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Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

TBC What's New Feed - Thu, 02/27/2025 - 10:00
Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny February 27, 2025Dave Hunt

 Since energy could not have existed forever, where did it come from in the beginning? It couldn’t have arisen spontaneously and in a vacuum. Nor could it be eternal and have been waiting billions or trillions of years to explode in a “big bang,” or it would have entropied before it “banged.” There is only one rational alternative: there must be an all-powerful Being who exists independently of, outside of, and is the Creator of this space-time-matter continuum in which we exist.

Lightning-Like Vision

TBC What's New Feed - Thu, 02/27/2025 - 03:43
Lightning-Like Vision February 27, 2025TBC Staff

Your eyes are quicker than anyone ever thought.

For you to see an image, a huge number of chemical and electrical reactions must take place in sequence. Science still does not fully understand all the reactions. Science does know that each set of chemical or electrical reactions must take place in a sequence that leads to the next set of reactions. Obviously, each of these reactions in the chain must take place extremely rapidly for us to see what is happening while it is still happening.

Researchers have been studying how quickly light causes the first chemical changes in the eye that finally lead to you seeing an image. This type of chemical change is called a photochemical reaction. Photochemical reactions are the basis of photographic prints. However, the photochemical reactions that result in a printed photograph take place much more slowly than the photochemical reactions in your eye. Now, for the first time, scientists have timed the first photochemical reaction in the eye. They have found that the eye’s photochemistry is among the fastest ever studied. They report that the first reaction takes place in 200 thousandths of one thousandth of a millionth of a second!

Clearly the many chemical and electrical operations involved in sight could not have developed by trial and error, step by step, over huge spans of time. Our Creator has given us the ability to see so that we could see His handiwork in the creation. Even the process by which we see clearly shows the excellence of His work!

Matthew:13:15For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.
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“…for this people’s heart is waxed gross, and [their] ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with [their] eyes, and hear with [their] ears, and should understand with [their] heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”

https://creationmoments.com/sermons/lightning-like-vision/

The God Who Speaks

TBC What's New Feed - Wed, 02/26/2025 - 03:38
The God Who Speaks February 26, 2025TBC Staff

The God Who Speaks

Solomon wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes to the question of is God does not exist, is there any meaning to life. Questions of origins (where did I come time?), meaning (why am I here?), morality (why should I live any way at all), and destiny (where am I going when I die) aren't new and plagued humanity down through history. In "The God Who Speaks," Thaddeus Williams points out that science can give us answers to how things work, but it isn't able to answer the questions of the meaning of life. But God and His word speak to these very issues, and those who spend time in His word are changed. Williams writes about his "Favorite Atheist," French existentialist Albert Camus. His writings demonstrate the sheer meaninglessness of existence if all there is, is birth, living a few meaningless, and going into nothingness. Nothing one has done will matter because, in the end, all will cease to exist.  It is a bleak life indeed. But then : 

Something astounding happened to Camus, something that has everything to do with a God who speaks.  

In the 1950s a New York Methodist pastor named Howard Mumma was guest preaching at a church in Paris. Mumma noticed a mysterious figure in a dark trench coat circled by admirers. It was none other than Albert Camus, mid-twentieth- century international atheist celebrity, and a self-described “disillusioned and exhausted man.” He confessed that he had never read the Bible himself, and Mumma agreed to be his tour guide through the text. What followed was a friendship that lasted five years, Mumma visiting Paris and Camus visiting New York City to explore the possibility that God has spoken.

Williams describes Camu coming to the place of wanting to be baptized. He died in an auto accident before he settled on being baptized though. Had he come to the faith? None of us know this side of the veil. But the word of God speaking is demonstrated in this account. Williams goes on to demonstrate the importance of spending time in the word of God: 

When researchers Arnold Cole and Pamela Caudill Ovwigho polled forty thousand people ranging from eight to eighty years old, they made some unexpected discoveries. People who read their Bibles once or twice a week experienced no benefit over those who never read their Bibles. At three times a week, some minor gains were detected. But with at least four times of reading Scripture per week, everything seemed to spike.  

- Sharing their faith skyrocketed 200 percent.  
- Discipling others jumped a whopping 230 percent.  
- Feelings of loneliness dropped 30 percent.  
-  Anger issues dropped 32 percent.  
- Relationship bitterness dropped 40 percent.  
-  Alcoholism plummeted by 57 percent.  
- Feelings of spiritual stagnancy fell 60 percent.  
- Viewing pornography decreased 61 percent. 

Solomon concludes his considerations with, "Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth" (Ecclesiastes:12:1Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
See All...) and gives a very poetic description of aging and breathing our last. It is the word of God through with the voice of God speaks to help us remember our creator.

https://mailchi.mp/d34f5dc31384/santeria-animal-sacrifice-and-the-constitution-part-1?e=169825fd77

Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

TBC What's New Feed - Tue, 02/25/2025 - 10:00
Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny February 25, 2025Dave Hunt

Consequently, what about the first law, the law of the conservation of energy, which says that energy cannot be created and must therefore have been here forever? That law precludes a creator, ruling out God by very definition. This is arbitrary, unscientific—and unreasonable, but most of the world, led by the new atheistic science, is far down that irrational path. Although it is true that man can neither create nor destroy energy, common sense says that it could not have existed forever or, according to the second law, it all would have entropied long ago. Therefore, energy and all matter must have had a beginning.

Him With Whom We Have to Do

TBC What's New Feed - Tue, 02/25/2025 - 03:34
Him With Whom We Have to Do February 25, 2025TBC Staff

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...

This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont, to be called Lord God παντοκρατωρ or Universal Ruler.”

― Isaac Newton  (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).

The Green Paradigm is Shifting Fast

TBC What's New Feed - Mon, 02/24/2025 - 03:47
The Green Paradigm is Shifting Fast February 24, 2025TBC Staff

On November 5, 2025 voters sent the message that they’re sick of high gas prices, government diktats about what kind of cars they have to drive, billions in subsidies to “green renewable” energy industries, and EVs, and hectoring virtue-signaling from snooty elites about “settled science” and climate change “deniers.” The winds of change have set the “green” paradigm tottering.

What happened? Recently the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote,  “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.” But this statement begs the question that the more accurate name for “climate change,” ––Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW)–– reflects true science, which has “gone wildly amiss” because of “groupthink and “self-flattery” and other human frailties.

In fact, the real problem is the claim that, as the honest name above says, CO2 emissions from humans will eventually heat the atmosphere to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. But this is not a scientific fact established by the empirically based scientific method, but a dicey hypothesis. We simply do not have a thorough enough understanding of the complexity of global climate over time and space. For example, we don’t know precisely how water vapor in the atmosphere, the biggest greenhouse gas, interacts with CO2, or how it contributes to cyclic cooling and warming.

These gaps in our models and computer simulations have been exposed by many physicists, to whom we should listen rather than “climate scientists.” For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, wrote  in 2021, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”

The weakness of the “science,” then, makes not just “groupthink” and “self-flattery” possible, but also politicization, the fear-mongering of apocalyptic scenarios, and old-fashioned greed fed by government subsidies, tax breaks, and grants. Worse are the mandates to eliminate carbon-based energy and replace it with intermittent energy from windmills and solar panels, even though the infrastructure needed to store and deliver electricity to cover down times, is many decades from becoming a reality. This is a huge problem for the warmists, since those “clean, renewable” but intermittent energy sources require back-up reserves of electricity generated by natural gas and coal.

So how did ACGW gain such traction given its lack of any scientific bona fides? As with any issue that relies on claims of science, the lack of familiarity with how science works has increased among our students over the postwar decades, who leave K-12 schooling with globally pathetic levels of proficiency in science and mathematics.

Take the popular claim that ACGW is “settled science.” Such a statement violates the protocols of the scientific method, which physicist Richard Feynman defines as “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.  For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”

Or as the theorist of the scientific method Karl Popper put it more bluntly, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” Yet those doing just that regarding the claims of ACGW are met with epithets like “denier,” a sly slur borrowed from “holocaust denier,” and professional ostracizing and “cancellation.” There’s nothing “scientific” about such responses to challenges.

But it’s not just bad science or scientism that explains the “green” energy cult, itself an offshoot of romantic environmentalism. Ancient myths that have been part of Western culture for millennia also have influenced the way we think about the natural world and our place in it. One, the myth of the Golden Age, has been especially pervasive. This explanation of the human condition posits a simpler time in the past during which humans lived in harmony with nature, which like a benevolent mother provided us all we need to survive and flourish. People lived communally, without law, class distinctions, rulers, technology, wealth, or private property, which are all the seeds of war, slavery, conquest, greed, and suffering.

Today these mythic motifs and ideals saturate modern environmentalism, including hypotheses like ACGW, and policies like the protection of animal species threatened with extinction, even at the expense of human well-being. Popular culture has been filled with these ideas, from Disney cartoons to movies that feature American Indians as Noble Savages and peaceful environmentalists, contrary to their actual history. Other exotic ethnicities likewise are labeled by this same Western cliché.

Moreover, as historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin writes, these mythic residues like the Noble Savage have political uses: “The notion that somewhere whether in a real or imagined sociey, man dwells in his natural state, is at the heart of primitivist theories; it is found in various guises in every anarchist and popramme of the last hundred years, and has deeply affected Marxism and the vast variety of youth movements with radical or revolutionary goals.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-paradigm-is-shifting-fast/

Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

TBC What's New Feed - Sun, 02/23/2025 - 10:00
Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny February 23, 2025Dave Hunt

It is self-evident that at one time the stars, planets, galaxies, and the energy from which they are made did not exist. All must have come into existence in the distant but finite past. Of that we can be certain. Otherwise, all stars would have burned out by now and the entire universe would be approaching absolute zero in temperature. We are driven by the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, to conclude that there was a time when no material thing existed, not even the energy from which all is made.

Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

TBC What's New Feed - Fri, 02/21/2025 - 10:00
Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny February 21, 2025Dave Hunt

It is a fact that the sun could not have been in the sky forever. It can only burn for a finite length of time. No matter how huge or of what kind, a fire will eventually die. It is true of every star and everything else that makes up the universe that all physical things deteriorate with age and ultimately become useless. Stars die, but they are not yet all dead, so they could not have existed forever.

Lessons from the Rich Fool

TBC What's New Feed - Thu, 02/20/2025 - 03:15
Lessons from the Rich Fool February 20, 2025TBC Staff

Lessons from the Rich Fool

“But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (Luke:12:20But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
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This sobering verse gives in a nutshell God’s evaluation of people whose dominating concern is the accumulation of material possessions. Such a person is, by the Lord’s own testimony, a fool.

But before the man in this parable became a covetous fool, he first became a self-centered clod, interested only in his own desires. In the verses comprising his monologue (Luke:12:17-19 [17] And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? [18] And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. [19] And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
See All...), he used the personal pronouns “I” and “my” no less than 11 times and then even addressed himself using the pronoun “thou” or “thine” twice more.

Satan was the first to be covetous and proud: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:...I will be like the most High” (Isaiah:14:13-14 [13] For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: [14] I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
See All...). Lucifer’s primeval, self-seeking covetousness brought rebellion and sin into the angelic host and then into the human family. Ever since his fall, he has used this deadly sin of self-centeredness to keep men away from God and to lead them into all kinds of other overpowering sins.

In the case of the rich man, his pampering of self had led him into a life of such greed and covetousness that he was still concerned only with his own personal comfort (“eating and drinking”) right up to the day of his death. He “thought within himself” (Luke:12:17And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
See All...), giving no thought whatever to God’s will or the fact that all his possessions really belonged to God. Multitudes over the ages have been overtaken by this same sin of self-centered covetousness, perhaps never more pervasively than in modern America, even among American Christians. To anyone of such covetous spirit, the day may soon come when the Lord will say, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”

https://www.icr.org/article/the-rich-fool/

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