked upon Noah as the only good guy left and promised him he would spare him and his family.
The Lord told Noah what was coming and instructed him to build an ark, which was an enormous boat, designed to carry him and his family to safety so they could ride out the flood. Go also told Noah to take animals on board so that they can re-populate the earth once the flood was over.
Before the flood, the world was a very different place.
First of all, the Bible tells us that there was a large amount of water in the upper atmosphere which formed a sort of canopy. Such a canopy would have been great for filtering out cosmic rays and ultraviolet light.
“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters”
Genesis 1:6
So what we have here is a layer of water, dry land and underneath that another layer of water. How can you have a layer of water underneath dry land? We have huge subterranean pockets of water under the earth even to this day – ask anyone exploring for oil.
So Noah is instructed to take animals on his boat ‘after it’s kind’ – that does not mean Noah takes an example of every species – just an example of every kind of species.
For example – Noah didn’t need to take every breed of dog – just two (male & female) dogs. The same for reptiles – Noah didn’t need to take a fully grown example, he just needed young reptiles which would have been smaller and more manageable.
Notice I’m avoiding the word dinosaur here. The word dinosaur didn’t exist until 1841 and was introduced by a guy called Sir Richard Owen. The Bible refers to dinosaurs as dragons and dragons are mentioned 35 times in the Bible.
Anyway, the floods come.
The Bible tells us that the ‘fountains of the deep’ broke open. We know that volcanic activity spews out enormous quantities of water in the form of steam. Volcanoes don’t just release lava – 70% of what they release is water in the form of steam. We know there are huge pockets of water trapped underground.
The Bible says in Genesis 7:11 that these fountains ‘broke up’ or ‘burst forth’ – this clearly implies seismic activity. The only way to release underground water is to break the ground and that means earthquakes. And in this case it means earthquakes on an unprecedented level.
Such seismic activity would have seen huge swathes of dry land sink into the sea, the seabed permanently scarred the creation of underwater valleys and trenches as well as the creation of mountains, which would be above sea level once the floodwaters, receded. This process was aided by a constant deluge of rain, which lasted for over a month and never let up.
Previously, those opposed to the idea that there could have ever been a global flood of this kind pointed to the fact that the rainfall required would have to be enormous. But, as news and television pictures clearly show, it doesn’t have to rain for more than a week to create widespread flooding and devastate huge expanses of land thanks to climate changes, which are happening within our time.
It rained for forty days and forty nights and every living thing on the planet perished according to Genesis 7:21 apart from those on the ark.
There are over 270 cultures that which tell stories of a world wide flood which virtually wiped out mankind.
After the flood the animals and people aboard the ark repopulated the world. But the world was a much different place now. The canopy was gone for one thing which was acting to protect the surface.
Pre-flood, the average life expectancy of man was 912 years. Post-flood it progressively dropped to 70 to 80 years which it has remained to this day.
How do we know this?
The Bible meticulously details the genealogy line and how long those people lived for. And by meticulous, I mean meticulous and for a very good reason…
There is a man in the Bible called Methuselah whose name in Hebrew means ‘When he is dead it shall be sent’. This name was given by Enoch; a prophet of God (more on prophecy later on…) Methuselah was Noah’s grandfather and what big biblical event happened just after Methuselah’s death?
It was the flood.
It’s like a great row of dominoes – if just one of these names or years is out then it knocks out many of the prophecies and significance of Biblical events.
But what does this have to do with dinosaurs?
The thing about reptiles is that they never stop growing. Not like people who will reach their adult height at around 16 or 17 – reptiles will grow for their entire lifespan. So if that lifespan were to be 900 years, you can imagine you would end up with a pretty big reptile on your hands. But post-flood, they didn’t live as long nor grow as big and would not have been able to mature fast enough to breed at the same rate they did beforehand.
So the human population was growing fast and what large reptiles existed at that time couldn’t mature fast enough to keep their numbers up to what they were and they were hunted for food and medicine.
How do I know this?
The Bible refers to these reptiles as dragons and throughout history there are lots of legends about ‘dragon slayers’.
The Chinese have a famous legend about a guy called Yu who, after a great flood, helped drain the land to make it habitable again and drove away snakes and dragons.
Marduk, the god of Babylon, is portrayed as riding a dragon. Babylonian walls are filled with paintings of dragons and lions – how did they know what a dragon looked like?
In 326 BC, Alexander the Great reported that his men feared the dragons that hid in caves when they took parts of India.
In 2 AD – after Christ – the Roman Empire was filled with mosaics depicting dragons.
St George slayed a dragon in 275 AD, as the legend goes. St George was a Christian who was put to death for his beliefs in 303 AD.
Beowulf killed a dragon by pulling its front arm off, causing it to bleed to death which was weird but there is also a Babylonian cylinder seal depicting a man pulling off a dragons arm too. These depictions were many thousands of years apart so it’s not like they could compare notes.
Marco Polo lived in China for 17 years around 1271 AD and reported that the emperor raised dragons specifically for the task of pulling his chariot.
Also in China, in 1611, there are written records listing who worked for the emperor and what they did. One of the jobs listed is ‘Royal Dragon Feeder’.
Red Indians in North America carved pictures of dragons in the walls of the Grand Canyon.
There are dragon legends from all over the Earth depicted in paintings, carvings, pottery, jewellery, you name it.
Why did dinosaurs become extinct – because we killed them all. We hunted them to extinction.
Because of what happened during the flood, huge numbers of dinosaur where wiped out, there dead bodies buried under tons of sediment. Their bones are then found in layers of rock which we incorrectly guessed the age of so that’s how we end up with dinosaurs that are pre-historic, not pre-flood.
The ones that re-populated the earth after the flood were hunted for food and medicine – plus they would have been something of menace. There are many carvings and drawings depicting dragons swallowing people whole, which would be consistent with the way a reptile eats. Snakes & lizards consume their prey whole. Would you want a dragon near your village?
Dragons were creatures of mindless violence and destruction. No wonder they are also used to symbolise satan and sin.
Just going back to the Flood for a moment, here’s a question - Where did all the flood water go when the waters receded?
Volcanoes can cause lava flows underwater. Lava is so hot that, even underwater, it still not cooled sufficiently to solidify it. Because of the earlier volcanic activity the ocean floor would have been very hot.
Once this process stopped and the fountains of the deep and the volcanoes had exhausted themselves, things would have begun to cool down. And that creates a whole new set of problems.
As the ocean floor cooled it would have become heavier and denser. This would have caused even more turmoil on the now ravaged ocean floor. The highly pressurised underground pockets of water that were released during the flood are now just immense, underwater caverns that collapse under the weight of the lava encrusted ocean floor. This effectively makes the ocean basin much deeper. Tectonic plates shift in response to this activity creating mountains and landmasses, which weren’t there before.
This, in turn, makes the ocean basin even deeper again. In the midst of this, all the animals and organic matter caught up in this would be buried under tons of sediment and debris, sucked deeper into the ground or the ocean floor. As the tectonic plates meet to create mountain ranges the sediment and debris is lifted with it and the whole thing solidifies in place, fossilising all that is trapped within.
It is a logical step then to assume that there must be fossilised remains of land animals caught on the ocean floor and the remains of water borne creatures fossilised in the mountains ranges if this theory is to mean anything.
And that is exactly what science has found. Seashells and other marine life have been found deposited on mountains, even Mt Everest. This is not uncommon and can be seen on The Matterhorn range and the Alps – it happens all over the world.
Similarly, on the ocean floors and lakes we constantly find the remains of land animals and even upright trees just beneath the seabed. Companies exploring for oil come across this all the time.
The bottom line in all of this is that the Bible is able to produce compelling evidence that FACTS have been recorded thousands of years before science has managed to catch up to it.
Science is very often built upon faulty premises, unsubstantiated theories and trying to rationalise what they see with what they currently know. We seem to have advanced little since the days when people who challenged the theories of the day were strung up to public ridicule. In our much more civilised times, we don’t do that anymore – we let the press do it on our behalf.
The astronomer sees the vastness of the Universe and assumes it must be billions of years old. The geologist uses the knowledge of his learned friend, the astronomer, to date the Earth as billions of years old. The biologist figures that, given the huge time spans his other two colleagues are dealing in, life must of ‘evolved’ over a long period of time. But it’s all theory and assumption.
The word of God provides facts and certainty. It’s not ambiguous about how old the Earth is. It’s not ambiguous about how life started on this planet. It’s not ambiguous about where we came from.
But there is something else that is seemingly beyond the grasp of science. For all their knowledge, theories and equations, it’s the answer to one tantalising question that constantly eludes them.
In addition to the ‘how’, the Bible also answers another, very important, question – the ‘why’…
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