I will appear to be rambling for the first couple of chapters and will also be jumping from point to point rather quickly at first. In doing so I will be setting up the content of the book. I will also be asking a few questions and stating a few facts that I will be going into in more depth in later chapters. I would like to start with a couple of easy questions first.
Is there a Creator? If there is, then where did he come from?
I have spent my entire life looking for the answers to those questions. To use a familiar baseball analogy; sometimes I am in left field, sometimes I am on third base, sometimes I am in the upper deck center field bleachers and sometimes I am behind the batters box. No matter where I'm at it is plain to me that there are more ways than one to look at something. To have only one point of view means deliberately ignoring other thoughts on a subject; even if those other thoughts appear contradictory to each other or to the ones you already hold.
Looking at something from more than one point of view is not an easy position to adopt because it can cause a lot of conflict; not only within yourself but also within others. In yourself, when you can clearly see opposing viewpoints, and know that there are some questions that are very important to the health and sanity of your mind and you have to make a decision, one way or another; in others, because those you are close to have had to put up with you and your search since you made the decision to search for those answers. For this author, that “journey” has been a work in progress since the early 1970's. During those years I have jumped back and forth across the fence of opinion more than once.
When you make a decision to try and understand the workings of a Creator in this universe you are going to find plenty of unanswerable questions. Some of those questions have to be set aside for a while as you look for other, more basic answers that will eventually build a foundation of support for those more difficult questions. Unfortunately you will never find answers to all of your questions in this lifetime. If you want to doubt, you will find places to hang those doubts on.
It is not my purpose to, maliciously or even accidentally, destroy anyone’s belief, faith or understanding and it is not my intent to make you just like me. Whatever factual material you read here is only meant to explain the reasons why I believe things are the way they are. I will be presenting what I firmly believe are verifiable facts and doing my best to harmonize those facts with everything we already know. If that sounds like the work of a lifetime, well…it is.
Sadly, there are many "believers" who do not believe and are sometimes completely opposed to the idea of truth being progressive. If truth were a stagnant thing then we would all be living in caves and the law of survival of the fittest truly would direct our lives. Creatures without the ability to subjectively reason will never recognize the need to go beyond what they already know. Humans are intelligent, reasoning creatures; therefore, our understanding of what truth is will continue to expand until there is nothing more to learn. Since there will always be something for us to learn then we need to come to grips with the truth that what we already know as truth can change as we continue to learn more about what we already know. In its simplest form, just when you have it figured out…
There are people everywhere, of every type of belief or faith, even in the very church denomination to which I belong, who will take only the narrowest of views when trying to harmonize what we have learned of and in this world’s past with what scripture tells us of history. Not only does that limit a person’s view of things it also limits their understanding on a broader range of how, or why, the God they believe in manipulates, or allows to be manipulated, events that take place on this planet of ours.
Events such as, how was this world created in the first place, what processes were involved during that creation and how was this world destroyed during what most people call the diluvial flood, the flood described in the book of Genesis?
Bill Cosby said that God made it rain for forty days and forty nights and waited for the sewers to back up. Genesis says that it rained for forty days and forty nights as well, but it also says that the windows of heaven were opened and that all the fountains of the great deep broke forth. – Genesis 7:11. Most people believe they understand what the windows of heaven are, but what were all the fountains of the great deep and what were the forces at work that caused those windows to open and all the fountains of the great deep to break forth? We will get into my understanding of those things as we progress through this book but I would like to remind the people of biblical faith of one thing; they do not know everything there is to know about this world.
If the recorded histories of scripture are verifiably true then everything we know should be able to harmonize with what the Bible says…but there are areas in which the Bible is silent. After the disciple John had written his narrative of what he knew about the life of Jesus he went on to say, "And there are also many other things Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." - John 21:25. John was tending to exaggerate there a little bit...and we know that, but you get the point he was trying to make.
A tremendous amount of unwritten history occurred before, during and after the flood of Genesis that the author did not catalog. He could not write it all down because of a lack of technology. Moses, the biblical author of Genesis, had to write everything down on papyrus.
If you would like to learn how to make papyrus “paper” there are excellent resources for that on the www. It is a rather interesting side trip...it will bore the kids to sleep though. Papyrus scrolls were not easy to make or store. Producing an ink that would stand the test of time was not the easiest of tasks either. It would be rather interesting to know what Moses would have written down in the book of Genesis if he had had the kind of word processing technology available to him that we have today.
I now consider myself a creationist. Why? Because there are just too many marvels that we have discovered through the years, about this world we live in, for me to be able to see things any other way. However, to say that I believe the same way most mainstream creationists believe would not be too close to, or too far from the truth. Does that sound definitely vague to you; as if I am trying to straddle that fence of opinion I talked of earlier and not offend people on either side too much?
To believe in a Creator of all things does not have to make you an intellectual hermit, but it does not make you someone who knows it all either. Look at this world and universe around us and then tell me that we are the ultimate in all there is to know. To believe that is arrogance beyond understanding.
What is so hard about accepting the view of a Creator in our lives? What is so satisfying about believing that we are only the products of evolution? Why is it so important to us as humans to believe that we are the acme of everything and that we arrived at the place we are today on our own strengths and merits? Why do we always feel we have to be the ultimate in survival of the fittest?
There is nothing wrong with discovering something new but just because we discover something new does not mean that we have to have an immediate and complete understanding of everything there is to know about that new discovery. Ignorance is much more acceptable than discovering something new, writing down a theory to explain it and then presenting that theory as a fact when the facts cannot be proven or verified.
In the biblical account of creation, it says that a day, during the time of creation, was one complete rotational turn of the Earth on its axis. Humanity has divided that rotational period into 24 hours. At the time of creation, that rotational period could just as easily have been divided into 24-hour segments but does that mean that the rotational spin of the Earth was just as fast then as it is now? In the beginning, the rotation of the Earth could very well have been much faster or slower than it is now. If you can prove that a day, or a single rotation of the Earth, was as long then as it is now then I would like to see your proof.
As we look at our world and the solar system around us we can easily see that extremely catastrophic events have taken place in the past. When that destruction did happen what caused it and what were the results to this planet, the Moon and the other planets of this solar system?
We have evidence of parts of this planet going through an extended period of extreme sub-zero weather; an ice age. The Bible does not mention anything about an ice age but does that mean it never happened? The same forces responsible for a worldwide flood could also be responsible for disrupting this world’s orbital and rotational path through the solar system. In doing so it could also have been responsible for causing extensive areas of the planet to freeze because of the absence of a warming sun in places where glacier evidence is seen.
Something came through this solar system a few thousand years ago and wreaked severe havoc; like a gravitational billiard ball affecting other gravitational billiard balls. It caused global damage to not only the Earth, its rotation and its orbit as we know it, but it also affected, to some degree or another, every planet orbiting this fireball we call the Sun. How long ago all this happened is known only by the evidence we have available through verbal and written history and the things we see around us. We are only making the explanation of what happened even harder to understand when we try to keep different events separate and say that some of them happened millions of years ago while others happened only thousands of years ago. In reality, all of the events could easily have occurred during the same period of time and only our biased interpretation of those events and the world around us, is keeping us from seeing how they could have all happened and/or worked together during that same time period, causing the things we see around us today. I am still talking to both sides of the fence here.
There is a controversial Russian scientist/author by the name of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky who has done an excellent job of placing past cosmic and orbital phenomena which has affected our planet, as well as the entire solar system, into a very understandable format. It is hard, but not impossible, to find his books any more and what you will be able to find are used volumes. However, you can purchase them in eBook format. For those of you who are interested in ancient history as viewed from a large variety of cultures around the world, you will find the history that Dr. Velikovsky has compiled to be rather interesting when trying to make sense of this world around us. Although I am not always in agreement with his interpretations of those historical events that is only because I am seeing things from a different point of view.
In Earth In Upheaval, Velikovsky takes us around the world and shows us such things as the remains of ostriches, polar bears, crocodiles and arctic foxes that have been crushed and buried together in one mass "grave". He also tells us of the bones of hippopotamus which have been found in England and about palm trees found in Greenland.
Dr. Velikovsky gives convincing evidence that global catastrophic events have occurred in this planet's not too distant past. During that time he shows that the levels of the world's oceans were drastically changed, the earth was shifted on its poles, global climate was abruptly altered and ancient civilizations and entire species of animals became extinct. Velikovsky has researched the writings and cultural traditions of the people who lived during those times to draw, what he believed to be, a harmonious picture of those many recorded and remembered events.
There are those who will shy away from “research” such as his but it should be possible to take another culture’s history and blend it with what we already know. If the core of the other culture’s history and what we already know are true. It will be impossible to blend together every detail of the events of other cultures perfectly because during the span of time there are bound to be mistranslations, forgotten events, exaggerated events, misunderstood events, etc. The list can be extensive as to why past events do not harmonize completely with one another. We are human and that alone should help us to understand that mistakes can be made in recorded history. However, the main facts of any event should remain intact and accurate enough to match up with another culture’s recorded history of those events. There should be at least a general harmony, is what I am saying.
Galileo was very nearly destroyed as a heretic by the religious majority of his time when he proposed that the Earth was not the center of the known universe but was instead just a planet orbiting around a Sun. He decided to alter his views however, when faced with the option of either recanting or being burned alive.
Just because we believe we are more enlightened now than when the religious “leaders” of the past kept this world in the darkness of superstition and lies does not mean that we are quite out of the woods yet. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who claim to be on the side of God who will completely ignore history from other cultures, simply because the history they are being presented with does not seem to fit with their understanding of what the past says...according to what they have been told. You would do yourself a favor if you were to take a little time and try to understand some of it. If your faith in what you believe in is strong then you should be able to handle another point of view while still maintaining that faith.
While I am on the topic of subjective reasoning, we should get into a little bit of the science that many people have complete confidence in and have a tendency to hold as a kind of religion of its own.
Those who believe that the carbon dating system, used for determining the age of materials on this Earth, is evidence that a material being tested is millions of years old also have to consider other evidence. Just because the process of biblical creation might have taken place roughly 6,000 years ago does not mean that the material used during that creation process had not already been in existence for millions, or even billions of years before it was used during that time of creation. Carbon dating the material of this world and saying that fossilized life is as old as the material around it is an assumption that seriously needs to be reconsidered.
We can look out into the cosmos of this universe and see plenty of material available for the creation of suns and planets. There is enough material in this universe to form trillions of solar systems.
Although I consider myself a creationist that does not mean I have to completely ignore the scientific evidence that speaks for itself. Yes, I can acknowledge the evidence that is presented, that the galaxies of this universe are uniformly moving away from themselves and a unknown point of origin. If that is the case then you should consider that all of the material that is now uniformly moving away from itself, was at one time one solid mass of material. I don't find it hard to admit that I am a creationist who also believes in the possibility of a big bang. God has many ways of creating order from chaos and there are many ways that he uses chaos to create order. There is nothing wrong with a creationist believing that all of the material in this universe is as old as the universe itself.
Images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed galaxies that are 13.8 billion light-years away, making them the winners as the most distant galaxies ever seen. Suppose for a moment that some of the material that has been out in this universe for billions of years were suddenly, today, brought together by an intelligent creative force that is beyond our understanding as mere human beings to comprehend. Six to ten thousand years from now, when we finally discover what was intelligently created/terraformed on and with that material that is billions of years old, can we logically say that the objects that were created are as old as the material it was created with?
Right from the start, in the very first chapter of Genesis we are told that, in the beginning, “The earth was without form , and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” – Genesis 1:2
Yes, there was something there to begin with, before God began his work of creation; it was material that had formed together as a result of that initial beginning of the creation of this universe. How long had that unformed mass of water been there before that biblical creation process began? That we don't know for sure but we do know that the material that made up that pre-creation Earth was most likely as old as the universe itself and that it was just as much a part of God's creation as the creation of the universe was originally.
Was there something else that was mixed in with that mass of water?
Why, without a sun to keep it warm, was the water described as being in a liquid form instead of it being in a frozen state? The Hebrew word that describes the water that covered the unformed earth is tĕhowm (teh·hōm') and is translated as deep, abyss and primeval ocean. The Hebrew meaning of the word, as used in Genesis, describes a great quantity of water that is making a noise, as in roaring water that is in commotion and waves that follow other waves without intermission. Brings to vision the Atlantic Ocean in winter.
Here are a couple more questions for both sides of the fence to consider. How did the massing together of enough material to create the extensive underground coalfields of this earth come about? The same process responsible for the coal fields of this world could also be responsible for the turning of soft earth into rock, as well as into other materials like precious minerals and stones. Also, what caused the cellular material of trees to turn to stone as we can see in the extensive petrified “forests” of the world?
While doing a little research on the www I ran across some rather interesting information on the processes responsible for the development of the large Petrified Forest of northeastern Arizona.
I was surprised to find that the petrification of cellular material does not take millions, or even thousands of years to accomplish. For petrification to take place there has to be cellular material for the minerals in the surrounding soil to replace. Minerals in the water flowing through the soil deposit minerals in the plant's cells and the cells within the wood need to become petrified before they decompose completely.
I used to be a hard-core evolutionist and I know that some people will see me as someone who has become disillusioned and bitter, someone who is striking back at a scientific/philosophical network that has lied to me all of my life. Yes, there came a time when I began to understand that science, while trying to make square pegs fit into round holes, has done just that. There have been times when some scientists have misrepresented the facts (lied about their findings) or have knowingly manipulated their "scientific findings" to prove their own mistaken beliefs. Yes, some creationists have been guilty of doing the same and it is for that reason that I never just take another persons word as an explanation for anything. Creationist and evolutionists alike can tell me what they want but I am still going to research what they have told me until I prove them either right or wrong.
All right, I am soap boxing here, but I want you to know where I stand in the search for knowledge. If it is not true then I will not say it. If I cannot prove it then I will tell you so, instead of creating a web of deception to convince myself and others to believe something that can't be proven.
There is so very much that we know about genetics and life in general. We understand the mechanics of life very well and there are those who believe that we humans are on the verge of being able to create life on our own. Those who believe that should easily be able to at least acknowledge the work of an outside Creator of life on this planet.
Someone is not abandoning all intellectual reason by seeing the hand of a Creator in a piece of cellular machinery, like a human body or a horse, any more than someone is abandoning all intellectual reason by seeing the hand of a creator in a piece of manufactured machinery, like a car or a computer. They are all the work of intelligent design and creation; the only difference is that they are created from different types of materials.
From there you will also find links for many other videos that describe the various mechanical movements that continuously occur throughout living organisms. It is rather amazing to realize that life around us is made up of individual, living, cellular "machines"...beginning at the molecular level.
There is a vast separation between creationists and evolutionists. Occasionally you see some action when one group or the other publishes an article that appears to “disprove” something the other side believes in. Is that what life is all about? We are like children taunting each other in the schoolyard when we think and act like that.
What you will be reading for the first part of this book is not necessarily "doctrine". It will all be based on doctrine but sometimes you have to become a bit of a factual novelist as you fill in some of the things that most likely happened during the early stages of our solar system...there were not very many of us around back then. I plan to do my limited best to produce scientific explanations for the factual novelization that I will tend to delve into at times.
Later in this book I will be getting into verifiable and historical biblical text. You will have no problem telling where that begins. To start we will be going through history that is both verifiable and speculative. Even if the separation between the two becomes a little fuzzy, that fuzziness is not going to jeopardize you, me, the course of this world’s journey through the solar system, your spiritual salvation or the ultimate destiny of humanity.
My main objective for the first part of this book is to look at some of the things that we see on this planet and in this solar system around us and try to harmonize them with what we have been told from both sides of the fence.
Although it is not always easy to understand the physical and spiritual things of this world, there has to be a way of knowing what the big picture is all about.
This book will be like going from Los Angeles to New York City, with a road map that you have just purchased, never used and are not sure if you can trust. Before you begin your journey it is always advisable to sit down and plan that trip by plotting a course from town to town. As you reach those never-seen-before destinations you will hopefully find that you can trust the map you have. By the time you have reached the border of New York, even though you have not completed the journey, you should then be able to see, by having faith in the map maker who has directed you from Los Angeles to the border of New York, that you can trust the map you have for the last few miles to the city of New York.