AfricanJungleKing.Org

You’re right. I am definitely a what-iffer. Life would be intrinsically more boring for me if I wasn’t. Being a what-iffer doesn’t mean that I am exactly insane but, all the same, let’s agree I am a what-iffer. Some of my what-iffs are productive.

Examples: What if Ghana had the longest zip line across the largest man-made lake? What if free SHS was possible? What if the ecstatic, unintelligible gibberish of today’s churches wasn’t the tongues of the Bible? What if I could change Ghanaian culture in favour of outdoor adventure activities? What if Sunday worship was the Mark of the Beast? What if America was truly racist? What if I could reconnect with my first love in ways that could build the best friendship I had ever wanted?

These what-ifs are productive in the sense that they cause me to bend my mental, physical, intellectual and financial resources to seeing some happen, discovering many to be true, lambasting false Christian theories and building better relationships. Then there are the totally useless what-iffs; the ones I call modin-Sane: What if, instead of having an abortion it was possible to extract an embryo alive from the womb of a woman who didn’t want it, and move it into a lab that could sustain it to babyhood for nine months? What if we could have shitholian African Parliamentarians taken out and shot? What if Ghana could launch a real space ship into orbit (I knew I shouldn’t have eaten too much pepper the night I had this what-if)? What if we could rid Africa of corrupt leaders by May 26, 2018?

As you can see, not all what-ifs are positively whatifiable. So, when I what-iffed the possibility of a non-existing God, I immediately filed it under modin-Sane.

But the thought wouldn’t be so easily discarded. My mind actually thought it would benefit from considering the possibility that there was no God. This had come about because many unbelieving friends of mine had that week put up spirited denunciations and ridiculed the concept of the existence of God. I faced them fair and square of course (no one I know of has ever accused me of running away from an intellectual fight), and floored the archeologists and humanists among them (let’s hope they don’t read this and write rejoinders ;-)).

So I gathered my puny human intellect, picked up a glass of aluguntugun juice, sat on a camp chair on an island in the Akwamu Gorge one evening, raised my eyes to the starry skies and bent the forces of my mind to contemplate the possibility that God did not exist. Before this exercise, I had availed myself of all the still-unrefuted scientific evidence that had been discovered and widely published in some of the world’s leading science journals. Some of them had for 40 years supported the Genesis Creation record that God made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. By embarking on this what-iffer, I was essentially about to suspend what I had believed for 35+ years and consider alternatives.

Make no mistake. The only way to declare that God does not exist is to attack the first book of the Bible – Genesis. But since Genesis had done me no wrong (I like Moses actually. His meekness is one I aspire to, just as soon as I get rid of my Kalashnikov), I could not bring it up in my what-iffing. If a person is willing to consider that there is no God, that person has no business bringing a book of God into his or her enterprise. If God does not exist, then Genesis does not exist. Therefore, I had to turn to something that wasn’t godly – the big bang theory of relativistic cosmology – earlier deduced by an “army of data” to have occurred 5.5 billion years ago and was later amended to some 13.8 billion years.

The theory essentially claimed the universe as we know it started with a small singularity, then inflated (bang!) over the next 13.8 billion years to the cosmos that we know today. What commends the big bang theory to itself is its reliance on what seems to be overwhelming experimental evidence for an ancient age of the earth and its unquestionable laws of radioactive decay, also called radiometric dating.

Christians claim that God created the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything else that exists. They cite the Bible as the source, and the basis, of that belief. If one wants to refute that, then one has to refute the Bible’s authenticity, and as the world knows, there is no end to the relentless pursuits on a daily basis to discredit the Bible.

But for the Christian, there really isn’t much work to do to prove anything beyond what the Bible has said. God created the heavens and the earth. Enough said. Since Science claimed to be above faith and the Bible, I began to ponder whether Science had any real evidence from among the “overwhelming scientific data” for the claim that the earth had banged itself into existence over billions of years.

What physical element, substance or property was scientifically credited to be the evidence of the big bang? I was informed by the documentation I assessed that pleochroic halos were deemed to be the phenomenon, which supposedly established the constancy of the decay rate of radioactive matter over geologic time, and threw out the ananse story of a God who had power to create. If there were no God, then the scientific evidence should support no claim of a fast-solidifying foundation of granite rock – known as Precambrian rock. Science holds that these rocks were formed (excruciatingly) slowly as molten magma cooled down. The Bible holds that these rocks were formed instantly in one day when the Spirit of God moved over a formless earth and caused the dry land to appear from nothing. These pleochroic halos are apparently formed by radioactivity in various rocks and are most easily observed in mica under a microscope. Uranium forms the rings of a certain type of one of these halos, which is the key for scientists as to whether the rate of decay was constant. But uranium is not the only element that forms these halos. Polonium does that too but, unlike uranium, polonium has only a fleeting existence, leading scientists to only credit uranium with the production of the halos.

As a what-iffer my interest, while sipping my aluguntugun juice, and trying to make sense of tons of scientific gobbledygook, was knowing when the Earth was formed. If the evidence proved that it took billions of years, God would cease to exist in my eyes because a God of truth would not have us believe that it took Him six days only to create the heavens and the earth when it took Him billions of years. But if science could not prove when the earth banged into existence, then it simply would become charlatan and false, and God would be true.

Essentially in big bang cosmology, all of Earth’s chemical elements formed hundreds of millions or billions of years before the time matter finally began to condense to form the proto-Earth as a molten ball of matter. Geologists generally believe that these are Precambrian rocks because they contain no fossils and have no evidence of life in them. These are the rocks that underlie the continents – the foundational rocks – and are the ones that contain the uranium and polonium halos. The evidence I studied, while the harmattan winds whipped Lake Volta into a frenzy, suggested that the polonium halos could not have emerged from uranium. Granite cooling from a molten state would have taken so long that there would have been, in the heat and all that turmoil, no traces whatsoever of polonium. In fact, polonium would have been incinerated in minutes.

The answer to how polonium could have been around in the long time it would have taken the granite to cool was the answer to my musings. Basically, a speck of polonium in molten rock could be compared to a tablet of Andrews Liver Salt in a glass of water. The beginning of effervescence is equated to the moment that polonium atoms began to emit radioactive particles. In molten rock the traces of those radioactive particles would disappear as quickly as the Martin Liver Salt crystals in water. The only way the crystals would be preserved is if the water were instantly frozen. Polonium halos could only have formed if the rapidly “effervescing” specks of polonium had been instantly encased in solid rock.

The truth, of course is this: there are immeasurably large number of polonium halos embedded in granites around the world. Just as frozen Martin Liver Salt crystals would be clear evidence of the quick-freezing of the water, these many polonium halos undeniably give evidence that a sea of primordial matter quickly “froze” into solid granite. The occurrence of these polonium halos, then, distinctly implies that our earth was formed in a very short time (in six days actually), and not over a long, drawn out period of billions of years.

The most credible source of that information is the Bible, which speaks unimpressed with scientific gobbledygook about the foundation rocks, “And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands.” “Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands.” “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. … For He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” (Hebrews 1:10; Psalm 102:25; Psalm 33:6,9).

Before the alunguntugun juice ran out, my belief was strongly reaffirmed that God exists. He is. He was. And always will be. Scientists, not unexpectedly, believe the polonium-halo evidence for Creation is, at best, a tiny mystery, in spite of the fact that they haven’t been able to refute the evidence in close to 50 years. “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” 1 Corinthians 1:27.

Polonium halos may be insignificant in the discussions of a big bang theory, but they clearly offer a big challenge to the science of evolution and totally flaws the theory of the big bang, and until that challenge is proven beyond reasonable doubt, I believe in God!

So, with that resolved, I bent what was left of my what-iffing over a long night to what social evidence we would see if there were no God. And I realized that people would have us believe God does not exist as a way of shaking off His moral restraints. Evidence abound that the increasing rise in divorce, fornication, licentiousness, homosexuality, vice and all the putrefying sins of the world is linked to the removal of God’s moral restraints. Other than His law, what else would make stealing another person’s wife abhorrent (unless you were the victim-husband)? Human laws have not been enough to curb society’s hurtful tendencies, and neither has the proliferation of churches in every available street corner of Accra where I live. It is God’s word and His law – not the false churches that create economic opportunity for themselves in His name, nor the false humanists who would have every allusion to God’s power and grace to save removed from all mention, nor the false scientists who move from their failure to ground the theory of evolution to declaring vile homosexuality a hereditary tendency over which its adherents have no control – that would make the world a better place.

This jungle boy believes God through Christ will come soon to clean the mess we have made of His earth and restore us into His image and His original plan for all His created beings – joy, untold happiness, and the realization and achievement of our sanctified dreams and aspirations higher than our present senses of self-actualization.