Capernaum
Capernaum - Israel
Capernaum was recently discovered and excavated on the shores of Galilee/Gennesaret.
The Bible says that during Jesus' 3-year ministry, Capernaum, a
fishing town, served as the base of his ministry:
"Now when Jesus heard that John had been put in
prison, He departed to Galilee. And leaving Nazareth, He came and dwelt in
Capernaum, which is by the sea..." (Matthew 4:12-13). Among
Capernaum's excavated ruins is Peter's house, which had served as a base for the
local and visiting Christians. You can actually peer into the ruins of
Peter's house in Capernaum, identified by the markings on the stone wall.
As archaeology, physics, astronomy, microbiology and other sciences advance, what I've learned is that more and more of the Bible actually have been getting confirmed, not vice versa. For example, prior to the telescope was invented, people could count the ~5000 stars visible to the naked eye and dismissed as exaggeration the statement in Jeremiah 33:22 that stars "cannot be numbered". The Hubble telescope has shown that even with today's technology, the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe, indeed cannot be numbered. Molecular vibrations and resonance now explain how sound waves collapsed the wall of Jericho in Joshua 6:20, and while medical breakthroughs let more people to live to be 100 years old, we can't push beyond the 120 years limit prescribed in Genesis 6:3.
Does that mean the earth was created in six days as the Bible claims? Probably, but only as the Bible claims - "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (2 Peter 3:8) - and the plural form of the original Greek word for "thousand" means "innumerable".
What about Darwin's theory of Evolution, which claims that we're simply the result of random mutations over a very long time?
Imagine that amidst the ruins of Capernaum above you find 10 stones laid out in the shape of the letter "S". You may look at those stones and wonder if they'd been laid like that by someone or if something random like rain water draining from the hill near Capernaum may have placed the stones in that shape.
But imagine that you find in Capernaum's ruins 10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) stones that spell out the entire collection of Shakespeare's plays. You couldn't attribute that to some random cause, could you? You'd leave Capernaum with the conclusion that somebody must have laid out those stones.
What's my point? Charles Darwin didn't have the electron microscope and assumed the cell - the basic building block of life and the starting point for his theory of evolution - to be just some uniform blob. But today's electron microscope shows the cell actually to be an incredibly complex organic machine made of about ten trillion atoms organized into highly specific, interdependent parts, all of which are needed for the cell to exist in the first place.
The number of atoms in a cell far exceed the number of cells in a newborn baby. So building a theory for the human body without knowing the cell is like building an air force without knowing what an airplane is.*
The courses on evolution, including one at Masters' level, whose teachings I believed unquestioningly until hearing the other side of the argument, now stand out for the major issues it skirted more than the minute details they focused on.
* For more scientific evidences on this, watch and listen to a couple of former atheists. One is an MD and the other is a JD / former Legal Affairs Editor of Chicago Tribune.
As archaeology, physics, astronomy, microbiology and other sciences advance, what I've learned is that more and more of the Bible actually have been getting confirmed, not vice versa. For example, prior to the telescope was invented, people could count the ~5000 stars visible to the naked eye and dismissed as exaggeration the statement in Jeremiah 33:22 that stars "cannot be numbered". The Hubble telescope has shown that even with today's technology, the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe, indeed cannot be numbered. Molecular vibrations and resonance now explain how sound waves collapsed the wall of Jericho in Joshua 6:20, and while medical breakthroughs let more people to live to be 100 years old, we can't push beyond the 120 years limit prescribed in Genesis 6:3.
Does that mean the earth was created in six days as the Bible claims? Probably, but only as the Bible claims - "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (2 Peter 3:8) - and the plural form of the original Greek word for "thousand" means "innumerable".
What about Darwin's theory of Evolution, which claims that we're simply the result of random mutations over a very long time?
Imagine that amidst the ruins of Capernaum above you find 10 stones laid out in the shape of the letter "S". You may look at those stones and wonder if they'd been laid like that by someone or if something random like rain water draining from the hill near Capernaum may have placed the stones in that shape.
But imagine that you find in Capernaum's ruins 10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) stones that spell out the entire collection of Shakespeare's plays. You couldn't attribute that to some random cause, could you? You'd leave Capernaum with the conclusion that somebody must have laid out those stones.
What's my point? Charles Darwin didn't have the electron microscope and assumed the cell - the basic building block of life and the starting point for his theory of evolution - to be just some uniform blob. But today's electron microscope shows the cell actually to be an incredibly complex organic machine made of about ten trillion atoms organized into highly specific, interdependent parts, all of which are needed for the cell to exist in the first place.
The number of atoms in a cell far exceed the number of cells in a newborn baby. So building a theory for the human body without knowing the cell is like building an air force without knowing what an airplane is.*
The courses on evolution, including one at Masters' level, whose teachings I believed unquestioningly until hearing the other side of the argument, now stand out for the major issues it skirted more than the minute details they focused on.
* For more scientific evidences on this, watch and listen to a couple of former atheists. One is an MD and the other is a JD / former Legal Affairs Editor of Chicago Tribune.