An Address to the Probus Club
Good
morning and thank you for inviting me to speak here today.
First a little about myself.
Born in
Two years at Polytech –
Farming and orcharding in
I work
mainly with graphic design and writing and illustrating of books.
I am
self-employed.
I
understand that the reason I’m here is to entertain and inform so I will try to
do both.
Some of
you probably read my letters to the newspaper. This is a little hobby of mine
which I hope you enjoy as much as I do.
Truth.
Most of
us go through our lives holding a large number of beliefs, which we consider to
be true. We believe things about the world we live in, the people we meet, the cars we drive. We have faith in these things, and will
usually defend our beliefs if they are challenged.
Truth
is an interesting subject.
But
before we get too serious about it, here are some amusing ‘truths’ which have
turned up on the sports media:
Sports
commentator David Coleman said “And here’s Moses Kiptanui,
the 19 year old who turned 20 a few weeks ago.”
Mr.
Coleman also told us : “It’s a great advantage to be
able to hurdle with both legs”.
Murray
Walker, during one event, told us “We now have exactly the same situation as we
had at the start of the race, only exactly the opposite”.
Greg
Norman told us: “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father”.
Alan
Minter told us : “There have been injuries and deaths
in boxing, but none of them serious”.
Tony Crozier once announced: “The Queen’s Park Oval, exactly as
the name suggests, is absolutely round.”
But who
trusts sports commentators? We can see for ourselves what’s going on without
their help.
So
truth is sometimes difficult to find.
What
about the movies? Is there truth in there?
I have
watched thousands of movies and enjoyed most of them, but over the years I have
noticed a certain pattern to them. There are many predictable things in the
For
example:
It is
always possible to park directly outside any building you are visiting,
A
detective can only solve a case if he is suspended from duty,
If you
decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the
steps,
Most laptop
computers are powerful enough to override the communication systems of any
invading alien,
It
doesn’t matter how many opponents you have, if you are a martial arts experts
your enemies will attack you one at a time,
Any
lock can be picked by a credit card or a paper clip, unless it’s the door to a
burning building with a child trapped inside,
Television
news bulletins usually contain a story that affects you personally at the
precise moment you turn the TV on.
But
truth doesn’t always persuade.
Take Noah - he preached
the truth for 120 years and no-one believed him.
And
truth is harder to find when we are young. Children live in a world coloured by fantasy and magic. We even talk about the
‘magic’ of childhood.
When we
are very young we believe many things which we thought were true, but
unfortunately they turned out to be quite the opposite:
Money
grows on trees
The
tooth-fairy leaves money for teeth
All
grown-ups are invincible
Children
never become old people
Everybody
goes to heaven when they die
The
world is our oyster
In a
survey held many years ago, people voted for who they thought
was the most reliable and trustworthy.
Politicians
. . . . came near the bottom of the list, along with
lawyers and car salesmen. Ministers weren’t near the top either. Doctors and
teachers were considered the most reliable. Just out of interest, where would you
rate bankers and corporate managers? Where would you rate newsreaders?
It is
an interesting thing truth.
The
following are a few of the untruths which I think need to be addressed:
1.
St
Patrick’s Day.
Most of
St.Patrick’s Day is taken up with Irish music,
leprechauns, green bread and legends about snakes leaving
The
truth is, he was a British citizen, born in Roman
Britain about 390 AD. He was taken captive by Irish raiders and sold to an
Irish king who put him to work as a slave-shepherd. During those six long,
bitter, lonely years, he drew on his Christian upbringing and found God, who
promptly told him to walk to the coast where, God told him was, a ship would be
waiting.
He did
and it was.
Patrick
walked the 200 miles and found a ship there, which took him back to
2.
Charles Darwin.
Known
as the man who has become the figurehead for the ‘Theory of Evolution’, has also been held
up as a proponent of materialism. His theory demands the total exclusion of
God, or any Intelligence. If his theory is true, then all life came about by
accident.
Yet
Darwin himself never believed that life came about by chance.
On the
last page of
On
another page of his book he wrote: “For I am well aware that scarcely a single
point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often
apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I
have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing
the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”
In other words,
So why
is Creationism so vigorously opposed by most NZ State schools? Could it be that
our government and the bulk of our teachers are unwilling to give students a
balanced presentation? Are teachers afraid to give their students all the
facts, lest students decide, on the basis of evidence, that there is more
credence for Creation than Evolution?
3.
Church
traditions.
I was
brought up a Presbyterian as a child, and later tried the Salvation Army and
finally the Brethren. I have attended Catholic, Methodist, Anglican and even Quaker
services. In all the different churches I have attended I have heard things
which did not match with what the Bible says. I call these inconsistent
teachings traditions, because they are Manmade.
There
are in fact hundreds of them..
I would
like to pick out just a few.
Jonah and the whale –
the Bible says a “great fish” not a whale swallowed Jonah.
Elijah went to heaven in
a chariot of fire? – no, he went in a whirlwind. The
chariot divided Elijah from Elisha.
The
three wise men came to worship Jesus at the manger? –no, they arrived at
Moses was placed as a
baby in a boat made of reeds? – yes, but his boat was
covered in black tarry pitch. The Egyptian woman who found him was attracted by
his crying, not by his beautiful face.
Jesus wore white and had
a mystical glow? Never! He was so ordinary-looking he had to be pointed out.
Which
brings me to Noah’s Ark.
In a
large number of story books, Noah’s
The
truth is quite different.
Noah’s
Its
displacement tonnage was about 20,000 tons.
It was
longer than a football field, and taller than a three-story building.
It had
three decks and had enough cubic capacity to hold 125,300 sheep.
Traditions
say that Noah had to catch the animals, but the Bible says God brought them to
him.
Traditions
say the flood was local, but the Bible says it covered the whole planet.
Traditions
say that full-grown animals were taken on board, but the most likely size would
be the younger and smaller.
And yes
Noah had dinosaurs on the ark – baby ones.
To
support the Bible account of the great flood, we have hundreds of similar
stories from almost every language group in the world. We also have about three
quarts of the world’s land area comprising sedimentary rock, in which are
embedded billions of fossils. Fossils, as you know, are the remains of plants
and animals buried by sediment.
Now I
would like to look at some of the myths we have been taught through the media,
by such leading lights as David Attenborough, David Bellamy and Sam Neil.
How
is coal formed?
David bellamy told us the usual story -
that forests grow on the same area for thousands of years, gradually dropping
leaves and sticks and building up a thick layer of peat, which eventually
hardens and becomes coal.
But
is this true?
If we
look at a coal bed, such as the vast, enormous one which stretches down under
the sea from
The
truth is, coal is formed by a cataclysmic flood of water,
which rips forests from the earth and buries them in heaps.
Where
do languages come from?
Another
TV presenter told us that language evolved out of the grunts and clicks made by
a certain branch of apes.
The
truth is, language is so complex, it needs a special
extension to the brain to handle it. Language can only be learned from another
language-speaker..
It is
therefore impossible for language to arise by accident. There had to be an
original human who already spoke a language fluently before any other humans
could learn it. If a child is not taught a language, its speech-centre
atrophies. Language can come only from language – this confirms the Bible,
which says that Adam and Eve were created with built in language ability.
DNA and inheritance.
David
Attenborough tells us that one of the main planks on which the theory of
evolution rests is that of DNA and its ability to pass on modifications to
offspring. We are told that, given enough time, all life will change and adapt
to a changing environment because DNA keeps coming up with new sequences.
The
truth is, DNA is like a finished book. No new chapters
can ever be written into it. All DNA can do is pass on what it already contains.
Within
a gene pool there is always some room for variation – big dogs, little dogs,
white dogs, black dogs – but nothing new can ever appear. No new genes are
possible.
Many
forms of life have been seen to lose things, but no new thing has ever been
found.
Birds
may lose the ability to fly, fish may lose pigment from their skin, deformities
and mutations may occur, but no new organs have ever arisen. Life is like a
huge clock, which is gradually winding down. The DNA we have today will gradually
become depleted, but never increased.
Freedom of enquiry.
When it
comes to the truth, I think one of the most important principles we need to
defend is that of ‘Freedom of Enquiry’.
For
example, whenever we hear something from a so-called expert, we should be free
to question what we hear, and not have to fight a wall of dogmatic bigotry.
Most
evolutionists will tell us that the fossil record illustrates evolution, but
the fact is there are no transitional fossils anywhere in the fossil record.
Most
cosmologists will tell us that the universe is billions of years old, but the
fact is there are many evidences which indicate that the universe is only a few
thousand years old.
Most of
the earth-sciences will say that the Earth is millions of years old, yet there
is a huge amount of evidence which contradicts this.
The
scientific world is peppered with liars, charlatans and deceivers. Many
scientists are fanatical and one-eyed, quite prepared to present false
information to bolster their personal beliefs. The media quite often follows
their lead, and the public is deceived into thinking lies are truth.
I would
like to close with this humorous quote from Osama Bin Laden. It comes from a
notice which (someone said) he posted on the wall of his cave:
“We
have heard that there may be American soldiers in disguise trying to infiltrate
our ranks. I want to set up patrols to look for them. First patrol will be
Omar, Muhammed, Abdul, Akbar
and Brad.”
Like
Osama, perhaps we ought to check out what we believe, just in case we too have
been infiltrated?
Thank you.