D Teams

What do you think about the parallel between the coolest scientist ever getting the most supreme award ever, and the first verse of Genesis? Talking about Herbert Spencer who died in 1903, he said that all that is knowable in the universe can be summed up in five categories: time, force, action, space and matter. Discuss some of the ways we see Gods hand in the world around us: maybe about the interesting patterns and systems we see in the world, for instance, the patterns of ice and snow crystals, the system of reproduction, the way that our bodies make food into energy that is usable for the cells, how our cells replicate through the DNA replication process. Things like that are just some of the examples you can throw out there to the kids to get them thinking. How is our conscience evidence for God? Anthropologists who study the morals and customs of various underdeveloped and primitive peoples testify that to this day they have yet to find, even among the wildest savages, a people lacking some form of an understanding of good and evil. Furthermore, many tribes not only place a high value on good and despise evil, but for the most part their views agree on the essence of the one and the other. Many even primitive tribes stand just as high in their understanding of good and evil as many cultured peoples. Even among those tribes which place a positive value on certain deeds which are unacceptable according to prevailing opinion, there is in general a marked consensus in the moral consciousnesses of all people. I feel that the conscience is a side effect of God making an in His image. That carries with it a certain innate quality which makes us know right from wrong, without having to be taught it. We can see this at work in kids at a young age, who having swiped a cookie, even when not specifically told not to have a cookie, will hide the cookie form mom or dad and eat it on the sly. Have you ever thought about or studied the textual evidence of the Bible? Like Angelo said ther is an overwhelming amount of texts around. For instance, the book of Malachi was written ~ 400 BC, the oldest copy we have of this book dates to about 250 BC, only 150 years after it was written. That is a very short time between the copy and the original writing. Compare that with the writings of Tacitus, whose earliest manuscript is about 1000 years after his death, and we only have 20 of his copies, compared to the OT alone of over 10,000 copies. Now, just because we have a lot of copies and a short time between the original time and the copies, why does that make it better? That is a good question. The first thing to note here is that the copying procedure did not leave room for errors. The Masoretes, scribes who copied the OT, were very meticulous in their copying techniques, they knew how many characters each column and row had in the scroll they were copying, if there were too many or too few, the scroll was burned. They also various other techniques to check the accuracy of the text, things such as math tricks. In Hebrew each letter is assigned a number value, and each column and row had a specific

value associated with it, if these did not check out, then they were burned. The next noteworthy piece of information about this is the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1947, the oldest complete manuscripts of the OT were dated to 900-1,000 AD. The Dss were dated to ~150-70 BC. The DSS contained portions or whole books of every book in the OT with the exception of Esther, with one complete copy of Isaiah. When comparing the Isaiah scroll to the oldest copies we had, there were found to be only 13 textual variations. So with a span of time up to 1200 years long there were only 13 variations in the book of Isaiah, on example of a variation is the adding of light to Isaiah 53:11. Finally we have the affirmation of Scripture by Jesus himself. Numerous times he referred to Scripture to rebuke the Pharisees and other leaders at the time of his ministry. What does it mean to you, and your group that sooner or later, no matter what worldview you prescribe to, you will have to trust some authority? Meaning sooner or later the Whys have to stop somewhere.