Explanation of how Genesis is not an allegory or fable, but based on solid evidence.
Sermon Notes
THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR THE BIBLE (part 1)
By Mario Seiglie, July 25, 2009
Look around you at the youth here – 2/3 will be gone by the time they are adults.
So begins the book by Ken Ham, Already Gone. Interviewed 1000 in 20’s
After surveying more than 1,000 twenty-somethings on multiple occasions, Ham and American Research Group founder Britt Beemer found that those who had regularly attended Sunday school classes while growing up were more likely to question the authority of Scripture. These 20- to 29-year-olds were also more likely to leave the church, defend the legality of same-sex marriage and abortion, and defend premarital sex.
"This is a brutal wake-up call for the church, showing how our programs and our approaches to Christian education are failing dismally," Ham writes in his latest book, Already Gone: Why Your Kids Will Quit Church and What You Can Do to Stop It. Though his book includes both reasons for and remedies to what Ham describes as the "Sunday school syndrome," he says one of the biggest factors is a disconnect that church leaders and parents have helped create in children's understanding of the creation account.
According to the apologist, the church began planting seeds of doubt in the last century among younger generations by turning the Genesis creation account into a figurative story that rendered scientific facts a non-issue—while the gospel accounts of Jesus' resurrection were held up as verifiable proof of the Bible's inerrancy. This inconsistency, says Ham, created a deep questioning that was furthered by an increasingly secular school system that held everything up to the plumb line of science.
"What you see in the Bible is that when there is compromise in one generation, and it's not dealt with, you usually notice it to a greater extent in the next generation," Ham told worldnetdaily.com. "Because of the way in which they've been educated, [today's teens now believe] that what they are taught in school is reality, but the church teaches stories and morality and relationship. Bible teaching is not real in the sense of real history."
We are not immune.
Disconnect – I know – it happened to me – evolutionist and Catholic – but 17, discovered God’s true church. Realized part of worldly, man-made church – not teaching complete biblical truths – just a fatal mixture.
Instead of going from church to world, I went from worldly church to true church. Why the difference?
2 Thes. 2:8-12 Love of the truth
Biblical truth – but leads to physical truths as well – Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, etc.
Linus Pauling: Science is the search for truth, the effort to understand our world.
Noting to apologize over – brief series – science, history, archaeology.
Mr. HWA – stripped of preconceived notions – unlearn man-made teachings, let Bible speak for itself. Not read into the Bible, but read from the Bible out.
Creation or evolution – Darwin’s birthday, coincidentally, 150 years Origin of Species
Only two feasible explanations
Problem – why kids leaving – most Christian churches in two wrong camps:
1. Majority – Catholics, mainline Protestants – Genesis 1-11 Allegories, not historical, believe evolution is true, but God-guided—Pope – apes evolved, finally given a soul.
2. Recent-creationists – lump all within 7-10,000 yrs. – the 40 tests astronomy, physics – expansion rates, echo, geology, radiometric dating, ice, corals, fossil layers, etc. Believe trilobites, dinosaurs and Adam all created within a week some 7,000 years. 250,000 fossils – 15 major layers – layer cake – no fossils of dinosaurs and man, or mammals. Plant life as well.
3. Third camp – ancient earth creationists – two groups – day/age, literal day/destruction.
Study evolution – takes more faith than to believe in a Creator.
4 unanswered questions:
1. Where is the evidence from non-life to life? Greatest step of all.
Features: living things possess DNA; metabolic system, reproduce, growth, stimulus-response; goal-directed interaction w/environment.
2. Solve chicken or egg dilemma. DNA & Protein –
3. DNA info. 250,000 miles. Circumference of earth 25,000 miles. Pinhead – 500 times. 5,000 times around earth. Pile of books.
4. Evolution – two mechanisms – mutations & N.S. – where all species in process mutation?
I don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution.
Ancient earth
Mr. Hwa
Job 38
Gen. 3
Rev. 12:9
2 P. 2:1-4 Angels that sinned
Gen. 1:1-2 Original, destruction
Ps. 104 renewal of earth
From original creation & earth to destruction – geologic strata
