How great must that delusion be to which teeming millions of our race are given over when, even in this supposedly enlightened age, we find multitudes flocking to statues and images of supposed gods with a view to placating and pleasing them with drink offerings! So great is the deception that we find hordes of devotees convinced that they are witnessing a miracle when their milk offerings appear to be consumed before their very eyes, and in India religious fervour rose to such a height that the country was described as being brought to a standstill by the “devotional frenzy” which had gripped the Hindu faithful. But this was far from being confined to India and the Asian continent. The phenomenon — idols drinking milk — was said to be observed even in Britain and America with queues forming at Hindu temples in these nations’ principal cities. Some close to the scene have explained the “miracle” as a clever deception practised by Hindu priests suspected of
having installed suction pumps hidden out of sight within the idol. If the purpose was to gather money into their coffers, it was clearly a great success. In other cases the porosity of the material of which the idols were composed explained the disappearance of the milk from spoons placed to their mouths. According to the Daily Telegraph, a man called James Randi, described as the world’s best known “miracle buster”, said that if the spoonful of milk were held to the elbow it would just as easily be absorbed by capillary action. Mr Randi, we are informed, was recently involved in an investigation of a statue of the so-called Madonna located in Civitavecchia, Italy, and which purportedly cried tears of blood. “Working with Professor Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia, they found that all that was needed to recreate the phenomenon were a hollow statue of porous alabaster that has been fired to give it a shiny surface, some human blood and a nail. If you scratch the surface of the glaze, that is the only exit for the liquid and it runs out,” said Mr Randi. A genetic test was done on the blood from the Civitavecchia statue and it turned out to be male. When we asked the priest about it, he smiled, and said: “Yes of course it is the blood of Christ”. What if it were female blood? The Priest replied: “That would be all right too — it would be her blood in that case.” The same Telegraph article tells us that a few years ago, Professor Garlaschelli also explained away another supposed miracle, that of the blood of St Gennaro which was supposed to liquefy from a dark brown solid. This is one of Italy’s most venerated relics. “He showed that it was little more than medieval alchemy, having recreated the effect in his laboratory using chemicals plentiful in the clays from Mount Vesuvius. The congealed blood is a thixotropic mixture, a solid that becomes liquid when shaken or vibrated.” The cardinal, in the course of the annual ceremony, takes hold of the reliquary containing the “blood”, gives it good shake, and, behold, the “miracle” takes place!
The “Big Bang” — Fact or Fiction?
It is interesting to read in the Press that scientists are coming up against difficulties which appear to cast doubt on the validity of their much-vaunted Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe and that they are now, in fact, arguing among themselves. Because the Biblical account of the creation of the heavens and the earth never seemed to receive as much as a mention, we were beginning to think that perhaps these learned and eminent men had never really heard of it, and that they had never entered into discussion with those who believe it. That, however, is not the case as far as Professor Steve Jones of University College is concerned. He
quotes the result of a Daily Telegraph opinion poll which asserted that 39 per cent of people believe that the universe began with a Big Bang while 29 per cent ‘opted for the idea that it arose “through an act of creation by God, broadly as described by the book of Genesis in the Bible”.’ Professor Jones then goes on to ask: ‘Can it be true that 16 million Britons think that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and “formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”?’ That there are so many who believe this to be the literal truth is very “depressing”, as far as he is concerned and his language in regard to them is scornful.
“If everything”, he writes, “began through the whim of a creator whose deeds are written down in a big book the accuracy of which is beyond question, then science is irrelevant. As believers are certain that they are right, then every fact, by definition, fits their theory. If all evidence can be interpreted in only one way, then there is no point in arguing. There is, in fact, not much point in looking for evidence at all. The Big Bang, unlike the Book of Genesis, is just a theory. It may be right but scientists bicker about it all the time. Every contribution to the debate is taken seriously, even if only to be dismissed. The idea explains so many phenomena as well — the background radiation that echoes a cataclysmic event, the fact that the universe is expanding, and much more — that the controversy seemed to be dying down.
“Recently, though, a nasty problem started it up again. Scientists reported that some stars appear to be older than the universe itself — if it did indeed begin with a Big Bang. Estimates of the date of that event, based on the rate at which the universe is expanding, were about 12 billion years ago. Some stars, though, are now thought to be 16 billion years old. A few astronomers have been happy to declare that four billion years was nothing between friends; but to others the finding casts doubt on the whole theory. For a year or so the dispute has generated more heat than light. Last month the Telegraph reported a possible answer: the universe is expanding more slowly than we thought, so that it is really about 18 billion years old; older than any star. Problem, apparently, solved — although the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, delivered a noticeably cool response to the finding. And in last week’s Nature, new information from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that the universe is only 9.5 billion years old: problem back, worse than before. . . . It could be something trivial. But it might be that the Big Bang will turn out to be a small flop; if the idea is simply wrong, we would be back to a state of dismal uncertainty about our origins.” Well that is what Professor Jones
thinks, but he is not speaking for us but for his own company of agnostic scientists. On the basis of what is on record in the Bible we do not accept that the universe is billions of years old; nor do we for a moment give credence to the Big Bang Theory. If, in the words of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s great defender, (quoted by Professor Jones), we are now witnessing “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”, the spectacle is not one which surprises us at all. Scientists and astronomers will sooner or later have to come to the realisation that it is “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” The Christian, standing upon “the rock of divine truth”, as A A Hodge pointed out, need not fear the result of scientific investigations. The God of truth is also the God of creation and there cannot be any conflict between His word and His works being alike revelations from Him. Defined as “the human interpretation of God’s works”, science is far from being irrelevant. “God has given us the Bible not only to guide our faith but also to provide a framework of revelation within which to interpret the mysteries of the earth’s origin and destiny.”1
On the same page of The Daily Telegraph, we have the Astronomer Royal asserting that “the triumph of the 20th century is to have learnt that we and the earth come from stardust. . . Darwin showed our links with the animal world; today’s discoveries reveal our link with the cosmos. We are ashes of long dead stars. Every atom in our bodies is a fossil whose history can be traced to the early universe.” The question we would like to ask the Astronomer Royal is the obvious one — where did the stars or the atoms come from in the first place? He would most likely turn away from us and avoid the difficulty. Professor Jones tells us that he — against his better judgment, he says — used to argue with “those who claim that evolution, of stars and of man, is wrong and that it is all due to God. Soon, though, I realised that this was not a real dialogue at all. Anything I said was either a lie, a silly mistake, or fitted perfectly into Genesis”. Jones goes on to say that “the evidence for human evolution is, in fact, extraordinarily weak. There are no more fossils than would cover a decent-sized table and we know almost nothing about what propelled a hairy and rather stupid ape into a bald and mildly intellectual human being.” He did not wish to be quoted out of context so it is proper to also point out
1 Professor J C McCampbell in Foreword to The Genesis Flood
that Professor Jones considers the fact of evolution to be so well established in other animals that he found it completely convincing. “Man is an animal, therefore I believe we, too, evolved. How it happened is another problem. There is not a single statement in the Origin of Species that is not disputed. That is enough to convince many who believe only in certainty that Darwin is wrong and Genesis is right. If scientists disagree and believers do not, then surely believers must have won the argument.” He goes on, however, to assert that “to any scientist, precisely the opposite is the case. Conviction kills the search for truth because it does away with the argument altogether.” We disagree. Conviction of the truth of the Divine record stimulates and encourages scientific research. Was that not true in the case of Michael Faraday, generally considered to have been the greatest of all experimental physicists?