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Professing Christian claims CMI site is ‘full of lies’

As with most negative feedbacks we receive, the letter is full of inflammatory accusations and baseless assertions, but this is different in that the writer professes to be a Christian. This feedback submission is from Mr TM of USA, who declined permission for his full name to be used. A response by Dr Jonathan Sarfati, of Creation Ministries International (Australia), is interspersed throughout TM’s letter as per normal email fashion. Ellipses (…) at the end of one of TM’s paragraphs signal that a mid-sentence comment follows, not an omission.

Update: See responses from several readers to this article.


As a committed Christian of 30+ years, …

But what does ‘Christian’ mean nowadays? It should mean someone who follows Christ, but nowadays often means someone who goes to church. Of course, that doesn’t make one a true follower of Christ any more than going to a garage makes you a car. Even atheists–cum–new-agers like Spong call themselves ‘Christians’. I also have to wonder about someone who’s apparently afraid to reveal his name on a posted feedback …

… I find this site absolutely frightening.

Yes, it does frighten atheists and their compromising churchian allies, because there are thousands of visits each day to our website, thus bypassing establishment censorship [e.g. to see the refutation of the latest anticreationist agitprop from the US National Academy of Sciences]. These people are finding evidence that the Bible can be trusted and are less likely to be swayed by the anti-Christian attacks of pseudo-intellectuals, who are not too happy with us as a result.

It is nothing but lies, top to bottom.

This is a very serious charge. If you could demonstrate any ‘lies’ (or even unintentional falsehoods) we would remove them immediately because we value integrity very highly, as followers of Jesus. However, I doubt that you have actually spent much time studying the material or you would have realized that the articles are scripturally and scientifically sound and you would not be making your slanderous accusations.

I suspect you are sincere, but that does not excuse you.

I suspect that your complaint is sincere, but that does not excuse you for failing to provide a single piece of evidence to support your inflammatory claims.

There is not space or time to go through all of my complaints, so let me summarize:

1) You are willing to corrupt the Scriptures to make them say whatever you want. You claim to be taking it literally, but in fact you are interpreting it.

Of course. We interpret the historical narrative passages as historical narrative (e.g. Genesis!) and the poetic passages poetically. We have explained this amply on Q&A: Genesis, e.g. Should Genesis be taken literally? [Update: see also Is Genesis poetry / figurative, a theological argument (polemic) and thus not history? Critique of the Framework Hypothesis

In virtually every Biblical explanation you offer, you assert that the passages mean things that aren’t LITERALLY there.

Again, would you please give us an example or two?

You are INTERPRETING it to fit your preconceived viewpoint.

Au contraire, we are letting the Bible teach us via the normal rules of the original languages and historical context. It’s the churchian evolution/long-age compromisers who try to fit the plain meaning of Scripture into their preconceived ‘scientific’ viewpoint. It can be easily demonstrated that our understanding of Scripture is similar to that of Bible scholars before the modernist era (e.g. Basil, Luther, Calvin) which clearly shows that it is not us who are interpreting the Bible to fit with our pre-conceived ideas.

From having studied the Bible for nearly 20 years, I assure you that it is an appallingly bad interpretation.

From your august heights, maybe you can demonstrate this rather than expect us simply to take your word for it. How about an analysis of the original languages and types of literature? Again, you might also like to check out our Q&A page on Genesis.

2) The objections that you make to evolution are hardly original.

Some are original, some don’t claim to be original, but they are still valid regardless, and (again) you have not proven otherwise.

Scientists have been patiently refuting these exact arguments for decades.

I’m one of many creationist Ph.D. scientists who would be interested to hear you explain the above assertion. It would also entail that the evolutionary scientists you mention had the power to see into the future, because many of our arguments are based on very recent discoveries, such as the molecular motors that drive the bacterial flagellum, the virus’s DNA-winding machinery, and the enzyme ATP-synthase that manufactures life’s vital energy currency ATP. Actually, the closest they came—before such discoveries—were claims that a motor would falsify evolution because a wheel could never be built up in small steps via natural selection! Our Q&A: Design has many more recently discovered amazing design features that couldn’t possibly have been refuted for decades.

They are not valid—not even close. They have been shown to be demonstrably false on many occasions.

Then it shouldn’t have been difficult for you to demonstrate their falsity on at least one occasion!

They represent a corruption of scientific truth as great as your corruption of Biblical truth. If, after having been told that something is false, you continue to repeat it, that makes you a deliberate liar.

Again, it would have helped if you had provided a single example.

The evidence in favor of evolution draws from all branches of science.

I’m a Ph.D. physical chemist, and have never found the slightest support for evolution from goo to you via the zoo. Maybe you’d like to provide me with some lessons in physics and chemistry?

It is profound, well documented, and thorough.

Then you shouldn’t have had any trouble documenting an example of this profound and thorough evidence.

No amount of wishful thinking or outright fraud will make it go away.

Fraud? Do you mean like the evolutionists’ faked peppered moth photos (actually glued on tree trunks) or Haeckel’s forged embryonic diagrams repeated in textbooks to maintain the fiction of similarity and recapitulation? Or Piltdown Man, or ‘Archaeoraptor’ the feathered dinosaur or rather the ‘Piltdown Bird’, or … ?

I also know that I am wasting my time and efforts in writing this.

If you had provided some actual biblical or scientific evidence for your assertions it might not have been such a waste of time for all of us.

You have closed your minds, and are not interested in the truth.

We are very much interested in the truth—Jesus is the truth (John 14:6), and He also said that God’s Word is truth (John 17:16). But since you reject the plain teachings of Genesis, perhaps you reject the plain teachings of these verses too? What is your source of ‘truth’? The words of fallible scientists?

I will pray …

But to whom are you praying, since the true God reveals Himself as the almighty Creator who created everything ‘very good’ in six normal days (Genesis 1:31), and cursed the world with death and suffering only after Adam sinned (Genesis 3:17–19)? See The god of an old earth. Although as we’ve often pointed out, it’s possible to be a true Christian and believe in millions of years and evolution, there is still a glaring inconsistency—see The big picture.

… for all of you at this site that you will cease to defame and profane the name of God with this mendacity. You are a prime example of “taking the Lord’s name in vain” …

On what grounds can you object to alleged violations of one command in Scripture while disbelieving other passages of Scripture, including the six-day creation given as the basis for another command of the same Decalogue in which this command is found—Exodus 20:8–11?

…and abusing His Word for your own petty egos.

When anti-creationists get so steamed up it shows that our website is hitting home. God laughed at the futility of those who challenge His word (Psalm 2:4).

Are you really so insecure in your faith that you feel you must lie in order to support it? What Would Jesus Do?

The only way we can know this is by what Jesus actually said and did, and we can find this out only from the Bible. Then we find that He regarded Scripture as unbreakable (John 10:35), that He believed that the Genesis account of creation and the Flood were real historical events (Matt. 19:3–6, Luke 17:26–27), and that He frequently quoted Scripture as the final, non-negotiable settling of any point (‘it is written’). See The Authority of Scripture and Jesus Christ on the infallibility of Scripture for elaboration. So, WWJD is good advice—I urge you to practise it and believe what Genesis clearly says.

If you do intend to write again, then please answer Some questions for theistic evolutionists. These questions show how compromise views seriously undermine the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

T.M.

(Dr) Jonathan Sarfati
Research scientist, author and editorial consultant
CMI (Australia)

Published: 27 May 2001; edited and republished 15 March 2008 (GMT+10)
Published: 9 February 2006

Helpful Resources

15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History
by Dr Don Batten, Dr Jonathan D Sarfati
US $4.00
Booklet
Refuting Compromise
by Dr Jonathan Sarfati
US $17.00
Soft cover