In our first lesson (Overview) we read:
For this cause we also thank God without ceasing, that, when you received from us the message, the word of God, you accepted it not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the word of God, which also works in you who believe.
(1 Thessalonians 2:13)
Many books claim to be from God, but some contradict others and they cannot all be true. But is there one that is? - Is it possible to know for sure?
We also saw (Deuteronomy 18:21-22) that the Bible throws out the challenge that we can test it for ourselves. So let's do this.
Germs are microscopic, invisible to the human eye; yet they have caused the deaths of millions across the world. It was not until the late 19th Century that scientists such as Louis Pasteur (from whom we get the term ‘pasteurized’), Robert Koch and others opened up our knowledge of these things. Yet, their discoveries in how to prevent the spread of disease can already be found in the Bible - 3,500 years beforehand. For instance,
Dr Ralph H Major, of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and later Professor and Chairman at the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, wrote this (in his History of Medicine (1954)):
Moses ... the greatest sanitary engineer that the world has ever seen. His doctrines laid down in that fine treatise [or, textbook] on hygiene, the book of Leviticus, could be summed up by the objects of sanitation today ...But it is perhaps astonishing to realise this: not only did the surrounding nations at the time have no knowledge of these things - but even Europe right up until recently had been all but wiped out by infections like the Great Plague. And yet, the information was right there all the time ... in the Bible.
Scientists, from many thousands of experiments, have observed certain fundamental laws to hold in the universe. Two of these laws are:
A little more about these:
In a closed system, energy cannot be created nor destroyed. You can turn heat into electricity, and use electricity to make parts move inside a machine. But in the end energy is something that cannot be destroyed; neither can we create it in the first place.
Every time an action takes place, heat energy is given up that can never be reused. Also, each time any action takes place, the order in the entire system breaks down slightly. While a teenager's bedroom may be a graphic example - what this means is that in fact everything, from a spinning top to the entire universe, is running down!
Everything must have always been running (Conservation of Energy).
Yet, everything must have run down, decayed, cooled to a freezing nothingness a very long time ago (Entropy).
This begs an important question ...