THE EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD PART 3
If you have not heard the first two lessons, we have been examining the external evidence for the existence of God. We have been looking at our universe, but we have we have mainly focused on our own galaxy and how precise everything is so that life can be sustained on earth. Anyone that honestly considers how precise everything is would have to come to the conclusion that there is no way all these things just happened by some random accident. Along the way we also considered several Scriptures that show scientific foreknowledge of things that have just recently been confirmed in the last 100 years or so.
Since our universe is so complex and precise, there are more and more scientist who believe that our universe and everything in it was designed by an intelligent being, which we know is God. So, in this lesson we are going to continue to look at the design of the earth, more specifically our oceans, and we are going to spend some more time looking at more Scriptures that show scientific foreknowledge regarding our oceans. We will also take a look at Geology and the Bible. I think you will find all this information interesting and it will show once again that God is our Creator.
Oceanography and the Bible
Oceanography is the study of the history, geography, motions, and chemical composition of the Ocean. The Ocean is another important creation of God. It covers around 70% of the earth’s surface and is the primary source for our life giving rain. It has been estimated that if the Ocean was half its size, we would only receive a fourth of the rain that we do now and the planet would virtually become a desert. On the other hand, if the ocean covered a half more of the land then it does right now, we would receive a fourth more rain fall and much of the land would turn into a massive swamp. But, God created it in such a way that it has just the right balance showing once again that the earth had a designer.
Our oceans also help maintain our temperatures across the globe because water heats and cools at a much slower rate. For example, when the weather turns cold the heat given off from the ocean helps keep things a little warmer. Also, about 90% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the plants that live in the ocean. As I mentioned in our last lesson, the moon is in the perfect place to make our tides just right, which gives the proper movement of the plants in the ocean so that they can live. Without all these factors being just right, life on earth would not exist or it would be very limited depending on far off these factors are from where they are now.
Even the salt in the sea plays a crucial role to life on earth according Dr. Robert E.D. Clark:
He says, “that water
vapor alone does not readily lend itself to the production of clouds. “Nuclei,”
he says, “must be provided on which the water can condense.” The huge
quantities of salt in the seas, together with wind and water action, create the
conditions whereby the formation of rain is generally made available over the
surface of the earth” (The Universe: Plan Or Accident?).
There are many benefits we get from the ocean:
Again, if all the things I have said about our ocean doesn’t scream out intelligent design, it should. For the remainder of our time we are going to examine some more scientific foreknowledge from the Scriptures.
The Water Cycle (Eccl 1:7; Job 36:27-29 Amos 5:8.
Job 36:27 For He
draws up drops of water, Which distill as rain from the mist, 28 Which the clouds drop down And
pour abundantly on man. 29
Indeed, can anyone understand the spreading of clouds, The thunder from
His canopy?
Here we see Job talking about God drawing up the water and then it falls to the earth from the clouds. This is also declared in,
Amos 5:8 He calls for the waters of the sea And pours
them out on the face of the earth; The LORD is His name.
One last passage I want
to look at that goes along with this is,
Ecclesiastes 1:7 All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is
not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return again.
All of these passages are making a scientific statement about the cycle of water. All the water on the earth is going through a continuous cycle of rain, drainage, and river flow which mainly ends up in the sea. Since all this water is running out to sea, what keeps it from overflowing?
The answer is evaporation and the hydrologic cycle. The water from the sea evaporates and basically turns into clouds which dump their water, which we call rain, all over the face of the earth and then eventually it drains back out to sea once again. This cycle is repeated over and over again.
But how did Solomon, Job, and Amos know this in their day when this concept was not generally understood until the 16th or 17th century? Well, I believe the answer is because God supplied them with this information.
The Recesses of
the Deep (Ps 33:7, 2Sam 22:16, Jon 2:6)
We have several
passages in the Bible that speak about the topography of the ocean floor that
could have not been known by the earlier writers of the Bible since they had no
way of exploring the depths of the Ocean with any precision. The closest thing
they could do was to take a sounding, which was done by using a lead weight
attached to a rope that they could drop into the water to see how deep it was.
We have this mentioned in the N.T.
Acts 27:28 So they took a sounding and found
twenty fathoms. A little farther on they took a sounding again and found
fifteen fathoms.
In context, these men thought they were getting
close to shore so they took a sounding and found that the water was 20 fathoms.
A fathom was measured from the tip of the middle finger to other tip of the middle
finger which would be right around six feet, which means their first sounding
was around 120 feet deep. The next sounding they took was around 90 feet. So,
using this method, their knowledge of the topography of the ocean floor would
be very limited, yet the Bible gives us some specific details about the ocean
floor, For instance notice:
Psalm 33:7 He gathers the waters of the sea
together as a heap; He lays up the deep in storehouses.
Also God asked Job,
Job 38:16
"Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses
of the deep?
2 Sam 22:16 refers to the channels of the deep.
The word “recess”
means hidden and the writer of our Psalm talks about this deep place as a
storehouse. This is exactly what can be found in all 3 oceans. In 1873, some
British scientist first discovered a recess in the Pacific Ocean that was 5 ½
Miles deep and then another team found an area that was over 6 miles deep.
It has been
estimated that if the earth surface was smoothed over, the current volume of
water in the ocean would cover the entire earth 2 miles in depth. The ocean has
a far greater depth than the height of the land. To give you an example, if
Mount Everest was placed in the lowest know depression of the ocean, the water
would cover the top of
Now the question becomes, how could these early writers have known about these deep storehouses of the ocean? Again, I am left to the conclusion that they could not and that only God could have given them this information.
A.E. Parr who served as the director of the
“Before the invention of echo-sounding equipment it was generally thought that the bottom of the oceans would present the appearance of plains, plateaus and gently rolling terrain. Now we know that it also has valleys and mountain ranges, and even canyons, to equal all the forms we find on land.”
Now I cannot possible know what ever single person thought about the topography of the ocean floor, but without having the ability to explore the depths of the ocean, I could easily see how people back then would have simply thought that the further you went out the deeper it got. I cannot imagine any of them thinking that the ocean floor had canyons and mountains, yet notice what the Book of Jonah records:
Jonah 2:5 The
waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were
wrapped about my head 6 at
the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed
upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O LORD my God.
This account of Jonah
teaches us that there were mountains in the ocean and please remember is wasn’t
until 1800’s that such things were known for sure, yet once again the Bible
shows us that it is spot on with modern day science, which is another proof
that God provided this information. Even today, we know more about the surface of the moon than we know about
the ocean’s floor, yet the Word of God informed us long ago about some of
details about the ocean floor before man invented a way to confirm it.
Path in the Sea
(Ps. 8:8).
One of the greatest finds in the 1800’s has to do with Oceanography. A man by the name of Matthew Fontaine Maury discovered the sailing paths in the sea. Dehoff writes about this in his book.
“Before Matthew Fontaine Maury lived there were no sailing lanes and no
charts of the sea. One day, when he was
ill, his son read to him from the eighth Psalm.
He read that God put under man ‘…the fowls of the air, the fish of the
sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths
of the sea.’ ‘Read that again’, he
said. Upon hearing it the second time,
the venerable scientists said, ‘If the Word of God says there are paths in the
sea, they must be there. I will find
them.’” (Dehoff, pg. 53).
Today, Mr. Maury is known as the Father of
Oceanography. He founded the
Springs in the Ocean. Job 38:16
Job 38:16 "Have you entered into the springs of the sea,..
In this Chapter, God is giving Job a taste of his infinite wisdom, and in this verse He speaks of the springs of the Sea. The earliest mentioning of these springs in secular history that I am aware of comes from writing of the Greek Geographer Strabo who lived from 63 B.C. – 21 A.D. As strange at it may sound, many of these fresh water springs have been found in the different oceans. Once again, we see the Bible is spot on with science.
One of the strongest
arguments against evolution is this: There simply has not been enough time for
the process of evolution to occur. Even the followers of
Consider this: It is estimated that more than 2 Billion tons of sediment are dumped from the rivers into the oceans each year. It has been projected that all the earth’s continents will erode away is some 14 million years. One evolutionary source was baffled regarding this and said the following:
“Why, in the course of millennial, is there so
astonishingly little sediment on the ocean floor?”
What could possible be the answer to this question? It seems simple to me. It is because God created the heavens and the earth and just as the Bible suggests, the earth is very young. Discoveries like these show that the earth is not old enough to support the evolutionist timeline. Again, NO TIME = NO EVOLUTION!
Now let’s take a look at the bible and Geology.
Many of the scientists in this field clash with what the Bible teaches because most of these scientists teach evolution. Geology involves the study of the history of the earth’s crust, rocks, and strata. Strata simply means the different layers that are found within the earth’s crust.
If you look in any biology or geology textbook, you will find a diagram of a so-called Geological Column. The Geological Column is supposed to represent 12 different geological ages of life forms that have formed over billions of years. The lowest level is supposed to contain the most simplex creatures, and the further you move up the column the more complex they become. But let me let you in on a little secret; this geological column does not exist anywhere on this earth, it only exists in the textbooks and the evolutionists imagination.
There is a major flaw with their geological column. For example, if all the earth’s living creatures were stacked on top of each other that supposedly evolved over a time span of 2 billion years it has been estimated that the depth would have to be 130 miles. This is a major problem considering the earth crust is only 25 to 30 miles deep.
Another major problem they have to deal with is the true geological record that we have today. The lowest level of fossils we have is called the Cambrian level. This is an amazing level because there are great variety of organism found here which indicate that all these life forms existed together at once, which is exactly what the Bible teaches. The truth of the matter is that every major invertebrate animal group has been found in this layer. The simplex and the complex are found together which goes directly against what the evolutionist teach because according to them only the most simplex should be in this layer.
I believe the Bible holds the real answer of why this lower level contains so many different kinds of organism and that is the account of the flood in Genesis 6 and 7. In order for something to become a fossil it has to be covered quickly before it decays or gets eaten.
Since there are so many different organisms in one place, the world wide flood, as mentioned in Book of Genesis, would explain why so many creatures are preserved in one place. You can imagine as the water begin to rise the animals would all head to dry ground, which would put them in the same area as each other as the water overtook them. The fact that there are many of these great graveyards across the globe indicates a world wide flood. The water would quickly bury these creatures giving them the ideal condition to become fossils. Also, every mountain on the face of the earth shows signs of being under water at one point, which gives us more evidence of a world wide flood just as the Word of God states.
I also want to show you some evidence that shows that man and some of these other creatures that supposedly died out millions of years before man both coexisted at one time.
First I want to show you an Inca burial stone.
“This stone was
engraved by the Incas long before the discovery of dinosaurs in the mid 1800's.
Engraved on this stone is a triceratops dinosaur which is accurately portrayed
in detail with a human rider mounted on its back. It would appear that the
Incas, or their ancestors, had seen living dinosaurs.”
Our next example is a fossil of sandal print and trilobite.
“The oldest fossil
footprint yet found was discovered in June 1968 by William J. Meister on an
expedition to Antelope Spring, 43 miles west of Delta, Utah, USA. He was
accompanied by his wife and two daughters, and by Mr. and Mrs. Francis Shape
and their two daughters. The party had already discovered several fossils of
trilobites when Meister split open a two-inch-thick slab of rock with his
hammer and discovered the print. The rock fell open 'like a book' revealing on
one side the footprint of a human with trilobites right in the footprint
itself. The other half of the rock slab showed an almost perfect mold of the
footprint and fossils. Amazingly the human was wearing a sandal! The sandal
that seems to have crushed a living trilobite was 10 1/4 inches long and 3 1/2 inches
wide; the heel is indented slightly more than the sole, as a human shoe print
would be." According to the "Theory of Evolution" humans and
trilobites would not have been around at the same time, but as the photo shows,
they were.”
My last example is what is known as the Coffee track.
“In 1934 Mr. A.M.
Coffee of Stinnett, Texas, a pumper for the Gulf Oil Company, discovered a
trail of nine “human-like footprints” in series on a rock ledge about four
miles out of town. He worked one of the tracks loose and took it home. After he
showed the artifact to a few friends including his boss, various interested
persons took the rest of the tracks from the site. The discovery created an
instant controversy among archaeologists, geologists and anthropologists, because
the sedimentary rock system of the entire area is geologically assigned Permian
(assumed to be 225 million years old). The general consensus was that the print
had to be a carving made by Indians, or the like. The difficulties involved in
drawing such conclusions were enhanced by the fact that the print was
accompanied by eight other prints in the series, along with an adjacent child's
print. Further controversy ensued when it was pointed out that the tracks were
not “stylized” as other Indian carvings are.”
These foot prints have been analyzed by a CT scan and have been deemed authentic foot prints and not carved ones. So, once again, we have another example that shows that man existed at the same times as the other animals that supposedly lived 225 million years ago.
We have around 250,000 different species preserved in fossils today. Out of all of these fossils records we would assume that if the evolutionist were correct we would find some half formed creatures. However, not one single fossil has been found with half formed features. There are so many holes in the evolution theory one wonders why they continue to teach it.
Scientist will never find their missing link because the Bible makes it clear that things produce after their own kind as seen in,
Genesis 1:11 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth
grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields
fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the
earth"; and it was so. 12
And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according
to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in
itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
This means a tree will produce a tree, and a monkey will produce a monkey. We have never evolved from something else and we are not in the process of evolving into something else.
I hope the information I have shared with you today has been helpful and that you can use it to teach others. I stand amazed at how much scientific foreknowledge in found in the Bible and how precise He made everything so that it has the proper balance to sustain life. I hope you will join us for us our next lesson as we continue to look at more evidence that show the existence of God and that He created us and our universe.