“By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent."
Mention snakes or other crawly reptiles, and people usually shy away. Typically, snakes have a reputation for being dangerous or, at best, completely unable to show affection. New research shows us that in many cases this isn’t true at all.
A number of studies have now shown that at least some snakes take care of their young, have friends and even prefer to hang around with relatives. Mother pythons will stay coiled around their eggs for the two months they take to hatch, not even leaving them for food. Though she is cold-blooded, should the temperatures drop too low, she can generate muscle heat by shivering. A black-rattler mother will stay with her hatchlings for nine days. During that time, she can protect them from predators. The young snakes can barely see at all until they shed their skin at nine days, after which they set off on their own. Cage studies involving non-sibling and sibling rattlesnakes, showed that non-siblings distance themselves from each other. However, rattlesnakes that were siblings would touch each other frequently and often intertwined. Live-bearing skinks, found in Australia, are monogamous for life.
While evolution leads people to think of reptiles as primitive, here we see that their Creator, the God Who is love, blessed them with feelings for one another. This, too, is testimony of His loving nature.
Man and Creativity
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
There is so much to be gleaned from considering the fact that Man was made in the Image of God. There are many aspects, in consideration of this, which have more import than the one that I will address in this broadcast. Imago Dei implies a value to humanity, which is far beyond that of the rest of God’s creation.
Many have commented on how human consciousness, thought, intelligence and morality are all corollaries of our being created in His image. Another aspect of this, is our own ability to create.
Human creativity is obviously qualified by the fact that we must use pre-existing materials for our creations. It is only God who created ex nihilo. But the author J.R.R. Tolkien got this right when he stated that “In such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”
One does not only have to consider novels that imagine new or different worlds. One can also include artistic creativity in the visual arts, in painting, in sculpture, or in aural arts, especially music. No such artistic ability or creativity would be possible if we were mere animals. This sort of creativity would not have arisen by blind, random, evolutionary chance. Where is the evolutionary advantage in creating “Lord of the Rings”, or Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony? Even those creations that we do not like – that may have been tainted by man’s fallen nature – are still explicable only by the doctrine of Imago Dei.
Thank You, Lord, for artists, novelists, musicians and so many other creative people. We especially pray for Your people in the world of arts, who seek to glorify Your Name through their work. Amen.
Catastrophe on Uranus
“He made the stars also.”
In a previous Creation Moment, we discussed the giant planet Uranus and its anomolous motion. The tilt of the planet’s rotational axis is at 98° to the Solar System Normal. By “Normal”, we mean a line drawn perpendicular to the plane, on which most of the planets of the Solar System orbit. As a comparison, the Earth’s rotational axis is at 23° to the Normal. Additionally, the planet Uranus is rotating clockwise, as seen above its North Pole, whereas the Earth and most other planets rotate counter-clockwise.
In that previous Creation Moment, we opined that no one knows how this anomalous rotation and tilt came about. That is still true, but evolutionary astrophysicists have recently suggested a catastrophic reason.
Some half a billion years, after the initial formation of the planets from stellar dust, an object about twice the size of Earth crashed into Uranus. It was a glancing blow but sufficient to cause the planet’s current tilt and rotation. This idea was suggested after a large number of computer simulations were run by researchers.
The reason for proposing this catastrophe is clear. Current evolutionary theories require the Solar System to have congealed from dust, in which case angular momentum would have had all objects rotating in a nearly similar way. The anomaly that is Uranus spoils this story. As creationists, we do not need to search for such speculations. We do not need to expect that God created all the planets with the same spin or axial tilt.
Thank You for the glories of Your creation, and thank You for the ability of people to look into Your creation in order to understand it better. Amen.
The Lord God Walking in the Garden
“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 God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?”
Genesis chapter 3:8 is both a beautiful verse, and a worrying verse. We read “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day”. This sounds so pleasant. The way it is worded suggests to me that this event had occurred before. Therefore, it is likely that Adam and Eve had been experiencing close fellowship with the Lord God. If He was walking, then this must have been a theophany – a pre-incarnate appearance of the Second Person of the Trinity. It would literally have been paradise just to walk with Jesus in the cool of the day, having fellowship with Him.
<p>But on this occasion, there was no longer close fellowship. “The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Where there had previously been sweet fellowship, now there was fear, guilt, and shame. But, as David noted in the Psalms, there is nowhere we can go to hide from the presence of the Lord. So God calls, “Where are you?”
Why does God ask questions like this? God knows exactly where Adam and Eve are, and what they have done. The answer to this question will not be of benefit to Him, so it can only be of benefit to the man and his wife. God is offering them the chance to repent, and by the subsequent events, He shows them a way back to fellowship again.
Two Creation Accounts or One?
“And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
The book of Genesis includes two very different creation stories.”
This is a common statement made by a lot of people – usually those, such as liberal Christians, or atheists – who want to undermine belief in the Bible. But Enns claims to be a Bible-believer. He just accepts the idea of two creation stories as self-evident. Why?
He says that
God meant them to be understood as pointing to realities deeper than the merely historical.
These sorts of statements are of concern to us. The apparent story does not have to be true. The “real truth” is deeper. To me, this sounds like saying: “God is telling a lie in order to tell us the truth.”
“But it’s not meant to be read as history”, they object, to which I reply, “Why not?”
Enns gives a number of reasons why he thinks the two stories are different. We will object to the term “story” and refer to both as “accounts”. He states that the order of events in the first two chapters of Genesis is different. In chapter 1, the creation of plants precedes the creation of man, whereas in chapter 2 the creation of man precedes that of plants. Is this the case?
Most emphatically not! Genesis 2:5 refers to types of plants – not plants in general – that God was to plant in the Garden. Genesis 2 presupposes Genesis 1 and is best understood as an expansion of the events of Day Six.
Paul’s Adam
“For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
I saw a video on the BioLogos website entitled Paul’s Adam. Even the title caused concern. The apostle Paul alludes to Genesis in a number of places in his epistles, but two places in particular refer directly to Adam. These are Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. In both cases, Adam is compared to Jesus.
When I watched the video, I heard the featured theologians say that Paul got it wrong. These supposedly Bible-believing theologians were explaining that Adam was never a real person, but that they did not expect the apostle Paul to know that, and, therefore, the lesson drawn by Paul is still true.
The lesson that Paul draws, in brief, is this: Adam was our representative in Eden. Jesus was our representative on the cross. “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” The analogy made between Adam and Jesus in both passages is so close that logic would tell us that the lesson would be undermined if Adam did not exist.
It seems that some self-avowed conservative theologians are playing with fire these days. The idea that “it’s okay, if Paul was wrong” is not an acceptable answer. The more humble approach is to acknowledge that if Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, told us that Adam was real, then he most certainly was.
What Science?
When I taught science, I drilled into my students important aspects of scientific method. Take two tubes, each containing a different clear solution. We then mix the solutions, and they turn green. If we do the same experiment tomorrow, with the same amounts of solutions, at the same concentrations, at the same temperature – in other words, all the conditions are the same – then we will get the same result. We would not expect the same materials to gently turn green one day, and explosively turn orange the next. That is why it is a point of principle that scientific experiments are repeatable. This is also why, as science teachers, we got students to write down their experiments. We always did so in a regimented format, noting the Apparatus and Materials used, then the Method (how we did the experiment), the Observations (it turned green), and finally the Conclusion – what we had learned from the experiment.
Evolution is not like that. An evolutionist supposes that inorganic molecules turned into a cell, or that an ape-like ancestor became human. These things are not repeatable. That fact alone does not falsify the event. God made birds on Day Five, but we cannot repeat that event, either. Both are, scientifically, suppositions of one-off events in the past, so we call them historical science, as opposed to the former being operational science. The true event is the one where we have the eye-witness account – and the only eye-witness was God Himself, recording what He actually did in Genesis 1.
Does the Cat Exist?
Erwin Schrödinger had a cat. Or perhaps he didn’t. At any rate, we don’t know whether it is alive or dead. Or still in the box. Confused?
Let me explain. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment in order to try to explain quantum theory. He imagined putting a cat in a box. There is a radioactive atom in the box which may, or may not, decay. If it does decay, it will release an alpha particle, which will hit a sensitive mechanism, able to release a hammer. The hammer will hit a vial of poisonous gas, killing the cat. The radioactive atom’s decay is a quantum event, so, whether the cat lives or dies, is also now a quantum event. If we have not opened the box, we do not know if the cat is alive or dead. In fact, before decay, a radioactive atom is assumed, by quantum theory, to exist in all possible states. Therefore, the cat is both alive and dead. Of course, once the box is opened, there is no doubt because we can see whether the cat is dead or alive.
The purpose of Schrödinger’s thought experiment was to criticize the whole concept of Quantum Theory. Surely, it was not possible for something to be and not to be at the same time. This simplistic version of Quantum Theory suggests a universe which is not understandable. No wonder that early scientists based their discoveries on the solid truth of God’s word.
Thank You, Lord, that You have given us the tools to understand this world. We expect order in the universe because You are a God of order, not chaos. Amen.