Letters From Grandpa #442

LETTERS FROM GRANDPA

• 442

Dearest grandchild:

Today’s letter will deal with Romans 3:4: “Let God be true and every man a liar.” In order to “prove” an argument it is a common practice to cite some “authority”. Today’s letter will emphasize the importance of not placing confidence in the “authority” of men. Men are often wrong, but God is never wrong! Most of the following facts have been condensed from an article on the internet titled “The 41 Worst Predictions of All Time.” The name of the author was not given.

• In 1490 a royal committee appointed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gave six reasons why Columbus would fail in finding another route to India.
• In 1610 a group of Aristotelian professors pronounced that Galileo was wrong in stating that the planet Jupiter had moons.
• In 1825 the Quarterly Review stated that it was palpably absurd that a locomotive could travel twice as fast as a stagecoach.
• In 1839 French surgeon Alfred Velpeau assured the world that the knife would always produce pain during surgery. Anesthesia was discovered and used in surgery only seven years later.
• In 1860 Anthony Trollope said that he had a very strong opinion that the Suez Canal “will not and cannot be made”. The canal was opened nine years later.
• In 1861 Lt. Joseph C. Ives explored the Grand Canyon with the U.S. Corps of Engineers. He then predicted that it would be the last time that a party of whites would visit that profitless locality.
• In 1868 U.S. Congressman Orange Ferriss assured us that the purchase of Alaska would always be a source of weakness and expense without any adequate return.
• In 1873 British surgeon Sir John Erichsen assured the world that the abdomen, the chest, and the brain would be forever shut out from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.
• On Aug. 2, 1902 Harper’s Weekly stated that the building of roads for motor cars was not for the near future in spite of rumors to the contrary.
• In 1903 Simon Newcomb, a U.S. astronomer, pronounced that aerial flight was one of a great class of problems with which man could never cope. Later that same year, Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
• In 1913 a U.S. district attorney prosecuted Le DeForest for fraud because he said that his Radio Telephone Company would be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic.
• In 1918 newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, stated that the Bolsheviks had produced the “truest democracy in Europe, the truest democracy in the world today.”
• On Jan. 13, 1920 the N.Y. Times assured their readers that professor Goddard’s rockets could not function in outer space. 49 years later, July 17, 1969, they retracted the story just before the Apollo landing on the moon.
• In 1922, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then U.S. assistant secretary of the Navy, said it was highly unlikely that a fleet of airplanes would ever be able to sink a fleet of navy vessels.
• On Oct. 16, 1922 Josephus Daniels, former U.S. Secretary of the navy, said that the radio made impossible a surprise attack by Japan on our Pacific possessions.
• In 1926, Le DeForest, the “Father of the radio,” said that we did not need to waste our time dreaming of commercial television.
• In 1929 U.S. Senator William Borah said that he would never see the repeal of prohibition (18 th

Amendment) He was wrong! It was repealed only 4 years later in 1933.

• In 1939 R. H. Naylor, British Astrologer, said that Hitler’s horoscope was not a war-horoscope. He said that if and when war did come Hitler would not strike the first blow.
• In 1945 Adm. William Leahy, an expert in explosives with the U.S. Navy, assured President Truman that the atomic bomb would never go off. Later that same year, August 6 1945, an atomic bomb reduced Hiroshima to rubble.
• In 1945 Dr. Vannevar Bush, a U.S. engineer, assured a U.S. Senate committee that we did not need to worry about intercontinental missiles for a very long period of time.
• In 1948 Science Digest said that landing on the moon offered so many problems that it would take 200 years to solve them. It only took 21 years.
• In 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt said “If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Also in 1970, Democrat Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin wrote an article for Look Magazine. In it, he stated “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• According to the San Jose Mercury News, environmentalist Noel Brown said that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.
• In 2000 climate scientist David Viner predicted that global warming would eliminate snow for those who live in England.
• In 2009 Al Gore, speaking at a Climate Conference in Copenhagen, said there was a 75% chance that the entire north polar cap could be completely ice-free within the next 5–7 years.
• Etc.

Our English word “science” comes from the Latin “scire” which means to “know.” Because we are constantly learning, science books quickly become obsolete. The Bible, by comparison, is perpetually relevant and does not need to be constantly changed or corrected in order to be relevant. Russ Whitten, writing in the Destin Log, states that archeology is constantly proving the Bible to be accurate and reminds us that Sir William Ramsay spent 30 years trying to find a mistake in the book of Acts and failed. In fact, Ramsay’s investigation convinced him to become a Christian. Whitten wrote about this famous archeologist: “Sir Ramsay found no historical or geographical mistakes in the book of Acts. This is amazing when we realize that in the book of Acts, Luke mentions 32 countries, 54 cities, nine Mediterranean islands and 95 people and he did not get one wrong. Compare that with the Encyclopedia Britannica. The first year the Encyclopedia Britannica was published it contained so many mistakes regarding places in the United States that it had to be recalled.”

Yes! Careful investigation is yet to prove the Bible wrong! So - “Let God be true and every man a liar.”

I love you,

Grandpa Boyce