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Ancient books that discuss history, geography, or science contain many errors. Current editions of many medical books become totally useless in less than a decade. In the light of this it would be quite illuminating to examine the scientific passages the very ancient book of Job.

Of all the books in Bible, scholars regard Job as the oldest. This book has been put almost in the middle of the Old Testament — instead of being placed according to chronology — because all the poetic books have been grouped into one in the middle of Old Testament. The story in the book has taken place somewhat at, or even before, the time of Abraham. This means that the narratives recorded in this books are perhaps more than four thousand years old.

Today researchers have in their collection a good amount of literature produced in ancient times. Archeologists have unearthed thousands of clay tablets and other written material that gives us a fairly good idea of the cultural and scientific development attained by people of old. This can then be compared with the information recorded in the book of Job to see whether the divine inspiration of this book has left any special mark on it or not.
One of the best and easiest things to do in this matter is to examine the scientific content of the ancient literature. We all know that people who lived in these ancient societies maintained many erroneous ideas regarding the natural world, and these ideas are often carried into their writings — preserved now for our study. However, when one compares the ancient literature with the book of Job, which is equally ancient, we will find a striking difference.

Whenever ancient writers wrote about the natural world, they affirmed many things that were wrong, foolish, or even silly. This was not always their fault, but rather the consequence of their ignorance. Logically, if the book of Job is a product of only human writers, then it should exhibit a similar pattern of errors. This would be an enlightening experiment because the book of Job is full of comments about the natural world. Even a cursory reading will reveal over one hundred references to the natural world.
However, what strikes a careful reader is the sanity of these comments. The ancients had very bizarre ideas about the world, its origin and its day-to-day happenings. For example, people of many ancient civilizations considered the solar and lunar eclipse as the result of giants swallowing up the sun and the moon, respectively. In fact, without exception, almost all comments which the ancient people made regarding the natural world were ridiculous. However, the book of Job shows an unusual balance of thought and a restraint from wild imaginations. And, even more than the restraint, many of the statements have turned out to be highly accurate assessments of the physical world and its natural processes. Just a few of these examples are cited below.
Air is felt by all of us when a breeze moves past our faces. However, it is an entity that can neither be seen nor touched. It is difficult to imagine that it would have any weight, and for thousands of years people did not know that air has any weight. In fact a few hundred years ago, a person venturing to suggest that air has weight would have been laughed out of court even by the most scholarly people of his times.

It is only in the recent centuries that scientists who study air demonstrated that it has a significant amount of weight. Even today people are amazed when we tell them that air has a measurable weight — and it requires some effort to convince them. However, the book of Job says about God’s activity, "When He imparted weight to the air" (Job 28:25). Had the scientists taken this statement seriously, they could have discovered this fact much before the time when they actually discovered this property of air.

The study of moon is another example. For thousands of years moon has been considered a SOURCE of pure, soft, and undefiled light. Similar to the sun and stars, moon was also understood as emitting its own light. It is only after the invention of telescopes that people understood the real nature of moonlight — it is the light of sun, reflected from the dusty surface of moon. But in the four thousand year old discourse with Job, Bildad says that "If even the moon has no brightness" then how much is the glory of man (Job 25:5-6).

If the Bible were a book written merely by human authors using their human intelligence alone, then this books should not have been any different from the rest of the ancient writings. In these ancient writings, even when produced by the wisest men of that generation, we find scores of scientific errors. This is a rule of this world that even the best of the brains cannot escape the scientific fallacies of his age. This is such a universal fact that even medical books written merely a hundred years ago are full of scientific blunders. About 160 different organs in the body were considered — and declared — vestigial and useless; today almost all of these have been discovered to be vital for the functioning of the human body.

Whenever human authors comment upon the natural world, they are bound to repeat the erroneous beliefs of their generation. However, when it comes to the speakers in the book of Job they do not make a single mistake, even though they make hundreds of references to the natural world. On the contrary, many of their observations were scientifically so advanced that scientists discovered those truths only in the recent times. Surely one has to look to the Divine Hand behind the writing of Bible to explain this.

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If life is the result of evolution,then the first steps must have taken place at the chemical level. This is a very good possibility because chemical processes can be studied by man with precision and exactness. The chemistry, physics, and statistics of the processes which contribute to sustain life are known quite well, and one can study the question of chemical evolution of chemical evolution with much confidence.

Ultimately all chemical evolution must start with the bare elements like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, etc. Then they should combine randomly to form molecules, and suitable molecules must then form large macromolecules, and this process must keep repeating till the first life appears. It all looks so easy at the conceptual level, but the actual chemical processes are to be under certain condition as laid by the principle of evolution. First of these condition is that all processes must be random.

An event is called random it it takes place completely unplanned. In the case of random activities, we can never predict what is going to happen next but the mathematics of probability can applied to study such events. Probability is never able to tell us what the next event will be but it is able to give us two very important information : how much is the probability of a particular event, and what will be the final outcome if this random process is allowed to continue for a very long time. This means that with the help of the theory of probability we can predict the result of random chemical reactions if these reactions are allowed to continue for the millions of years which the evolutionists usually assign to life on the earth.

Even though randomness is the first requirement of chemical evolution, it itself acts as the death sentence of evolution. This is because randomness is a far greater destroyer that it is a builder of order. Further, randomness can give rise only to very small orders while intelligence is required to create the type of order which is found in living cells. While randomness is not able to create all type of order, it is a great destroyer of them all. This is why bottles of medicines usually contain the instruction: ‘Keep the cap tightly closed, and store away from light’. If the cap is not tightly closed, air will enter the bottle and if it is not kept in a dark place, light will enter the bottle. Both of these conditions will give rise to random chemical reactions, and they will break down all the chemical compounds which were carefully planned and formed in the factory. So, contrary to the impression given to students of evolution, randomness is the greatest destroyer, not creator, of order. The longer the time period allowed, the greater is the disorder :

The second factor which is held responsible for life is the order inherent on atoms and molecules. Since no intelligent creator is to be involved, according to evolution, all the order that we see must somehow come from the matter itself. However, this demand immediately faces another problem. There are two types of order in the world : natural and externally imposed. If we allow a crystal to grow in suitable and externally imposed. If we allow a crystal to grow in suitable conditions, it naturally takes a beautiful crystalline shape.

No one has to arrange the atoms because the inclination towards this arrangement is built into it. But if we take aluminum, plastic, and other metals in suitable proportions and shake them together, they will not give rise to a jumbo jet because the information needed to make a jet is not inherent on the materials. That information resides in the human mind, which must first assemble 4.5 million components and then carefully assemble them to make the jet. Further, even if we put all these 4.5 million finished parts in a container and shake them, they will not join together to give us an assembled jet. On the contrary, this random motion will destroy those parts to such an extant that after a suitable length of time we will get only fine dust in the huge container.

If life on the earth is a product of evolution, then it must have started at the level of chemistry. But herein lies the greatest problem for evolutionists : They must invoke randomness and natural order to explain evolution. But randomness is a great destroyer of order, contrary to the demands of chemical evolution. and as far as order is concerned, the kind of information and order which is necessary for life does not reside on matter. Such order has to be created externally, just as a complex machine has to be made on other machines using vast amounts of human intelligence.

Chemical evolution by random processes looks like a good idea, but it is a proposal which works against the demands of evolutionists.

[A Free Course Resource] According to the theory of evolution, all the life that we see in this world is a result of blind chance. By blind chance they mean events which were completely unplanned and uncontrolled. This is a very good scientific proposal because we can investigate and study it exactly. Ultimately everything takes place at the level of atoms and molecules, so in this article we will describe the effect of blind chance on atoms and molecules.

Mathematicians have developed what is known as the Theory of Probability, to study unplanned blind processes. Chemists have collected an unbelievable amount of information about the way life building chemicals react when left to themselves without outside control. Putting these two together we can come to exact and firm conclusions about what will happen when chemical reaction take place randomly in any given situation.

The most important two chemical families for life are the proteins and the DNA. Proteins supply substance, structure, and function to the living organism, while DNA provides the vast amount of genetic information that is necessary to sustain the life. In themselves neither the proteins nor the DNAs have life in them, nor does their presence guarantee life. Rather, in living organism the DNA and proteins need thousands of other chemical substances to function properly and fully.

Assuming that proteins and DNAs were available to start with, let us see what blind chance would do to them. Biochemists tell us that if they are allowed to react with each other, they will start degenerating so that after a sufficient span of time neither useful proteins nor useful DNAs will be left. Most of the complex molecules will break down into simpler ones, having no use as building blocks of life. Also, a good proportion of these degenerated molecules will be harmful to life. They would poison any living organism into which they get in.

Life is not merely a collection of a lot of molecules and DNAs, just as a Jumbo Jet is not merely a collection of metals and plastics. Nor will a collection of suitable metals and plastics shaken for millions of years will produce a jet plane. On the contrary even if all the finished parts of a jet are put together randomly in a huge container and shaken for million of years, they will not produce an assembled jet. In fact these millions of years, they will not produce an assembled jet. In fact these millions of years of blind shaking will achieve only one predictable result everything will degenerate into dust : It is the same with life building chemicals. Millions of years of blind processes will reduce them to the smallest possible chemical units, comparable to the dust particles mentioned above:

In the above example we had started with the assumption that the basic building-blocks like proteins and DNAs were already available to start with. In the actual case, however,nothing except pure elements like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen is available. Starting from these, it is impossible to go to the level of proteins and DNAs. Stanley Miller, Sidney fox and some other scientists have tried to do experiments at this level. Taking some of the most simple chemical compounds, they tried to study the effect of electric spark on them. Their famous experiment shows very clearly that the chemical compounds formed during random processes do not get ordered as is necessary for life. Most of the chemicals were harmful for life, and if the random processes were allowed to continue they were only destroying the simple chemical compounds  formed in this experiment. This means that over long periods of time, blind processes destroy even the smallest amount of order which might exist in the universe.

Ultimately all of life depends upon the information that resides on the DNA molecules. The total amount of information residing on the DNAs of a single human cell is equivalent to the information contained in 300 volumes of an encyclopedia : It is this information which directs all the life sustaining activities in the body. There is no life apart from this information. This is the greatest problem facing the chemical evolution of life. There is no known random process which will generate information. On the contrary, all our studies of random processes and information- generation have shown that blind chance always plan. further, just as the ability of a jet to fly does not reside in metals and plastics, the information carried by DNAs is not resident in the basic chemical properties. Just as an engineer creates the ability of flight by the right ordering of about 4.5 million different parts, it is the complex ordering of chemicals which carries the information on DNAs. the question is, who created this externally imposed order ?

Many people think that Bible believers stand upon shaky ground while the evolutionists stand upon firm foundation. It is shown in this article that the opposite is true. The evolutionist stands upon a foundation of sand, yet he is not willing to abandon his loyalty to his assumptions !

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