Miracles or Spiritual Deception?
An important message from Polycarp.
According to Bible prophecy, false Messiahs, false prophets and false apostles arise as this age draws to a close, and later work great miracles, signs and wonders to deceive multitudes worldwide. Spiritual deception will dramatically increase, eventually so convincing that even the elect will find it difficult to resist.
Even today, faith healers and spiritual healers draw multitudes with promises of miracle healings and deliverance. We hear more and more about miracles and spiritual gifts, but how can we discern among real miracles of God, miracles, signs and wonders of the occult, and fake miracles via deceptions of men?
Surely we or our loved ones couldn’t be deceived? Or could we? See the article here.
Tags: Christian Life
February 22nd, 2010 at 11:27 am
I will post here the same message as I posted on Polycarp:
Would it be just too cynical to suggest that Rory Roybal is really using this article just to promote sales of his book “Miracles or Magic” in which he apparently sets out to help people guard against this very thing?
And are there really more quack apostles than in past times? The difference now, I would suggest, is that these people have an easier route to the masses, via the intenet. I found no reliable source that has scientifically confirmed the increased incidence of “false prophets”. This is surely scare mongering for the decidedly secular purpose of increasing revenue from book sales. Actually I quite hope I’m wrong, and that Rory Roybal is absolutely sincere. Past history with other authors of this kind leads me to think I am not.
February 22nd, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Hi Jim, that’s not too cynical at all, but would that negate the message?
I don’t know if there are more “quack apostles”, but as you rightly point out, their reach is vast today and many are falling under their spell, through TV, Internet & books.
It strikes me that there is nothing new under the sun and that virtually every deception we have today can be found in the letters of Paul.
February 22nd, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Hi Jim,
(also posting the same response here as on Polycarp)
No I don’t think it would be too cynical since a lot of that does occur, but in this case it’s not the truth, and I can say in good conscience before God that my motives are to fully glorify Him. Unless I didn’t believe in God at all, it would be extremely foolish for me to testify to this knowing I will stand accountable to my every word before Him.
Regarding an increase in quack apostles, prophets, and messiah figures, this may be challenging to categorize accurately from a purely scientific perspective, but it is clearly predicted in the Bible (e.g. Matt. 24:11, Matt. 24:24, Mark 13:22, Rev. 13:11-15, Rev. 16:13-14, Rev. 19:20). If one believes the Bible, then the evidence is clear, but if not, I would understand and expect increased skepticism.
Kind Regards,
Rory Roybal
February 22nd, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Thank you Rory.
February 23rd, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Thanks Rory.
February 26th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I suppose one could say fairly confidently that no miracle caused by occult forces would stand up to competent investigation by unbiased sources, but those attributed to divine intervention…Oh, wait a minute, that doesn’t work, does it?
February 26th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
If one believes the Bible accounts, genuine occult miracles would stand up to competent investigation as well as miracles of God, since the Bible uses the same original words for miracles, signs and wonders of God as miracles of spiritual enemies.
God uses miracles for His glory and our good, but the enemy will increasingly use miracles as the leading tactic to deceive and harm mankind. The evidence for their authenticity will be extremely convincing, since the Bible says the world will be deceived by them (Matt. 24:24, Rev. 13:14, 16:14, 19:20).
The deception will be so convincing, that all who will not receive the love of God’s truth will be deceived by the power, signs and lying wonders of the enemy (II Thess. 2:9-12).
May 1st, 2010 at 8:34 am
An updated version of the article is now available at Miracles or Spiritual Deception?
May 1st, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Rory,
Ever the inquisitive researcher I looked up your article and then other promotional articles you have produced. One of the phrases you have used is:
” Most leading evolutionists, naturalists and atheists do not deny our universe has the appearance of careful design and irreducible complexity…”
This simply is not true. It is a deception to imply that it it is.
May 2nd, 2010 at 6:45 am
Hi Jim,
My statements in the article are accurate.
Here are quotes from the leading evolutionist of our day, Richard Dawkins, from his famous book The Blind Watchmaker“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.“
“Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.”
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker Longman, England 1986, p. 1, 21.
The following quotes are from Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion:
“One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.”
“The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artifact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.”
…
Phillip E. Johnson cites Francis Crick in order to illustrate the fact that the biological world has the strong appearance of being designed:
“One of the world’s most famous scientists, probably the most famous living biologist, is Sir Francis Crick, the British co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, a Nobel Prize winner… Crick is also a fervent atheistic materialist, who propounds the particle story. In his autobiography, Crick says very candidly biologists must remind themselves daily that what they study was not created, it evolved; it was not designed, it evolved. Why do they have to remind themselves of that?
Because otherwise, the facts which are staring them in the face and trying to get their attention might break through. What we discovered when I developed a working group of scientists, philosophers, et al., in the United States was that living organisms look as if they were designed and they look that way because that is exactly what they are.”
Phillip E. Johnson, Essay: Evolution And Christian Faith
Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, New York, Basic Books
1990, p. 138
Moreover, Crick has written several times that problems with an undirected origin of life on earth are so great that we should consider the idea that space aliens sent a rocket ship to the earth to seed it with spores to begin life. Crick also strongly recommends Dawkin’s book The Blind Watchmaker, which says plainly that living things have the appearance of design.
Crick also wrote:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.“
Francis Crick, Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, Simon & Schuster 1982, p.88
…
Sir Fred Hoyle was a distinguished British astronomer and Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, evolutionist and agnostic. He developed the steady state theory of cosmology and was considered for the Nobel Prize, though it was given to his underlings. In 1982, Hoyle presented Evolution from Space for the Royal Institution’s Omni Lecture. After considering the very remote probability of evolution he concluded:
“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of …“
Hoyle, Fred, Evolution from Space, Omni Lecture, Royal Institution, London, 12 January 1982 pp. 27–28
After years of study, Hoyle estimated the chances of the random emergence of even the simplest cell:
“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that ‘a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein’.”
Hoyle on Evolution. Nature, vol. 294, 12 Nov. 1981, p. 105
He also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik’s Cube simultaneously..
Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, 1983
Hoyle further said:
“The likelihood (probability) of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to number with 40,000 noughts after it… It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.
There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.“
Sir Fredrick Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 148.
…
Cristina Chiappini is a research scientist at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste. Aside from her theoretical work on the Milky Way’s formation, she also observes planetary nebulae to trace their contribution to the galaxy’s chemical evolution. In 2001, Cristina Chiappini wrote the following regarding the Milky Way galaxy:
“… it is an elegant structure that shows both order and complexity … The end product is especially remarkable in the light of what is believed to be the starting point: nebulous blobs of gas. How the universe made the Milky Way from such simple beginnings is not altogether clear.”
Cristina Chiappini, The Formation and Evolution of the Milky Way, American Scientist (vol. 89,
Nov./Dec. 2001), p. 506. …
Even Darwin conceded in “The Origin of Species” that all existing terrestrial life must have descended from some primitive life form that was called into life “by the Creator”!
The eye on the tail of the peacock is a thing of awesome beauty, with an intensely blue center surrounded by iridescent concentric colored circles. It is enjoyed as the peacock raises and displays his plumage, and seems to have no purpose but to please the observer. Darwin called the peacock the most splendid of living birds. Of this, Darwin writes:
“That these ornaments should have been formed through the selection of many successive variations, not one of which was originally intended to produce the ball-and-socket effect, seems as incredible as that one of Raphael’s Madonnas should have been formed by the selection of chance daubs of paint made by a long succession of artists, not one of whom intended at first to draw the human figure.“
Dariwn said:
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the following regarding candid admissions of Charles Darwin:
In an 1860 (post Origin) letter to Asa Gray, Darwin says:
“I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”
(Darwin 1902 [1995], 236)
In 1885, the Duke of Argyll recounted a conversation he had had with Charles Darwin the year before Darwin’s death:
“In the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature — I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of Mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,” and he shook his head vaguely, adding, “it seems to go away.”
(Argyll 1885, 244)
Ref. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/notes.html
…
Thomas Huxley, often known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his strong advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution, was an English biologist. He wrote:
” `Creation,’ in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence, and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some preexisting Being. Then, as now, the so-called a priori arguments against Theism and, given a Deity, against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me to be devoid of reasonable foundation.“
Thomas H. Huxley, L. Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, Vol. I (1903), p. 241
As a world leader in evolutionary biology, atheist, and self-proclaimed Marxist, Richard Lewontin admitted:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.“
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.
…
Best Regards,
Rory
May 2nd, 2010 at 6:55 am
My apologies for the formatting above, but I have reviewed the source and found no problems despite the appearance. Blog admin, if you can easily edit/fix this it would be much appreciated since I don’t seem to be able to do so from my end, or if you find a way for me to do so I will be happy to reformat and repost.
Thanks, Rory.
May 2nd, 2010 at 7:42 am
Hi Rory
I changed the editing . The original formatting paragraphs and breaks where still there.
May 2nd, 2010 at 8:33 am
Caught by my own use of words… My point was that your quote implies obliquely that they acknowledge design and irreducible complexity to be the case. However, from Darwin to Dawkins, that is not the case. They pose this as a rhetorical question, and then go on to anser it and to explain why this cannot be so. But I apologise for my accusation. This does not mean that present day scientists support the view that design or irreducible complexity are valid conclusions.
May 2nd, 2010 at 10:59 am
Jim is quite right to point out that Rory seems to imply some acceptance of design in the scientific community. Creationists often use his selective quote to sugest Darwin believed in design, whereas the very next paragraph reveals their lie.
I was disappointed to see Hoyle mentioned in this context as it’s a terible way to remember him. He was something of a boyhood hero to me, I just remember his broadcasting on the BBC radio in the 1950s. His later mistakes in chemical evolution are so basic that I would have seen through them as a schoolboy. The argument is now known as ‘Hoyle’s fallacy’. A tiny amount of research would have shown this. Think back to your own schooldays and try to remember what you learned about basic reaction kinetics and orders of reaction. Chemistry simply doesn’t happen as Hoyle claimed. If it did, our everyday plastics would be rarer and more expensive than diamonds are now, and sizeable diamonds wouldn’t exist at all.
Am I alone in my despair that religious faith so often exists in a climate that shuts off reasoning and, more sadly, encourages deception?
May 2nd, 2010 at 11:27 am
Hi Jim,
I agree with most of your last post, except that my intent was not to obliquely imply these staunch evolutionists believed in ID, although I understand this was your first impression. That would have indeed been a ridiculous assertion.
None of the leading evolutionists I quoted actually believe the universe was designed by a living, conscious intelligence (otherwise they wouldn’t be evolutionists/naturalists would they?), but they believe(d) it has the appearance of being designed, which is what I said in my article and substantiated above.
I hope you found the quotes interesting.
Thanks,
Rory
P.S. These comments between Jim and I are not about the Miracles Or Spiritual Deception? article the original post was about, but about a different article Jim noticed on my site, Miracles of God, Evolution or False Prophets?
P.P.S. Thanks a lot for fixing that Caral =)