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CONTENTS

Does Scientific Fact Clash with the Bible? 3

The Origin of Life

The Origin of Man

Place of Man’s Origin

Man Reverses Himself

—the Bible Triumphs

Learning from Nature

Your Future in a Scientific World

based my answer? Have I carefully analyzed the facts, or have I based my answer on unproved theories, hearsay and prejudice? What do I really know about the Bible’s account of

for the answers to these questions. Others turn to the religious leaders. Still others say there is no positive answer. Another group, the atheists, after rightly rejecting the many conflicting beliefs and inconsistencies of those who claim one thing and practice another, conclude that life started without a creator and hence all life on earth today is the result of the evolutionary process. Millions of people within the communistic bloc, and even those attending the public schools in the Western world, are systematically taught this.

While there is some respect shown the Bible in Western lands and it is used to support moral issues, even in Christendom it is generally thought to provide no final answer to the question of man’s origin. The conclusion is drawn that modern science and its findings have discredited the Bible.

Is it true that the findings of proved science nullify the Bible’s account of the origin of life? Many quickly answer, Yes. But before dismissing the matter, ask yourself these questions: On what have I man’s origin when put to the test of scientific findings? Think of it this way: If you were accused of a crime you did not commit and you were on trial for your life, would you be satisfied to be condemned to death on the basis of rumor, hearsay, theory, or because your neighbor was prejudiced against you? Of course not! You would want the facts presented.

In this same spirit one who loves the truth should honestly face this fact: As shown in the following articles, the findings of proved science harmonize completely with the Bible’s account of the origin of life! Thus, if you are to reject what the Bible teaches concerning the origin of life, then, to be consistent, you must also reject the established findings of true science, which expose theories that have no basis whatsoever in scientific fact

Let us now examine, from the scientific viewpoint, the origin of life and see how this lays the foundation for answering the questions of why man is on the earth and where he is going—questions that are of vital concern to you.

HOW did an life begin? The atheist answers: “By itself?’ The Bible answers: “You are worthy, Jehovah, even our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they existed and were created,”—Rev. 4:11.

There is no middle ground. Either the Bible is correct or the atheist is correct. Either there is a Creator or there is not. Either life began by the will of a Creator or it began by itself.

What is the evidence? What have the scientists discovered in their centuries of searching and experimenting? To examine this matter let us employ three means used by scientists to determine whether the testimony supports the atheist, who says: “Life began by itself,” or whether it supports the Bible, which states: “Jehovah , . . created all things.” These three means are: (1) Observation and logic; (2) Mathematical calculations; (3) Verified principles or laws of nature.

Observation and Logic

Observation is what registers on the senses, from which we can draw logical conclusions. Observation tells us that a vacuum, total emptiness, does not out of itself form material substance. A child knows that an empty piggy bank will not fill up with coins by itself. Someone must put them in. An engineer cannot hopefully sit in his office and wait for the component parts of a skyscraper to assemble themselves. Workers must accomplish this.

Things such as these have never been observed to happen of themselves. With every construction a superior force has accomplished the work needed. The greater is responsible for the forming of the lesser. It is never the reverse.

Note the logical conclusions drawn from such observations by research chemist E. C. Kornfeld: “While laboring among the intricacies and infinitely minute particles of the laboratory, I frequently have been overwhelmed by a sense of the infinite wisdom of God. . . . One is rather amazed that a mechanism of such intricacy could ever function properly at all. . . . The simplest man-made mechanism requires a planner and a maker. How a mechanism ten thousand times more involved and intricate can be conceived of as self-constructed and self-developed is completely beyond me,”-—The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe.

Mathematics

Professor J, Gray, mathematician and scientist, said that all systems move “towards the state of greatest probability.” Now, then, is it probable that life originated by chance?

Is it probable that all the atoms of a blob of ink would, by themselves, move in the same direction to form letters and words on a page of paper? Is it probable that the Sunday edition of the New York Times would have been formed by a chance coordination of ink molecules? What is the mathematical probability of such chance happenings?

Professor Gray said: “The probability of simultaneous coordinated movement is very, very small . . . The degree of smallness can be judged by putting ten black and ten white balls into a box and drawing them out at random in lots of ten. The probability that we will draw ten white or ten black balls is five times in one million. If we increase the numbers and draw one hundred balls, the probability of drawing balls all of one color is so small that we say that anybody who expected it to occur must be slightly demented . . . The organization of the simplest living organism is clearly more complex than that of a stone or of a motor-car, and it carries out processes which are infinitely more complex than the sorting out of black from white particles* What, in fact, is the probability that any chance distribution of molecules should lead spontaneously to the dynamically active mechanism of the living organism? Would any serious credence be given to the suggestion that a motor-car or even a foot print on the sands came spontaneously into existence without the intervention of directive forces? Why, then, should we accept the spontaneous origin of living matter? It is possible, but it is so improbable that, if considered as an observable phenomenon, in any other sphere of human thought it would be discarded as a figment of a deranged brain.” —Nature, Oct. 28, 1933.

Another scientist computed the probability of a single protein molecule (one of the molecules essential for life) arising out of chance. As stated in the book Human Destiny, it would take 10 to the 243d power [1 followed by 243 zeros] billions of years for this to happen! Since scientists estimate the age of the earth to be a few billion years, there would not have been enough time for this to occur!

However, let us assume that this did happen, contrary to the principle of things occurring according to the "greatest probability.” Does this mean life? No! Life itself is not even in question in this calculation, but merely one of the substances that make up living things! The same scientist says: "One molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary ... If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the preceding figures would seem negligible.” And for good reason, as an article on creation in Look magazine of January 16, 1962, stated: “The cell is as complicated as New York City.” Did New York City build itself?

The conclusion from mathematics is overwhelming. Princeton University biologist Professor Edwin Conklin said: "The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.” (Reader's Digest, January, 1963) Webster’s new unabridged dictionary took 757 editor-years to produce, not including the time of typists, photocopiers, clerical assistants, or the time of over two hundred consultante, to say nothing of the many men required to print and assemble it in the factory! Would anyone suggest all this happened by blind chance?

The Bible explains very simply why the mathematical probability that life would originate by itself is so infinitesimal: because it did not happen by chance! There was not even one chance in billions, because God, not blind chance, is identified as having created all things.—Gen. 1:1,20, 24,26.

Principles of Nature

A third line of scientific evidence is that provided by the established principles or laws of nature. Four of these are: (1) Inertia; (2) Equilibrium; (3) Conservation of mass-energy; (4) Biogenesis.

A dictionary defines "inertia” as the "tendency of all objects and matter in the universe to stay still if still, or if moving, to go on moving in the same direction unless acted on by some outside force.” A ball will not pick itself off the ground and throw itself to the catcher. A wagon or an automobile will not start moving by itself. The law of inertia tells us that these things stay the way they are unless acted upon by another force. A horse pulls the wagon. A person drives the automobile. Inanimate matter, devoid of motion, energy and life to begin with, would have stayed that way forever unless acted on by an outside force. It would have had no reason to begin forming into a universe and then into life. This would be contrary to the law of inertia. The only way it would have overcome this inertia would have been for an outside source of energy to begin operating on it.

The Bible is in complete harmony with this scientific principle. Isaiah 40:26 tells us the source of power that overcame this Inertia: "Raise your eyes high up and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who is bringing forth the army of them even by number, all of whom he calls even by name. Due to the abundance of dynamic energy, he also being vigorous in power, not one of them is missing.’’ Yes, God is identified as the One who provided the needed force.

Another principle is that of "equilibrium/¹ also called "entropy" or the "second law of thermodynamics." Engineering specialist C. M. Hathaway tells what this is: “In simple terms . .. [the] Second Law of Thermodynamics means that Nature cannot design herself, because every physical transformation must be accompanied by a loss in design.” Scientist G. R. Harrison, in the book What Man May Be, adds: "Boiled down it says that if you want to do anything remarkable in a physical system you must supply direction. Molecules left to themselves become chaotic in their motions. A house or a turnip or a man left without control tends to decay; to produce any of these objects requires directed effort. Everything we call alive seems to contain such a directing force.”

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Edwin Schrodinger says: “When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion comes to a standstill, usually very soon . . . after that the whole system fades away int lead inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur." To illustrate: the sun shining on the desert sand and the wind blowing on it never produce an automobile or even two gears, one turning the other. To the contrary, put an automobile in the desert and it soon begins to disintegrate. Or take a large barrel and put into it bits of iron, glass, rubber, wood and other materials. Then turn the barrel thousands of times and open it. Would you find that the materials had developed by themselves and produced a complete automobile? Neverl All you would find is pieces of the materials and a dust composed of a mixture of them. If a housewife did not clean house for a few weeks, what would happen? Would the house improve in appearance? No, deterioration would set in and in time the house would look chaotic.

This principle of nature is completely contrary to the theory that living things began by themselves. Inanimate matter does not search out a way to improve itself but tends toward this state of equilibrium. To theorize and say that matter searched out a way to organize itself, not only into a machine, but into life itself, is stubbornly to ignore these principles of the physical world around us.

The third principle, the “conservation of mass-energy,” Is the discovery by scientists that they cannot actually destroy or create anything, but merely change things into some other form of matter or into energy. With the advent of atomic energy, scientists have been able to transform matter into energy through atomic reactions, although they cannot transform energy into matter. Sir James Jeans said: “Energy is indestructible,” showing that it could not have come from nothing. If it cannot be reduced to nothing, then it could not have come from nothing. It had to originate with a source of always-existing energy, which source is God.

Of the fourth principle, “biogenesis,” The Encyclopedia Americana says: “From the Greek words bios, life, and genesis, birth, source, creation, is the biological term for the doctrine that living organisms are produced only by other living organisms . . . biologists are now not only in virtually unanimous agreement that all life derives from preceding life, but that the parent organism and its offspring are of the same kind"

This principle tells us that there is nothing living on earth, animal or vegetable, that did not receive its life from previous life, from a superior, mature parent. Since this law of biogenesis states that life proceeds only from preexisting life, there must have been a preexisting life that started all life. This eternal source of life, as shown at Psalm 36:5, 9, is God: “O Jehovah, . ., with you is the source of life.”

Note the harmony of this Bible explanation with the following statements of scientists. Astronomer G. Stromberg (Science of Mind, Sept. 1958): “We are convinced that [mMZ] ex nihilo fit (out of nothing, nothing comes).” Physicist Lord Eelvin (Evolution): *T am ready to adopt, as an article of scientific faith, true through all space and time, that life proceeds from life and from nothing but life.”

Thus the evidence from observation and logic, from mathematics, and from laws of nature confirms the Bible to be correct when it speaks of a First Cause that always existed. (Ps. 90:2; 93:2; Isa. 57:15) As Lord Kelvin declared (Nineteenth Century) : “If you think strongly enough you will be forced by Science to a belief in God.” Adds scientist Max Planck (Science of Mind, Dec. 1955): “There is no explanation of the universe apart from the assumption of a Supreme Creative Intelligence.” Albert Einstein, in The World as 1 See It, affirmed: “The scientist’s religious feelings take the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

Romans 1:20 says of those who choose to ignore such findings of true science and who cling to theories that have no basis in scientific fact: “They are inexcusable.” Why? Because: “Those things of God which the eye is unable to see, that is, his eternal power and existence, are fully made clear, he having given the knowledge of them through the things which he has made.”—The Bible in Basic English,

When put to the test of scientific evidence, the Bible emerges triumphant on the question of the origin of life! But where did man come from? Did God create life in the form of living cells and then guide these through the evolutionary process until man emerged? Or was man, as well as all other forms of life, a direct creation of God? What does the scientific evidence show? The next three articles will discuss, according to actual scientific findings and not according to speculative theories, the facts concerning man's appearance on earth, the place where he started and the time he has been on earth.

OVER 3,400 years ago Moses wrote: “And God proceeded to create the man in his image, in God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.” —Gen. 1:27.

About a hundred years ago evolutionist Charles Darwin wrote:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”—Origin of Species,

Here again, there is no middle ground. Either the Bible is correct or the evolutionist is correct Either God made man as a special creation or he created an elementary form of life from which man evolved.

What does the scientific evidence show? What are the facts of man’s origin? Let us examine the evidence from the following viewpoints: (1) Fossil remains; (2) The races of mankind; (3) Languages and writing.

The Facts of Fossil Remains

Evolutionists state that man developed from a primitive form of life. They constantly seek to find links between the various forms of life in the fossil record to prove their contention.

Did Charles Darwin have such fossil remains as evidence when he formulated his ated varieties between the allied species.” He continues; “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks . . . To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can. give no satisfactory answer.”

That was over a hundred years ago. But have discoveries been unearthed since that time to fill in these gaps in the record? Note what an internationally known evolutionist of modern times, Lecomte du Noiiy, acknowledges in connection with various types of life:

(1) Of reptiles: “All types of reptiles . . , appear ‘suddenly* and it is impossible to link them to any terrestrial ancestors. The same is true of tortoises.” Then he illogically concludes: “A long series of transitions certainly exist. .. But we have no precise facts to go on, and no trace of intermediaries.”—Human Destiny.

(2> Of birds: They have, “it must be admitted, all the unsatisfactory characteristics of absolute creation,” Once more he illogically adds: “We feel that such cannot be the case. This stands out today as one of the greatest puzzles of evolution.”

• (3) Of insects: “About a thousand species have been identified, but nothing is known of their past. If they descend from the common stock we have no idea when they branched off to evolve in their own manner.” Again he illogically concludes: “At any rate, it is plausible to imagine, as do certain great zoologists, that things occurred in this way.”

• (4) Of horses: “Each one of these intermediaries seems to have appeared ‘suddenly/ and it has not yet been possible, because of the lack of fossils, to reconstitute the passage between these intermediaries.” Another illogical conclusion follows: “Yet it must have existed.” However, he admits: “The known forms remain separated like the piers of a ruined bridge . . . The continuity we surmise may never be established by facts.”

• (5) Of all lower animals: “In brief, each group, order, or family seems to be born suddenly and we hardly ever find the forms which link them to the preceding strain. When we discover them they are already completely differentiated. Not only do we find practically no transitional forms, but in general it is impossible to authentically connect a new group with an ancient one.”

• (6) Of man: “The truth is that nothing positive is known.” By this is meant that there is no record of man’s ancestry found in the fossils that links him with previous forms. A similar conclusion is stated by The Encyclopaedia Britannica: “There remain great blanks in the line of evidence which links the origin of modern man to an extinct form of anthropoid ape. Between the highest kind of anthropoid and the lowest type of man . . . there still exists a great gap; the transitional forms which fill this gap still remain to be discovered.” In its 1959 edition, exactly a hundred years from Darwin’s writing, this was stated: “Here there is a conspicuous gap in the fossil record which still remains to be filled by future discoveries.”

For over a hundred years thousands of scientists have made the most intensive effort to find the evidence of man’s supposed descent from the lower forms of life, and the record is still a blank! As Science magazine of July 4, 1958, said: “One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified multicellular marine invertebrates in the Lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age , . . when we turn to examine the Precambrian rocks for the forerunners of these Early Cambrian fossils, they are nowhere to be found.”

However, what of the discoveries of such remains as Neanderthal man, Java man, and others? Are these evidences in support of evolution? No, because, as previously noted by scientists, the link between these and the lower animals is nonexistent. Nor are such fossils older than modern-type human fossils. In the book Fossils, by geology Professor W. H. Matthews, we find this statement: “It was originally believed that Neanderthal man was directly ancestral to Homo sapiens, or modem man. However, specimens have been found which combine the characteristics of both Neanderthal and modern man. Even more important is the discovery of fossil remains of modem man that are as old or older than Neanderthal man,” This is also true of the others. Fossil remains show that modem man has existed as the contemporary of these extinct varieties or long before they appeared on the scene!

Most of these so-called "links” consist of only a fragment here, a borre or a tooth there. Out of these, a supposed prehistoric man is constructed. One such in Nebraska, U.S.A., was said to be one million years old. The evidence? Only one tooth (yes, tooiftj not teeth!) was found¹ This tooth was later proved to be from an extinct species of pig! The Java man was constructed from a few fragments of a skull, a few teeth, a thigh bone found fifty feet away, and part of a lower Jaw found in another part of the island!¹ Many scientists point out that the skull fragments were obviously from a chimpanzee or ape. The famed Piltdown man was recently acknowledged to be a deliberate fraud, bringing together the Jaw of an ape and the skull of a humanlf

Why this great difficulty in tracing man’s origin back through the animal kingdom? Why does the mountain of evidence in the form of thousands of fossils always say the same thing—that all kinds appear suddenly, in wide variety and abundantly, without connecting links? Because, as the scientific record confirms, the origin of man and animal took place just as Genesis 1:21, 25, 27 said it did: "God proceeded to create the great sea monsters and every living soul that moves about, which the waters swarmed forth according to their kinds, and every winged flying creature according to its kind . . . the wild beast of the earth according to its kind and the domestic animal according to its kind and every moving animal of the ground according to its kind.. .. And God proceeded to create the man in his image, . . . male and female he created them.”

The Races of Mankind

What do studies of the races of man show? Anthropologists R. Benedict and G. Weltfish, in The Races of Mankind, state: “The Bible story of Adam and Eve, father and mother of the whole uman race, told centuries ago the sau . truth that science has shown today: that all the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin. Science describes the intricate make-up of the human body; all its different organs cooperating in keeping us alive, its curious anatomy that couldn’t possibly have ‘Just happened’ to be the same in all men if they did not have a common origin . . . The races of mankind are what the Bible says they are—brothers.”

In What Is Race?, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, we are told: "All of us, if we went back far enough, hundreds of generations, would arrive at the same place—the base of the human family tree with the first ‘Homo sapiens.’ , .. Our common ancestor could as well be called Adam, which also means man in Hebrew, for the familiar Biblical story foreshadowed the evidence of science that present men derive from a common stock.”

Scientific evidence shows that ancient man was the intellectual brother of modem man, except that modern man has degenerated. Archaeologist O. D. Miller says: "The tradition of the ‘golden age’ then, was not a myth. The doctrine of a subsequent decline, of a sad degeneracy, of the human race from an original state of happiness and purity, undoubtedly embodied a great but lamentable truth. Our modem philosophies of history which begins with the primeval man as a savage, evidently need a new introduction. No, the primeval man was not a savage.” {Har-Moad) The Bible, in Genesis chapter 3, shows this is what actually happened.

French biologist and geneticist Jean Rostand says of ancient man: “If, by some miracle, it were possible to fetch a newborn child of that past age into our own time, and to bring him up as one of ours, he would become a man exactly like us.” —Science World, Feb. 1, 1961.

Languages and Writing

Did languages evolve from grunts to complex forms? They should have if evolution is true. But what is the evidence? Science Digest of October, 1960, reports: “Whatever the origin of language, it must have spread rapidly. In his brief moment on the earth, man has developed 2,500 to 5,000 different languages . . , Each of the languages is complete. Contrary to popular notion, not even the most primitive savages communicate in grunts or growls.”

In its issue of September 3,1955, Science News Letter says: “Evolution in language, Dr, Mason has found, is just the opposite of biological evolution. Languages have evolved from the complex to the simple.” As Science Illustrated of July, 1948, said: “Older forms of the languages known today were far more difficult than their modern descendants . , . man appears not to have begun with a simple speech, and gradually made it more complex, but rather to have gotten hold of a tremendously knotty speech somewhere in the unrecorded past, and gradually simplified it to the modern form.”

Archaeologist J. P, Free states: “We see no reason for doubting the Biblical indication concerning the original unity of language, or the implication that mankind had speech from the beginning. No discovery, ancient or modern, has shown otherwise.”—-Archaeology and Bible History,

Professor C. Laird, in The Miracle of Language, says: “All languages appear to have descended from one universal parent language.” Says the New York Journal-American of August 11, 1962: “At one time, man probably did speak only one language. Scholars can trace practically all the languages spoken on earth today back to an ancestor language. In time, however, this one language broke up into several groups, each of which is a ‘family* of languages.” It is just as the Bible relates at Genesis 11:1: “Now all the earth continued to be of one language and of one set of words,” Then came the confusion of tongues, which science has corroborated.

Interesting too is the total absence of any reference to subhumans in the earliest records of man, whether written documents, drawings in caves, sculptures or otherwise. Had there been such manbeasts, the early writers and drawers would have mentioned them or drawn likenesses of them, since it is natural for man to be concerned with such matters. To the contrary, the earliest records of many peoples confirm the Bible record.

From the facts of the fossil record, the relation of the races, man's languages and his records, science once again has confirmed the Bible record to be completely accurate. As the great biologist Yves Delage once said: “If one takes his stand upon the exclusive ground of facts it must be acknowledged that the formation of one species from another species has not been demonstrated at all.” (Zs Evolution Proved?) Evolution is without basis in scientific fact! Another triumph for the Bible In this scientific world!

German scientist August Welsmann’s conclusion several decades ago, as recorded in The Encyclopedia Americana, is even more pertinent today: “Nothing but gross want of knowledge can excuse a man at the present day in bringing forward this argumentum ex ignorantia in support of the descent of man from beasts.”—1942 Ed., Vol. 18, p. 185.

AT VARIOUS times in the past it has been said that man had his earliest beginnings in places such as Asia,

Africa or Europe. Some have singled out Egypt as the place of man’s origin.

Thousands of years before any of these suggestions, the Bible declared that man’s original home was in a garden located in the geographic area called Eden. Genesis 2:8 says: “Further, Jehovah God planted a garden in Eden, toward the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” The general location of this area can be established by the names of two of four rivers mentioned in connection with it. At Genesis 2:14 (Knox) we read: “The third river, which flows past the Assyrians, is called Tigris, and the fourth is the river Euphrates.”

Thus the Bible, thousands of years ago, gave the place of man’s origin as southwest Asia, in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, called Mesopotamia by the Greeks (meaning “land between the rivers”). The place of man’s home 1,656 years later, after the flood of Noah’s day, is mentioned with even more exactness as “the mountains of Ararat,” in what is now the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, —Gen. 8:4.

What do the findings of scientists reveal as to the accuracy of these Biblical descriptions compared to the other suggestions? What does the evidence of modem science tell us as to where man first walked the earth ?

The Place of Origin Located Without doubt ancient civilizations existed in various continents. However, after more than a century of extensive research by scientists the search for man’s place of origin narrowed down to the Near East. Discovery after discovery resulted in an accumulation of facts upon which the scientists could draw definite conclusions.

In the book From the Stone Age to Christianity, Professor W. F. Albright writes: “Archaeological research has thus established beyond doubt that there is no focus of civilization in the earth that can begin to compare in antiquity and activity with the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean and the region immediately to the east of it.” As for other areas where cultures were found, Albright states: “Other civilizations of the Old World were all derived from this cultural center or were strongly influenced by it.”

During the last century some scientists concluded that Egypt was the homeland of man's oldest civilization. But then evidence began to mount to shift the emphasis away from Egypt. Regarding this, archaeologist W. A. Fairservis in The Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile states: “During the nineteenth century Egypt was regarded as the homeland of man’s civilization, oldest in the world. Now the pendulum has swung to Mesopotamia primarily because the accumulating evidence for priority, gathered from a remarkable series of excavations there, seems to place Egypt as the recipient rather than the originator of an overwhelming number of traits important to civilization. Agriculture, animal domestication, earliest metallurgy, the wheel, writing, etc., are all considered to have come to the Nile Valley diffused from their points of origin in Western Asia.”

Ulis is corroborated in the Foreword of Professor G. E. Smith's book, In the Beginning: “That civilization originated in the great river valleys of the near and middle east may be regarded as certain ... We do know that many of the earliest features of Egyptian culture were probably borrowed from further east.”

But where “further east”? Archaeologist P. J. Wiseman tells us: “All the real evidence we have, that of Genesis, archaeology, and the traditions of men, points to the Mesopotamian plain as the oldest home of man. Far Eastern civilization, whether Chinese or Indian, cannot compete with this land in the antiquity of its peoples, for it can easily sustain its claim to be the cradle of civilization.”

Other authorities add to this evidence to make clear that the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia, is the birthplace of mankind. Note some of this testimony in regard to various fields of human endeavor, such as the arts and sciences.

Writing

Not so long ago it was generally believed that writing was one of the newer arts of mankind and of undetermined origin. Now, however, writing in various forms has been discovered in such quantity as to make plain that it was known and used even before the flood of Noah's day. Tens of thousands of documents written on various surfaces bear testimony that the art of writing was of the most ancient origin. But where did it get its start?

The ancient historian Berbsus, writing in the third century B.C., said that the art of writing was introduced by a southern Mesopotamian people. David Diringer in The Alphabet adds: “Cuneiform writing is probably the most ancient system of writing ... It seems that the great invention was due to the Sumerians [the earliest inhabitants of Shinar] ,.. the earliest extant written cuneiform documents, consisting of over one thousand tablets and fragments, discovered mainly at Uruk or Warka, the Biblical Erech, and belonging to the 'Uruk Period’ of the Mesopotamian pre-dynastic period.”

It is only logical for science to find that writing originated in Mesopotamia. Perfect Adam was given not only a language, but also the ability to write, for in the Bible, at Genesis 5:1, we find reference made to “the book of Adam’s history.” Yes, Adam, the author or owner of that document, could write. After his dismissal from Eden, and especially after the flood of Noah’s day, mankind spread to various parts of the earth, taking with them their degenerating languages and their now developing forms of writing.

Since neither Noah nor Shem was a party to building the tower of Babel, their speech and alphabet were not confused. So it should not be surprising that, centuries later, Semitic peoples (descendants of Shem) would be writing prose and verse while other national groups were still struggling in the development of systems adequate to express their ideas in writing. In this regard R. W. Rogers, in Volume I of History of Babylonia and Assyria, states: “Even while they still struggled with ideograms, determinatives, and simple and compound syllabic signs, Phoenicians and Hebrews close at hand, to say nothing of yet ruder folk like the Moabites, were writing inscriptions, and, in the case of the Hebrews, even books in prose and verse by means of a simple and most effective alphabet—whose construction was the greatest effort of ancient civilization.”

Thus writing originated in Mesopotamia, and the more advanced alphabetic style is attributed to the descendants of Shem, who, no doubt, were more advanced because of receiving a writing style from Noah for a language that was not confused after the flood.

There is evidence in early post-Flood writings to indicate that Eden was near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, In these writings on the plain of Shi-nar the symbol for sun was originally a picture of the sun rising between two mountain peaks. If the writing had originated in Shinar, no doubt the sun would have been shown rising from the level horizon, as the southern portion of Mesopotamia, Shinar, was flat. Also, the sign for land or homeland, which was used to designate the flat level plain of Shinar, was the picture of three mountain peaks. These symbols must have been used in the mountains to the north before man made his way down the rivers to Shinar, As G. R. Driver in Semitic Writing states: "Such signs prove the Sumerians to have been originally a people dwelling in mountainous country, not in the flat Babylonian plain.”

Mathematics

The early Sumerians used mathematics. Long before the Babylonians came on the scene the earliest inhabitants in Mesopotamia had a workable system of numbers that was satisfactorily adapted to business transactions. In the same area the ancient Babylonians formulated their fundamental laws of mathematics. So highly developed were these laws that some of them were not rediscovered by the Greeks until fifteen hundred years later! As Edward Chi-era says in his book They Wrote on Clay: "So advanced were they that many an As-syriologist gets lost in trying to analyze a list of figures, the interrelations of which he will never be able to grasp ur* his mathematical knowledge is greater uian is generally the case ... For the complicated calculations which were the joy of the Babylonian mathematicians, the sexagesimal system may even have been superior to the decimal.,, Actually, the whole system was so effective that it has imposed itself upon the world. Few people realize that we still follow it in some cases. We still divide the circle into 360 parts, the hour into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds .. . The revelation that figures could alter the numerical value according to their position in a group has been assigned to a good many other peoples, while the Sumerians, who first discovered it, have been forgotten.”

That mathematics had its origin where man originated, in Mesopotamia, was also indicated by the Bible. In Adam’s documents, later compiled by Moses in the first few chapters of Genesis, we find both cardinal and ordinal numbers,—Gen. 1:8; 4:24.

Astronomy

Where did the science of astronomy get its start? In Asia, Africa, Europe or the Americas? Astronomy got its start in the same cradle of the human race, Mesopotamia! Note what F, Hoyle, in his book As-tronomy, states: "Certainly Greek astronomy before 1000 B.C. was quite negligible whereas in Babylonia of that time astronomy was already a strong development, and even before Babylonian times it is possible the Sumerians already possessed a considerable body of fairly refined astronomical data,”

In The Concise History of Astronomy, Peter Doig comes to the same conclusion: “It was probably in the Mesopotamia region of the earth that many of the constellations and the zodiac itself were first mapped out. Fragments of the baked bricks of libraries have been found shoeing constellations named as they are at the present day.”

In addition to the mention of astronomical data on tablets, it is of great interest to note how scientists- know that astronomy began in Mesopotamia. This is done by examining what the ancients saw and from this determining where they were when they observed the sky. Pierre Rousseau, in Man’s Conquest of the Stars, says: "We may very roughly outline the zone of the earth in which the preoccupation with the heavens first made its appearance.” Where is this general area? He continues: “This zone passes through the Mediterranean, and China.” But which of these is the more ancient? Rousseau concludes: “It Is even possible to localize the birthplace of the science of the heavens less approximately, if we note that the most ancient constellations form a zoo in which figure the lion and not the tiger, the bear and not the elephant, the dog and the bull but not the camel or the crocodile, and if we consider that the only region where this zoological distribution prevails is Asia Minor.” This knowledge coupled with where the tablets were found shows that it was in Mesopotamia where the stars were first grouped in constellations and where contemplation of the night sky gave birth to the science that is devoted to it.

The Bible Confirmed

Many of the other arts and sciences can also be traced back to the area between the rivers. Notice some of these statements from current literature: “From the dawn of chemistry in ancient Mesopotamia ... ” (Great Chemists) “An anonymous Sumerian physician . . . wrote down, in the cuneiform script of his day, more than a dozen of his favorite remedies. This clay document, the oldest medical ‘handbook¹ known to man ...” “What I held in my hand was a copy of the oldest law code [Sumerian] as yet known to man.” (The Tablets of Sumer, by S. N. Kramer) In so many fields of human effort we are brought back time and again to the region of Mesopotamia.

After examining the accumulated evidence, scientists conclude that the place of man’s origin was indeed where the Bible said it was, in the geographic area near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. As former president of Franklin College W. A. Williams said: “It is admitted that the earliest civilization began on the Euphrates, near the garden of Eden... The first great empires clustered around the places where Adam and Noah lived. No other civilization recorded in any quarter reaches farther back.” Archaeologist O. D. Miller also stated: “All the great civilizations known to ancient history have been traced gene-ologically to one common center, namely, the Gan-Eden of the Hebrews. All the ancient cosmogonies had a common origin, and they have been traced in the main to the same central region inhabited by the first men.”

The place of man’s origin has been confirmed by scientific discoveries to be as Genesis 2:8 records: “Jehovah God planted a garden in Eden, toward the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” Another triumph for the Bible in a scientific world!

PERHAPS the greatest controversy of all in regard to man’s origin concerns the length of time he has been on earth.

According to Bible history, man has been on the earth for about 6,000 years. According to evolutionists, the estimates run to millions of years, and man with a brain capacity near modern man is said to be about 500,000 years old.

To their discredit and shame, some scientists give the impression that “prehistoric” man is an established fact and can be traced back for many thousands of years before 4,000 B.C. That man’s “prehistory” is not a fact can be seen, from the words of prominent scientist Dr. P. E. Klopsteg, who stated: “Come, now, if you will, on a speculative excursion into pre-history. Assume the era in which the species sapiens emerged from the genus Homo . . . hasten across the. millenniums for which present information depends for the most part on conjecture and interpretation to the era of the first inscribed records, from which some facts may be gleaned." —Italics ours.

Notice that important point —the “prehistory” of man depends on conjecture and interpretation! However, let us not resort to such weak and unscientific speculation. Let us go to the actual record to see what the facts are concerning the length of time man has been on the earth.

No Record Be for^ About 4,000 B,CJ

When we examine the actual records of ancient men and civilizations, their history, writing, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture and other facets of life, it is of extreme interest to note that there are no records before about 4,000 B.C.! Following are observations of authorities in regard to some of these records:

• (1) History, “Recorded history Is no more than six thousand years old/¹ (Man, by A. Montagu) “Civilized societies have been in existence for about six or six and a half millennia." (The Origin of Civilised Societies, by R. Coulborn) “The wheel, the arch, writing and the making of bronze— these were some of the great achievements of the Sumerians, whose cities began to arise on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates 5,500 years ago." (Life magazine, August 25, 1961) In Archaeology in the Holy Land, K. Kenyon writes that the analysis of ancient documents has “carried back the beginnings of written history into the fourth millennium B.C."

How logical the question of C. B. Falls in The First Three Thousand Years: “Why, then, if the origins of Western civilization go back into the dim ages, does its history begin in the fourth millennium B.C.?” The answer? Man did not have a history before that time!

• (2) Writing. Definite conclusions have been reached by authorities in this field. They agree that writing began after 4,000 B.C.! Note some of their observations: “It was less than six thousand years ago that man first learned to write and the historic period began.’' (The Story of the World, by J, Southworth) “The earliest written documents that archaeologists have discovered so far date only from about 3,000 B.C.” (Natural History magazine of January, 1961) “It was probably toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C., about five thousand years ago, that the Sumerians . . . came upon the idea of writing on clay.” (From the Tablets of Sumer, by S. N. Kramer) “One of the most remarkable facts which has emerged from archaeological research, is that the art of Writing began in the earliest historical times known to man. It is now generally admitted that history first dawned in the land known as Babylonia, and that the civilization there is older than that of Egypt, yet, however far the excavator in Babylonia digs down into the past, he finds written records to illuminate his discoveries ... A conservative estimate is that the pictographic forms of writing which have been found, may be dated from 3,300 to 2,800 B.C., thereafter cuneiform writing came into view.” (New Discoveries in Babylonia About Genesis, by P. J. Wiseman) “The earliest writing that we know is . . . from Sumer in Mesopotamia in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—the very birthplace of civilization itself. The date is about 3,500 B.C.”—Man, by A. Montagu.

If man had his brain capacity developed 50,000 to 500,000 years ago, then why did he not learn to write and read much sooner? If “stone-age savages” of today are capable of learning to fly airplanes, play ehess and take on the virtues or vices of present society through education, then why did it take mankind 500,000 years to learn to read and write? Here, too, the answer is a simple one: man has been on earth since about 4,000 B.C., which is why his writings are found only from that time forward!

• (3) Astronomy. It is admitted that ancient man was a good artist, able to picture and illustrate matters of interest and importance. It is also admitted that he observed the movements of the sun, moon and brighter stars. But when records of their observations are found, they cannot be dated before the Bible’s time for man’s creation! In fact, accurate records of star groups do not appear until after th^ Bible’s date of a world-covering flood, involving the dissolution of a water canopy around the earth, thus permitting the stars to be seen plainly for the first time.

Mathematicians can calculate the date of tablets by the astronomical data they contain. What is the oldest tablet of this kind? “There are no tablets—let alone astronomically datable ones—before the end of the 4th millennium B.C.” (Dr. A. Sachs, Brown University) “There are no tablets dating back to the third or fourth millennium B.C. which would contain astronomical data.” (Dr. J. Lewy, Hebrew Union College) “There exist no dated documents before 4,000 B.C. nor before 2,000 B.C.” (Dr. O. Neugebauer, Brown University)

Says W. F. Albright of Johns Hopkins University: “There are no archaeological finds (including inscribed objects) which contain any reference to datable astronomical phenomena before about 2,000 B.C.” How completely these findings confirm Bible chronology, which shows the flood of Noah's day to have been shortly before 2,000 B.C.!

Other Evidences

Other records of man are all dated after 4,000 B.C. Note briefly some of these: (1) Mathematics: “From the Sumerians, around 4,000 B.C.”¹ “The earliest written records, on clay tablets dating back to about 3,500 B.C., indicate that even at that time, the operations of addition and multiplication of the positive whole numbers were well established.”² (2) Population: “It can be demonstrated, by taking the rate of population increase, per century, and working back from our present world population . . . that mankind started with two people not very long ago.”⁸ “Calculations point to the unity of the race in the days of Noah.”⁴ (3) Languages: *The oldest such records at our disposal are those of Sumerian, a language spoken in the Mesopotamian valley between 4,000 and 3,000 B.C.™ (4) The wheel: “It was certainly known among the Sumerians as early as 3,500 B.C., and by 3,000 B.C. was in general use throughout the eastern half of the Fertile Crescent.”® (5) Agriculture: “Archaeological evidence indicates very clearly that men began to cultivate the soil about 6,000 years ago.”⁷ (6) Glass: "... goes back only about 5,000 years.”⁸ (7) Perfume: “5,000 years old.”’ (8) Bread: “About 3,000 B.C.”^J0

Man 6,000 Years Old

It is dishonest for men to guess man's age as being millions of years and pass this off as fact. Claims that devices such as the radiocarbon clock show much older dates are not valid. Beyond a few thousand years, no method of dating objects by such means is accurate. The rate of deposit of carbon has not been constant. In view of variations in cosmic activity producing this carbon, Science Digest, December, 1960, said: “It most certainly would ruin some of our carefully developed methods of dating things from the past,”

The Bible's record of what actually took place Is what science has found to be true according to the facts. About 6,000 years ago, man was created by God. As the human race spread over the earth various cultures began suddenly. Some developed highly for a while, and others degenerated to a stone age. It is the same today. While rockets streak to the moon, the Aust n aborigine lives in a stone age.

As to man's sudden appearance, Dr, W. A. Fairservis stated in The Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile: “Monumental building, state religion, the wheel, metallurgy, social hierarchy, writing, early law, even nationalism erupt out of the Tigris-Euphrates area, seemingly the first in the story of civilization,”

Archaeologist P. J. Wiseman also said: “No more surprising fact has been discovered by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world. This discovery is the very opposite to that anticipated. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case.”

If we look at what science has actually discovered and not at what some would like to discover, we find that the Bible triumphs in this scientific world!

REFERENCES

i Science News Letter (Jan. 27, 1962] review of A Biatory of Mathematics, by H. A. Freebury,

e Science Digest, June. 1961.

u Why We Believe in Creation, Not in Evolution, by Fred J. Mel dau.

* Quotation of Man Scientifically Disproved, by Wm A. Williams,

c Story of Language, by Dr. Marlo Pel.

e The Past, A Concise Encyclopedia of Archaeology, page 493,

i Pamphlet entitled "Creation or Evolution.'¹ by W. H. Tier.

« "The Origin of Glass," published In the New York Journol-American, June 28, 1962.

® “Origin of Perfume,” In the New York Journal American, March 1, 1962.

io "What Is Bread?" in the New York JoursoJ-Amerkua, August 13, 1962.

A HUMBLE person recognizes that man’s knowledge is very limited. He realizes that additional research often turns up evidence that calls for a change and, on occasions, a complete reversal of thinking. This fact was noted in The Scientific Monthly, of June, 1954, which said: “It is too much to expect that articles written in some cases as much as five years ago could now be accepted as the latest thinking in the areas of science with which they are concerned,"

Since better methods of observation, new discoveries and additional knowledge are continually forcing man to change his thinking, should not this humble him when current information is at variance with God’s Word the Bible? On such occasions, would it not be unwise to base one’s conclusions on the shifting sands of human knowledge? Has not new evidence time and again forced men to reverse their thinking to harmonize with what was written in the Bible thousands of years previous? Yes!

Zoology

Consider, for example, the lowly rabbit. Although the Bible at Leviticus 11:6 and Deuteronomy 14:7 refers to it as a cudchewing animal, a popular dictionary commenting on Biblical matters observed: “The hare was erroneously thought by the ancient Jews to have chewed the cud, who were no doubt misled ... by the habit these animals have of moving the jaw about.”¹ Since current human knowledge

did not agree with the Scriptural statement, “higher critics” and many scientists were quick to seize upon this as an example of the unreliability of the Bible. How unscientific It is! they said.

But not so! Recent research has turned up startling new evidence to the effect that rabbits do chew the cud. In 1940 British scientist E. L. Taylor published the results of extensive experiments that proved this.² To assure the accuracy of this discovery about the rabbit, this magazine wrote to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D.C., for confirmation. On December 5,1950, this reply was received: “There seems to be no reason to doubt the authenticity of the reports of various workers that rabbits customarily store semi-digested food in the caecum and that this is later reingested and passes a second time through the digestive tract. The observations were carried out in a thoroughly scientific manner and the proof seems conclusive."⁸

Should not this example teach men not to be so cocksure of their opinions when they happen to conflict with the Bible? Scientist Taylor said that it should serve as “a useful reminder of the incomplete and uncertain nature of our knowledge, even of familiar things." Evidently Moses had a superior source of information, for it is unlikely that he had carried out extensive experiments on all the animals to which he referred.

Another example of a recent reversal of thinking that vindicated the Bible was the report that snakes are charmed by music, and not by the movements of the charmers. “Zoologists have scoffed,” observed a report in the New York Times. “Snakes do not have a highly developed sense of hearing, some said. Others have maintained snakes are stone deaf.” But contrary to popular opinion, support for “the auditory acuteness of serpents in general, appeared last week, in, of all places, the Journal of the American Medical Association.”⁴

After submitting evidence that snakes can hear, Dr. David I. Macht said “that Shakespeare, who repeatedly referred to serpents as deaf (as in ‘King Henry VI/ part 2, act 3, scene 2: ‘What, art thou, like the adder waxen deaf?’), merely repeated a common misunderstanding.” “On the other hand,” Dr. Macht said, “the psalmist was right who implied conversely, in Psalm 58, Verse 5 [4 also] that serpents can hear.” “Contrary to the claims of some naturalists,” he said, “snakes are ‘charmed’ by sounds, not by movements of the charmer. Revise the textbooks, the physicians recommended.”⁴ But there is no need to revise the Bible!

Consider yet another example: The Bible at Job 39:29 says of the eagle: “From there it has to search for food; far into the distance its eyes keep looking.” But Cassel’s Book of Birds noted: “It has been generally asserted that birds of prey are gifted with an acute perception of odours, and are thus enabled to discover their food at a distance.”

Confronted with such a Bible statement contradicted by a popular opinion of men, what would you believe? How wise it is to accept what the Bible says! For, just as it occurred in this case, increased knowledge invariably forces man to reverse himself to harmonize with the Bible. Experiments have shown that “birds possess a sense of smell very far inferior to that conf' i upon carnivorous quadrupeds, and that, so far from guiding them to their prey from a distance, it affords them no indication of its presence even when close at hand.”® On the other hand, experiments confirmed the Bible by proving that birds do hunt by sight

Astronomy and Creation

About fifteen years ago astronomer Peter W. Stoner, as Chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy, Pasadena City College, California, wrote: “Thirty years ago there were serious discrepancies between Genesis and astronomy. Today there is striking agreement which has been brought about by development of the science. .. . Although Genesis was written thousands of years ago, every reference to astronomy in this first chapter is corroborated by the best of our present scientific information. And yet we note that books of astronomy, written 25 years ago or more, are full of serious errors and anything written more than a few hundred years ago would be suitable only for the entertainment of the reader.”*³

Since men of long ago held to ideas that we recognize today as ridiculous, is it not a remarkable vindication of the Bible that increased knowledge has brought man's thinking into conformity with the Scriptural record? For instance, it was long man’s opinion that the earth was flat However, no statement to that effect is found in the Bible; rather, it accurately says that God is the One “dwelling above the circle of the earth.”—Isa. 40:22.

And although the ancient Egyptians thought the earth was held up by five pillars, and the Greeks believed that one of their gods, Atlas, supported it, yet the Bible did not record any of such fanciful contemporary theories. With scientific accuracy it said that the earth is a body in space with no visible support. God “is stretching out the north over the empty place, hanging the earth upon nothing” —Job 26:7.

For a long time scientists found fault with the Bible’s opening sentence, where it says that the earth was created, that it had a beginning. Even less than sixty years ago “it was the current idea that there had been no beginning to the physical universe.”⁷ However, astronomer Arvid Ljunghall, Ph.D., recently commented on the results of modern research: “There has been found practically incontrovertible evidence that our world is of a limited age, that there was a time when the universe and matter did not exist, and that for this reason a creation must have taken place. We are thus now confronted with the remarkable fact that the Bible account of creation, that was so unscientific, so wholly strange to scientific thinking, when our century was young, is now wholly in line with the modern idea of the universe."⁶

Archaeology

Following Darwin’s publication of his evolution theories, “there arose toward the close of the nineteenth century an extreme school of critics which was ready to deny the historical foundation of practically everything related In the earlier books of the Old Testament.”* The leader of this school of thought, Julius Wellhausen, claimed that the Bible record concerning Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was made up by Jews living about a thousand years after their time, and that therefore “it is impossible to obtain any historical information with regard to the Patriarchs” from the Scriptures. “Practically all of the Old Testament scholars of standing in Europe and America held these or similar views,” observed W. F. Albright, one of the foremost archaeologists of the twentieth century. But now, he said, “the situation is changing with the greatest rapidity, since the theory of Wellhausen will not bear the test of archaeological examination.”¹⁰

Yes, the findings of modern archaeology have forced man to reverse himself. As another archaeologist pointed out: “It has become necessary to scrap most, if not all, of what people have learned or read about the Old Testament, in colleges and seminaries, in textbooks, commentaries and encyclopedias, and to go back to the original books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua."¹¹ There in the Bible is where accurate information is found, modem research has proved! Consider a few specific examples.

Bible critics long maintained that writing did not come into common usage until the time of Solomon or afterward; and, therefore, the early Bible narratives could not be relied upon since they were not put into writing until centuries after the events occurred. One of the exponents of this theory said, in 1892: “The time, of which the pre-Mosaic narratives treat, is a sufficient proof of their legendary character. It was a time prior to all knowledge of writing."¹³ But there is now overwhelming archaeological evidence to the contrary.

“We must again emphasize,” archaeologist Albright explained, “that alphabetic Hebrew writing was employed in Canaan and neighboring districts from the Patriarchal Age on, and that the rapidity with which forms of letters changed is clear evidence of common use."¹³ And another leading authority, Professor Sellin, observed: “That the question should ever have been raised whether Moses could have known how to write, appears to us now absurd."¹²

“The [Jordan] Valley/' announced G. A. Smith some years ago in his famed Historical Geography of the Holy Land, “has never been populous. It has deserved the name of wilderness." But after extensive examination the famous archaeologist Nek son Glueck confirmed the Bible description. (Gen. 13:10) “The Jordan Valley was not only one of the first settled sections of the country/’ he said, “but it was also one of the richest parts of all ancient Palestine and Transjordan . . . truly, a Garden of God/’¹⁴

“It was once assumed that the new country of Israel had no metal/’ a Reader's Digest article noted in March, 1954. But the Bible said it was “a land the stones of which are iron and out of the mountains of which you will mine copper." (Deut, 8*. 9) Again Nelson Glueck proved the Bible right, and the critics wrong. After persistent effort he found Solomon’s industrial center at Ezion-geber; it was so vast and well-designed for metal production he called it “the Pittsburgh of old Palestine/' and Solomon the “great copper king/’™

The Bible makes repeated reference to the powerful Hittite nation. But since there was no secular evidence concerning them, “scholars denied the existence of any such people. . . . Since then Egyptian and Assyrian monuments have been found describing them as a great people of the North (see 1 Kings 10:29; 2 Kings 7:6), whose armies were feared for their valor and numbers, able to cope with Egypt or any world power/’¹⁶ Thus, scholarly thinking was forced to change to line up with the Bible.

“Higher critics" have long questioned Bible chronology. They have claimed that the Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations existed more than a thousand years before 2,369 B.C.E., the Bible date for the end of the Noachian Flood. Although these ancient dates for the Babylonian king' -dll be found in many of the older books, observes one authority, “they are incredible. They would, if true, leave long gaps in the history that we have no information to fill/'¹¹

Egyptian chronology has long been based upon the writings of the Egyptian priest Manetho, who lived about 250 B.C.E. But Albright says that it is “certain that all systems based on the Manethonian lists are much too high.”¹* And J. H. Breasted says that “they are so absurdly high throughout that they are not worthy of a moment's credence/’¹® Another historian concludes: “The obvious trend is directed towards a reduction of the whole chronology to the limits set by that very Biblical tradition which had been ridiculed/'¹*

In view of the evidence, why question the truthfulness of the Bible? It has proved accurate time and time again, while man has repeatedly had to reverse himself.

REFERENCES

• 1 . Smith's Bible Dictionan*. Vol- 2. p, 1002.

• 2 Proceedings o/ the Zoological Society of London, 1940. Vol. HO, pp. 159-163.

£ Fhotostatlc reproduction in Awake!. April 22, 1351. p. 28.

4 New York Times, January 21, 1954.

aaaseFs Boo/f of Birds, by Thomas Rymer Jones, p. 9.

e Modern Science and Christian Faith, by thirteen members of the American Scientific Affiliation, p. 22.

t The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe, edited by J. c. Monsma, p. 139.

s Swn&to Dap bladed December IB, 1958.

& Abraham, Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins, by Sir Leonard Woolley, p. 22.

io The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible, by W. F. Albright, p. 129.

ii The Bible Is True, by Sir Charles Marston, p, 22. iz The Pentateuch and Haftoraha. edited by J. H.

Hertz, Vol. JI, p. 106.

is From the Stone Age to Christianity, by W. F. Albright, 1340, pp. 192. 193.

i* Coronet, March, 1955, p. 79.

15 The Bible as History, by Werner Keller, p. 107.

is The Universal Bible Dictionary, edited by F. N, Peloubet, p. 259.

17 Archaeology and the Bible, by George A, Barton, p. 60.

is From the Stone Age to Christianity, 1940. by W. F. Albright, P. 113.

is [fniueraal Jewish History, by Philip Blberfeld, PP. IS, 37, 38*

I) IONICS” is the name of the science of learning from nature. It is a science many persons have heard little about, since it received that name in 1960. "An infant science born of biology and electronics has made its appearance,” announced Time magazine that year. Its purpose is to study living creatures in hope of finding ideas to design or improve manmade mechanisms.

This new branch of science has come about largely because of the realization that whatever man tries to do, it is likely that nature has it in a superior way. Says biologist Harvey E. Savely, head of life sciences for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research:

“In the living things we see around us, problems of organized complexity have been solved with a success that invites our wonder and interest. It is natural therefore, that we look to these successful inventions in nature for clues for new classes of man-made machines with greatly increased capabilities.”

Design Demands a Designer

Who is responsible for these “successful inventions in nature”? Some 3,500 years ago that God-fearing man Job gave the credit to the Master Designer, Jehovah God, his words also showing that even the idea of learning from nature is nothing new: “Ask, please, the domestic animals, and they will instruct you;

also the winged creatures of the heavens, and they will tell you Or show your concern to the earth, and it will instruct you; and the fishes of the sea will declare it to

you. Who among all these does not well know that the hand of Jehovah itself has done this?”—Job 12:7-9.

Though the men who take instruction from nature may give no credit to “the hand of Jehovah,” yet the design of the “successful inventions” in nature points to the hand of the Creator, as The Encyclopedia Americana stated:

“The argument from design in the world for the existence of a Creator is now actually stronger than ever in scientific minds, and a review of all the purposes that exist among living things make it quite Impossible to believe that they were developed without a designer. . . . For Fabre (the noted French entomologist] every portion of the insect world is a manifestation of design. ‘The wing of a cricket, that wonderful piece of lace work emerging from a tiny sheath, speaks of another Architect—the Author of the plan according to which life labors.'" —Vol. 18, 1942 ed., pp. 184, 185.

Insects, with superbly designed built-in instruments, are of keen interest to many researchers in bionics (from Greek bios, “living things” and onics, from the last part of the word “electronic”). Even the lowly mosquito is under study, one reason being the need for man to overcome the static that plagues many communications systems. The mosquito, simply by vibration of its wings, somehow sets up a hum that cuts through any jamming noise man or nature can produce and conveys a message to another mosquito 150 feet away.

Birds and Sea Creatures

The larger winged creatures, the birds, have often given man ideas. The "conical camber²' wing (which gives unique stability to a small plane) introduced by Cessna in 1960, for instance, was modeled on the wing tips of soaring seabirds.

Bionicists in the United States are specially interested in birds because of their superior navigational systems. How marvelous and yet how compact! Hence Duke University scientists are studying the migratory pigeon. Birds under study by the United States Navy include the Tasmanian shearwater, a bird that yearly circles the Pacific, flying across Japan and the Aleutians, returning to its home nest the same week every year. Man wants to know how birds can fly over unfamiliar terrain to familiar places. A birdlike navigational system would be of immense value to fogbound ships or those in waters where there are no navigational guides.

Sea creatures also give evidence of amazing design. The dolphin’s speed, for instance, has long puzzled man. How can this creature easily overtake ships doing twenty-five knots? The mystery was solved not long ago when a former German guided-missile scientist discovered that the dolphin has a specially designed skin. What kind? An elastic, ducted, hydraulic skin that prevents eddies of turbulence from forming and growing in intensity as they would if the skin were rigid. The elastic skin “gives” where an eddy forms and thus quashes the turbulence. It is hoped that discoveries such as this will result in new coatings for aircraft, hydroplanes and possibly even the inside surfaces of pipelines.

Fish are giving bionicists many ideas. Scientists are studying, for instance, an artificial gill to extract oxygen from water and throw off carbon dioxide, like a fish’s gill. Some fish intrigue scientists because they detect obstacles with an electronic virtuosity that man-made devices cannot approach. Some electronically guided fish emit pulses of low voltage with frequencies characteristic for each species. “It is known that one kind of fish can detect a current of two one-hundredbillionths of an ampere per square centimeter of its body. Its electronic sensing permits it to discriminate between glass rods in its tank that differ in diameter by less than one-tenth of an inch,”²

Eyes and Ears Extraordinary

Bionicists today are giving a great deal of attention to those inventions in nature that will help them design electronic machines that “see” and “hear.” Insect-eating bats fascinate scientists because of their built-in ultrasonic sound system that enables them to “see” objects in their path of flight. Thus while flying in the dark, the bat can detect flying food and also avoid obstacles. Man is now producing an electronic version of this sight-by-sound principle. One benefit, it is hoped, will be an electronic aid for blind persons.

A classic achievement in bionics has come from the study of the design of the frog’s eye. Researchers found out how the frog’s eye screens out all that is unimportant, notifying the brain only of the presence of a moving object the size and shape of an insect or a worm or the appearance of an object that could be an enemy. “The importance of what we have learned from the frog’s eye is the function of selectivity,” says Franz L. Putzrath, director of Radio Corporation of America’s neuron research. “The frog’s eye makes a lot of decisions before transmitting the essential information to its brain. By patterning our pattem-recognition machine closely after the biological structure of the frog’s eye, we have developed a new concept of information processing/³ • An electronic system based on the design of the frog’s eye would be most helpful at airports, where it could watch patterns on the radar screen, detect departure of any plane from its course and flash instructions to correct the situation.

One would hardly think that the beetle’s eye would give man ideas for invention, but it has. The eye of the beetle is in effect a split eye, so that the beetle gauges its speed in flight by the time it takes a tree, for example, to pass from the first to the second half of its eye. Scientists in West Germany have applied the principle. Two photocells are used in place of the beetle’s eye; these watch the ground from the nose and tail of an airplane. So from the design of the beetle’s eye comes a reliable ground-speed indicator for aircraft.

Bionicists have also learned much from the design of the crab’s eye, which gives it exceptionally sharp images. The scientists found that the nerve cells of the horseshoe crab’s eye are cross-connected, so the eye has the unique ability to intensify the contrast between the edges of a sighted object and its background. The result of this increase in contrast is that a sharp image is sent to the brain. The design principle is now being used to produce sharper TV images.

Not only eyes in nature are being scrutinized by scientists, but so also are the ears. The ears of owls, for instance, excite scientific wonder. The owl can hear a mouse chewing and swoop down on it, even though it is hidden from view beneath a pile of leaves. Scientists would like to imitate such a sound-locating system. Then there are the ultrasonic ears of moths, ears so keen they can detect bat cries a hundred or more feet away, enabling them to take evasive action to avoid the hungry bat. When researchers connect an electrode and an amplifier to the moth’s abdominal ear, they can listen in on supersonic sounds that even the most sensitive man-made microphones cannot pick up.

As bionicists learn more and more from eyes and ears in nature, the words of scientist Isaac New

ton become more timely: “Was the eye contrived without skill in optics, or the ear without knowledge of sounds?” To reverent men like Newton the very fact that man and creatures in nature exist with marvelous powers of vision and of hearing proves that there is a Master Designer and Creator who has understanding and faculties of sight and hearing infinitely superior to ours. “The One planting the ear, can he not hear? Or the One forming the eye, can he not look?” (Ps. 94:9) When scientists produce inventions based on the designs in nature and then fail to give credit to the Creator, they show lack of wisdom. Since “Jehovah himself gives wisdom,” those who leave Him out of the picture and who ignore his Holy Word can never have true wisdom. As God’s prophet said: “They have rejected the very word of Jehovah, and what wisdom do they have?”—Prov. 2:6; Jer. 8:9.

So learning from nature is not enough; if we will have true wisdom we need to go to the Source Book of wisdom, the Holy Bible—the Book that long ago directed man to learn from nature and to recognize in it the handiwork of God. As Job said: “The hand of Jehovah itself has done this.” —Job 12:9.

yy HICH kind of science wil] you choose to accept? Will you follow the way of the greatest Scientist, Jehovah God, or will you choose the way of pseudoscientists and suffer their fate?

Your future, yes, your life, depends on your choice.

As we have seen in the foregoing articles, true science is actually a study of God’s works. Pseudoscience is “false, counterfeit, spurious, sham, pretended/* according to one dictionary. It is a system of theories and assumptions rather than facts. Of such the apostle Paul wisely counseled: “Guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith.” —1 Tim. 6:20, RS.

While as free moral agents we are at liberty to believe true science or false science, this does not mean that the future of our earth is to be determined by the choice of humans. It is not. The future of our world, our earth, and the kind of world it will be have already been determined, and not by pseudoscientists or by any other kind of human scientists! The Great Scientist, the all-powerful God, has already determined what kind of a world there will be in the near future. The choice open to men is not one that involves determining what kind of a world it will be, but whether they will be there or not. Since our future is bound up in the choice we make, we must have a reliable guide to direct our course.

Guide for the Future

It is logical to examine the Bible and to find it in complete harmony with true scientific knowledge. It cannot be otherwise, because the author of true science is also the author of the Bible!

However, the Bible was not written primarily as a scientific textbook. Its astounding accuracy on scientific matters is merely incidental to its message. Since the Bible discusses some of the most difficult scientific matters with such accuracy, the reader should have confidence that whatever else it discusses in connection with man and his future is likewise accurate.

Would it be so difficult for the designer of an automobile to write down the directions for operating it? Surely, then, the Great Designer and Creator of man could easily author a thoroughly reliable book to give direction to the human family and to tell man what the future has in store for him.

When we consult God’s Guide Book for human affairs, the Bible, we happily note that the time limit for God’s patience with this world that has misused his creative works is due to expire within our generation! God’s permission of wickedness, and man’s rebellion, is near its end. The miserable state of affairs that plagues mankind is very near its finish!—Matt. 24:33, 34.

What will replace this present system of things? The rule over earth by Jehovah God and his king, Jesus Christ Bible prophecy clearly shows that this kingdom of God by his Son was set up in the heavens in the year 1914 (A.D).⁴ Since that time God has exercised his influence in man’s affairs in a very direct way. By means of the preaching of the Kingdom message he has been separating from the unbelieving and disobedient ones an evei> increasing number of earth’s inhabitants who fully realize their need for God and who delight to do his will. When this preaching work is done, God will bring this system of things to its end at the battle of Armageddon. At that battle God will unleash powerful forces that he alone controls and will cut off the wicked from the earth, while preserving those who love and serve him.—Matthew chapter 24; Mark chapter 13; Luke chapter 21; Rev. 16:14-16; Ps. 37:9,10.

Does the end of this present system of things mean that science will be done away with? No. Jehovah is the greatest scientist. He has brought into existence a multitude of scientific marvels. Why should he destroy what he has created when it does not rebel against him? Science will not end. To the contrary, God’s new world will be a scientific world, for man will continue to acquire and use knowledge obtained from a study of the creative works of God, and the Great Scientist himself, Jehovah God, will use the things he has created for the benefit and blessing of all obedient mankind.

Wars to Cease

With supreme power to control exercised in all the earth, Jehovah will make all wars to cease. No more will man be permitted to engage in armed conflict. Under the kingdom by Christ earth’s inhabitants will actually destroy weapons of war and use the material to build implements for man’s good.

Long ago the prophet Hosea, writing under the influence of God’s powerful active force, foretold: “The bow and the sword and war I shall break out of the land, and I will make them lie down in security.” (Hos. 2:18) Confirmed the psalmist: “He is making wars to cease to the extremity of the earth. The bow he breaks apart and does cut the spear in pieces; the wagons he burns in the fire.” —Ps. 46:9.

Then obedient mankind will "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning shears. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more.” (Isa. 2:4) Gone will be war and the learning of it! Scientific research will be used, not to destroy, but to bless mankind. Only peaceful education and peaceful pursuits will prevail.

Food Shortages Gone

Science has shown the possibility of producing abundant food supplies from the earth and sea under proper conditions. Today, however, vast portions of the earth are unsuited for food production. In that new world the Great Scientist will direct his people to use earth’s resources properly, including the producing of adequate and delicious food supplies.

No more undernourished millions! For then “the meek ones will eat and be satisfied.” (Ps. 22:26) “The earth itself will certainly give its produce; God, our God, will bless us.” (Ps. 67:6) “The wilderness and the waterless region will exult, and the desert plain will be joyful and blossom as the saffron. . . . For in the wilderness waters will have burst out, and torrents in the desert plain. And the heat-parched ground will have become as a reedy pool, and the thirsty ground as springs of water. ”—Isa. 35:1, 6, 7.

Joyful Work Provided

How many of earth’s billions really look forward to their work? For too many, work is difficult, often unpleasant, and not thoroughly satisfying. Shortly this condition will pass away. In God's new world men will be assigned work that will be a delight to their hearts.

In accord with instruction provided by God, and using the knowledge acquired by a study of the handiwork of the Creator, man will do as foretold through the prophet Isaiah: “They will certainly build houses and have occupancy; and they will certainly plant vineyards and eat their fruitage. They will not build and someone else have occupancy; they will not plant and someone else do the eating. For like the days of a tree will the days of my people be; and the work of their own hands my chosen ones will use to the full. They will not toil for nothing, nor will they bring to birth for disturbance.”—Isa. 65: 21-23.

Perfect Health

Who is there that is not beset with sickness during his life? Especially after the vigor of youth passes does man feel the sorrow and pain of serious illness. This condition of poor health will also be done away with soon! Under Kingdom rule, Jehovah God, the Great Physician, the One who made man and knows best what he needs to enjoy perfect health, will provide the means to eradicate completely all sickness’

God's infallible promise is: “No resident will say: T am sick.* The people that are dwelling in the land will be those pardoned for their error.” (Isa. 33:24) To Illustrate that this was not just a dream, Jesus healed all manner of sicknesses while he was on earth. On a small scale he demonstrated what he will do on a global scale in the new world. “And Jesus set out on a tour of all the cities and villages, . .. curing every sort of disease and every sort of infirmity,” “Then great crowds approached him, having along with them people that were lame, maimed, blind, dumb, and many otherwise, and they fairly threw them at his feet, and he cured them.”—Matt 9:35; 15:30.

Everlasting Life

It is a fine thing to have good health. Yet, it is still distressing to know that we will get old, our skin will wrinkle, teeth decay, hair fall out, hearing wane, vision fail, and then realize that the grave awaits us. In addition to .health, distressed humanity needs life! This too will be provided by Jehovah God! He who originated life can sustain it as long as He desires. In that new world God will sustain the life of submissive humans forever: “For the wages sin pays is death, but the gift God gives is everlasting life by Christ Jesus our Lord,”—Rom. 6:23.

The great enemy of mankind, death, will be conquered by the life-giving and lifesustaining power of the Source of life, Jehovah. Revelation 21:4 foretells: “He will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be any more. The former things have passed away.” Even those who have gone down in death but who are in the memory of God and of his Son will live again. Jesus said: “The hour is coming in which all those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who did good things to a resurrection of life, those who practiced vile things to a resurrection of judgment.’* —John 5:28, 29.

Where will all this take place? On a paradise earth! As Jesus said: “Happy are the mild-tempered ones, since they will inherit the earth.” (Matt. 5:5) The inspired psalmist wrote: “The righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it,” (Ps. 37:29) This will not result in overpopulation. Jehovah originally told man to “fill** the earth, not to overflow it. When mankind has sufficiently multiplied and filled the paradise earth with a perfect, happy, Jehovah-worshiping race of people, then the Great Scientist will say, “It is enough,” and will make provision to halt the bringing forth of offspring. Surely He who originated life and can sustain it forever can easily regulate it to suit his purpose.

Dominion over the Earth

Happy mankind will once again exercise loving dominion over the earth and its multitudinous forms of life. Hosea 2:18 says: “I shall certainly conclude a covenant in that day in connection with the wild beast of the field and with the flying creature of the heavens and the creeping thing of the ground.” The prophet Isaiah showed the extent of this dominion: “The wolf will actually reside for a while with the male lamb, and with the kid the leopard itself will lie down, and the calf and the maned young lion and the well-fed animal al] together; and a mere little boy will be leader over them.”—Isa, 11:6.

Restored forever will be the condition that prevailed in Eden when Jehovah told man: ^<'Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is moving upon the earth.” —Gen. 1:28.

Think of it! Elverlasting life in a paradise new world with loving control over all lower forms of living things, peace and harmony with our fellowman and with God, and eternity to study the works of the Great Scientist and to progress from one wonderful peak of scientific knowledge to another!

What must you do to live in that new world and enjoy the fulfillment of these thrilling promises? Jesus said: “This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ.” (John 17:3) To take in knowledge of God means to study his communication to the human race, the Bible. In this way you will learn God’s purposes and also his requirements for you. To help you do this Jehovah’s witnesses will be happy to call on you and share more of this life-giving knowledge with you. This service is provided at no cost to you. You may write the publishers of Awake! magazine and they will send a qualified minister to aid you in learning more of God's will for us in these critical last days.

By thus learning of God and doing your best to please him, you too can have the marvelous hope of living forever in his paradise new world. “Hope in Jehovah and keep his way, and he will exalt you to take possession of the earth. When the wicked ones are cut off, you will see it** (Ps. 37: 34) What a tremendous triumph for the Bible it will be when the Great Scientist, Jehovah, fulfills the promises recorded therein and pours out a continuous stream of blessings on all obedient men throughout eternity!

Happy w the people whose God is Jehovah!

—Ps, 1^:15.

Venus

$ Space explorer Mariner IPs closeup look last December revealed some interesting data about earth’s “sister planet” Venus. The planet appears to be most inhospitable to man. Its surface is 800 degrees Fahrenheit, with virtually no difference in sunlit and dark sides. Cloud temperatures are below zero. Venus' water supply, if any, Is at least 1,000 times less than In the earth’s atmosphere. Venus' day is 225 earth-days long. The Philadelphia, Pa., Inquirer> February 27, concludes that Venus is “too hot to handle—for earthlings anyhow.” Especially so when we remind ourselves that lead melts at 600 degrees.

“Scientific” Hoax

<> An Associated Press dispatch published on February 26 reported that Russian scientists had brought “two prehistoric tri ton a—vertebrates resembling lizards—back to life.'' This report stated that the Moscow Radio claimed these creatures lay frozen solid for 5,000 years in Siberia, that “on awakening, the creature behaved exactly as It had thousands of years ago. It ran around, ate and slept. It was not afraid of people, willingly eating wild berries, flies and mosquitoes out of their hands.”

Western scientists were unanimously skeptical, “The chances are a million to one that the tritons were not frozen for 5,-000 years,” said Dr. Francis Ryan, zoologist of Columbia University, Professor Gleb Lo-zika-Lozinsky of the Leningrad Institute of Cytology called the stoiy “pure invention.” On February 27 the story was exposed as “pure fantasy.”

Archaeological Findings

Current archaeological discoveries in the Palestine area give historical support to the Bible, said Laird Harris, who helped on excavations there. Listed among important findings, as reported by the Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), January 23, are: "The linking of the excavated cities of Megiddo and Hazor, mentioned in the Bible, in the reign of Solomon. Discovery of Solomon’s copper factory at the seaport of Ezlon Geber. The tracing In Egypt of manuscripts which prove the New Testament of today is substantially that In existence in 140 A.D. The location in Israel of what is believed to be the Biblical city of Shechem, where Abraham and Jacob worshipped.”

The Loneliest Man

<*> One of the richest men in the world, J. Paul Getty, 70, has also been referred to as 'one of the loneliest,’ which proves that money is not everything. Getty told an interviewer: “I always wish I had a better personality. . . . I’m always worried of being dull.” He envies “people who are younger, more cheerful, who have a better character than I have.” Getty’s income is estimated at $11,200 an hour.

Crime Up

<$> A special report to the Philadelphia (Pa.) Inquirer, March 5, stated that during 1962 crime increased 7 percent in the United States. Cities with a 10,000 to 25,000 population led the list with a 9-percent rise. Rural counties closed the year with a 1-percent overall increase. The number of teenagers under 18 arrested "rose an alarming 9 percent,” while there was no change in the number of adult arrests.

D Isunl ted—Dora es tl rated

<$> Christendom was reminded of her moral duty by clergyman Douglas Rhymes of Southwark Cathedral. Rhymes reportedly stated, according to The Guardian (England), that Christendom’s religions present a spectacle of a “church” that can never make up its mind because it does not want to offend authority. Rhymes further stated: “A church which is to be engaged in the purposeful and persistent permeation of the world will not be left by God halting between two opinions in relation to the most important questions of the day, but will speak definitely and disturbingly to the world.” The world, he said, had domesticated Christendom’s religions into a “reservation” for people with religious needs, and religion has largely accepted the domestication.

Albright and the Bible

Dr. William F. Albright, a distinguished American archaeologist, had this to say on key issues of Biblical scholarship:

"In my opinion every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and the eighties of the first century A.D.—very probably aometime between about 50 and 75 A.D.”

Albright discounted the carbon clock as an accurate means of dating bones. He said: "Carbon 14 is almost totally useless in dating bones, which contain a minimum of carbon. We now have many thousands of carbon dates from all over the world, but dating material by inscriptions is nearly always more accurate than use of radiocarbon."—Advertiser-Tribune (Tiffin, Ohio), January 22. 1963.

Peace Prize              ,

$> With the warm approval of Communist leader Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, the Swiss-Italian Bal-zan Foundation awarded its Peace Prize for 1963 to Pope John XXIII. The prize is worth 551,000. Khrushchev’s approval was conveyed by the foundation’s Soviet committee member, Professor Norair M. Sia-saskian. He said: "The Soviet government fully approves and supports the decision to award to Pope John XXIII the prize for peace, humanity and fraternity." The selection was made by a committee from twenty-one countries. All but one voted for the pope.

Is Fraud Justified ?

<$> A Roman Catholic Jesuit priest says that there are times when tax fraud is justified. The Buffalo (N.Y.) Courier -Express for January 21 carried an item published in a Roman Catholic monthly magazine called La CivUta Cattolica or The Catholic Civilisation, Priest P. E. Trabucchi asks: "How must the taxpayer behave— for example—when the tax official thinks that all taxpayers declare only a third of their real incomes and does not accept as true a taxpayer's declaration in good faith?” "The honest taxpayer is subjected to a real injustice," said Trabucchi. "He can protect himself only by declaring as much less of his true income as he thinks the tax office will add.” His advice, however, does not agree with that of the Bible. -Matt. 22:21; Rom. 13:5-7.

Problem Breakdown

The Family Service Association of metropolitan Toronto (Canada) had a special survey taken of 549 clients to find out just who comes in for advice. The survey, says the Toronto Daily Star, disclosed that people in all income brackets sought counsel. The majority of the problems had to do with marital difficulties; next in line were personality problems and third down on the list were the money troubles. More than one third seeking advice were between the ages of 30 and 39.

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32

A W j K'EV

¹

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1946, Vol. 14, p. 763. t Science News Letter^ Feb. 15, 1961, p. 119.

²

Time. October 3, I960, p. 54.

³

The Saturday Evening Post, January 5-12, 1963, p. 70.

⁴

For more Information on this matter read "Four Will Be Done on Earth,” pages 81-103; published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.