These beloved tales written by Christian apologist C. S. Lewis were favorites of my children and contain within them some parallels with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Ark Encounter has had the Logos Theater perform two of the famous stories at their venue, The Horse and His Boy, and the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe. This winter, they are bringing Prince Caspian to the theater. Narnia is a parallel universe that is filled with talking creatures such as centaurs, fauns, satyrs, and minotaurs, borrowed from ancient mythology. Though each of these interconnected tales are well-written works of fantasy and captivating adventure, I have been a little uncomfortable with the potential danger of taking the mythological universe introduced by C. S. Lewis being taken too seriously to the point where some readers begin to live in a world of fantasy and magic. This is reflected in a lot of the on-line role-playing games where the players accumulate preternatural powers, multiple lives, fighting dragons, witches, beasts and armies in an ugly, hostile world. I think that The Lord of the Rings departed from the gospel parallel too much, and Harry Potter removed it entirely. This is a progression that I think is a danger that leads to people desiring the world of magic and the occult. Unless the true nature of Jesus Christ is understood, people’s desire for the supernatural is filled with the fake evil substitute. Evolutionists have speculated that there are parallel universes, and it is ours that got lucky enough to produce life and civilization. The evolution world is a fantasy world where a godless power of scientific laws rules. I think that these stories are harmless only if the reader and children are taught the genuine gospel story and the difference between that and what is represented in Lewis’s fantasy world.

Dr. Jerry Bergman has written a book about whale evolution. It is titled "Whale Evolution: A Whale of a Tail" and it exposes the strange idea that dog-sized precursors to the whale evolved from a land mammal and returned to the sea. Some of the early false claims about three of the so-called "walking whales" (Pakicetus, Rodhocetus and Ambulocetus) have been exposed. Since then, evolutionists continue to crank out new theoretical land ancestors, and each claim contradicts the previous claims. Jerry describes the anatomy of the whale and the impossibility for land ancestors of the whale to survive the migration of the nose to the back of the head, lose its legs and develop flippers and fins, develop the ability to drink sea water, dive without getting the bends, and develop echolocation.

The RNA World Hypothesis proposes that life could have evolved from inanimate matter through initially forming self-replicating RNA. There are immediate problems with that hypothesis. The mechanism to form RNA requires nucleotides to form. For nucleotides to form, you need amino acids, phosphates and sugars. There are already problems isolating left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. Then somehow, DNA has to be reverse engineered from RNA, and that process needs RNA and amino acids in their right forms. The reagents needed to form amino acids conflict with the reagents needed to form nucleotides. The synthesis of nucleotides and the components of life are considered in this video. Nineteen difficulties are presented. Two studies from Germany have proposed ways RNA could have been the link between inanimate molecules and living microbes. Benedikt Obermayer’s Munich group has reported a computer simulation of "prebiotic RNA" in Physical Review Letters. Christopher Deck and colleagues from Stuttgart reported their work synthesizing RNA in Nature Chemistry. Both groups are trying to demonstrate how RNA molecules could have built and replicated themselves to transmit useful information. The mystery of abiogenesis - getting life from non-life - is a major hurdle for evolution. Abiogenesis violates a basic principle of biology. Since living cells need both proteins and DNA to function and reproduce, evolutionary theorists have struggled with the problem of how one could have evolved without the other. RNA is an intermediary-of-sorts between DNA and proteins (able to carry out some enzymatic function and to transmit information), so the “RNA world hypothesis” paints a scenario in which the earliest life forms would have only required RNA. The discovery of bits of self-replicating RNA increased the popularity of the RNA world. Efforts to synthesize self-replicating RNA strands long and varied enough to actually encode for a functional biochemical molecule have been unsuccessful. The Stuttgart group decided to immobilize an 8-base-strand of RNA and surround it with chemically-activated nucleotides and "micro-helper" pieces of RNA. They hoped such immobilized RNA strands would lengthen. Some RNA chains added 4 bases. Some, however, failed to copy correctly. Twelve bases is not long enough to code for functional molecules, but Deck considers the work a success. The group suggests that early life forms may have gotten by with simpler molecules. And although the experiment required pinning down the RNA starter strand with a bit of DNA, the group proposes early RNA got "adsorbed and immobilized on surfaces billions of years ago." The Munich group didn’t actually grow any RNA. They performed a computer simulation proposing a "natural" hydrothermal "RNA reactor" (i.e. porous rocks on the sea floor where nucleotides can accumulate in the pores and be exposed to strong temperature gradients) in which aggregates of nucleotides can randomly bond to build RNA. During normal transcription of RNA, only certain nucleotide pairings are stable. Therefore, in this computer-simulated reactor, randomly generated bits of RNA hybridized by matching up properly with other bits of RNA, thereby outlasting improperly paired molecules.

The Lewiston Area Historical Society is dedicated to preserving the history of the Lewiston lumbering industry and how the town preserved itself when the lumber boom closed down. This video features Julie Giorgano who is the new coordinator of the museum, Greg Arbogast, one of the museum's main tour guides, tells about some of the items in the museum. Doug Sharp gives an account of the history of the vacation home when he was a boy, and Steve Spracklen plays the ragtime piano for us.