THE COURT IS IN SESSION - PART 1 ROMANS 1:18-23

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Hear ye! Hear ye! The Court of Heaven is now in session! All rise for His honor, The Lord God. Paul followed the basic biblical pattern: Unbelievers

must first face the LAW OF GOD and the condemnation we are under, then be shown His GLORIOUS GRACE and SALVATION as the only way of escape.

Just like in a courtroom, the charges are read first before the judge can offer a solution.

The charges: Man is absolutely guilty before God!

2. MAN’S SUPPOSED INTELLIGENCE v. 18-20

Human history is not the story of an ape becoming civilized, or a beast that worshiped idols and then evolved into a man worshiping one God.

Human history is just the opposite: Man began knowing God, but turned from the truth and rejected God.

God revealed Himself to man through creation—the things that He made and the evidence that we see every day.

From the world around him, man knew that there was and is a God who had the wisdom to plan and the power to create.

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3. MAN’S ACTUAL IGNORANCE v. 21-23

Man knew God; this is clear. But man did not want to know God or honor Him as God.

Man refused, in spite of the evidence, to thank the Creator God or give Him the glory He deserves.

The result was an empty mind and a darkened heart.

Man the worshiper became man the philosopher, but his empty wisdom only revealed his foolishness.

Paul summarized all of Greek history in one dramatic statement: “the times of this ignorance.” ACTS 17:30

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Having held down God’s truth and refusing to acknowledge God’s glory, man was left without a god; and man is so constituted that he must worship something.

If he will not worship the true God, he will worship a false god, even if he has to manufacture it himself!

This fact about man accounts for his propensity to idolatry. Man exchanged the glory of the true God for substitute gods that he himself made—the creation itself.

First on the list of false gods is MAN HIMSELF/ humanism/human logic and reason alone.

4. HISTORY: MAN’S LONG LIST OF GODS

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5. NATURALISM AND DARWINIAN EVOLUTION

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Let’s be intellectually honest, WHAT IS EVOLUTION? Nothing but a very long, mindless, unguided process built

on selfish advantage (natural selection/survival of the fittest), evil prevailing (most violent species surviving) and ultimately death; THAT’S WHAT IT IS.

So natural selection/Darwinian evolution seems smart to those who see only the surviving products; but as a design process, it is patently idiotic to contemplate.

And the raw brutality of the process should be mind-bogglingly offensive to any animal or nature lover.

As we just studied in COL. 1:15-20, JESUS IS THE CREATOR.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” GENESIS 1:1

In the beginning: when God chose to create time—to start the clock—set things in motion.

The first verse of the Bible speaks of the creation of space and matter, and the creation of time.

The universe is actually a continuum of space, matter, and time, no one of which can have a meaningful existence without the other two.

6. ELOHIM, GOD IN THREE PERSONS, CREATOR

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7. WHAT IS COSMOLOGY?

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COSMOLOGY: The science of the origin and development of the universe in modern astronomy; it is dominated by the Big Bang theory.

BIBLICAL CREATIONISM: Begins with a transcendent Creator, outside of the creation itself, creating the entire space/time/matter universe.

MODERN EVOLUTION: Begins with elementary particles of matter evolving out of nothing in a “big bang.”

PAGAN PANTHEISM: Begins with elementary matter evolving into complex systems by the forces of nature personified as different gods and goddesses.

8. WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCE ACTUALLY SHOW US?

You might be thinking, “What about the fossil proof that the Earth must be billions of years old?”

Let’s look at the Cambrian Explosion—the supposed prehistoric explosion of life 541-485 million years ago.

Anomalocaris, Ottoia, Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia, Opabinia!

This strange list represents a group of animals from the Cambrian period that is only now being appreciated, animals which supposedly lived.

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9. THAT’S WEIRD These animals are so strange and different that most are contained in PHYLA of which they are the only example, and which no longer exists.

AND BY THE WAY, THEY ARE ALL FROM DIFFERENT PHYLA.

Yet, here is the real puzzle of the Cambrian Explosion for the theory of Darwinian Evolution.

All the known phyla, except one, along with all the oddities, first appear in the Cambrian period.

There are no ancestors, there are no intermediates. 9

10. HOW COULD THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OCCUR?

Didn’t Charles Darwin propose an evolutionary process that was slow and gradual? Yes, indeed he did.

This formulation has remained the mainstay of evolutionary explanations for more than 100 years since Darwin, until very recently.

In the years before Darwin, the marvelous fit of an organism to its environment was considered the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer. Change had to be slow. Enter the discovery of the DNA MOLECULE.

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11. THE PROBLEM WITH DNA The gradualness of the evolutionary process was deeply reinforced with the discovery of DNA and the genetic code.

DNA operates as an informational code for the development of an organism from a single cell to an adult, and also regulates all the chemical processes that go on in cells.

Mutations or mistakes in the code had to have very minor effects—most commonly, death or birth defects.

So change had to be unbelievably slow—billions of years.

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12. SOUNDS LIKE A FARCE!

This necessity of gradualism explains the difficulty evolutionists have concerning the Cambrian explosion or EVOLUTION’S BIG BANG, as Time magazine called it.

How could animals as diverse as arthropods, mollusks, jellyfish, and even primitive vertebrates all appear within a time span of only 5 to 10 million years, with no ancestors and no intermediates?

Evolution just doesn’t work, and we have not one single piece of fossil evidence it ever occurred!

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13. COULD THIS BE EVIDENCE OF A CREATOR?

Genetic information does not just spontaneously arise from random DNA sequences. Chemicals cannot produce information; information must have a source and never arrives by chance. Could that source be Logos—the Word?

Why hasn’t such rapid change as is indicated by the evidence ever happened again?

It sounds more like somebody said, “This is what you are; stay that way.” Hummmm. GENESIS 1:25

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14. TWO COMPETING WORLDVIEWS

Both Evolution and Biblical Creation are complete worldviews.

Of the two, creation is better supported by scientific observation, and it alone makes sense out of life and eternity.

Examples of supposed botanical-biological evolution simply do not exist, but the scientific evidence points toward Creation.

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15. PROBLEMS FOR EVOLUTION ABOUND The Burgess Shale deposits near Field, British Columbia,

Canada—Exact same ferns and palm we have today.

The Siwalik Hills, the foothills of the Himalayas in India—Nearly the whole fossil record found inverted.

Can all life be traced back to a single pool of primordial goo (Miller/Uray)—No, it can’t.

Darwin’s Evolutionary Tree/Ernst Haeckel’s Drawings/ Fossil Missing Links, like Archaeopteryx—All hoaxes.

Living Fossils—Really poor evolvers. 15

16. MAKES ONE WONDER If evolution really works and is the best scientific explanation, it is that these “primitive” organisms have not changed significantly in over a billion years. Well, let’s see. ROMANS 1:19-20 When I look at my world, I see the marvelous hand of an

incredible OMNIPRESENT, OMNIPOTENT CREATOR. Humanist Evolutionists see unverifiable processes,

massive amounts of unexplainable data producing unbelievable results. WHO IS RATIONAL AND WHO HAS MINDLESS FAITH?!

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