In the Beginning:
Science and Genesis 1-11
Class Ten - Genesis 5, Methuselah and Genetic Entropy
We have just seen that even evolutionists state Neo-Darwinism has no theory of the
generative, so it is certainly not the fundamental concept underlying all of
biology. So what is being taught as fact
to our public school students is false.
But beyond that, there is another fundamental error in that standard, an
error that was made deliberately. What
do you think that is?
The error is the failure to define the term evolution! I personally know a member of the science
sub-committee that developed this standard.
He specifically requested the committee to make a distinction in the
standard between micro and macro evolution and they refused! Why do you think they refused? With a fuzzy definition of the word
“evolution” they can make the dogmatic statement in Standard 15. For example, the statement evolution is false
and a fairy tale for adults is a true statement. The statement that evolution is true and
consistent with the Bible is also a true statement. The law of non-contradiction would say that
both of these cannot be true, but we of course are talking about micro
evolution and macro evolution, one of which is true and one of which is false.
Standard 15 PP
then states in one of the underlying benchmarks – 15:1: PP
“Explain how evolution is supported by the
fossil record…” The clear implication
there is that the fossil record supports evolution. As you will soon see in this course, that is
patently false.
Relative
to macro-evolution, this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge
in The End of Christendom is appropriate: PP
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution,
especially to the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great
jokes in history books in the future.
Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an
hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.”
Before we go to our next topic, let’s have PP
another quiz - on nothing we’ve covered. Again, you can grade yourself. PP
The
tallest man alive today is over 8’ tall.
Who was the tallest man in the Bible? a) Adam, b) Noah, c) King Og or d) Goliath?] Relative to King Og PP
- Deuteronomy 3:11 (PP King Og’s
bed 9 cubits long x 4 cubits wide -13.5’ x 6’); PP Goliath - 1 Samuel
17:4 PP 
- (Height 6 cubits & 1 span -
9’9”). While we are all aware of the long ages of
men in the Bible before the Great Flood, we don’t give much thought to their
stature. They were big, folks! Tracks from the Great Flood era found in
PP x2
show size 25 human prints next to those of dinosaurs. Noah was probably taller than either Goliath
or King Og. Adam was of
course the first man to feel the effects of sin on his body. Adam therefore was probably taller than Noah
as he was not born with the effects of sin in his body. Some people postulate that Adam may have been
16 feet tall! Dinosaurs may not have
looked so huge to someone that size. And
we’ve already seen PP
evidence that dinosaurs lived common with man.
We
are now PP
at Genesis 5, the genealogy of the first generations of man. Genesis 5 lists the ten Biblical patriarchs
prior to the Great Flood. Rather than
read the whole chapter, I’ve listed four verses that make the point we want to
address scientifically: PP 1.
“This is the book of the generations of Adam.
In the day when God created man. He made him in the likeness of God. PP 5. So all
the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. PP 8. So all
the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died. PP 27. So all
the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he died.”
Obviously we see great longevity in each of these. Before we get to that, there is another
question we need to ask. Why did they
die at all? Recall
my comments regarding Genesis 1:8, which states PP:
“And God called the expanse heaven.” I related that to Genesis 1:31where God
stated everything He had made was very good.
I suggested to you that the earth at this time was in fact heaven on
earth. That God created man to live
forever before the Fall, and it’s reasonable to think
that prior to the corruption of sin that led to death the earth would have been
man’s heaven. So in that scenario, if
earth at that time was in fact to be heaven on earth to man, who was made to
live forever, why these short time spans relative to forever? Of course we can only conjecture here. Perhaps God turned on entropy in man after the
fall. Entropy is a scientific term
which, put simply, means that everything trends towards disorder. We certainly see that trend in a lot of the
bodies in this room! The opposite
possibility, that God simply didn’t provide something to ensure man lived
forever, is addressed in Genesis 3:22-23:
PP
“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold the man has become like one of
Us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also
from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.’ – therefore the Lord God sent him out from the
garden of Eden…” So God could have simply
withheld the “fruit” from the tree of life, immediately beginning the decline
in man’s longevity.
But as we read those few verses of Genesis 5, you of course
weren’t pondering why they lived such short lives. You were pondering how they could have lived
such long lives as viewed in the context of the current average life span of
man. I would venture to guess that very
few in this room have not in their minds questioned these ages even while
believing in the inerrancy of Scripture.
Tonight we are going to put those questions to rest scientifically. By the way, long pre-Flood ages are not
unique to the Bible. A “kings list”
excavated near
Before we look at the scientific evidence, let’s look PP
at the lives of the patriarchs and make some
interesting observations. I’ve drawn a
line PP at the Great Flood.
Notice that Methuselah died in the year of the Flood. Methuselah means in Hebrew, “he died and then
it came”, or “when he dies, judgment.”
We know from verse 27 that Methuselah lived longer than any other man PP
– 969 years. We also note that he died
in PP 1656, which is the year of the Great Flood. But note that Adam lived PP 930 years
and since Methuselah was born in the PP 687th year after
creation that he and Adam had a common period of 243 (930-687) years that they
lived in close proximity to each other.
Note also that Noah was born PP 1056 years after creation and of
his 950 years, 600 (1656-1056) were common with Methuselah and in fact Noah was
born only 126 years after Adam died, and also note that was alive when everyone
on this chart after the Flood, except the last two, was born.
Again, I can’t be dogmatic about this, but I think the first part
of Genesis, certainly the section on creation and the fall, was written down by
Adam under the divine inspiration of God, passed on through Methuselah to Noah,
who carried it onto the Ark. Only our evolutionized minds, which have been taught to think early
man lived in caves and was completely ignorant, would have us doubt that
possibility. But I believe my position
is buttressed by the first verse of Genesis 5:
PP
“This is the book of the generations of Adam.” This by the way is the first reference in the
Bible to a book. As we move to
Genesis 6 verse 5 tells us: PP
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the
earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his
heart was only evil continually.” That
led to God saying to Noah in verse 13: PP
“Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them,
and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.” Verse 3 of Genesis 5 indicates that Noah had
a 120 year warning regarding the Flood and verse 18 strongly implied that only
the only people that would definitely be on the ark was Noah and seven others
of his family. I don’t think it is
coincidental that none of the patriarchs died in the Flood. In fact, the death of one of them could have
triggered the Flood. So Noah had plenty
of time to gather written information to take across the divide of the Flood as
he knew that all life, and all records of that life and how it arose, that did
not enter the ark would be destroyed.
Relative to God’s directive for everything to be vegetarian before the Flood,
there is a potential conflict in Genesis 4 which states in verses 2 & 4: PP
“…And Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the
ground…And Abel, on hi part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of
their fat portions.” Does that somehow
indicate that man was eating meat before the Flood. Actually those verses simply show that man,
following God’s example, used animal skins (specifically sheepskins) to cloth
themselves and that Abel kept a flock of sheep to provide clothing for Adam and
his descendants and made offerings to the Lord from the best of that flock.
Another question revolves around my statement that none of the
patriarchs died in the Flood. Methuselah
died in the year of the Flood, and Adam and Seth, who were born before the
Flood, survived on the
But back to the lives of the patriarchs; notice that those long
ages begin to decline rapidly after the Flood.
We see that Shem only lived to 600, Shelah to
433, Peleg to 239, Abraham to 175 and Jacob to “only”
147. Here’s a PP
graph
reflecting that decline, and here PP
again is
a line delineating the pre-Flood ages from the post-Flood ages. But even attaining 147 years would be
impossible today. Even Psalm 90, which
was written by Moses, not David, tells us in verse 10: PP
“As for the
days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty
years…” So by the time of Moses life
expectancy approximated what we experience today. Of course there are exceptions to that. My mother died four months before her 100th
birthday in 2010, but that is by far an exception, and she would be been
delighted to have gone to be with the Lord at least a decade earlier.
But let’s get
to the issue at hand, which actually is the impact genetics has on
longevity. Genetics is defined as
PP “the branch of biology that deals with
the principles and mechanisms of heredity and with the genetic contribution to
similarities and differences among related organisms.” The material we are going to discuss is
addressed effectively, and generally at a layman’s
level, in the book PP
Genetic
Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome by Cornell geneticist Dr. John Sanford. Recall that I said the term entropy, simply
put, means that everything tends toward disorder. Keeping in mind that Neo-Darwinism teaches
that natural selection, acting on beneficial mutations, over eons of time, produces
new species, tell me what is the significance of Dr. Sanford coupling the term
“entropy” with the word “genetic”? It
appears that PP 
the title
of Dr. Sanford’s book states that genes tend towards disorder, which is
diametrically opposed to what evolution teaches! PP
That’s me in the middle in Vietnam in 1969 as a Marine 1st Lieutenant at the age of 24. I certainly don’t look like that today – genetic entropy at work! PP
genotype,
which is represented here by a DNA strand, and a phenotype. Think of a genotype as a sentence in an instruction
manual. Evolution states that a mutation
in a sentence in that instruction manual (the genome), which over time becomes
numerous sentence changes, can effectively rewrite the instruction manual. However, Dr. Sanford points out in his book,
that, while that’s a nice theory, in practice it is impossible. That’s because in reality all genotypes
reside in PP phenotypes, which simply means body structure. An
enormous chasm exists between genotypic change (a molecular mutation) and
phenotypic selection (a whole organism’s reproduction). So-called “Mother Nature” never sees the
individual DNA parts. She just sees the
whole organism, so the selection is everything within the organism or none of
it! PP
Natural
selection cannot select a “beneficial change” without also selecting the huge
number of negative mutations that also exist in the organism. Natural selection has to take the whole
phenotype, with all its genetic changes, or nothing at all! Yet somehow, despite that insurmountable
problem, over
billions of generations natural selection acting on those beneficial mutations
would generate a new species. It’s an
interesting theory, especially considering the problems we have already
mentioned about natural selection’s inability to select only beneficial
mutations. Also, please note that PP
mutations occur only once in about every ten million
duplications of DNA, and then 99% of the time result in the degradation of the
organism. For example, what is a common
name we use for mutation? Cancer!
The evidence that the evolutionists use to support their position,
such a viruses, actually simply provide through the
loss of information a temporary benefit to an organism. So here we have another “just-so” story from
the evolutionists that does not fit with the scientific evidence. Keep in mind that for any supposed
beneficial mutation to be effective, it has to be preserved in the organism and
then linked with the next beneficial mutation, with the presumption that the
next beneficial organism also impacts the same area! But mutations are random and not directional as would be
required in the evolution theory.
But
we just saw that however minute, there is a chance a beneficial mutation could
arise. Dr. Ralph Seelke,
a research microbiologist at the
Results So Far: If Evolution Requires Two or More Independent
Mutations NOTHING HAPPENS The biological details of
Dr. Seelke’s research goes well beyond a layman’s
knowledge. Should you want to delve into
that deeper simply Google Dr. Ralph Seelke and you can see the
information on his website. Suffice it
to say that his research shows that the engine for Neo-Darwinism, in concert
with the excerpt we read from Origination of Organismal
Form, cannot produce changes needed to generate a path to a new species.
PP
Hence, in reality what
we see in all organisms is genetic entropy (all things trend towards
disorder), not genetic enhancement as Darwinian macroevolution requires.
Dr.
J. C. Sanford confirms Dr. Seelke’s research, stating
in his book: PP
“We have reviewed
compelling evidence that even when ignoring deleterious mutations,
mutation/selection cannot create a single gene – not within the human
evolutionary timescale. PP
When deleterious mutations
are factored back in, we see that mutation/selection cannot create a single
gene – ever. This is overwhelming
evidence against the Primary Axiom. PP
In my opinion this
constitutes what is essentially a formal proof that the Primary Axiom is
false.” Dr. Sanford defines PP
the Primary Axiom as the belief that “man is merely the
product of random mutations plus natural selection.” His opinion has been corroborated by Dr. (x3)
Jerry Bergman, author of The Slaughter of the Dissidents, who performed
a literature search in 2004 on beneficial mutations. He found 453,732 hits on the word “mutation,”
but only 186 of those mentioned the word beneficial, and in all those cases the
discussion involved loss-of-function changes. PP
He was unable to find a
single example in the scientific literature of a mutation which unambiguously
created new information.
And
relative to the long ages set for in Genesis 5, Dr. Sanford states in Genetic
Entropy: PP
“Genetic damage
results in aging, and aging shortens lifespan…Logically we should conclude that
if all of this is true, then at some time in the past there must have been a
time when there was less genetic damage in the genome, and thus longer lives,
and less deleterious effects from inbreeding.
Is there any evidence of this.” PP
This chart from Dr.
Sanford’s book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, shows a
match between the biological decay curve (increasing mutations in each
successive generation) and the Biblical genealogies it tracks beginning 400
years after Noah (from Shem through Jacob and ending with the average middle
ages life span of 40) with a correlation of .90, and therefore PP
confirms scientifically the Biblical record!
PP
Dr. Sanford
states in Genetic Entropy: “We are
forced to conclude that the writer of Genesis either faithfully recorded an
exponential decay of human life spans, or the author fabricated the data using
sophisticated mathematical modeling.”
What you should take
away from this discussion is two things PP:
1) The
long ages set forth in the Bible are confirmed scientifically by genetics. PP
2) Genetic
entropy falsifies Darwinian evolution.
Furthermore,
genetic entropy means that each succeeding generation has more genetic
deleterious mutations than the preceding generation. So you have more mutations than your parents
and your offspring, if any, will have more than you. Carry that to its logical conclusion and over
time those mutations become fatal to a species.