1,655 Years of Fascinating History

Dr Andrew Milnthorpe and I boarded a train at our home station in Bracknell for London specifically to visit the London Transport Museum, as trains, in particular, are his speciality. Taking after his father, who can give the name to any insignificant-looking carriage used so nonchalantly by both daily commuters and leisure travellers alike, along with locomotives of both past and present, their love of trains certainly runs in the family.

Therefore, during a chance meeting with Andrew at our local swimming pool - he was about to begin his swimming session just as I finished mine, I suggested visiting the Transport Museum during the following Bank Holiday weekend, after asking me if there's anywhere we can go to together. I watched as his countenance breaking into joy at my suggestion. I knew that I have struck the right note.

And so we spent a good part of the day together at the London Transport Museum, where displays of maps of the developing railway network around London was of greater interest than the trains themselves, although sitting inside an antiquated carriage was intriguing in itself, even if the carriage did not pull out, as my subconscious was expecting, to begin its journey. 

Victorian ladies cabin, London Transport Museum.

The London Transport Museum was by no means the only museum we have visited. Andrew, Alex and I have also visited the British Museum in Bloomsbury, and also the two Natural History Museums, the famous one in South Kensington and the smaller one in Oxford. We also spent a few hours at the Science Museum, next door to the Natural History in London, and some time in the Museum of London located at the redeveloped Barbican district. Just to add here that some years ago, Alex and I spent the day at the Victoria & Albert Museum, also in South Kensington.

So really, what is the museum all about? Isn't it a collection of artefacts made by humans going back thousands of years? And this includes the development of technology, so featured in both the Science Museum and the London Transport Museum. It's all educational, allowing the student to learn something without the keen eye of the teacher wielding a cane, therefore, the museum is often the venue for school trips, at times seen as a treat, instead of being confined to a classroom.

Of course, the collection can be very interesting, intriguing even, or it could be downright boring. It really all depends on individual interest. As for me, I can gaze at a map of the London railway network as it was before the War, for quite a long time, while someone else would walk straight past it, and go for the Victorian ladies dress and men's fashion for that period - the kind of exhibit I would have walked straight past as I ponder on the former possibility for a train to travel from Southampton to Dover via London Waterloo without the need to reverse!

As for Natural History, going by what I have seen over the years, this seems to enjoy universal popularity. Add a computer to the exhibit where the public can play an educational game, and I have seen queues of families with their kids all waiting to have their turn on the computer. As for me, I had my time on these computers, especially in the Natural History Museum in London. All I had to do was turn up during a normal working day during school term, and most of the computers were free and waiting for the next participant. Back then, I even tested the integrity of one device by teasingly pressing the same key when various questions were presented. When a text akin to the words:

You are just messing around. Leave, and let the next person play the game...

appeared, indeed, I felt rebuked, thus demonstrating the programmer's foresight of those who just want to mess around and will not take their learning more seriously.

Perhaps I may have had a point about my messing around. It was in the Evolution gallery, where at that time the statue of Charles Darwin dominated from one corner before it was moved to its present site, which now dominates the cathedral-like main gallery. The computer game was that of Natural Selection demonstrated on two groups of mice, one group dark-skinned the other group light. With the elimination of one group living in an unsuitable environment and thus subject to predation, if anything, this seems to go against evolution rather than support it.

However, it was only last year, accompanied by Alex and Andrew, when, on one sunny Bank Holiday Monday, we visited the Oxford Museum of Natural History. No computers here, nor Darwin's statue, this was an excellent collection of animal skeletons, both extinct and living species. Alongside were displays of fossil marine life, stretching from the Cambrian to more recent periods.

Fossils are fascinating, to me at least. This is where such a vivid demonstration of Noah's Flood is so fervently displayed. These are all features of suffering and death and seems so unlike that of an evolutionary scale where suffering and death are seen as a necessity in organism development. As more and more fossils are discovered, including those of species never seen before, I get the impression that God is trying to tell us something, yet we don't want to hear it, but instead deliberately stick our fingers in our ears to ensure that the truth never settles in our minds.

If only, yes, if only...

If only a bed containing mixed fossils were discovered. Here I'm referring to the Cambrian Trilobite, a fossil of a Coelacanth (a living fossil), several skeletons of Dinosaurs including a Plesiosaur, a Triceratops and a Tyrannosaur. And on the same rock strata and quite nearby, or better still, partially superimposed on the other skeletons, is that of a horse, a domestic cat, and a couple of fully-evolved modern humans. And in the hand of one of the human skeletons, there appears to be what looks like some kind of scientific wizardry, a gadget which features a delicately-cut crystal. And the tail of the trilobite is actually resting on the gadget! What a sensation such a find would bring! Indeed, the whole of the academic world would be left shattered!

Actually, according to one source,* a fossil trail of both dinosaur and human footprints, along with raindrop splash marks, have already been discovered on an ancient Paluxy River bed, near Glen Rose Texas, the rock on which those tracks were found were from the Cretaceous Period, some 100,000,000 years old, the preservation of such footprints indicating a rapid change of the environment enabling such prints to remain preserved. Furthermore, on sites stretching from Virginia and Pennsylvania, through Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and westwards towards the Rocky Mountains, what appears to be human footprints have been found in rocks of the Paleozoic Era (which includes the Devonian and Silurian rock strata) supposedly to be around 250,000,000 years old!

Paluxy River bed, Texas.

The Paluxy River has also revealed giant human footprints, an astonishing phenomenon which suggests the existence of the Nephilim, or giants, of Genesis 6:4. Very similar giant footprints have been found also in Arizona, and near Mt Whitney in California.

 Human footprints testify of "giants in the earth in those days."

It was 1970s geologist Albert C. Ingalls who wrote, concerning these finds:

If man, or even his ape ancestor, or even that ape ancestor's early mammalian ancestor, existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all of the geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence for the present at least, science rejects the attractive explanation that man made these mysterious prints in the mud of the Carboniferous Period with his feet.**

Science has rejected these finds as fake news, whether the footprints were made by some undiscovered reptilian species, or whether the human or dinosaur footprints were some elaborate carving, or even if the mud surrounding the human footprint had collapsed into a print made by some other animal and partially filled to form a human print. What I find amazing is how respected scientists would go to extreme lengths to deny the truthfulness of the Biblical record!

I find this so sad. Much of that was because of the Lord himself, back in 1973, gave me the option either to believe the Scriptural record or believe in evolution, with no in-betweens. Without hesitation, I chose the former. But since then, I have developed a fascination with the first 1,655 years of human history within the Scriptural frame. That is the time from the creation of our first parents to the Flood of Noah, the antediluvian world.

What was my present home location like as before the Flood? Was it a jungle inhabited by a wide diversity of species, including dinosaurs? Could my part of the world lay below the antediluvian sea, with great beasts such as the ichthyosaur and the long-necked plesiosaur gliding overhead through the primaeval ocean? Or could my area have been part of a city with highly-developed communication systems and technology? It's this last bit which I find so elusive. As one archaeologist once wrote:

The ancient Egyptians must have had wireless. We've been digging here for years and we have not found a single wire.

This is a referral against Erich von Daniken's book Chariots of the Gods? which this writer advocated the invasion of a super space-civilization to our planet around 40,000 years ago, who then tinkered with the DNA of a group of apes to kick-start their evolution towards homo sapiens. I have read the book after I was lent to me by a work colleague in 1975 after he was convinced that the visions the prophet Ezekiel saw was actually a helicopter, and the tabernacle Moses had built was a gigantic radio transmitter!

I never took Erich von Daniken with any seriousness in the way my friend did, but by reading in the Bible about the tremendous longevity these pre-Flood people lived, which is not far below a thousand years, I can imagine how rapid they may have gained scientific knowledge over the course of time, and may even lay down the foundations of the fabulous Atlantis of Plato's fables. Therefore, I find it a pity that no evidence of such advanced civilisation has never been unearthed, or for that matter, discovered deep under the ocean. Considering how wicked the antediluvians were, it comes to me as no surprise that the bodies of every human being were sucked down to the depths of the ocean and destroyed altogether, and every artefact and every building were atomised in the violent torrents of the floodwaters.

But how the landscape might have looked, and how tremendously beautiful the land might have been, I can only imagine, along with a global tropical climate under constantly cloudless skies, with the brilliant multitude of stars shining by night. And all that despite that the ground was cursed because of the entrance of sin.

Fantasy image of the sunken Atlantis.

And yet, it was by no means a safe place to live. Life was made very cheap. Also, an extraordinary phenomenon was taking place at the time. The angelic sons of God were abandoning their place in heaven to marry the beautiful daughters of men (Genesis 6:1-4). The robbing of the wives from their human husbands might have stirred horrific violence from jealousy, rage and hatred. As a result of such an unholy union, babies with only half-human genome were born and grew up to be giants, famous men, men of renown. These guys were unredeemable, not having a full human DNA from both human father and mother. Unless the Flood came, the Messianic Line from Adam to Christ could have been ineffective or severed, having been polluted with a non-human genome.

Other than destroying a wicked, corrupt human race, the Flood played its role in the redemption of mankind by preserving the Messianic Line from genetic contamination. After the Flood, this angelic-human copulation was no longer permitted by God, thus demonstrating yet again God's love for us and his willingness to save everyone who comes to Christ through faith. 

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*John C. Whitcombe Jr and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood, Baker, 1969, 1975.

**Albert C. Ingalls "The Carboniferous Mystery" vol. 162, Scientific American, January 1940, p.14, and quoted in the above book.