The Knowledge of God among the early Cultures

Summary of 1st chapter of Bill Cooper«'s After the Flood by Dennis Edwards

Was there a knowledge of God among the very early cultures of mankind, cultures that we are taught were totally pagan and polytheistic in nature? If the Genesis Flood was a real event we would expect to find within the early cultures spreading out from the Middle East a knowledge of the One True God. Let us look at some of the early thinkers and see if we can capture a belief in an Almighty God among the so-called pagan peoples.

Taoist Lao-tzu from 6th century BC in China wrote,

Before time, and throughout time, there has been a self-existing being, eternal, infinite, complete, omnipresent...Outside this being, before the beginning, there was nothing![1]

Lao-tzu was obviously a believer in a Creator, But it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that scientific observations confirmed that the universe had a beginning. The effects of the sun's gravitational pull on light during a 1911 solar eclipse forced the then divided scientific community to agree wholeheartedly in Einstein's theory of relativity which predicted that the universe had a beginning. Sir Fred Hoyle's Steady State Theory, that the universe was eternal, fell into oblivion. Nevertheless, Lao-tzu some 550 years before Christ was already teaching that the universe had a beginning. But as today there are always those opposed to the idea of God the Creator. In Lao-tzu's day, we find another China-man named Kuo-Hsiang, who said,

I venture to ask whether the creator is or is not. If he is not, how can he create things?...The creating of things has no Lord; everything creates itself![2]

Sounds familiar, doesn't it, the creation creating itself. Isn't that what the "Big Bang" tells us, that nothing exploded and created everything? We see here already in the 6th century BC that there were those who didn't believe in a Creator and tried to convince others of the same.

Obviously, Lao-tzu didn't have the book of Genesis to consult with, but his conclusions were very much in keeping with God's revealed Word in Scripture, and with the Creationist point of view. Apostle Paul tells us that contrary to modern psychological opinion the knowledge of God is innate. Man has a built-in-awareness. Paul writes,

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness,  since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.[3] (NIV)

Paul is saying that because some people do not want to believe in God, whatever the reason may be, they suppress the truth that God has put within them. Like the famous atheist and intellectual of the 20th century Aldous Huxley so openly confessed.

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption . The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do . . For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.[4]

Paul goes on to explain a bit more.

For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them. [5] (NIV)

Paul is explaining here how God has put His law within our hearts, within our conscience. If we will truly follow our conscience, His law within our hearts, we can actually be obedient to God. We can do this even without the divine revelation of His Word from the Bible, even without actually believing in Him. That's how we can get good atheists. They can follow their conscience to a certain degree, even if they are in a mental or emotional battle with God.

Even though early culture's ritualistic beliefs may have glorified lesser deities, they nevertheless had a concept, though imperfect, of the One True God. How do we know this? Because He is mentioned in their writings. The fact that His mention, and the mention of the Creation, along with the mention of the  Flood are concurrently found in the ancient traditions of many cultures worldwide, highly suggests that these "legends or myths," as they are called by modern academics, were founded upon "a body of knowledge that had been preserved among the early races from a particular point in history."[6]

For example, an ancient text from Heliopolis in Egypt where the Egyptian High Priest lived and worked states the following about the Most High God,

I am the creator of all things that exist...that came forth from my mouth. Heaven and earth did not exist, nor had been created the herbs of the ground, nor the creeping things. I raised them out of the primeval abyss from a sate of non-being.[7]

Sounds like He's quoting from the book of Genesis where God spoke the universe and all things into existence.. Author Bill Cooper notes in his book After the Flood the following:

Indeed, in every major culture throughout the ancient world of which we have any record, the overwhelming consensus was that the universe had been created by often a single and usually supreme divine being, even in notoriously polytheistic cultures...Each culture was capable of expressing a view of the Creator that was not always perverse even though it flourished in the midst of an aggressive and thoroughly perverse paganism.[8]

Among the early Greeks around 800 BC we find in the Theogony of Hesiod another account of the creation of the world that bears similarities to the Genesis account.

First of all the Void came into being...next Earth...Out of the Void came darkness...and out of the Night came Light and Day.[9]

In Genesis we read and see the similarities,

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.[10] 

In 600 BC Xenophanes even in the midst of a thoroughly pagan polytheistic Greek society held an even loftier view of the Creator.

Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things which among men are shameful and blameworthy - theft and adultery and mutual deception...[but] there is one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought,...he sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, he hears as a whole...Always he remains in the same state, changing not at all...But far from toil he governs everything with his mind. [11]

Note that Xenophanes did not try to name the God. He was not talking about Zeus or Hermes who had mortal attributes. This God was too great to be described in words. Later in Greek history, we find this idea of a God, much beyond man, particularly in the thoughts of Plato.[12]

Let us therefore state the reason why the framer of this universe of change framed it at all. He was good, and what is good has no particle of envy in it; being therefore without envy, He wished all things to be like Himself as possible. This is as valid a principle for the origin of the world of change as we shall discover from the wisdom of men.[13]

Again, in Genesis we read similar sounding words,

and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:[14] 

Plato said he had discovered these principles from the wisdom of the ancient philosophers.Under Plato's influence the creationist concept of the ancient world was to become more "scientific and logic based" with a firm belief in a singular and almighty God. 

However, at the same time in Greece the idea of atheism was beginning to spawn and take root in the mind's of other men. It was when Plato refined the idea of a omnipotent God Creator that atheism began to spring forth against it. While the false ideas of polytheism held men's minds, atheism wasn't necessary.[15]

Thales of Miletus who lived from 625-545 BC is credited to have been the first materialist philosopher. Aristotle described him as the 'founder of natural philosophy.' But Thales was by no means an atheist. Though we have no original writings of Thales, we have quotations from him within the writings of Aristotle and others.[16] One such comment attributed to Thales says,

Of existing things, God is the oldest - for He is ungenerated. The world is most beautiful, for it's God's creation...Mind is the swiftest, for it runs through everything.[17]

Here we see Thales expressing classic creationist sentiment. The cause of the universe must be greater than the universe. Since that cause is outside of time and material, it has no beginning, or is "ungenerated." The fact the we indeed live in a world full of beauty, even in its present "fallen-state,"makes better sense if a "beautiful God" created it, than if it came into being without cause or reason. The information found in the DNA of every living creature testifies to a "Mind," dwelling and creating all of life, and "running through everything."

In today's creation verses evolution debate we hear similar arguments. Dr. Stephen Meyer in his book Signature in the Cell explains it like this.

Our uniform experience affirms that specific information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in a radio signal, or produced in a simulation experiment—always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind and not strictly material process. So the discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source. It follows that the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is that it too had an intelligent source. Intelligent design best explains the DNA enigma. [18]

However, though Thales presents very creationist ideas, his pupil Anaximander takes natural philosophy to a fully developed theory of evolution. No doubt, the ideas of atheism and evolution were developing before hand, nevertheless, it was Anaximander who gave them voice,[19] Plutarch writes that Anaximander said that

...originally, humans were born from animals of a different kind...[20]

So we see natural philosophy needing no Creator. This idea was no doubt brewing underneath ancient Greek society in defiance to a very strict Greek  laws of blasphemy and impiety. These laws obligated everyone to think and believe the same and not teach anything that was not "state doctrine." Socrates had  himself gone to his death because of these very laws.[21]

Plato speaks of the materialists as if they were a new movement in thinking. To Plato's lofty Creator orientated mind, these new ideas were perverse and dangerous, especially to the younger generation. He writes,

Some people, I believe, account for all things which have come to exist, all things which are coming into existence now, and all things which will do so in the future, by attributing them either to nature, art, or chance.[22]

Plato continues and says these thinkers define the 'gods' as 'artificial concepts' and 'legal fictions.' He considers these ideas a 'pernicious doctrine' that 'must be the ruin of the younger generation, both in the state at large and in private families.'[23] It seems, therefore, that the idea of atheism was already growing in Plato's time. He was so concerned with its growth, that he made the above comments, and spent a large part of his philosophical work trying to defend the Creator and an orderly universe.[24] 

To Plato the Creator turned chaos into order simply because His nature is good, and it was therefore His good pleasure. The Creator loved order rather than chaos and to ensure the continuance of that order, everything was made according to an eternal and flawless pattern. Plato's Theory of Forms silenced the atheistic camp for nearly fifty years until the time of Epicurus in the 4th century BC. [25]

Aristotle tried to combine the ideas of the materialists and the creationists, similar to today's Christians who believe in evolution with God at the steering wheel. That idea would be fine, if  that were how God said He did it. That idea would be fine, if there was a mechanism for adding new genetic information to the genome. But there isn't, and therefore, evolution doesn't even have a mechanism to make it work. Both natural selection and mutations conserve genetic information, or delete genetic information, or damage genetic information. These scientific facts make neither one, nor the other, nor the two working together, capable of making the changes necessary for molecules to develop into men. Horizontal variation in kinds of animals does occur, but not vertical changing from one kind of an animal to another. Besides that, God didn't say He did it that way.

In any case, like many modern atheists and agnostics, Epicurus argued that it was insufficient to suppose a Creator God from the evidence of a well-order cosmos, because to Epicurus' eyes, the cosmos was not well ordered.[26] To Epicurus the universe was the results of a long, perhaps infinite, series of accidents resulting from the random jostling of atoms. But in order not to offend the general public and their beliefs, Epicurus was careful to acknowledge the existence of the 'gods', but relegated them to having little interest in the cosmos. In this way he was making a side-attack and not a frontal one which would have caused more resistance and gotten him in trouble with the authorities. 

Later in the late 18th and early 19th centuries James Hutton and Charles Lyell would make a similar side-attack against Christianity. Lyell, who was a trained lawyer, decided not to attack the divinity of Christ, as he knew the Church would whole-heartedly defend that point. Instead he promoted Hutton's idea of uniformitarianism which states that current geologic processes, occurring at the same rates observed today, and in the same manner, are what account for all of Earth's geological features.[27] Lyell would promote a long time scale of  "millions of years" in his plan to remove Moses' influence from science. At that point in history, in the 1830s, the geological record was assumed to be the result of the Genesis Flood and not the result of slow processes over "millions of years." If he could get people to doubt the reliability of Moses' record in Genesis, he could bring down all of Christianity.

And it worked. Lyell's persuasive Principles of Geology published first in 1830,  ran for 6 editions, and became the most popular scientific book of the era. As a result, many Christian leaders accepted and absorbed the idea of millions of years into their Christian theology. Charles Spurgeon (seen above), the famous British Christian leader, had already acknowledged "millions of years" as early as 1855, four years before Darwin was to publish his famous book. He said,

Can any man tell me when the beginning was? Years ago we thought the beginning of the world was when Adam came upon it. But we have discovered that thousands of years before that God was preparing chaotic matter to make it a fit abode for man, putting races of creatures upon it, who might die and leave behind the marks of his handiwork and marvelous skill, before he tried his hand on man.[28]

With the acceptance of  Lyell's ideas, when Darwin later published his work in 1859, the ground work had already been done. Many Christian leaders then accepted evolution and incorporated it into their Christian ideas on origins. But even Darwin's favorite advocate, Thomas Huxley, nicknamed Darwin's bulldog for his aggressive debating skills, knew Christianity could not absorb evolution into its doctrine, like a more recent atheistic scientist has confessed.

Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus´ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing. [29] 

Epicurus was able to present his materialistic ideas because he acknowledged the 'gods.' The success of his ideas caused the Stoics, founded by Zeno in 308 BC, to make a counter attack. Under the Stoic's a far more profound concept of the Creator was developed.[30] Stoic Chrysippus said the following:

If there is anything in nature which the human mind, which human intelligence, energy, and power could not create, then the creator of such things must be a being superior to man. But the heavenly bodies in their eternal orbits could not be created by man. They must therefore be created by a being greater than man...Only an arrogant fool would imagine that there was nothing in the whole world greater than himself. Therefore there must be something greater than man. And that something must be God. [31]

Reminds me of the verse from the Psalm of David which says,

The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.[32]

But where in the world could the Stoics come up with the idea of a supreme and omnipotent God? The Greeks had had contact with the Jewish people as far back as 587 BC, when the Greek mercenaries assisted the armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in the destruction of Jerusalem. However, the Jewish people were held in contempt by the Greeks. Therefore, for survival purposes, many Jews hid their nationality and Hellenized their names and their ways just as they have done since then in Christian countries during the Middle Ages and even recently after WWII.[33]

The Jewish Torah which included the book of Genesis had been translated into Greek in 250 BC, seventeen years before Chrysippus became leader of the Stoic school in 233 BC. But Zeno had founded the Stoic school of thought some fifty-eight years before that translation. So whether or not it was the book of Genesis that had influenced Stoic thinking, we cannot be sure. But under Chrysippus we see the concept of 'evidence from design,' [34]

an argument for that divinely inspired intent and purpose which was observable throughout the universe and which convinced the Stoic, as it convinces the creationist of today, of the scientific and philosophical correctness of his model. [35]

Later the Roman Stoic Cicero was to give this idea its highest expression in the pre-Christian era with his words.

When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? Our friend Posidonius as you know has recently made a globe which in its revolution shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets, by day and by night, just as they appear in the sky. Now if someone were to take this globe and show it to the people of Britain or Scythia would a single one of those barbarians fail to see that it was the product of a conscious intelligence?[36]

Cicero is obviously giving voice to the idea of "intelligent design." The design in the universe and in our solar system that makes life on earth possible cries out that there is a designer. Scientists now know that many factors like the force of gravity, the speed of light, the electromagnetic field, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, to just name a few, need to have a certain strength for life to be possible on earth. It just so happens that these many physical factors are all fine-tuned to the exact frequency or force to make life possible. Just a small variation in any one of their strengths or speeds and the universe, as we know it, would cease to exist, or life would be impossible.

Like Sir Isaac Newton so wisely put it many years later.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.[37]

Cicero was actually trying to refute the Epicurean Lucretius who was a Roman materialistic poet and contemporary of his. Lucretius said our minds cannot perceive things correctly, but the universe was purely materialistic in nature. Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods was written in 44 BC as a rebuttal to Lucretius' ideas. [38] Cicero wrote.

In the heavens there is nothing accidental, nothing arbitrary, nothing out of order, nothing erratic. Everywhere is order, truth, reason, constancy...I cannot understand this regularity in the stars, this harmony of time and motion in their various orbits through all eternity, except as the expression of reason, mind and purpose... Their constant and eternal motion, wonderful and mysterious in its regularity, declares the indwelling power of a divine intelligence. If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.[39]

Lucretius had said that there was an innate power in matter to create itself and arrange itself into meaningful and purposeful order without any outside aid or influence. Yet he found himself unable to trust that same matter when it came to perceiving or even explaining this fact! David Hume in the 18th century would echo these sentiments. Hume said it was only reasonable to believe in God, but since we know that God does not exist, then we cannot trust our reasoning powers. That is, he couldn't and wouldn't trust anyone's reasoning powers, but his own.[40]

The Greek materialists had taken the argument down to the atomic level, but found only greater and more mind-boggling complexity. This made it more difficult in their attempt to explain the allegedly accidental creation and mindless existence of the universe.[41] Evolutionists have the same problem today of explaining how a directionless cause could produce such a complex molecule as the DNA. In response to the materialists accidental and mindless force of nature, Cicero replied,

Is it not a wonder that anyone can bring himself to believe that a number of solid and separate particles by their chance collisions and moved only by the force of their own weight could bring into being so marvelous and beautiful a world? If anybody thinks that this is possible, I do not see why he should not think that if an infinite number of examples of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were shaken together and poured out on the ground it would be possible for them to fall so as to spell out, say, the whole text of the Annals of Ennius. In fact I doubt whether chance would permit them to spell out a single verse![42]

Sounds a lot like the idea of monkeys tapping out the work of Shakespeare on a typewriter, doesn't it?[43]

Lucretius, attacking the classical creationist view of that time, proposed the idea that the earth was not fixed, as the earlier Greek philosophers had taught. He believed that the earth moved in an infinite space that possessed no center. Sounds like Edwin Hubble's, Stephen Hawking's, and Carl Sagan's center-less universe. If the earth is not near to the center of the universe, then we do not appear to be anything special. Lucretius idea was to counter the Stoic idea that the universe was finite and its edge was equidistant from the earth.[44]Lucretius explained,

It is a matter of observation that one thing is limited by another. The hills are demarcated by air, and air by the hills. Land sets bound to sea, and sea to every land. But the universe has nothing outside to limit it.[45] There can be no center in infinity.[46]

Lucretius had introduced the idea of randomness, aimlessness and sheer relativism of Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot." He moved away from the idea of the earth being fixed in space which the Greek and Roman classical science accepted. It wasn't until Copernicus' mathematical equations and Galileo's observations that this false idea of the earth being fixed at the center of the solar system was overthrown. Nevertheless the need for a Creator of the universe was not overthrown.[47]

The fact that earth is not the center of the universe, in that everything is not revolving around it, does not mean that our galaxy cannot be at the center, or near the center of the universe. Edwin Hubble, observing a red shift in distance starlight in every direction he looked, was annoyed with this apparent reality. He believed the red shift indicated that the star emanating the light was moving away from us. He said,

Such a condition (these red shifts) would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe analogous, in a sense, to the ancient Conception of a central earth. The hypothesis cannot be disproved but it is unwelcomed…. But the unwelcomed supposition of a favored location must be avoided at all costs. Such a favored position, of course, is intolerable; moreover, it represents a discrepancy with the theory, because the theory postulates homogeneity, i.e. smoothness or evenness.[48]

What Hubble really meant by this was that although the evidence seems to indicate that our galaxy is near the center of the universe, it was unacceptable to him because of its philosophical implications. Like George Ellis , who worked with Stephen Hawking on the Big Bang cosmology, has said,

You cannot do physics or cosmology without an assumed philosophical basis... People need to be aware that there is a range of models that can explain the observations .... For instance, I can construct a spherically symmetric universe for you with Earth at its center, and you cannot prove otherwise based on observations, (that it is wrong) ....you can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide it.[49]

What most people don't realize is that cosmologists choose a model that agrees with  their core belief system, or initial assumptions, that are not necessarily supported by evidence, but believed none the less. Edwin Hubble, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking do not want to confirm God in their cosmology. Therefore, they start with assumptions that the universe has no center and no edge in order to avoid a conclusion confirming the Biblical model.

But the question of who created the universe has been from the dawn of time one of man's most fundamental concerns. How did the universe come into existence? Where did its astonishing degree of order and complexity come from?[50] These questions lead to the next ones. Is there a Creator God? How can I know Him? Does He want me to live my life in a certain way to please Him? Cicero tells of man named Lucilius who said that the Creator

is, as Ennius says, "the father both of gods and men," a present and mighty God. If anyone doubts this, then so far as I can see he might just as well doubt the existence of the sun. For the one is as plain as the other. And if this were not clearly known and manifest to our intelligence, the faith of men would not have remained so constant, would not have deepened with the lapse of time, and taken ever firmer root throughout the ages and the generations of mankind.[51]

The Apostle Paul explains it in this manner,

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they (all mankind)are without excuse. [52]

So ends our limited study on the knowledge of God among the early cultures. In his book  Eternity in their Hearts, Don Richardson also has done research on this topic. He has found many other cultures in South America and Asia with a similar knowledge of the Mighty God in their written and oral traditions.[53] Another interesting study which looks at the many similar Flood "myths" around the world is Charles Martin's Flood Legends: Global Clues of a Common Event which presents more collaborating information about mankind's common heritage.[54]

This ends my summary, paraphrasing, and commentary on the first chapter from British Bill Cooper's After the Flood: The early post-flood history of Europe traced back to Noah. Please read the book!

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/433064.After_The_Flood

The author lays out astonishing evidence showing how the earliest Europeans recorded their descent from Noah through Japheth in meticulously kept records, knew all about Creation and the Flood, and had encounters with creatures we would call dinosaurs. These records of other nations lend chapters 10 and 11 of Genesis a degree of accuracy that sets them apart from all other historical documents of the ancient world. In a book which is the fruit of more than 25 years of research, he traces the development of the creation / evolution controversy that raged in the ancient world, and explodes many of the myths and errors of 'modernist' biblical critics. This book shows how European history can be traced right back to the flood and the descendants of Japheth, through contemporary accounts and a table of nations.[55]

Footnotes

[1] Lao-tzu, Tao-te-ching, (tr.Leon Wieger, English version Derek Bryce) Llanerch Publishers, p.13. Cited by Bill Cooper in After the Flood, New Wine Press, England, 1995, p.16.
[2] Clarke, John; Nature in Questions, Earthscan, 1993, p.24. Cited by Cooper, p.17.
[3] Romans 1:18-20 (NIV) Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® All rights reserved worldwide.
[4] Huxley, Aldous, Ends and Means (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1937), 270. Cited in https://answersingenesis.org/world-religions/atheism/aldous-huxley-admits-motive-for-anti-theistic-bias/
[5] Romans 2:13-15. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+2%3A13-15&version=NIV
[6] Cooper Bill; After the Flood,  p.17.
[7] Wallace Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. 1, New York, 1969, p.308-313. As paraphrased by Bill Cooper, p.17.
[8] Cooper, Bill; p.18-19.
[9] Hesiod, Theogony, (tr. Norman Brown 1953), Bobbs-Merrill Co., New York, p.15. Cited by Cooper, p.19.
[10] Genesis 1:1-5 (KJV) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1%3A1-5&version=KJV
[11] Barnes, Jonathan; Early Greek Philosophy, Penguin Classics, UK, p.95-97. Cited by Cooper, p.19.
[12] Cooper, Bill; p.19-20.
[13] Plato, Timaeus and Criteas, (tr. Trevor Saunders, 1970), Penguin Classics, UK, p.42. Cited by Cooper, p.20.
[14] Genesis 1:25b-26a (KJV) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1%3A25b-26a&version=KJV
[15] Cooper, Bill, p.22.
[16] Cooper, Bill, p.21.
[17] Barnes, Jonathan; Early Greek Philosophy, Penguin Classics, UK, p.68. Cited by Cooper, p.21.
[18] Meyer, Stephen;  Signature in the Cell; Harper Collins, 2009, p.347
[19] Cooper, Bill, p.21.
[20] Barnes, Jonathan; Early Greek Philosophy, p.73. Cited by Cooper, p.21.
[21] Cooper, Bill, p.22.
[22] Plato, The Laws, (tr. Desmond Lee, 1965), Penguin Classics, UK, p.416. Cited by Cooper, p.22.
[23] ibid, p.417.
[24] Cooper, Bill, p.23.
[25] ibid
[26] ibid
[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism
[28] C.H. Spurgeon, “Election,” The New Park Street Pulpit 1 (1990): 318.Cited in https://answersingenesis.org/theory-of-evolution/millions-of-years/where-did-the-idea-of-millions-of-years-come-from/
[29] G. Richard Bozarth, ‘The Meaning of Evolution’, American Atheist, p. 30. 20 September 1979. Cited in https://answersingenesis.org/theory-of-evolution/quotes/the-atheists-know-why-christianity-has-to-fight-evolution/
[30] Cooper, Bill; p.24-25.
[31] Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, (tr. Horace McGregor 1988),Penguin Classics,UK, p.130. Cited by Cooper, p.25.
[32] King David, Psalm 14:1
[33] Cooper, Bill; p.26.
[34] ibid, p.27
[35] ibid
[36] Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, p.159. Cited by Cooper, p.27.
[37]  Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
[38] Cooper, Bill; p.27-28
[39] Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, p.144-145. Cited by Cooper, p.29.
[40] Cooper, Bill; p.29
[41] ibid, p.30
[42]Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, p.161. Cited by Cooper, p.30-31.
[43] Cooper, Bill; p.31
[44] ibid
[45] Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, (tr. Ronald Latham, 1951) Penguin Classics, UK, p.56. Cited by Cooper, p.32.
[46] ibid
[47] Cooper, Bill; p.32.
[48] Edwin Hubble, The Observational Approach to Cosmology, 1937, p.40. Cited by Gary Bates in Alien Intrusion, p.90.
[49] http://creation.com/galactocentric-cosmology
[50] Cooper, Bill; p.33.
[51] Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, p. 124. Cited by Cooper, p.33.
[52] Romans 1:20 KJV
[53] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/904375.Eternity_in_Their_Hearts
[54] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6568803-flood-legends
[55] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/433064.After_The_Flood