Dear Associates, Students and Friends:
On November 13, 2009, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that water had been discovered on the moon. In a NASA website article titled “LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon” an unmanned research spacecraft was crashed into the moon while instruments from another unmanned craft recorded the residue and results of the impact. The announced results showed that there is water on the moon.
This information fits very well with this month’s presentation by Dr. Ernest L. Martin. “The Bible and Scientific Mysteries, Part 2.” This 1994 transcribed lecture deals with a massive quantity of ice in orbit around the earth before the flood in the time of Noah. That ice fell to earth providing most of the water causing the flood in the time Noah, a flood that had a worldwide effect. 1
Water on the moon should not be surprising when we learn that there was frozen water in a ring system (like the rings around the gas giant planet Saturn) in orbit around earth in ancient times. Water comprising the rings was in orbit. Now water has been found on the moon which also is in orbit around earth. As Dr. Martin says in this month’s article, the Bible can inform science and give them directions for information and even further research and experimentation.
Biblical information did not lead NASA to conduct their impact test, but as you will see from Dr. Martin’s 1994 article, water on the moon should not have come as a surprise to them. It shows that water exists outside earth’s atmosphere. When the ice rings broke up, some of the orbital ice from ancient times was cast to the lunar surface while most of it fell toward earth, vaporized, and resulted in a major source of water for the 40 days and 40 nights of rain in Noah’s flood as told in the Book of Genesis.
The NASA web article concludes: “What other secrets will the moon reveal? The analysis continues!” Indeed. Perhaps a factual, non-theological, but subtle analysis of biblical data should be looked at as a source of potential scientific information. The low cost/high benefit ratio of such biblical analysis would be highly favorable for research for most all basic scientific mysteries. After all, biblical data is readily available and is waiting to reveal its “dark sayings”: “The king [Nebuchadnezzar] answered unto Daniel, and said, ‘Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets’” (Daniel 2:47).
Perhaps what is needed is an expanded scientific mindset, a broadened scientific research paradigm that accounts for all data, including the biblical revelation. Science asks questions of reality using disciplined methodology and thought processes. The Bible has answers to basic questions of physical reality — if correct questions are asked, and the text is allowed to speak for itself.
Unfortunately, science will be brought kicking and screaming to consider data in the Bible because most biblical interpreters themselves do not take the words of Scripture seriously. I am amazed how biblical scholars themselves do not take the text of Scripture seriously. On practically any given scriptural issue, textual controversy, or biblical passage, most theologians believe most anything except reading and taking the text to mean what it says, as any person would normally understand the text. After all, why should scientists take the biblical text seriously when theologians and textual scholars do not?
While no one has a complete biblical understanding, the plainest meaning is usually the best, not a nuanced and contorted meaning molded by theology that never entered the minds of the biblical authors or the audience. Dr. Martin’s presentation is straightforward, and understands the plain meaning of Scripture.
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After all, we should all be able to give an account, a reason for the hope that is within you (1 Peter 3:15). The apostle Peter, after discussing believers who do right (not sinning or doing evil) yet they suffer because they are believers:
“… yet [even so] hallow the Lord Christ in your hearts, ever ready with a defense for everyone who is demanding from you an account concerning the expectation [the hope] in you, but with meekness and fear, having a good conscience, that, in what they are speaking against you as of [as if you were] evildoers, they may be mortified, who traduce [humiliate] your good behavior in Christ.”
1 Peter 3:15─16, Concordant Version
If you cannot give a defense to those demanding an account and a reason for the your hope in life, you can at least inform them about ASK. Let the significant biblical teaching on the ASK website, with God’s leading and prompting, open their minds to read, learn, and understand God’s Word, just as you have been led and prompted. God loves those “speaking against you” just as He loves you and has led you to an increasing measure of God’s truth of His Word. “Love your enemies, …” (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:28).
Part of the “expectation in you” within you comes from your freedom in Christ: freedom from a false, nonbiblical, impossible-to-understand closed trinitarian godhead, and a false, nonbiblical, horrible teaching of an eternal hell (to name two of the “big three” false teachings). Most all of us believed such things in former times, but our minds and hearts have been made free in Christ to know the truth in such matters.
David W. Sielaff
david@askelm.com
1 If you have not already done so, read “The Bible and Scientific Mysteries, Part 1” which discussed data presented in the Bible that could inform areas of science where mysteries (in some cases basic mysteries) of life and creation still can be discovered. The books of Genesis, Job, and Proverbs have a great deal of scientific information within them that needs to be understood so that valuable information revealed in the Holy Scriptures can be used to benefit mankind. This month’s Part 2 presents information specific to the time of the flood of Noah.
Indeed a Sandia National Laboratory (a government-owned/contractor operated facility) website discusses rings of water around the earth in a September 2002 article “Rings around the Earth: A clue to climate change?” Scientist Mark Boslough describes one possible mechanism of ring formation:
“Boslough describes an impact where the collision object ricochets back into the atmosphere. The ricochet becomes part of an expanding vapor cloud, setting up an interaction that allows some of the debris to attain orbit velocity. The orbiting debris will collapse into a single plane by the same mechanics that led to the rings of Saturn and other planets, Boslough explains. Such a ring would most likely form near the equator, because of the dynamics involved with the moon and the earth’s equatorial bulge.”
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