Reverend Glenn Armstrong, D.D., August 23, 2006

I. INTRODUCTION

"More than a billion years ago, squishy little critters in a primordial soup started the evolutionary process that eventually led to people and penguins, elephants, and earthworms and all the other thousands of species in the animal kingdom." "It is probable that what existed were little squishy things that didn’t have many of the characteristics of modern animal groups." (We all came from little squishy primitive animals.)

II. BACK TO SCHOOL AND BACK TO A LOT OF BALONEY!

I happen to think the second greatest profession is education. To me teaching only follows preaching. I also happen to think preachers should be careful what they preach and equally teachers should be equally careful about what they teach. Preaching must have a theological base and not subject to the wants and wishes of the worshippers and teaching must have a logical base for the learners. Both preachers and teachers train and influence lives – if not there is no need for either. The preacher looks back into eternity and asks "who" but also looks forward into eternity and asks "where". Who is the first uncaused –cause, the prime mover, the originator, the one powerful and wise enough to create and make order out of nothing. "Where" is the attempt to figure out where one spends eternity, since a major principle of science is that what exists may change forms, but nothing ceases to exist.

I have always had trouble with "zero". Very early in my education, I was told that zero was nothing, yet when we put numbers on the blackboard, we wrote 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. I silently wondered why the teacher was playing with my mind. I could already count and I always counted eleven numbers on the board. (Count them yourself!) I had to learn that zero is nothing. By itself, it has no value, ability, essence, and contributes nothing. It speaks of absence and non-existence.

I am older, wiser, somewhat educated, have studied and read for more than sixty-five years and have been paid for the last fifty- five years by intelligent people to teach what I know. I am not the brightest person on the planet by far, but then I did not happen to just "fall off the turnip truck" last week either. Yet, I still have trouble with zero. I am asked to believe that zero, read that nothing, left alone to struggle over long indefinite billions of years was able to go from non-existence to everything. The formula for that illogical premise is--- Zero, plus time, plus chance equals the whole of everything! Zero does not exist and is meaningless without some other qualifier! Chance does not exist either. It has no properties, is not an entity, and only exists as an attempt to explain a mathematical probability of, in this case, other non-existing items interacting. Well, what about time? If time is the measurement of space between events, then time does not exist either until the non-existing becomes existing and becomes mobile.

If zero eventually equals everything, I am headed for the bank to deposit nothing and wait for it to make me rich.

III. IF YOU LACK KNOWLEDGE, GO TO COLLEGE

Forty-five years ago, I took classes at the Flint College of University of Michigan. I really enjoyed the classes and have profited from them through all my ministry. This is not a put-down on education, but it does call attention to some bias against biblical Christianity. In the series of lecture on "Origins" the young professor said to me, "Armstrong, Don’t tell me you believe in the Adam and Eve stuff!" and eighty students laughed. I answered, "Don’t Tell me you believe in that Origin of the Species stuff and no one laughed. He asked me if I had read the "Origin of the Species" and I said, "no, and I doubt if anyone in this room has." The interchange continued when he asked why I rejected the "Origin of the Species" if I had never read it and I answered, "For the same reason you reject the Bible, having never read it." However, I said I had read the whole title and believed everyone should reject the book because of the premise it purposed, namely, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

My objections to the title should be everyone’s. 1) I object that some races of people are "favored" in their origin and other are less evolved. 2) I object to the thesis that "events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular, but by the establishment of general laws." 3) I object to horizontal evolution being the base for vertical evolution. That is, I object to saying that hybriding in the foundational precept for increased complexity needed for change of species. A better hog does not mean a new dog! And we do not say, "Goodbye to our cousin the whale." And you have to stay in college way too long to get your brain to accept that the dinosaurs evolved into humming birds. I am not making this up. Dinosaurs’ evolving to birds is the answer to their extinction according to the display in the science section of the Minnesota museum. Anyone may have very large relatives, but none of them evolved from a sixty-foot many-ton whale!

Knowledge and wisdom can travel different highways and end up at different places.

I do believe the Bible’s account of the creation of everything. I do believe it takes a self-existing intelligent God with infinite wisdom and power to create, design and give order to a vastly complex universe of matter, give intelligence to matter and cause it to both exist and function. It takes more than mud and time to make a mister. Slime does not self-exist; decide to bring about a brain; crawl out of the goo; develop a freckle that turns into a leg, arm, head, nerve system, muscles; and get up and walk around looking for a female that just happened to crawl out of the slime at the same time and who wants to reproduce new little goo babies. I know it sounds as if I am making this up, but I was taught this as the evolutionary explanation for all matter/mind/man.

IV. FAITH AND FACTS

I am well within my rights to write that people who are "faith" people are considered by others to be about a half a bubble off! (This is an old term to mean that the bubble in the level is not calibrated properly, so everything come ends up out of plumb.) The current view of "faith people" is to tolerate them unless they try to appear educated. Certainly, they must be dismissed as inferior to people of "facts". I am a person of faith, but I do not have enough faith to believe that everything came from nothing! That takes too much faith for me!

It is currently assumed that the people of "facts" are people of science and education. Faith we are told, belongs privately in the home and the church while facts belong in the public, schools and halls of science. This feeds well to those who believe that faith is without facts and facts require no faith. Non-sense! I have pastored many people of science, who are now believers in theological truth. Many of them have major educational backgrounds with doctorate degrees (some with more than one) from state universities and some are recognized as the head of their specialties in the whole world. They are openly believers and unquestionably people of faith. I studied under man who three earned doctorates and had a hard time finding an additional course of study.

This is a good time to expose the word "science" as a term from which all people of faith are expected to flee in panic. Science is correctly defined as "… a branch of knowledge dealing with a body of facts systematically arranged and showing the operation of laws." This body of truth is expected to be accumulated by observation, documentation, duplication and provide predictable applications. Science also depends on the ability to gather information to prove a hypothesis through empirically testing. Let no one assume that any person has the ability to observe creation, duplicate it, test it and formulate predictabilities. What is being done is to look at observable information and adapt it to fit a hypothesis that is all ready assumed to be true.

So far, the "facts" people have concluded that we live in a closed universe, without any outside force (God) and all that exists is matter, man and mind. This is comfortable to the "facts" people because it removes all accountability to a creator/ sustainer/redeemer God. Thus, heaven, hell and eternity are non-existent and all people are animals that are born, fed, bred, die and rot in a grave.

When "faith" people teach the existence of a God, who by right of being creator is also the moral governor of the universe, including man, we make the "fact" fellows uncomfortable and they become the very, very nervous and they look for like-minded lawyers and judges to restrict those who dare challenge their right to be the special "enlightened".

The non-God people want everyone to believe that nothing compacted into a very tight little speck blew up and became everything. They look forward to the energy of that explosion slowly dissipating until the gravity pulls the all of everything back into another tight little dot. Doomsday is ahead when the big bang becomes the big crunch!

"Fact" people often win their arguments by simply securing an artist with a good airbrush. Evolution can be depicted by graphics when it is impossible to be observed any other way. It usually starts out on the left side of the page with a chimp that slowly stands upright as it heads to the right side. When it gets there, it has become a fully developed man with an attaché case headed to work with computer hardware powered by software and eating lunch from Tupperware. GAA/Aug/2006