It was a good day

I went to a little place called Lake Isabella , Ca for an archery shoot this past weekend. The weather was perfect, high 70's and sunshine. The shoot went well I finished fourth, which is pretty good in my class. Lots of friends there to hang out with. I have to say the best thing about the weekend is that God had plans other than me just shooting. Met a man a fellow believer in Christ who was having issues about Genesis. he had been buying into the whole evolution is a fact view and was beginning to have doubts about God's word. He still believed Christ is Lord and savior but those doubts were there. Letting them fester and grow could have been harmful to his walk. God lead me to him, where I was able to share things I have learned about the truth of God's Word when it comes to creation. He listened closely and i could see and feel the peace it was giving him. What a great moment, that was for me to see God putting me to work for His glory.
But He was not through with me yet for that weekend. that night at the campfire, I began to talk to one of my fellow shooters form the club I ma affiliated with. Found him feeling lost and confused. He grew up in a family and a neighborhood that was very close, both socially and in their walk with God. After moving away and now being in his latter years he was missing that fellowship. Feeling lost and missing that relationship with God and fellowship with other believers. I shared with him God's Grace and God's plan that he should find a new local church and renew that fellowship. A fellowship God calls us to with our brothers and sisters in Christ. I listened as he shared his thoughts with me and silently prayed for him.
I am always amazed how God can take any situation you are in. Any place you might be and turn it into a way to glorify Him. I thank and praise Him for every opportunity He places before me to do just that. Praise Him for His Grace and Love, for His patients, for His guidance in my life.

Flying Dino's

Meet Darwinopterus modularis, the newest and greatest. Said to be one of the oldest flying reptiles yet discovered. Found in the out reaches of China it is said to be a predecessor to the later flying reptiles such Pteranodon. It is said to be unique in that it has the characteristics of many different flying reptiles and is been dubbed "modular evolution" A transformer of the ages so to speak. It is also said to have flown around eating other smaller flying reptiles and dinosaurs. Of we know this because the bones left us a note telling us all the characteristics of the creature. It must have eaten meat after all it has sharp teeth.
From a perspective starting with God's Word, of course it had the characteristics of the other flying reptiles they are all of the same kind. Each different species arose form that kind to adapt to the enviorment it lived in. As for the idea on how it lived and what it ate those are all guess based on man's idea to make it into what we want it to be. Just because something has sharp teeth does not mean it eats meat. Unless we suddenly discover the stomach contents we will never know what it ate. Unless it left a note about its life we will never know its habits. Just like many other discoveries secular science, speculates based on a bias that we evolved and there is no God. When you start with God we see a wonderfully made unique creature.

Plant eating spiders

One of the most common arguments against Genesis is that there are animals that have, do and always will eat others, They cannot survive without eating others. In Genesis it clearly states that Adam and Eve along with all the animals were vegetarians. We have seen this behavior in almost every kind of living creature today. Bears can live off only fruits and berries, lions can do the same. No science has discovered a spider in South American that gets most of it's nutrition from eating plants. Evolutionist hail this as a unique and unusual thing. I see that this just strengthens my belief that in the beginning there was no death, no animals eating each other. This spider is just doing what God made and intended for it to do. There is no surprise no uniqueness seen by those who believe in God's Word, that He is the wonderful Creator of this world we live in. That His Word is the truth as written, from beginning to end.
Here is the link to the article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33281411/ns/technology_and_science-science/from/ET

6 Days?

I have been studying and getting ready for a presentation to the youth of the church, on the 6 days of creation. My focus has been ; Are the days in Genesis 1 6 normal 24 hour days. The quick answer to that is yes. If you take the Bible as God's literal word then they are 6 normal days. The problem arises when we take man's ideas and try and fit them into the Bible. The problem started in the 1800's when the idea that the earth was millions of years old first entered into popularity with science. Many of the church fathers decided that science over road the authority of God's Word and, told us that Genesis was just a story. Or perhaps evolution is true as long as God did it. Let us take a look at Genesis and see if it is only 6 normal days.
The Hebrew word for day is "Yom" , as with the English word day it can have different meanings based on the context it is used. Lets look out side of Genesis in the Old Testament and see how it is used to mean a 24 hour day. It is used 410 times the word day is used with a number and means an normal day. 38 times morning and evening without the word day means a normal day. 23 times evening and morning with the word day means an ordinary day. 52 times night with day meaning and ordinary day. Now lets look how it is used in Genesis 1 For the sake of time I am going to highlight the important parts vs. 5 night, evening , morning, first day, vs 8 evening , morning second day. vs 13 evening, morning third day, vs 19 evening, morning fourth day. I do not need to go on they all read the same. Taken in context it is a normal 24 hour day.
In this blog at this time I ma not going to go over all the flaws in the different dating methods used to determine the earth is billions of years old. What I want you to see is that when we take God's Word as written in means a 24 hour day. You have to ask do i take the infallible Word of God or the fallible word of man. Where is my starting point? Do I truly believe in the authority of God's Word? If there was millions of years before Adam, that means there was millions of years of death, suffering, disease, before sin. The Bible clearly states that death was a result of sin. Romans 5:12 "Therefore just as through on man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and therefore death spread to all men, because all sinned" . If you take God's Word as written there was no death before sin, so the idea of millions of years makes no sense, unless you try and re-write God's Word to fit man's ideas.
This is a battle over the authority of God. Not a battle of science and evidence. We all have the same science, the same evidence. Where d o you start with the authority of God's Word or with man when you interpret the evidence? I start with God's Word, I have been on the other side and it makes no sense. I have seen the truth in His Word and saw the fallibility of my own thinking. You cannot have it both ways, Jesus said You are either for Him or Against Him, there is no neutral position.

Meet Ardi

This is a recent article about our newest "ancestor" Ardipithecus ramidus. It seems the media thinks just like with "Ida" this is the lastest and greats. They do however fail to tell the whole story. I hope this helps explain what the find really means.
Hiram


Evolutionists aren’t yet sure if they should call it a human ancestor, but one thing they do know is that “Ardi” does away with the idea of a “missing link.”
Although first discovered in the early 1990s, the bones of Ardipithecus ramidus are only now being nominated for evolutionists’ fossil hall of fame—via a slew of papers in a special issue of the journal Science. In it, Ardi’s researchers describe the bones and make the case that Ardi is even more important in the history of human evolution than Lucy.
Despite claims of its evolutionary significance, one of the scientists who studied Ardi noted, “It’s not a chimp. It’s not a human.” That is, instead of looking like the hypothesized “missing link” (with both chimpanzee and human features), Ardi’s anatomy—as reconstructed by the scientists—shows it to have been distinct from other apes as well as from humans. The researchers have consequently shunned the notion of a missing link: “It shows that the last common ancestor [between humans and] chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between,” explained Penn State University paleontologist Alan Walker (who was not part of the study).
The first question creationists have to answer is just what Ardi is. We can quickly eliminate important things that it isn’t: it’s not a human fossil, nor is it a complete fossil. In fact, even referring to “it” is deceptive, because Ardi is a partial skeleton put together based on a smattering of bones linked with at least 36 A. ramidus individuals. Dated at 4.4 million years old, the first bones were found in the early 1990s in Ethiopia. The delay in publishing an analysis was in part due to the poor state of the remains. “It took us many, many years to clean the bones in the National Museum of Ethiopia and then set about to restore this skeleton to its original dimensions and form; and then study it and compare it with all the other fossils that are known from Africa and elsewhere, as well as with the modern age,” said the University of California–Berkeley’s Tim White.
But the Evolution News & Views blog offered a more critical look at how the poor state of the fossils casts doubt on the scientists’ headline-grabbing claims. One telling quote comes from National Geographic News (in the same article that quoted Walker, linked above):
The first, fragmentary specimens of Ardipithecus were found at Aramis in 1992 and published in 1994. The skeleton announced today was discovered that same year and excavated with the bones of the other individuals over the next three field seasons. But it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish the skeleton, because the fossils were in such bad shape.
After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface.
They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. To save the precious fragments, White and colleagues removed the fossils along with their surrounding rock. Then, in a lab in [Ethiopia], the researchers carefully tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding “millimeter by submillimeter,” as the team puts it in Science. This process alone took several years.
Pieces of the crushed skull were then CT-scanned and digitally fit back together by Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.
Thus, as a starting point, creationists should remember that—as with many fossils—the state of preservation is far less perfect than what media images and “reconstructions” portray. (The “complete,” 4 feet [1.5 m] tall Ardi fossil, as reassembled, is shown on the cover of the special Science issue.)
We also know, as Walker explained (above), that Ardi actually shows many differences from both other apes and humans. Kent State University’s Owen Lovejoy described some of the features: “She has opposable great toes and she has a pelvis that allows her to negotiate tree branches rather well. So half of her life is spent in the trees; she would have nested in trees and occasionally fed in trees, but when she was on the ground she walked upright pretty close to how you and I walk.” Obviously, we would point out that the scientists haven’t actually observed Ardi walking; their assertion is based on their reconstruction of the bones. Furthermore, Ardi’s feet not only had opposable big toes, but also lacked arches, which separates Ardi from humans and means “she could not walk or run for long distances,” BBC News reports. And National Geographic News notes, “Ardi would have walked on her palms as she moved about in the trees—more like some primitive fossil apes than like chimps and gorillas.”
In fact, despite the headlines and hype, the evolutionary researchers aren’t even confident enough to say that Ardi is a human ancestor as opposed to simply an extinct ape. BBC News reports:
Even if it is not on the direct line to us, it offers new insights into how we evolved from the common ancestor we share with chimps, the team says.
Asked whether A. ramidus was our direct ancestor or not, the team said more fossils from different places and time periods were needed to answer the question.
“We will need many more fossil recoveries from the period of 3-5 million years ago to confidently answer that question in the future,” the scientists said in a briefing document that accompanied their journal papers.
“But if Ardipithecus ramidus was not actually the species directly ancestral to us, she must have been closely related to it, and would have been similar in appearance and adaptation.
Not only does that uncertainty exist; several scientists have admitted skepticism over the Ardi reports. Harvard University paleoanthropologist David Pilbeam told ScienceNOW, “I find it hard to believe that the numerous similarities of chimps and gorillas evolved convergently.” (We, too, have criticized the idea of convergent evolution in the past—albeit from the opposite angle.)
Also, anatomist William Jungers of Stony Brook University criticizes the conclusion that Ardi could walk upright: “This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedality is limited at best. Divergent big toes are associated with grasping, and this has one of the most divergent big toes you can imagine. Why would an animal fully adapted to support its weight on its forelimbs in the trees elect to walk bipedally on the ground?” he told National Geographic News.
Finally, some scientists have asked how Ardi fits into the evolutionary scheme with Australopithecines like Lucy, another supposed human ancestor said to have lived more recently than Ardi. Was there enough time, in the evolutionary timetable, for primitive Ardi to have evolved into less-primitive Lucy? The BBC quotes Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, who said, “With Australopithecus starting from four million years ago, one would have thought that things would have moved further down the line by 4.4 million years ago. OK, you can have very rapid change, perhaps; or Ardipithecus might be a residual form, a relic of a somewhat older stage of evolution that had carried on. Perhaps we will find something more like Australopithecus at 4.4 million years old somewhere else in Africa.”
We must admit that from our perspective, we’re growing desensitized to the fervor that increasingly surrounds each new fossil discovery claimed to support evolution. Surrounding Ardi’s unveiling is a spectacular media frenzy, but in many ways it’s little different than the hype over Ida less than five months ago (see Ida (Darwinius masillae): the Missing Link at Last?). That hype was quickly revealed to be unmerited at best and dishonest at worst (see Ida (Darwinius masillae): the Real Story of this “Scientific Breakthrough”). In the same way, the concerted release of so many papers on Ardi and the corresponding hubbub seems to perhaps be more about attention-seeking than about science. Could it be that the ongoing pressure for scientists to find something of evolutionary “significance” has led to a systematic incentive to make a huge deal (to use the vernacular) out of otherwise trivial fossils? (See The Dating Game for more along these lines.)
Perhaps we’re being a bit too rough, though. Evolutionists believe our own origins lie buried in such fossils as Ardi, so it’s no wonder they have a desire to interpret such finds in the light of human evolution. But in the case of Ardi (and Ida, Lucy, etc.), good science abstains from making such untestable, presupposition-driven claims.
Given the number and scope of the papers presented this week on Ardi, it will take some time before creationists are confident in our conclusions on Ardi and her kin. Based on our first look, however, the facts seem solidly behind the idea that Ardi was a quadrupedal ape with relatively little in common with humans (i.e., no more than most apes); the key basis for the alleged Ardi–human link (which even the authors are hesitant to confirm) is the idea that it walked upright—an idea that even evolutionists have criticized. And we can’t forget that all of these conclusions are inferred from digital reconstructions and fallible reconstructions of bones that were in very bad shape.
Without having a live “Ardi” to observe, scientists will only ever be able to come to probabilistic conclusions about its characteristics. As far as we’re concerned, the evolutionary “threat” to creationists from Ardi is no more than that posed by Ida: viz., none.