Aldous Huxley Tells it Like it Really is for Atheist

By Gary DeMar

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, died on November 23, 1963 along with C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy. Huxley was the grandson of Thomas Huxley, notoriously known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” He and Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the promoter of the “do what thou wilt” philosophy, were friends. Huxley’s book Doors of Perception (1954), the inspiration behind the musical group The Doors, suggested that mescaline and LSD were “drugs of unique distinction” which should be exploited for the “supernaturally brilliant” visionary experience they offered. Both Crowley and Huxley appear on the cover of the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Huxley was a prophet to a lost generation in search of itself and took a few wrong turns.

Huxley reveals something about his chosen worldview in Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (1937). Note how he (1) recognizes that secular science borrows moral capital without any empirical justification. His comments on de Sade (2) are shocking but in keeping with his atheistic assumptions. His honesty is refreshing when he states (3) that he and his atheist friends objected to morality “because it interfered with [their] secular freedom.”

1. “[I]n recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one—the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of significance.” (268–269).

2. The Marquis De Sade’s “philosophy was the philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Life was without significance. Values were illusionary and ideals merely the inventions of cunning priests and kings. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for. There was no reason why anyone should have the slightest consideration for anyone else. For those who found rape and murder, rape and murder were fully legitimate activities. And so on. . . . De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary in history.” (177–179).

3. “For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries” Huxley writes, “the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our secular freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.” (273).

Jimmy Carter and the End Times

By Gary DeMar

Joel Rosenberg, author of Epicenter and a series of end-time novels, appeared on the Glenn Beck Show the week of April 21–25, 2008 explaining his views of the end times and how Jimmy Carter’s latest visit to the Middle East is fulfilling Bible prophecy. In a “Special Report,” Rosenberg wrote the following as justification for his prophetic views:

In Daniel 9:27, the ancient Hebrew prophet tells us that in the End of Days, an evil leader will make a comprehensive peace deal or covenant with Israel and her many neighbors and enemies. That deal will seem “firm,” says Daniel, but it will not be forever. It will be for 7 years. According to the Book [sic] of Daniel and Revelation, Israel will accept the deal (fatally flawed though it is), but the evil leader will break the deal after 3 1/2 years, invade Israel, set up a global empire, and eventually trigger the War of Armageddon.

This sounds ominously convincing until you actually read Daniel 9:27:

And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.

There is no mention of an “evil leader” making a peace deal or covenant with Israel and then breaking it. There is no mention of Israel’s “neighbors and enemies.” Nothing is said about Israel accepting the deal. Nothing is said about “a global empire.” While Rosenberg envisions the antichrist making a covenant; in reality it’s the Messiah who makes a covenant with the many and puts a stop to sacrifice and grain offering by His sacrificial death (Matt. 26:28). The beginning of Jesus’ ministry begins Daniel’s 70th week. In the middle of that final week, Jesus is “cut off,” crucified and forsaken by the Father (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34).

Hebraic scholar John Lightfoot (1602–1675) presents an interpretation of Daniel 9:27 that sticks with the text and context of Daniel 9 and understands that Jesus is the focus of redemptive history and not Israel:

“Daniel, knowing from Jeremiah’s Prophecy, that the seventy years of captivity were now fully expired, addresses himself to God by prayer for their return: he receives not only a gracious answer to his desire, but a Prediction of what times should pass over his people till the death of Christ; namely, seventy weeks, or seventy times seven years, or four hundred and ninety [years]. This space of time the Angel divides into three unequal parts:—

1. Seven sevens, or forty nine years, to the finishing of Jerusalem’s walls.
2. Sixty-two sevens, or four hundred thirty-four years, from that time, till the last seven.
3. The last seven in the latter half of which Christ preaches,— viz. three years and a half,—and then dies, &c.

“The twenty-seventh verse therefore is to be read thus: ‘He shall confirm the covenant with many in the one week, and in half that week he shall cause Sacrifice and Oblation to cease, &c.’ So that from this year to the death of Christ are four hundred ninety years; and there is no cause, because of doubtful Records among the Heathen, to make a doubt of the fixedness of this time, which an Angel of the Lord has pointed out with so much exactness.”

Lightfoot offers the following comments related to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry: “[Jesus] has now three years and a half to live, and to be a public minister of the gospel; as the angel Gabriel had told [Dan. 9:27], that in ‘half of the last seven of the years’ there named, he should confirm the covenant: R. Jochanan saith, ‘Three years and an half the divine glory stood upon the mount of Olives and cried, Seek the Lord while he may be found.’”

It’s quite obvious, then, that the 70th week of Daniel is history because it is fulfilled prophecy. Jimmy Carter and his mid-east shenanigans should be dealt with in terms of political realities. He’s been trying to be a peace broker since 1978 that began with the “peace accords” with Anwar Sadat that went nowhere and led to Sadat’s asassination on October 6, 1981. Before his death, he was thought to be the prelude to the fulfillment of the “king of the south” prophecy found in Daniel 11:5. Hal Lindsey considered him to be a candidate, and so did Mary Stewart Relfe, but by the time her book was published, Sadat was dead. Rosenberg will not fare any better.

The Preamble to West Virginia’s Constitution Returns

By Gary DeMar

It’s been noted that all 50 state constitutions make reference to God, Almighty God, Creator, Supreme Ruler, Divine Goodness, Divine Guideness, Supreme Being, or providence mostly in their Preambles, with the noted exception of West Virginia on its online version. Due to the efforts of Bruce Barilla and the kind people in the governor’s office, this oversight has been rectified.

 The Preamble reads:

Since through Divine Providence we enjoy the blessings of civil, political and religious liberty, we, the people of West Virginia, in and through the provisions of this Constitution, reaffirm our faith in and constant reliance upon God and seek diligently to promote, preserve and perpetuate good government in the state of West Virginia for the common welfare, freedom and security of ourselves and our posterity.

And He Calls this Interpreting the Bible Literally!

By Gary DeMar

Joshua 21:43–45 seems clear when it states the following:

So the LORD gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it. And the Lord gave them rest on every side, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers, and no one of all their enemies stood before them; the Lord gave all their enemies into their hand. Not one of the good promises which the Lord had made to the house of Israel failed; all came to pass.

Even after such a definitive confirmation, there are those who claim that these verses do not mean what they seem to mean. Here’s a question for those who take this position: What if God had wanted to tell the Israelites that all the land had been given to them just like He had promised; how would He have said it? He would have said, I’ve given you all the land, and so you don’t misunderstand what I’m telling you, every good promise I made to you has come to pass.
 Even after being confronted with these crystal clear words from Joshua, futurists continue to insist that they do not teach what they say. Consider the comments of Old Testament scholar Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.:

Oftentimes students of the Bible point to three passages that appear to suggest that the promise of land to Israel has indeed been fulfilled: Joshua 21:43–45; 23:14–15; Nehemiah 9:8. These texts assert that “not one of all the LORD’s good promises to the house of Israel failed; every one was fulfilled” (Josh. 21:45; cf. 23:14).
However, the boundaries mentioned in Numbers 34:2–12 are not the ones reached in the accounts of Joshua and Judges. For example, Joshua 13:1–7 and Judges 3:1–4 agree in maintaining that there was much land that remained to be taken.

Numbers 34:2–12 and Joshua 13:1–7 are before Joshua 21. What about Judges 3:1–4? These people groups were left in the land for Israel’s testing “to find out if they would obey the commandments of the Lord” (3:5). The problem was with Israel, not God. Israel had been given all the land, but they failed to hold it (2:1–4).

Here’s how an emailer explains the use of “all” in Joshua 21:43–45: “And of course, what Dr. DeMar again fails to realize is that using a ‘literal’ interpretive principle does not necessarily mean that the words of a given text or passage will be taken literally.” This is a literalist saying this. It’s not me interpreting what I think he is saying. When literalists are pushed to support their claim that only they interpret the Bible literally, literal takes on a less than literal meaning. He goes on to explain himself:

I went to a professional basketball game not long ago. The score was extremely close and at one point in the game, it was a definite fight to the finish. After a great deal of effort, the home team won the game by one three-pointer. At that point, everyone was on their feet, shouting at the top of their lungs! Now, is my statement correct as written? Of course it is, because I was there and it happened. I witnessed it. But wait; what if there were a few people who were not on their feet, shouting at the top of their lungs? Does my statement then become false? Of course it doesn’t. Would someone reading my account or listening to me retell it believe that every single person who attended that game (including the workers at the arena), was on their feet and shouting at the top of their lungs? I can’t imagine it. Moreover, no one would accuse me of lying even if a decent sized group of people did not join in the revelry. This is called a generalization and quite acceptable. People simply understand the general meaning of what is being stated, including the fact that while not everyone did as I said, my statement is still considered truthful.

Of course, there are times in Scripture where “all” does not mean everyone or everything without exception (Matt. 3:5; 24:14, 22; Acts 2:17; Rom. 11:26), but sometimes it does. Let’s take another look at Joshua 21 and compare what it says to the description of the crowd at the basketball game.

If we only had “So the LORD gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it” (21:43) then “all” might have less than an all inconclusive meaning. But we have verse 45: “Not one of the good promises which the Lord had made to the house of Israel failed; all came to pass.” “Not one . . . failed” defines “all.” If I had asked the emailer, “Did everyone stand up and cheer?,” and he said, “Not one failed to stand up and cheer,” I would have to assume that everyone stood up.

Self-Refuting Evolutionists

By Gary DeMar

Even before Ben Stein’s Expelled hit the movie theaters, a website went up critiquing the film. The people at Americans United for Separation of Church and State are encouraging their supporters not to see Expelled but instead to go to the Expelled Exposed website:

Two (Opposable) Thumbs Down: Skip Ben Stein’s Movie And Check Out ‘Expelled: Exposed’ Instead.

Could you ever imagine going into a court of law and only hearing the prosecution’s testimony? Keep in mind that AU is a legal organization. But there is no surprise here. The organization has always been about only telling one side of the story. Here’s what Rob Boston of AU wrote: “I’ll admit I haven’t seen it, but I trust the judgment of my AU colleague, Lauren Smith, who saw excerpts at a Religious Right event. She was not impressed.” I’d love to see Boston on a witness stand. “I’ll have to admit I didn’t see Roy steal the money, but my good friend did, and I trust his judgment.” What do you think would happen if any critic of evolution said something like this? It proves the point of Expelled: Evolutionists refuse to deal with contrary evidence and will exclude anyone from Academia who might ask some embarrassing questions and point out that evolution king Darwin has no clothes.

But let’s get back to the Expelled Exposed website that was created and is maintained by the National Center for Science Education. The website shows every indication that it was designed! Did the NCSE just throw up millions of bits and bytes, sit back, and wait for the site to come together? Of course it didn’t. They called in a programmer and, dare I say the word, a “designer.” Evolution does not comport with reality. There is no way to apply the evolution hypothesis to how the world works. I know, evolutionists will appeal to mutating viruses and bacteria, but no matter how often they mutate, they’re still viruses and bacteria with no new information added. There still remains the fundamental question of where the original information and matter came from. Multiple universes? Aliens? I don’t see how these are answers since they’re still left having to account for multiple universes and aliens.

The Irish Rovers, Unicorns, and a Skeptic Named Fred

By Gary DeMar

A clever novelty song of the 1960s was sung by a music group called “The Irish Rovers.” Their Unicorn Song (1967), based on  Shel Silverstein poem “The Unicorn,” was a one-hit wonder that is still popular today. It told the story of how unicorns didn’t make it on Noah’s ark.

So what does this song have to do with the Bible and a skeptic named Fred? For several weeks, I have been receiving emails from an atheist named Fred who gives all the appearances of being intelligent but continues to send me poorly argued reasons as to why the Bible cannot be true. One of these reasons is the Bible mentions unicorns. Since unicorns are mythological creatures, and the Bible considers unicorns to be real, therefore, the Bible can’t be the word of God. Good logic; bad information.

Fred claims to have studied the Bible in the original languages. Anyone who knows anything about ancient languages should know that translations are not the same as the original text. As our knowledge of ancient languages has improved, translations have gotten more accurate. This is the scientific method in action.  

An animal called the re’em (Hebrew: רְאֵם) is mentioned in several places in the Hebrew Bible, probably as a metaphor for strength since horns are mentioned. An article in the Jewish Encyclopedia states, “The allusions to the re’em as a wild, un-tamable animal of great strength and agility, with mighty horn or horns (Job 39:9-12, Ps 22:21, 29:6, Num 23:22, 24:8, Deut 33:17 comp. Ps 92:11), best fit the aurochs (Bos primigenius), [a wild ox]. This view is supported by the Assyrian rimu, which is often used as a metaphor of strength, and is depicted as a powerful, fierce, wild mountain bull with large horns.” Some have argued that a re’em might be a reference to a rhinoceros (nose horn) which often has a large single horn. While this is possible; it’s unlikely.

So how did the unicorn get into the Bible? Keep in mind that the Hebrew OT was translated into Greek which was then translated into Latin and then finally into English. At the time, a number of Hebrew words had no Greek, Latin, or English equivalents. In some cases, translators did not know how to render some Hebrew and Aramaic words, so they took educated guesses. The translators of the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint or LXX) rendered re’em as monokeros (mono= “one” + keros=”horn”). One theory speculates that a one-horned animal had been seen on some ancient Babylonian pictographs that showed a “wild ox” in profile. Being a profile carving, it looked like a one-horned creature (see Chalres F. Pfeiffer, Howard F. Vos, and John Rea, eds., Wycliffe Bible Dictionary [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999], 83).

The translators of the 1611 King James Version used the English equivalent “unicorn” (one-horn) for monoceros, although in modern translations the re’em is said to have “horns” and is not translated as “unicorn.” In Hebrew, re’em does not mean “one-horn.”

In The Truth About Unicorns , James Cross Giblin writes the following:

In the original version, the Hebrew writers referred seven times to a powerful animal called the re’em…. Not knowing what animal the Hebrews had in mind, the authors of the Septuagint translated re’em as monoceros, the Greek word for unicorn. There’s no reason to believe, however, that the Hebrews thought of the re’em as one-horned. Some later scholars argued that it was probably the African antelop, the oryx. They pointed out that the Arabic word for oryx was the similar rim (41).

How long has this information been available to a skeptic like Fred? The American Tract Society Bible Dictionary of 1859 states: “The Hebrew word means erect, and has no reference to the number of horns.” Smith’s Bible Dictionary, which was published in 1901, offers a helpful explanation: “The rendering of the Authorized Version of the Hebrew reem, a word which occurs seven times in the Old Testament as the name of some large wild animal. The reem of the Hebrew Bible, however, has nothing at all to do with the one-horned animal of the Greek and Roman writers, as is evident from (33:17) where in the blessing of Joseph it is said, ‘As the firstborn of his ox, majesty is his, and his horns are the horns of the wild ox; with them he will push the peoples, all at once, to the ends of the earth. And those are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and those are the thousands of Manasseh.’”

Fred is not interested in facts. They cloud his ability to rail against a worldview that has made him irrational and unteachable. I’ll be curious to see how he will attempt to dismiss this information.

Evolutionists Say they don’t believe in Talking Animals

By Gary DeMar

I’ve been corresponding with a die-hard atheist/evolutionist. One of the criticisms “Fred” has against Christianity is that the Bible has talking animals in it. He considers this to be absurd. It’s possible that the serpent (”a shining one”) of Genesis 3 is most likely a temporary manifestation of Satan, a “messenger of light” (2 Cor. 11:3-4, 14) that indwells one of the animals. Satan indwelling an animal does not seem unusual by biblical standards (Mark 5:1-13). There may be some hermeneutical help available from passages that describe Dan as a “serpent” (Gen. 49:17) and Herod as a “fox” (Luke 13:32). Whatever is going on in Genesis 3, it is not a description of animals that have an innate ability to speak.

Balaam’s donkey was obviously used by God as His mouthpiece. I don’t know why anyone who knows anything about the Bible would be surprised that a God who can create the world, make man from dirt, and raise the dead (Acts 26:8) could not use an animal to utter a message of rebuke. The text is quite clear that “the LORD opened the mouth of the donkey” (Num. 22:28). If Balaam’s donkey is a “talking animal,” then Charlie McCarthy is a talking block of wood.

After some additional thought, I wrote the following to Fred:

You take issue with animals talking. Given atheist/evolutionary assumptions, you’re an animal, and you’re talking! You find the miracles of the Bible ridiculous, and yet you believe that the universe came into existence from pre-existing matter that at one time was concentrated into an object (that no one ever saw) about the size of a marble. You also believe that this super-heated inorganic, sterile material exploded, and in time brought forth organic life with mind, logic, morality, and billions of talking animals like yourself. So please don’t lecture me until you solve the inherent problems of your own theory.

Cooking and Trimming Historical Evidence

By Gary DeMar
Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an English scientist and mathematician who conceptualized the idea of a programmable computer, understood that scientists were often guilty of manipulating evidence to add credibility to a theory. Babbage described three types of misconduct: forging (the outright invention of data), trimming (the cosmetic ‘massaging’ of data, so as to display them to best advantage), and cooking (discreetly losing the data that were out of line or did not help the hypothesis).[1] A careful and practiced eye will be on the alert for attempts to manipulate the evidence to support a preconception of a theory.

Misleading people on any given topic is made easier if the general public is ignorant on a subject or does not have the inclination or the ability to check the facts. John Adams is all the rage with his own HBO special based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book John Adams. In the past, Adams and other founding fathers have been used to support any number of views. For example, Barbara Ehrenreich ’s article “Why the Religious Right is Wrong” succeeds because it takes advantage of our nation’s historical ignorance. “[John] Adams,” she writes, “once described the Judeo‑Christian tradition as ‘the most bloody religion that ever existed.’”[2] As we will see, Ehrenreich trims and cooks the historical record and then hides her tracks by not referencing the Adams citation or offering anything else he said on the subject. How would she explain, for example, what Adams wrote in his Diary dated July 26, 1796?

The Christian religion is, above all the Religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern Times, the Religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity, and humanity, let the Blackguard [Thomas] Paine say what he will; it is Resignation to God, it is Goodness itself to Man.[3]

There is no need to reconcile this diary entry with Ehrenreich’s “trimmed” citation. Her Adams “quotation” is pulled out of context from a series of letters which he wrote to Judge F. A. Van der Kemp on issues relating to religion and politics. Adams actually stated, “As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”[4] In this letter, Adams defended biblical revelation against its many corruptions, certainly a worthy and needed enterprise, but Ehrenreich’s cooked and trimmed citation is a gross misrepresentation of his views. Levi Anthony cites Ehrenreich’s clipped citation in his article “God in the Classroom” wiithout questioning its validity. She can get away with this because of the general ignorance of Americans when it comes to American history. I’m interested to see Mark Bauerlein’s new book The Dumbest Generation who “finds nearly six in 10 17-year-olds can’t place the Civil War in the second half of the 19^th century.”[5]

Check out David Diefendorf’s Amazing . . . But False! There’s even some historical flim-flam in this book. Without an accurate knowledge of history, we are at the mercy of professional “mythstorians” who continually pull the historical wool over our eyes so they can promote a destructive social, scientific, and political agenda as Al Gore is attempting to do with his global warming hysteria, claiming that anyone who does not agree that global warming is man-made is akin to those who believed in a flat earth. Gore is as ignorant of the history of a belief in a flat earth.

Notes
1. Walter Gratzer, The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), vii.

2. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Why the Religious Right Is Wrong,” Time (September 7, 1992), 72.

3. John Adams, The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 3:233–334.

4. Letter to F. A. Van der Kemp, December 27, 1816. See Norman Cousins, ed., ‘In God We Trust’: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 104–105.

5. Greg Topp, “Dummy ‘drumbeat’ goes on,” USA Today (February 26, 2008), 5D.

Harold Camping: An Exercise in Exegetical Convenience

By Gary DeMar
Harold Camping is at it again. He is predicting that an eschatological “end” will take place in 2011.[1] After Edgar Whisenant’s 88 Reason Why the Rapture is in 1988 failed to deliver on its promise to predict the week of Jesus’ return, I thought that date setting had pretty much fallen out of favor with Christians. This is why I only mentioned Harold Camping’s 1994? in Last Days Madness as just another misguided attempt at date setting. Who in his right mind would take Camping seriously? What a miscalculation on my part. Never again will I underestimate the gullibility and ignorance of Christians when it comes to interpreting prophetic issues. Camping sold tens of thousands of copies of 1994? He appeared on “Larry King Live.” A two-day debate was held between Camping and two professors from Westminster Theological Seminary. I even debated Mr. Camping on a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, radio station. The media have given Camping’s view front-page coverage because of his calculated prediction that Jesus will return before October 1, 1994.

Who is Harold Camping? He is the president of the California-based Family Radio Network, a world-wide conglomerate of radio stations broadcasting a conservative and somewhat idiosyncratic Christian message. On a daily basis, Camping hosts a live call-in program entitled “Open Forum.” Listeners are invited to call, toll-free, and ask questions concerning biblical doctrines. For twenty years Camping has been working on calculating the time of Jesus’ return. He believed the end would occur sometime between September 15–27, 1994.[2]

He did not know the exact day because Scripture says “no man knows the day or the hour” (Matt. 24:36). While this is true, Camping asserts that we can certainly know the month and the year that Christ will return. Camping is an anomaly in prophecy circles because he is amillennial. Amillennialists are not known for setting dates. Camping’s prophetic methodology reads like the Kabbalah, a hermeneutical principle of finding hidden meanings in the text of Scripture. The human language of Scripture is examined and interpreted according to its numerical equivalents. By interchanging numerical equivalents, letters and words could be created, thereby allowing for new interpretations. The following example will illustrate that 1994? is a mixture of the Kabbalah, numerology, and an overactive imagination that is typical of Camping’s methodology. Camping’s methodology and preoccupation with numbers may have something to do with the fact that he earned a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942.[3]

In John 21:1–14, we learn that Jesus’ disciples were about 200 cubits out from the Sea of Galilee engaged in their trade as fishermen. On this day the disciples catch 153 fish. According to Camping the Bible is teaching that the 200 cubits represent about 2,000 years between the first and second comings of Christ.[4] Since Jesus was born, according to Camping, on October 4, 7 B.C., one needs only to add 2,000 years minus one year for the year zero and “presto change-o,” out comes 1994! What about the 153 fish? The number 153 equals 3 times 3 times 17: “The number three signifies the purpose of God whereas the number seventeen signifies heaven. Thus we learn that [the] purpose of God is to bring all believers that are ‘caught’ by the Gospel into heaven.”[5]

Camping reconstructs the genealogies to fit his interpretive model—pinpointing Adam’s creation at 11,013 B.C. While his method is ingenious, there is no way of testing his conclusions.[6] While the exact year of creation is important to Camping’s overall system, it is his conclusion that the numbers 13, 130, and 13,000 have date-setting significance. He bases this on the following: Adam was 130 years of age when Eve gave birth to Seth (Gen. 5:3); Jacob was 130 years of age when he came to Egypt (Gen. 47:9); Jehoida was 130 years of age when he died (2 Chron. 24:15). Because of the 11,013 B.C. date for the creation of the world, Camping is stuck with the number 13,000 (11,000 years B.C. + 2000 years A.D. = 13,000 years; more about this later). Camping searches the Bible to find a way of making the number 13 and its multiples significant. He does this by trying to convince his readers that while there are apparently 12 tribes, there are actually 13 tribes. He does the same with the number of apostles. While there seem to be only 12 apostles, there are in actuality 13 apostles.[7] Camping then moves in for the kill. While there are apparently 12,000 years for the duration of the earth, there are actually 13,000 years.

But I can play the numerology game as well as Camping: There are actually 14 tribes—the ten tribes + Joseph + Ephraim + Manassah + Levi = 14. Fourteen is the result of 2 X 7, the number of the church (2) and perfection (7), according to Camping.[8] Fourteen thousand years becomes the duration of man’s existence on earth. The same can be done with the number of apostles. Using Camping’s math, there are really 15 apostles: “The twelve,” including Judas (Luke 22:3), plus Matthias (Acts 1:26), Paul (1 Cor. 15:9), and Barnabas (Acts 14:14). But this will not do since neither 14 nor 15 fit with Camping’s belief in the soon return of Christ and the arbitrary 13,000-year marker.

The supposed significance of the number thirteen is arbitrary. The numbers ten and twelve and their multiples are much more significant than the number 13.[9] Could not 12 and 120, the age of Moses when he died, really mean twelve thousand years? It certainly makes more sense than 13,000 years. Of course, if you divide 12,000 by 2—the number, according to Camping, that signifies the church[10]—you get 6,000. Bishop Ussher calculated that the world was created in 4,004 B.C. To get the number 6,000 for the duration of the earth, we can do the following: 4,004 B.C.+ 1996 A.D.—one year from the change from B.C. to A.D. = 1995. Depending on what numbers we use, we can get the Bible to teaching almost anything.

You might think that I’m making this up, that I’m putting the worst possible spin on Camping’s 1994? I assure you that his entire book reads like this. Consider the following:

Likewise, the Bible apparently assures us that there were to be 12,000 years in the duration of the earth. That is, creation occurred 11,000 years (remember 11,000 + 6 years) before Christ [Jesus was born in 7 B.C.]. And Revelation 20:1–3 teaches that Satan was to be bound a thousand years. Since it can be readily shown that Satan was bound at the cross so that Christ would not be frustrated in His program of salvation for the world [!], the duration of the earth should be 11,000 plus 1000 years for a total of 12,000 years. Moreover, you recall that God told Noah in Genesis 6:3: “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.’“ While this 120 years could be the 120 years during which Noah constructed the ark, it apparently could also be a reference to the fullness of time for all mankind. The number twelve does signify the fullness of whatever God has in view. Then the 120 years could also signify 1200 years or 12,000 years or 120,000 years[11] for the duration of man’s existence on earth. Given all the other information in the Bible, we know that 12,000 years is the only number that can relate.[12]

Of course, Camping has a problem. He is one thousand years short. He must now figure out a way of stretching 12,000 to 13,000. It is at this point that he hunts for the mystical 13: 12 tribes become 13 tribes and 12 apostles become 13 apostles, according to Camping’s numerics. “Now we should broach the question: Where does 13,000 years bring us? This is easily answered. Creation occurred in the year 11,013 B.C. Exactly 13,000 years later brings us to 1988. This was the thirteenth thousandth anniversary of the history of the world.”[13] Camping’s calculations only take us to 1988, the end of the 13,000 years for the duration of the earth. “We see again how 13,000 years or the year 1988 stands out as the end of the world. Does that mean,” Camping argues, “that we could expect the year 1988 to be a candidate for the year of Christ’s return? Surely it must be a very important year, but we know it cannot be the year of the end of the world because we have already passed the year 1988.”[14]

Did you follow that? Camping maintains that 12,000 years is the magic number, but this leaves him a thousand years short. The number 13 which becomes 13,000 becomes the missing component. But this only takes us to 1988. The reason 1988 is not the year Jesus will return is because Jesus did not return in 1988! Camping must now come up with six additional years to make 1994 the year Jesus will return. How does he do it? Camping goes to Daniel 8:14 and finds 2300 days that are to be, according to Camping, “the final tribulation period. . . . Therefore, six years later than 1988 (actually 2300 days), Christ would return and we would be at the end of this world’s existence. That is the year 1994.”[15]

As this brief analysis demonstrates, Camping’s methodology is subjective. He picks and chooses only those numbers that fit his system. Numbers that contradict his conclusions, Camping arbitrarily reformulates to give them the needed meaning to force compliance to his already developed methodology. Camping’s amillennial detractors have had difficulty dealing with him. Traditional amillennialists and the renegade amillennialist Camping refuse to deal with the very clear time indicators that set the parameters for interpretation. Until premillennialists and amillennialists deal with the time texts, we will see more books like 1994?

Notes

1. Harold Camping, Time Has an End: A Biblical History of the World 11,013 B.C.–2011 A.D. (New York: Vantage Press, 2005).

2. Harold Camping, 1994? (New York: Vantage Press, 1992), 531.

3. http://www.atlasbooks.com/marktplc/01508.htm#summary

4. Camping, 1994?, 503.

5. Camping, 1994?, 504.

6. For an explanation, see James B. Jordan, “1994?—Not!,” Biblical Chronology 5:5 (September 1993), 2.

7. Using Camping’s math, there are really 15 apostles: “The twelve,” including Judas (Luke 22:3), plus Matthias (Acts 1:26), Paul (1 Cor. 15:9), and Barnabas (Acts 14:14). The New Testament describes the number of apostles as “the twelve” (1 Cor. 15:5).

8. Camping, 1994?, 371.

9. Terry, Hartill, Lange, and Gunner, in their discussions of the interpretation of symbolic numbers, do not even list the number 13. They go from 12 to 40. See John J. Davis, Biblical Numerology: A Basic Study of the Use of Numbers in the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, [1968] 1987), 122–123.

10. Camping, 1994?, 230.

11. Why isn’t 120,000 the key number? It’s larger than 13,000, therefore, Jesus’ coming could still be in the future. David Chilton writes: “Consider the promise in the law: ‘Know therefore that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love Him and keep His commandments’ (Deut. 7:9). The God of the Old Covenant told His people that He would bless them to the thousandth generation of their descendants. That promise was made (in round figures) about 3,400 years ago. If we figure the Biblical generation at about 40 years, a thousand generations is forty thousand years. We’ve got 36,600 years to go before this promise is fulfilled!” (Paradise Restored: An Eschatology of Dominion (Tyler, TX: Reconstruction Press, 1985), 221. Using Camping’s numerics we come up with the following: 40,000 years X 3 (the purpose of God according to Camping, the Trinity, the number of days Jesus was entombed, the number of apostles and tribes divided by 4, the approximate age of Jesus, 30—when He began His ministry— divided by 10, the number of cities in Decopolis) = 120,000.

12. Camping, 1994?, 440, 441.

13. Camping, 1994?, 441.

14. Camping, 1994?, 443.

15. Camping, 1994?, 444.

No Divine Foot in the Door

By Gary DeMar

William D. Watkins has written, “Facts do not come with interpretation tags, telling us how to view them. . . . Both sides haggle over the facts. Both sides search for new facts to add to their arsenals. Both sides raise accusations, yet it’s a rare day indeed when both sides acknowledge that their differences stem from something much more basic than facts. Their differences are rooted in opposing worldviews, which in turn are permeated with philosophical assumptions and commitments.”[1] In 2004, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, from North Carolina State University, caused a stir when she found “soft tissue” in a “fossilized dinosaur skeleton.” Given the basic assumptions of evolutionary theory, such a find borders on the impossible, unless there is a flaw in the underlying assumptions of evolutionary theory. “It’s a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T.rex walked what’s now Hell Creek Mountain in Montana.”[2]

So what does a scientist do with the evidence? “I had one reviewer tell me,” Schweitzer writes, “that he didn’t care what the data said, he knew that what I was finding wasn’t possible. I wrote back and said, ‘Well, what data [evidence] would convince you?’ And he said, ‘None.’”[3]

Dr. Scott Reed wrote the following in the journal Nature: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”[4] Modern-day science rests on the premise of materialism; it’s the operating assumption of science. “Modern biology has arrived at two major principles that are supported by so much interlocking evidence as to rank as virtual laws of nature. The first is that all biological elements and processes are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. The second principle is that all life has evolved by random mutation and natural selection.”[5] As a scientist, how does Wilson “know”—not just believe—these things? How does Wilson account for “the laws of physics and chemistry”? Did they just happen? Demonstrate from existing reality how laws appear out of less than thin air. What makes them “laws”?

On the one hand, Wilson states that these laws cannot be changed (notice his use of the word “obedient”). On the other hand, the nature of evolution is change (“evolved by random mutation and natural selection”). All worldviews are fundamentally faith-based, even those claiming to be scientific. “In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology [purpose] in the world at all.”[6] If all this happened “in the beginning,” and no one was “in the beginning,” how can a scientist make such a claim? What caused the causes? Is there purpose in the world today? If purpose did not eternally exist, from where and what did it arise?

How do we know if something is a “good purpose” (people finding cures for diseases) or bad purposes (sterilizing people who might add bad characteristics to the gene pool)? There is no way to tell by a study of the genome. Science can only describe what “is.” “Materialism,” the operating assumption of all science, “cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door”[7] in order to make a determination of an “ought.” Genes don’t have interpretation tags that say “good behavior” or “bad behavior.”

Notes

1. William D. Watkins, “Whose Facts Anyway?,” Christian Research Journal (24:2), 60.
2. Barry Yeoman, “Schweitzer’s Dangerous Discovery,” Discover (April 2006), 37. Also see “Scientists recover T. rex soft tissue: 70 million-year-old fossil yields preserved blood vessels” (March 24, 2005).
3. Mary Higby Schweitzer as quoted in Yeoman, “Schweitzer’s Dangerous Discovery,” 37.
4. Scott C. Todd, correspondence to Nature 410 (6752) (September 30, 1999), 423.
 Edward O. Wilson, “Let’s Accept the Fault Line between Faith and Science,” USA Today (January 15, 2006): www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-01-15-faith-edit_x.htm.
5. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991).
 6. Richard Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review (January 9, 1997), 31: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”