Report from Dr. Terry Mortenson

Terry Mortenson sent a report on his ministry down near where the devastating Hurricane hit. I have included it below.

ISRAEL REPORT

On Thursday morning I will be doing a report for the staff showing photographs taken during our recent tour of Israel. This talk and the photos will be available on this BLOG mid morning—so make sure you come back to see it.

Thanks for stopping by

Ken

TERRY’S REPORT:

Friends,

Just a few more comments about my talks at the church on Sunday and a little on the hurricane damage in this area where I am.

One lady told me that she and her husband are going to be leading an adult Sunday school class on creation at their church (a different one from the one I spoke at). She said she has always believed God’s Word but that my lectures really helped her see more clearly why it is so reasonable to believe what she believes and how to have answers for skeptical questions. She took 14 pages of notes and bought a bunch of materials to help her and her husband prepare to teach others.

One couple from another Southern Baptist church in the area shared with me their sadness and frustration in trying to influence their pastor. They had given him a copy of Jonathan Sarfati’s Refuting Compromise and he refuses to read it. His mind is made up and he is going to persist in being willfully ignorant of the Biblical and scientific arguments against his old-earth compromise views. It grieves my heart and the heart of this dear couple.

A man in his 40's approached me after my Flood talk. He is a geologist and an agnostic evolutionist, who is married to a creationist. He told me they have interesting discussions in their home and he said it sometimes gets rather heated. As is so common with evolutionists, he was confused into thinking that creationists and the ID proponents basically had the same beliefs. I explained that they were not—that the ID'ers ignore or deny the teachings of Genesis 1-11 and most of them accept millions of years and geological ages and evolutionary cosmology. I think I helped him see that there is a significant difference. He tried to say that we creationists are biased with our religious views but I responded by saying that the evolutionists are just as biased and their beliefs are based on assumptions about the unobserved past. As a geologist he understood that geology today accepts catastrophic explanations for some things. But I pressed him on the fact that they are still strongly influenced by uniformitarian thinking. I asked why he was an agnostic and he mentioned arguments from the late atheist astronomer, Carl Sagan, who led him to believe that the genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3 were contradictory. So I responded to that erroneous argument and encouraged him to look for more information on our web site. He seemed to be nudged by the things that I said in this conversation and he did stay for my second talk on the Big Bang. In that talk I again emphasized the role of assumptions in the interpretations of the observations scientists make in outer space and, because of his comments, I stressed that atheism is just as religious as Christianity—it is just a different kind of religion. So we should not let the atheists deceive us into thinking that only we Christians have religious beliefs.

A man who works for LifeWay Publishing (the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention) asked me if we had approached LifeWay about getting our materials there. I said that to my knowledge we had not, but that the best thing would be for someone like him to work to make that happen. He asked for my business card and I expect that he will try to work on this.

Thanks for praying. Please ask the Lord to guide people as they read the literature and watch the videos they bought that they will know how they can use this information to influence other Christians and to share the gospel more boldly and confidently with their non-Christian friends and relatives.

At the home where I am staying the power went out about 1:45 pm on Monday. This is the brick home of the mother of the pastor of education, Marcus. His wood frame house was not deemed safe. The winds were picking up as the eye of the storm got close to us. A tall pine tree in the yard here twisted and broke about 10 ft from the base. I am three hours north of the coast and in this area 97% of the homes and businesses are without power. Marcus and I went out on Tuesday morning to check his home and the church. His house had no damage and the church just had very minor roof damage. Trees are down all over, many fallen over power lines. Phone service is limited—whether ground phones or cell phones. The authorities say it will be a week before power begins to be restored in the metro-Jackson area. It will take that long nearly just to assess the damage and develop a strategy to restore power. Most people probably won’t have power for 2-3 weeks (or longer in rural areas). But the devastation here is nothing compared to the coast of Mississippi.

Again, I can’t help but think about the little tiny glimpse of the violence of Noah’s Flood that this hurricane presents to us. The damage we are seeing on the TV in the coastal areas of Louisiana and Mississippi are the result of just 3-4 hours of heavy wind, rain and storm surges of the ocean passing over the location (combined with tsunamis). Think of the results if it was 40 days (960 hours) of non-stop conditions like this or worse than this. And the Bible tells us that it was actually 150 days before the tectonically significant fountains of the great deep closed and the rains stopped (Gen. 8:1). It really is not wild, ridiculous imagination to believe that the Flood produced most of the thousands of feet of fossil-bearing rock layers (like we see in Grand Canyon). What is wildly ridiculous is the faith of those Christians who think the Flood was localized in the Mesopotamian valley or left only a little erosional and sedimentary evidence.

My Tuesday morning flight was cancelled and I was rescheduled for a flight with a different airline on Wednesday evening, getting back into Cincinnati about 10:00 pm.

Thank you for praying!

Terry