Bible in a Year Blog

2Cor5:11-21

MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION

Since Adam, God’s plan has been about restoring His relationship with mankind.

-Foreshadowed in OT.
-Means provided through Christ in Gospels.
-Proclaimed in rest of NT.

What does this mean to us:
:…And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”

This is why we are here on earth, and not spirited away upon salvation. We are to be the carriers of His message – in speech and through behavior.
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A CHILL PILL VERSE

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Some people will say that Christ did experience sin – that he was not sinless based on this verse. (a supposed contradiction of the Bible).

I don’t argue with these kind of propositions. I do point out that the translation could just as well be that Christ was made a “sin offering” or that He “bore” (carried) sin for us.

Since being ‘made sin for us’ is contradictory in my mind – I lean to the alternate translations.

Let the reader decide.

John

======= Vance:

Do those of you who believe the Bible is to be always taken literally also believe that Christ stating John the Baptist was Elijah meant that a dead man’s soul literally returned in a new born infant (and thus that the Bible proves the theory of reincarnation)? Since Jesus says In John 14:12-14, “In solemn truth I tell you, anyone believing in me shall do the same miracles I have done” and in Mark 16:17 that, “those who believe, in my name will cast out demons,” can I likewise assume that you also literally cast out daemons and walk on water before calling yourself Christian? Can I also assume that you’ve cut off any sinning limbs and stoned to death any disobedient children? That Paul told the American Indians his testimony since literally commanded to in Acts 22:15. Not to mention that you believe Jacob to have literally bested God (the wimp)?!?

The basis of all science is that only God knows and the best one can do is statistically provide sufficient evidence for a hypothesis (or hunch) in order to call it a theory. A theory is not just a wild guess, of course, but represents a well established body of knowledge that has undergone significant testing and peer review. Even Newton’s Law of Gravitation, however, is unable to explain certain anomalous behaviors associated with planetary motion in strong gravity fields (notably, Mercury) and completely fails at the atomic level (which is why we have relativity, and after that unified field theory, and today string theory, etc). The idea that any scientific premise is open to debate is one of the hallmarks of science. But is it a principal tenet that must separate science from religion?

Why is theology so seemingly beyond such debate? For example, a boy in a biology class in Baltimore, MD last year declared, “There’s one less rib in boys!” The teacher pulled out a male and female skeleton from the closet and had the boy count the ribs to demonstrate that men and women had, in fact, the same number of ribs. The next day the boy claimed he told his priest what happened and that his priest had called the teacher a heretic. Is science and critical thinking heresy? Does knowing where babies come from diminish the hand of God making it a miracle? Why does the religious acceptance of evolutionary biology and geology need to be fundamentally different from the acceptance of other sciences, such as astronomy?

Can both evolution and the Bible be true?

Even creationist sites (http://www.answersingenesis.org/) are often forced to argue for evolution (which literally only means change) within classes, “When you realize that horses, zebras, and donkeys are probably descended from the horse-like ‘kind.’” In 2001, Michael Behe admitted his work on irreducible complexity in support of intelligent design in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box had a “defect” and does not address “the task facing natural selection” (see http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/biph/2001/00000016/00000005/00353967). Evolution theory is likely to see some serious corrections, but it will NEVER be disproved. Of all the “creation myths,” most believe that the Bible story is the one most validated by science. For example, DNA research has demonstrated a single Eve (a single Adam is harder to do and yet to be done). Thus, any rational person must believe that Cain married his sister.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein

3.6 million years ago, a volcano now called Sadiman puffed out a cloud of ash that blanketed the area surrounding the famous Laetoli hominid footprints. A light rain then turned the ash into a sort of cement that recorded thousands of tracks of antelopes, rhinos, guinea fowl, and monkeys, as well as the footprints of prehistoric humanoids. Volcanic rock can be dated by a method called potassium-argon dating. Hot, newly erupted lava and ash contain the radioactive chemical element potassium-40 that, over time, decays into a different material called argon-40. By comparing the ratio of potassium to argon, scientists can gauge how long this natural clock has been ticking. The age of volcanic rock and ash can be pinpointed to within roughly twenty thousand years – a mere moment in Earth’s 4-billion-plus year history. Likewise, we know that “Lucy” (discovered in 1974) and other members of her species, Australopithecus afarensis, lived between 3.9 and 3.0 million years ago (3.2 million years specifically for Lucy). Australopithecus afarensis were muscular, heavy-browed humanoids that walked upright but with small, chimp-like brains where males were almost two feet larger than females (Lucy was only 3.5 feet tall). The Hader skull was discovered in 1992 (3.0 million years old) and a family of 13 individuals was found in 1975 (3.2 million years old).

Such dating comes from several methods. Potassium-Argon dating is generally provided with a plus and minus 12% 1-sigma error but can be used on samples from the beginning of the earth (4.6 billion years) to less than 100,000 years ago. Argon-40 to argon-39 ratios has recently been shown to provide even more accurate dating information but confirms these previous estimates. Other Chronometric techniques include written records (as far back as 3,000 BC), tree (living and dead) ring analysis (data goes back 8,000 years in Europe, 3,000 years in the American Southwest, and 10,000 years for a few other places), Amino Acid dating (for bones, fossilized feces, shells, and calcium rich soil for as much as 200,000 years), geomagnetic reversal time scale: magnetic north moves about 25 miles per year and has often reversed (good for dating recent events up to 8,000 BC and relative to reversals that occurred at .69, .89, .95, 1.9, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.43 million years ago – this is the time frame that our genus Homo has evolved), radiocarbon dating (based on carbon-14 radioactivity decay in all living tissue after death, accurate to less than 1 out of 1,000 years after certain small corrections are applied, but only good up to about 40,000 years), urnium-238 dating for crystalline minerals (for a few decades old to the formation of the earth), thermoluminescence dating (good to about 300,000 years ago, but with higher error rates), electron spin resonance dating (new technique good back roughly half a billion years), uranium / horium dating, oxidizable carbon ratio, optically stimulated luminescence, varve analysis, and obsidian hydration dating. Relative dating techniques (to simply determine which of two items is older) include stratigraphy, index fossils, fluorine analysis, geochronology, artifact time markers, seriation, and pollen analysis. Most items can be dated accurately using several of these techniques as confirmation of the results. It is unlikely that all are outright wrong.

Moreover, the overwhelming evidence for evolution has come from four sources: 1) the fossil record of changes in earlier species, 2) the chemical and anatomical similarities of related life forms, 3) the geographic distribution of related species, and 4) the recorded genetic changes in living organisms over many generations. Much has been added to our understanding of evolution since Darwin – six different processes can operate independently or in concert to bring about evolution (recontextualization, pruning, chunking, merging, appropriation, and mutation). The current theory is called the synthetic theory of evolution since it combines the concept of Darwin’s natural selection, Mendel’s basic understanding of genetic inheritance, and a variety of evolutionary theories from population genetics and molecular biology. The biological sciences now generally define evolution as being “the sum total of the genetically inherited changes in the individuals who are the members of a population’s gene pool.” Evolution is the change in frequencies of alleles in the gene pool for a population. For example, recent research has shown that a woman making poor nutritional choices during pregnancy will not only produce a child of low birth weight but a grandchild of low birth weight as well due to measurable changes in her child’s alleles. While natural selection is the most powerful evolutionary process, it only selects among the existing variation already in a population. The ultimate sources of the new variation are the recombination of existing genes and mutation. Dr. Stephen O’Brien has discovered some Europeans carry a genetic mutation that prevents HIV. We also have DNA samples from four Neanderthals, though, that show that we are not decedents. Thus, the “missing link” for humans continues to be missing. But, in the eight million years since the earliest ancestors of humans diverged from the apes, more than a dozen hominids have lived on the Earth (see http://www.becominghuman.org/ and http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/index.htm). See “Is evolution just a theory?” at http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/evolution/educators/students/e_s_1.smil and “Why is evolution controversial?” at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/11/2/real/e_s_7.html on the brutality of honest reasoning. There are 480,000 research biologists and geologists in the world and about 160,000 of them are Christian. Of these, only about 700 believe in new earth creationism and yet most churches actively work to minimize such widely held beliefs.

The U.S. Supreme Court has judged that “Creation Science” is not a science because it refuses to subject itself to objective review. This intolerance is not a Biblical canon, however, but only the unfortunate state of a church effectively unchanged since the lack of such review got it into so much trouble over insisting that the Sun revolved around the Earth (as recently as 1966, Muslim leaders were still trying to suppress the Copernican “heresy”). Never has a single creationist ever received a doctorate in anthropology, spent decades in the field doing core research, or published in major scientific publications with critical review. Creationists often make the assertion that evolutionists only take the data and force it into their personal atheistic views. The reality, however, is that this actually describes ALL creationists because not a single one is actually acquiring any data (no need in their eyes). Instead they only babble on about some great conspiracy where everyone is out to get them and they refuse to discus the issues with real scientists (http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_dialog.htm). I would personally appreciate being shown the data from the “research” into global changes from the vapor canopy left by the global flood. This is not even biblical as Psalm 104:5-9 states that the global flood during creation (which IS supported by science in the creation of Pangaea) would never happen again. Moreover, when 1 Kings 10:24 states that “the whole world” sought audience with Solomon no one really thinks that this included the Native American Indians or that when Paul writes in Romans 1:8 about reports “all over the world” that he included them as well, so why expand the “global” flood. See a discussion by an U of A Christian student at http://www.saintjoe.edu/~dept14/environment/rogero/ppt/creationism_cmsharp.ppt.

It is more likely that one of you walks on water (or that Terri Schiavo could talk with an empty skull – http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050404/scvegetative.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo#Controversy) than dinosaurs ever lived with men.

Jim

======= Joanna: