Dinosaurs and the Biblical Account of Creation

Mark Witton / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Genesis 1 teaches that God created the heavens and earth and all that was contained within them during the first week of creation—dinosaurs included. Yet evolutionists teach that life came about by accident, and that dinosaurs existed millions upon millions of years prior to the age of man. So which of these two accounts is true? Did man and dinosaurs coexist as the Bible teaches, or did they live millions of years apart as taught by evolution? For someone who does not take God’s Word at face value, the only means to answer this question is through physical evidence. Therefore, let’s take a look at which of these two beliefs is supported by physical evidence.

First, we need to recognize that most of what is taught about dinosaurs and their skeletal remains is contained within the realm of historical science—not operational science—meaning it involves interpreting evidence from the past, and when you realize that everyone has presupposed philosophical ideas and beliefs that bias their interpretations, you understand that their conclusions may or may not be accurate because they include speculation, personal bias and assumptions. For instance, if a paleontologist believes that Darwin’s Tree of Life is accurate, he will place the date of a discovered bone within that theory. If he does not agree with Darwin’s theory of evolution, he will usually place the evidence within a different timeframe. That’s what is wrong with the claim that there are “thousands of bones” supporting Darwin’s evolutionary theory. When bones are discovered and then dated according to a specific theory, of course they are going to support that theory. It’s called circular reasoning.

So where does all of this leave us according to dinosaurs, evolution and the Bible? If evolution is true there will never be any operational scientific evidence to verify it because it happened “before the age of man.” Yet if the biblical account is accurate and God created every living creature during the first six days of creation, man included, then we should see evidence within ancient writings that indicate man and dinosaurs did indeed coexist. But does this evidence exist? Is there proof that man and dinosaurs simultaneously roamed planet earth? Let’s take a look and see.

The modern word dinosaur (terrible lizard) wasn’t coined until 1842 by a creationist scientist named Richard Owen. Before 1842 dinosaurs were often referred to as dragons, and there are multiple civilizations that have some type of record, whether drawings or writings, of great dinosaur-like creatures coexisting with man. These ancient records include a hero named Gilgamesh from the land of Sumer in Babylon who slew a dragon, an ancient Indian carving that remarkably resembles an Edmontosaurus, and old legends of dinosaur-like creatures from Scandinavia, Italy, China, Ireland, Africa, Arabia and other areas of the world. The city of Nerluc, France was even renamed in honor of the killing of a horned dragon, and the old European science book, Historia Animalium, presents dragons as still being present during the 1500’s.

Also, biblically speaking, Job, the oldest book of the Bible—probably written around 2000 years prior to the birth of Christ—records two creatures whose descriptions remarkably resemble that of the ancient dragons. These creatures were referred to as Behemoth (meaning kingly, gigantic beast) and Leviathan (meaning dragon-like or great sea creature). Some of the newer Bible versions do the Word of God a disservice by changing the word Behemoth to hippopotamus or elephant. Yet Job 40:15-19 includes the description of Behemoth, and in this description we discover that Behemoth’s tail, “sways like a cedar.” Have you ever thought of a hippo or elephant’s tail as “swaying like a cedar”? Of course not. If this creature was a hippo or elephant the description would more likely have read, “swaying like a twig.” These versions have also changed the word Leviathan to alligator or crocodile, yet the biblical description of Leviathan (Job 41) presents him as a terrifying sea creature that no man would ever dare challenge. Let’s ignore the major detail that very little in this biblical description actually fits that of an alligator or crocodile, and just consider the fact that we have men who wrestle alligators with their bare hands!

Two final bits of evidence: First, near Glen Rose, Texas, you will find a human footprint fossilized inside a fossilized dinosaur track. The only way a human print could have been fossilized inside this dinosaur track is if the soil was still wet when both walked through the mud. Some have tried to claim that the human print is not human at all, but some type of dinosaur or other creature. Yet this theory is laid to rest by simply following the set of footprints for just a short distance, for no other creature makes the exact same footprint as that of a human. The only adequate explanation for these footprints is that man and dinosaurs coexisted.

Second, paleontologists have recently discovered what appears to be soft tissue from the exposing blood vessels in the skeletal remains of a Tyrannosaurus. This indicates that this specific T-Rex’s bones are only a few thousand years old. Even if this date is off by many thousands of years, it certainly does not fit into Darwin’s timeframe of evolution.

So where does this evidence lead…straight to the Word of God!

For more on Creation Versus Evolution go to http://www.rocklanpublications.com.

Feed My Lambs

spbpda / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

“Who is Jesus? I never heard of Him,” the eight-year-old girl exclaimed the first day she attended our Good News Club. After several weeks of hearing the story of salvation, she responded to the invitation to receive Christ as her Lord and Savior. When my co-worker finished counseling with her, I heard her encourage, “Why don’t you tell Mrs. Daffern what you have done?” The little girl walked around the corner to where I stood. “Mrs. Daffern,” she began, “I knew I had sinned. I asked Jesus to forgive me and come into my heart.” Then with tears streaming down her face and the biggest grin I think I’ve ever seen, she added, “and I love Him so!” If I live to be a hundred and see many people find Christ, the testimony of that little girl will always be one of my favorite.

Yet the story doesn’t end there. Before we moved away, I was blessed to see her begin attending our local church, make a public profession of faith and receive baptism. Because of her testimony, her older sister and mother also began attending church. They too received Christ, were baptized and became members. But the story doesn’t end there. The last Sunday I attended that church before moving to another town, I was privileged to see her father attending with them.

Some of you may be wondering, “Can a child’s decision be real and lasting?” or “Is it really scriptural to lead children to Christ?” Please read Matthew 18 and note verse 2. “And Jesus called a little child unto him and set him in the midst of a group.” Also, in Mark 9:36 we’re told that Jesus, “held this child in His arms.” Verse 6 refers to these “little ones who believe in me.” The word used for “little ones” is the word micros. It is the same word we get our English word microscopic from. It means exceedingly small or microscopic. Jesus was talking about a young child, and the fact that He picks the child up and holds him in his arms tells us that this child was probably not over six years of age. Finally, Jesus forever settled the question of whether a little child can believe when He said, “little ones who believe in Me” (Matthew 18:6 KJV). Note the words “believe in me.” These are the same words used in John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Me shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life.” Very certainly Jesus was talking about this little micros child as having a saving faith—the same faith that provides everlasting life to all who are true believers/Christians.

Jesus takes the salvation of a child even one step further when He warns in Matthew 18:6 that it would be better for us to be “drowned in the deepest sea than to offend one these little ones.” I can’t think of a better way to offend a child than to tell them—when God’s Spirit is convicting them of their sin and drawing them to Him—that they are not old enough to come. God forgive us for the children who could have been reached, but weren’t because we thought they were too young.

Hidden In My Heart available through RockLan Publications or Amazon.

Darwin’s “Trail of Tears” Continues

ニコール / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

When you read Darwin’s autobiography, it is easy to see that he would never have supported men like the Columbine kill­ers; nor would he have given his stamp of approval to murderous tyrants like Hitler. He seems an everyday, loving husband and father. So where did he go wrong? How did this everyday man devise a theory that would influence two young men to go on a shooting rampage and godless world leaders to slaughter millions? The answer to this question stems directly from Darwin’s blatant denial of the existence of a Supreme Being, which then caused a dilemma. If “in the beginning” God didn’t create, then where did life come from? Darwin knew the only way to justify his atheism was to devise another means by which life came into existence—a means that left God out. Natural selection was the answer to both dilemmas; it allowed the abandonment of God and gave an alternative means for the creation of life. Once developed, his theory not only helped to settle his own atheistic mindset, it gave those who wished to denounce a divine Creator the intellec­tual means to justify their unbelief, and it provided the foundation for tyrants like Hitler to slaughter millions—thus Darwin’s Trail of Tears.

Yes, beliefs do have consequences! Regretfully, Hitler was a prime example of the consequences of Darwin’s teaching. He was totally indoctrinated in evolution, even to the point of providing his troops with books by Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche in hopes of influencing them toward his belief of inferior races. But why? Why would he care what his troops believed? Well, how else do you brainwash hundreds and thousands of soldiers, many husbands and fathers themselves, into believing the mass murder of millions—women, children and babies included—is moral? It is impor­tant to note here that Hitler’s extreme prejudice toward certain races wasn’t merely an innocent byproduct of Darwin’s theory that others pinned to Darwin’s name; it originated with Darwin himself when he drew his tree of life and theorized that good would come from death by way of natural selection, it was promoted by Darwin when he classified black Africans, Australian Aborigines, and Tasmanians on the lower limbs of his evo­lutionary tree, and it was practiced by Darwin when he referred to those with dark skin as “degraded,” saying he would rather have descended from a monkey than such a “savage.” Darwin even pre­dicted that one day the “civilized” races would rise up and exterminate the “sav­age” races. Sound familiar?

Darwin’s assumption that men evolved by random chance also led Josef Stalin, the mass murderer of multitudes, to become an atheist as a young man while reading his works in seminary. It inspired Karl Marx, who offered to dedicate his book Das Kapital to Darwin, to state that Darwin’s theory “contains the basis in natural history for our view . . .” These Darwinian enthusiasts, some of the world’s most notorious and depraved leaders, along with Mao, Pol Pot and other communist leaders, have murdered close to 100 million people, and all compliments of a theory which lessened the value of human life to an accident of random chance, thus no greater than that of any animal (Tom DeRose, Evolution’s Fatal Fruit, 2006).

For more information on Creation Versus Evolution visit www.rocklanpublications.com.

Slave Trafficking: Rose-Colored Glasses (Part 2)

vgm8383 / Foter / CC BY-NC

Now I understand why the Lady of Shallot in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem died after she turned from the rose-colored mirror through which she saw the perfect and beautiful world. She had known her whole life that if she were to stop seeing and weaving the beautiful images she saw of the world through her rose-glassed mirror that an unknown curse would come upon her. So she ignored the true world and kept weaving in her happy oblivion. Then one day Sir Lancelot came riding by on his beautiful noble steed with his strong armor, flashy shield, shiny helmet, coal black hair and dashing smile. She couldn’t stop herself. She ran to the window and looked at the world as it truly is for the first time because she had to truly see him, and not through a mirror. It was beautiful. She saw the water lily bloom and the love of her life. But the magical mirror cracked side to side and her loom broke in two. “The curse has come upon me,” she cried. She could never go back to the other world she had known because she realized it never truly existed, and of course her mirror had cracked! She left the tower for the first time in her life and gazed down toward Camelot in a strange, somber and quiet trance. She stepped into a boat and floated down the river toward Camelot. Floating down the river and singing in her song, she died.

Now, I’m not going to float down any rivers in a boat as the mythical Lady of Shallot, nor do I have any morbid dates with my Eternal Destination at this particular moment in time. But I love the poem in which the Lady of Shallot lives and the truth behind it, even though it has a most tragic ending. Unlike the Lady of Shallot, however, my story and the story of all those who know our Lord ends differently. It is a far cry from tragedy.

But so many of us live as she did, with our rose-colored glasses, not seeing the world as it is but as we want it to be. We do not see the destitute or the child prostitute on our doorstep because it would ruin the rose-world in which we live. As I’m with these girls and see the things going on, I think of how in a month I will leave them and return to my lovely parents and friends, and to my beautiful home and most blessed life. They will still be here. Years from now, I will stop and wonder whether or not they made it out.

Truly we are blessed people. We have so much opportunity at our fingertips and when we simply open our eyes to the truths of the world there is so much good we can do. But we cannot help those around us and right before our eyes if we do not look to see them. When we do see them, our world will be forever altered. It does not have to be a death or a horrible change. We cling to the promises that God has given us and do the best we can to love and obey Him and lead others to the freedom and hope we have found in Him alone.

James 1:27 “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

Posted by Mary Fordham at 4:06 AM

SlaveTrafficking: Rose-Colored Glasses (Part 1)

Sailing “Footprints: Real to Reel” (Ronn ashore) / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Thursday, June 10, 2010

I passed by a family sleeping on the road today. The little baby boy was running around naked. When he saw me he screamed and ran up to me with his arms held out. It broke my heart. I wanted to pick him up and wash him and clothe him. I was already passing by when he saw me and ran to me. He grabbed my skirt and clung to my leg. I smiled down at him but I could not take him with me.

We go to the bars every day and spend time with the girls. They squeal in excitement when they see us coming and we play several games of pool with them. Sometimes we bring them bread from the market. We buy them pineapple or orange drinks too. We have a great time but foremost in our thoughts are the masks they wear and the lives they are being forced to live.

Sometimes at night we go to the GoGo bars and walk around Nano Plaza. Hundreds of girls are there for sale and they walk around with numbers on. At some of the places the girls walk around upstairs without clothes on. All the men who buy them can see are the numbers on their boots from down below. They buy them without ever seeing their faces.

We talk to the girls at the bars and they are animated and sweet. Then when they have to get up and dance on the stage naked or mostly naked with bright neon lights and mirrors filling the entire room, with all the men saying and doing various things, their faces turn into masks.

Vacant eyes stare out from the faces that pray they will please Buddha enough in this life to have a better spot next go around. We see Buddha’s everywhere with food, drinks and incense surrounding them. They girls pray to be purified constantly and for forgiveness for the lives they are living. It is truly so tragic.

Several of the girls have responded to our invitations to check out Beginnings (a local Christian mission) and one even came home with us. Beginnings offers them a different chance at life away from the bars. They finish school and are taught trades. They are given allowances to send home to their families. It’s not much, but some of them don’t make much. They are basically indentured servants to the bars and all their pay goes to the bars. They have a quota of customers they must meet every month and most of the money they make goes to their demanding families.

Often, even if they would make more money at Beginnings, the families will not allow them to leave the bars. They still obey their parents even when they are 43-years-old and still prostituting at a bar half-way across the country.

Two girls we met (one was 36, but we refer to all of them as girls) have become Christians, but they cannot leave the bars because their families told them Beginnings might traffic them and they are not allowed to leave the safety or lifestyle the bar has provided them. Their families are hoping they will find foreign husbands who will provide for the families. When a Thai woman marries a man, he marries her entire family and it becomes his responsibility to provide for them. The girls asked us to pray with them and we did. They asked that we pray for their families—their parents’ health and for their brothers and sisters. They never mentioned any specific need they had or asked us to pray for themselves at all—just for others.

Posted by Mary Fordham at 4:06 AM                        

Is There Evidence of Noah’s Catastrophic Flood?

elmada / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

Second Peter 3:3-6 teaches that in the end time man would intentionally deny special creation by the spoken Word of God, as well as Noah’s global flood. Why? Why would man feel the need to deny there having once been a global flood? I can easily understand why he would deny special creation, but why would he deny the story of Noah’s deluge? Why would it matter whether or not there was once a global catastrophic flood that destroyed the whole face of the earth?

Really, the answer is quite simple. If such an awesome catastrophic event is history, then billions of plants and animals would have been rapidly and randomly buried with water, mud, and pressure, immediately beneath the earth’s surface, causing billions and billions of fossils mixed without order or cause. And that’s the problem. If a global flood did produce these enormous amounts of randomly placed fossils, then Darwin’s theory of millions of years didn’t. Also, Darwin taught that the oldest of all living creatures would be fossilized in the lowest levels of the earth; while the newest and most recent of creatures would appear in the upper most levels. But what do we find beneath the earth’s surface? Remember the Cambrian Explosion? It counters Darwin’s theory because it reveals billions of creatures fossilized in a random, confusing manner, just as you would expect had they been caused by a global flood. Thus the Cambrian Explosion literally turns Darwin’s tree of life upside-down, yet amazingly enough it fits perfectly with the evidence of there having once been a great catastrophic flood.

In Encounters with the Unexplained, a video produced by Grizzly Adams Productions Inc., the following statement is recorded by a government scientific organization: We see over 22 unique features on our planet which can now be systematically explained as the result of a cataclysmic global flood whose waters erupted from subterranean chambers (Genesis 7:11) with an energy release exceeding the explosion of 10,000,000,000 hydrogen bombs.  Some of these features include the mid-oceanic ridge, the continental shelves and slopes, the ocean trenches and rings of fire, the oil and coal deposits, the Ice Age, herds of frozen Mammoths (result of sudden ice age), the major mountain ranges paralleling oceanic ridges, strata and layered fossil, earthquakes, magnetic variations on the ocean floor, submarine canyons, methane hydrates, overthrusts, volcanoes and lava, geothermal heat, limestone, metamorphic rock, plateaus, the Moho, salt domes, changing axis tilt, and the jigsaw puzzle fit of the continents. 

Additional Evidence:
1) There are at least 272 stories from every culture around the world that speak of a global flood, and although the details often vary, these stories always refer to a man named Noah (or similar name) who was saved from the flood to repopulate the earth. If it were a local or “calm” event, its occurrence would have faded away into history without much notice. Instead, these stories have been passed down as actual history for millennium.
2) The flood account is found on Babylonian, Acadian, and Samarian tablets now housed in the British museum. These tablets date back to 700 B.C.
3) Ancient Chinese accounts that date back even further than the tablets in the British museum.
4) In the mid 1800’s, George Smith began piecing together some 25,000 pieces of clay tablets unearthed in the city of Nineveh and dating back to the 6th century B.C. In 1872 Smith came upon the account of an ancient ship paralleling the biblical account of Noah’s Ark. These tablets became known as the Gilgamesh Tablets.
5) There have been over 100 sightings of Noah’s art on Mt. Ararat dating from the 5th century B.C. to 1990 A.D. These sightings include such historians and explorers as Josephus, Eusebius, Marco Polo, and a good number of U.S. military personal. B.J. Corbin’s book titled The Explorers of Ararat record and detail these sightings.
6) The genealogical records of many European kings can be traced back to Japheth, one of Noah’s three sons.
7) Analysis of population growth confirms a zero population at the estimated time of the flood.
8) Civilization seems to have originated in the Ararat/Babylon region, exactly where the Bible story places Noah and his family when they left the ark.
9) The Ice Age started very quickly, and this would have required a cataclysmic event such as a global flood to trigger such rapid climatic change. A slow, gradual decrease in temperature as evolutionists teach would have produced a very cold earth, but not an icy earth. (Herds of frozen Mammoth)
10) Fossil graveyards are found worldwide, and in rocks of all ages. Only a catastrophic global flood could have achieved this.
11) Marine fossils can be found on the crests of mountains alongside land animals.
12) The sudden dying out of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Herds of adult dinosaurs fossilized, but no young or babies. Why? The young couldn’t keep up with the adults when they were fleeing from the rising waters.

Additional information can be found through Amazon by ordering Creation Versus Evolution: A Biblical and Scientific Study and Creation Versus Evolution: A Biblical and Scientific Study for Youth.

Written by Rockie Fordham, author of It’s Hard to Drain the Swamp When Yer up to Yer Ears in Alligators! also available on Amazon.

Darwin’s Trail of Tears

CGP Grey / Foter / CC BY

Avid evolutionists recently celebrated the 200th birthday of their hero, Charles Darwin, in a manner that promoted his theory as true science. Major museums assisted in this propaganda by displaying Darwinian exhibits that presented evolution as proven fact and praised Darwin for opening the minds of many. Regretfully, they were right in one of these two areas; Darwin did open the minds of many, but what they failed to mention is the trail of tears this legacy left.

Darwin was born into a religious family in the year 1809, yet he was never a true believer. His family attended the Unitarian Church of England, a church whose beliefs had long rejected the authority of God’s Word and essential Christian doctrines such as the deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the fall of man.
This was the false religion Darwin grew up in, and with a lack of genuine faith in his Creator he had no foundation upon which to stand when his young daughter succumbed to the terrible disease of tuberculosis (supposed diagnosis). Having no true relationship with God, and in bitterness of heart, he replaced his Creator and false religion with a new religion, natural selection, thus devising a theory that would become a magnet for those who wished to abandon belief in God. Although Darwin’s abandonment of the Creator doesn’t appear to have been with the desire of “now I can do what I want without consequence,” many have latched on to his theory for that precise reason. After all, natural selection did away with the need for God, and without a God to answer to for your actions, you can do anything you desire; without a God to set the criteria of right and wrong, you can create your own.

That’s what is so dangerous about the theory of “man being a byproduct of random chance.” It does away with God. Thus, it gives a justified foundation for men to create their own standards, and if their newly-devised standards include the murder of 13 or the murder of millions, who are we—a mere product of random chance—to declare them wrong? Thus the dilemma: without an Ultimate Authority (God) who sets the criteria, what makes one man’s ideas superior or more acceptable than another’s?

Yes, beliefs do matter. If a person believes he is nothing more than the byproduct of chance events brought about by random mutations in a pool of primordial slime, he will pattern his life accordingly. His decisions and actions will stem from that belief. A perfect example of this is the Columbine killers. Not many people know that on April 20th, chosen in honor of Hitler’s birthday, one of the two men responsible for this murderous rampage chose to wear a T-shirt that read “Natural Selection”. Authorities later discovered these two young men had created their own website greatly dedicated to evolution. They believed that killing people was nothing more than “scattering molecules” and practicing “survival of the fittest”. Their minds were open to Darwin’s teachings.