Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/KathleenParker/2009/05/10/evolving_faith

Jesus prayed to His Father as He faced the cross, “Sanctify them in Your Truth, Thy word is Truth”. Could it be that our sanctification depends on believing Christ’s testimony regarding Genesis? For example…

“From the beginning, He made them male and female” and again, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it shall be at the coming of the Son of Man”.

Mr. Collins may be a geneticist and we give him credit for that, but he becomes a vain philosopher when he says common genes imply common descent.

The Bible gives us a framework for science. Collins denies that common design testifies of a common designer. No doubt the DNA sequence that codes an arm or a leg will be similar between a man and an ape. But men are more than DNA sequences. It is written that all men are made in the ‘image of God’. How does that code in DNA?

The strongest argument against the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable is based on Biblical Theology. What does the Bible say about sin and death? Macro-evolution depends on death being the natural order; the Bible testifies that death is the result of Adam’s sin.

Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/BillOReilly/2009/05/09/the_destruction_of_miss_california

Miss Prejean is clear and unashamed that her beliefs are based on the authority of the Bible to define moral standards for all men for all time. Morality is determined by the moral authority of Almighty God, Creator of the heavens and the earth. He has revealed Himself to men and given us His Ten Commandments.

The legitimate bounds of human sexuality are given in the seventh commandment prohibiting adultery; that is, the intent of the Law is to maintain the integrety of the one flesh relationship within the marriage covenant. According to this commandment every other form of sexual expression is sin and carries with it the death penalty.

In Moses there is no mercy, but in Christ there is mercy and forgiveness. God is calling all men everywhere to repent and believe the Gospel.

The authority of Scripture supersedes all other authorities, including the state and the church. This is anathema to the statist and to the moral relativist. Their view cannot coexist with Miss Prejean’s view of an absolute morality; therefore she is persecuted for being intolerant.

Re:http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidLimbaugh/2009/05/08/memo_to_capitalists_be_very_afraid

The hyper-egalitarians want more than equality under the law; they want equality in practice. They want to exchange the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property for choice, dependency and state sanctioned thief; they want to redefine civil rights to legitimize sexual perversion. They are willing to trample on the rule of constitutional law to get what they want, and their defenders are given to radical intolerance of any view but their own.

Dark energy is a substance that has not as yet been measured directly. At the urging of the neo-scientists, millions of government dollars are being spent trying to detect and characterize dark energy.

Another assumption is the Copernican principle, which holds that the universe has no edge and no center. It assumes that there are no unique places and that the position of the earth is therefore not special. If this principle is rejected, then the general relativity equations can describe a universe that does have a center and edges. A bounded universe admits to the possibility that earth is uniquely positioned, which is anathema to the neo-scientists.

There is strong evidence from quantized red-shifts of galactic clusters indicating that galaxies are in evenly spaced spherical shells around the Milky Way Galaxy. Earth appears to be within 100,000 light years of the center of the universe, a position with the small chance of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 of having happened by accident. If earth is near the center of the universe, then the need for the mythical “dark energy” vanishes.

A cadre of secular scientists is following the data where it leads, and where creation cosmologists have already been—recognizing that earth appears to be near the center of a bounded universe. May many follow the data back to God, who placed the earth then ‘stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in’ [Isaiah 40:22].

Major peer-reviewed science journals serve as forums for an incestuous style of peer review and intellectual discussion.

Faculty members of prominent universities are raised to celebrity status and their opinions promoted as those of science’s most progressive thinkers.

International conferences are held with speakers and select attendees chosen to present a unified body of scientific thought.

Supporters are given high academic honors while dissenters are marginalized.

These actions can bestow overwhelming scientific respectability on even scientifically empty concepts. Rank-and-file scientists may find themselves under pressure to conform despite their better judgment. The tendency is to succumb to group-think and the herd-instinct, which is now labeled "informational cascade". [http://www.icr.org/article/4590/]

Those that compromise the doctrine of a global Genesis Flood may not realize that a local flood theory amounts to demeaning the integrity of God. Has the promise made to Noah and his descendants about never again flooding the earth been kept?

Then God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying: “And as for Me, behold, I establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you… Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” [Genesis 9:8-11].

Men return from war after having been injured by a bomb.  Some have arms or legs missing.  Whatever remains of their bodies is reconstructed by surgeons who have studied for years to learn the intricacies and workings of the human body.  But that knowledge is not enough.  They must also possess the skill resulting from years of training in order to rebuild that which has been destroyed by a blast.  Still other soldiers injured by explosions, even though they had once been brilliant, are no longer able to feed or dress themselves.  This is what we have observed about explosions.

However, we are told that the Big Bang, an explosion far greater in force than anything known to man, resulted in intricate patterns of order and interdependency.  And even more remarkable, we are told that out of impersonal matter came personhood, consciousness, intellect and discernment.  This view of origins is the direct consequence of man’s escape from reason, logic and rationality.  In opposition to this scheme, in John 1:3 we read that creation was the work of the Logos, or Christ Jesus, who is the source of all reason. 

A proper understanding of creation is foundational to science, philosophy, ethics and religion.  However, we can no longer have an objective and rational discussion of creation for fear of offending agnostics and atheists, who have made a willful commitment to irrationality.  Why is there such a rejection of creationism today?  Because immoral men are uncomfortable thinking about a Creator who will hold them accountable.

Of course, the rejection of reason affects different people to varying degrees.  There are many with whom you can have a reasonable discussion of political or social issues.  It is marvelously pleasing when we find elements of reason remaining in anyone’s thinking.  However, once a discussion begins to have implications with regard to sin and judgment, the natural man constructs a wall which no reason can penetrate.  Within the context of describing our daily lives, no man will ever accept the notion that something came out of nothing, or that order came out of chaos.  However, if the context is creation, all rationality must stand on its head, for fear that if there is a Person behind creation, then He must hold all men accountable.

The Bible does not present any rational arguments for the existence of God.  God is self-revealed.  Therefore, we read in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God,” and in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word.” I accept God’s self revelation without attempting to rationalize His existence.  However, I will by no means allow the atheist or agnostic to say that his position is rational.  In Romans 1:18-19, the Apostle Paul wrote that unrighteous men know that God exists, and yet they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.  Consequently, I say with all the authority of God’s word that sin, rebellion and unbelief are irrational.

Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a soothing aroma. Then the LORD said in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done.

    “While the earth remains,
      Seedtime and harvest,
      Cold and heat,
      Winter and summer,
      And day and night
      Shall not cease.”  [Genesis 8:20-22].

We need not quote the God hating drones for TownHall has many examples from the preachers of unrighteousness. But here is a quote from the religious…

"The suffering and death of Jesus, according to the theory of the Atonement, pays for our sins and buys our salvation. It's an interesting theory, but not one that I find compelling." -Katherine Ragsdale (to be president of Episcopal Divinity School on July 1)

http://townhall.com/columnists/MarvinOlasky/2009/04/30/the_blessing_of_abortion

The reprobate and the religious have judged God’s word and found it to be deficient. Jesus Christ is seen as lacking in what they think God should be. With respect to their image of God, the revelation is insufficient because they both suppress the truth and are subject to vain imaginations.

The Bible is explicit in its condemnation…

‘Who are you, O man, to reply against God?’ [Romans 9:20]

Consider that such pride and autonomous wisdom are the bosom friends of every man. How then can the power of grace be denied when such men are transformed into humble Christians that tremble before the word of God? [Isaiah 66:1-2]

Will we deny that ‘the potter has power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? [Romans 9:21] But someone will complain that this would make God unfair. What does the Scripture say? God is God…

      His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
      And His kingdom is from generation to generation.
      All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing;
      He does according to His will in the army of heaven
      And among the inhabitants of the earth.
      No one can restrain His hand
      Or say to Him, “What have You done?” [Daniel 4:35]

Here is the quote that got my attention…

‘All I said in my book is that parents - the vast majority of whom claim to believe in God - should know what they believe about Him, understand their beliefs well enough to teach them to their own children, and then do so. It's simply another aspect of child development that helps to nurture the whole person and offers deeper meaning to life in a world that often seems shallow and superficial.’ –Marybeth Hicks

http://townhall.com/columnists/MarybethHicks/2009/04/29/faith_tutoring_boon_to_young

Fathers are commanded in the NT to train their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, meaning that we are to apply the Law and the Gospel in our relationship with them. Parents also have opportunity to train by example. Can we live out the Gospel in the home by the way we deal with our own sin and the sin of others? Are we training our children on how to resolve conflict by seeking forgiveness from those they have offended and being quick to forgive those who sin against them?

With respect to origins, the question is beyond scientific speculation and a matter of divine revelation and religious faith. The natural world communicates the truth to all men from God [Romans 1:l9-20]. As a result of man's epistemic and moral condition, faith is the basic requirement for a proper acknowledgment of the answer to origins: "Now faith is... a conviction of things not seen.... By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear" [Hebrews 11:1,3].

There is no lack of explicit, special revelation about creation; Scripture mentions it over seventy-five times. Thus, men have the answer to origins, but speculative theories like evolution are fabricated to help suppress the clear truth about the Creator and are used to protect and encourage man’s flight from God. The Christian must challenge those theories rather than cooperating in such suppression; he must appeal to man's better knowledge and demonstrate the foolishness of trying to avoid God's revelatory truth. Any misdirected view of origins must be forcefully confronted with the presuppositional and revelational worldview of creationism.

The biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo requires a proper distinction between Creator and creature and denies the eternality of matter; it refutes both pantheism and materialism. It teaches that the world is derivative, contingent, and glorious only as reflecting its Creator's glory; thus the world cannot be exalted to a place of idolatrous worship. On the other hand, it prevents disrespect and exploitation of the natural world, cruelty to the animal kingdom, and disdain from the human body.

Creation ex nihilo assures us that things have a beginning and that time is not illusory; genuine importance can attach to events, and history can be characterized by real progress. Nature is also taught to be orderly, intelligible, and profitable to man's end of glorifying God; thus, nature is worthy of study in order that it be subdued to kingdom purposes.

Creation ex nihilo grounds man's authentic freedom within the sovereignty of God, substantiates the perspective of morality in the world, and under girds man's aesthetic creativity.

Creation ex nihilo proclaims the sovereignty, freedom, transcendence, goodness, and immanence of God; all things being in His wise control, meaningless mystery does not surround everything, and man can attain knowledge by thinking God's thoughts after Him.

Further, God is not repulsed by the material world or neglectful of it; He can care for our needs, attend to our prayers, enter our world in His incarnate Son, send His Spirit into our hearts, and promise effectual results for His kingdom in history. These are but a few of the main doctrinal tenets which creationism sets forth. It is a worldview able to lay siege effectively to all apostate competitors at every point.

Many of you will remember the intense efforts ICR made to respond to the THECB demands related to ICRGS’s application to grant degrees in Texas, even after the Commissioner formally rejected the recommendations for approval from his own Site Team and Advisory Committee, and then denied ICRGS the right to move its Science Education Master’s degree program to Texas.

As you read through the press release below that was sent out to the national media, please remember to pray with us that the Lord will receive honor to His name through all of this.

ICR has agreed to accept this challenge because of the blatant misuse of power—and because, if successful, the THECB (and other government agencies) will feel empowered to undermine and potentially destroy Christian institutions that take a strong stand on the authority of Scripture—especially those institutions that attempt to negate any of the ”idols” of evolutionary humanism.

Much of the focus of our world today is on “science”—and its endorsement of godless activities like abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, sanctioned promiscuity, legal pornography, no-fault divorce, genetically engineered babies, and same-sex “marriage.” The list seems endless.

Today, science attempts to provide a “rationale” for such wickedness. Tomorrow, science—“back in its rightful place” (as Barack Obama said in his inaugural speech)—will further its attack against “religion,” led by well-placed spokesmen like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and others whose hatred for Christianity is seething out everywhere.

Of course, the real battle is a spiritual one (Ephesians 6:12), with the enemy’s ruthless “roar” (1 Peter 5:8) trying to shout down the absolute truth that the Lord Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

Thanks for reading through this. Thanks for praying for us. Please remember to intercede for us as often as the Holy Spirit brings ICR to your mind. Blessings.

Henry M. Morris III
Institute for Creation Research
Chief Executive Officer

Contact: Lawrence Ford, Director of Communications, Institute for Creation Research (ICRGS), 214-615-8398, press@icr.org

DALLAS, April 21 /Christian Newswire/ – The Institute for Creation Research Graduate School (ICRGS), a California-based science education institution established in 1981, has filed suit in both federal and Texas state courts against the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), its commissioner, and some of its board members, for interfering with the constitutional rights of ICRGS in its application to move the school to Texas.

Named as defendants in the suits are THECB Commissioner Raymund A. Paredes, Lyn Bracewell Phillips, Joe B. Hinton, Elaine Mendoza, Laurie Bricker, A. W. "Whit" Riter III, Brenda Pejovich, and Robert Shepard, in both their individual and official capacities, for discriminating against the private school's academic and religious viewpoint.

ICRGS additionally names as defendant in the state lawsuit the THECB agency itself, which has a prior record of abusing the constitutional rights of other private educational institutions in the state, as determined by the Texas Supreme Court in 2007.

Since 1981 ICRGS has offered the Master of Science degree in biology, astro-geophysics, geology, and science education, and recently consolidated its four majors into a single Science Education major on a predominately distance educational platform, except for required science labs and/or field studies. Since its inception, ICRGS faculty members have been highly credentialed science professionals with terminal degrees from such schools as UCLA, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and other competent institutions, along with noted experience in science research at top private and government laboratories in the United States.

In fall 2007, the THECB Site Evaluation Team and Advisory Committee recommended approval of the ICRGS application to grant degrees in the state of Texas. However, both agency recommendations were subsequently rejected by Commissioner Paredes after evolution-only activists pressured the commissioner to deny ICRGS a degree-granting license in the state.

After twice convening ex parte advisory committees of his choosing (both of which included no committee advisors with special competence in the private sector Christian education school market served by ICRGS), Commissioner Paredes recommended on April 23, 2008, that the THECB deny a Certificate of Authority to ICRGS, which the voting members did on April 24, 2008.

Since June 2008, ICRGS has worked through the administrative appeal process with the THECB, and the controversy is pending in the State Office of Administrative Hearings.

ICRGS is a private, non-profit graduate school that receives no state or federal funding.

The choice between evolution and creation is at base religious. Nothing less is at stake than the charge of worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. An answer to origins weighs idolatry in the balance.

The Darwinian bandwagon was filled with men who wanted desperately to believe in a god of their own creation; an impersonal god who in no way interferes with the activities of the external universe; a god infinitely remote in time reduced merely to the creation of matter. This impulse was basic to the revolt against Christianity from the mid-eighteenth century to Darwin.

It was Darwin's gift of hope, rather than the quality of his evidence, that captivated the minds of his readers. Though his book on origins of the species had to be revised and reworked again and again, in order to deflect the sharp and overpowering criticisms lodged against his theory, nevertheless the hope remained. "give me matter, and I will show you how a caterpillar can be produced."

Men wanted to believe that the combination of limitless eons of time, autonomous impersonal matter, and totally random forces might forever banish God from His creation and from the Day of Judgment. Darwin offered them hope; he offered them the scientific answer that would at last reduce biological processes to mere mechanism. Machines, in the final analysis, are not subject to judgment, for they are not bounded by any ethical law greater than survival. Even the violation of the law of survival at most leads to the void of nonexistence, not the eternal reality of personal judgment by a personal God.

When biblical faith comes into conflict with the autonomous outlook of a scientific or philosophic theory, the Christian declares that God's revelation and truth are the necessary epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions of all science and philosophy.

When God's word is contradicted, as is particularly evident in the area of creation, two worldviews are at base what stand in conflict. One of them requires speculative and self-defeating assumptions; this is seen in the case of evolution. Darwin's rationalistic explanation requires an irrational foundation; Huxley professed to be "agnostic" about ultimate origins but certain that the Bible was wrong; Goudge holds, as cosmological tenets, both that nature is uniformitarian; that is, always and everywhere operating by the same laws, and that change is a fundamental feature of nature, including nature's laws.

The Christian worldview gives a basis for an orderly world that can be explored and subdued to God's glory, a basis for rational understanding and application, and a basis for bringing the facts and reason into fruitful, meaningful, non-arbitrary relation. The former worldview moves from foolish speculation to a worship of the creation in some form. The latter brings one to bow before the transcendent and immanent Creator and Redeemer of the world.

Mr. Hilton obviously wants more than tolerance because Miss Prejean’s answer was more than tolerant. He wants acceptance, and he wants it at the expense of another man’s conscience. This is the height of tyranny.

The cultural war is enflamed when men are expected to accept as normal what their conscience says is sin. The conflict arises because the secular world view is not based on the moral order appealed to in the document that declared America’s independence from tyranny.

The ‘Law of Nature and Nature’s God’ is the natural law referred to in Romans 2 as the law written on the conscience of man as part of his being made an image bearer of the Creator. This is the same law that was given to Moses on tablets of stone and is written on the renewed heart in the New Covenant.

These lawless men are insolent, arrogant and full of malice because they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer; therefore God gave them over to a depraved mind. Romans 1 is being fulfilled again; this time in America.

They would destroy the natural law foundation of civil rights by pursuing the normalization of a perversion that is contrary to natural law. They are enemies of liberty as is their godless ideology, meaning social Darwinism.

Evolutionary anthropologists once thought that stone knives were developed in the late Stone Age, around 40,000 years ago. That figure was later revised to 200,000, around the Middle Stone Age, when stone blades were discovered in lower strata.

Now stone blades have been found in Kenyan rock layers dated at about 500,000 years old according to evolutionary estimates. Thus, the original claim that “40,000 years ago, man made his first stone implements” was off by over 92 percent, suggesting that evolutionary depictions of human history are unreliable.

[Mr. Thomas you are too kind here using the word ‘suggesting’. Let’s go ahead and say it, the evolutionary depictions of human history are unreliable because they are based on a false theory of reality. Their theory of the geologic column is a flat out denial of the Genesis record of created kinds and the Genesis Flood.]

The news of 500,000-year-old knives may be frustrating to evolutionary anthropologists, who had already faced difficulty adjusting history to accommodate the supposedly 200,000 and 300,000-year-old stone knives found in recent decades. An attempt was made to reconcile those data to the old historical framework by reasoning that since modern man only emerged from an ape-like ancestor some 200,000 years ago, pre-modern (almost-man) creatures who lived over 380,000 years ago must have been able to make knives, even though they were quite ape-like in other respects.

[This stuff makes sense to the neo-scientists because the alternative of created kinds has been suppressed to the level of being unthinkable.]

But these newly-discovered knives predate even “pre-modern” man’s imagined ability to make such tools. A difference of about 160,000 years is significant enough that it cannot easily be ignored. Another major alteration is needed to accommodate the new data.

[No problem! the theory of evolution evolves with the data, no matter how absurd the accommodation. Ever hear of Punctuated Equilibrium?]

Although puzzling to evolutionary scientists, evidence such as these stone knives fits perfectly with the biblical record, which teaches that mankind was created fully human from the beginning, without any “ape-man” ancestors. In fact, ape-kind and mankind are described as being created as distinct kinds [Genesis 1:25], thus ruling out that “kind” of evolution.

[In the light Genesis 1, macro-evolution is not a credible theory. The fossil record is confirmation of created kinds and the Genesis Flood.]

Removing the restriction of long-age assumptions, the stone knives were most likely made somewhere on the order of several thousand years ago, at least since the time of the Tower of Babel. The forced dispersion of peoples from the Middle East outward across the rest of the world, as described in Genesis 11, caused migrating families to start from scratch, eking out an existence with stone knives and cavedwellings for a time. The volcanic deposits that sandwiched the newly-discovered African blades could well be remnants of post-Flood volcanic activity, marks of a time when earth’s crust was less stable, still settling down from the great, year-long upheaval of Noah’s Flood. This historical picture, unlike the standard evolutionary one, is based on eyewitness accounts, not on unfounded and ever-changing presuppositions.

In describing the “human ancestors” who made the Kenyan blades, the journal Science stated that “these toolmakers were capable of more sophisticated behavior than previously thought.” Of course they were. They were fully-created human beings!

Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/MichaelGerson/2009/04/17/red_faith,_blue_faith

The Declaration of Independence is clear that ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ is the foundation of our unalienable rights, and that the role of government is to secure those rights through civil law consistent with the Natural Law.

The assault on the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property is consistent with the deterioration of Christian doctrine preached from the pulpits and believed by the people.

We are seeing the decline of America as she exchanges her heritage for the lie of secularism, but what is seen as the decline of the church is the vinedresser removing the unfruitful branches and casting them into the fire, while He prunes the fruitful branches so that they can bear more fruit [John 15].