Job 38:4 “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”
‘Every day, all over the Earth, plants engage in chemical warfare against insects and animals that would eat them. When this drama is described by evolutionary scientists, they usually talk about plants as though the plants were skilled chemists who developed their abilities on their own.
For example, the leaves of the oak tree contain tannins. Tannins form complexes with proteins so that, when eaten, they have little nutritional value. An evolutionary account of how this arrangement came about describes how the trees supposedly developed this strategy for self-defense. Stories like this make one wonder how oak trees gained so much knowledge about animal digestion and chemistry. Some species of milkweed and dogbane produce powerful muscle relaxants that can be fatal to humans.
One might picture, in the far distant past, white-smocked milkweeds working in the chemistry lab. Other “doctor” milkweeds are feeding various concoctions to humans in cages to test their responses. When one tries to account for this without a Creator, the picture can become silly.
The Bible provides an answer that makes a great deal more sense. In Job 38 and 39 the Lord – the Creator – asks Job about dozens of aspects of the creation. In His questioning, He asks Job about the source of the knowledge and abilities found in living things. The answer, of course, is that the creating God, and no one else, designed, built and taught the creation. Other answers simply can’t satisfy.’https://creationmoments.com/sermons/plant-self-defense-3/?mc_cid=90ceddb138&mc_eid=00c1dcff3c
‘The Suez Inscription of the Medo-Persian King Darius the Great (Darius I Hystaspes, 521-486 B. C.) of the Achaemenid Empire is found in the Cairo Museum in Cairo, Egypt. The inscription is commented on by leading Egyptologist, Biblical and Old Testament scholar, and evangelical Christian Dr. James Hoffmeier. The canal was built through the Wadi Tumilat, connecting the easternmost or Bubastite branch of the Nile with Lake Timsah, which was connected to the Red Sea by natural waterways. Darius the Great is frequently mentioned in the Bible (Ezra 4:5, 24; 5:5–7; 6:1, 12–15; Haggai 1:1, 15; 2:10; Zechariah 1:1, 7; 7:1). He is the Persian ruler who, in the time of Ezra the priest, confirmed the decree of the Persian king Cyrus for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem: Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in the house of the rolls … in Babylon. And there was found at Achmetha, in the palace that is in the province of the Medes, a roll … thus written: In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place where they offered sacrifices … And also let the golden and silver vessels of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took forth out of the temple which is at Jerusalem, and brought unto Babylon, be restored, and brought again unto the temple which is at Jerusalem[.] . … [L]et the … Jews build this house of God in his place. Moreover I make a decree what ye shall do to the elders of these Jews for the building of this house of God: that of the king’s goods, even of the tribute beyond the river, forthwith expenses be given unto these men, that they be not hindered. And that which they have need of, both young bullocks, and rams, and lambs, for the burnt offerings of the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine, and oil, according to the appointment of the priests which are at Jerusalem, let it be given them day by day without fail: That they may offer sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven, and pray for the life of the king, and of his sons. Also I have made a decree, that whosoever shall alter this word, let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be hanged thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this. And the God that hath caused his name to dwell there destroy all kings and people, that shall put to their hand to alter and to destroy this house of God which is at Jerusalem. I Darius have made a decree; let it be done with speed. (Ezra 6:1-12) The Suez inscription of Darius reads: “I am a Persian; with Persia I seized Egypt. I commanded to dig this canal from the river named the Nile [Pirāva], which flows through Egypt, to this sea which comes from Persia. Then this canal was dug, according as I commanded. And I said, ‛Come ye from the Nile through this canal to Persia.’” (“Persians,” ed. James Orr et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia [Chicago: Howard-Severance, 1915], 2336.) The Greek historian Herodotus states that Pharaoh Necho / Neco started to build the 115 mile long canal to join the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez, while Darius I of Persia completed it. Herodotus writes (Histories 2:158-159): Psammetichus had a son Necos, who became king of Egypt. It was he who began the making of the canal into the Red Sea, which was finished by Darius the Persian. This is four days’ voyage in length, and it was dug wide enough for two triremes to move in it rowed abreast. It is fed by the Nile, and is carried from a little above Bubastis by the Arabian town of Patumus; it issues into the Red Sea. The beginning of the digging was in the part of the Egyptian plain which is nearest to Arabia; the mountains that extend to Memphis (in which mountains are the stone quarries) come close to this plain; the canal is led along the lower slope of these mountains in a long reach from west to east; passing then into a ravine it bears southward out of the hill country towards the Arabian Gulf. Now the shortest and most direct passage from the northern to the southern or Red Sea is from the Casian promontory, which is the boundary between Egypt and Syria, to the Arabian Gulf, and this is a distance of one thousand furlongs, neither more nor less; this is the most direct way, but the canal is by much longer, inasmuch as it is more crooked. In Necos’ reign a hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians perished in the digging of it. During the course of excavations, Necos ceased from the work, being stayed by a prophetic utterance that he was toiling beforehand for the barbarian. The Egyptians call all men of other languages barbarians. Necos then ceased from making the canal and engaged rather in warlike preparation[.] The king Darius mentioned in the Bible was a real historical person. The Darius inscription is one of thousands of archaeological evidences validating the Bible is God’s Word.’
This story is soooo whatever that it doesn’t make sense. Here’s a woman who is triple vaxxed against Covid but she catches Covid and is barely capable of continuing her life as she once knw it. HOWEVER, the answer to the problem is in the last sentence in this blog and that is “Vaccination is the best way to reduce the risks of Covid-19“. Yeah, I will hurry down and get my jab!
‘Australian journalist Tracey Spicer has been struck down with long Covid that has left her feeling a like “a shadow of her former self”.
The 55-year-old triple-jabbed broadcaster and author caught the virus in January on a holiday to the Gold Coast.
The illness left her bedridden for two weeks. But while she has recovered from some symptoms, such as a severe cough, she remains so sick she can barely work — more than three months after catching the virus.
She told Nine News she is suffering from debilitating fatigue and chest pains that have landed her in hospital, fearing she was having a heart attack.
“I’ve felt like a shadow of my former self. I’ve been swimming through mud every day,” she said. “Even cooking a meal can be absolutely crushing. I can hardly walk around the block.
“I’ve had the debilitating exhaustion, and I also had a very worrying four weeks where I was in and out of hospital with chest pain, I thought I was having a heart attack.”
Spicer is well-known for her work with sexual assault survivors — which had an enormous public impact and led to several investigations.
She said she wants to see Australia step up its response to long Covid.’
Yep, ‘Until last week, the British government offered the best source of raw data on the efficacy of the Covid vaccines. Each Thursday, the UK Health Security Agency reported the number of new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths by vaccine status.
Since last fall, and especially since the Omicron variant hit, the reports have presented an increasingly dismal picture of vaccine efficacy. Last week’s report showed that in March, nearly 90 percent of adults hospitalized for Covid were vaccinated. And OVER 90 percent of deaths were in the vaccinated:
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The importance of these reports is hard to overstate.
They were the single best source of raw data about how well the Covid vaccines were or were not working anywhere in the world. It was a long-running sequential series with clearly defined rules from a large country with high vaccine coverage.
Plus, because the British have national health insurance, the government could determine with near-certainty who had been vaccinated. As you can see, fewer than 1 percent of the people in the reports are called “unlinked” – meaning their vaccine status was undetermined.
AS OF THIS WEEK’S REPORT THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IS NO LONGER PROVIDING THESE CHARTS.
The British government is offering the nonsensical excuse that it can no longer provide the figures because it has ended free universal testing for Covid: Such changes in testing policies affect the ability to robustly monitor COVID-19 cases by vaccination status, therefore, from the week 14 report onwards this section of the report will no longer be published.
The British government is lying.
Even if the end of free testing somehow affected its ability to provide “robust” data about infections, it would make no difference to the hospitalization or death figures, which are far more important. Unless Covid patients are going to be hospitalized anonymously, the Health Security Agency will still be able to match their names (and the names on death certificates) against vaccination records.
In fact the British government would be derelict not to continue to collect the data, and it surely will. But the public will no longer see it.
Why?
One reason and one reason only. Ever since I mentioned the existence of these reports to Joe Rogan in October, they have become an embarrassment. They are impossible to spin, and the clearest possible signal of vaccine failure.
We’ve seen the unbelievable microscopy images of the experimental jabs from other investigators around the world, but we wanted to see it for ourselves! There are now 4 teams working on this in New Zealand and Dr Robin Wakeling has agreed to go public with his findings.
The following statement was recently made in an online political article. ‘New arrivals to the region will have a chance to embrace the world’s oldest continuing culture through a series of events being supported by the NSW Government.’https://dugaldsaunders.com.au/funding-to-bring-cultures-together-on-country/
Is that statement really true concerning the aboriginal culture? The majority of the world has swallowed the evolutionary tale which is diametrically opposed to the Biblical teaching. The following is from Creation Ministries International which I trust you will read with an open mind.
‘Today’s feedback from Chris B. of Australia, concerns media reports about when Aboriginal people settled Australia. It’s answered by CMI’s Dr Tas Walker.
Example of ideas (ref. 1) about how Aborigines settled Australia.
Hello,
In recent years the media has reported ever increasing ages that the Aboriginal Australians have inhabited the continent, and progressively, figures of 10, 20 and up to 40 and 50 thousand years have been given. The evidence of these dates mostly come from artefacts like cave painting or rock engraving. Recently, however, these sorts of dates have been claimed to arise from comparing DNA of Australian Aboriginals with that of the people indigenous to the Highlands of New Guinea. The theory is that at one time they had the same genome, but, genetic drift over time can be seen by comparing the DNA, thus “counting back” to when they were one people.
Is this technique of genome comparison a valid way to date how long Aboriginal people have been living in Australia, or does the technique contain certain evolutionary assumptions? Does CMI have any information refuting such DNA based dating that you can kindly refer me to?
The dating technique you mention is called a ‘molecular clock’. It involves very sophisticated laboratory techniques for comparing DNA sequences. However, like all ‘scientific’ clocks, a date cannot be calculated without making a number of unprovable assumptions about the past (see Fatal flaw). The reason the technique gives long ages is because the rate of genetic change is calibrated to provide results consistent with the standard evolutionary long-age timescale. However, when the rate of genetic change is ‘calibrated’ against the rate actually measured in organisms at the present time the timescales are much shorter—consistent with the biblical timescale.
The article Evolutionary molecular genetic clocks—a perpetual exercise in futility and failure explains the principles of the molecular clock and discusses the problem with the method. In summary, genetic clock methods assume evolution and deep-time by calibrating against the paleontological timescale. In addition, the methods have multiple problems: 1) different genes/sequences give widely different evolutionary rates, 2) different taxa exhibit different rates for homologous (similar) sequences, and 3) divergence dates commonly disagree with paleontology despite being calibrated by it. And finally, the molecular clock idea is directly tied to the neutral model theory of evolution, which assumes mutations occur in the so-called junk DNA. However, recent discoveries undermine the idea of pervasive junk DNA, thus negating its foundational premise.
The article Empirical genetic clocks give biblical timelines shows that when measured rates of genetic change are applied, ‘molecular clocks’ yield ages consistent with the biblical timescale. The article concludes, “A straightforward empirical approach constricted to analyses within a single taxa, typically yields dates of not more than about 5,000 to 10,000 years. Thus, when the hypothetical evolutionary constraints are removed, and the data is analyzed empirically, biblical timelines are achieved.”
One recent media article about the dating of Aboriginal occupation of Australia was reported in Science Daily,1 based on research published in Nature.2 This analysed hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia. The genetic relationships between people within Australia and outside Australia from this analysis are likely to be reasonable. All people on earth today are descended from the eight people who were on Noah’s Ark that came to rest in the Middle East, and so the emigration paths described in the paper would be compatible with the biblical account. However, the multi-thousand-year dates are not, for the reasons outlined above.
The article The dating game discusses various efforts to date Aboriginal remains, in particular the individuals dubbed Mungo Man and Mungo Woman, found in sand dunes in south-western New South Wales. This article was published in 2003 but is still relevant. It describes how published dates, based on a range of different methods, progressively rose higher and higher. In 1999, when researchers at Australian National University in Canberra published a date of 62,000 years, other evolutionary researchers objected. It created an international problem for theories of human evolution. Such an early occupation of Australia by Aborigines would require the whole out-of-Africa theory of human origins to be rewritten.
However, the new molecular clock researchers are not so ambitious, citing dates of 50,000 years. Perhaps some sort of a compromise is being sought by settling on a number that won’t run afoul of the out-of-Africa scenario but still have very old dates for Australian Aborigines.
These scenarios for Aboriginal occupation of Australia are based on evolutionary assumptions, and these contradict biblical history. Especially they ignore Noah’s global Flood. However, the Bible provides a solid interpretive framework for scientific investigations into human origins. The first Aboriginal settlers to Australia were descended from people as intelligent and inventive as all other people alive at that time. Like everyone else, they were descended from Noah, who built and managed the Ark, and from a people who developed an advanced civilization around the Tower of Babel. So, as the DNA research reveals, the Australian Aborigines were related to other people groups, including those in India and Papua New Guinea. This aspect of the DNA research fits nicely with the biblical account.
However, the idea that the Aboriginal people of Australia are a primitive culture that had not evolved as much as people from other cultures is wrong. It’s evolutionary racism. Rather, they lost some of their technological know-how when they reached Australia. This can happen in a generation if parents do not pass their culture onto their children, or if small populations become isolated. Perhaps it was this isolation and the pressure to cope with a worsening climate as the continent dried out after the post-Flood Ice Age. But, they, like all other peoples, are made ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:26), to have a relationship with God.
In summary, the dates produced by the ‘molecular clock’ are not valid because it begins with an incorrect calibration and has numerous fatal problems. However, if measured mutation rates are used as calibration then dates consistent with biblical timescales are obtained. But the method still has problems, which is why scientists do not rely on the dates it produces until they have checked other research to decide which dates to accept. On the other hand, the genetic relationships between people groups revealed by DNA comparisons are likely to be reasonably sound, and may help sort out migration routes of people since disembarking from Noah’s Ark in the Middle East about 4,500 years ago.
Ray Tobler, Adam Rohrlach, Julien Soubrier, Pere Bover, Bastien Llamas, Jonathan Tuke, Nigel Bean, Ali Abdullah-Highfold, Shane Agius, Amy O’Donoghue, Isabel O’Loughlin, Peter Sutton, Fran Zilio, Keryn Walshe, Alan N. Williams, Chris S. M. Turney, Matthew Williams, Stephen M. Richards, Robert J. Mitchell, Emma Kowal, John R. Stephen, Lesley Williams, Wolfgang Haak, Alan Cooper. Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia, Nature, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nature21416.’https://creation.com/dna-research-australian-aborigines-50000-years-ago
Before he took his nap ‘President Biden received his second COVID-19 booster dose at the White House on Wednesday, a day after the Food and Drug Administration authorized a fourth dose, or second booster shot, of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for adults age 50 and older and immunocompromised groups.
As had been the case with his previous doses, Biden, 79, received the shot on camera, part of the administration’s effort to promote vaccinations.
He declined to answer shouted questions from reporters about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s monthlong war in Ukraine.