Church censors biblical creation
The Melbourne Anglican requests an article from CMI and then refuses to publish it.
The Anglican Diocese of Melbourne publishes The Melbourne Anglican (TMA) monthly. An editor contacted Dr Don Batten of CMI (Australia), asking for an opinion piece on creation/evolution. Dr Don Batten wrote this, painstakingly tailoring it to the strict 800 word limit given, and emailed it to the editor on 26 May 2009, ahead of the requested deadline. The piece did not appear in the June or July issues and Dr Batten asked what had happened. Editor Roland Ashby said that he could not find anyone to write a countering article and he was not willing to publish CMI’s short essay without such a counter piece to accompany it (never mind that TMA had already published several one-sided pieces against biblical creation). When the editor requested the piece he said that there was no hard and fast guarantee that TMA would publish it, which is understandable as an article could contain unacceptable ad hominem, etc. However, at no stage did he tell Dr Batten that publication depended on the editor obtaining an effective counter piece. Clearly the whole exercise was a “set-up” along the lines of: “Here is the case for biblical creation ‘from the horse’s mouth’, so to speak. Now here is a counter to it that shows it has no sound biblical or logical basis—end of story; chapter closed.” It appears that TMA is not going to publish Dr Batten’s article—apparently no one was able to effectively refute it!
However, with the Internet, it is not so easy now for church authorities to stifle the dissemination of Biblical truth. So here is the essay for the benefit of the many thousands of people who visit creation.com daily and many thousands more who will find out about it by CMI’s web visitors sharing it with their friends.
Why do we lose our young people?
A youth worker in an Anglican church in Melbourne wrote:
“I used to beat my head against a wall wondering why we lost all our young people at about age 16. I’ve realized that age 16 is when they teach evolution in depth in science. Some of the teachers actually identify the Christian students and make a special point of explaining the differences and difficulties in reconciling Genesis and the ‘facts’ of evolution. It’s no wonder we lost them. I come near tears just thinking about it.”
This is not some side issue. This is the greatest excuse for unbelief in our day. Cosmic evolution (the universe made itself and we are the fluke product of stardust) gives people a rationale for unbelief. Allegorizing the Bible to try to accommodate it just confirms the non-Christian’s unbelief.
Furthermore, this is a huge cause of doubt for Christians. “Is what I believe just myths and fairytales?” Many an atheist testifies that they lost childhood faith when exposed to evolution.
Professor William Provine: “Belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”
Evolution entails death and struggle for survival for eons before man appeared. This is inconsistent with the goodness of God. After He finished creating, God pronounced everything “very good” (Gen. 1:31). He did not create an evolutionary world.
Evolution demands that the Fall (Gen. 3) be mythologized, and that destroys the Bible’s teaching about mankind’s rebellion and salvation. If “God used evolution”, then the creation did not become corrupted when Adam and Eve sinned (Gen. 3:14–20, Rom. 8:19–23); it was corrupt from the beginning. And if Adam was not a real person, or Adam’s death was only ‘spiritual’, what of the death of the Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45)? How could His physical death on the cross, remembered in the Eucharist, remove the curse of death from us, as we look forward to our resurrection bodies (Heb. 2:9, Rom. 5:9–19, 1 Cor. 15, Gal. 3:13)?
If God ‘created’ over billions of years He seriously misled us in inspiring “six days”, with evenings and mornings! Ex. 20:8–11 defines the days; the basis of our 7-day week.
Evolution is inconsistent with the nature of God and the original very good creation, the nature and gravity of the Fall, the death of Jesus and the promise of resurrection, the gravity of sin and the justice of God’s judgment, and the necessity for a new heavens and the new earth (Rev. 22). What is left?
Evolution is not only bad religion; it’s bad science.
Experimental science, which investigates how today’s world operates, has greatly benefitted mankind. It uses experiment and observation in the present. Evolution is a hypothesis about history, on which you can’t do experiments (time machine, anyone?). It is story telling driven by the prevailing worldview, which is naturalism (nature is all there is; God does not exist). Acceptable stories have to fit this prevailing worldview.
Christianity birthed science, as historians of science recognize. The founders were devout Christians. Real science and the Bible are compatible.
Evolution is a blinkered view that impedes science. The assertion that living things came purely from natural processes—no intelligence allowed!—is philosophical dogma that science cannot prove. And almost every discovery of modern molecular biology contradicts it. As Professor Paul Davies said, “Most of the workings of the cell are best described, not in terms of material stuff—hardware—but as information, or software” and that, “there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing”. The insistence that no intelligence was involved in inventing the encyclopaedic quantities of information in organisms blinds scientists to not expect sophistication in living things. “Junk DNA” illustrates the point; evolutionary notions created the idea. The junk DNA turns out to be functional. The evolutionary ‘junk’ science impeded that discovery.
Living things are full of sophisticated nano-machines; rotary and linear motors, upon which life depends. Not even one of the many protein components needed to make one of those motors could ever come into existence by pure chemistry, even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every microsecond of its supposed age.
Mutations and natural selection operate in today’s fallen world, but they will not create the billions of “letters” of information needed to change a microbe into Mozart.
Evolution is materialistic dogma pretending to be science.
“But so many experts can’t be wrong”? They have been many times in the past. Didn’t Jesus say, “Broad is the way that leads to destruction”? Jesus believed Genesis was history (e.g., Mark 10:6); so do I.
Creation Ministries International
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