Contents of this chapter

11 Science supports biblical creation
12 What is evolution?
13 Natural selection
14 Do mutations add new genetic information?
15 Where did DNA come from?
16 How did life begin?
17 Evolution is an old time religion
18 We are wonderfully made
19 The search for the Missing Link
20 What about Neanderthals?
21 The human race is one race
22 No need to compromise
23 Is science really the source of all knowledge?
24 The evidence points to design and a Designer
25 The good creation
26 The First and Last Adam
27 Did God really use suffering and death to create?
28 Did Adam and Eve know what they were doing?
29 The Tree of Life
30 God is Love
31 Disobedience damages our relationship with God
32 After the Garden
33 Genesis is history not allegory
34 The Flood
35 Floods of evidence
36 Geological models
37 Fossils
38 Problems with data collection
39 Bonebeds and polystrate fossils
40 The age of the universe
41 Galileo challenged the scientific community of his day
42 The Big Bang
43 The RATE Project
44 Field relationships determine rock ages
45 We see the world with a trained eye
46 The heavens declare God’s handiwork

10 Genesis

After accepting the scriptures as the inerrant Word of God, I felt as though The Bible took on a whole new meaning for me. From the very first chapter of Genesis The Bible challenges the popular worldview. Just how much we accommodate this modern, secular worldview as Bible believing Christians is a controversial topic. We are told by Christians who believe in theistic evolution, that Genesis is not an actual account of history. Instead they regard Genesis as a book about who created what, not how and when it was created.

At first glance this idea seems quite reasonable, but one need only look a little deeper to realise that by insisting on marrying a belief in humanistic evolution with biblical Christianity we must concede that God used pain, suffering and death to produce the world of living creatures we observe today. If we accept evolution as the mechanism God employed, we must also accept that He ordained disease, suffering and death as part of the extremely long, creative process He used to bring humans to the point He desired before He called them “human.”

This modern version of the biblical Creator portrays our Father as the direct author of pain, suffering and death from the very outset, with His creative plan including these aspects of our mortality as indispensable components of the creation process. A god who created in this way sounds more like the pantheon of pagan gods of creation and destruction I investigated before I met Jesus.

Such a long, drawn out process of creation contradicts Jesus, who said in Mark 10:6, “…..from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.” Jesus was citing Genesis 1:27, demonstrating His agreement with, and acceptance of the OT teachings on the creation week and the age of the Earth. Jesus clearly placed Adam and Eve at the beginning of the creation.

In response to this reasoning one theistic evolutionist asserts:

Jesus’ words, taken in their obvious context, aren’t referring to creation at all. Jesus is asked a question about marriage and divorce, and he answers the question using scripture……. I think Jesus’ use of the phrase “at the beginning” is largely incidental. (see).

Using this reasoning we could assert that almost anything in the scriptures is incidental, if it suited our argument. This is a perfect example of eisegesis. If one takes a plain reading approach to scripture there is little room for an evolutionary timescale.

Theistic evolution also contradicts the teachings of Paul when he outlined the foundational Christian doctrine that Adam brought sin, and consequently death, to humanity, while Jesus (the last Adam) offers salvation and eternal life to those who will accept His monumental gift of grace (2 Corinthians 15:21-23; Romans 5:12).

Here again theistic evolutionists have an answer. They claim Adam brought spiritual, but not physical death, to the creation. According to this teaching there was no time when the Earth was without death, pain and suffering, that’s just the way God made it. I find this understanding of our Father almost abhorrent, and totally unnecessary.

Why would one choose to paint the God who has revealed Himself to us as Love in this light? There is only one answer to this question; these people have decided to believe the changing understanding and underlying core beliefs of naturalistic scientists. I would also contend that most of the theistic evolutionists I have encountered have not fully examined the research and writing of highly qualified, scientifically-trained, Bible believing brothers and sisters in Christ.

11 Science Supports Biblical Creation

Well educated Christians may feel they would need to compromise their intellectual integrity to question their belief in evolution and long geological ages, but questioning is a very real and productive part of scientific inquiry. The theory of evolution is one model that seeks to explain the data collected from the present world in an attempt to understand and explain the distant past.

We cannot perform observations or experiments on the processes that took place thousands of years ago during the creation of the universe; we can only collect artefacts and data in the present and then make observations and hypotheses.

As we make these hypotheses we bring to the interpretation of the data our own preconceived ideas or unproven assumptions concerning the past. These assumptions can never be proven by scientific observation and must therefore be based on the subjective selection of supporting data.

In our modern world, philosophical naturalism has become almost synonymous with the sciences, as it is the methodological philosophy which governs virtually all scientific endeavour. The basic belief of naturalism, which is also known as materialism or physicalism, is that reality consists of nothing but the physical, material world governed by nothing but natural law. This belief system influences the axioms and assumptions of its adherents in clear and specific ways. The idea that only natural processes can be considered in the question of origins is based on a dominant assumption of philosophical naturalism. This idea cannot be arrived at through empirical evidence but is the direct result of a philosophical ideology or worldview.

In many areas of science this belief makes little or no difference to outcomes, but, as CMI writer Dr Don Batten points out:

…..we can make a valid distinction between different types of science: the distinction between origins science and operational science. Operational science involves discovering how things operate in today’s Creation—repeatable and observable phenomena in the present. This is the science of Newton. However, origins science deals with the origin of things in the past—unique, unrepeatable, unobservable events. There is a fundamental difference between how the two work. Operational science involves experimentation in the here and now. Origins science deals with how something came into existence in the past and so is not open to experimental verification / observation (unless someone invents a ‘time machine’ to travel back into the past to observe). Studying how an organism operates (DNA, mutations, reproduction, natural selection etc.) does not tell us how it came into existence in the first place. (see)

In operational science, hypotheses can be tested again and again, but the type of science that is utilised to investigate origins is forensic or historical science. In this area the scientist’s own philosophical worldview inevitably biases assumptions, perceptions and predictions. These biases can be clearly perceived when we come to investigating how our universe and living things came into existence. Although secular science now insists only natural processes can be considered in the question of origins, this was not the case when Francis Bacon, John Ray and Robert Boyle laid down the foundations of modern science.

Bible based creation science has an equally robust scientific base, but scientists who believe The Bible’s version of creation use alternative axioms, which would be similar, if not identical to those held by the fathers of science. The main presupposition of biblical creationists is that the Creator designed the creation and brought the physical universe and all living things into existence out of nothing (Psalm 33:6; 148:5; John 1:3; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 11:3). A secondary assumption is that anyone who honestly observes the creation cannot help but see evidence of this design throughout the universe.

While evolutionists look at the world through eyes that see evolution as the driving force in the world of living things, the creationist sees the hand of God. Dr Jonathan Sarfati has illustrated this point in his book, The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on Evolution. He writes:

A long-tongued moth was supposedly a successful prediction of Darwin and Wallace who reasoned that it must exist to pollinate an orchid with a long nectar channel. But this is equally a prediction of creation: that a long channelled orchid would have a long-tongued moth designed to pollinate. (6)

Despite the capitulation and compromise of people like Professor Mark Noll, who seems to embody modernist, evangelical antagonism towards those who hold to the inerrancy of scripture, modern creationism is not some sort of Johnny-come-lately. It is more realistically a revival of the church’s attitude to the scriptures that has been undermined by higher criticism and its progeny, existential methodology (7). In Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, he naively suggests creationism grew out of the teachings of Ellen White. Although calling for intellectual rigour, he seems to have abandoned just that when it comes to his attitude to beliefs surrounding origins. Like so many other academics, he appears to be blinded by the power of the naturalist paradigm.

Christians have a relationship with their Creator because He chose to be born, live, die and rise again on the planet He created. Our Father has continued to reveal Himself to His people through His Word by the power of the Holy Spirit and it should be this revelation that influences the way Christians view the world and form both their ontology and their epistemology. On the basis of God’s revelation of Himself, Christians place their faith in the eternal reality of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Word, which is the very foundation of the Christian faith, not in the changing opinions of fallen humanity.

Just as belief in the inerrancy of The Bible has a profound influence on the way Christians see reality, belief in evolution can also have a profound effect on one’s worldview and personal philosophy. In the 16th and 17th centuries most people accepted that, as the famous biblical creationist Sir Isaac Newton put it, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton clearly expressed the understanding that we have arrived at this point in human history, with our accomplishments, technical expertise and spiritual awareness, because those who went before us left us a legacy on which to build. A popular notion today, even in some Christian circles, appears to be the product of the evolutionary belief that the human race is evolving to become more civilized, capable and aware of reality. This idea is that peoples of the past can be dismissed as “less advanced” in their ability to understand scientific, spiritual and ethical matters.

This notion fosters the attitude that we can look at people from past centuries as less sophisticated and more superstitious, which often leads to the delegation of any religious beliefs to the area of primitive superstition. Historical records and The Bible give us an entirely different understanding. The people of Noah’s day may have been less technologically advanced, but they were just as capable of expressing compassion, living by the rule of law, building giant structures such as pyramids and developing and understanding complex astronomical and mathematical formulas as people today.

Superstition is still widely spread amongst the present population of the world, and not only in the third world, where people generally have less access to education. Many well educated people read horoscopes and believe in fate, luck and even hexes. Research has shown that conservative Christians, who are the most likely to reject Darwinism, were also the most likely to reject “occult and pseudo-scientific notions.” Conversely, surveys showed that regions poor in Darwin-rejecting churches had the most cults, occult activity and superstition.(see)

There is actually no evidence that we have evolved in our ability to comprehend God’s world or truth. God did not need to dumb down His Word when He first communicated it to men, and people today do not need to reinterpret The Bible to fit our present understanding of the universe. Even a brief sojourn into the publications of qualified Bible believing scientists demonstrates the indisputable fact that modern, operational science, is in no way incompatible with The Bible.

Technology may have advanced our understanding of the universe, but science that is based on experimentation and observation, as opposed to historical or forensic science, which is open to the influence of philosophical presuppositions about the unobservable past, in no way contradicts the Word of God. In fact we find that as science discovers more of the complexity and beauty of God’s creation it actually enhances and complements God’s Word (see and also) , as many truly open minded scientists have discovered. (see)

12 What is evolution?

Evolutionists often blur the boundaries between the definitions they use. At one moment they may refer to adaptation, and then, in the next breath, this is referred to as evolution. This sort of inconsistent language is not just the propensity of laypersons. Even academics write using imprecise language to obfuscate the lack of evidence for their pronouncements. It is not uncommon to read statements like this one from Nature Education:

The evolutionary link between sickle-cell trait and malaria resistance showed that humans can and do adapt. But are the “bugs” that make us sick evolving as well? (8) (see)

These two simple sentences starkly illustrate a number of important points. In the first sentence sickle-cell trait is mentioned as an example of a gain-of-function adaptation by particular populations to an environmental stress (malaria). Creationists have tackled this issue head on and the results of their research are extremely revealing.

One of the world’s leading experts in sickle-cell anaemia, Dr Felix Konotey-Ahulu, asserts that highlighting this sort of “natural selection” does not demonstrate that “upward evolution” is a fact. He points out that although the sickle-cell trait gives children resistance to cerebral malaria, the mutant gene is still a defect and in no way can it be viewed as an increase in complexity or an improvement in function which natural selection favours. He emphasises that while evolutionary biologists claim this as one of their “proofs” for evolution, there remains the unhappy downside. Dr Konotey-Ahulu works with people affected by this illness and he reminds us that, “having more carriers of the sickle-cell genes results in more people suffering from this terrible disease.” (see)

The second sentence in the above quote from Nature Education asks us to examine the evidence for “bugs” evolving. CMI and other biblical creationists have covered this topic extensively. There are numerous examples of bacteria developing tolerance to certain drugs (see), while others have adapted to feed on new sources of nutrition (see). The question yet to be comprehensively answered is whether some special mechanisms pre-existed in the genes of these organisms to enable them to use their designed for purpose adaptational ability to fill environmental niches, or whether there is evidence of random mutations and natural selection generating new enzymes. To date no conclusive evidence has been presented to demonstrate the latter. In fact, over and over again, scientists are discovering that the adaptational ability of creatures is inbuilt. Despite this they continue to call this ability evolution.

As one ABC science reporter states:

Scientists have used crushed fly legs that are 70 years old to solve the riddle of why insects evolve rapid resistance to pesticides. DNA extracted from the fly legs shows that Australian sheep blowflies have an existing, advantageous genetic characteristic that allows them to resist certain insecticides. (see)

While CSIRO scientists inform us that:

Mutations of esterase 3 confer two forms of organophosphate resistance on contemporary Australasian Lucilia cuprina…..The pinned specimen analysis also shows much higher genetic diversity at the locus before organophosphate use….(see)

This is patently an adaptation due to a loss of genetic diversity that is being referred to as evolution. Our Father’s original creation held vast amounts of genetic diversity within each kind and the process we are asked to accept as evolution is actually a reduction of this information as creatures adapt to varying environments, just as the Father intended. This sort of evolution could never lead to the gain of genetic information evolutionists claim occurred when a “simple” organism gradually mutated into something as complex as a human being.

Well informed Biblical creationists try to use more precise scientific language than the confusing mixture of terms and concepts often employed by evolutionists. It would be helpful if evolutionists defined from the start just what they mean by the terms “mutation,” “adaptation” and “evolution” and then carefully avoided mixing their terminology. One is almost tempted to believe that this confusion is part of their methodology. Although interrelated, these are not synonymous terms, they are discrete processes and it is helpful to examine them individually if we are to be properly informed.

13 Natural selection

If we consider the things we can actually observe, we see that what is commonly called “natural selection” occurs in the world around us, but this is very much a part of the creation model of origins. Creation scientists recognise that the process that has come to be known as natural selection actually “fine tunes” God’s creation.

No new genetic information was needed for the beaks of these finches to adapt to their environment

A biblical creationist, the chemist/zoologist Edward Blyth (1810–1873), wrote three major articles on natural selection that were published in The Magazine of Natural History from 1835 to1837 (see) and it was probably his ideas that inspired Darwin and Wallace. A number of others had observed and recorded their ideas on this topic well before Darwin called it his “dear child.” However, natural selection is not evolution. The Bible teaches that animals were created as different kinds and what we actually observe is that living things reproduce “after their kind,” just as The Bible teaches (Gen 1:11).

Another Bible believing scientist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), who was the founder of the science of taxonomy, tried to determine just what the created kinds were. He defined a ‘species’ as a group of organisms that could interbreed among themselves, but not with another group, just like the Genesis concept. This is also what we see in the world around us today.

Carolus Linnaeus

CMI’s Dr Don Batten points out:

God created all kinds, or basic types, of creatures and plants with the ability to produce variety in their offspring. These varieties come from recombinations of the existing genetic information created in the beginning, through the marvellous reproductive method created by God. Since the Fall (Gen 3), some variations also occurred through degenerative changes caused by mutations (e.g. loss of wing size in the cormorants of the Galápagos Islands).

The variations allow for the descendants of the created kinds to adapt to different environments and ‘fill the Earth’, as God commanded. If genera represent the created kinds, then Noah took less than 20,000 land animals on the Ark; far fewer if kinds occasionally gave rise to families. From these kinds came many ‘daughter species’, which generally each have less information (and are thus more specialized) than the parent population on the Ark. Properly understood, adaptation by natural selection (which gets rid of information) does not involve the addition of new complex DNA information. Thus, students should not be taught that it demonstrates ‘evolution happening’, as if it showed the process by which fish could eventually turn into people.

Understanding what God has told us in Genesis provides a sound foundation for thinking about the classification of living things, as Linnaeus found, and how the great diversity we see today has come about. (see)

A surprising number of people today attribute almost miraculous powers to natural selection, with very little understanding of what this process entails. What we observe is that natural selection favours certain already existing genetic traits in populations by culling genes out of the gene pool. Thus natural selection only affects changes in the frequency of the variants once they appear, it has nothing to do with the reasons for the existence of the variants.

New populations arise through adaptation to new environments and these are often given new species names. Through natural selection one lot of information is preferred over another, which leads to adaptation. This is an important part of the creation model and the fact that adaptations and speciation occur in no way proves evolution is a scientific fact.

Even the word used to describe this mechanism is somewhat incongruous. In any other context the word selection would be understood as an act of conscious intelligence, and yet in this context we are asked to accept that blind, unconscious nature has acted in an extremely purposeful way to perform an act of creation no scientist (generally accepted as amongst humankind’s most intelligent people) has yet managed to duplicate. The question a Christian needs to ask is, Is there an exogenous selector (or process) at work, or has God pre-programmed organisms to fill the Earth?

Dr Randy J. Guliuzza asserts:

….based on current data, the power to overcome environmental stresses—called adaptation—is strictly an organism-based informational capacity programmed into organisms by the Lord to enable them to fill environmental niches. (see)

While Dr Carl Weiland points out:

A population may respond to environmental selection pressure based on information already present in its total gene pool. For instance, if a population of plants in a moist environment is exposed to ever-increasing dryness, only those plants carrying genes for deeper roots and waxier cuticles will survive. The population will have ‘responded’ and become ‘adapted,’ but only because the genetic information coding for waxier cuticles and deeper roots was already present. (see)

In other words, adaptation is entirely the result of the organism’s designed for purpose adaptational ability. Environmental stresses may act as a trigger to “turn on” this ability, but they do not actually do anything that would normally be viewed as selecting.

14 Do mutations add new genetic information?

Advocates of the theory of evolution see random mutations as the key mechanism responsible for generating new, functionally more complex genetic information, claiming these mutations are then sorted by natural selection. However, no one has ever observed mutations generating additional, new genetic information, and there is no evidence of one kind “evolving” into another through this process, despite the many stories constructed by evolutionists that include such scenarios.

Creationists point to mutations as tangible evidence for the Fall. From a biblical perspective, these genetic copying mistakes started occurring as a direct consequence of Adam and Eve’s rejection of God’s specific guidance. They are a part of the biological breakdown that was introduced when death and suffering entered the world.

The role of mutations is perhaps one of the fundamental issues in the evolution-creation debate. When we turn our attention to the area of genetic mutations we find the popular conception is that organisms can somehow mutate, and although they themselves lack a certain trait, this trait can be generated through a copying mistake during reproduction or by some response to an environmental stress which alters the genetic material. As a precise, scientific understanding of the mechanisms involved in mutations is often viewed as far too complicated for the average layperson to comprehend, the philosophical naturalist scientist is accepted as the arbiter of this higher knowledge.

The simplistic stories, repeated over and over by these experts in the field, surround the facts with tales of the past that are pure speculation based on a particular philosophical bias. These stories are easily assimilated by the unqualified lay person, while the confusing mixture of terminology hides the paucity of evidence for the unfounded claims of naturalism. It is no surprise that the majority of people capitulate to those they consider more able, when these “experts” constantly use confusing terminology and have access to millions of taxpayer dollars to create resources to flesh out their claims.

In his book Variations of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), Darwin refers to a process he calls “pangenesis.” In an attempt to explain the source of variation in organisms and the mode of inheritance of these variations, Darwin mentions “corpuscles,” which he imagines are produced by the various body parts in response to environmental stresses. He suggests these corpuscles might travel to the gonads to be passed on to the next generation (9).

Since those very early days of evolutionary ideas a great deal has been learned. The discovery of DNA and a far more comprehensive understanding of the genome have given us a wealth of information about biochemistry on which to base our ideas. After initially rejecting Lamarckism (a theory of organic evolution suggesting acquired characteristics are transmitted to offspring), research has swung around and we now have a new field of research called epigenetics, which examines non-permanent and self perpetuating modifications of the genome (see). However, despite all the research that has been carried out to date, no evidence of new genetic information being generated within a population of organisms has yet been observed.

Dr Jean Lightner comments that:

It is worth noting that mutations produce new alleles (variant forms of a gene) and certainly add variety. However, molecules-to-man evolution requires the generation of new information to build new, complex, interdependent biochemical pathways. Despite the deceptive wording found in the gain-of-function definition, there is no increase of information or improvement of biochemical pathways. Without a mechanism for developing such pathways, evolution is nothing more than a myth. Instead, what we observe fits exactly with what we would expect if The Bible is true. Living things are very well designed. Errors introduced by mutations do not build new, well integrated biochemical pathways; instead they often cause disease (see).

While CMI’s Dr Robert Carter states:

I believe mutation can corrupt information, scramble information, and change it horizontally, but that it is utterly unable to account for the changes necessary for long-term evolution. Also, evidence is accumulating for the existence of genetic algorithms designed to facilitate changes to the DNA sequence. Dr. Peter Borger has coined the term “variation inducing genetic elements” (VIGEs) and we happily incorporate them into the creation model. Since these changes would be caused by pre-programmed genetic modules, it is hard to call these changes “mutations.” The HLA genes in particular, as a vital part of the immune system, are pre-programmed to scramble….. (see)

After looking at the data we find that instead of these never observed, millions of mutations being the engine that drives the mythical process of evolution, one could make a strong case for the exact opposite. Organic chemist Dr Royal Truman asserts:

…..almost all mutations are recessive, camouflaging their presence and hindering selection against them. Another consideration…… is that key environmental factors (disease, temperature, mutation, predators, etc.) affecting survival vary over time. Strong selection must be present for a huge number of generations if fixation of a (temporarily) favourable trait throughout a population is to occur. Relaxation for just a few generations could undo this process, since selection for a different trait would then be at the expense of the preceding one.

He also points out:

After decades of research, if even one mutation out of a million really unambiguously created new information (apart from fine-tuning), we would all have heard about it by now (see).

If we are to accept the belief that all life present on Earth today evolved from a primitive, single celled organism, which somehow spontaneously sprang into life from inorganic elements (abiogenesis), millions of mutations generating different alleles, with entirely new properties, would have to have occurred for natural selection to act upon. A single celled organism does not possess the genetic information to grow muscles, tissue, bones, blood vessels, cartilage, internal organs, eyes, ears, antennae, nails, claws, teeth, scales, hair, leaves, bark etc, etc, etc. Somehow, from somewhere, the genetic information had to come into existence to produce all the unique parts of every living thing that has ever existed on our planet.

The genetic information, which instructs a living cell to produce different properties, could not have developed from the recombination of the existing genetic information in a single celled organism; new genetic information would need to be produced. The fact that at most only one or two candidates exist that might possibly demonstrate an observable example of this increase of genetic information (and even these are doubtful), after decades of intensive and extensive research, shows that to be an evolutionist one must place one’s faith in an unobserved mechanism, and then believe this mechanism has occurred millions, if not billions of times.

The theory of evolution is held together by concentrating on a few key, observable processes, which have been woven into a far fetched story that is surrounded by confusing terminology and included as an indispensable component of the “informed,” popular worldview. Most people do not really understand the science behind these ideas, but they are promoted in such bold and authoritative terms that most “progressive” people just accept them as fact.

We hear almost daily about how organisms have “evolved” to adapt to certain environmental niches. What we actually observe is the inbuilt ability of creatures to adapt. There is no empirical evidence to demonstrate an organism has mutated to produce new genetic information (as would be needed if a common ancestor gave rise to all living things); living things are simply doing what God designed them to do, they are adapting to fill the Earth.

15 Where did DNA come from?

All living things function and reproduce using vast quantities of coded information which is transcribed, stored, read and translated from precisely ordered instructions. No one has yet answered the question from an evolutionary point of view, of how the complex, sophisticated DNA code originated. Since Darwin’s day we have come to understand that all living things contain vast libraries of information in the form of a genetic code. After many breakthroughs it was discovered that it is the arrangement in the DNA (which is comprised of sugar, phosphates and bases) that contains this information, not the matter itself.
If one is honest, it is difficult to avoid the observation that the very structure of DNA points to intelligent, purposeful, sophisticated programming, which is far more advanced than any technology we have yet managed to create or imagine. There is no evidence here of blind, purposeless, naturalistic processes. Inventing a story of how mindless matter could formulate such a complex coding system has not yet been convincingly attempted, but of even more importance is the fact that no one has yet observed even a simple code system being spontaneously generated (see).

Anyone who is truly interested in facts would have to admit there is real difficulty in explaining such elegant precision arising from unintelligent, inorganic matter. Evolutionary author D. L. Abel admits:

The fact of purposeful programming at multiple layers gets more “apparent” with each new issue of virtually every molecular biology journal (10).

16 How did life begin?

Apart from the rather flimsy evidence presented to support the theory of evolution, the committed, thinking materialist must also face the problem of abiogenesis, or the origin of life from nonliving matter. Scientists have not yet been able to demonstrate a scientifically feasible model for abiogenesis to have occurred on the early Earth. Evolutionists therefore often attempt to distance the theory of evolution from speculations concerning the origin of life.

The well known primordial soup theory faces real difficulties when put to the test. Experiments aimed at recreating conjectural scenarios that could demonstrate abiogenesis using this model require very concentrated and pure amino acids. In the real world any hypothetical primordial soup would be impure and grossly contaminated with other organic chemicals that would destroy the amino acids necessary for life. This is only one of the many difficulties the concept confronts.

Amino acids are necessary to form living cells, but the generation of these basic components would be only the very beginning of an unimaginably complex process. To date no scientist has been able to create life from scratch in a laboratory, and even if they had, this would simply demonstrate just how much purposeful intelligence was involved in the process. It would be the product of thousands upon thousands of hours of work, using laboratory equipment, computers and other sophisticated tools, to produce what we are asked to believe happened by pure chance. The more we learn about life, the more we are forced to acknowledge just how intricately well designed and precisely crafted living organisms are. Any honest person would have to admit, life comes from life, nothing else has ever been observed or demonstrated.

All the hypothetical scenarios for early life so far have been filled with speculation and very little convincing experimental evidence. While researchers have been working for decades to come up with viable mechanisms to produce a living organism, over the past few decades we have come to realise just how complex even the most “simple” forms of life are. As physical chemist Dr Jonathan Safarti points out:

Even the simplest decoded free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 482 genes coding for all the necessary proteins, including enzymes. These proteins are composed of about 400 amino acids each on average, in precise sequences, and all in the ‘left-handed’ form. Of course, these genes are only functional with pre-existing translational and replicating machinery, a cell membrane, etc. But Mycoplasma can only survive by parasitizing more complex organisms, which provide many of the nutrients it cannot manufacture for itself. So evolutionists must postulate an even more complex first living organism with even more genes (see).

CMI scientist Dr Don Batten has summarized the popular belief of many people today who insist the evolutionist story alone is a realistic hypothesis for the universe and everything in it. He writes:

I have sometimes summarized the grand (or general) theory of evolution (GTE) thus:
Nothing exploded and produced hydrogen—the ‘big bang’. Then hydrogen stars exploded causing hydrogen atoms to jam together to form the heavier elements. From these elements stars as we know them formed, and galaxies and walls of galaxies—the whole universe. And then, from a swirling disc of cosmic dust left over from some exploding stars, our Solar System formed, with the accreting matter in the centre finally achieving enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion—the Sun. And Earth had formed, with the other planets, all with very different characteristics. Earth happened to be in the right place to be suitable for life.

Initially a molten blob, it finally cooled down enough for water to form. In the water, complex organic chemicals made themselves and (contrary to everything we know about the chemistry of life) chanced to form the first living cell. And this first cell changed, over eons of time, by accidental changes, to produce every living thing on Earth, including microbes, magnolias and microbiologists. And the human mind. It all happened by happenstance; no intelligence allowed!

Contemplating the GTE recently, I came to a fresh realization of just how ridiculous it is. Yes, I’m sorry, ridiculous. This grew out of a discussion I had with an atheist, whom I challenged about his logic-defying beliefs.
A short summary of this fashionable ‘scientific’ belief system could be: “Hydrogen is a gas, which if left long enough, turns into people.” The non-rational produced the rational (see).

17 Evolution is an old time religion

It is obvious that to believe in evolution one must exercise considerable faith, because scientific support for the theory is extremely poor, and just like the fossil record, it is composed of more gaps than empirical evidence. Consequently, it would appear a belief in evolution is actually a philosophical or religious belief. Those who believe in evolution cannot look to sound science as the basis for their belief, they must then place their faith in unobserved, hypothetical biochemical mechanisms to explain life, because of a prior commitment to philosophical naturalism. Unlike the founders of modern science, who had no problems with the idea of a creator God, science has now embraces a total commitment to naturalism. Canadian science philosopher Dr Michael Ruse admitted that:

….. at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism, namely that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and these sorts of things, come what may.

Although he later defended evolution by stating that, in his view, it works, nevertheless he also said,

evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically (11).

Those who are absolutely committed to a belief in evolution usually insist that it is only through purely materialistic science that we can hope to arrive at real truth in our understanding of the universe. This is philosophical naturalism, a metaphysical stance which has its roots in ancient cultures. The majority of evolutionists would contend that their ideas are modern, while insisting biblical creationists are simply adhering to outmoded concepts, which are a product of the less sophisticated and far less informed predecessors I referred to earlier. These same adversaries would no doubt insist that biblical Christianity is now a “disproven relic of the past.” This understanding is far from the truth.

An old edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica gives an interesting insight into the religion of the Mayan people, who lived around 600 BC. They believed:

…themselves to be of one blood, descendants of a common ancestor. … Thus, the Turtle clan of the Iroquois are descended from a fat turtle, which, burdened by the weight of its shell in walking … gradually developed into a man. The Cray-Fish clan of the Choctaws were originally cray-fish and lived underground, coming up occasionally through the mud to the surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, and, treating them kindly … taught them to walk on two legs, made them cut off their toe nails and pluck the hair from their bodies, after which they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their kindred, the cray-fish, are still living underground. The Osages are descended from a male snail and a female beaver (12).

It is possible that evolutionary thought began with the Hindu concept of reincarnation, and there is also reason to believe the Greek philosophers built on this idea, or perhaps the ideas of even earlier cultures (13).

Thales of Miletus

The Greek philosopher, astronomer, statesman and mathematician, Thales of Miletus (640–546 BC) proposed the idea that life originated in water (14), while his student, Anaximander (611–547 BC), developed his tutor’s proposals further, concluding that humans evolved from fish or fishlike creatures. He also suggested that these fish-men eventually cast off their scaly skin and moved to dry land (15) (see also).

Another Greek philosopher, Empedocles (493–435 BC), who is often called the father of evolutionary naturalism, argued that chance alone “was responsible for the entire process” of the evolution of simple matter into modern humankind (15). He proposed “spontaneous generation” as the mechanism behind the origin of life, and he also taught that all living organism types gradually evolved by a process of trial-and-error, which utilised the recombination of animal parts (16) . He expressed a belief that natural selection was the primary mechanism of evolution, the fittest being more likely to survive to pass on their traits to their offspring (17). Later, Aristotle (384–322 BC) claimed that humans are the highest point in one long, continuous “ascent with modification” of life (18).

In the centuries between the Greek philosophers and Darwin numerous thinkers built on these early ideas. Many learned people, including Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, wrote about natural selection and transmutation, as evolution was called in those days. Darwin simply pulled a number of ideas together with some field observations, James Hutton’s uniformitarian ideas and the inclusion of the notion of vast ages gleaned from Charles Lyell’s book Principles of Geology (19), which Darwin carried with him on the Beagle. In his younger days Darwin was heavily influenced by his mother’s faith, and at one time considered going into the ministry. However, he finally took the side of his paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), whose book Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life influenced him greatly.

Erasmus Darwin

One hundred and fifty years later we have enough information to dismiss these fanciful ideas. If we look to science, and scientific observation, the creation model is supported by the data in all areas. Many Christians fear the age of the Earth could present difficulties for biblical creationists, but even here a careful examination of the creation science model shows the academic creationist interpretation of data once again stands up to extensive scrutiny. Dr Tas Walker has done a great deal to demonstrate a biblical geological model is a robust and evidence based approach to geology (see). His approach will be examined in greater detail when we look at geological models and the Flood later in this book.

18 We are wonderfully made

There are so many areas one could examine to give support to the creation model, but perhaps the human body is the closest to home. Evolutionists would have us believe that humans have evolved from more primitive species over millions of years. Even the Australian Meat Board has jumped on the bandwagon, at one time using a version of the famous illustrated chart of “the ascent of man” in one of its advertisements. This fanciful depiction of human “evolution” shows the gradual stages of a progression we are asked to believe took place, when there is no real evidence to support the concept.

At the extreme left hand side of the chart we have a chimp like creature, which is followed by a series of progressively more humanoid creatures, each more upright, taller, less hairy and with gradually lighter skin. The ascent of man chart usually depicts the fully “evolved” human as being a white male, who is often closely preceded by a dark skinned man bearing the facial characteristics of an aboriginal or African person.

On viewing such illustrations it is easy to understand why the early evolutionists treated the Australian aboriginal people as “less evolved” and at one time considered the possibility that they may be the “Missing Link.” This idea became so compelling, many aboriginal graves were robbed and the bodies, skeletons and skulls were smuggled out to collections in Europe and America (see). The truth is, there is no real factual basis for these charts (20), they are works of fantasy created from manufactured or distorted evidence, yet the average, uninformed person would assume they are based on extensive fossil evidence.

One famous book that included an impressive ascent of man chart (21) also admitted, “Many of the figures shown here have been built up” from a few fragments, “a jaw, some teeth perhaps … and thus are products of educated guessing.” The writer also acknowledged that “even if later finds should dictate changes,” in other words, if these guesses are proven to be completely wrong, “these reconstructions serve a purpose in showing how these creatures might have looked (22).” Even according to orthodox Darwinism the dominant view today is no longer this simple, single, evolutionary line of ape to humans. Evolutionists now believe human evolution would be more accurately represented as a branching bush.

The first or second creature in the visual parade depicted on such charts is usually shown as being stooped, but walking on its hind legs with arms swinging by its sides. Occasionally the parade begins with a knuckle walker, but each successive creature gradually becomes more upright. This concept is based on pure fantasy. We know of no creatures that are stooped like this. In fact the fossils show distinct differences between humans who are totally bipedal and primates that lived mostly in trees but occasionally walk on their back legs when on the ground.

Because of the structure of their feet and knees these animals, like gibbons today, would need to hold their arms out to the side to keep their balance when walking on their back legs and their gait would inevitably differ. Depending on the amount of data found, creation scientists who examine the fossil specimens without evolutionist assumptions can usually classify fossils as either ape or human. Close examination inevitably reveals the fossil has either mostly apelike characteristics and is therefore an ape, or indicates completely upright posture and is therefore human (see). Humans have been fully human from their first appearance in the fossil record.

The difference in the skeletons of humans and apes is far more than the latter simply deciding to spend more time on their hind legs than their preferred method of locomotion, which is either resting on all four limbs or swinging through the trees (brachiating). Humans have unique, upright knee, hip, back and skull joints that are perfectly designed for upright movement. Because many of our uniquely human features are required simultaneously, creationists have good reason to believe that our upright human posture could not have evolved step by step from a quadrupedal creature, or even from one with limited ability for bipedal locomotion.

It would be difficult for an ape-like creature to gradually develop upright characteristics incrementally, or to develop individual features separately. Both of these scenarios would vastly limit their locomotion. The necessary changes to their physiology would cause severe restrictions to their movements on either two or four limbs and their brachiating locomotion would be severely impaired (23).

Evolutionists have devised bizarre explanations to suggest reasons a quadruped would spend more time on its hind legs, even though this posture would inevitably create difficulties with locomotion. But once again these are fanciful stories to explain their preconceived ideas on human origins. Jamie Shreeve, science editor for National Geographic magazine offers one such explanation:

Why would an animal fully adapted to support its weight on its forelimbs in the trees elect to walk bipedally on the ground?”
One provocative answer to that question—originally proposed by Lovejoy in the early 1980s and refined now in light of the Ardipithecus discoveries—attributes the origin of bipedality to another trademark of humankind: monogamous sex……a male Ardipithecus would supply a “targeted female” and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.

To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food (see).

There is no empirical evidence to support such claims, they are driven entirely by philosophical assumptions. A pre-existing belief in human evolution means evolutionary biologists must device scenarios to explain why something that defies logic might happen. This pre-existing belief also drives the search for the “Missing Link.”

19 The search for the Missing Link

When one begins to examine the “evidence” for human ancestors there are a number of things that stand out. The first being the fact that the selection and collection of data is the result of a specific, pre-existing belief, that is, humans evolved from ape-like creatures over millions of years. Thus, the scientists are actually searching for evidence to support this theory and the data collected is interpreted from, and must conform to, this belief base. Consequently, anything that can be labelled hominid is quickly categorised and assigned to a taxon that is largely determined by an existing conceptual framework.

In 1994 a great deal was published about a new “Missing Link” in human evolution. Australopithecus ramidus was touted as, “a long-sought link in the evolutionary chain of species between humans and their African ape ancestors” (24). The new holotype was described using fragments of fossils found scattered over an incredibly large area. As CMI’s Dr Don Batten points out:

Fossils were collected from the surface at 17 different positions spread over 1.55 km and probably represent 17 separate individuals. The holotype (ARA- VP-6/1) is based solely on eight teeth, most of which were damaged. Other material discussed as representing A. ramidus included parts of the base of a skull (ARA- VP-1/500) found 550m away, and fragmented arm bones (ARA- VP-7/2) found 270 m away. The larger pieces of bone exhibited carnivore teeth marks. Eleven of the fossils were comprised of a single tooth, a piece of tooth or, in one case a piece of bone. The paucity of material is illustrated in the detailed treatment given a single deciduous (temporary) molar tooth found 1.55 km from the location of the holotype. In appearance and measurements this tooth looks identical to a chimpanzee (Pan paniscus) tooth (see).

The reference to carnivore tooth marks hints at the possibility that all these specimens could be remnants of creatures brought together from far and near, having been carried by predators to a preferred feeding ground. It would be impossible to ascertain with any reliability that all these fragments belonged to one type of creature. However, the scientists involved had an agenda, and even though paleoanthropologists were divided over the fossils’ significance they continued their search and eventually found a more complete skeleton embedded in rock. After removing the fragile fossils and surrounding rock, they spent a number of years working in a lab in Addis, Ethiopia, where the researchers carefully “tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding “millimeter by submillimeter.” (see)

The research in Ethiopia was driven by the pre-existing belief that humans have evolved from a common ancestor we share with living apes. This belief has become such an accepted idea that millions of dollars are spent annually to find the links to prove this assumption. The evolutionary paradigm drives the research in the same way a belief in astrology drives an astrologer. Specific data is collected and interpreted according to a pre-existing set of beliefs.

The work in the field to collect fossils is only the beginning of this philosophically driven research. After collection, the fossils are subjected to interpretations that are also coloured by assumptions. As ICR writer Brian Thomas points out:

Most artists’ depictions show Ardi standing upright in a distinctly human pose, a portrayal in keeping with the researchers’ contention that she had a human-like walking ability. Clearly, if humans evolved from some other primate, then somewhere along the way the hip and related bone structure must have changed. Most primates waddle when they “walk,” with knees aimed outward. Human hips are angled such that the articulating legs (and knees) instead point forward. What did Ardie’s hips look like?

The paleontologists painstakingly reconstructed her hip bones from the fossilized pieces that had been recovered. Their efforts were hampered by the incompleteness, fragmentation, erosion, and distortion of the bones. They completed their structure by inserting a “conjectural sacrum,” and correcting “various additional dimensions” (25), ( leading one to wonder how close their digital model is to what originally existed.

Adding further reason for skepticism, the authors admitted, “We based the anterosuperior projection of the ASIS on the well-preserved AIIS and their typical relationship in hominoids.” Since the very word hominoid is a term employed in the study of “human evolution,” one wonders what role evolutionary dogma played in the necessary reconstructions, and whether the data–consciously or unconsciously–was made to appear human to advance Ardi’s candidacy as a human predecessor.

William Jungers of Stony Brook University expressed a concern that the researchers’ presentation of Ardi’s hip structure as being similar to human’s was possibly premature: “This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedality is limited at best (26).” Which means the depiction of “Ardi as our ancestor” is limited at best. (see)

Dr Weiland adds:

….. the detailed work of evolutionist anatomists such as Charles Oxnard, (show) that there is a broad group of fossil creatures, now extinct, that is more dissimilar to both modern apes and modern humans than these are to each other. Oxnard’s conclusion was that australopithecines (the main constituents of this group) were not in the human line. We agree with him, not surprisingly. Ardipithecus appears to belong to this group as well; in fact, when the highly fragmented specimen was first discovered in the mid 1990s, it was originally put into that same genus, and called Australopithecus ramidus. Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, says that Ardipithecus is not the common ancestor of apes and humans. But, he says, “it’s the closest we have ever been able to come.”

Did Ardi possess features which indicate a more upright stance than modern apes? Quite possibly, even likely. But then, so did the australopithecines/habilines. And both groups also possessed features making them suited for life in the trees as well. And CT scans of australopithecine skulls show that the organs of balance (the “semi-circular canals”) were positioned in ways quite different from that required for a creature that walks habitually upright. (see)

Evolutionary scientists are constantly seeking the fabled “Missing Link,” but the more they learn the further away “Ardi” moves from fulfilling this role. One website devoted to evolution admitted:

Because Ardipithecus ramidus shares certain characteristics with apes, some experts think it’s an ancestor of chimpanzees instead of humans. A growing consensus, however, seems to consider it close to a common ancestor of both apes and humans since its teeth are intermediate between those of earlier apes and Australopithecus afarensis. (see)

Another aspect of evolutionary research that always stands out for me is the propensity of researchers to assume fossils are not modern humans because they are not typical of the “average” western bone structure. My heritage is northern European, but I have a definite brow ridge and I was also born with no wisdom teeth. Other members of my family have had two sets of adult teeth, with the second set of adult teeth emerging in later life. There is an incredible range of size, shape and variety present in the bone structures of the current human population on the Earth and many of the fossils assigned to “early human” status could quite easily be inhabitants of our world today.

It is also a sad possibility that people who were born with birth defects have mistakenly been determined to be less than human. Human skeletons from Liang Bua Cave, Flores, Indonesia, were given the scientific name Homo floresiensis and touted as a new species of pre-human. The people of this region were typically of small stature but one particular skeleton was claimed to have pre-human characteristics. It has now been accepted that this little person probably had Down Syndrome (see).

When one examines the evidence it is quite obvious that apes are wonderfully designed and there are two different habitats that determine their structure. Those that live predominantly in trees are often gracile and although they may be bipedal on land they do not walk like humans, they do not have the balance humans were designed with and must hold their arms out to the side when walking on their back legs. The apes that spend more time on the ground are usually knuckle walking quadrupeds that occasionally move about on their back legs. These creatures are all well designed for their particular habitat.

Humans, on the other hand, demonstrate exclusive design characteristics that enable them to have a distinctive relationship with their Creator. Humans have a brain that is far larger than would be needed for mere survival. We have minds that can think, create and reflect on life; we have emotions, conscience and the ability to make choices. We can also communicate in complex ways because of the unique neural and biological mechanisms, which endow us with uniquely human abilities for abstract thought (see) and meaningful language (see).

Human hands and feet are remarkably and specifically designed body parts that make humans uniquely human. The human foot has a unique arch structure between the heel and sole, which gives humans the ability to push on the front and back of the foot, making running, balance and sporting activities possible in an upright position. By contrast ape feet are designed for grasping, making them perfect for their lives in trees. Human hands have unique, fully opposable thumbs, enabling us to make pinch grips with each of our four fingers and blessing us with fine motor skills far beyond the simple grasping capacity of apes.

We may have a few superficial similarities to apes, but this is simply evidence for good design. Arms and legs, hands and feet are good design solutions for both creatures, and as they were both designed by the same Creator, one would expect Him to use this utilitarian model for both applications. However, our arms, legs, hands and feet are quite unambiguously human, and a closer inspection of the designed for purpose detail shows our unique and individual design.

Human beings are not simply an updated version of an ape-like creature, we have been made in the image of our Creator, who designed us for an entirely different purpose than the apes and other animals. He designed us to be part of His loving family.

20 What about Neanderthals?

As Darwin began to win over a portion of the scientific community to his idea that humans were descended from apes, naturalists everywhere were intent on finding the “Missing Link.” A few people saw a way to gain support for the theory and make a reputation for themselves (and perhaps some financial gain) by inventing creatures to fit this niche. Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man were two such examples. These hoaxes were accepted by the scientific community for a number of years (it was 40 years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud), but both were eventually shown to be the product of charlatans.

However, the discovery of Neanderthals was an entirely different story. A number of almost complete skeletons of these ancient people were found in and around the Neander Valley in Germany, sparking much speculation concerning their relationship to modern humans. It is now widely accepted that Neanderthal people were fully human. Early graphic illustrations of these people gave them extremely hairy bodies and some showed them stooped. Graphic artists are responsible for many such “creative” interpretations when it comes to fleshing out fossils. We now have good evidence to believe Neanderthals were modern humans, who had been genetically isolated by a Post-Flood Ice Age, which would have directly affected their anatomy and physiology (27).

How we view Neanderthal people is almost certainly related to our view of evolution. We only have skeletal remains to work with but the results of “fleshing out” these bones can be startling.

Dr Robert Carter points out (see):

Researchers at the University of Zürich used computer-assisted paleoanthropology to reconstruct this Neandertal child, based on the Gibraltar 2 skull (see). Neandertal DNA decoding now reinforces this clear humanness. (Image de.wikipedia.org)

Whereas this image in the British Times newspaper shows a decidedly apelike person (see).

While creationists have long held to the view that the Neanderthal people were fully human, evolutionists have maintained the philosophically biased position that they were our evolutionary ancestors and thus subhuman. Gradually, as more evidence is uncovered, this view is being eroded and more recent images of Neanderthal people look more like modern humans. The latest challenges to the idea that Neanderthals were an earlier species, rather than part of the human race, are the discovery of artworks and evidence of body painting in Spanish caves. National Geographic reports that:

Prehistoric dots and crimson hand stencils on Spanish cave walls…. narrow(s) the cultural distance between us and Neanderthals—and fuels the argument, at least for one scientist, that the heavy-browed humans were not a separate species but only another race (see).

While an international research project, led by Bristol University, which focused on two Neanderthal-associated sites in the Murcia province of south-east Spain found:

….that pigment-stained and perforated marine shells were almost certainly used as pendants by Neanderthals in Spain…..

They further observed that:

This is significant because until now the practice of body ornamentation has been widely accepted by archaeologists as evidence for modern behaviour and symbolic thinking in early modern humans and not Neanderthals (see).

It has also been proven that Neanderthals coexisted and cohabited with other humans. Damien Labuda and a number of his colleagues conducted a study on which he reported “a notable presence (9% overall) of a Neanderthal derived x chromosome segment” in modern humans, whose origins were non African (28). As my great grandfather came from Germany perhaps this explains my brow ridge.

All of this research fits well with the creationist understanding of the Neanderthal people, who had been previously isolated by the Ice Age, but were gradually assimilated into the rest of the human community when the ice melted and the geographical barriers were removed. Neanderthals had brains that were slightly larger on average than modern humans. This could lead one to speculate that they possessed superior intelligence, however, the idea that intelligence is related to brain size is highly questionable (see).

Neanderthals were a people group who continue to raise interesting questions for both evolutionists and creationists. Fossils are predominantly in the hands of evolutionists, who often deny qualified creationists permission to examine them. Creationists have occasionally had access to the fossils and this has led to some interesting speculation. Orthodontist, Dr John W. Cuozzo, has examined the fossils of a number of Neanderthal children and his research has led him to suggest that Neanderthal children matured much later than modern children. He applied his knowledge of dentistry and orthodontics to palaeoanthropological data and after examining the reconstructions of fossils made by evolutionists he discovered some surprising irregularities. He suggests:

In reconstructing fragmented bones of Neandertal children, evolutionists assume that rates of development were equal to or faster than modern children. Belief in faster development, or earlier maturation, arises from viewing Neandertals as more primitive, or more ape-like than modern humans. However, a detailed re-examination of the skull fragments and available teeth of four juvenile Neandertals—the Pech de l’Aze, the Gibraltar child, the Engis child and the Le Moustier youth—reveals that Neandertal children did not develop like apes and were most likely slower in development than children today. This is consistent with the biblical record of longevity in ‘early man’ and is thus very likely due to delayed maturation in early post-Flood people (see).

Using his anatomical knowledge, Dr Cuozzo realigned the jaw of the reconstructed fossils, more accurately positioning the teeth and lower jaw. When the lower jaw was positioned with the skull socket and jaw knob fitted together (rather than being 30mm apart as the original alignment had it), Dr Cuozzo discovered the Neanderthal child’s face was much flatter than that created by the evolutionist reconstruction. He discovered that after realignment:

….. there was no protrusion (forward positioned) of the lower jaw, and that it fitted perfectly into the temporomandibular (TM or glenoid) fossa with the teeth fitting exactly together.

Dr Cuozzo also suggests:

….. it seems to be the prevailing practice among palaeoanthropologists that the ape heritage assumptions of neo-Darwinian evolution dictate the construction and interpretation of fossils. Then the construction or new interpretation is turned around and used as a fact to prove the validity of neo-Darwinian evolution (see).

21 The human race is one race

Sadly, the concept of “apemen,” as depicted in charts of the “evolution” of man, has permeated our society in very negative ways. There was a strong element of social Darwinism in early evolutionist circles, this may perhaps be attributed to the ethnocentrism of the early evolutionists. However, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who was another of Erasmus Darwin’s grandsons (on his mother’s side), also revealed a strong agnosticism and antagonism towards Christianity in his writing for most of his adult life. As Russell Grigg explains:

He believed that talent, character, intellect, etc. were all inherited from one’s ancestors, as was also any lack of these qualities. Thus the poor were not hapless victims of their circumstances, but were paupers because they were biologically inferior. This was contrary to the prevailing scientific view that all such qualities were due to environment, i.e. how and where a person was brought up. Galton believed that humans, like animals, could and should be selectively bred. In 1883, he coined the term ‘eugenics’ [Greek: εύ (eu) meaning ‘well’ and γένος (genos) meaning ‘kind’ or ‘offspring’] for the study of ways of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race .

Griggs adds that in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius:

Galton enlarged on all these ideas and proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. When Charles Darwin read this book, he wrote to Galton, ‘You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work … .’ Galton’s ideas undoubtedly helped him extend his evolution theory to man. Darwin did not mention Galton in his Origin, but referred to him no less than 11 times in his Descent of Man (1871).

Griggs goes on to say:

The concept of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race may seem admirable at first glance. However, historically the method of achieving it has involved not just increasing the birthrate of the ‘fit’ by selected parenthood (‘positive eugenics’), but also reducing the birthrate of those people thought to impair such improvement, the ‘unfit’ (‘negative eugenics’).

For example, by 1913, one-third (and from the 1920s on, more than half) (29) of the US States had laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to be ‘unfit’. This resulted in the forced sterilization of some 70,000 victims, including criminals, the mentally retarded, drug addicts, paupers, the blind, the deaf, and people with epilepsy, TB or syphilis. Over 8,000 procedures were done at the one city of Lynchburg, Virginia (30), and isolated instances continued into the 1970s (31 32). About 60,000 Swedish citizens were similarly treated between 1935 and 1976, and there were similar practices in Norway and Canada (33).

In Germany in 1933, Hitler’s government ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens with ‘undesirable’ handicaps, not just those held in custody or in institutions. This was to prevent ‘contamination’ of Hitler’s ‘superior German race’ through intermarriage(see).

I do not need to cover here how Hitler continued in his endeavours to direct the process of selection, while attempting to advance the German “race,” by the systematic murder of millions of human beings. Those considered unfit or inferior by, and for the benefit of, those who regarded themselves as being fit and superior, met an unimaginably barbaric death (34).

Thankfully, evolutionists have moved away from such crude and obviously unacceptable expressions of this form of belief in, and attempts to progress, the “ascent of man.” But occasionally, after a lifetime of viewing such powerfully graphic, evolutionary fantasies as the charts mentioned earlier, the underlying impression made on the subconscious minds of white people comes to the fore. An example of this, was the shameful incident of a dark skinned cricketer of Caribbean descent, being jeered at and called a “monkey” by a white crowd in 2007 (35) (see). And more recently, we had the incident of an indigenous Australian Rules footballer being called an “ape” by a 13 year old girl in the crowd. There is a high probability that this young girl had been taught from a book containing an ascent of man chart, which depicted a creature that looked very much like the footballer preceding the “fully evolved,” white man at the end of the parade (see) and also (see).

I am also reminded of a conversation I overheard between one of my lecturers at university and another mature age student; both these people had naturally blonde hair and blue eyes and they were discussing an incident concerning some people from the Pacific Islands  who had abused a child. I was almost knocked off my seat when I heard the lecturer declare that these people where, “just down from the trees,” and that this was the sort of behaviour one would expect from them. He seemed somehow to have overlooked the fact that many “fully evolved,” blonde haired, blue eyed white people did exactly the same sort of thing.

Misinformed non-Christians often point to Christianity as having racist elements. Groups such as the Christian Identity Movement have taken evolutionary teachings and superimposed them onto The Bible, claiming only the white “races” are descendants of Adam and Eve. Once again we must remember Jesus’ warning, not all those who claim to be Christians are actually members of the body of Christ (Mat 7:22, 23). Those who take a plain reading approach to The Bible do not add to it; the idea that the white races are the only true humans and other races are “less evolved,” subhumans cannot be found in the pages of The Bible. Therefore, these groups are not Christian, they adhere to diabolical doctrines using Christian terminology, but they are far from followers of Christ, whose commandments are to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us (Mat 5:44).

The biblical understanding of the human race is that we are all of one blood and evolutionists would now generally agree with biblical creationists when they assert that all people groups have come from the same original population. Biblical creationists know we are all descendants of Noah’s family, which dispersed throughout the world after the flood. Different ethnic groups, isolated by geographical boundaries, developed physical features which distinguish them from other groups, but these are purely superficial. As a CMI article points out:

Generally, whatever feature we may look at, no people group has anything that is, in its essence, uniquely different from that possessed by another. For example, the Asian, or almond-shaped, eye gets its appearance simply by having an extra fold of fat. Both Asian and Caucasian eyes have fat—the latter simply have less of it (see).

Skin colour is one of the areas people most often mention when they are talking about races, but the genetic differences in people with different coloured skin are very small. As Dr Don Batten points out

….. the same main substance—a dark brown pigment called melanin—colours the skin of all humans. Individuals that have a lot of it appear to have ‘black’ skin; people that have little appear ‘white’. Melanin is produced by organelles called melanosomes, contained in special cells called melanocytes. Melanocytes are located in the bottom layer of the skin, and produce melanin with the aid of tyrosinase and other enzymes. People with lighter-coloured skin have smaller, fewer and less dense melanosomes than darker-skinned people.

‘Melanin’ actually comprises two pigments, which also influence hair and eye colour. Eumelanin is dark brown, whereas pheomelanin is reddish in colour. People tan when sunlight stimulates eumelanin production. Redheads, who are often unable to develop a protective tan, have a high proportion of pheomelanin. They have probably inherited a defective gene which makes their pigment cells ‘unable to respond to normal signals that stimulate eumelanin production’.

Research has implicated variants of the melanocortin-1-receptor gene (MCR1) in this inability to tan, which also relates to the production of freckles in childhood and photodamage to the skin that manifests in adulthood. When exposed to UV light, and in the absence of sufficient eumelanin, pheomelanin produces free radicals that may cause skin damage, including cancer.

Skin colour, like many other human traits, varies in almost continuous fashion throughout the spectrum from very pale to very dark.

While (eu)melanin functions in protecting the skin from the damaging effects of exposure to the sun’s UV rays, it also apparently protects folate, an essential vitamin particularly important for neural tube development in the unborn. Melanin also protects those living in lowland equatorial regions from tropical skin ulcers through an anti-microbial effect. So people with good levels of melanin are better adapted to living in the tropics than people with little melanin. On the other hand, melanin reduces the production of vitamin D, a vitamin essential to normal bone development that is manufactured in the skin on exposure to sunlight.

Consequently, people with dark skin tend to suffer from rickets at high latitudes, where the skin’s exposure to sunshine is lacking, unless their diet is rich in vitamin D (by eating fish, for example, as the Inuit do). In such areas people with little melanin (‘whites’) are better adapted. These factors have undoubtedly contributed to the distribution of skin colours in different regions around the world (see).

The Hodgson twins

Despite the assertions of evolutionary anthropologists and white supremacists, there is only one race, the human race. The Bible tells us that the peoples of the world today are all of one blood, we have minor genetic differences but these are extremely small. As a CMI article points out:

Scientists have found that if one were to take any two people from anywhere in the world, the basic genetic differences between these two people would typically be around 0.2 percent—even if they came from the same people group (36). But, these so-called ‘racial’ characteristics that many think are major differences (skin color, eye shape, etc.) account for only 6 percent of this 0.2 percent variation, which amounts to a mere 0.012 percent difference genetically (37) (see).

22 No Need to Compromise

Drs Truman, Batten, Safarti, Wieland and many other Bible believing scientists have dedicated their lives to assisting Christians in the development of an understanding that there is no need to compromise where science is concerned. It can be extremely challenging for the untrained layperson to get behind scientifically daunting headlines and the brio of articulate, academic atheists. It is refreshing to realise that there is no reason for anyone to doubt that scientists who know the Creator, and believe in The Bible’s version of creation, are just as well trained and intellectually able as those who adhere to philosophical naturalism, they simply begin with a different worldview.

The exciting truth for thinking Christians is that the creation model stands up in every area of scientific inquiry. At this very moment, Bible believing scientists are working hard to do their own research and keep up with the latest secular research and discoveries. Thanks to these hard working, poorly funded brothers and sisters, there is no difficulty defending The Bible’s version of origins, for anyone who wishes to take the time to examine the evidence. The almost universal censorship of this evidence, and the selective manner in which creation science is presented in the media (no scientific evidence for creation is ever allowed to be aired (see)), makes seeking out and discovering sound, scientific creation research, amidst the humanist media monopoly, the real challenge for the thinking Christian.

Through the work of Bible believing Christian scientists, we can discover that the fossil evidence is good evidence for a worldwide flood (see) and the so called “evolution before our very eyes” Dawkins talks about is nothing more than “progressive degradation of a gene,” (38) which in turn points to the Fall. While Lucy, the much publicised Australopithecine “missing link,” turns out to be not at all structurally close to humans. From her inner ear structure, scientists have determined it is almost certain she spent most of her time brachiating in the trees, like most apes (see). Despite the controversy over her metatarsal bone, she probably did not walk in an upright position but rather, as Dr Weiland explains:

….. the evidence overall seems to fit well with Oxnard’s notion of a unique mode of locomotion of these (mostly tree-dwelling) creatures when they were on the ground, not human-like bipedality at all (see).

23 Is science really the source of all knowledge?

As Christian writer Dave Breece stated, “Our society has come to assume that the source of all knowledge is science (39).” He also points out that, “…science has come to be thought of as a mysterious entity beyond the intellectual capabilities of the average man (40).” Thus, we are faced with a dominant cultural paradigm, which tells us that we must accept certain ideas “because they are scientific,” but we can’t possibly know how these ideas are arrived at, because that is beyond our capability. Thankfully, Christians need not be cowered by this proposal. The evidence is there, because many faithful brothers and sisters have the training and ability to do the research and have also taken the time to make it available to the layperson. We can be informed, even those of us who are not scientifically trained.

Science is not the domain of the intellectually superior; it is simply the “careful, more codified, more patiently recorded observations (41),” of people in a particular field of endeavour. This is not an exclusive club, most people can learn and understand when Bible believing scientists like the CMI contributors prepare such excellent resources. It is also obvious, to anyone who has taken the time to investigate exactly how the research is performed, that things are not necessarily clear cut. There are usually many interpretations brought to the data and these are heavily influenced by personal perspectives.

24 The evidence points to design and a Designer

Every day secular scientists discover that designs in nature are so good they would love to copy them, if only they knew how. The list of designs in nature that have already been mimicked by scientists and engineers grows daily (this area of science is called biomimicry (see) ). Humans have been copying designs in nature for centuries. Some recent examples are George de Mestral’s use of the design of a burr to create Velcro; Mercedes-Benz mimicking the design of the boxfish to make cars and architects building skyscrapers, whose air-conditioning designs are based on termite mounds (see). Despite this, most secular scientists shy away from stating the obvious, that such overwhelming evidence for design indicates the existence of a Designer.

As scientists and engineers strive to understand and recreate design principles such as those found in the feet of geckoes (to make non sticky bandages that will adhere to the fragile skin of the elderly, but can be removed without damage), they continue to insist these wonderful designs are the product of the mindless processes of mutation, adaptation and natural selection. After marvelling at designed for purpose natural phenomena, people like atheist Richard Dawkins, rather than entertaining the possibility of a Designer, often make rather illogical statements such as, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose (42).” In 2004, in an interview with Bill Moyes, Dawkins also said, “Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.”

Paul had an answer for such wilful ignorance:

For ever since the world was created, people have seen the Earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see His invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship Him as God or even give Him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. (Rom 1:20-22)

Other atheists show that wilful ignorance is associated with a desire to create an alternative social and political environment. They oppose any idea of a Creator, who has revealed a world where meaning and purpose can be understood and acted upon, perhaps because belief in a Creator would necessitate a change in their lifestyle. The writer, Aldous Huxley (brother of famous atheist evolutionist Sir Julian Huxley), declared he “… had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning….the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political (43).” No doubt the liberation he sought was freedom to do whatever his sinful nature desired, rather than conforming to the predominantly Christian culture of his peers.

Theistic evolutionists usually don’t have such worldly reasons for refusing to examine the scientific evidence for The Bible’s version of origins. In our secularised world the only explanation we hear for the origin of life is evolution. In zoos and museums, schools and universities, television, radio, movies and even churches, evolution is assumed as fact. Often those who have not taken the time to examine the research of Bible believing scientists assume evolution and long ages are proven facts, because they have never heard the evidence against these ideas and no one is prepared to question them. The paradigm stands unchallenged, because even Christians are not prepared to entertain the possibility that the science is not as sound as secular humanist scientists would have us believe.

It is laudable that people are interested in pursuing truth; however, they will never know whether the clever incorporation of the observable processes of mutation, adaptation and natural selection into naturalisms model for the evolution of species is the only scientifically sound model of origins, unless they take the time to carefully examine the alternative. To fully accept evolution, one must believe that millions of biologically functioning, extremely specialised proteins have been produced by mindless, chance mutations of existing genetic instructions, creating new genetic information when not one of these mutations has ever been observed.

The belief that fish can evolve into fishermen, given enough time, is not supported by scientific observation or evidence, nor has Darwinism developed a scientifically viable, hypothetical mechanism for the origin of life. Despite decades of research, abiogenesis remains a scientifically improbable theory, which most neo Darwinists strive to avoid. Rather than acknowledging the reality of the Creator, a being of infinitely superior intelligence, whose abilities are immeasurably beyond our comprehension, they resort to impossible, illogical, unreasonable chance.

25 The Good Creation

Having examined the case for a loving God being solely responsible for the creation of our universe, just as The Bible outlines, we can be assured that in the beginning, after each literal creation day, God declared His work to be tôv (in the Hebrew טוב), which is translated as “good” in most English Bibles (Gen:1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Before He ceased His creative work on the seventh day, God declared the whole of creation to be “very good” (Gen 1:31). Every aspect of His creation was good, until evil entered after humans used their God given gift to choose whom to believe.

Adam and Eve chose to reject God’s rule in their lives and listened to Satan’s lies. This choice brought death and its accompanying range of evil physical and moral consequences. Following the account of this momentous catastrophe, The Bible gives us a hint of God’s gracious plan to reinstate His original purpose; the creation of a holy, eternal family, through the promised Seed (Gen 3:15), His Son.

When the long awaited Messiah was born into the world, He revealed God’s intention of creating a new universe, where pain, suffering and death would have no part. It is only a holy universe that can accomplish this, a universe entirely under the reign and rule of the Lord Jesus Christ. When God’s plan is finally realised…..

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev 21:4)

26 The First and Last Adam

If the introduction of sin and death was not through a literal Adam and Eve at the very beginning of time, then the death and resurrection of Jesus to “give us victory over sin and death” (1 Corinthians 15:57) must be reassessed. If the first Adam did not actually bring sin and consequently death to the world, was the death of the last Adam really necessary to bring eternal life? Without this key point of the gospel, Jesus’ death can be seen as merely an example of an “enlightened man” giving his life so that others could hear his wonderful philosophy and precepts. The whole concept of the incarnation as presented in the gospels and Paul’s teachings is brought into question. We could make a case for any enlightened man being sufficient to guide humanity into a golden age. In this case it was Jesus, but he would then be one of many sages who came to the peoples of the world throughout the ages. As a New Age hippie I accepted that this was a deeper and more enlightened understanding of The Bible, but as a Bible believing Christian I have a very different premise to guide me.

Once we start down the road of reinterpreting the scriptures to fit our own, more “educated” or “enlightened” ideas, there is no end to the possibilities. Before I understood that The Bible is the inerrant Word of God I saw it as just another holy book written by men who claimed to know God. Granted, in this case they were men who knew the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God Jesus claimed as His Father, but it is difficult to know where we draw the line once we stray from accepting The Bible as God’s inerrant Word. Before I knew Jesus, The Bible was just another spiritual book, filled with human mythology from a particular group of spiritual people, and therefore I could read into it anything I chose. Now I believe it must be approached in an entirely different way to all other texts.

27 Did God really use suffering and death to create?

As a new Christian I simply accepted that the scientists were right concerning the issue of origins, God must have used evolution to create, no problem! Before I began to examine and question the received wisdom of our modern society I didn’t really doubt this idea. Somewhere in the first few chapters of Genesis there was room to squeeze in evolution and long ages, God had simply not given the full account of His creative process to the prescientific people who recorded His Word. Eventually, as I developed an interest in science and completed a few tertiary units in basic science at university, I realised the evidence for evolution was very patchy. After further examination of the research, I discovered a decided lack of conclusive facts and important data to support the theory. Consequently, the incredible stories evolutionists construct around the well known, undisputed facts, began to sound more like science fiction than scientific reality.

When I started to look into the science without naturalistic bias it became quite obvious I had accepted the theory without question. I finally understood that the evolutionary explanation for the origin of life on our planet was just one story woven around the observable facts. I also came to understand that even for the dedicated naturalist, considerable faith is needed to believe life spontaneously came into existence from lifeless chemicals, and then slowly, through mindless, chance mutations, developed into the myriad of intricately complex flora and fauna we see around us today. The more I read the more I realised The Bible’s creation story is simply a different faith view on the origin of life. I think the crunch came when I started looking more closely at the creation science model and began to grow in my theological awareness.

Even if I were to add the divine element to the naturalist view of the origin of life, and chose to believe God guided the process, once I looked a little deeper into biblical truths I was confronted with the question, “Why would a loving God use death and suffering as part of His creative process?” And the biblical answer is – He didn’t. The Bible plainly reveals that God created a “good” universe that had light and dark, hot and cold, up and down, and the potential for good and evil.

When He created humans and angels God gave them the power of contrary choice, which means they had the power to make a choice contrary to the nature God had given them (see). This power sets humans apart from animals, and actually gives people a power God does not possess (1 John 1:5), they can choose to do evil (John 8:44), which in itself is an expression of disdain for God’s Way. God did not create the evil, but by allowing humans to make a choice to do evil (that is, reject His holy Way) He also ensured that His ultimate, eternal family will be those who voluntarily choose to love and obey Him.

By its very nature, love must be voluntary. God did not create automatons, who would respond to Him on cue: He created individuals in His own image (Gen 1:26), who can choose to love and obey Him or reject Him and His Way. God’s great love enables the beloved to respond freely and such a response brings great joy to the heavenly host (Luke 15:7, 10) as the lost soul is welcomed into the family of God.

God created a universe where actions have orderly, predictable and clearly understood consequences. In Eden the knowledge of good and evil was God’s exclusive domain. He protected Adam and Eve from this knowledge when He commanded them to avoid the fruit of just one tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen 2:17), but they chose to ignore God’s command. Rather than depending on their own ability to determine right from wrong they had a perfect relationship with their Creator, whose intimate guidance, once they chose to reject it, was withdrawn. When they chose to ignore His command, seeking wisdom of their own (Gen 3:6), they did this with a clear understanding of the consequences. God had already explained to them that if they ate of the fruit of the tree they would die (Gen 2:17). This was the first occurrence of a conditional prophecy recorded in The Bible. They understood that the future outcome was contingent upon their actions, but they went ahead with their decision to reject God’s command.

The Bible teaches us that death entered into the creation at that point in time and only the Lord of Life can reverse the consequences of the choice Adam and Eve made. Paul explains:

…..Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone. (Rom 5:18)

Adam and Eve chose to rebel against their Creator and severed their unique relationship with God when they did the one thing He had commanded them not to do. They understood the consequences of their actions and those consequences affected not only them, but every person, creature and plant that would live on Earth; from that moment in time death entered the world and they began to die. God ended the idyllic life Adam and Eve had been living and from that time on they would both be forced to labour; Eve in childbirth and Adam in the fields (Gen 3:16-19).

Adam and Eve had been given dominion over the Earth (Gen 1:28) and the consequences of their actions and the curses that God pronounced as a result of their choice, affected not only their own bodies and those of their descendants, but every living thing within their domain. After death was introduced into the world, Adam and Eve and their descendants would be perpetually surrounded by death. The first death in The Bible is recorded immediately after their fall from grace and was a direct result of their rebellion. God took the skin of an innocent animal to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness (Gen 3:21). Until that time they had lived in ignorant innocence, now they were faced with a self awareness that enabled them to see that the righteousness, purity and holiness that had been theirs because of their intimate relationship with the Creator had been removed.

As humankind moved further away from God and sin increased, death became even more prevalent. Neither people nor animals needed to eat the flesh of other creatures before the Flood; God gave plants to humans and the animal kingdom for nourishment after the creation week (Gen 1:29), but after the Flood He told Noah and his family they should now also eat animals (Gen 9:3). The Earth had been so catastrophically changed by the Flood there would not be enough plant material to feed all the animals and people. God had originally planted the food in Eden for Adam and Eve, but after they left the garden they had to work hard to feed themselves (Gen 3:17-19), and after the Flood humans needed to include meat in their diet to survive.

The wellbeing of every creature that was under their care was contingent upon Adam and Eve’s faithfulness to the Creator. The death and suffering of animals is a constant reminder to us of what rebellion against God has cost the creatures we are meant to watch over. We see this principle worked out even today. We don’t need to look very far in today’s world before we find animals suffering because of the neglect and greed of humans, if not directly, then through degradation of their habitat. Species are going extinct at an alarming rate as greedy, careless people clear land for luxury crops.

God entrusted us with the care of innocent animals, but He also entrusted us with the care of innocent children. Along with the unparalleled privilege of the potential to become part of His eternal family, God gave humans incredible responsibilities, He allowed us to bear and care for other human beings. One of the most distressing aspects of my career as a primary school teacher was to see parents or guardians abusing the children in their care. Unloving and careless parents create difficulties for their children that can last a lifetime and sometimes many generations. At times these parents may not intend harm to their children, but simply living lives that revolve almost entirely around their own selfish desires often creates difficulties for those within their care.

The Bible clearly teaches that innocent creatures and children yet to be born were calamitously affected by Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God. God designed the world giving humanity incredible power, He gave us dominion over everything that moved on the Earth (Gen 1:26-28). When Adam and Eve rebelled against God, that rebellion had repercussions for all the other living things over which they had dominion. This event was a turning point in human history and it could only be reversed by God Himself entering into human history as the man who would ultimately bring the repercussions to an end.

If death, pain and suffering were actually something that had been present on this planet for millions, if not billions of years, God would be a monster. Allowing such a long period of prolonged suffering would mean He was prepared to watch over this carnage for an unimaginably long period of time. However, God is not just watching the world evolve, He has, from the very moment Adam and Eve made their catastrophic choice, been unendingly involved in repairing the damage they wrought.

28 Did Adam and Eve know what they were doing?

We might ask whether Adam and Eve understood the concept of death, as death had never occurred before they chose to disobey God. Our first parents were created as adults and God must have given them information about numerous things they had not actually experienced, enabling them to function in the world in which they came to consciousness. We all know about many things we have not actually, personally experienced, because we have been given enough information to understand the concepts and have a God given ability to create abstract images and ideas in our minds.

An oncologist understands cancer in minute detail, without having to suffer from the disease him/herself, and people who are born blind understand the concept of sight, because it has been carefully explained to them. When God gave Adam and Eve the warning concerning death, He must also have ensured they understood just what it meant, or Satan could not have discussed the subject with Eve (Gen 3:1-5).

29 The Tree of Life

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had free access to the Tree of Life (Gen 2:9), unlike the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil this tree was not restricted to them (Gen 2:16,17). One of God’s greatest acts of love was to cut off their access to the Tree of Life after they rebelled (Gen 3:22). Once they had sinned God sent them away from the garden to till the soil and grow their own food, and He made it impossible for them to return to Eden (Gen 3:23, 24). From that time on they would also be responsible for their own choices and actions. God had already explained to them that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would bring them death, and once they had eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree He then cut them off from the source of eternal life. God’s great love is revealed by the fact that He did not condemn them to live eternally, separated from Him by their sin. They began to die. God told them they would eventually return to the dust from which they were originally formed (Gen 3:19).

When Adam and Eve rejected God’s command death entered into their flawless bodies and their very DNA became subject to breakdown. Their bodies could no longer infinitely produce perfect new cells, and this genetic defect was passed on to their children, and their children’s children. As The Bible’s history unfolds human lifespans decrease. We now live in a world where the accumulation of hereditary mutations has led to numerous diseases and disabilities being present amongst all living things, and the expected lifespan for a human has been reduced from something like 700 to 70 years. In our present generation, life is often prolonged by the wonders of modern medicine, but often the quality of life diminishes and our gradual decline brings a myriad of pains and problems.

30 God is Love

Scripture is quite clear concerning the magnificent love and mercy of God. For the first twenty years of my life I had been surrounded by truth and lies. The biggest lie was that there is no absolute Truth, but the Truth concerning the love of God that leapt into my heart that day in Burringbar was so overwhelmingly real it changed the course of my life and it will shape the destiny of humankind.

Paul tells us:

…God’s mercy is so abundant, and His love for us is so great, that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience He brought us to life with Christ. It is by God’s grace that you have been saved. (Eph 2:4-5)

From the very foundations of the world God began to work out the rescue and redemption of His children. His plan is to resume the loving, intimate relationship that had been severed at the Fall. From the time they were expelled from Eden, humanity would journey through human history separated from God, while the subject of the very first lie would be a constant, dreadful reality. But God intervened in that history and created the potential for each person to take an alternative path.

Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44), told Eve that she would not die if she disobeyed God. Eve told the serpent….But of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die….And the serpent lied…. You shall not surely die…. (Gen 3:3-4)

Satan’s second lie was a further emphasis on the first, he told Eve they would not die but that they would be like God, knowing good and evil. He said……for God knows that in the day you eat of it, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as God, knowing good and evil. (Gen 3:5) Satan told Eve she would be immortal and omniscient, both of these lies continue to surface in our world, even today.

It is not a long stretch of the imagination to view the sending forth of Adam and Eve, away from the Tree of Life and into the world, as an expression of God’s love. In His divine empathy, God knew that living forever in a fallen world with a sin nature would be unbearable, and He had already planned the Way for all of humanity to turn back to Him and become part of His restored, eternal family. God knew every child that, in a manner of speaking, lay in the loins of Adam and Eve, and He allowed humanity to continue. Although He knew His creation had been incredibly flawed, God did not abort the billions of children waiting to be born into this imperfect world. Instead, He patiently gave each one the gift of mortal life and enabled them to make a choice to become part of His eternal family, by choosing to put on the immortality His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, offers each and every soul (1 Cor 15:54). As Jesus said:

Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: (Matthew 25:34b)

God has made provision for each and every one of His children to respond to His love and even those people who have lived in remote places, far away from any awareness of the Lord Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, will benefit from His incarnation. God the Father can determine their response to His touch, but it is because of the death and resurrection of Christ that He can offer these people the gift of eternal life.

Some may suggest this would mean the gospel is superfluous, but this is far from the truth, the gospel has changed human ethics in ways no other teaching has ever done. We know God loved us so much that He died for us, this is the basis of our modern culture and it is this love that has changed the world. The gospel carries the very words of the Redeemer of the world who instructed us to, “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John 13:34-35) Throughout the past 2000 years humanity has had this dazzling Truth shining like a beacon down through history. Like Jesus, it is a Truth that can overcome all the lies religion, bigotry, intolerance, and hate perpetrate.

Paul further explained God’s love to the Romans:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:35-39)

This love is beyond measure and can only be fully realised as the Holy Spirit reveals it to those who invite Him to dwell within their hearts and minds. Paul explained to the Ephesians:

…..Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in Him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. (Eph 3:17-19)

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he outlines the mysterious concept of the Body of Christ and helps them to understand their place in it. He informs them that each member of the body will have different gifts, but he concludes this exposition with a reminder that there is a way of life that should surpass all else. He writes:

If I could speak all the languages of Earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.
If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
Love is patient and kind.
Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.
It does not demand its own way.
It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.
It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!
Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. (1Co 13:1-13)

The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is unrelenting; those who follow Him must express a love that is only possible through the renewing of the human spirit by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It is only as Christ indwells us that we can even hope to come near to Paul’s teachings on love. Despite human failure and the shortcomings of Christians in expressing God’s love for humanity, God’s love can reach out to anyone and everyone, but we must be prepared to obey Him.

31 Disobedience damages our relationship with God

Adam and Eve’s disobedience disastrously affected their relationship with God. From that point on they and their descendants would be destined to have a sin nature (Romans 3:23, 5:12), having permanently damaged their trusting and dependent relationship with their Creator. God also cursed the ground because of Adam and Eve’s choice (Gen 3:17), thus the whole of creation now groans (Rom 8:19-23), waiting to “be delivered from the bondage of corruption.” This was not God’s original plan, and it is not His final answer.

God has allowed this sinful world to go on for thousands of years, during which time people have had the opportunity to make the most important choice they will ever make. Those who take a plain reading approach to The Bible accept that the Earth is not billions of years old. As geologist Tas Walker explains:

Before anyone can calculate an age for anything, they have to assume its history.

The assumed history the majority of contemporary geologists bring to their work is based on a belief that the Earth is billions of years old. This basic assumption is the lens through which they view all data. As Dr Walker continues:

The numbers quoted for the age of the Earth (or the age of the dinosaurs or the age of a volcano) are the outworking of personal beliefs, made to look authoritative by much technical equipment and complicated calculations (see).

There are many scientific reasons to believe The Bible’s account of world history. When we look at DNA in “ancient” fossils (see), the erosion of coastlines (see), the reversals and decay of the Earth’s magnetic field (see) and the amount of salt in the sea and silt on the sea floor (see) we discover that The Bible’s chronology (and the consequent estimation of the age of the Earth) is far more evidence based than philosophical naturalists would have us believe.

The Bible reveals God has patiently worked from the beginning of time to ensure His message of love and hope was spread throughout the world. Despite humanity’s evident propensity for violence, selfishness, greed and hate, God created a nation, His chosen people, Israel, as the first group of ambassadors (Ex 19:5-6). Knowing from before the beginning of time that mortal humans would never be equal to the task, He prepared this nation for the time when He would be born into the fallen world, so that He could pay the price for sin. After His incarnation He worked through the Holy Spirit to create a unique body of people to carry the message of His love and plan to humanity.

The idea that God has allowed sin and death to dominate His creation for millions of years is not biblical. He has foreknowledge of those who will respond to His touch and when the fullness of those who choose His Way is complete, He will bring this present world to its end quickly and with finality (Rom 9:28; 11:25; 2 Pet 3:9). Many unbelievers today accept the received idea of an almost eternal past, filled with millions if not billions of years of pain, suffering and death, while at the opposite end of the spectrum they see no future beyond the grave. God has revealed through His Word that those who believe The Bible’s timeline can anticipate this comparatively short time of pain, suffering and death coming to a swift end, after which the saints are promised an eternal future, where death and pain are no more, having been conquered by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus compared this present, short time of pain to the labour experienced by a mother before the birth of her child: after a child is born the pain of labour pales into insignificance when the new baby has safely arrived (John 16:20-22). In just the same way the pain and suffering of this present world will be put into perspective by life in the glorious new heaven and Earth God will create for eternity.

©Pacific Press: Licensed from GoodSalt.com

The question each person must answer at some point is, will they choose to be part of the eternal creation God has determined will exist in the future, or will they choose to perish along with this fallen world of suffering, pain and death? This choice is presented throughout the OT, in Deuteronomy we find:

“Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. (Deu 30:15)

And Jesus outlined the choice in John 3:16 when He said:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Jesus spoke about the love of God providing renewed access to the source of eternal life, cancelling the power of death that now rules in the lives of every human (1 Corinthians 15:55). Paul also referred to this choice in Romans 6:23 when he wrote:

“For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

As Christians we know that the most loving thing we can do for others is to share the reality of God’s love with them by telling them the Good News, that Jesus has made a way for them to personally experience the love of God in their own lives. This love is only possible for those who have a relationship with God through His Son. Many Christians have given their lives trying to share this truth, and today, as it has been throughout the ages since Jesus returned to the Father, people may respond with hate and aggression to this message. However, that is no reason to withhold the Good News. A loving parent would never withhold a life changing truth from their child, even if that truth appears at first unpalatable. If a child needed major surgery to save his or her life a parent would consent, even if it meant the child would suffer pain and discomfort. In the same way we may discomfort some by insisting on sharing the Good News, but it could mean the difference between eternal life and death for them.

32 After the Garden

Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden with the knowledge of all that God had taught them to that point about Himself and His world. God had created them able, He even asked Adam to name all the animals (Gen 2:19). Perhaps they had walked with Him in the cool of the evening and He would no doubt have delighted in teaching them, just as a parent teaches a child. Sadly this idyllic time was cut short as they turned away from trusting their Creator and chose instead to trust their own ideas. But God, in His loving mercy, instituted an alternative plan for humanity. He determined to call out a people who would live according to His guidance and direction, through whom He could prepare the way for the Seed, His Son, to be born into the world (Gen 3:15).

In Jesus Christ, God would take upon Himself the consequences of the sin of humanity. God had warned Adam and Eve that the consequences of their rebellion would be death (Gen 2:17). The substitutionary death of Jesus Christ was sufficient to satisfy this penalty for each and every person who has ever lived (Heb 10:10), and He is therefore able to offer anyone who will accept it access to eternal life and deliverance from destruction (1 Cor 1:18). This renewed access is through His righteousness and obedience, He is the only One who can offer eternal life because He is the only One who has conquered death (Acts 2:24). As Paul explains:

For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and His gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one Man, Jesus Christ. (Rom 5:17)

God is not only concerned with the quantity of the life He offers but also with the quality. An eternal life that is less than perfect would be intolerable. Only life for eternity, where a loving Father ensures individual wholeness (holiness) is worth contemplating. In God’s eternal kingdom we will triumph over death and sin.

From Genesis 4 verses 6 and 16 we know that even though Adam and Eve damaged their original relationship with God, He continued to speak with them and guide them after they left the garden. They showed repentance through the introduction of offerings (Gen 4:3-5), which recognised their sin and foretold the need for a substitutionary death to deal with that sin conclusively. After their expulsion from the garden God continued to communicate with their family and even Cain was included in this relationship, as he pleaded with God not to send him away from His presence after he had become the first murderer (Gen 4:16).

33 Genesis is History Not Allegory

Most Hebrew scholars have no doubt that Genesis is written as an historical record. Dr Robert McCabe points out that the creation account is the same sort of literature as the rest of Genesis, i.e. historical narrative, while it lacks the key features of Hebrew poetry (see). It is an historical account of the work and purpose of God, who has ensured that this record of events has been passed down to us from the very beginning of human existence, which was actually the very beginning of time.

Adam and Eve were there from the 6th day of creation and they had the opportunity to talk with God about His work. They were vital witnesses, who passed on this knowledge to their descendants (Adam lived for 930 years, that’s a long time to sit around and chat about the past), and the main player in all these events, the key witness, guided the recording of all that occurred in His written Word. The Bible can truthfully begin with the words “In the beginning….”

A common assertion, even amongst some Christian writers, is that Genesis draws upon the creation myths of the surrounding, ancient cultures. This understanding clearly shows a particular presupposition. An alternative understanding is based on the presupposition that Genesis is the original, inspired, truthful account, while other creation stories are simply corruptions of the original record, which was passed down through the human family from Adam and Eve and eventually recorded by The Bible writers. God ensured the preservation of the true account of our origins, while other cultures took parts of that story from their ancestors and constructed their own creation myths.

34 The Flood

As the biblical history of humankind moves on we see people obeying God’s directions to “fill the Earth” (Gen 1:28), when they spread out and built communities. Over a thousand years pass before the narrative reaches a climax; from Genesis 6 we know that people exercised their God given right to make choices for themselves, and tragically, most people chose to heed Satan and turn away from their Creator. Perhaps some even went so far as to have sexual relations with the fallen angels (Gen 6:4). There are many speculations about the biblical creatures called the Nephilim, with some commentators claiming they are the human/angelic offspring who spawned the legends of the Titans and gods of mythology.

Whatever may have been happening, it is clear that eventually humanity had completely moved away from God their Creator and consequently people were living in total debauchery, with violence and injustice dominating the population (Gen 6:5, 11). Humanity had turned its back on God their Creator and totally embraced Satan’s lies. The widespread violence, hate and corruption were a direct challenge to the Creator’s plan and purpose for His creation, to bring about a holy family, free from sin and its consequences. The extent of the people’s wickedness grieved God’s heart deeply. As Moses records:

The LORD observed the extent of human wickedness on the Earth, and He saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. So the LORD was sorry He had ever made them and put them on the Earth. It broke His heart. (Gen 6:5-6)

We know what we mean when we say we have a broken heart, but when it is God who is grieving it is impossible to know just what God was experiencing. He must have been devastated at the extent of corruption and violence within the human population, but there was one man, one righteous man, who remained faithful to his Creator. The Bible tells us Noah was a “righteous man.” He and his immediate family were the only people on the whole planet who “walked with God.” And so….

God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to all people. I will destroy them completely, because the world is full of their violent deeds. (Gen 6:13)

Despite the fact that from God’s perspective the violence and debauchery was a plague on the Earth, the people themselves simply went on as usual. When talking about this time Jesus said:

“When the Son of Man returns, it will be like it was in Noah’s day. In those days before the flood, the people were enjoying banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat. People didn’t realize what was going to happen until the flood came and swept them all away. That is the way it will be when the Son of Man comes. (Mat 24:37-39)

Today we live in similar times, Noah spent 120 years warning everyone about the coming Flood, but they neither listened nor took him seriously and consequently they had no idea what God was planning. Peter tells us:

…..God did not spare the ancient world—except for Noah and the seven others in his family. Noah warned the world of God’s righteous judgment. So God protected Noah when He destroyed the world of ungodly people with a vast flood. (2 Peter 2:5)

Like Noah, Christians today feel they have a vital message for the people around them whose lives could end tomorrow. Unfortunately, the majority of people today refuse to listen and consequently fail to realise what is going to happen when this present age is brought to a close. People are totally preoccupied with enjoying God’s gifts of food, drink, human companionship and intimacy, while they totally ignore, and at times even ridicule, the Creator who provided them with His Word. God has His reasons for allowing the gospel message to be ridiculed by those who consider themselves above such “superstitious nonsense.” Paul, an extremely learned man, explained:

The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God. As the Scriptures say, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent.” So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. Since God in His wisdom saw to it that the world would never know Him through human wisdom, He has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe. (1Co 1:18-21)

I find this idea incredibly comforting. It is not intelligence or innate ability that opens people to a personal relationship with their Creator, it is simply the act of humbly believing what He says about Himself. Anyone and everyone – no matter how smart or rich, cultivated or educated – can hear and believe God’s Word if they will only stop and listen. God knows every heart and soul intimately and He is waiting for each and every individual to stop and turn to Him. But He will not wait forever. God will not allow the pain and suffering that plagues our Earth to go on indefinitely; He will bring this present creation to an end.

Before the Great Flood, God continued to work toward His redemptive plan for humanity, but it is my belief that it would have been futile for him be born into a world that was so contaminated with sin and violence. Proclaiming the gospel in such a world would be like casting pearls before swine (Mat 7:6). I have recently watched as a family was devastated by a father molesting his step daughter. The ramifications of this act go on like ripples in a pond, drastically affecting family and friends, and destroying innocence and trust. In the antediluvian world such practices would have been commonplace, with child abuse and violence more the norm than a rare event.

When people refused to listen to Noah, God took drastic action; He destroyed every person, vertebrate land animal, bird and reptile (Gen 6:19-20) that was not kept safe by Him in the gigantic, three story ark with Noah and his family. Many of the sea creatures would also have perished, as the fossil record shows (see), while remnants of the plants, insects and other invertebrates would survive on floating mats of vegetation (see).

From a worldly perspective people complain that any god who could destroy his creation must surely be more of a devil than a god of love. From a biblical perspective this is completely missing the essence of God’s plan for humankind. He did not create us to live a short life filled with pain, suffering, violence and death. He wants each one of us to have an eternal life, in which we can realise our unique potential throughout an endless existence, surrounded by people we love and who love us. This is the environment in which we can also have an unparalleled relationship with our Creator.

Admittedly this is a difficult concept for people to comprehend, particularly those who do not love and trust their Creator. Many people, who have not come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour, have expressed horror at the thought of living forever without sin. I have even heard people say it would be more fun in hell! I find it impossible to consider eternity with the Father without knowing the Son. Apart from the mystery that has been unfolded in the incarnation of Christ, God would be a fearful entity. He created out of nothing and He could destroy it all in a moment. But He has revealed His love for humanity through His suffering, death and resurrection, and we can each be part of the future He will surely bring about.

Because of Jesus we understand the tough love of the OT God had a purpose. At the centre of it all was love. Being with God means being surrounded by love, and it is for this purpose that each person was designed and created. The people before the Flood were surrounded by hate and violence, even the little children were better off being removed from such a world. God knew who would go on into eternity and they were effectively removed to a far better environment.

The historical narrative of the Flood will always remain as a stark reminder of the Father’s intention to bring an end to violence, suffering, pain and death. This cataclysmic event was an unavoidable component of His great plan to bring this sin affected world to its inevitable end. But this will not be the end of the story. God has revealed there is a far greater story yet to be composed. Anyone who chooses to move on into the new creation will be part of the ultimate goal God has carefully outlined throughout His Word. We can each create our own chapter in the great eternal story yet to written.

After the cataclysm of the Flood, God sent forth the animals He had preserved and the remnant of humanity – Noah’s family – to repopulate the Earth (Gen 8:17, 9:1). This family had technological ability (they had built a colossal ark that survived the deluge), agricultural expertise and spiritual knowledge, which was carefully preserved and passed down to their descendants. From this small community all the nations of the world have grown and now cover the Earth (Gen 9:1).

People today have come to view the story of Noah and the ark as nothing more than a fable, passed down over generations to entertain children. This is a very effective way of preventing people from actually examining the evidence for the truth behind the account given in God’s Word. And there is a wealth of evidence, as anyone who is prepared to make enquiries will discover.

35 Floods of evidence

There is no evidence of erosion between these layers.

The timeframe of the Flood event fits perfectly with the population statistics of the world today. When conditions are favourable populations can grow rapidly. As the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) writer Henry Morris points out:

….. if a simple geometric growth rate is assumed (which was the assumption made by Charles Darwin in relation to his imagined “struggle for existence” in nature), it would only take about 1,100 years—assuming 35 years per generation—to develop a world population of six billion people. Immediately after the Flood, with only eight people and the whole world before them, with long lifespans still prevailing, and with every incentive to have large families, the population surely would have grown explosively. Yet the average annual growth rate since the Flood need only have been one-fourth the present growth rate to produce the world’s present population in the 4,000 years (minimum) since that time.

All of which indicates that the evolutionary scenario, which assumes that human populations have been on the earth for about a million years, is absurd. The whole universe could not hold all the people (see).

CMI have also produced numerous articles, DVDs and books on the Great Flood and one of their researchers, Dr Don Batten writes:

Evolutionists claim that mankind evolved from apes about a million years ago. If the population had grown at just 0.01% per year since then (doubling only every 7,000 years), there could be 1043 people today—that’s a number with 43 zeros after it…. Those who adhere to the evolutionary story argue that disease, famine and war kept the numbers almost constant for most of this period, which means that mankind was on the brink of extinction for most of this supposed history. This stretches credulity to the limits.

…. It is relatively easy to calculate the growth rate needed to get today’s population from Noah’s three sons and their wives, after the Flood. With the Flood at about 4,500 years ago, it needs less than 0.5% per year growth. Since the Flood, the world population has doubled every 155 years, or grown at an average of 0.45% per year. There is agreement between the growth rates for the two populations. Is this just a lucky coincidence? Hardly. The figures agree because the real history of the world is recorded in The Bible (see).

There are articles on both CMI’s (creation.com) and ICR’s (icr.org) websites that give sound scientific information on the Flood and its consequences; these articles include logistical papers on how the animals (including dinosaurs) and people fitted in, and lived on the ark for about a year. Other articles cover catastrophic plate tectonics (the geophysical context of the Genesis Flood) and the worldwide geological processes that occurred during that time; the consequent Ice Age and the revegetation and repopulation of the Earth; the dispersion of humans after the Tower of Babel and human cultural development (anthropology) and the processes of adaptation, variation, speciation and genetic decline and decay which have occurred since that time.

It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt to comprehensively cover the wealth of information now available to anyone who is prepared to suspend disbelief long enough to genuinely research this alternative perspective. Perhaps it was my early anti-establishment, “question the status quo” thinking, that made me sceptical about the evolutionary/materialist worldview generally presented by the world media and science community today. I think I could say that from the time I was old enough to speak I was always asking “how” and “why.” I wanted to understand how things worked and I was curious about the evidence people provided as the basis for their assertions.

I have found it stimulating and extremely interesting to discover the truth behind the hype of publicly proclaimed “discoveries” (see) and (see). One of the things I quickly realised was just how much we are asked to accept without viewing or understanding the data, but the real surprise was discovering how many people were not even remotely interested in examining the evidence for themselves, or understanding the methods used in the collection and interpretation of the data during research.

Admittedly there is a lot of pseudoscientific rubbish around, but it is reasonably easy to find quality, scientific research that is not totally biased by philosophical naturalism. It is my hope that more people will take the time to do a little searching beyond the censored range the humanistic naturalists allow to filter out into the media. There is, without doubt, a great deal of worldwide evidence pointing to the Genesis Flood for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. This catastrophic event contradicts the uniformitarian axioms of modern geology, but fits perfectly with the scientific and geological data once one is prepared to suspend any preconceived ideas about the age of the Earth.

36 Geological models

One of Dr Tas Walker’s charts

Broadly speaking there are two models that explain the present geological formations on our planet, these are:

1. The slow and gradual (uniformitarian) build up of numerous layers of strata, in which animals and plants were gradually buried and fossilised over millions of years.
2. A sudden, worldwide deluge that carried and buried millions of animals and plants in a year long catastrophic event that reshaped the surface of the Earth.

The premise of long ages often determines the results of research, as the evidence is invariably considered using the assumption of deep time. As mentioned earlier, creationist geoscientists have constructed a biblical geological model to replace the evolutionary, long-age based geologic column (see). This alternative model examines the data using a biblical interpretation and assumes the actual mechanism that produced most of the rocks and fossils was the Genesis Flood. By contrast, secular geologists are generally philosophical naturalists and use uniformitarian and old Earth presuppositions.

Uniformitarianism is based on the belief that existing, observable mechanisms, acting in the same manner, and with essentially the same intensity as at the present time, are sufficient to account for all geological changes. This concept is intrinsically linked to philosophical naturalism, as it seeks to explain the physical world, allowing only natural forces as the mechanism by which the geological strata were laid down. Uniformitarianism has influenced our thinking since the early 1800s. It is obvious that to hold this view one must also agree with certain assumptions, most notably that the Earth is billions of years old and, as a rule, there have been no major, worldwide catastrophic events in the past, which would influence the uniform, gradual nature of geological change.

It has recently been demonstrated that during a major catastrophic event, vast geological changes can and do occur in a very short period of time. The eruption of Mt St Helens in Washington, United States, on 18th May 1980 is a poignant example of this. Meteorologist Michael Oard points out that:

…thanks to the detailed investigations carried out by many scientists, the recent geological and geomorphological events at Mount St Helens can provide insightful analogs for past Earth-shaping events, which are evident in the rocks and fossils. These analogies defy the principle of uniformitarianism—the guiding light for mainstream geological interpretation—and have fuelled the ideas of the neo-catastrophists, who have brought back catastrophism into secular geological thinking (although not on the scale of the Genesis Flood). Creationists can use neo-catastrophic ideas and research about the eruptions of Mount St Helens to better understand Flood and post- Flood catastrophic processes.

…..Of great interest is the 19 March 1982 mudflow, which produced a 43 meter deep canyon in one day. This canyon is a one-fortieth scale model of the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

…..An extremely energetic wave in Spirit Lake, north of the volcano, sloshed 260 m up the side of the adjacent mountain, with the return flow dumping one million trees into the lake. As these floating trees rubbed against each other, bark was dislodged and sunk to the bottom of the lake. Such bark, covered over with sediments, mimics a layer of peat that can turn into a coal seam, with subsequent sedimentation and time. This is a modern example of the creationist log mat model for the formation of coal. Many of the trees in Spirit Lake have sunk into a vertical position, at different levels on the lake bottom (see).

Although this event gives us an insight into what one volcano can do, the question remains, is there evidence for a universal deluge? In their introduction to numerous articles on the geological evidence for a young age of the earth ICR suggests:

There is extensive evidence for the layers of strata in the geologic record being laid down very quickly, similar to the processes observed when Mount St. Helens erupted. Rapid global formation of sedimentary rock beds is evidence that the Earth is thousands of years old.

The major formations of the Earth’s crust are sedimentary rock beds. These were formed by rapid erosion, transportation, and deposition by water. There is no global evidence of long periods of time between these layers or indications that these layers took long periods of time to form.
For example, sandstone is a major feature of the lower part of the Grand Canyon. The same rock layer is found in Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, the Midwest, the Ozarks, and in northern New York state. Equivalent formations are found across wide portions of Canada, eastern Greenland, and Scotland.

The flood that covered the Earth formed the large geological structures that we can observe today (see).

French sedimentologist Guy Berthault conducted extensive experiments, sometimes working with non-creationists, which demonstrated that fine rock layers (laminations) can form by a self-sorting mechanism during the settling of differently sized particles. As he explains, one experiment:

……showed a property of mechanics, and not chronology, applies to heterogranular mixtures, producing segregation of the particles according to size….. lamination was not formed by successive layers (see).

This led him to the conclusion that sedimentary rocks are produced by a self-sorting mechanism, followed by cementing of the particles together. In other words the laminations are not laid down over countless centuries, but are created when the particles that are suspended in water are sorted because of their size, then settle out in layers and are consequently compacted and cemented together, forming the distinct layers we can observe today. Although this idea at first attracted the usual negative comments from uniformitarian geologists (see), evolutionists have since conducted similar experiments with the same results (44).

One interesting aspect of the uniformitarian response to Berthaul’s work was that the criticism often centred on his Christian beliefs rather than the actual experiments, the results or the interpretation of those results. Because of his beliefs many antagonists assumed him to be an uneducated amateur, when in fact he is well respected in international circles. Philosophical naturalists rarely find themselves having to defend their bias towards naturalism, but many highly educated and respected creation scientists are rejected out of hand because they hold an alternative worldview to the dominant secular one (see) .

The creation versus evolution debate has been raging throughout the corridors of scientific establishments and universities for over 100 years, and this debate is not going to be quelled, despite the censoring of Bible believing Christians. Although the media are caught up in trying to suppress any evidence of real science pointing to The Bible’s version of origins, it is my hope that many people will break free from this carefully crafted smokescreen.

Even though Professors of Evolutionary Biology, like Tim White, from the University of California, Berkley (see) , preach the sort of doctrine that encourages his students to attempt to completely erase the person and work of Jesus Christ from world history (see), Jesus will continue to touch hearts and minds with His message. And once a person looks sincerely and openly into Jesus, the Truth will prevail.

37 Fossils

The sedimentary layers, which cover the Earth’s surface, hold the world’s fossils. Although the word fossil actually comes from a Latin word which means “dug up,” some evolutionists insist a fossil is not a fossil until it has been assigned a date of over 7000 years. The definition of a fossil, however, according to most textbooks and dictionaries, is usually something like “the remains or impression of a prehistoric plant or animal embedded in rock and preserved in petrified form” (see)

The idea of long ages has become so entrenched that at times the power of the paradigm dominates to the point of blindness. When skin from a duck-bill dinosaur fossil was discovered near Grand Prairie, Alberta, many questions were raised by the scientists involved (see). Most people would realise that skin does not endue for long ages, it quickly deteriorates and turns to dust; but the secular scientists asked one interesting question that was undoubtedly based on their long age assumptions.

As the media report released by Canada’s national synchrotron research facility announced, “University of Regina physicist Mauricio Barbi said the hadrosaur, (was) a duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period (100-65 million years ago).” One of the most pressing questions Barbi had related to “how the fossil remained intact for around 70 million years.” Barbi went on to say, “There is something special about this fossil and the area where it was found, and I am going to find out what it is” (see).

ICR writer, Brian Thomas uses this incident to illustrate the power of the long age paradigm. He suggests:

….. finding the right answer works best by first asking the right question, and focusing on some special quality “about this fossil” that enabled it to persist “for around 70-million years” does not appear to be the right question. That line of research will leapfrog a far more fundamental and relevant mystery: How long could actual dinosaur skin tissue possibly last?

Who, upon entering a room and encountering a burning candle would immediately begin to wonder what special something about that candle enabled it to continually burn for a million years? Would it not make more sense to first question how long such a candle could potentially burn before going out?

Similarly, questions that assume some special factor in the skin or in the earth could preserve original organic dinosaur remains for even one million years ignore what is already widely known about skin protein decay. A candle’s flame can be extinguished and relit, but skin decays continually and relentlessly until it is completely gone, becoming dust in thousands, not millions of years. The research questions so far proposed typically exclude the very best explanation—these fossils look young because they are young (see).

Those people who assume long ages often present the story of ancient plants and animals living in specific, consecutive time periods (or eras) of the ancient past. They claim the evidence unambiguously shows these creatures were buried, layer upon layer, over millions of years and eventually, through petrification, became layers of fossils.

This basic idea has been extrapolated and visually portrayed in another popular chart, with the fossilised plants and animals layered into the secular geologic column, graphically illustrating how evolution is said to have progressed. Another work of imagination, this chart, with its successive layers of deposition, is used to demonstrate the concept of the gradual evolution of species over millions of years. These simplistic diagrams create the illusion of layers of fossils, all in a distinct order, showing species evolving from less to more complex creatures over vast periods of time.

This concept has become the unshakeable paradigm of most palaeontologists. However, as John Woodmorappe points out:

The global ‘stack’ of index fossils exists nowhere on Earth, and most index fossils do not usually overlie each other at the same locality. So, even in those places where all Phanerozoic systems have been assigned, the column is still hypothetical. Locally, many of the systems have not been assigned by the index fossils contained in the strata but by indirect methods that take the column for granted—clearly circular reasoning (see).

Circular reasoning also argues that fossils are old because the strata in which they are found is old, after which “old” fossils are used to prove the strata’s great age. Fossils can in fact be formed in comparatively short periods of time. There are shoes and hats, flour bags and fence wire that have all been fossilised in less than 100 years. Under ideal conditions petrification can actually take place in as few as three weeks.

The environmental conditions in which organisms are entombed play a vital role in fossilisation. The most common process for fossilisation is permineralization. During this process minerals fill the cellular spaces of the dead organism, crystallize and eventually the shape of the original plant or animal is preserved as rock. Sometimes the original organic material is completely dissolved away, leaving the form and structure but none of the organic material remains. Under ideal conditions permineralization of bones that fall into mineral springs today can actually occur within a matter of weeks.

Carbonization or distillation is another reasonably common fossilisation process. During this process plant leaves and some soft body parts of reptiles, fish and marine invertebrates decompose, leaving behind only the carbon. Sometimes incredible detail is achieved, when the carbon creates an impression in the rock, outlining the fossil (see) .

In both these processes rapid burial is essential to preserve the organism intact, thus ensuring it does not have time to decompose or be consumed by predators. There are actually fossilised animals that have been buried in the process of eating or giving birth. This would definitely indicate sudden, rapid burial. It also reveals that not all animals died before they were buried. This is exactly what would be expected during a worldwide flood. Evolutionists agree that the faster the organism is buried the more likely it is to be fossilised, and that fossilisation happens in water. However, they insist the “fossil record” was created by a long, slow process over millions of years.

The evidence for rapid burial can be interpreted in two very different ways. Because they reject out of hand any notion of a catastrophic worldwide flood, which often caught creatures unawares, evolutionists claim rapid burial is a rare occurrence. They explain the billions of fossils that have been unearthed by the addition of long ages. One evolutionist website claims:

…when you think of the billions and billions of living things that have inhabited the Earth over the last 550 million years only a very small percentage are immortalized in stone (see)!

A creationist interpretation of the same data would see indisputable evidence for a catastrophic worldwide flood and say that the “billions and billions of living things that have inhabited the Earth over the last 550 million years” is an assumption based entirely on preconceived ideas, this is an assumed history. We don’t know how many animals have lived from the beginning of time, nor do we really know exactly how much time we are looking at. All scientists can do is to invent plausible explanations based on what they think may have happened. To do this both camps depend on strong presuppositions and work from these.

The evolutionary mindset for long ages is now almost cast in cultural concrete. It is difficult to look at any documentary these days without being told about vast periods of time. However, there is no direct way of measuring the age of something. It is not like taking out a tape measure and making a direct comparison of the tape (something that is calibrated accurately on a universally agreed scale) with the object being measured. Nor can we determine exactly when a past event happened, unless a reliable witness accurately recorded it. To determine the ages of things that existed thousands of years ago we must rely on indirect evidence, which is always subject to interpretation.

The Bible’s record of time puts the creation of the world at about 4200 BC (see) . When we know the Creator we know that His eyewitness account is from a completely reliable witness. That same witness has also included a description in His Word of a mechanism that perfectly explains the geological evidence that covers the Earth. Christians can take these historical events and fit them into the data collected from the field. The exciting result is that they complement each other perfectly.

There are a number of computer models for the Flood but nothing like the money and time has been spent on these models as has been spent on the long-age/evolutionist models for geological change. Despite the lack of government funding enjoyed by philosophical naturalists, a number of biblical creationist geoscientists have dedicated their lives to researching and presenting plausible biblical explanations for the geological data.

As CMI writer Steven Robinson suggests, there are still many questions to be answered. He writes:

Although creationists claim to be able to explain the geological column and its associated fossils by reference to the Genesis Flood, it is not generally appreciated that there is more than one such explanation.

…..Where one places the end of the Flood determines how much of the fossil record is attributed to the Flood itself and how much to geological instability thereafter; and since post-Flood instability is likely to have lasted much longer than one year — the Ice Age, for example, must have lasted many decades — explanations of the fossil succession within the Flood year will be radically different from explanations of the succession which is considered post-Flood (see).

At this stage there is no comprehensive model for the Flood, but there are multiple suggestions. As mentioned earlier some Bible believing geologists have completely abandoned the standard, secular geologic column and created a biblical alternative, while others try to work from the standard column. This situation illustrates the dynamic nature of the research and is as it should be, good science consists of constant and ongoing re-evaluation of explanations and interpretations, as new facts come to light.

38 Problems with data collection

One of the difficulties Bible believing scientists face is that they must often work from data collected by uniformitarian scientists, who resent creationist intrusions into what they consider to be exclusively naturalism’s realm. When visiting the sites of field work carried out by evolutionists, Bible believing geoscientists frequently discover evidence that would be of interest to creationists, has been totally overlooked by their secular colleagues. They often find data a creationist would consider a useful component of a data set has been totally ignored as of no consequence by uniformitarians, which illustrates the way pre-existing assumptions inevitably influence the selection and recording of data from the very outset.

The selective nature of data collection is not restricted to geological field work; the collection of fossils is very much influenced by research goals and parameters (as mentioned earlier with hominid fossils). As CMI writer Peter Line reports:

Paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff writes: ‘In my view, “objectivity” does not exist in science. Even in the act of gathering data, decisions about what data to record and what to ignore reflect the framework of the scientist.’ Evolutionists John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas acknowledge: ‘… we must admit that the history of palaeontology does not read as a shining example of the pursuit of truth, especially where it was the truth of man’s origins that was at issue’.3 They later say: ‘… we do know that the popular image of the scientist as a dispassionate seeker after the truth could not be further from reality’ (see).

The methodology of selecting and collecting data has also influenced research into fossil distribution. Noncreationists use fossils called index fossils as a crucial part of their work. Index fossils are commonly found, widely distributed fossils that scientists use to help date other fossils. They are usually selected because they are considered to be limited in time span. An example would be the ammonites, which are found in the layers evolutionary geologists call the Mesozoic Era, but are not found after their Cretaceous period. If a fossil from an unknown era is found near a fossil from a known “time” in the same sedimentary layer, it is assumed that the two species were from about the same time. An index fossil that is subsequently found in a layer outside its supposed timeframe could cause real difficulties in the dating of other fossils. Creation scientist John Woodmorappe found that much of the stratigraphic order in the extinct molluscs called ammonoids was due to “time-stratigraphic concepts and taxonomic manipulations” (see).

The unquestioning acceptance of the uniformitarian paradigm colours the interpretation of the evidence and causes any data that does not fit the paradigm to be overlooked or viewed as an anomaly. One way secular scientists have dealt with anomalies is that similar fossils have been given different names and may even be assigned to different superfamilies when found in strata of different designated ages (45). This practice has occurred many times and has even been found to have happened with index fossils.

Scientists from both the philosophical naturalist and Bible believing persuasions have ongoing challenges in many areas of their research. Ascribing importance to particular aspects of research, while consciously downplaying other areas, could be said to occur in both camps. However, like most Australian students, I had only ever been exposed to the naturalist school of though, and consequently, until I started to read more work from Bible believing scientists, I was completely unaware of some interesting phenomena that appear to be neglected in most secular school textbooks.

39 Bonebeds and polystrate fossils

A Text Book on Geology by Charles Schuchert

Two of the most convincing pieces of evidence for the Genesis Flood are bonebeds and polystrate fossils. Great dinosaur bonebeds have been found on every continent, as far north as Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean and as far south as Antarctica, about 400 miles from the South Pole (see). These bonebeds are enormous fossil graveyards that have without doubt been created by an unimaginable watery catastrophe. An ICR article by Brian Thomas gives us an excellent insight into their significance.

Canadian scientists have found a massive dinosaur fossil graveyard in Alberta containing so many bones that it calls into question the standard stories of slow and gradual dinosaur fossil formation. No mere river flood could account for so many casualties. So, the researchers proposed that the cause was something much more violent.

The formal description of the discovery was published in a book titled New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs (46). Co-editor David Eberth, Senior Research Scientist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, stated in a museum news release, “Data from this mega bonebed provide pretty clear evidence that these, and other dinosaurs, were routinely wiped out by catastrophic tropical storms that flooded what was once a coastal lowland here in Alberta, 76 million years ago (see).”

The “bonebed” covers almost a square mile and contains many Centrosaurus remains. These dinosaurs looked like the more familiar Triceratops, but had additional horns protruding from their skulls. Eberth said of the site that “the scale of the carnage must have been breathtaking” as these and other creatures tried but failed to escape the onrushing waters. Flying or swimming creatures were not fossilized en masse like the larger lumbering beasts, and the researchers reasoned that they were able to escape the overpowering waves.

But where did the water come from that could cause such mayhem? The researchers proposed a “tropical storm model,” in which hurricanes must have washed water up onto a shallow coast (see). That hypothesis shares some similarities to the flood model proposed by creation scientists, but how well does each fit this fossil data?

The standard dinosaur fossilization story holds that the reptiles were crossing a stream and got caught in a rising river. But no rising streams today deposit fossil graveyards. Tropical storms, however, are known to drive water ashore and devastate landscapes, washing over whatever animals lie in their paths. The tropical storm model may be an improvement over the flooded stream scenario, but it is equally true that today’s hurricane storm surges don’t produce fossil graveyards either!

And warm oceans are required to generate these weather patterns, hence the term “tropical” in “tropical storm.” Canada is not very tropical, and even if it was once 2,500 miles further south, any ancient tropical storm similar to today’s tempests might pile up carcasses, but would not bury them deep enough to keep them from rotting before they could fossilize.

Eberth cited hurricanes as the reason why dinosaur fossils “are often found preserved so exquisitely (see).” And yet “exquisite” fossil preservation is not a byproduct of even the most powerful of today’s hurricanes. A more catastrophic event is needed that could carry much more sediment to deeply bury the remains and keep them from decaying. None of today’s natural processes are adequate to explain the centrosaur and other fossil graveyards.

The basic description of the historical account provided in Genesis, which is corroborated by hundreds of legends (see), depicts rising waters that eventually washed over all of the Earth’s continents before running into today’s deeper ocean basins. Such a universal deluge fits the facts of the Canadian mass kill with the fewest logical leaps.

It makes more sense to interpret this fossil graveyard as a result of one of the many tsunami-like waves that gradually pulsed over the continents during the course of the year-long Flood event, when “the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the Earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered” (Genesis 7:19) and (see).

Also of interest are the numerous bonebeds, where a mixture of fossilized marine and land creatures are found intermingled with plant material. This is not an unusual occurrence. For example, the famous dinosaur beds in the Morrison Formation at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, United States also contain logs, clams, snails, and mammals, while a sandstone formation, which extends from the east side of the Rocky Mountains eastward to Edmonton, Canada contained a fossilized juvenile hadrosaur alongside marine clams and snails, as well as birds, mammals, and other dinosaurs (see).

This kind of collection, all jumbled close together, is not the sort of thing we see in the carefully layered evolutionist charts. Numerous animals living today have also been found in the layers of rock uniformitarians have labelled as “the dinosaur era.” Intrigued by this possibility, Dr Carl Werner set himself the task of researching whether fossil beds contained at least some modern animals and modern plants alongside dinosaurs in the rock layers. His research revealed:

We found fossilized examples from every major invertebrate animal phylum living today including: arthropods (insects, crustaceans etc.), shellfish, echinoderms (starfish, crinoids, brittle stars, etc.), corals, sponges, and segmented worms (Earthworms, marine worms).

The vertebrates—animals with backbones such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals—show this same pattern.

Cartilaginous fish (sharks and rays), boney fish (such as sturgeon, paddlefish, salmon, herring, flounder and bowfin) and jawless fish (hagfish and lamprey) have been found in the dinosaur layers and they look the same as modern forms. Modern-looking frogs and salamanders have been found in dinosaur dig sites.
All of today’s reptile groups have been found in the dinosaur layers and they look the same or similar to modern forms: Snakes (boa constrictor), lizards (ground lizards and gliding lizards), turtles (box turtles, soft-shelled turtles), and crocodilians (alligators, crocodiles and gavials).

Contrary to popular belief, modern types of birds have been found, including: parrots, owls, penguins, ducks, loons, albatross, cormorants, sandpipers, avocets, etc.

…..At the dinosaur dig sites, scientists have found many unusual extinct mammal forms such as the multituberculates but they have also found fossilized mammals that look like squirrels, possums, Tasmanian devils, hedgehogs, shrews, beavers, primates, and duck-billed platypus. I don’t know how close these mammals are to the modern forms because I was not able to see most of these, even after going to so many museums.

…..Few are aware of the great number of mammal species found with dinosaurs. Paleontologists have found 432 mammal species in the dinosaur layers; almost as many as the number of dinosaur species. These include nearly 100 complete mammal skeletons. But where are these fossils? We visited 60 museums but did not see a single complete mammal skeleton from the dinosaur layers displayed at any of these museums (see).

Once again the paradigm determines the selection and presentation of the evidence. A person would have to look long and hard to find the evidence for mixed fossil graveyards, because it is very rarely displayed for the public to view. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the significance of fossil graveyards is suppressed to preserve the anticreationist perspective. I believe the existence of polystrate fossils is also suppressed, or at least not openly discussed in museums and classrooms.

Polystrate fossils cut vertically across many geological layers, hence the name polystrate (poly meaning many, and stratum meaning layer) fossils. Large fish and whales have been found with their heads in one geological layer and their tails in another. The most striking polystrate fossils are tree trunk fossils, which are often found in coal. These resemble the trees mentioned earlier that sank into Spirit Lake near Mt St Helens.

Logs floating upright in Spirit Lake

At first, the trees in Spirit Lake were observed to float; but their roots, which had been ripped out of the ground and remained attached to the trees, gradually became saturated (roots are designed to absorb moisture) and the increased weight pulled the trees into a vertical position with the roots down. The uprooted trees then slowly sank into the lake in this upright position, just as though they had been replanted there.

Polystrate fossil trees could not possibly have been buried gradually over many thousands or hundreds of thousands of years because the top part of the tree that remained exposed to the elements would have completely decomposed before it was gradually protected by sediment. Instead, it is logical to conclude that these trees, after being ripped from the ground by the deluge, would have floated, then sunk and been buried by further sediment during the Flood. This event would take no more than a few years.

Ian Juby’s photo of a polystrate fossilised tree

Uniformitarian scientists naturally presume the geological layers surrounding the fossil trees would take thousands, or even millions of years to be laid down through slow, gradual processes. However, some long-age theorists have been forced to concede that the individual layers were laid down rapidly, admitting that if there were millions of years separating the layers (irrespective of whether the individual layers formed rapidly or slowly), the top of a tree could not possibly remain standing for such an extended time, as it would not be covered, and thus would rot before being preserved by fossilization/petrification. This powerful evidence for the fact that the entire sequence of layers could not possibly have taken more than a matter of months to a handful of years at the very most to build up around the tree is disregarded, as uniformitarians seek to find explanations that preserve their long-age paradigm.

Professor Derek Ager, a man who was disparaging of creationists, could not ignore the fact that the geological evidence in this case pointed to rapid sedimentation and burial. In his attempt to reconcile his beliefs with the evidence he proposed that “we cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed and at other times there were long breaks in sedimentation, though it looks both uniform and continuous.” There is no real evidence for this “uniform and continuous” sedimentation, he assumed this to be the case because of his presuppositions. He also presumed “long breaks in sedimentation” to preserve the idea that the Earth is millions of years old – in spite of the evidence (see) and (also).

Scientists are always influenced by their presuppositions; however, it is difficult to know how the evidence displayed by fossil bonebeds and polystrate fossils can be viewed in any way other than it indicating rapid burial and sedimentation. The fact that this part of the fossil evidence is being kept from the public is telling. Also, the use of fossil fragments to create imaginary creatures is almost dishonest, if not at times actually fraudulent. Creation scientists have at times been faced with apparently challenging evidence, but misrepresenting, manufacturing or hiding evidence is never conducive to discovering the amazing truths of God’s creation.

40 The Age of the Universe

Dr Russel Humphries, an astrophysicist who works with CMI, has developed a model for the universe that explains the difficulties of starlight and time for those who believe the Earth is comparatively young. His time dilation hypothesis is supported by astronomical observations and complex astrophysics (see). Humphries could have viewed the apparently unassailable “reality” of deep time as an insurmountable problem, which he and his colleagues could have ascribed to “one of God’s great mysteries.” Instead he chose to believe The Bible lays a sound, scientific foundation and worked from that basis, showing that the authority of The Bible need never be compromised. Rather than avoiding, hiding or misrepresenting the evidence he decided to look at it in a new way. His hypothesis is an intriguing and very real possibility.

Dr John Hartnett explains:

What Humphreys has done…. is show us another parameter of something that most people view as a constant, and that is time itself. Using Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, he has shown how time can vary depending on your position in space—it affects your viewpoint. Time is slowed by gravitational forces. A clock at sea level has been shown to run more slowly than one on top of a mountain, because the one at sea level is affected by more gravity. This is an effect known as time dilation, and has been experimentally demonstrated.

Humphreys uses this to great effect in his model to deal with the distant starlight issue. His cosmology starts with the Earth near the centre originally, then the universe rapidly expanding in a “white hole”? or black hole running in reverse. At the beginning, gravity would slow Earth “clocks”? far more than clocks further away, especially at the edge of the universe. Therefore, “billions of years”? would be available (measured by clocks in those distant regions of space) for light to reach the Earth, for stars to age, etc.—while less than one ordinary day is passing on Earth (measured by Earth clocks, on which biblical time is based) (see).

Secular scientists like to ridicule creationists when they point out that distant stars are millions of light-years away from the Earth, but they are actually talking about the distance light would travel in a year through a vacuum at its current speed of 300,000 km/sec (186,000 miles per second). That distance is 9,461,000,000,000 km (5,878,000,000,000 miles), but that doesn’t mean that it took the light millions of years, by our standards, to get here. A light-year is a measurement of distance, not time, and as Dr Humphries and other Bible believing scientists have explained, there is good reason to believe that as God stretched out the heavens, time was dilated.

Isaiah tells us:

God, the LORD, created the heavens and stretched them out. He created the Earth and everything in it. (Isa 42:5a)

Once again we see how presuppositions influence the interpretation of the evidence. The naturalist presumes long ages because this is necessary for evolution to have taken place, while the creationist believes God is outside of time and could easily dilate time during the creation week. Distant stars and galaxies might be millions of light-years away, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it took the light millions of years to travel that distance (see). For the creationist, time dilation is a scientifically feasible hypothesis that could explain the starlight and time challenge to the creation model of the origin of the universe.

It can be difficult for the scientific community to let go of strongly held beliefs, but it has been done in the past and will hopefully be done again in the future. The concept of time dilation challenges the uniformitarian philosophy behind secular thinking, but it is based on sound science, astrophysics and biblical history.

41 Galileo challenged the scientific community of his day

Back in the 17th century, Galileo (1564–1642), with his telescope, used sound science to challenge the cosmology of his day when he carried out repeated and repeatable observations, which refuted the philosophical teachings of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The Aristotelian worldview had so influenced church leaders at that time, that they had unquestioningly accepted the geocentric Ptolemaic system.

Galileo was a scientist who believed in the trustworthiness of The Bible and he attempted to demonstrate that the Copernican (heliocentric) system was completely compatible with the scriptures. He was fighting against the contemporary principles of Bible interpretation which, blinded by Aristotelian philosophy, did not do justice to the biblical text.

Russel Grigg points out that Galileo was in a similar situation to biblical creationist scientists today:

The heliocentric (from Greek helios = sun) or Copernican system opposed the views of the astronomer-philosophers of the day, who earned their livelihood by teaching Aristotle and Ptolemy, and so were biased against change. They therefore either ignored, ridiculed, destroyed, or hostilely opposed Galileo’s writings. Many Church leaders allowed themselves to be persuaded by the Aristotelians at the universities that the geocentric (Earth-centred) system was taught in Scripture and that Galileo was contradicting The Bible. They therefore bitterly opposed Galileo to the extent of forcing him on pain of death to repudiate his findings.

This was because:

1. The Church leaders had accepted as dogma the belief system of the pagan (i.e. non-Christian) philosophers, Aristotle and Ptolemy, which had become the worldview of the then scientific establishment. The result was that Church leaders were using the knowledge of the day to interpret Scripture, instead of using The Bible to evaluate the knowledge of the day.
2. They clung to the ‘majority opinion’ about the universe and rejected the ‘minority view’ of Copernicus and Galileo, even after Galileo had presented indisputable evidence based on repeatable scientific observations that the majority was wrong.
3. They picked out a few verses from The Bible which they thought said that the sun moved around the Earth, but they failed to realize that Bible texts must be understood in terms of what the author intended to convey. Thus, when Moses wrote of the ‘risen’ sun (Genesis 19:23) and sun ‘set’ (Genesis 28:11), his purpose was not to formulate an astronomical dictum. Rather he, by God’s spirit, was using the language of appearance so that his readers would easily understand what time of day he was talking about. And it is perfectly valid in physics to describe motion relative to the most convenient reference frame, which in this case is the Earth.

This plain meaning (the time of day) is perfectly satisfied by the language of appearance and does not demand the secondary deduction that it is the sun itself which moves. Indeed, this is exactly the same thing that scientists do today in weather reports when they give the times of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. They are using the language of appearance, and using the Earth as the reference frame. A convenient figure of speech does not invalidate science; nor does it invalidate The Bible. Likewise verses such as Psalm 19:6 and 93:1, which the writer(s) clearly meant to be poetic expressions, were given a literal meaning.

Today we live in a world where most of the scientific establishment is heavily biased in favour of naturalism (the belief that everything can be explained by natural causes) and long ages. The scientific establishment propagates this belief system by claiming that everything in the universe originated in a big bang, and that all things are the result of evolution over billions of years. Indeed, many astronomers, scientists and teachers today have built their careers and earn their livelihood by teaching these theories. However, these ideas, like Ptolemy’s, although ingenious and possibly plausible to atheists, are loaded with complications and contradictions, and are simply wrong.

At the same time there is a minority of scientists, the creationists, who hold the opposing view that The Bible provides a better explanation of how the universe and life came into existence—created directly by God—and that the evidence from design, the fossil record, information theory, etc., is what one would expect if this is so. All such evidence, like Galileo’s, is ignored, ridiculed, concealed, or hostilely opposed by the establishment.

And once again many Church leaders have allowed themselves to be persuaded by the ‘science’ taught at the universities; they get around the atheistic part by telling all that the big bang, billions of years, and evolution are all compatible with Scripture. This inevitably leads them to oppose the minority (creationist) view (see).

Church leaders and teachers have gradually transformed the attitudes of churchgoers to the authority of The Bible by telling parishioners The Bible’s version of creation is questionable. As Francis Schaeffer predicted in the 80s, this has led to what could be viewed as the great falling away mentioned by Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:3. Once the foundations of the Christian faith were eroded the way was opened for new pagan religions like Wicca and other modern pagan cults to fill the void. People who are unhesitatingly prepared to accept that the universe sprang into existence from “natural processes” like the big bang and fish can miraculously turn into fishermen, are mixing these beliefs with nature worship and other ancient pagan and eastern beliefs. The church has been literally eaten away from within while belief in the individual’s inner divinity without any need for a Saviour grows (see).

42 The Big Bang

Most secular cosmologists today believe that everything in the universe was “kickstarted” by a “big bang” about 15 billion years ago, when the universe suddenly emerged from an extremely hot and dense state. The big bang theory relies on a number of hypothetical entities to work. The three most prominent examples of these hypothetical entities (things that have never actually been observed but are crucial for the plausibility of the theory) are inflation, dark matter and dark energy. Fatal contradictions between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory are eliminated by assuming the existence of these unobserved entities.

As Dr Carl Weiland points out, even a group of evolutionary scientists has admitted:

Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation. … Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements.

In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles (see).

This is a theory under repair. There are a number of differing versions of the big bang model being considered amongst secular cosmologists and they are all grappling with inconsistencies, which are resolved by inventing hypothetical entities to make them work. Admittedly this is not an unusual occurrence in physics, but this is certainly being done on an astronomical scale here.

Another aspect of the theory is that although there is no way to prove it, the big bang assumes that the universe has no centre or edge. Not only is this not proven, but some of Dr Humphrey’s recent research on redshift patterns indicates that our galaxy is at, or near to, the centre of the universe (see). This research is generally dismissed out of hand by secular scientists because it contradicts their sacred cow, the big bang theory.

43 The RATE Project

Another group of Bible believing creation scientists took on the challenge of radiometric dating, focusing specifically on investigating whether the methods used are objective and reliable. These dating methods are often quoted as indisputable evidence for long-age pronouncements. An eight-year, privately funded research project known as RATE, or Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth produced some “groundbreaking scientific research that underscores the accuracy of the Genesis account of creation” (see).

The scientists involved in this project wondered whether the assumption of a constant, slow radioactive decay process could be wrong. They also considered the possibility of there being a speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.

The dates for rocks, which are calculated with radiometric dating, are based on the isotopic composition of the rock. The isotopic composition is something that can be accurately measured, however, following this measurement interpretations are made to give an age to the rock. The age of the rock cannot actually be measured, but once again is inferred, by making certain assumptions concerning the environmental conditions present when the rocks were formed and the rate of radiometric decay.

Another major assumption brought to the dating issue is that we can justifiably extrapolate the rate of change back thousands, millions, or even billions of years based on a few decades of current data. This extrapolation assumes little or no interference in the system during this vast period of time. In other words, the system has remained closed to any form of contamination over this almost incomprehensibly immense expanse of time. CMI calls this method the “observe and extrapolate method” of dating (see). There is really no way of knowing that any of these major assumptions are absolutely certain.

As with the biblical approach to the data, the uniformitarian approach inevitably colours dating methods by making assumptions about the past that cannot be arrived at scientifically. Assuming that conditions in the past were as they are today, and that the rate of radioactive decay has remained constant over thousands of years, is a direct result of a philosophical point of view; this point of view relies on an assumed history that has been created to support the philosophical beliefs of naturalist/evolutionists. The uniformitarian position is not arrived at by scientific evidence, but is purely a faith stance. In fact there is really no reason to make these assumptions, as there is good evidence they are false.

As Dr Weiland explains:

There is now powerful confirmatory evidence that at least one episode of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper, though technical, can be summarized as follows:

• When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas, which readily escapes from rock.
• Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
• By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
• However, there is a significant proportion of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is, at first glance, surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
• Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert on helium diffusion from minerals to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole Earth) could not be older than 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5,680 (± 2,000) years (see).

We also know that rocks that were formed to create the new dacite lava dome on Mt St Helens volcano in 1986 were dated by the potassium –argon method as being 0.35 ± 0.05 million years old while the same method gave dates for andesite lava flows from Mt Ngauruhoe in New Zealand in a range from <0.27 to 3.5 million years when we know the lava flows occurred between 1949 and 1975 (47). Again and again radiometric dating gives results that are patently incorrect, secular scientists understand this and work around it.

44 Field relationships determine rock ages

A geologist works out the relative age of a rock by carefully studying where the rock is found in the field. Geologists use field relationships to determine the relative ages of rocks and no matter what the radiometric date turns out to be the field relationships are of primary importance, because all radiometric dates are evaluated against them. The geologist will always be able to interpret dates, and the results are only accepted if they agree with what is already believed. There is a whole range of standard explanations that geologists use to interpret radiometric dating results. As geologist Dr Tas Walker explains, when radiometric dating does not correspond with field information the geologist would make one of a range of assumptions:

Instead of questioning the method, he would say that the radiometric date was not recording the time that the rock solidified. He may suggest that the rock contained crystals (called xenocrysts) that formed long before the rock solidified and that these crystals gave an older date. He may suggest that some other very old material had contaminated the lava as it passed through the Earth.

…..He may suggest that some of the chemicals in the rock had been disturbed by groundwater or weathering. Or he may decide that the rock had been affected by a localized heating event—one strong enough to disturb the chemicals, but not strong enough to be visible in the field.

No matter what the radiometric date turned out to be, our geologist would always be able to ‘interpret’ it. He would simply change his assumptions about the history of the rock to explain the result in a plausible way. G. Wasserburg, who received the 1986 Crafoord Prize in Geosciences, said, ‘There are no bad chronometers, only bad interpretations of them!’ In fact, there is a whole range of standard explanations that geologists use to ‘interpret’ radiometric dating results (see).

45 We see the world with a trained eye

The landscape we observe around us is generally viewed today as displaying evidence for millions of years of Earth history, because we have been told again and again by teachers, scientists and the world’s media that this is what we see. However, after examining the evidence for long ages it can be seen that philosophical presuppositions influence the interpretation of the data far more than most people would ever imagine, and if we remove those presuppositions there is no reason to assume vast ages by the appearance of the rocks.

As we travel along roads that have been cut into rock layers we have been conditioned to see millions of years of slow gradual built up displayed before our eyes in the layer upon layer of sedimentary rock. And yet, when we look at the way the Earth’s weather affects the surface of the soil, it is obvious that smooth thin layers could not remain flat, unweathered and impervious to erosion, waiting undisturbed for a few millennia to be covered by the next, smooth layer. These many layers must surely have been laid down rapidly as the grains were sorted by size and shape in flood waters, allowing no time for the preceding layer to be disturbed. They were laid down, one upon another in a comparatively short period of time, as they settled out of the water in which they were carried.

When the water drained off the continents into the newly formed, deep ocean basins after the Flood, the runoff first caused some sheet erosion as the continents rose, but left behind areas of smooth, compacted layers of sediment that now cover much of the Earth’s surface. In certain, spectacular places, the unprecedented rush of floodwaters carved out valleys and enormous canyons in these smooth layers (see). Not far from Sydney a spectacular landmark called the Three Sisters magnificently displays evidence for the geological processes that took place during the Flood. Dr Tas Walker gives us a vivid account of the geological forces that formed this area. After describing the processes that took place as the sand settled out of the flood waters to form the Sydney Basin he explains:

Well after the sediments of the Sydney Basin were deposited, in the second part of the Flood the offshore ocean floor began to sink and the Blue Mountains began to rise. The water then covering Australia began to run off the continent. As it did, it rapidly cut the landscapes.

At first the water flowed in sheets, shaving flat vast areas of the continent sometimes producing ‘planation’ surfaces. Then, as the flow reduced, the water cut wide valleys like those we see around the Sydney area. As the volume of water continued to decrease, narrower valleys were cut at the edges of plateaus, like those we see from the Three Sisters lookout (Echo Point).

When the water had completely receded and the land was dry, large valleys remained where the flow had been. These valleys end abruptly in blind, steep walls. We see waterfalls today at the ends of these valleys, but they are only tiny remnants compared with the flow of water that eroded the valleys. There is no way that such minuscule water flows could have carved the huge valleys. This pattern of erosion is exactly what we would expect during the final phase of the global Flood (see).

As I drive through cuttings in the Sydney sandstone these days I see the geological evidence for an enormous, catastrophic worldwide Flood. My eyes no longer see the long ages my teachers and the media presented, as the smooth layers indicate rapid deposition; my eyes now see one part of God’s great plan to ultimately create a world without sin.

There are also many places where we can observe enormous, smooth folds in the rock layers, indicating that these layers were buckled up while the strata were still soft and full of moisture. As Dr Walker explains, these folds:

…. do not indicate evidence of brittle fracture. So they must have been folded while still plastic. Also, as a result of the folding, the rocks changed (metamorphosed) and new minerals such as mica grew in them. Metamorphic reactions need abundant water if they are to proceed. All this means that there was not much time between deposition and folding (see).

If a global Flood had been part of the history of the world, creating our present landscape, we would expect to find not just smooth sedimentary layers, but billions of dead animals buried in these layers of sand, clay and mud that cover the planet. This is exactly what has been found. We can look at the massive fossil graveyards and the polystrate fossils and try to explain them away, insisting that the universe is billions of years old and these fossils are the remnants of dead animals gradually trapped in the Earth over millions of years, or we can admit that these millions of years are a fabrication born from a particular philosophical bias. A scientist with a biblical bias has no problem with the evidence, The Bible believing scientist can demonstrate that the sedimentary layers containing huge fossil graveyards were laid down rapidly in water and are undeniable evidence for the Genesis Flood.

Alongside the geological evidence one would expect to find if the Flood was indeed an historic event, we would also expect to find stories, passed down through generations, about a great deluge in the distant past. This is precisely what we find. All over the world dozens of people groups have preserved such stories. Numerous tales with significant similarities to the biblical one have been recounted and recorded from indigenous peoples living in places where no missionaries or westerners who might be carrying the story of Noah had ever before visited.

There are flood stories from indigenous people in Africa, China, the Americas, Australia, Scandinavia, Europe and the Middle East. Although altered by telling and retelling, all these stories have remarkable similarities to the story of Noah’s Flood. Many include mention of a boat in which people and animals were saved, while a number mention violence on the Earth being the cause of the Great Flood. The cultural memories of the descendants of Noah are yet another piece of convincing evidence for the veracity of The Bible (see).

46 The heavens declare God’s handiwork

Creation scientists are faced with a secular world that insists the Christian message is obsolete in our modern, “enlightened” times. Breaking through the media bias and secular science’s censoring of Bible believing scientists’ alternative interpretations of the data is a real challenge. Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is one of many brave scientists who have faced this challenge head on. His book and documentary, The Privileged Planet, examine how our place in the cosmos is designed for discovery. He convincingly examines the Earth-Moon system to support his hypothesis that the Father designed the universe with the perfect proportions for human discovery. On his website he proposes:

Many scientists and philosophers have claimed that Earth is an ordinary speck of dust adrift, without purpose or significance, in a vast cosmic sea. Yet current astronomical evidence seems to suggest just the opposite.

We now know that a rare and finely-tuned array of factors makes Earth suitable for complex life. We depend on our planet’s oxygen-rich atmosphere, its large moon, its planetary neighbors, and its precise location within the solar system and Milky Way galaxy. But there is more. The same factors that make a planet like Earth hospitable to life also provide the best conditions for scientific discovery (see).

Our Father designed our world and the universe for us to explore and enjoy. He made it impossible for anyone who truly looks at His remarkable creation, without a bias towards philosophical naturalism, to miss the fact that such perfect design is absolute proof of a Designer. As Paul writes:

For ever since the world was created, people have seen the Earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see His invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. (Rom 1:20)

By refusing to acknowledge the possibility of a Creator, the secular world remains blind to the stark reality that the intricately interrelated and incredibly complex design of both macro and micro systems (which are way beyond humankind’s ability to even begin to duplicate), is unmistakable evidence for a Designer. Once one realises many boldly proclaimed media announcements are based on such blindness, which in turn is the product of a strong philosophical bias, it is difficult to unquestioningly accept many of the secular, scientific world’s conclusions concerning the unobservable past. The many leaps of faith involved in much of the media hype are a stark reminder of how easily we can be conditioned to accept unproven theories as fact.

Now that I have had the opportunity to look more closely at the evidence, I find the scientists I choose to trust know and worship the Living God, whose Word is Truth. The universe around us clearly demonstrates the truth of creation. While philosophical naturalism attempts to cover up the Truth with convincing lies, it is my prayer that people will emerge from the web of deceit woven by those who oppose the Truth, and see God’s hand in the wonders of the creation.

Although a number of well intentioned, untrained Christians have made some unscientific claims that have brought creationism into disrepute, there are now hundreds of highly trained, intelligent, Bible believing scientists who are steadfastly forging a path into understanding more of God’s wonderful creation. Thankfully, these committed men and women realise that the eternal destinies of countless unsaved people may be influenced by their work to assert the reliability and authority of The Bible. Against incredible opposition, often from those who claim to follow Christ (Galileo and the church of his time come to mind), these dedicated scientists continue to bring the truth of God’s creative work and His plan for humankind’s eternal destiny into the light.

Footnotes

6 Sarfati, J. The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Creation Book Publishers. Georgia, USA. 2010. p62
7 Francis A. Schaeffer. The Great Evangelical Disaster, (Kindle Locations 427-478). Kindle Edition.
8 Pardis C. Sabeti M.D., D.Phil. (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA) © 2008 Nature Education http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/natural-selection-uncovering-mechanisms-of-evolutionary-adaptation-34539
Citation: Sabeti, P. (2008) Natural selection: uncovering mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation to infectious disease. Nature Education 1(1)
9 Darwin, C.R., The variation of animals and plants under domestication. London: John Murray. 1st ed., 1st issue, 1858
10 Abel, D.L., The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity, International Journal of Molecular Sciences 10:247–291, 9 January 2009
11 National Center for Science Education, PO Box 9477, Berkeley CA 94709–0477, USA
12 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Werner Co., New York, Vol. 23, p. 467, 1898
13 Osborn, H.F., From the Greeks to Darwin, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, p. 54, 1929
14 Birdsell, J.B., Human Evolution, Rand McNally, Chicago, p. 22, 1972
15 Thompson, B., The History of Evolutionary Thought, Star Bible & Tract Corp., Fort Worth, p. 29 – 31
16 Osborn, H.F., From the Greeks to Darwin, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, p. 52, 1929
17 Osborn p54
18 Osborn p54

19 Lyell, Charles. 1830. Principles of geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by reference to causes now in operation. London: John Murray.
20 Bernard Wood (prof. of human origins, George Washington Univ.), “Who are we?” New Scientist, 2366 (26 Oct. 2002), p. 44.
21 Howell, F.C., Early Man, Time Life Books, New York, 1970, p41-45.
22 Ibid. p.41
23 Burgess, S. In God’s Image. One Day Publications 2008. p7.
24 White, T. D., Suwa, G. and Asfaw, B.,  Australopithecus ramidus, a new species of early hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia. Nature, 1994. (371:306-312).
25 Lovejoy, C.O. et al. 2009. The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking. Science. 326 (5949): 71.
26 Shreeve, J.Oldest, Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found,. National Geographic News. Posted on nationalgeographic.com October 1, 2009.
27 Stringer, C. and C. Gamble. In Search of the Neanderthals. Thames and Hudson. 1993
28 Labuda, D. et al An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations. Oxford Journals. – Mol Biol Evol (2011) 28(7)
29 Washington Post, 8 August 1999, p. A21
30 Wieland, C., The lies of Lynchburg, Creation 19(4):22–23, 1997
31 ‘Eugenics’, Encyclopædia Britannica 4:593, 1992
32 Black, E., War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York/London, 2003
33 Isherwood, J., Payout planned for victims of ‘barbaric’ sterilizations, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1997, p. 10
34 Weikart, R., From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, USA, 2004
35 Santow, S., Racist crowds mar international cricket, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/18/2063394.htm>, pub. 18 October 2007
36 J.C. Gutin, End of the Rainbow, Discover, pp. 72–73, November 1994.
37 Cameron and Wycoff, The Destructive Nature of the Term Race: Growing Beyond a False Paradigm, pp. 277-285.
38 Sarfati, J. p64
39 Breese, D. Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave. Scripture Press, Buck, England. 1990. p34.
40 Ibid p.32
41 Ibid p.34
42 Dawkins, R., The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA, p. 1, 1986.
43 Huxley, A. Ends and Means, Chatto & Windus,1937, p270
44 H.A. Makse, S. Havlin, P.R. King, and H.E. Stanley, Spontaneous Stratification in Granular Mixtures, Nature 386(6623):379–382, 27 March 1997.
45 Woodmorappe, J., The cephalopods in the creation and the universal deluge: in: Studies in Flood Geology, 2nd edition, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, CA, pp. 177–197, 1999.
46 Ryan, M. J., B. J. Chinnery-Allgeier and D. A. Eberth, eds. 2010. New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
47 Sarfati, J.