200 million Christians are facing persecution

Jesus’ way went to the cross. Nowadays many Christians are being persecuted for their faith. El Greco (1580): Christ Carrying His Cross. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Persecutions are nothing new to Christians. Jesus predicted them and according to early Christian tradition all the apostles except John were martyred for their faith.

Persecutions have not abated in all parts of the world. Especially North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China, Pakistan, Iran, Eritrea and Vietnam mistreat Christians.

In many Muslim countries, conversion to Christianity is punishable by death. All too few people in the West know or are willing to speak about this glaring breach of human rights.

Next Sunday (November 21st) is an International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. There are surprisingly many persecuted Christians in the world, approximately 200 million.


Source:

International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church.

The CERN breakthrough and the riddle of antimatter

The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Researchers at the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, say they have succeeded in trapping antimatter for a sixth of a second. Although that does not sound like an aeon, in the world of captured anti-hydrogen atoms, it is a longish time.

The scarcity of antimatter is a problem for naturalistic views of cosmology.

”According to the current understanding of physics, the big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. However, the universe that we know could not have come about since matter and antimatter would have annihilated each other”, says Paula Eerola, professor of particle physics at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

The big bang has other serious problems as well, for instance the assumed inflation at the beginning that lacks any empirical evidence and defies the laws of physics to boot. In addition, early galaxies grew too fast for the big bang.

Astronomers have often had to prop up the big bang with auxiliary assumptions. In a sense, the big bang with its hard-to-believe additions resembles Hinduism - and can hardly be kept neat with the help of Occam’s razor.

Why is there something instead of nothing? is a question to which naturalistic origins models do not have an answer. The fine tuning of the cosmos has in any case prevented the universe from exploding into pieces at the very beginning.

Sources:

Antimatter captured by CERN scientists in dramatic physics breakthrough. The Telegraph. 19 November 2010.

Tutkijat vangitsivat antimateriaa. Aamulehti. 19 November 2010, A18.

New research: Earth probably had water from the very first day

Genesis says that there was plenty of water on Earth from the beginning. Image courtesy of NASA.


Joel Kontinen

”Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” This is how Genesis describes the birth of our planet.

Astronomers who believe in the Nebular Hypothesis or some other natural explanation of how the solar system was formed have assumed that in the beginning Earth was too hot for liquid water.

The origin of the Earth’s oceans has been a mystery for astronomers. They have suggested that comets might be a plausible source of water. However, the water on comets differs considerably from the water we find on Earth. Asteroid impacts cannot solve the riddle, either, since their elements differ from those on Earth. For instance, they have more platinum than we have.

Nora de Leeuw, a chemist at University College London, and her colleagues made a computer simulation of Earth's birth process. They conclude that dust particles could be able to cling on to water at 630 degrees Celsius ( 1,166 degrees Fahrenheit). They thus suggest that there could have been liquid water on Earth from the very beginning.

Recently, they published their research results in the journal Chemical Communications.

Although the basic premise of Leeuw and her colleagues probably differs considerably from that what Moses wrote in Genesis, their research brings up serious weaknesses in naturalistic origin hypotheses and suggests that Moses knew what he was writing about when he said that there was water on earth at the very beginning:

” And God said, 'Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.' And it was so. God called the dry ground 'land,' and the gathered waters he called 'seas.' And God saw that it was good. ” (Genesis 1:9-10).

Source:

Shiga, David. 2010. Earth may have had water from day one. New Scientist 2785 (5 November).

What did the world’s oldest shrimp look like? – Like a modern shrimp, of course

A modern shrimp. Image courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), via Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen


The shrimp has hardly changed in ”360 million years”. A 70 millimetre (2.75 inches) long fossil recently found in Oklahoma is thought to be the oldest shrimp in the world.

The fossil discovery, published last week in The Journal of Crustacean Biology, is exceptional in that the muscles of the shrimp have been preserved well.

The shrimp looks just like its modern relatives some people are fond of eating.

Evolution is often defined as change but shrimps have remained shrimps for aeons. Similarly, the fossil record shows us that damselflies have remained damselflies, that a squid remains a squid, a Coelacanth remains a Coelacanth, a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) remains a horseshoe crab and a tuatara (Sphendon punctatus) remains a tuatara throughout the time when dinosaurs were assumed to be turning into birds and early mammals into men.

Living fossils clearly support the Genesis model of after its kind. The biblical kinds are known for stubbornly resisting change into other kinds. Even the assumed millions of years of earth history have been unable to bring about change that would have bridged the enormous gulf between the biblical kinds.

Source:

Minogue. Kristen. 2010. ScienceShot: World's Oldest Shrimp Is Still Strong.
ScienceNOW (11 November).

David Livingstone: A missionary who resisted the slave trade

Dr Livingstone, I Presume? Stanley and Livingstone met in November 1871. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Christianity is not only theory. For Scottish missionary doctor and explorer David Livingstone (1813 - 1873) faith also meant resisting iniquity.

Although the efforts of William Wilberforce, a Christian politician, had succeeded in putting an end to slave trade in the British Empire in 1833, Arabs still captured Africans and sold them as slaves. About five times as many slaves were killed, wounded or succumbed to diseases than were eventually shipped as slaves.

Dr. Livingstone regarded slavery as a glaring iniquity and he struggled to put an end to it.

This week marks the 139th anniversary of Stanley’s and Livingstone’s historical meeting.

Sources:

Dr Livingstone, I Presume? Christianity. com.

BBC:Historic Figures/ David Livingstone.

What’s wrong with the BioLogos Foundation?

Joel Kontinen

In a new video on the BioLogos Foundation homepage, Dr. Kathryn Applegate attempts to show that ”evolutionary science reveals God’s character”. It is quite a claim.

Darwinian evolution relies on a wasteful process in which death has been present from the very beginning. Even old-earth creationist William Dembski admits that in a truly Christian worldview death is a consequence of the Fall.

Like other theistic evolutionists, the scientists and theologians at BioLogos must basically re-write the Bible to make it conform to Darwinian evolution.

Dr. Francis Collins established the BioLogos Foundation to "contribute to the public voice that represents the harmony of science and faith". By “science” he means Darwinian evolution which by definition is an unguided process – but which in BioLogos’ parlance is actually guided.

Contributors to BioLogos include Karl Giberson, Pete Enns and John Polkinghorne, none of whom advocate an orthodox view of Christianity.

Theistic evolution abounds with theological problems that cannot be solved. It distorts the Bible and God’s character and plays fast and loose with biblical history. It has to deny important biblical events such as the global flood and re-interprets it as a local deluge.

BioLogos attempts to do the impossible – combine two mutually exclusive worldviews (theistic and atheistic).

Source:

BioLogos.org

New research: Stone Age tools were surprisingly sophisticated

Cavemen were no simpletons. Cave paintings at the Museo Regionale Archeologico, Palermo. Image courtesy of Bernhard J. Scheuvens, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen


Time and again, believers in the Darwinian story are amazed by discoveries that change their view of ancient man. Recently they discovered that ancient Papuans were more sophisticated than they had assumed. Then they found that Europeans ground flour much earlier than they had thought.

There is more to come. Recently, Vincent Mourre at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France and colleagues studied 127 triangular and leaf-shaped rock points found in a cave in South Africa and published their research results this week in Science.

The points were probably used in spears or knives.

According to ScienceNOW, early men knew how to ”carve with remarkable finesse. A new study suggests that cave dwellers were using a delicate stone-carving technique called pressure flaking 75,000 years ago, 55,000 years before scientists thought the technique was invented.”

Evolutionists are known for inflating dates so we should take them with a pinch of salt.

What the research shows, however, is that the Book of Genesis had it right. It tells us that early man was no simpleton but a creative being made in the image of God.

Source:

Minogue, Kristen 2010. Stone Age Toolmakers Surprisingly Sophisticated. ScienceNOW (28 October).