What is Your Foundation?

A few years ago, I led a teen retreat called "Foundations for Survival" and we had a series of talks about what the Foundations of our faith should be based on. A foundation is what everything else is built on; your foundation will determine how you see the world, how you make your decisions and what is important to you.

What are man's ideas based on? Three things.

The first is naturalism, which says that all that is only happens from natural causes.

The second is uniformitarianism, which says that all the processes that we see in nature today have been happening at the same rate throughout time. 

That requires the third idea which is millions of years. The scientists and naturalistic philosophers who have put these ideas together recognized that for the first two ideas to be true, millions of years are required to get what we see in nature today.

What are the Bible's ideas based on? Also three things.

First, God created everything from outside nature. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

Second, the Bible is true. Thy word is truth (John 1:1).

Third, the Bible tells us that is is about six thousand years since God created the earth. When we read the genealogies in Genesis, we see that we can calculate the time because each patriarch is given not only his age at his death, but his age when his son was born and how long he lived.              Example:  And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth. And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begot sons and daughters. and all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died (Genesis 5:3-5).

Man's ideas change pretty rapidly. Our body of knowledge changes every twenty years. The Bible, on the contrary, doesn't. (But the word of the Lord endureth forever (I Peter 1:25)). The Bible also says things about science that man didn't catch onto for thousands of years; washing hands, for instance. That's been a big issue since 2020, but it wasn't until 1865 that Dr. Lister applied Louis Pasteur's principles of microbiology to surgery and advised that surgeons wash their surgical gowns, instruments, and hands. However, the law in the Old Testament that Moses compiled around 1400 B.C. said, And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean (Leviticus 14:8). Jesus was asked by the Pharisees in 30 A.D., Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread (Matthew 15:2). Man's scientific knowledge had to catch up with the Bible.

The Bible says about itself that it is true and that is really enough. The Bible doesn't need man's ideas to support its truth. Among all other books, it stands alone. It is the standard of truth that all other books and knowledge are compared to. Other books are written by one man. The Bible took at least fifteen hundred years and over forty authors to write. If there were any mistakes, lies, or inconsistencies in it, they would have shown up; but over thirty-six hundred years of history, it has stood the test of time.

If we were to use man's ideas to test the truth of the Bible, would it stand up to scrutiny? It would and it has. Some of the most famous documents of the ancient world by Julius Caesar and Aristotle have only two to six copies and those are from hundreds of years after the authors lived. The New Testament has over two hundred complete copies from as early as 150 B.C., less than one hundred years after it was written and as for the Old Testament, there is more evidence for its accuracy than any other book in history. Among this evidence are the Dead Sea Scrolls which were written two thousand years ago. An entire scroll of Isaiah was found and contain only nineteen differences from modern copies and those were just copyists' mistakes, not doctrinal changes. Using man's rules of evidence, the Bible is true.

Beyond that, all twelve of the apostles died or were imprisoned because of their insistence on the truth of the Word of God. More people throughout history have been martyred because they believed what the Bible said than for all other ideas man has ever pursued. Should your foundation be based on science, which changes every twenty years, or the Bible, which is worth dying for?

On Friday night, the students gathered out in the field for an astronomy lesson. They learned that secular scientists really want there to be intelligent life out in the universe because it would throw doubt over the whole Bible. If God created a perfect universe and Adam's sin made it necessary for Jesus to die to save mankind and eventually come again to destroy the universe, what does that mean for extra-terrestrial races? Did Jesus die for them? If they didn't sin as Adam did, why would a just God destroy those races for our sake? If there are E.T.s out there, the whole Bible is called into question; but if Earth is the only place with intelligent life, the Bible can stand.

Why the astronomy lesson?

Even secular astronomers concede that the earth is in what they call the Goldilocks Zone. Our planet is in the perfect spot for so many things. It is not so close to the sun as to burn up, and not so far as to freeze. The moon is not so close to us that it would cause catastrophic tides and not so far that the tides would be insufficient to stir oxygen into the oceans and keep them from stagnating. Our planet is midway out from the center of the galaxy so we get enough cosmic radiation from the stars to assist in warming us but not so much that we turn into the Thing from the Fantastic Four comic books. The sun, moon, and stars are also the perfect size and distance from us to enable us to tell time and navigate. We are the only planet with eclipses that can be used as historical markers because of the precise distance between the three. Because of the tilt of the earth, the moon, sun, and stars rise and set at different positions over the course of the year, giving us a way to calculate seasons and years. (And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years (Genesis 1:14)). The stars enable us to navigate in deserts, plains, and oceans where there are no landmarks. If we were closer to the center of the galaxy, the night sky would simply look gray, and if we were farther out, we would lose the constellations because there would be so few visible stars.

Aside from being in the Goldilocks Zone, when we look out at the far end of the universe as far as we can see, the stars move away from us, and their light waves are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. It is the Doppler Effect in light rather than sound. What is more, it shifts the same amount of red in every direction, indicating that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is in the center of the universe. God created our planet in a special position in the universe. If our planet is special, then mankind is special; and if mankind is special, then you are special.

On Saturday morning, the students had twenty-three minutes to take on the subject of creation v. evolution. They heard about how each of them match up with the evidence.

The Bible is often accused of being full of fairy tales, but what is the definition of a fairy tale? J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, defined a fairy tale as a story that everyone knows is not true, but we are expected to accept as true. 

Darwin said that with chance, the laws of nature, and enough time, anything can happen. What are the laws of nature? Laws are observations for which there are no exceptions. The law of gravity says that things always fall down, never up. For our purposes, here are the laws of nature that apply to life as we know it:

1. The Law of Biogenesis--Life only comes from life; life does not come from non-life.

2. Information Theory--Universal information can only come from an intelligent sender or a designer. 

3. Another of Information Theory's laws is that information is always lost, like a game of Telephone.

Which theory, creation or evolution, is consistent with these natural laws? Before we can address this, we have to point out a key difference between biblical creation and evolution. Remember: we said that man's ideas are based on naturalism--things only happen with a natural cause. God's ideas say that God--from outside nature--created everything. Given that difference, does creation or evolution actually match what we see?

In Genesis, the Bible says that from outside nature God created every plant according to its kind, every flying creature according to its kind, every water creature according to its kind, and every land animal, including people, according to its kind. From one pair of each kind, we have all the varieties of dogs, finches, ferns, and jellyfish. A chihuahua is a specialized form of dog and has lost the information to look and behave as a wolf, but it is still recognizable as a dog. We see no evidence either in the fossil record through transitional forms, or in what we observe today that the dog kind ever transformed from a different creature, with different structures and DNA into what we recognize as a dog today. So the Bible's explanation of the beginning of life, animals reproducing after their kinds, and the loss of information as animals specialize are consistent with all of our natural laws--that life doesn't come from non-life, that information requires an intelligent sender, and that information is lost.

What about the theory of evolution? Does it match the natural laws? 

The best definition of the theory of evolution was established by a University of Southampton zoologist, Gerald Kerkut. It states that every organism is descended from one single-celled organism which was originally non-living material. 

How does this match up with our natural laws? Unfortunately for evolutionists, who are certain that with time, chance, and the laws of nature anything can happen, not a single aspect of their theory lines up with any law of nature.

Naturalism requires that there not be an intelligent sender.

Evolution's primary mechanism, genetics, always results in a loss of information, whether through combining dominant and recessive characteristics such as brown versus blue eyes or long versus short hair, or changes in DNA from mistakes in copying which is what we call mutating. Both of these are consistent with our natural laws, but not with the theory of evolution. Evolution assumes new information is being produced by mutations to turn a one-celled amoeba into a jelly fish, then a tuna, then a frog, then a lizard, then a bird, and finally a mammal. However, the laws of nature tell us that we don't gain information, we lose it. We are not getting better, as evolutionists would have us believe; we're getting worse.

Worst of all for the theory of evolution is how life started. The theory claims that all life came from non-living material. Not only do we not see that happening today in ponds around the world, but in experiments that attempt to make a single protein from non-living material, they have to make huge, contradictory assumptions and the result is still insufficient to make even a single protein. The Law of Biogenesis stands: life does not come from non-life.

Back to our definition of a fairy tale--a story which we know can't be true, but we are expected to accept as true--which is the fairy tale, biblical creation or evolution?

In their final chapel session, the students heard the true history of creation from the Bible. They learned that everything we need to know of the nature of God, the nature of man, the nature of creation, the source of sin, death, disease, and even weeds, the nature of relationships between God and people and between people and each other, and, most importantly, God's solution for all the trouble we got ourselves into are found in the first three chapters of Genesis. 

They learned that God, from outside nature, created everything that is in nature and He created it to be very good. (And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Genesis 1:31a)). Not only was everything perfect, but there was no death and no living creature had to take another's life to live, including man. (And God said, Behold, I have given you . . . and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food (Genesis 1:30-31)). 

They learned that man was given authority over all of the physical creation and his choices affect all of nature. (And God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth (Genesis 1:26)). 

They learned that when man sinned by eating the one thing God told him not to eat, the goodness God put into nature was corrupted. There was no longer going to be openness and transparency in relationships. Man would hide from God (And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord (Genesis 3:8)). Men and women would guard themselves from each other (And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (Genesis 3:7)). Man would desire his own way instead of God's which is what we call sin. (And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever; Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden (Genesis 3:22-23)). All of the natural world that God had put under man's dominion was now subject to decay. Plants grew thorns and animals grew fangs and claws to defend themselves. (Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee (Genesis 3:17-18)). Man began to die and disease and decay became a part of natural existence which was never God's intention when He created life. (And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Genesis 2:16-17)). 

However, along with all this bad news, God gave us the good news! God cursed the devil in the form of the serpent and said, And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel (Genesis 3:15). A man would come into the world and while the devil would bruise Him on the heel--kill Jesus on the cross--in the process, Jesus would bruise the devil on the head and he would never recover. The salvation message that we have a way out of a life filled with sin, disease, and death was prepared from the very beginning of time. It is available to all mankind because it was given before there was Jew or Gentile, black or white, Old World, New World, or Third World. The seed of woman--Jesus--would save everyone, if only each one believes for himself that Jesus died to pay not for His own sins, because He didn't have any, but for our sins. That was the hope that God gave as He was passing out consequences and curses for disobedience. We can each one of us have the hope of salvation. 

So do you believe God created the universe? Do you believe the Bible is true history? Do you believe that Jesus is the one who would bruise the devil on the head for our sakes? You can have the hope of one day returning to the world as God originally created it in heaven.