Friday July 9th, 2010
Patrick Mead
Always ask, "So what?"
What good will a bunch of science do in Christian evidences? Not much, honestly.
"The Vikings" - Kirk Douglass
Great movie because of all the hilariously anachronistic mistakes. Norwegians didn't have slave rowers. One of them was wearing a digital watch. In one scene, you could see electrical wires coming down the "mountain."
Mac Beth movie - Gunpowder wasn't invented yet.
Hypothetical story: Imagine you are a tourist in Egypt with the most boring tour guide in the entire world. Because you're bored, you start shuffling your feet, and somehow you find the top of an ancient, never-before-discovered pyramid. Congratulations. So, since this pyramid has never before been discovered, everybody helps dig it up, and you get to go in first, with your torch (since modern technology never exists in these kinds of movies), and you find...a Buick.
Now, there are two trains of thought that you can possibly take here. Either 1) The Egyptians made Buicks, or 2) Someone else has been here.
There are generally two views of the world.
1) The universe is a box, and everything fits into that box.
2) The universe is a box, but at least once, somebody reached into the box and tweaked things a little.
Every so often you'll encounter someone who begins reading the Bible in Genesis because they are trying to be an atheist. They end up wading through the most boring (and most misunderstood) book in the Bible, Leviticus, and they stop there.
Okay, so let's take a look at Leviticus.
Leviticus 11 - Regulations about food.
Ever wonder about this? God doesn't give an explanation for why he bans certain foods. But modern science has found some of them.
1) Pigs - They carry parasites, especially trichinosis. They didn't have ice blocks or refrigerators to keep the meat cold.
2) Bunnies? When bunnies pee (which is probably the first time that phrase has been used in this building), they pee dangerous parasites that cause blood diseases that can be caught if someone walks barefoot.
Other banned animals/foods simply spoil quickly. Yes, some smell and are obvious, but many spooky spoils don't smell at all.
Animals that live in the sea that don't have scales? They're bottom feeders. They eat toxins and yucky stuff and things that nothing else in the sea will eat. Shrimp are the cockroaches of the sea. Catfish are also bottom feeders, and are banned in Levitical law.
Remember, now we have medicine. We can eat these things without worrying, and if we do get sick, we can fix it. They did not have that luxury. God wanted to protect them. And the fact that he did it without offering an explanation reveals something of his heart.
How did Moses know all this? Finding scientific knowledge in a book of the Bible that was written thousands of years ago is like finding a Buick in a pyramid. It just doesn't belong there.
What about camels and horses? Sociological reasons. Firstly, they need to be over 10 years old in order to viably reproduce (you wouldn't consider slaughtering it before it has reproduced so that you have others to replace it). They require huge amounts of food--much more than cows, which chew the cud. And they don't just eat grass--they eat grain, carrots...everything. This would mean sacrificing HUGE amounts of food for a few rich people to eat. God says, no.
What about people who are unclean until evening (the next night at sundown) and were to be isolated, and to wash and change their clothes?
It wasn't until the 1700s that people figured out that doctors should probably wash their hands once in a while, and the first doctor who suggested it was encountered with such opposition that he was ousted from his career and died in poverty. Microscopic diseases were still unheard of.
God gives us regulations for...surprise...how to cure a virus. You can't kill a virus, but the washing, changing clothes, and 24 hours of isolation is enough for it not to spread to the rest of the community.
Leviticus 11:24-25
"You will make yourselves unclean by these; whoever touches their carcasses will be unclean till evening. 25 Whoever picks up one of their carcasses must wash his clothes, and he will be unclean till evening."
If you're a mother, what happens when your kid says, "Mom, look, I found a dead bird!" Exactly. If you're a smart mom, you tell him to put it down, wash his hands, take a bath and change his clothes. God is doing the same thing. Do you realize that if we had followed Levitical rules, we would have avoided the Bubonic Plague?
If only we still followed Levitical law. It's amazing. It told the Israelites how to dig latrines, how nothing that goes in your mouth should come near them (and where do we put our toothbrush??), to keep rats and mice away, to stay away from cats and dogs (which have terrible cases of mites, which is what causes the allergies...and what do we have as pets??) You have enough mites already. Do you know that your pillow accrues 30% more weight because of your own mites? God kept away all the animals with mites. Amazing.
For animal carcasses, if a dead animal falls on something, that item is unclean...except for metal. Metal can be cleaned, because it is non-porous. (Still think these are just stuffy religious laws that have no meaning?)
If a grasshopper decided to die in the clay pot you cook in, you have to break the pot, and pots were hard to come by. People traded pots for wives; you were a 3-pot wife or a 2-pot hussy! And just because some grasshopper decided to take a detour through your kitchen, you're now a 2-pot hussy! But what is one of the first questions someone with a serious illness gets asked in the ER, besides, "Where did you go?" "Did you get any clay pottery from there? Are you using it?" God knows exactly what he's doing.
This is not mentioning all the regulations for mold, mildew, etc., that we have now found are accurate as day. Someone reached in from outside the box.
Apologetics resources:
- apologeticspress.org
- answersingenesis.org
- evolutionfacts.org
- patrickmead.net
- tentpegs.patrickmead.net
- Book: The Origin of Humans
- Book: None of These Diseases (about Leviticus)
Afterthoughts/preview of Part 2:
Classic argument: The earth appears old; therefore, it evolved over millions of years. Question...how old were Adam and Eve five minutes after they were created? Were they five minutes old, or were they adults? Scripture says that trees were created with fruit already on them--with seeds inside. So, what came first, the chicken or the egg? A chicken, with an egg inside it.
1 Corinthians 15 says that blood was not shed until sin entered the world. This creates a problem for Intelligent Design (the philosophy wherein an omnipotent God made the world evolve).
