If you watch the SecureTeam video of it on YouTube, and read the comments below it, you'll find it wasn't a UFO crash at all. Just someone throwing a grenade at the police, and the road blockade was part of their response. Fairly "normal" for Belfast apparently.

https://youtu.be/u7WJyZNJus0

Hi Tom,
you mentioned your experience of nearly dying on the gurney, and how it didn't match what religion taught you.
I'm gonna guess here that religion taught you that you would be going to some afterlife, either heaven if you'd been good, or hell if you'd been bad.
Sadly, a lot of religious people believe this even though the bible doesn't actually teach this!

In the bible, death is often referred to as "sleep", as this selection of verfses shows:
then let my enemy pursue and overtake me; let him trample my life to the ground and make me sleep in the dust. Psa 7:5

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death; Psa 13:3

You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning Psa 90:5

And while we're dead and in this "sleep", we don't actually do or experience anything:

No one remembers you when he is dead. Who praises you from the grave? Psa 6:4-5

Do you show your wonders to the dead? Do those who are dead rise up and praise you? Psa 88:10

It is not the dead who praise the LORD, those who go down to silence; Psa 115:17

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. Ecc 9:5-6

It would not make sense that those who die go straight to heaven or to hell. Jesus commanded his disciples to heal the sick and raise the dead...
As you go, preach this message: 'The kingdom of heaven is near.'Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Mat 10:7-8
... which might be great for one who went straight to hell, to be rescued from death, but one who went straight to heaven would be rather disappointed to be dragged back to this earthly existence again.

But there will come a time when the dead WILL awake from their "sleep". First, there will come a resurrection of the righteous, who will rise to meet Jesus Christ as He returns to Earth to collect His followers:

According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 1Th 4:15-17

Those who are not among the righteous will be resurrected much later, but only to have their case judged and for them to understand why they don't qualify for eternal life. These will then experience the "second death", which is a permanent death from which there is no coming back:

I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years. Rev 20:4-6

This second death does not consist of burning in hell and being in anguish for ever and ever. It is a fire from God that consumes the sinners fully. The fire cannot be quenched prematurely, but it will end by itself when it has done its work. The result of the fire's work is permanent, eternal. These people cease to exist.

Tom and Notbeold, you've both written interesting comments, to which I will reply. But I can't do it right now because it's late in the evening here and I've had too many late nights in a row already. I'll write replies in the next few days.

Evolution doesn't qualify as scientific, because it can't be repeated and tested in the lab. And as for it being more fact than theory... that's not right either, if evolutionists themselves are anything to go by, as can be seen from the following selection of quotes:

"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ...
The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp.
It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say.
We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."

Wolfgang Smith,
Mathematician and Physicist. Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University. Former math instructor at MIT. Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin. Tan Books & Publishers, pp. 1-2


"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.…
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study."

Professor Stephen Jay Gould,
The Panda's Thumb, 1980, pp.179-181.


"This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists."

G. G. Simpson,
Tempo and Mode of Evolution (N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1944), p. 106


"Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations."

'Species Selection: Its Range and Power,' 1988, p. 19


"The evidence given above makes it overwhelmingly likely that Lucy was no more than a variety of pygmy chimpanzee, and walked the same way (awkwardly upright on occasions, but mostly quadrupedal).

The 'evidence' for the alleged transformation from ape to man is extremely unconvincing."

Albert W. Mehlert,
Former Evolutionist & paleoanthropology researcher. "Lucy - Evolution's Solitary Claim for Ape/Man". CRS Quarterly, Vol 22, No. 3, p. 145


"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it.
That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people.
Question: 'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true?'
I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence.
I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing – it ought not to be taught in high school'."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist. British Museum of Natural History, London. Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, November 5


"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future.
Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."

Malcolm Muggeridge,
Well-known Journalist and philosopher. Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo


"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the GREATEST HOAX ever."

Dr. T. N. Tahmisian,
Physiologist. Atomic Energy Commission. As quoted in: Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes, 3D Enterprises Limited, title page


"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

Prof. Louis Bounoure,
President Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum, Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research. The Advocate, p. 17

I enjoy a good discussion too. But these days I'm wary of just how much time they can consume, as these posts can get extremely long.



I am firmly convinced of the truth of what I know and believe, and feel the burden of Jesus' commission to "go and make disciples of all nations", so I guess that shows through in how I write. I feel it's my duty to show people the way to the truth.


Even though science was established mostly by religious people, many scientists today unfortunately try to divorce science from religion. Maybe religion isn't the right word to use here. I don't exactly mean the set of rules by which to live and the institutions which promulgate them, but the general belief in a omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity - like the Creator God of the bible. If the universe wasn't created by a God of order (the bible says God is a God of order, not confusion) but instead arranged itself out of some primordial chaos, how can we have any faith in our observations, in our ability to reason, and in the soundness of our logic and conclusions? How can we have any faith that the universe is orderly, and consistent, operating by definite laws that act the same way everywhere in the universe? Science actually depends on the assumption of an orderly universe rather than a chaotic one.
Science and faith in God are not enemies. As you acknowledged, there are plenty of people of faith who work in scientific research, and who find no contradiction between true science and what the bible teaches.


Here are some good videos to watch on the problems with the Big Bang. I watched this series on TV a while ago, and at the end of it you're left wondering "how the heck can anyone still believe in the Big Bang theory?".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzyQbOQ0dv0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E66409i-yn4
(They're both over an hour long documentaries, so save it for when you have them time to watch.)


It's a pity that they present such things as "science" though, when it isn't. I don't think in this case that curiosity initiates discovery. These artists' renderings are heavily based on the scientists' own preconceived notions, and this shows in the areas where there is not data and where speculation is required. In fact, even in areas where there is data, sometimes that data is overruled because it does not agree with evolution. For instance, I was rather annoyed to discover a model of "Lucy" at my nation's natural history museum, but the feet had been made to look human, even though they were actually ape feet. They were trying to paint Lucy as the missing link between man and ape. Lucy has since been designated as fully ape, not a missig link.


I don't see the connection here. Why would a 6000 year old Earth stifle curiosity? It's like you're saying we need a fantasy idea about the world in order to explore it, and that the actual truth would be too boring to explore.
But what if the Earth really is 6000 years old? As more and more evidence comes to light in support of that view, would science eventually stagnate because a young Earth isn't exciting enough to study?
You may want to buy a book called "Busting Myths", which is available from https://creation.com and which contains 30 articles interviewing PH.D. scientists who accept the bible's account of origins. The curiosity and excitement of these scientists is certainly not stifled by their belief in a young Earth.
By the way, the Earth is around 6000 years old, but the rest of the universe can be much older. It all depends on the frame of reference. Several of the creationist cosmological models incorporate time dilation effects brought on by the concentration of matter (and hence gravity) at the beginning of the universe. It is known that gravity affects time, so while 6 days went by on Earth during creation week, distant parts of the universe may have experienced thousands of years in their frame of reference.


Hmm, not sure if I can agree with that. Some of what man does is rather destructive to the quality of life, whether his own and/or that of society around him.


Maybe my meaning didn't come through clearly. I agree that type 2 isn't really science. But there are many people who think of it as science. They would be both the evolutionists and Big Bang cosmologists who practice and preach this not-science, and the lay people to listen to the evolutionary propaganda which tells them it's science. Even the media are guilty of this, tending to portray a debate between creationists and evolutionists as a debate between science and religion, thereby equating evolution with science and belittling creationism as merely some religious musings that have no scientific value.


In science, theory can have an additional meaning that it doesn't have in regular use. In science, it can mean a body of knowledge that has been well investigated and for which laws and equations and such have been well established and proven by experiment. (particles-to-people evolution, which can't be repeated and proven by experiment, fails to meet this defition of a scientific theory, so the theory of evolution isn't actually a scientific theory.)


This is a limitation of science. It is always searching for truth, but it's hard to tell when it's arrived at the truth, because next month some new discovery may put today's truth in the rubbish bin. In the case of religion, or the Christian religion at least (and the Jewish faith), we have the sure word of God which we can rely on and which won't change. In the book of Job, for instance, it is written that he (God) "hangs the Earth on nothing", and science eventually caught up and confirmed that the Earth indeed is not suspended or supported on anything, but orbits freely through empty space.


Science is practical and useful that way, for sure. But the question of how old those things are is important, because what you believe about the age of the Earth affects your paradigm, which will ultimately affect your destiny.


The unfortunate thing is that scientists are often blind to other realities. They measure rates of sedimentary depositions as they are now and use those figures to extrapolate into the past to say that this or that geological feature took 20 million years to form. For a long time they were unwilling to take past catastrophes into account, which would dramatically affect age calculations. They also assumed other wrong things, such as that each pair of ice layers (dark, light) represented one year in the past (summer + winter), and that each pair of tree rings likewise represented one year. These days we know those ice layers merely represent changes in weather (warm, cold) and that trees can actually produce more than 1 set of rings per year.
The continental drift movement is likely an after-effect of the flood. The creationist models of the flood involve very rapid movement of the continents (meters per day) during the year-long flood, after which they rapidly slowed down.

Men held the pen, but God inspired them as to what to write. Many of them even say as much in their writings, that God told them what to say or write.

If the scriptures were really just the words of men, that wouldn't account for the many prophecies that they contain and which have subsequently come true.
Nor would it account for the cohesiveness of the bible as a whole, even though it was written by around 40 people from diverse cultures, regions, languages, social statuses, professions, and time periods.

Read in the gospels the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, for instance, and then go read Psalm 22 which king David wrote several hundred years earlier, and in which he is describing Jesus' crucifixion experience well before crucifixion was even conceived as an execution method. And the psalm finishes with the triumphant exclaimation "for he has done it!", foreseeing the importance of the event and the awesome victory it represents.

No, God is not an alien. That would not explain our existence. Evolutionists already have a HUGE problem trying to explain abiogenesis. If some alien seeded life here, then you're just moving that abiogenesis problem to some other planet.

I think you give the ancient less credit than they deserve. They had technology back then you know. Surely you've heard of the Baghdad batteries, and the Antiketera (spelling?) mechanism? And how did the ancients build the pyramids, and Macchu Picchu, and many of the other wonders of the ancient world that we can't figure out how they did it?
The Israelites spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and during that time they constructed an entire portable temple, complete with various metal items cast from bronze, silver, and gold. There were also items that involved intricate wood working, and weaving of fine embroidered cloth. Pretty impressive for a people moving around while living in the desert. Could YOU achieve that?

Jeepers Tom! You've posted an entire book!
I read through about half of it before I gave up. It's just too much to read.
Much of it is just lots of questions and speculations. I'm not really sure what your purpose and message in all that was supposed to be.

Anyway, from your post before that I see that you believe in "God", or at least in whatever concept you personally have of what God is, and that you dislike organised religion. You also have (what I personally believe is) an unrealistic faith and confidence in the not-science of evolution.

We will likely not ever agree about these things.

I put it to you though that "God" the creator is an intelligent being (not an impersonal force) and one who desires to relate to other intelligent beings, which is why He made us in His image (so we are not like the unfathomable totally different aliens you wrote about) and why He left us with His word to inform us of the nature and state of the world/universe we live in and how to connect with our Creator. IF (and that remains a big IF to me for now) this Creator also made sentient beings on other planets, they would almost certainly also be made in God's image, and therefore able to relate to Him the way we relate to God, and this would mean we would be able to relate to these other sentient beings in ways similar to the way we relate to each other and to God. I don't think they would be quite as different and unfathomable as you think they would be.

There are people around the world who report having had contact with alien beings. These beings sometimes spoke to them. (Some are, reportedly, in regular and even cordial contact with these aliens.) For some, these beings emanated a tremendous feeling of evil, and invoked a tremendous fear in the experiencer.
WHatever it was they experienced, it's an experienced shared by thousands of other experiencers, so it is definitely a real phenomenon.
But the research shows that these are not interstellar travellers but interdimensional travellers. These beings also react negatively to the name of Jesus Christ, which wouldn't be the case if they were merely from other worlds, but does suggest this is a spiritual phenomenon and that these beings are actually demonic in nature. Research also suggest they have a deceptive and nefarious purpose here.

I am inclined to believe the word of our Creator God rather than the musings of men who are fallible and have limited access to knowledge. Since the bible warned about a powerful deception that was to be brought against mankind in the end times, I'm inclined to be cautious about these alleged "alien" beings and what they're gonna tell us about themselves when they finally do anounce their presence publicly.
Because of the beliefs you hold, you are more likely to be deceived into believing these "alien" beings when they tell you who they are and where they came from, and this deception may turn you even further away from God.
I advise you to watch the "Alien Intrusion" movie and arm yourself with this knowledge. It may help you to sift truth from error when the time comes.

Science actually does glorify God. True science does. But you have to understand there are two types of science, although one of them isn't technically science.

Type 1 is operational science. This is the type of science that produces instant glue, and expanding foam, and LCD televisions, and rockets to the moon, etc. It is the type of science that discovers some new thing, which is then tested and repeated in the laboratory by lots of other scientists in the peer review process, and analysed and formulated until it is well understood and can be applied in practical applications. Here we have access to measurements, to observations, we can change conditions and test what happens to prove or disprove a correlation between various factors. This is proper science.

Type 2 is historical science. Some examples:

A rock is dug up and we want to know the age of it. So we use measuring instruments to determine the quantifies of radioactive parent and daughter isotopes in the sample. (So we're using a scientific method up to this point to obtain some data about the sample.) Then we use these figures in a calculation to determine the age of the rock sample, and in order to do that we have to throw in a bunch of assumptions that we cannot know to be true but we assume them to be true. The result of the calculation is then believed to give us the age of the rock sample. This, however, cannot be tested. (Except in some rare cases where it actually shows the result is severely wrong!)

Or a geologist looks at land forms, such as the Grand Canyon, and concocts a story about how it formed, saying that the Colorado river carved the canyon over millions of years. Contradicting factors are swept under the carpet. Catastrophies are denied, uniformitarianism is the only explanation allowed! (Although more recently, catastrophism has gained acceptance, especially after the eruption of Mt Saint Helens.) Mt Saint Helens proved that multiple sedimentary layers can form quickly from a single event, and that canyons can be carved quickly by the power of lots of water, and that trees can be ripped from the soil and carried elsewhere and buried upright and petrified in a short space of time - thus disproving the story concocted for Yellowstone's petrified forest. But most of the time uniformitarianism and long ages are invoked to explain various geological features, while a global flood is denied to have occurred on a planet covered 70% by water.

Or, a scientist might dig up a bunch of bones, assign them an age based on the rock layer they're found in (involves circular reasoning) and make up a story about those bones and what both the ancestors and the descendants of that once-living creature were. (saying they evolved from this to that.)
Or, a scientist might dig up a single tooth, and proudly announces that he's found the earliest homonid ancestor of man, gets an artist to draw a picture of (not only) what the tooth's owner looked like but also what his girlfriend looked like(!) and makes up a story about how that man lived his life in a primitive age. (And months or years later another scientist finally realises that the tooth found actually belonged to a pig!)
This is what historical science is all about. Finding bits and pieces here and there, and speculating and making up stories about them, without the ability to test the validity of the speculation, or to prove what the ancestors or descendants of that creature were. It is not true science.

Actually, cosmology falls into this category too, because the Big Bang is just a speculative exercise. It cannot be repeated, tested, or observed today. And that theory has so many flaws that they have to keep bolting on ad-hoc explanations, to the point that now they postulate a universe filled with 96% dark matter and dark energy (entirely theoretical constructs, never seen or measured by anyone) to explain the remaining 4% real matter and energy in the universe!

So, to get back to your original point that religious folks ignore science because it doesn't glorify God, I can tell you that is just not the case. I have watched the growth of the Creationist movement, and I read a lot of creationist materials, and I'm sure many others do too. Within the creation camp are many highly qualified scientists from all sorts of scientific disciplines. Many of them are "heavy weights" in their field, and indeed if you look at the birth and history of science you'll note that most of the founders of the various branches of science were bible-believing creationists. Their modern-day counterparts look at the evidence in the world through scientific eyes and see no conflict with Genesis. In fact, they see things that confirm Genesis, such as created "kinds" of creatures reproducing "after their kind", and signs that the world is young, and signs that a global flood really happened, etc.
These scientists share their discoveries with us, showing how God is glorified through the things that He made. The sheer brilliance and genius of His handiwork displayed in all manner of creatures and at all levels from the ecology down to gross anatomy, and on to micro biology and molecular biology and genetics. Science is discovering all these things and therefore it absolutely glorifies God.

Well you put that to me, so naturally I feel like you're saying this of me specifically. And of course I can only give you my personal experience of religion. Other people's milage may vary, but I'm sure that within the same congregations that I've attended their experiences have been pretty much the same as mine.


You say "religions" as a general term, then use a caricature of the Christian religion specifically to "prove" your assertion. Even then, you're not really proving your assertion, but showing us your interpretation of what religion is about. You're not proving that it was "designed" to control people. Who were the people who wrote the scriptures then with the intent to control people? When did they write all these scriptures? How were they going to benefit from this exercise? How did they manage to create and then bury all these archaeological artifacts for later generations to dig up and "confirm" the scriptures as true? How did they manage to perpetrate this hoax without being caught out?
You better have concrete answers to these questions if you're gonna claim that religions were designed to control people.


Funny! In my church we meet in small groups about an hour before the service starts to discuss the bible and the meanings of the passages we've read that week. We think about what the message(s) in those passages might be. We think about how other parts of scripture might shed light on the meaning of the passages we've read. We ask questions. We answer questions. We probe deeply into the scriptures to discover what they're telling us.
There's a lot of independent thought going on there. And there's no pastor or other church authority figure there to "control" the flow of the discussion or to "direct" us what to think or believe about the passages we've read.

Seems to me you've got a rather distorted view of the Christian religion, or else perhaps you've had the misfortune of having attended a more cult-like sect where they like to control their flock tightly.

Actually, I'm fully convinced of the reality of God and that He will grant eternal life to those who seek Him. But I wrote that previous comment more from an agnostic's perspective so that you could more easily relate to it.


Selfish pleasure seekers is kind of a broad term, and it doesn't mean that I'm saying you're all hedonists. It just refers to people who live life for themselves, do whatever they want to do and whatever pleases them, rather than doing what God would like them to do.

I don't know what religious bodies you're referring to (perhaps the catholic church?) but no religious body is controlling me in any way. I'm free to attend, and free to stop attending. I can spend my money as I see fit. I can vote however I want.

The only "pressure" I experience, if it is even right to call it pressure, is the gentle encouragement to follow Christ to the best of my ability and to improve and become ever more Christ-like.

I am not being controlled, if that's what you're trying to suggest.
I spend my money as I see fit. I donate to whatever cause(s) I see fit, and set the amount that I see fit to give. I try to live a decent life where I don't hurt people or take advantage of them.
If there is an afterlife for me, fine.
If there isn't an afterlife, ah well, I won't know about it because I'll be dead, and I won't have missed out on much in my lifetime.

For an atheist, however, if there is an afterlife, he will miss out on a lot (an eternal life of experiencing wonder and joy, given up for about 70 years of selfish pleasure-seeking.)
And if there is no afterlife, the atheist is no better off than the believer.

Some of these attempts to prove a biblical account are, however, not attempts to vindicate the bible, but attempts to prove that the event was entirely natural and not some supernatural miracle.

Your explanation about the flood, for instance, is watered down by the assertion that the evidence for a flood all over the Earth is actually evidences of multiple (local?) floods in various places over the Earth. This does away with the "global" aspect of the biblical flood.

The Red Sea parting explanation is another one that tries to make the event seem like it was an entirely natural event, whereas close scrutiny of the text shows that this is not possible. The event started after Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. This timing had to be a huge lucky coincidence if the event was really an earthquake. And you'd need double the luck because the return of the sea was also tied to Moses stretching out his hand over the sea.

But here is the death-knell for this earthquake/land-lift theory: In Exodus 14:22 it says "the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground with a wall of water on their right and on their left."
A bit of the seabed raised above sea level would not result in a wall of water on their right and on their left. The description makes it clear that the water was miraculously held back from filling in the dry space where the Israelites were walking.

I think it is also a fallacy to use a natural explanation for an event as a way to exclude God from the scene. God can use whatever means He wants, to achieve His objectives, and that can sometimes include an otherwise natural event. The timing of the event, and the precision with which it targets the intended recipients, still lets us know that God directed that event.

A friend of mine and his brother (who is now a creationist speaker) went on a trip to the region where Sodom and Gomorrah once stood to investigate the site. They found lots of ash heaps, some with partially-burnt bits of wood still in them, and they also found embedded within the ash balls of sulphur. They extracted some of these and have them analysed at the DSIR (scientific research centre) here in New Zealand. They found that the sulphur was exceptionally pure, much purer than what is normally found in nature. But again, the timing of the event (waiting until Lot and his family had left the city) and the accurate targeting of the cities, and the prior knowledge that this event was going to take place, are all indicators that this was a miraculous event too.


Maybe so, but the biblical report suggests that Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt extremely quickly. So quickly, in fact, that she didn't even get a chance to fall over after dying, but remained upright to form a pillar.


This doesn't prove or disprove anything. Besides, Eden was more than just a pristine environment. It had two special trees there too. And when Adam and Eve were banished from it, there were two angels garden the place to prevent any humans from returning there. It all got destroyed in the flood though, so Eden simply doesn't exist anymore.



The theory of evolution can't be measured and tested. One cannot go back to a time when there was no life on the planet, and take measurements and observations to see how that first self-replicating thing came to be. You can't "repeat" the Jurassic period either. That means the theory of evolution is not scientific, because that would require testing, repeatability, falsifiability, observation, measurement, etc. It is, as you say, perceptional. Those scientists choose to see things that way, even when observation directly contradict it. It is a form of delusion.


What you are doing here is dictating how God should be preserving his word in your opinion: His original scrolls must be supernaturally protected from decay, unlike everything else in the world.
Faith is important to God. But what place would be needed for faith if there was concrete evidence of God's supernatural power sustaining something? Perhaps God also wanted people to learn the value of His word through having to carefully protect it from decay, and to read and re-read His word when creating new copies to replace the old worn-out documents. In the bible God promises to preserve His word, but by that He didn't mean the physical medium on which His word was written, nor the language in which it was/is expressed. Objects decay and languages evolve, but God HAS preserved His word for us despite that. When copies of scripture of different ages are compared, they turn out to be remarkably similar, with only extremely minor differences that do not affect the meaning.


WHen you look at the prophecies in scripture and compare them with their fulfillment as can be determined from history, it becomes obvious that the scriptures really are God-inspired, and therefore taking them on faith is quite a reasonable thing to do.


The bible can be tested too, such as by the prophecies, or by the accuracy of its historical information (names of towns, kings, empires, etc) and this is the reality that reinforces faith.


There are a number of very old biological structures on earth, such as certain trees, or coral reefs. They all tend to date back to the time of the flood though, suggesting they were the first to establish themselves after the flood and have been growing uninterrupted since then. Here's an interesting article about the oldest trees around the world: https://creation.com/patriarchs-of-the-forest



You can't actually measure the time directly. All one can do is measure the ratio of parent to daughter elements, and from this make a calculation of the alleged time period since the rock was formed or since the organism died. But this calculation involves a number of unprovable assumptions, and can therefore give highly erroneous readings.
Carbon dating isn't any less accurate than the other methods (they're all inaccurate) but it has a restriction due to the sensitivity limits of the detecting equipment. A sample that is 90,000 years or older has so little carbon 14 left that it falls below the detection threshhold of the measuring equipment. So carbon dating is suitable up to about 90,000 years, and only for samples that contain carbon, such as biological specimens, coal, and diamonds.

You should look into polonium decay and the radio halos it produces in rock. Dr Robert Gentry studied these and he concluded that their presence in the rock showed the rock formed rather instantly, instead of the evolutionary scenario of the earth cooling from a ball of molten rock over millions of years.


The presence of Uranium 238 is no problem for the young earth model. It is part of the material that God created to make the Earth out of. Uranium 238 is the parent isotope, so its billons-of-years decay rate is irrelevant to its presence on a young Earth. But, here's the thing... one of the products of decay is helium. At these decay rates, it forms very slowly. But helium, being a small and inert molecule, will leak out of the rock crystals quite readily. That means, if the Earth is truly billions of years old, there should be very little helium left in rock crystals. But analyses of the rocks has shown that the helium content in the rock indicates about 6000 years of helium loss from the rocks, not billions of years worth.


Yeah, so? What's your point?



Read the book "The authenticity of the book of Genesis" by Bill Cooper, in particular the section on flood legends from around the world. This section makes it abundantly clear that memories of the flood were passed on to the descendants of the survivors of the flood, who carried it with them after the dispersal at Babel, and down through the ages. The similarities among all those legends from (now) widely separated cultures shows that the flood was a real event. The world's geology testifies to it also. We don't even need the actual ark of Noah to know the flood really happened.



Exactly! So evidence for evolution should be sought by creationists, right? Because an evolutionists would be so biased that he'll find evidence for evolution no matter what you put in front of him. Well, I've looked at what creationists say about the alleged evidence for evolution, and their independent assessment of the data is that it does not support the notion of evolution at all. There is variation within a kind, and natural selection, but there is no particles-to-people kind of evolution.


God wants us to have faith in Him. He doesn't want us enamored with relics.



Passing an animal's genome through the eye of a needle is not the same as passing the animal itself through the eye of a needle. I think Jesus' intention was to say that it can be very difficult for rich people to enter the kingdom of God because they'd rather hold on to their wealth. It's not impossible, and some rich people don't actually care too much about their wealth so are happy to let it go if that's God's will, but many wealthy people fear losing their wealth and would rather trust in it than in God.


The thing is, your style of discussion kind of comes across the same way, like you're the only one with a grasp of the truth and all those religous folk are wrong and misguided and haven't got a clue what they're on about. There are plenty of very clued up people with impeccable scientific qualifications who are also firmly convinced (by the scientific evidence) that the Big Bang and evolution are nonsense and that a recent creation by God as per the bible is scientifically tenable.

Yes, I suppose sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

A baseless assertion.

Dinosaurs and man did exist in the same time frame! And there is evidence for this:
(1) Read the book "After the flood", which is mainly about the geneaology of the European people traced back to one of the sons of Noah, but also includes many historical reports the researcher found where people encountered dragons (as they were known at the time). One such report even involved the Roman army who were laying siege to a city and were then themselves besieged by a dragon.

(2) Dragon/dinosaur rock paintings have been found in various places around the world.

(3) A dinosaur like a stegosaur or something is shown carved into an ancient temple in Laos or somewhere around there.

(4) The Icca stones depict numerous dinosaurs.

(5) People have reported seeing dinosaurs in the Congo. The locals were shown drawings of various living and extinct animals and pointed to a particular dinosaur as the one they see occasionally in their region. It is known to them as Mokele Mbembe.

(6) Pterodactyl-like creatures have been reported in Kenya.

(7) Fresh (unfossilised) dinosaur blood and blood vessels and other tissues have been found in partly-fossilised dinosaur bones. These features would degrade and fall apart well before 65 million years is up, so these dinosaurs cannot have become extinct 65 million years ago.

(8) There are two depictions of dinosaurs in the bible. One called the Behemoth, and the other the Leviathan. They're in the bible's book of Job, around chapter 41. These descriptions show that man and dinosaur co-existed.

There's probably more evidence but I'm not aware of it all.

As for the rest of your post, you were seriously venturing into cuckoo land with those fanciful fantasies. I'm glad my belief in God the Creator is rational, sensible, and backed by science.

LOL! You've never seen an alien, and yet you say life is common in the universe! So, how many alien civilisations or colonies have we discovered to uphold this notion that life is common in the universe? The answer is zero! SETI has come up with zilch after years of searching. You don't know whether life is common in the universe. That's a belief that some people have, yet you treat it as fact.


Other people, however, have had experiences with crafts and/or beings that they thought, or were led to believe, were from another planet.


I'm not sure that you do. In another comment somewhere I showed how statistical probability calculations show that life evolving anywhere from non-living chemicals has a probability so stupendously low that it is regarded as zero, and not even the Drake Equation can move that probability figure far enough away from zero to get anywhere near the tiniest plausibility figure, so it remains zero.


Besides technology, there are other barriers to travelling those vast distances. Travel time is one of them, requiring travel time well beyond the life time of the travellers. Cosmic radiation is another, slowly destroying the genome of the travellers, as well as slowly destroying the materials that the ship is made of. Given enough time, oxygen and water and other supplies will eventually leach out of storage tanks. Stored foods will eventually spoil. If a hydroponic food system is operated on board, its pumps and hoses and other fittings will eventually fail. And so on and so forth...



At least you acknowledge it as a belief, but it is not rooted in science. Scientists understand enough of the cosmos to know of the energy requirements for hyper-fast space travel, and the problems of avoiding collisions with even tiny dust particles at those speeds.


And yet you speak about these aliens being common around the universe, and definitely having superior technology. In one breath you say "why would they need lights on their craft, and why would they need to abduct humans when they can analyse them remotely with the technology on their craft" and in the next breath you say those same aliens with their amazing technology would have trouble detecting Earth's radio signals, or remotely analysing Earth for it's size, orbit, and mineral resources.



You are behind the times a bit. Analysis of light speed measurements over the years has shown that the speed of light has changed. Similarly, there is evidence that suggests radioactive decay has not always proceeded at the same pace and that certain factors influence the rate of decay.


And there is! You just won't hear it from your friendly neighbourhood evolutionist scientist. From creationist scientists I have learned that there are numerous "clocks" in nature which show the universe cannot be billions of years old, and that the Earth is much less than a million years old.


Actually, you come across as one who sneers at someone like me for having my beliefs in God and a young universe, and that you alone have a solid grasp on true science. But as I have already shown with some examples in this post, you are a bit behind in your knowledge of science. Also, you assert that aliens exist, despite the fact that you have never seen one. And you make other assertions about aliens without the slightest evidence to back up those assertions. So you are not talking from a science (knowledge) position, but from a faith (belief) position. My faith position, at least, is rooted in real substantiated history, and supported by scientific observation.



Many of these scientific "realities" are interpretations of the data. The humans making these interpretations do so within a framework of their beliefs and presuppositions, which affects how they will interpret the data. These humans are fallible and can be wrong. Science has had to scrap previously established "facts" when new evidence and new interpretations showed them to be wrong. So it's important to note the distinction between the reality that is, and the reality as we believe it is.


Indeed they do. Evolutionists, for instance, have been caught numerous times in hoaxes and falsifying of data to "prove" evolution. Yet you have unshakeable trust in these "scientists".


The results must still be interpreted, so it's not quite as objective as you think it is.
Evolutionists and creationists, for instance, have the same data and the same measurements, yet come up with completely different explanations for them. That is due to their different paradigms or starting suppositions. We are all biased in one way or another. The question is which bias is the best bias to be biased with.

who proved the Bible right?

archaeologists, geologists, geneticists, etc.

Who many times was it proven right? (time and time again)

What benefit will a number be to you? I haven't counted how many times it was proven right, but I've encountered countless examples of it. The exact number is unknown, but it's lots!

Where/what locations was it proved at?

All over the world, wherever the evidence is found. Some of that is archaeological evidence, found mainly around the Middle East. Some of it is geological evidence (for the flood), found in many places around the world. Some of it is biological or other scientific evidence, discovered in labs and zoos and research facilities around the world.

When did any of these times occur?

Since the Dark Ages, mankind's knowledge base has grown in leaps and bounds, and evidence that confirms the bible has been discovered throughout that time.

You will find www.creation.com a great starting place for your research. There are thousands of articles there on all sorts of topics related to the bible, as well as an on-line shop where you can purchase books, DVD's, and magazine subscriptions to further your knowledge.
My current read: "The greatest hoax on Earth? : Refuting Dawkins on evolution" by author and scientist Jonathan Sarfati. This is an expose and point by point rebuttal of Richard Dawkins' book "The greatest show on Earth".

You have indeed been watching the other channel, because there is plenty of literature that confirms what I've said about the bible. For instance, people have set out to prove the bible wrong, using whatever method they're skilled at, looked into the matter deeply, and ended up absolutely convinced by what they found that the bible is truly the word of God, and became believers and wrote books detailing their discoveries.
Others, in the course of their work, have made discoveries that confirmed some aspect of the bible.

It's easy to sit there typing away at your keyboard and demand lots of answers from me. And if I were to make the effort on your behalf to find some suitable books to read, you wouldn't read them anyway.

If you truly want to know these things, you'll go on a quest to discover these things for yourself. You'll set regular time aside to find relevant books and read them, and to keep doing this until you have built up a complete picture of the truth.

I have been on this journey for nearly 3 decades, and am fully convinced of what I've learned. More and more pieces of the puzzle have fallen, and are falling, into place. It all makes sense. And those things that don't yet make sense, well I won't let that bother me because the rest makes sense and I trust that those other things will eventually make sense too, like everything else has before.

But God exists. He created the universe, just a few thousand years ago. He created all life just a few thousand years ago. All living things show evidence of God's creative genius, right down to the inner workings of molecular machines within the individual cells. He came to live among His creation, in the form of Jesus Christ, to teach us the way and to redeem us from our cursed sin nature.

God cares about us! I challenged Him one day to prove that He cared about me, and a couple of months later He answered my prayer in the most mind-blowing way I had never expected. Years before, he even spoke to me personally, in the form of a mild rebuke of my brashness and impatience, but I still cherish the memory of it because the almighty Creator of the universe deigned to speak to me, just a pile of intricately arranged chemicals, and a brash young man at the time.

Stop doubting, stop denying, stop closing your eyes and ears to God! Search for Him diligently and you will find Him, if you search with all your heart. The world with all its good and bad points will make so much more sense to you then, and you will have the assurance of a better world to come where all the bad is eliminated once and for all.