《The New Answers Book 2》(Ken Ham etc.) Table of contents

Physiological Determinants

In one sense, most of the substance of our body really doesn’t continue to get older during our life: a great many of our body’s parts are constantly repairing and replacing themselves. The epidermal cells that cover the entire surface of our skin, for example, never get older than one month. New cells are continually produced (by cell division) deep in the epidermis, while the older ones continually slough off at the surface. Similarly, the cells lining our intestines completely replace themselves every 4 days; our red blood cells are entirely replaced about every 90 days; and our white blood cells are replaced about every week.

Even cells that never (or rarely) divide, such as cardiac muscle cells and brain cells, turn over molecule by molecule. It is believed that little or nothing in our body is more than about 10 years old. Thus, thanks to cell turnover and replacement, most of the organs in the body of a 90-year-old man are perhaps no older than those of a child. Indeed, you might say our body never actually grows older.

It’s rather like the story about “grandpa’s ax.” It seems a man had an old ax that hung over his fireplace and which he claimed had been passed down in his family for five generations. When asked how old the ax was, he said he wasn’t sure because although his great-great-great-great grandfather bought the ax about 300 years ago, he also understood that over the years, the ax had 6 new heads and 12 new handles. Our bodies are something like grandpa’s ax in that we too are constantly replacing “heads and handles,” and in a sense we never get older.

Is it even possible for anyone to age and die if the body constantly repairs and replaces its parts?

At this point we might be inclined to ask, why did Methuselah die so young? How, indeed, is it even possible for anyone to age and die if the body constantly repairs and replaces its parts? Surely, if our automobile could do this, we would expect it to last forever. Part of the answer may be that certain key parts of our body fail to repair or replace themselves. Our critically important heart muscle cells, for example, fail to multiply, repair, or replace themselves after birth (although, like all muscle cells, they can increase in size). This is why any disruption in the blood supply to the heart muscle during a heart attack leads to permanent death of that part of the heart. The nerve cells of our brain—including those of our eye and inner ear—also fail to multiply or repair themselves. From the time of our birth to the end of our life, we lose thousands of nerve cells a minute from our central nervous system, and we can never replace them. As we get older, this causes a progressive loss of our ability to hear, see, smell, taste, and . . . ahh . . . something else, but I just can’t remember it!

The important point is that science offers no hope for eternal life, or even for the significant lengthening of life. It has been estimated that if complete cures, or preventions, were found for the three major killers (cancer, stroke, and coronary artery disease), the maximum life span of man would still not increase (although more people would approach this maximum). And such long-lived people would still become progressively weaker with age, as critical components of their body continue to deteriorate.

We may conclude that God’s Word, not science, has the complete solution to the problem of aging and death. The solution has been “revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

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  Chapter 17 Why 66?
  

The Bible is composed of 66 books by 40 different writers over 1,500 years, yet it has one consistent storyline running all the way through, and it has just one ultimate author — God.

How can we be sure that we have the correct 66 books in our Bible? The Bible is a unique volume. It is composed of 66 books by 40 different writers over 1,500 years. But what makes it unique is that it has one consistent storyline running all the way through, and it has just one ultimate author—God. The story is about God’s plan to rescue men and women from the devastating results of the Fall, a plan that was conceived in eternity, revealed through the prophets, and carried out by the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

The Bible is understood by Christians to be a book without error.

Each writer of the Bible books wrote in his own language and style, using his own mind, and in some cases research, yet each was so overruled by the Holy Spirit that error was not allowed to creep into his work. For this reason, the Bible is understood by Christians to be a book without error.1

This collection of 66 books is known as the “canon” of Scripture. That word comes from the Hebrew kaneh (a rod), and the Greek kanon (a reed). Among other things, the words referred equally to the measuring rod of the carpenter and the ruler of the scribe. It became a common word for anything that was the measure by which others were to be judged (see Galatians 6:16, for example). After the apostles, church leaders used it to refer to the body of Christian doctrine accepted by the churches. Clement and Origen of Alexandria, in the third century, were possibly the first to employ the word to refer to the Scriptures (the Old Testament).2 From then on, it became more common in Christian use with reference to a collection of books that are fixed in their number, divine in their origin, and universal in their authority.

In the earliest centuries, there was little debate among Christians over which books belonged in the Bible; certainly by the time of the church leader Athanasius in the fourth century, the number of books had long been fixed. He set out the books of the New Testament just as we know them and added:

These are the fountains of salvation, that whoever thirsts may be satisfied by the eloquence which is in them. In them alone is set forth the doctrine of piety. Let no one add to them, nor take anything from them.3

Today, however, there are attempts to undermine the clear witness of history; a host of publications, from the novel to the (supposedly) academic challenge the long-held convictions of Christians and the clear evidence of the past. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code claimed, “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only relatively few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them.”4 Richard Dawkins, professor of popular science at Oxford, England, has made similar comments.5

So, what is the evidence for our collection of 66 books? How certain can we be that these are the correct books to make up our Bible—no more and no less?