By Tim Wildmon | AFA President

I remember sitting in the pew when I was a kid listening to my dad preach. Most of us don’t remember many sermons from when we were young, even if our daddy was the minister. You just hope all the messages you can’t remember sank down into your soul somewhere and make you a better Christian today. Mostly I remember catch phrases or talking points if you will. Every so often, Dad would have a message on the meaning and purpose of life. In that context, he would talk about the origin of life and the Bible. The catch phrase I remember was something like this: "It takes more faith to believe in atheistic evolution than it does to believe that God created everything."

Do you believe that there is an intelligent mind behind the world and our universe? Or do you believe that the world and human existence is a matter of chance or happenstance? And do you believe "happenstance" is even a word or do you believe — as I do — that it is a word that slowly evolved over the last few years? (We will deal with that last question another day.)

There have been volumes written on creation vs. evolution. I believe the first sentence of the Bible, Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But to debate creation and evolution is not my purpose here. My purpose is to share with you some information from a fascinating new book titled Who Built the Moon? written by British researchers Christopher Knight and Alan Butler. These gentlemen say that their field of study had no religious component and both describe themselves as "dyed in the wool agnostics." What these guys did was study everything about the Moon. Everything.

"Out first realization," said Butler, "is that all experts agree that the Moon is a highly improbable object and it has been nothing less than an incubator for life on Earth. Quite simply, we humans would not be here if the Moon had not been exactly the size it is in the various positions it has held over the last four-and-a-half billion years."

(Note to reader: I don’t know how the gents got the number "four-and-half-billion years," but it is not germane to what they discovered.)

Knight and Butler then noticed some very odd mathematical relationships between the size of the Moon, Earth and Sun. The orbital characteristics of the Moon and the Earth, they say, are unlikely to exist by chance alone. For example, the Earth revolves 366 times in one orbit of the Sun and the Earth is 366% larger than the Moon. Conversely, the Moon takes 27.32 days to orbit the Earth and is 27.32% of Earth’s size.

"There is no possible relationship between the relative size of the Earth and the Moon and their orbital characteristics, yet the numbers are the same. And that was just the first of many such underlying patterns," said Knight. "The number 366 was the basis of the ancient measuring system we have reconstructed, and that number keeps popping up along with a small group of round numbers such as 400 and 10,000. For example, the Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun and exactly 400 times smaller that the Sun. And in 366 orbits of the Moon, the Earth experiences 10,000 days."

"We were confused at first," admitted Butler. "Where there should have been random, disconnected numbers there were beautifully harmonious relationships and repeating patterns. It struck us as though we were looking at some kind of engineering blueprint involving the Earth and the Moon’s interaction around the Sun."

As if this weren’t enough, says the press release about the book, Knight and Butler made an even more surprising discovery. The metric system, which is now universally adopted across the world for scientific measurement, appears to have been created specifically to highlight the peculiarities of the Moon. For example, the Earth is 109.3 times smaller that the Sun, while the circumference of the Moon when measured in kilometers is 10,930 km! Also, the Moon is turning at exactly 1% of the Earth’s spin, which gives a speed at the lunar equator of precisely 400 kilometers per hour.

Again, quoting from the press release: "According to the pair, there can be only one logical explanation. Some agency saw the life-bearing potential of the Earth/Sun system and added the Moon as a means to create and nurture life. But the same agency did much more. It made certain that the resulting mathematics would be particularly relevant to a species with 10 fingers and also in the absolute knowledge of the eventual use of the metric system."

To be certain, these are compelling revelations.

My interpretation: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth."