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Sagan in Rahway High School‘s 1951 yearbook

Sagan discusses FAITH when there is no evodence

Carl Sagan on Religion

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The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt)

Biblical Archaeology is Silencing the critics! Significantly, even liberal theologians, secular academics, and critics generally cannot deny that archaeology has confirmed thebiblical record at many points. Rationalistic detractors of the Bible can attack it all day long, but they cannot dispute archaeological facts.

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Carl Sagan

Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …

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Francis Schaeffer the Founder of the L’Abri community

The Cosmos Is All That Is

Francis Schaeffer wrote in 1981 in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO chapter 3 The Destruction of Faith and Freedom:

Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it. 

How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I have ever done are posts from John MacArthur. One is on what the Bible has to say about alcohol and then what the Bible says concerning the prophecy of the city of Tyre.

https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-216/creation-day-5

We’re looking at day five in the Creation, (1 Genesis 20-23).  (1 Genesis 20-23).  The text says, “Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth and the open expanse of the heavens.”  And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind.  And God saw that it was good and God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”  And there was evening, and there was morning the fifth day.

We are in day five as the text indicates.  We have day by day gone through Creation week with some amazing, amazing insights given to us by the word of God.  One of the things that continues to strike me as I read more and more, what happens in a series like this pretty typically, is once I start a series all of you out there who are trying to help me start sending me things:  books, email, faxes, stuff off the internet until my library swells beyond comprehension.  And I have been reading, trying to read as much as I can possibly read and the more I read the more interested I become.  And I just have to kind of unload some of it on you. 

The thing that continues to strike me in my reading, because I really have never spent a large part of my life studying science; I took in college whatever was required and not once ounce of science beyond that, and managed to forget most of what I learned.  But I am now sort of reintroduced to the amazing diversity and complexity of the created order.   Those are the two words that stick in my mind:  the diversity and the complexity of the created order, which speaks to me of the immensity of God’s intelligence.  It is staggering how, as you begin to look at the Creation with any kind of thought, any kind of depth, you come face-to-face with the immensity of the intelligence and power of God.  And it continues to amaze me as I read evolutionists that want to deny God, to see the utter folly of their conclusions – the utter hopelessness of it.

December 1996 brought the death of an evolutionist and astronomer named Carl Sagan, probably the most well-known astronomer in the world.  His perception was that life just sort of happened and he ended up his life with absolute emptiness – absolute hopelessness.  And near the end of his life he was interviewed by Ted Koppel on television.  Koppel asked Sagan, realizing he was at the end of his life, that he had spent his life in science studying the universe as an astronomer, he said, “Do you, sir, have any words of wisdom for the people of the world?”  To which Sagan replied, and I quote, “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400-plus-billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe, which may be one of a large number – perhaps an infinite number – of other universes.  That is well worth pondering.”  End quote. 

He thought about it and he thought about it and he thought about it and he never let God be a reality.  In the end, the most brilliant evolutionist only knows that the universe exists.  He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, and mostly he doesn’t know who the creator is.  How sad.  Everything in the universe points to God, the Creator.  Even Albert Einstein said, “Of course there is a massive intelligence behind the universe.  A man is a fool who doesn’t believe that,” and then went on to say, “But we could never know him.”  The humanistic evolutionist refuses to see what is obvious, refuses to meet the God who wants to be known. 

Back to the created order itself.  Again, the complexity and diversity leave you with no other possible explanation than divine intelligence and divine power of proportions beyond our comprehension.  I just pick out little pieces of the created order that speak to this complexity and diversity and share a few of them with you.  Some birds navigate by the stars when migrating.  How do they know how to do that?  In fact, birds raised from eggs inside a building where they have never seen the sky can orient themselves toward home when shown an artificial sky representing a place they’ve never been. 

Moths have two ears.  Mites, little microscopic bugs, like to live in a moth’s ear.  But interestingly enough, mites occupy only one ear of a moth.  If mites get in both ears, the moth can’t fly, so scientists find mites only in one ear.  How do the mites know that one ear is occupied?  And then the fascinating Bombardier beetle has two chemicals in his little body which mix perfectly and at the right moment combine outside his body.  When they’re fired and they intersect, they explode in the face of the enemy.  That’s why they’re called Bombardier beetles.  However, the two chemicals that create an explosion outside the body, never combine prematurely to blow up the beetle.  And by the way, how did the beetle evolve those explosives and keep them separate? 

The University of Alberta, Canada, once showed that in that temperate climate there are an average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and that those 1,800 storms in operation at any time expend energy at the inconceivable figure of one billion, three hundred million horsepower.  Where does that come from?  A Canadian physicist said a rain of four inches over an area of 10,000 square miles would require the burning of 640 million tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain.  And to cool again the vapors and collect them in clouds would take another 800 million horsepower of refrigeration working 24 hours a day for 100 days.  And yet God, by the massive power of the sun evaporates the water, refrigerates it in the sky, and sends it back down again as water.  By the way, the average farmer in Minnesota is provided, free of charge, 407,510 gallons of water per acre per year by that process if the annual rainfall of 24 inches is occurring.  Where does all this power come from?

The U.S. Natural Museum says there are over 10 million different species of insects.  There are 2,500 kinds of ants.  I know, they were all at your last picnic.  One colony of ants can have as many as 100 million ants.  How do those little tiny things have such a reproductive system?  Some have estimated there are five billion birds in America.  Mallards can fly 60 miles an hour, eagles can fly 100 miles an hour, and falcons can dive at 180 miles an hour.  By the way, codfish, not that you need to know, can lay nine million eggs and herring only 70,000.  I don’t have any other comment, just that is enough to stagger me.  Nine million eggs?  Nine million little codfish?  That’s why there’s so many fish-and-chips places in England.  They never run out of that stuff. 

The Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, weighs 6,586 sextillion tons, hangs in empty space, spins at 1,000 miles an hour with perfect balance.  And that’s important, so you’re not just jumping every time the Earth moves.  At the same time that it’s spinning at 1,000 miles an hour, it is moving through space around the sun at 1,000 miles a minute in an orbit of 580 million miles.  It does so at a perfect angle set to create the seasons, which provide all the crops which feed its inhabitants.  Comet heads can be from 10,000 miles to one million miles long and the tails can be 100 million miles long.  They travel at 350 miles per second.  Your heart, about the size of your fist, weighs less than half a pound, pumps 1,800-plus gallons of blood a day, does enough work in 12 hours to lift 65 tons off the ground. 

Did you know that the sun burns up – this is staggering – four million tons of matter per second?  Consider things that are very small, like the atom.  They’re not visible.  We know they exist, but to this day they’re not visible.  Atoms are so small it takes three atoms to make up one water molecule, and if you were to take every water molecule in one drop of water and blow them up so that each molecule was the size of a grain of sand – this is one water molecule.  If you were to take every molecule in one drop of water and blow it up the size of a grain of sand, you would have enough grains of sand to make a road one foot thick, one-half mile wide that would go from L.A. to New York City.  That’s how many molecules in a drop of water and there’s three atoms in every molecule.  And yet the atom is mostly empty space.  The actual material in the atom takes up only one trillionth of the atoms volume and when atoms combine they only join together at their outer electron orbit, that’s all.  What makes matter seem solid are the motions within the atoms. 

This is not really solid.  Everything is mostly empty space.  If the average person had all the space squeezed out of them – that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?  If the average person had all the space squeezed out of it, how much volume do you think you’d occupy?  If you had all the space squeezed out of you, you’d be lost on the head of a pin for you could only occupy 1/100,000,000 of a cubic inch.  So when somebody comes along and says you’re nothing, they’re right.  But on the other side you see you’re thinking diet, I know.  You’re thinking there’s got to be a way to make this work.  But I want you to know a full cubic inch of that material would weigh a billion pounds.  A teaspoon full of water contains a million billion trillion atoms.  I mean it’s just staggering, isn’t it?  Did this all happen by accident?  Come on. 

Let me talk about the wheel of life.  This fascinates me.  I mentioned this morning who invented the wheel and somebody said, “The Mayans did.”  No, the Mayans didn’t, God did.  There’s a wheel of life.  You’ve got them all through you.  The wheel that I’m talking about, the wheel of life – scientists call it the wheel of life – is found in the enzyme ATP synthase.  Its structure has only recently been elucidated.  It’s won a joint Nobel Prize in 1997 for two scientists, Paul Boyer of the USA and John Walker of the U.K.  The wheel in this enzyme rotates at about 100 revolutions per second.  This miniature motor is 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead and it’s revolving 100 revolutions per second.  Every cell in your body and every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors.  Every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors in just one cell.  Someone estimated that your body has 10 quadrillion little motors.  Let me tell you what the little motor does.

The ATP motor’s job is to make the molecule adenosine triphosphate, ATP, from adenosine diphosphate, ADP, and phosphoric acid a synthesis which requires an input of energy.  The ATP can then break down into ADP again giving up the energy by coupling itself to another chemical process within the cell which requires the energy in order to react.  So energy is directed and the products are recycled constantly, constantly, in that little tiny motor, of which you have 10 quadrillion going on all the time.  Says Dr. Walker, “We require our body weight in ATP every day.”  So those little motors have to reproduce your entire body weight every day.  We’re turning over that amount of ATP, cycling that energy, to keep ourselves thinking and walking around, doing whatever we do.  If we have a lazy day, we’ll only use about half our body weight of ATP and if we work hard, up to one ton of ATP is recycled in a day.  In 1993, Professor Boyer deduced by indirect means how ATP was produced, but it was left to Dr. Walker in 1994 to provide the first detailed picture of how the motor works.  He used x-rays and an electron microscope to take an atomic snapshot.  And then some Japanese fellow came along in 1997 with a tiny fluorescent filament attached to the electron microscope so that the motor could be seen spinning under the microscope. 

These extremely complex little spinning motors are brilliantly designed.  Each motor is built from 31 separate proteins, and remember this is 200,000 times smaller than the head of a pin and they have 31 protein components that are made from thousands of precisely-arranged amino acids.  Am I losing you?  It gets worse.  This thing goes on paragraph after paragraph after paragraph.  These little machines are producing with every turn of the wheel at some 100 revolutions per second.  They are producing the necessary energy cycle to keep you alive and keep you functioning.  “It’s incredible,” says Dr. Walker, “to think of these motors of life spinning around in all the cells of our bodies and they are spinning in all the cells of everything that lives.”  Who designed these little wheel motors?  Who energized them?

(Psalm 139:14) says, “We were fearfully and wonderfully made.”  Now my friend, R.C. Sproul, is part theologian and part philosopher and I appreciate him for his theology, but I really appreciate him for his philosophy.  He is actually – he is actually a funny philosopher because he can make people look so foolish that you can hardly help but chuckle.  Sproul says there are only four options for the origin of the universe.  You only have four.  Option number one, the universe is an illusion.  It doesn’t exist.  That’s option number one.  Option number two, it is self-created.  Option number three, is it self-existent and eternal.  Option number four, it was created by someone who is self-existent.  Sproul says there aren’t any other options.  Either it doesn’t exist or it created itself, or it always existed or somebody created it.  That’s it.  He says, “I have puzzled over this for decades and sought the counsel of philosophers, theologians and scientists.  I have been unable to locate any other theoretical options that cannot be subsumed under these four options.”  That’s all you’ve got.  Then Sproul says, “Option number one must be eliminated for two reasons.”  That’s the option that says it doesn’t exist, it’s all an illusion.

“First, if it’s a false illusion then it isn’t an illusion.  If it’s a true illusion, then someone or something must be existing to have that illusion.  If this is the case, then that which is having the illusion must either be self-created, self-existent or caused by someone ultimately self-existent, so therefore everything is not an illusion.”  Secondly, he says you can eliminate number one, the illusion theory, because if we assume the illusion is absolute – that is, nothing does exist including that which is having the illusion – then there is no question of origins even to answer because literally nothing exists.  But if something exists, then whatever exists must either be self-created, self-existent, or created by someone who is self-existent.  

Let’s look at option two, that the universe created itself.  Well this is, by all logic, formally false.  It is contradictory and logically impossible.  Sproul says, “In essence, self-creation requires the existence of something before it exists.”  You get that?  You can’t create yourself unless you exist to create yourself.  “Self-creation is a logical and rational impossibility,” he writes.  “For something to create itself, it must be before it is.”  This is impossible.  It’s impossible for solids, liquids and gases.  It’s impossible for atoms and subatomic particles.  It is impossible for light.  It is impossible for heat.  It is impossible for God.  Nothing anywhere, anytime can create itself because if it could it would have to exist before it created itself.  Sproul points out that an entity can be self-existent and not violate logic, but it can’t be self-created.  When scientists say, “Well, 15 to 20 billion years ago the universe created itself,” what are they saying?  They’re saying nothing exploded into something.  That is a logical impossibility.  To retain a theory of self-creation is totally irrational and rejects all logic.  Such a theory can be believed, but it can’t be argued reasonably.

Then you’ve got option number three, that the universe, as it exists, as we know it, has always existed eternally.  Well that doesn’t fly.  You’re not eternal and neither am I.  We didn’t always exist.  There was a time when we didn’t exist.  There was a time when our children didn’t exist.  There are all kinds of things in this world that once did not exist.  In fact, everything around us once did not exist.  How could the universe exist forever and then do in time, i.e. create life, what it had never done forever.  If the universe always existed, then everything in it always existed, and we know everything in it didn’t always exist because you and I didn’t always exist.  Our parents will verify that.  We cannot be born and be always existing.  Cars and watches and chairs, all that, were brought into existence at some point in time. 

Option one, option two, option three are impossible.  We’re left with only one possibility.  The universe exists because it was created by someone who existed before it existed, a preexisting, intelligent power, namely God.  Matter can’t create itself.  Only an eternal, preexisting God could create it.  I was encouraged this week.  CNN reported that only nine percent of Americans believe that life arose purely by chance.  That’s good, isn’t it?  But the vast majority can flip the figures over.  Over 90 percent of the people in America believe that God was involved in creation, but that God used evolution as His method.  We’ve been trying to point out to you that that can’t be how God created because evolution is what?  Impossible.  Absolutely impossible.  That’s why there’s no evidence for it, because it can’t happen.  The sin of evolutionists is described in (1 Romans).  “The wrath of God,” verse 18, “is revealed from heaven against all un-Godliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”  The truth of the Creator God is obvious.  It’s absolutely obvious, reasonable, logical, but they suppress the truth.  Verse 19, “That which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them by reason, by logic, by cause and effect.  It is apparent, since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made.”

You cannot conclude anything other than that there was an eternal, preexisting creator.  That is the only reasonable conclusion, and consequently those who reject that and suppress that truth, (Romans 120) says, “Are without excuse.”  Without excuse, even though they knew God.  I mean there’s no other possible, reasonable conclusion.  They refuse to honor him as God, refuse to think and became empty in their speculations, their foolish heart is darkened.  They think they’re wise.  They have all their Ph.D’s and all of that, but they are actually fools.  They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of a corruptible man, birds, four-footed animals, crawling creatures.  They worship the creature more than the creator.  They make the creature the creator.  Life creates itself.  (1 Romans), “They worship the creation.  They see the creation as the life force which creates.”  Logically ridiculous as we noted a moment ago.  How did the universe come into existence?  Let’s go back to chapter one of Genesis and go back to where we’ve been all along.  It came into existence exactly the way it’s described in the opening chapter of the Bible, which is inspired by God, which is true and inerrant and infallible.  The truth of origins is clearly given here in six 24-hour – nearly 24-hour – solar days, six days defined as an evening and a morning or a period of darkness and a period of light.  Six normal days.  In six days, God created the entire universe the way it is now. 

We’ve been showing you through this study that that was about six or seven thousand years ago and that is all.  And when you look and you say what about all the strata and what about the appearance of age and all of that, the answer is God created everything old, everything mature.  And the flood also, which occurs later on, changes the face and the configuration of the earth and answers a lot of the questions that are brought up with regard to topography and sedimentary rock and fossils and all of that.  But the Bible is very clear, God created it all in six days.  Now day one, God created the material and light.  Day two, the seas and the heavens.  Day three, the earth and vegetation and day four, the lights – the luminaries – the moon, the stars and the sun.  Now we come to day five, and I just read it to you.  It has to do with God creating all the creatures that populate the seas and the skies.  This is the day when God completes the home for man and He creates the first living beings; the first living beings.  Verse 20, “Swarms of living creatures.”  That is the first time anything is said to be living.  Plants aren’t so designated.  They are organisms that have a kind of life, but it is not a conscious life.  The first living beings created by God came on day five.  I’ll just remind you, if you’re looking at the sequence, day five corresponds to day two as day four corresponded to day one.  On day one, God created the light.  On day four he created the stellar bodies to be the light givers.  On day two He created the seas and the heavens and on day five Je populated the seas and the heavens.

On day three, He created the earth and its vegetation, corresponding with on day six He created the animals and man to populate the earth and to consume its vegetation, so the parallels run consistently through.  The sea and the sky on day two and the inhabitants of the sea and the sky on day five.  The sea was given, of course, its final form on day three, but it was created on day two.  Now as we look at the text here, there are two phases to the day five creation.  First phase, the creation of conscious life, secondly the creation of reproductive life.  Two things are clearly identified for us.  Conscious life that’s living creatures who are conscious, that is they react to their environment and they move around from place to place.  Plants do not, obviously.  And secondly, reproductive life.  Verse 20, let’s pick it up at the text.  “Then God said,” and I’ll stop you there again.  Always the method of creation, God speaks non-existing things into existence.  He speaks them into existence out of nothing. 

“Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.”  So he first of all filled the waters.  Now in the Hebrew, this is what is called a paronomasia, which is a term describing a kind of literary device.  A paronomasia is basically this.  The Hebrew says, “Let the waters” – the text says, “Let the waters swarm with swarming things.”  It’s a repetition.  It’s the same in verse 11, “Let the earth sprout vegetation.”  Actually, in the Hebrew is, “Let the earth vegetate with vegetation.”  And here it’s, “Let the waters swarm with swarming things.”  Swarm with swarming, living things actually or swarm with swarming things that live.  Swarm is the word chosen here because it has the idea of movement, and I remind you that the distinctiveness of living creatures is that they move.  Plants are not called living creatures because they aren’t mobile.  They don’t move.  Living creatures move.  In fact, He filled the seas so that the verb here is to swarm.  And again, it pictures a large population of these creatures in motion.  Again, Cassuto, the Jewish commentator, writes, “The primary significance of the stem, sheretsin Hebrew, is movement with specific reference to the abundant, swift movement of many creatures who jostle one another as they proceed to crisscross in all possible directions.  God willed that into the midst of the waste an inanimate waters from one end of the sea to the other.  There should now enter a living being and that there should be born in their midst moving animate beings subject to no limitation of numbers or intermission of movement.

The sea began to just swarm with all these living creatures swimming everywhere and that would include – the seas would include the freshwater as well; all the waters of the earth.  The term living is that very familiar Hebrew word nephesh, which speaks of soul or being or life.  It’s used here for the very first time.  This is the first time we really have a living creature that moves on its own.  Plants have no such life in the sense that creatures do because plants can’t move and they are not conscious.  Living things are conscious, though animals are not self-conscious.  That is they are conscious.  They respond to their environment as individuals, but they are not aware of that response.  It is purely a mechanism that we call instinct.  They are not self-conscious, they do not know they are alive.  They do not know they are dead.  They do not know one another.  They do not communicate with one another in personal, self-conscious ways, although instinctively they are under tremendous control by the DNA codes that have been given to them for the preservation of their species and the function of their species as God as designed it.  But they are distinguished from plants by the word nephesh.  Literally, nephesh means “that which breathes.”  That which breathes. 

These beings are wayibārā.  That is to say they are created, and here He uses bārā, the word for create.  This is an epic-making achievement that demands the verb “to create.”  As a monumental thing takes place, He creates conscious beings that can move and they move through the sea in swarms; such a massive amount of created beings.  Now that is to say, and I stop you here because this is a very important thing.  When God created the fish and all those mammals and all those animals, whether you’re talking about fish or whether you’re talking about whales or whether you’re talking about sea-going dinosaurs or whether you’re talking about eels or whether you’re talking about plankton or whatever anywhere in the food chain, when God created all of that there was no evolutionary process.  He literally, in a moment, spoke into existence all the creatures that swim.  Just instantaneously, at the same moment on the same day, they all came into existence.  They were not somehow in a process of development as species evolved into other species and mutated into other species. 

They were all instantaneously created in massive swarms moving through the seas.  Verse 20 indicates the same thing, “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.”  Of course He doesn’t talk about swarming because there wasn’t such a dense creation of birds.  We know that today.  If you look in the depths of the sea where it hasn’t been polluted significantly, you will find an almost uncountable and limitless amount of life.  And you look into the air, and of course there are less birds.  So you find here that it doesn’t use the word “swarming.”  “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven.”  They are free to fly, literally in the Hebrew, on the face of heaven.  That’s a wonderful picture because you could translate it they fly in front of heaven, as if heaven were all the way out, heaven were all the way up into the very limitless ends of the eternity of space that God has made and the great expanse of heaven.  And the birds that are flying around the globe don’t go very far.  They just kind of fly what appears to us to be the surface of the vast heaven behind or on the face of heaven; in front of heaven with the great heaven behind them.

And then I think this is quite fascinating.  “And God,” verse 21, “created the great sea monsters.”  Why did it mention those?  You know, when it mentions the creation of plants and trees it didn’t mention apple trees or oak trees.  It didn’t mention any particular kind of plant.  Why here?  Just birds and just swarms of living creatures that swim in the seas, fish and more.  Why bring up great sea monsters?  Why introduce them?  There are a lot of other things in the sea.  Why them?  I find that fascinating.  The Hebrew word is tannin.  And you know, there’s a reason for this.  If you study the Old Testament, you find several Old Testament references to sea creatures.  There’s Leviathan.  Remember reading about Leviathan?  Leviathan is this massive, massive, powerful sea creature.  (41 Job), God says to Job, “Where were you?”  He says, “Where were you when I created everything?”  Then he comes to chapter 41 and He says, “Can you put your hooks in and control Leviathan?”  Some people, I think, have described this massive beast, fierce.  You can read (41 Job) yourself and read the characteristics of this beast.  I wrote a little note on it.  Some have described it as an alligator or a crocodile, but they’re not in the sea as such.  The best guess is that he’s describing some kind of dinosaur, some kind of massive seagoing monster, Leviathan. 

There’s also mention in the Old Testament of the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent.  (7 Job 12) the serpent of the sea or the sea serpent.  There is Rehab, and it refers to massive seagoing animals, very likely refers to dinosaurs.  But why does He mention this?  Why does he bring it up?  I think the answer can be found in this.  In ancient mythology, for example in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent area east of Israel and the Land of Canaan as well – the countries of the East generally – there have always been these very bizarre and very highly-complex fabricated legends about sea monsters.  The ancient pagans believed that the gods were sea monsters.  Even the Philistines had a god, Dagon, who’s half man/half fish.  So the ancients saw these, perhaps these great, fierce sea monsters as the deities, the gods.  They wrote epics about them.  Some of them, for example, you read about in some of the Ugaritic, which is a different language, Ugaritic epics with regard to the enemies of Baal.  The enemies of Baal took the form, one form was this god, Mot, who was called the Lord of the Sea.  He was a great sea monster.  This began to influence that whole part of the world where they saw the sea monsters as gods, the sea monsters as gods in rebellion against the good gods.  In the case of Israel, the gods in rebellion against the good God.

(27 Isaiah 1) you have mention of these sea gods who were so much a part of Canaanite culture.  When the children of Israel came to the Land of Canaan, they came across this Canaanite poetry, Canaanite legends about the gods taking on the form of these great sea monsters.  So the sea monster then became a picture of the principal of evil, the anti-god evil was sort of personified in the great sea monster, the great dragon of the sea, the great dinosaurs of the sea.  A number of versus, as I said then, refer to Leviathan, the great sea monster always seemingly depicted as the great enemies of the true God, implying they were somehow a supernatural deity or supernatural force that rose up against their creator.  That was all in the ancient epics.  That would have been in existence of the minds of the people at the time of Moses when he wrote Genesis.  The Jews had been apparently influenced by these pagan myths, which were ridiculous and foolish, and just in a marvelous way, the spirit of God prompts Moses in recording the inspired account of creation that came to Moses from God to write down and God created the sea monster. 

They aren’t false gods, they aren’t false deities, they aren’t symbols of evil.  They’re creatures that God made just the way He made all of the rest.  And God created the great sea monsters along with every living creature that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind and God saw that it was what?  And that includes the sea monsters.  So much for all that mythology.  The Old Testament is opposed to such foolish myths and voices its protest in its own quiet way, doesn’t it?  So God created the great sea monsters and God saw that it was good.  It’s as if the Torah said far be it from anyone to suppose that the sea monsters are some mythological forces of evil, some divine gods or demigods in opposition to the true and living God and revolt against the true and living God.  They are as natural as anything else God created and they were formed in their proper time and their proper place by the word of the Creator in order to fulfill His will.  He made them because He wanted to make them and he looked at them and He said they are good.

That’s why it says in Psalms, “Praise the Lord from the earth you sea monsters and all deeps.”  The poet in the Psalms is inviting all created forms of life to praise the Lord – all of them.  That’s Psalm, I think, 148:7.  It just puts that little note in there to dispel all of the bizarre mythology.  God created, in verse 21, the sea monsters, every living creature that moves, which with the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind.  Just a note:  “after its kind” is used twice.  God created everything that lives in the water at the same time on the same day.  He created everything that flies in the air at the same time on the same day, and He created them after their kind.  There is no evolution of species from kind to kind to kind to kind.  He created them after their kind.  All the species were created by God.  There can be variation within the species, but there’s no moving outside that DNA, that information encoded in each species. 

Henry Morris says, “The first introduction of animal life was not a fragile blog of protoplasm that happened to come together in response to electrical discharges over a primeval ocean as evolutionists believe.”  God just made it all in its kind.  Everything that lives in the sea, everything that lives in the sky, God created the way it is in its own species.  By the way, there couldn’t be any progress, any mutation, any natural selection, because God saw it all and it was good and there was no death in the universe at all.  There was no death in the world at that time.  Nothing died.  Nothing died.  I suppose we could conclude at that point that animals didn’t eat each other.  That’s a moot question in scripture, but it’s a reasonable assumption.  That’s why the theologian von Rad once said, “Outside of God, there’s nothing to fear.”  The Jews needed to hear that.  They didn’t need to fear the imaginary gods of the sea monsters.  Von Rad said something profound, “Outside of God, there’s nothing to fear.”  There’s only one to be feared.  Who’s that?  The one that can destroy both soul and body and hell, the New Testament says. 

Evil came into the world after creation.  Evil came into the world after the creation of sea monsters; huge, massive sea creatures.  The whole creation was made by God and was originally good.  So day five first brought the creation of conscious life.  Secondly, of reproductive life.  Reproductive life.  This is just – I just – the more I read about this, and I’m not gonna take the time to get into it.  You can do your own research.  The more I get into reproductive systems, the more incredible it is.  I mean it’s enough to imagine human reproduction and how God can do that, but just take that into every species in creation, the most small, tiny, microscopic kind of creation all the way to the largest land mammals and seagoing mammals and dinosaurs, and all of the reproductive processes all encoded in the DNA, all that information put in every single cell of every single creature reproducing its own kind.  That’s what it says in verse 22, “And God blessed them saying, “Here’s the blessing.””  He granted them this benefit.  The blessing is a benefit.  “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas.  And let birds multiply on the earth.” 

Obviously, the birds don’t fill the heaven above, but they do multiply.  Fish tend to fill the waters of the sea.  “Be fruitful and multiply.”  Be fruitful and multiply is kind of an Old Testament phrase for reproduction.  It’s exactly what it means – to reproduce.  In (1 Genesis 28) when God is creating man, it says, “God blessed them,” that is male and female, “and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.””  That was his command for them to procreate.  (9 Genesis) “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them,” Noah and his wife and their sons and their wives, “Be fruitful and multiply and repopulate the earth.”  (17 Genesis 16), “I will bless her.”  God is talking about Sarah.  “I’ll give you a son,” to her and then I will bless her and she shall be a mother of nations.  Kings of people shall come to her.  In verse 20, as for Ishmael, “Behold I will bless him.  I will make him fruitful and will multiply him.”  To make him fruitful and multiply means reproduction.  You find it in (28 Genesis 3), (35 Genesis 9-11), (48 Genesis 3-4).  That is a phrase meaning reproduction. 

So God gave this created order in the sky and in the sea, reproductive capability.  All living creatures are complex machines.  I said this long ago in the series.  They’re named for a scientist who discovered complexity.  It’s called a von Neumann machine after the scientist von Neumann.  Wilder Smith writes a whole book on the von Neumann machine.  All living organisms characteristically have three properties.  They are self-sustaining.  That is they have the capability to sustain their own life like those little, tiny, tiny wheels going around inside of you.  They are self-sustaining.  Secondly, they are self-repairing.  That is they fix themselves as they go.  And most definitively, they are self-reproducing.  A von Neumann machine is self-sustaining or self-perpetuating, self-repairing and self-reproducing.  So far we have never, by all of our science, been able to manufacture anything like that.  We can’t come up, for example, with a computer that sustains its own life and its own energy, repairs itself and has little computers.  We don’t have such a machine and the reason is the complexity of it is too vast.  The complexity of it is too complicated.  It can’t be done.  If we could get something complicated enough to do that, it would be in disrepair all the time.  It couldn’t keep up with the self-repairing process. 

We can’t create a von Neumann machine, and yet every single cell that exists is just that.  This amazing capability, biochemical reproductive systems being placed in every little DNA strip in every cell of every creature, and with that comes the capability to be fruitful and multiply.  This is an assurance of permanence.  This is an assurance of propagation.  It has nothing to do with evolution.  Each kind will multiply.  Each kind will reproduce its same kind with some slight variation, of course, within the kind.  And let birds multiply on the earth.  Somebody said, “Well, why does it say on the earth?  Birds fly.”  Well they fly, but they don’t multiply in the air.  They’ve got to go to a nest.  That’s where they cohabitate, that’s where they land to mate and hatch their eggs.  God knows.  There’s no evolution here.  Creatures of the sea and the creatures of the sky were all made in one day. 

In every single species, the largest legendary sort of fierce sea monsters down to the smallest marine organisms, all made in one day.  All the creatures that fly, all made the same day in their species with movement.  They move through the air.  They move through the sea.  And they are conscious.  That is to say if you drive your car down the road, isn’t it interesting how the birds avoid it?  They have a consciousness, although it is not a self-consciousness.  So man’s house is built.  It’s now ready for his occupancy and the crown of creation comes on day six.  The crown of creation is man.  You know what’s so sad, we’ll stop at this point, but what is so sad is that man refuses to see God in creation.  Isn’t that sad?  Man refuses to see God in creation.  He refuses to hear God in conscience, suppresses the truth, plunges into deeper darkness and hopelessness.  I’ll tell you what grieves me most of all.  What grieves me most of all is people who say they’re Christians, who believe the Bible, and then claim evolution.  I’ll say this again.  I said it weeks ago.  You cannot find evolution in (1 Genesis) anywhere.  It’s not there.  There’s no way to exegete that chapter and come out with evolution.  No way possible.  You have to suppress the truth.  Why do that?  Why would you – why would you affront God or blaspheme God or dishonor God in order to honor a Godless evolutionist; in order to buy some scientific credibility. 

We take scripture at its face value, don’t we?  I don’t know about you, but I start believing the Bible in (1 Genesis 1).  I don’t have to wait until chapter three.  Donald Barnhouse once wrote, “God gives man brains to smelt iron and make a hammer,” a hammerhead and nails.  “God grows a tree and gives man the strength to cut it down and the brains to fashion a hammer handle from the wood.  And when man has the hammer and the nails, God will put out his hand and let man drive nails through it, place him on a cross in the supreme demonstration that men are without excuse.”  They rejected the creator to the degree that when he was incarnate they killed him.  They killed him.  It is a dishonor to God to believe anything other than what Genesis says, right?  Does it honor God to believe He made all this?  Does it honor God to believe the creation account of Genesis?  Does it give Him glory?  Is it a proper representation of who He is and what He’s done?  And is it a source of worship?  Anything less is an affront to God.  To make matter self-creating, to make the complex diversity of this created universe the product of chance is to give chance more credit than God, and chance doesn’t even exist.  It’s a nonexistent reality.  We start worshipping God in (1 Genesis), do we not, when we worship him as creator. 

Father, thank you again for tonight as we’ve worked our way through day five and now have the glorious anticipation of that final day of creation, the day You created all the animals and the crown of creation made in your own image – man.  We worship You.  We adored You.  We praise You.  We thank You.  We glorify You.  We honor You as the God of Creation.  You’re not only the God of Creation, but the God of Salvation.  Einstein was wrong.  We can know You because you desire to know us.  You’ve made Yourself known to us in your creation and more than that, You’ve made yourself known to us in conscience by the law written in our hearts.  Beyond that, You’ve made Yourself known to us in revelation through the scripture and You’ve shown us that You’re not only a God of immensity, a God of immutability who doesn’t change, a God of omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence, a God of unlimited power and knowledge.  You’re a God of vast complexity and vast, vast beauty and order.  You are a God that fills an endless and infinite universe and yet you are a God who cares about sinners, who loves sinners, who came into the world and was born in a humble, humble, humble place in an obscure town called Bethlehem, laid in a feed trough, who came all the way down to take the place of sinners, to die on a cross so You might know us and we might know you.  Oh, how we rejoice that we know You, the true and living God, the Creator of the universe, and our friend and our redeemer.  We thank You.  Amen.

FEATURED ARTIST IS Hannah Höch

14. Hannah Höch: Life Portrait: A Collaged Autobiography by Hannah Höch and Alma-Elisa Kittner

German Dadaist and collage artist Hannah Höch’s esteemed career spanned two world wars and most of the 20th century, and by the age of 83, she was ready to reflect. The result was her final, largest photo-collage, Life Portrait (1972-3), comprising 38 sections and measuring nearly four by five feet. It is a self portrait-cum-memoir, alluding to the different periods of Höch’s life and work, while “ironically and poetically commenting on key political, social and artistic events from the previous 50 years.” It also includes imagery of her favoured themes and inspirations (“fashion imagery, news photographs, African art and pictures of plants and animals”) as well as multiple pictures of herself, identifiable by her signature bob haircut. This unique book presents the collage section by section, alongside relevant quotes and explanatory texts by Alma-Elisa Kittner, acting as a brilliant meditation on “Höch’s final masterpiece, and the life’s work it represents”.

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—

Proverbs 13New Living Translation

13 A wise child accepts a parent’s discipline;^[a]
    a mocker refuses to listen to correction.

² Wise words will win you a good meal,
    but treacherous people have an appetite for violence.

³ Those who control their tongue will have a long life;
    opening your mouth can ruin everything.

⁴ Lazy people want much but get little,
    but those who work hard will prosper.

⁵ The godly hate lies;
    the wicked cause shame and disgrace.

⁶ Godliness guards the path of the blameless,
    but the evil are misled by sin.

⁷ Some who are poor pretend to be rich;
    others who are rich pretend to be poor.

⁸ The rich can pay a ransom for their lives,
    but the poor won’t even get threatened.

⁹ The life of the godly is full of light and joy,
    but the light of the wicked will be snuffed out.

¹⁰ Pride leads to conflict;
    those who take advice are wise.

¹¹ Wealth from get-rich-quick schemes quickly disappears;
    wealth from hard work grows over time.

¹² Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
    but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.

¹³ People who despise advice are asking for trouble;
    those who respect a command will succeed.

¹⁴ The instruction of the wise is like a life-giving fountain;
    those who accept it avoid the snares of death.

¹⁵ A person with good sense is respected;
    a treacherous person is headed for destruction.^[b]

¹⁶ Wise people think before they act;
    fools don’t—and even brag about their foolishness.

¹⁷ An unreliable messenger stumbles into trouble,
    but a reliable messenger brings healing.

¹⁸ If you ignore criticism, you will end in poverty and disgrace;
    if you accept correction, you will be honored.

¹⁹ It is pleasant to see dreams come true,
    but fools refuse to turn from evil to attain them.

²⁰ Walk with the wise and become wise;
    associate with fools and get in trouble.

²¹ Trouble chases sinners,
    while blessings reward the righteous.

²² Good people leave an inheritance to their grandchildren,
    but the sinner’s wealth passes to the godly.

²³ A poor person’s farm may produce much food,
    but injustice sweeps it all away.

²⁴ Those who spare the rod of discipline hate their children.
    Those who love their children care enough to discipline them.

²⁵ The godly eat to their hearts’ content,
    but the belly of the wicked goes hungry

How to Be the Father of a Wise Child

June 20, 2021

Sermon Overview

Scripture Passage: Proverbs 1:20-22

These days, our nation is in troubled waters, and the problem is rooted in fathers who fail to accept their responsibility. The Book of Proverbs reveals how to be the father of a wise child.

Proverbs 1:22 says, “How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? For scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge.”

When our children are young, they are simple, ignorant, and careless, which is to be expected. However, some children are never taught to grow in wisdom and remain simple in their adulthood. They may have knowledge, but they lack spiritual wisdom and understanding. They are easily led into error, ready to believe anything.

If a child remains naive and has not been led by his father, he becomes a scorner. He defies instruction and despises the good and godly. Because of this, he is destined for destruction. 

The scorner’s very hard to reach, but there is still hope for him. If the scorner is not reclaimed, he becomes a fool; the scorner is insolent, but the fool is immovable. The fool rejects wisdom, ridicules righteousness, and rejoices in iniquity. His moral sense has been so perverted, he thinks good is evil and evil is good. 

As parents, there are four things we must keep in mind in order to raise wise children.

First, we need to expound truth to our children; saturate them in the Proverbs, emblazon the Ten Commandments into their consciousness, teach them the Beatitudes, that they might learn these simple, basic truths.

Second, expose sin: children need to see the repercussions of sin to understand their weight. We must pull away the veil and show them the ugly truth of sin and its consequences. 

We must also expel scorners, as Proverbs 13:20instructs, “He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed.” We cannot let our young, impressionable children hang around scorners and fools; we must be firm with who we allow them to be friends with.

Finally, we must express love; be gentle fathers, transparent and available.

Adrian Rogers says, “Words can hurt your children more than an open hand and a slap in the face. Love your children and delight in them.”

Apply it to your life

Are you raising your children to be wise or foolish? Remember your instructions from Proverbs: expound truth, expose sin, expel scorners, and express love.

Downloadable Resources

These resources are now available in multiple formats. You can print from either version. The Word version is editable.

• Sermon Outline Word document
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• Transcript PDF

Related Resources

• Fathers Who Teach Their Children to Be Wise
• How to Be the Father of a Wise Child Sermon Outline

_

If people really care about helping the poor, they should focus instead on reforms that actually have a proven track record of reducing poverty.

Thomas Piketty: Bad Numbers and Bad Economics

Thomas Piketty is a big proponent of class-warfare tax policy because he views inequality as a horrible outcome.

But a soak-the-rich policy agenda, echoed by many other academics such as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, is fundamentally misguided.If people really care about helping the poor, they should focus instead on reforms that actually have a proven track record of reducing poverty.

The fact that they fixate on inequality makes me wonder about their motives.

And it also leads me to find their work largely irrelevant. I don’t care if they produce detailed long-run data on changes in inequality.

I prefer detailed long-run data on changes in poverty.

That being said, it appears that some of Piketty’s data is sloppy.

I shared some evidence about his bad numbers back in 2014. And, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research and Professor Vincent Geloso of George Mason University expose another glaring flaw

…the Piketty-Saez theory is less a matter of history than an accounting error caused by their misunderstanding of World War II-era tax statistics. …It’s true that income inequality declined in the early part of the 20th century, but the cause had more to do with the economic devastation of the Great Depression than the New Deal tax regime. …they failed to account properly for historical changes in how the Internal Revenue Service reported income-tax statistics.As a result, their numbers systematically overstate the levels of top income concentrations by as much as a third …Between 1943 and 1944 the tax collection agency shifted from tracking “net income” to “adjusted gross income,” or AGI…a truer depiction of annual earnings… Yet Messrs. Piketty and Saez didn’t bring pre-1944 IRS records into line with AGI accounting standards. Instead, they applied a fixed and arbitrary adjustment to all years before the AGI accounting change that conveniently scaled upward to the highest income brackets. …They used the wrong accounting definition for personal income and neglected to adjust their data for wartime distortions on tax reporting. When we corrected these problems, something stunning happened. The overall level of top income concentration flattened, and the timing of its leveling shifted away from the World War II-era tax rates that Messrs. Piketty and Saez place at the center of their story.

Here’s a chart that accompanied the column, showing how accurate data changes the story.

Since today’s column debunks sloppy class warfare, let’s travel back to 2014, when Deirdre McCloskey reviewed Pikittey’s tome for the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics.

She also thought his fixation on envy was misguided.

…in Piketty’s tale the rest of us fall only relatively behind the ravenous capitalists. The focus on relative wealth or income or consumption is one serious problem in the book. …What is worrying Piketty is that the rich might possibly get richer, even though the poor get richer too.His worry, in other words, is purely about difference, about the Gini coefficient, about a vague feeling of envy raised to a theoretical and ethical proposition. …Piketty and much of the left…miss the ethical point…of lifting up the poor…by the dramatic increase in the size of the pie, which has historically brought the poor to 90 or 95 percent of “enough”, as against the 10 or 5 percent attainable by redistribution without enlarging the pie. …the main event of the past two centuries was…the Great Enrichment of the average individual on the planet by a factor of 10 and in rich countries by a factor of 30 or more.

But she also explained that he doesn’t understand how the economy works.

The fundamental technical problem in the book…is that Piketty the economist does not understand supply responses. In keeping with his position as a man of the left, he has a vague and confused idea about how markets work, and especially about how supply responds to higher prices. …Piketty, it would seem, has not read with understanding the theory of supply and demand that he disparages, such as in Smith (one sneering remark on p. 9), Say (ditto, mentioned in a footnote with Smith as optimistic), Bastiat (no mention), Walras (no mention), Menger (no mention), Marshall (no mention), Mises (no mention), Hayek (one footnote citation on another matter), Friedman (pp. 548-549, but only on monetarism, not the price system). He is in short not qualified to sneer at self-regulated markets…, because he has no idea how they work.

And she concludes with a reminder that some of our left-wing friends seem most interested in punishing rich people rather than helping poor people.

The left clerisy such as…Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty, who are quite sure that they themselves are taking the ethical high road against the wicked selfishness…might on such evidence be considered dubiously ethical. They are obsessed with first-act changes that cannot much help the poor, and often can be shown to damage them, and are obsessed with angry envy at the consumption of the uncharitable rich, of which they personally are often examples, and the ending of which would do very little to improve the position of the poor. They are very willing to stifle through taxing the rich the market-tested betterments which in the long run have gigantically helped the rest of us.

Amen. If you want to know what Deirdre means by “betterment,” click here and watch her video.

P.S. Click here, here, here, and here for my four-part series on poverty and inequality. Though what Deirdre wrote in 2016 may be even better.

P.P.S. I also can’t resist calling attention to the poll of economists at the end of this column.

Milton Friedman

Biography: 

Click here to see the Hoover project showcasing the works of Milton and Rose Friedman.

Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977 to 2006. He passed away on Nov. 16, 2006. (Link to obituary.) He was also the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946 to 1976, and a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1937 to 1981.

Friedman was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 and received the National Medal of Science the same year.

He was widely regarded as the leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics, which stresses the importance of the quantity of money as an instrument of government policy and as a determinant of business cycles and inflation.

In addition to his scientific work, Friedman also wrote extensively on public policy, always with a primary emphasis on the preservation and extension of individual freedom. His most important books in this field are (with Rose D. Friedman) Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962); Bright Promises, Dismal Performance (Thomas Horton and Daughters, 1983), which consists mostly of reprints of columns he wrote for Newsweek from 1966 to 1983; (with Rose D. Friedman) Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), which complements a ten-part television series of the same name shown over the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network in early 1980; and (with Rose D. Friedman) Tyranny of the Status Quo (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), which complements a three-part television series of the same name, shown over PBS in early 1984.

He was a member of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force and the President’s Commission on White House Fellows. He was a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board (a group of experts from outside the government named in 1981 by President Reagan).

Friedman was also active in public affairs, serving as an informal economic adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964, to Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign, to President Nixon subsequently, and to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign.

He has published many books and articles, most notably A Theory of the Consumption Function, The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, and (with A. J. Schwartz) A Monetary History of the United States, Monetary Statistics of the United States, and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom.

He was a past president of the American Economic Association, the Western Economic Association, and the Mont Pelerin Society and was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences.

He was awarded honorary degrees by universities in the United States, Japan, Israel, and Guatemala, as well as the Grand Cordon of the First Class Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government in 1986.

Friedman received a B.A. in 1932 from Rutgers University, an M.A. in 1933 from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in 1946 from Columbia University.

Two Lucky People, his and Rose D. Friedman’s memoirs, was published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EwaLys3Zak

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