Faith alone will save the country

Faith alone will save the country
By Terry A. Hurlbut
Recent events, judicial cases and controversies, and demographic trends and “crosstabs” tell us one thing above all. Faith alone will save not only any individual, but also a country, including the United States of America. The considerations go beyond the bare truth of the basic faith premise. Which is: neither the universe, nor this Earth, nor life in general, nor human, intelligent life came about by accident. Beyond this premise, the human race is dying out. Or rather, it appears to be dying out – because most have relegated faith to the realm of myth and legend. Only those populations that have faith, or return to it, will thrive.
Details of the basic faith premise
The basic faith premise is actually common to all faiths, differing in detail but not in basic fact.
First, it says the universe did not begin by accident. No astronomer or “cosmologist,” seeking to avoid invoking an intelligent Creator, can explain the universe. Popular belief has held for decades that cosmologists settled on a “Big Bang” as the origin of the universe. But on Christmas Day in 2021, an Ariane 5 rocket launched a gigantic folding infrared telescope named for early NASA Administrator James Webb. After it deployed, it sent back breathtakingly accurate pictures from the apparent edge of the observable universe. Those pictures are inconsistent and utterly irreconcilable with any understanding of a “Big Bang.” In September of 2023, two astrophysicists called the entire Big Bang model (the Standard Model of Cosmology) into question. Their grounds: galaxies had formed far faster than they should have according to that model. (See Adam Frank and Marcelo Glieser’s New York Times op-ed, and its archive.)
According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.
The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.
It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.
This might also interest anyone thinking about the question. The universe rotates around an axis parallel to, or coincident with, the axes of rotation and revolution of all objects within it. In particular, the Galaxy (“Milky Way” is redundant) rotates on an axis coincident with the universal axis of rotation.
How did the Earth form?
Second, it says the Earth did not form by accident, either. According to the Nebula Theory, our Sun, Moon, Earth, and other plants formed when three (or more) clouds of supernova dust somehow collided (whoever thought dust clouds could collide), coalesced, and clumped together. The Sun formed first, then the planets, then the Mavericks of the Solar System from whatever was left over.
The problems with this model are too numerous to list. Why doesn’t the Sun spin on an axis aligned with the axes of revolution of the planets? Why hasn’t Halley’s Comet, which famously heralded the coming of William the Conqueror, dimmed out long ago? (Comet Halley last appeared in 1986 and has faithfully observed a 76-year period since astronomers first spotted it.)
Besides that, this Earth cannot be as old as geologists have always said it was. Originally, Charles Lyell insisted that the Earth was eternal. The discovery of radioactivity destroyed that supposition. So now geologists, not astronomers, insist that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Therefore the Sun is 4.6 billion years old. So why hasn’t the Sun burned out long before this? And why do so many other indicators say the Earth is young? Those indicators include ocean brine, river mouth silt, the recession of the Moon, and the decay of Earth’s magnetic field.
How did life begin?
The third part of the basic faith premise is that life did not begin by accident. Regarding life, the anti-faith establishment offers the Grand Evolutionary Paradigm – or Trident, which has these three teeth:
1. Hyper-uniformitarianism: all processes in operation today, have operated at the same rate since time immemorial.
2. Abiogenesis: the first living things formed spontaneously from nonliving matter. Some practitioners – who Didn’t Get The Memo – call this chemical evolution.
3. Common descent: all life present today, descends from a single ancestral population that was the first species. The anti-faith establishment usually calls this “evolution.”
The problem: all three must be true to obviate an Intelligent Agency of the origin of life. Abiogenesis is absolutely the weakest tooth in the trident. Breaking it is ridiculously easy. No one has ever created the conditions that could have resulted in the spontaneous assembly of the first cell. Even Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, who built an apparatus to create amino acids from methane, hydrogen and ammonia, have never shown that the conditions in their apparatus ever existed in the wild.
Once that tooth breaks, the trident loses its power. But common descent is similarly week. The changes it predicts happen too slowly for the time limit that radioactivity is supposed to set. Moreover, no one has shown a clean genetic progression from species to species that matches the fossils (“cave findings”) one finds in the ground. Evolutionists speak of missing links – which have ever remained missing.
How faith and anti-faith work out today
This analysis establishes the foundation of faith – whatever faith one might embrace. If the universe, the Earth, and life did not come about by accident, Someone created them. The great faiths of humankind differ only in the identity and motives of that Creator – this Architect of the universe.
Faith gives one a sense of purpose – and specifically that Someone had a purpose in creating him. Not only is the world not an accident, but no one in it is an accident, either. This belief produces an optimism that a lack of faith cannot match.
Optimistic people plan for a future, because they see the point in such planning. In particular, optimistic people have children. They see every reason to bring new life into the world – someone to carry on after they no longer can. Pessimistic people, lacking faith, see a bleak future – or no future. Climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid strike – to pessimists, it’s all the same.
Observe the results! Today the Total Fertility Rate – that is, how many children the average woman will have during her life – for “developed” countries stands lower than necessary for replacement. That level is 2.1, to account for childhood deaths – and that’s for a civilized country. In the United States, TFR fell from 3.7 in 1960 to 1.7 in 1976. It recovered to 2.1 in 1990, then trended between 2 and 2.1 until 2007. Today it stands at 1.7 again. By no coincidence, anti-faith took hold beginning in 1960 and still prevails.
The faithful will inherit the earth
And what is the TFR for Old Order Amish, the most faithful community in America today? No lower than 4, and sometimes as high as 6 or 7. The Amish number 400,000 today – double what they numbered 25 years ago. Not only do they have prodigious numbers of children, but also those children, when they sample “The English World” in the practice they call Rumspringa, are turning away from it more than ever. (One can guess their emotions: varying between open-mouthed wonderment and monumental disgust.)
The Amish are the most striking example, but not the only ones. In 2004, President George W. Bush, winning reelection, carried States that, with one exception, were more fertile than the States his rival John Kerry carried. That’s true today, at least when one compares “solid red States” to “solid blue States.” The Democratic Party is the party of anti-faith – and the States they control are losing population in two ways. Not only are people moving out, but also – and more importantly – those that stay, are having fewer, or no, children.
“Faithful and true”
More to the point, people of faith should not fear to share it with others, on any grounds. We’re not asking anyone to discard any of the basic premises of science – as properly understood. This Earth, and the larger universe, is actually 7,000 years old – and one need not regard that proposition as absurd. The secret lies in the recognition that this Earth, when it was little more than 1600 years old, suffered an event the ancient Greeks first called cataclysm – the Storm of Storms. We remember it as the Great Flood of Noah. The attendant upheavals produced all the radioactive elements we know today – and the Mavericks of the Universe. Furthermore, analysis of the movements of two comets – Halley and Swift-Tuttle – gives us a comfortable range of dates for that event: 3290 B.C., give or take a century.
Sadly, toward the end of the Regency Period, a “naturalist” named Charles Darwin took a six-year sea voyage and drew all the wrong lessons from what he observed. His was as close to a manifesto as the Great Western Rebellion Against God ever had. Before Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, Darwin wrote The Voyage of the Beagle and his subsequent, much-better-known works.
But not until after World War II would that rebellion take full effect. We see it in The Baby Bust and the collapse of fertility in the West.
Loss of faith everywhere
Many commentators fear a Great Replacement of Western native peoples with Far-Eastern and Southern peoples. Elon Musk sees worse: those Far-Eastern and Southern migrants are adopting the pessimism prevailing in the West. Only in Africa does TFR remain consistently above 2.1 – but replacement level is likely much higher there. Africa, in comparison to the West, is both disease-ridden and war-torn.
But what Musk might not see – because he doesn’t seem to have faith, either – is that people of faith have many more children than people lacking it. Even so, the kind of faith dictates fertility or infertility. Muslims, to take one example, seem to be setting themselves up for their own demographic winter. Optimism can be difficult to maintain when your faith model requires physical warfare against the enemies of that faith – and those enemies continue to defeat you on the battlefield. That goes double when your faith teaches you to seek death in battle as your only sure path to salvation.
Which faith you choose, matters
For that and many other reasons, which faith you choose, matters. The Old Order Amish are the most consistent practitioners of the Christian faith. That is why their population is thriving while other populations are stagnating or collapsing. This is not to say that a population, in order to thrive, must avoid all technologies beyond 1850. (But we in “The English World” might re-examine our own technologies and abandon those that prove deleterious to physical, mental, and social health and fitness.) It is to say that we should abandon habits and pursuits that degrade us as human beings. The early Church faced that same dilemma when advising Gentle converts what sorts of things to avoid.
More to the point, American governments must abandon the idea that faith may not inform government policy or law. That idea has required the teaching of atheism, with the population-collapse result we know. It has also required the tolerance of practices that, some say, have incurred “Divine group wrath” upon the American people. Nor do such practices limit themselves to American ambivalence – or hostility – toward a polity called “State of Israel” today. They also include tolerance of abortion on demand, and letting people send abortifacients through the mail.
With each successive generation, people of faith will constitute a larger proportion of the people. The population, declining at first, will rise. That’s how faith will save the country.
Religion attends the birth of a civilization; philosophy accompanies it to its grave.
Will Durant
Link to:
The article:
https://cnav.news/2024/12/18/civilization/christianity-today/creation/faith-alone-save-country/

The Frank and Gleiser Big Bang challenge:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html
https://archive.today/20230902161629/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-giant-distant-galaxies-surprise

Total Fertility Rate for all the United States:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=US

Previous articles:
https://cnav.news/2024/10/06/accountability/clergy-accountability/religion-and-science-compatibility/
https://cnav.news/2017/09/20/civilization/christianity-today/creation/earth-7000-years-old/
https://web.archive.org/web/20141022200420/http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/defenses/ark-flood/global-flood-an-astronomical-date/
https://cnav.news/2024/11/04/accountability/news-media/demographic-winter-left/

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