Does your Hymnbook Teach Creation?

Does your fellowship sing songs glorifying the Lord as Creator of the Cosmos? Do your hymns mention Creation In Six Days (CISD)? Are there choruses that speak of the Fall and the Curse? What about the Flood or the Tower of Babel? Consider these selections that highlight creation and the early chapters of Genesis:

All creatures of our God and King

Lift up your voice and with us sing,

Alleluia! Alleluia!

Thou burning sun with golden beam,

Thou silver moon with softer gleam!

- St. Francis of Assisi

I'll praise my Maker while I've breath,

and when my voice is lost in death,

praise shall employ my nobler powers;

my days of praise shall ne'er be past,

while life, and thought, and being last,

or immortality endures.

- Isaac Watts

A number of Psalms emphasize creation: For a more complete list see the references here. Nicole Mullen’s tune “My Redeemer Lives” provides a strong creation message. In one performance she recited Psalm 8 before she sang this song. Answers in Genesis offers a music CD, Creation – The Story of Life featuring such artists as Mark Harris, Billy Sprague, Cindy Morgan, Larnelle Harris, Greg Long, Bob Carlisle and Lisa Bevill. Possibly the most popular song at creation conferences is “How Great Thou Art.” Consider these selections from Gadsby’s Hymns:

The spacious earth and spreading flood

Proclaim the wise, the powerful God;

And thy rich glories from afar

Sparkle in every rolling star. (#18)

When Adam by transgression fell,

And conscious, fled his Maker’s face,

Linked in clandestine league with hell,

He ruined all his future race:

The seeds of evil once brought in,

Increased and filled the world with sin. (#89)

Father, how wide thy glory shines!

How high thy wonders rise!

Known through the earth by thousand signs,

By thousands through the skies!

Those mighty orbs proclaim thy power;

Their motion speaks thy skill;

And on the wings of every hour,

We read thy patience still. (#207)

All creatures to his bounty owe

Their being and their breath;

But greatest gratitude should flow

In men redeemed from death. (#834)

The rolling sun, the changing light,

And nights and days thy power confess:

And the blest volume thou hast writ

Reveals thy justice and thy grace. (#1147) Noyes Fludde (Noah's Flood) is a 15th century “mystery play” and in 1957 Benjamin Britten turned it into an opera.

The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd

I, God, that all this world hath wrought,

heaven and yearth, and all of nought,

I see my people in deede and thought

are sett fowle in sinne. …

Man that I made will I distroye,

beast, worme, and fowle to flye;

for on yearth the doe mee noye,

the folke that are theron. …

Therfore Noe, my servante free,

that righteous man arte as I see,

a shippe sonne thou shalt make thee … Homeschooler Jodi Benson (the Little Mermaid) sang a song for children about the Tower of Babel.

Keep from me Thy loveliest creature, till I prove Jesus' love infinitely sweeter – Charles Wesley

O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, Who have set Your glory above the heavens! (Ps. 8:1)

The Iceman Cometh (Dembski version)

Young Earth Science (YES) holds that scripture and science supports the view the this planet is thousands of years old (not billions). William Dembski, the prominent Intelligent Design (ID) advocate, is somewhat sympathetic to YES: “I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it.” [1] Is this really true? Dembski counsels, “Young-earth creationists do not merely want to show why the other side is wrong; they also want to show why their side is right.” [2] They have done so Dr. Dembski.

Dembski claims that the multiple layers in ice cores in Greenland pose a problem for the YES idea of one Ice Age after the Flood. However, the layers are not always annual – many layers can occur in one year. J. Southon writing in Quaternary Research freely admits, “… the GISP2 (Greenland Ice Sheet Project) ice contains many subannual structures which mimic annual bands …” R. B. Alley et al. stated in the Journal of Geophysical Research, “… it is almost certain that variability exists at the subseasonal or storm level, at the annual level… We certainly must entertain the possibility of misidentifying the deposit of a large storm or a snow dune as an entire year…” The Post-Flood Ice Age would have produced “hyper-canes” at the poles which would make multiple layers in the ice record each year. [3]
One wonders how much of the excellent research on the Ice Age by Michael Oard and Larry Vardiman that Dembski has read:
Dembski criticizes the “post-flood rapid ice age model,” but fails to see its power and success in predicting the reality on the ground. [4] Evolutionists cannot explain the Ice Age and over 60 theories have been proposed. J. K. Charlesworth explains that there are “… an absolute riot of theories ranging from the remotely possible to the mutually contradictory and the palpably inadequate.” [5] The Flood implies the Ice Age! Volcanic ash cooled the earth; tremendous eruptions in the seas (Ge 7:11) heated up the oceans. This combination of higher precipitation, caused by the hot seas, and cooler summers produced the Ice Age after the Flood. This is the only model that successfully predicts ice sheets where we know they existed and it only takes a few hundred years! [6] This model gives thinner ice sheets than the mainstream view, but this makes it easier to explain the no-ice regions we find in Wisconsin. Assuming the widely accepted huge glacier thickness, we would expect a significant “bounce-back” after the tremendous weight of the ice melted – this would take about 25,000 years. Ohio, Illinois and Indiana show virtually no rebound. [7] Andrew Snelling explains, “… ocean temperatures increased [based on fossil oxygen isotopes] during deposition of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata, and then decreased during Tertiary (post-Flood) deposition.” [8] This is exactly what the Post-Flood Ice Age model predicts.

Dembski has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Mathematicians are always Killing Lies* – that is they are challenging false assumptions. One example is the old claim that you can only fold a paper in half seven times. YES advocates are also challenging falsehoods promoted by mainstream science. Commenting on ice cores, Dembski claims that Orthodox Protestants who take Genesis as Historical Narrative (OPGHN, “opgane”) are interested in “… devising loopholes to support an otherwise untenable position.” [9] Not so, my brother; in fact, the Post-Flood Rapid Ice Age Model (PRIAM**) is the only explanation that works and fits the data in the real world.
Dembski should take a hint from former aeronautical engineer and award winning SciFi author, James Hogan who said, “A comparatively young word [Y6K] – in the sense of the surface we observe today – is compatible with unguided Catastrophist theories…” [10] Hogan states that conventional dating, “was more a product of materialism’s fight with religion than an empirical construct … [it was] manufactured to provide the long time scales that Lyell and Darwin needed.” [11] Hogan maintains that, “Mountain uplifts and other formations show indications of being younger than conventional geology maintains.” [12] One example that Hogan presents that challenges standard dating uses thermoluminescence of lunar material which was dated at less than 10,000 years. [13] If the Moon is thousands of years old, then maybe the Earth is too!

The Ice Age is apparently referenced in Job, “From whose womb comes the ice? And the frost of heaven, who gives it birth? The waters harden like stone, and the surface of the deep is frozen” (Job 38:29–30).

Evolution itself has a chilling effect and Darwinism demands depression.
Don’t mock the faith! Have you no respect for religion…
- Larry in The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

If I have told you of things that happen right here on the earth and yet none of you believes Me, how can you believe (trust Me, adhere to Me, rely on Me) if I tell you of heavenly things? (Jn. 3:12, Amp)

Notes:
1) The End of Christianity by William Dembski (Broadman & Holman, Nashville, TN, 2009), p. 55.
2) Ibid., p. 56.
3) Earth’s Catastrophic Past by Andrew Snelling (Institute for Creation Research, Dallas, TX, 2009, Vol. 2), pp. 778.
4) Dembski, p. 61.
5) quoted in Snelling, p. 770.
6) Snelling, p. 774.
7) Snelling, p. 776.
8) Snelling, p. 773.
9) Dembski, p. 61.
10) Kicking the Sacred Cow by James Hogan (Baen, New York, NY, 2004), p. 47.
11) Ibid., p. 175, Note: Hogan is endorsing Velikovsky’s opinion.
12) Ibid., p. 174.
13) Ibid., p. 206.

*Wilhelm Killing and Sophus Lie were mathematicians
**can you say “Troy?”