Capernaum was recently discovered and excavated
in Israel.
Capernaum was a fishing town on the shores of Israel's
Lake of Gennesaret. The Bible says that during Jesus' 3-year ministry in Israel Capernaum served as the base of his ministry:
"Now when Jesus heard that John had been put in
prison, He departed to Galilee. And leaving Nazareth, He came and dwelt in
Capernaum, which is by the sea..." (Matthew 4:12-13). Among
Capernaum
's excavated ruins in Israel is Peter's house, which had served as a base for the
local Christians and those visiting northern Israel. You can actually peer into the ruins of
Peter's house in Capernaum, identified by the markings on the stone wall.
As archaeology, physics, astronomy, microbiology and other sciences advance,
what I've learned is that more and more of the Bible actually have
been getting confirmed, not vice versa. For example, prior to the telescope
was invented, people could count the ~5000 stars visible to the
naked eye and dismissed as exaggeration the statement in Jeremiah 33:22 that stars
"cannot be numbered". The Hubble
telescope has shown that even with today's technology, the stars in our
galaxy, let alone the universe, indeed cannot be numbered. Molecular vibrations
and resonance now explain how sound waves collapsed the wall of
Jericho in Joshua 6:20, and while medical breakthroughs let
more people to live to be 100 years old, we can't push beyond the 120
years limit prescribed in Genesis 6:3.
What about Darwin's theory of Evolution, which claims that we are simply
the result of random mutations over a very long time?
Imagine that you visit Israel and find amidst the ruins of Capernaum ten stones laid
out in the shape of the letter "S". You may look at those stones and wonder if they'd been laid
like that by someone or if something random like rain water draining from
a hill may have placed
the stones in that formation.
But imagine finding ten
trillion stones that spell out the entire collection of Shakespeare's plays. You couldn't attribute
that to some random cause, could you? You'd have to conclude that somebody must have laid out those stones.
What's the point? Charles Darwin didn't have the electron microscope and
assumed the cell - the basic building block of life and the starting point
for his theory of evolution - to be just some uniform blob. But today's
electron microscope shows the cell actually to be an incredibly complex
organic machine made of about ten trillion atoms organized into
highly specific, interdependent parts, all of which are needed for the cell
to exist in the first place.
The number of atoms in a cell far exceed the number of cells in a newborn
baby, so building a theory for the human body without knowing the cell is like
building an air force without knowing what an airplane is.*
The courses on evolution, including one at masters' level whose teachings I
believed unquestioningly until hearing the other side of the argument,
now stand out for the major issues skirted than the minute details
focused on.
*
For more scientific evidences on this,
watch
and
listen to a couple of former atheists. One is an MD and the other is a
JD / former Legal Affairs Editor of Chicago Tribune.