Noah’s flood : rocks and fossils

Just as naturalistic assumptions control biological evolution……

In this session we will look at geological evolution, calling it “Noah’s flood. Rocks and fossils.” You saw this morning that biological evolution is not scientific fact, it is simply philosophical naturalism imposed on the evidence. The glasses of the assumptions that nature is all there is, there is no God, it all happened by chance, those glasses are used by the evolutionist when they look at biological life and fossils to conclude that it all happened by chance. We see that when you look at the living creatures and the fossils with those glasses, it doesn’t make sense of the world. Why? Because there are no transitional forms; because mutation and natural selection are not changing one kind of creature into another, nor do mutation and natural selection increase positive information in the DNA molecule.

So also naturalistic assumptions control geological evolution

I hope you will see in this session, that the same thing is going on in geology. In fact the assumptions of philosophical naturalism took control of geology over 50 years before Darwin published his book. It was because the geologists were already in the 19^th c. speaking of geological evolution of the earth (they didn’t use the word evolution at that time, but that’s what it was), that laid the ground work for Darwin’s theory. It’s because the geologists gave him supposedly all these millions of years that his theory was even plausible. So let’s look at the evidence and you will see that the main question is not “are you showing the evidence?”, but are you confessing your assumptions that you start with before you ever look at the evidence.

NOAH’S FLOOD

And to understand this issue of the age of the earth and geological evolution, we need to look at Noah’s flood, because Noah’s flood is absolutely critical to understanding this issue. And most Christians who believe in an old earth, in millions of years, that the age of the earth doesn’t matter, they don’t pay much attention to the flood. Most of the theologians and OT scholars who argue for an old earth or the day-age theory or the gap theory, look only at Genesis 1. They ignore Genesis 6-9. But the flood is critical. As you will see, this was the key to the development of old earth geology in the early 19^th century.

Before the early 1800’s, the dominant view in the church and in Europe where science was born was that the flood of Noah was an historical global catastrophe. But in the early 1800’s as non-Christian geologists, (men who were not just unbiased neutral religious people, but who were anti-Biblical, either atheists, or deists), began to say that the rocks with fossils could not possibly have been caused by Noah’s flood. The rocks with their fossils came about in millions of years.

Three new theological views of the flood after the 1800’s

1) It was local: And so some Christians began to reinterpret Genesis 6-9, the account of the flood, and say “it was an historical flood, but it was a local catastrophe in the Tigris Euphrates Rivers in the Mesopotamian Valley, modern day Iran and Iraq. And it was just described in exaggerated language in Genesis.”

2) It was tranquil. And then others said, “No, it was an historical flood and it was global, but it was peaceful. It was tranquil. It was so peaceful, it left no geological evidence. So the geologists can talk about the millions of years and attribute that to the long processes, and the flood is global and we can believe that too, but we don’t have to try to relate them because the flood was so peaceful. After all, the dove went out and found an olive branch. And see, that proves that the flood didn’t destroy any of the plants.”

That argument fails to recognize that olive plants are very hardy and can survive in salt water for a long period of time and then replant themselves in soil and grow just fine.

3) It wasn’t. And then liberal theology. These ideas were developing in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, denying the miraculous, and stating that Gen. 1-9 is mythology. If you can believe in Santa Claus, you can believe in Noah’s flood.

Biblical arguments for a global catastrophic flood

I want to present to you a few of the Biblical arguments for why it was a global, catastrophic flood. It was not a local flood, as virtually all old-earthers today believe. There are a few old-earth theologians and OT scholars who believe in both millions of years and a global catastrophic flood, but they haven’t thought the issue through. You can’t believe in both. I hope to show you that these are contradictory ideas. But most of the people who are leading the church into believing in millions of years do not believe in a global flood. Hugh Ross does not believe in a global flood.

1. I) The first reason for believing in a global flood: the purpose of the flood.

The Bible tells us why the flood occurred, and it is absolutely clear: to destroy not only man, but all living things on the earth. And when we say “global” , we mean a flood that covered the whole globe. Some people say they believe in a “universal” flood, but we must ask if they mean“global”. Because some people believe the flood was universal with respect to man, men living in the Mesopotamian Valley. So one must be careful with definitions. So you have to say to them, “The kind of flood I’m talking about (while you put a miniature globe in a tub of water) is this kind of flood”.

Hugh Ross – the flood was to destroy only sinful man

Hugh Ross, (a proponent of the old earth view, who has a strong influence on seminary and Bible-college professors through his group Reasons to Believe,) said this about the flood: “Is the flood universal, or is it local?” (He didn’t use the word global) “I will argue that it is both universal and local.” He means it was universal with respect to man, but local with respect to the geography of the earth.  Ross says, “But there are physical reasons why the flood cannot be global, such as the limited extent of sin. Given that human beings had not civilized or inhabited Antarctica…” (Here Ross assumes that before the flood, the world was geographically exactly the way it is now, even though there are tropical fossils found in Antarctica, so maybe humans did live there.)… “There would be no need for God to flood Antarctica because there would have been no sin there. There would be no need for God to kill all the penguins, because those penguins had no contact with reprobate humanity. And in that case, I don’t think Noah took any penguins on board, because only the bird and mammal species according to the Levitical law can be impacted by sin.” (That is a bizarre interpretation of the Levitical law. He said that at a conservative Christian college. His assumption that penguins are only in Antarctica forgets that there are penguins in New Zealand today.) So Ross assumes that the purpose of the flood was to kill man.

But several verses in Gen. 6 tell that God intended to destroy animals with man.

But Genesis 6:7 says: “And the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.‘”

And Gen 6:13 says: Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold I am about to kill them with the earth.”

And Gen. 6: 17 “And behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth , to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish.”

These verses teach that the purpose of the flood was to destroy sinful man, all the land animals, all the birds, and the surface of the earth itself.

Since Gen. 6 says all the land animals, the flood had to be global

And only a global flood will accomplish that. Because many birds can migrate up to 2000 miles. Animals sense when a natural disaster is coming, when forest fires or volcanic eruptions are coming, and they flee the danger zone.

God could not have destroyed all the land animals and birds unless he used a global flood, because most of the land animals and birds would have been living outside the flood zone if the flood was only in the Mesopotamian Valley. They could have gone on living just as if nothing was happening in Mesopotamia. When I lived in Hungary, and the huge earthquake hit in Turkey, I was not worried about my house or life, because that was a local event. Only a global flood satisfies the purpose stated in Gen. 6:7, 13 and 17.

1. II) The second reason for a global flood was the purpose of the

The purpose of the ark was not just to save a few animals for Noah to start a farm after the flood. Genesis 6:19 says the purpose was to save two of every kind. He doesn’t say “two of every species” but “two of every kind.” The word kind is the same here as in Gen. 1.

Two of every kind, but only of land animals and birds, not two of every kind of fish. Noah didn’t build aquariums in the ark.

And the purpose was (Gen.7:3) “to keep seed alive upon the earth.” That would be totally unnecessary if most of the world was already inhabited by birds and land animals. If the flood was only local, there would be no need to save seed of two of every kind. It was a ridiculous task. But it would be absolutely necessary to build the ark if there was a global flood. The purpose of the ark shows that it was a global flood.

III ) The third reason for a global flood was the volume of the ark.

The huge size of the ark

A lot of people say that the flood account cannot be true, because how could Noah have gotten all the dinosaurs in the ark. How could he even get one dinosaur in the ark? The problem with this objection is they have a faulty view of the size of the ark. They think the ark was a little floating zoo. Nothing could be farther from the truth. And the sad fact is that many children’s books for Christians picture the ark like this (a thirty foot long, two story boat with giraffes sticking their heads out the windows). And what these pictures do is teach the children that the account of Noah’s flood is not true. The Bible tells us how big the ark was: one and a half foot ball fields long, the equivalent of a four story building in height, and 2/3rds the width of a football field. No boat was built this big again until 1860. It was a huge boat. You could fit 560 railroad cars in it.

Noah was told to take “every kind”, not every species.

But surely Noah couldn’t have gotten all the species of animals into that ark. Let’s do the math and see. How many animals were on the ark? First, Noah was told to take two of each kind, the same Hebrew word used in chapter one, and seven of the clean animals. The genetic boundaries of the Genesis kind are uncertain, but we are pretty certain that the genetic boundaries for a kind are much bigger than the boundaries for what we call a species. Species is a sub-unit of the original kind. The dog kind is made up of jackals, and dingos and wolves, and coyotes and all the 350 domestic dogs, from Great Danes to little poodles. All that genetic information was in the dog kind. So Noah didn’t take two poodles and two Great Danes and two German Shepherds and two spaniels, because all of those were developed in the last two centuries by artificial breeding. So the dog kind shows that it was a bigger category. We can be absolutely certain that the Biblical kinds were not smaller than species.

Now we’ll make it as difficult as we can for Noah. We’ll say that he had to take two of every species. It had to be less than that, but we’re going to make it as tough as we can. So how many species did he have to take?

By including species, there would be 50,000 animals

According to the leading evolutionist taxonomists, he had to take 3,500 mammal species, 8,600 birds, 5.500 reptiles and 3,400 amphibians (although amphibians live in the water a lot of their lives so they are not really bothered by a flood, but we’ll make it as tough as we can for Noah.) Then all of these creatures who live in the ocean or aren’t bothered by water: they can lay their eggs in the water or can live on the surface of the water. So 21,000. That’s the high number, that’s species. Double that for two of every kind, and throw in an extra 7000 for the clean ones and we have a maximum of 50,000 animals.

Now the average size of an animal is about the size of a sheep. Some animals like giraffes or elephants or brontosaurus or tyrannosaurus rex are bigger than a sheep, but a great number are much smaller: squirrels , rabbits, racoons, skunks.

Now with the larger animals, we have to remember the purpose for taking them on the ark was to save seed, to repopulate the earth after the flood, so Noah would not take the oldest ones or grandma and grandpa who have no reproductive potential. So he takes the teenagers who have a whole life of reproduction after they get off the ark. The younger ones are the smaller ones, and particularly with reptiles. Almost all reptiles continue growing all their life, unlike other creatures that reach adult size early in life and then stay that size. And we humans start to shrink as we get older because our bones are wearing out. So you take the young tyrannosaurus rex, which is smaller than granddaddy T Rex.

The dimensions of the ark are given in the Bible in cubits. A cubit was the distance from the end of your elbow to the tip of your hand and that varied a little bit. And that many cubic feet which is equivalent to about 560 railroad stock cars. Each stock car can hold 240 sheep. So 50,000 animals divided by 240 per car is 208 stock cars which is only 36% of the volume of the ark, leaving 2/3rds of the volume of the ark for the vegetable foods that God also told to take on the ark. Gen 6:21 “..take for yourself some of all food which is edible, and gather it to yourself; and it shall be for food for you and for them.” There was plenty of room in the ark. And remember, this is using species, the worst case scenario. If he was taking two of every kind, it was probably a lot less than that.

There have been a lot of objections raised to the ark, and there is a book, Noah’s Ark, a Feasibility Study, out on the table that is based on 7 years of research from John Woodmorappe, who is one of these tireless researchers, an incredible student of literature. And he’s looked at everything from ventilation systems to waste removals systems, to feeding, to housing animals, all on the basis of what people who take care of animals today tell what they have learned in research. And he has answered just about every objection that any skeptic has ever raised about Noah’s flood and he’s probably answered a lot of them that they have never even thought of, but he thought of for them. A wonderful powerful book, showing that even without evoking any miracles, it’s very believable that Noah and his family could have cared for the animals in the ark and they could have survived.

 

1. Then there is the character of the flood: was it tranquil or violent?

Many in the early 1800’s when the flood was initially rejected (and many today) will say there is no evidence in the Bible that the flood was a violent catastrophe. They just don’t read the text. The text tells clearly that it was violent:

In Gen. 7:11 it says “In the 600^th year of Noah’s life, in the 2^nd month, on the 17^th day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the deep burst open and the flood gates of the sky were opened.” Two sources for the water of Noah’s flood: the waters coming down from above, the flood-gates of the sky, and waters coming up from the bottom, the fountains of the deep. The great deep in the Bible usually refers to the ocean, so this is either the springs that are bringing water into the ocean (there are springs in the ocean floor today that are bringing hot briny waters into the ocean); or subterranean waters under the land. Most of our drinking water comes from underground reservoirs. There’s lots of water under the earth and under the floor of the ocean.

And then the flood gates of the sky.          It rained for 40 days and 40 nights non-stop, 24 hours a day, and this was not a gentle rain to water the garden. This was the wrath of God being poured out on a wicked world to destroy it. It was monsoons, hurricane-force rain, non-stop, global. This would cause some serious problems.

Furthermore we have the verb “burst open”, a verb in Hebrew used when Korah rebelled against Moses and his leadership and God judged Korah and his family, with his possessions, and Numbers 16:32 says the ground “opened” , the same verb, and all of their tents and their family and their possessions went into the earth and the ground closed. It’s the same word used in Zechariah 14 where it says that when the Messiah comes again, his foot will touch the Mt. of Olives, and the mountain will split in two and a huge valley will open up. This verb is telling us that when the fountains of the great deep burst open at the flood, there was world wide catastrophic tectonic activity. And when the earth breaks, (which is called an earthquake), it sets off volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and it is very violent.

Mt. St. Helens, of which we have a video on the table, was triggered by an earthquake underneath the mountain that caused that eruption. So the text is very clear that, at the very beginning of the flood, this was not just water slowly rising. It was violent. And those fountains of the great deep and the flood gates were not completely closed until the 150^th day. (Gen 7:24)

Then we find in the middle of the flood, (after day 150), when God decides that the waters have risen enough and done their job, and he is going to cause the waters to recede, then Gen 8:3 says, “And the waters returned from the earth continually, and after 150 days the waters were abated. All the English translations translate this “returned continually”. But in the Hebrew this is two Hebrew verbs. The adverb “continually” is not in the Hebrew. The English conveys the idea, but misses a certain element. The two Hebrew verbs used here are very common Hebrew verbs in the OT: the verb “to go” and the verb “to return”, telling us that as the waters dissipated, they were going and returning. When you have water moving back and forth, water erodes, it carries sediments. And when it looses its energy, it drops its sediments. The receding of the waters of the flood, were not like what happens when I pull the plug in the bath-tub when my kids have taken a bath, where it goes down steadily. There was erosive activity going on as the waters receded.

Now if you take earthquake activity like the earthquake that hit Turkey a few years ago and put with that flood conditions with fast moving water, what are you going to get? A catastrophe. And what will happen if you multiply that not in just one location but globally, simultaneously, for 150 days? You’re going to see something that is exactly what you would expect from the wrath of God being poured out on this wicked world. So you would expect to see creatures being ripped up by tidal waves, carried out into the ocean, drowned, buried in sediments.

1. Another evidence of the global flood is the depth of the flood.

The Bible is very clear that the flood rose and rose and rose till it covered all the high mountains. Gen 7:19,20 “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered, 15 cubits upward, the waters prevailed and the mountains were covered.” Concerning this verse, Hugh Ross said in a tape a few years ago, (I don’t know if he still holds this view), that “all the high” was not in the original Hebrew. Maybe he never took time to read a Hebrew-English interlinear, and he doesn’t know Hebrew himself, but “all the high” is in the Hebrew. The text is emphatic that the flood covered ALL mountains.

Suppose we are all mountains, with heads various heights above the floor. I start pouring water. Water seeks a level plain, so if I start pouring water into the room eventually I’ll cover the shortest person here, the person slouched in the chair. I could cover her completely but that wouldn’t cover this mountain over here. I’d have to keep pouring. And I’m standing here as the tallest mountain, so I’ve got to keep pouring because water seeks a level plain. The only way to cover all the mountains is a global flood.

1. VI. Finally, the rainbow promise indicates a global flood.

At the end of the flood God promises that never again will he destroy the world with a flood. And the promise is made not just to man, but to the animals, the birds, and the earth itself. (Gen. 9:10)

When you read this promise in Gen. 9, God repeats himself. The promise is 7 verses. Why so much repetition?

When the Bible repeats something over and over, God is trying to make you get the point. It’s not that he is trying to be boring, He is wanting to be emphatic. Did you get the point? This is for the WHOLE EARTH. I’m making the promise to the animals, to the birds, to all of your descendants, to the earth itself: “Never again will I flood the earth.” If the flood was local, God lied. Because there have been many local floods that have killed some of the animals and some of the people and some of the earth. But the flood of Noah was a global flood that destroyed all of the animals which were not in the ark, all of the birds not in the ark, and the surface of the earth.

Now what would you expect from a global flood of unimaginable violence that lasted 371 days from start to finish? What would you expect as it is ripping up the continents, ripping up all the plants on the land, eroding the soil away, burying creatures, what would you expect to find? You’d expect to find billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth. And that is precisely what we find. In every continent. On top of our highest mountains. Billions of dead things buried in rock layers, laid down by water all over the earth. It’s exactly what we would expect to find from the flood of Noah.

But the evolutionists say “There’s no evidence of a global flood. The geological record is the evidence of the evolution of life over millions and millions of years. And the age of the dinosaurs was 205 to 65 million years ago. They all died out before man came on the scene.” But the Bible says, No, these billions of dead things are not the record of the development of life over millions of years. This is the record of the death of all life in one year.

 

LOOKING AT HOW ROCK LAYERS WERE FORMED.

Where did the idea of millions of years come from?

In the early 1800’s these old earth geological theories were developed, and it came from the fossil record. Radiometric dating methods were not invented till the early 20^th c. The late 1700’s and the early 1800’s was when the old earth idea was born, and it was born because of the fossils. They said these fossils represent long ages of creation or of evolution. So the millions of years is from the fossils.

Three views of earth history in the early 1800’s

In the early 1800’s, the time period I studied in my PhD, there were three views of earth history” 1) The traditional Biblical view that had been the view of the church for 1800 years, that the flood of Noah was a global flood, that there had been a supernatural beginning with a supernatural 6 day creation week about 6000 years ago, and we are waiting for a supernatural ending to the world at the return of Christ. There were a group of men called the Scriptural geologists, who were the focus of my thesis whom you may learn about on the Answers in Genesis website.

2) The catastrophist view, put out by the French paleontologist Jean Cuvier and a British engineer William Smith. They said earth history was much longer than the Bible said, speaking of untold ages, and that during those ages there were at least 4 global catastrophes that were responsible for producing the sedimentary rock and fossils. Initially some of the catastrophists believed that the last catastrophe was Noah’s flood, but they believed most of the geological record came about long before that, long before man. Because they viewed these catastrophes as natural it was possible there could be another global or regional catastrophe in the future. Most of these were theists.

3) The uniformitarian view. It was developed by Werner and Hutton, but didn’t catch hold till Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology in 1830. He was a persuasive writer, trained in law, and then became interested in geology. He said there were NO regional or global catastrophes in earth history. We must explain everything in the rock record by present day processes of erosion and sedimentation operating at the same rate of intensity and frequency throughout earth history. So he started with an assumption about time and history. We can’t allow for catastrophes in our theories.

Uniformitarianism became the dogma of geology. By about 1840, that was the way geologists began to think. The Biblical view was rejected. The catastrophist view hung on until the 1840’s and passed off the scene. So for about 150 years it was the dogma of geology. Every geology student was trained to think this way: slow gradual processes formed the earth.

Derek Ager and his book The New Catastrophism 1993

But now listen to this from Derek Ager, a geologist who died just a few years ago, an evolutionist, as far as I can tell from his writings, an atheist. In the book I’ll quote from, he warned young earth geologists from using the information in his book to support this young earth view. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander; truth is truth. He’s dead now and knows that he is wrong about his atheism.

In an early chapter of his book he does a history lesson of geology. He says: “My excuse for this lengthy and amateur digression into history is that I’ve been trying to show how I think geology got into the hands of the theoreticians” (referring to the uniformitarians) “who were conditioned by the social and political history of their day more than by observations in the field. In other words we have allowed ourselves” (writing to his fellow old earth geologists) “to be brainwashed into avoiding any interpretation of the past that involves extreme or catastrophic processes.” In the rest of the book he goes on to argue for a neo-catastrophist view of earth history. He’s going back to the ideas of the early 19^th c.

Notice though, he says “the theories were developed by social and political ideas, not by observations in the rocks.” What determined what a man saw in the rocks? It was his assumptions that determined what he saw in the rocks. And Derek Ager said that in all of my geological education,undergraduate, graduate, PhD, and then for most of my geological career, “I’ve been brainwashed.” We’ve all been brainwashed from seeing any evidence of catastrophe in the rock record. But in his book he says, “It’s glaring; there’s all kinds of evidence of catastrophe.”

So the uniformitarian view dominated. Now in the late 20^th c., early 21^st c. the neo-catastrophist view is gaining ground. In fact I doubt if there are any pure uniformitarians in geology anymore. The neo-catastrophists have had such an impact over the last 30 years, that even the uniformitarians are thinking of catastrophic things like a catastrophic reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

And an amazing thing has happened: the flood geology of the Scriptural geologists in the early 19^th c. has been resurrected, and now we have flood geology in the 21^st c. in the young earth creationist view.

An example of brainwashing

Let me explain what is going on here by showing a picture. It’s a picture of an old lady. She is here. She doesn’t have her dentures in; this is her big nose and here is a little imperfection on her cheek; here is her right eye, her left eye, and she’s looking that way. Well, I’ve just lied to you. I’ve just brainwashed you. It’s not an old lady, it’s a young lady. She’s looking that way. This is her cheekbone; this is a nice cloth choke chain around her neck; that’s her left eyelash, that’s the tip of her nose; you can’t see most of her face or her right eye; and that’s her left ear. She’s looking that way. It’s a young lady. This illustrates a very important principle. The facts in this picture are the black lines and the white spaces. We all agree where the black lines are, how thick they are, how long they are, what direction they are, how they bend. The interpretation of the facts is old lady or young lady, and it depends on what you’re looking for as to what you see; I brainwashed some of you to see the old lady.

Derek Ager said we’ve been brainwashed in our education in geology from seeing any evidence of catastrophe. But it’s there. We just couldn’t see it because we were brainwashed.

Another geologist, reviewing Derek Ager’s book, said in 1993: “We are rewriting geo-history. We live in an age of neo-catastrophism. Surely what we know as geo-history originates not within rocks, but within the minds of human observers. As a creation of the human intellect, our geo-histories may owe more than is commonly supposed to processes acting within our own cerebra”. It’s what your starting assumptions are. We all have the same facts: the uniformitarians, the neo-catastrophists, and the young earth creationists all have the same facts, they have the same fossils, the same geological formations. They go out to the Grand Canyon and see the same layers of rocks, the same Colorado River, the same canyon and the same fossils in those rocks. But it depends on what your starting assumptions are as to what your interpretation will be. If you start with uniformitarian assumptions and you completely rule out catastrophe as a possible explanation for what you are seeing, you won’t see any evidence of catastrophe and you’ll come up with a uniformitarian interpretation of the Grand Canyon. You’ll say a little bit of water over a long period of time cut the Grand Canyon.

But if you start with catastrophic assumptions like the neo-catastrophists and you say I’m not going to rule out catastrophe before I go and look at the rocks, you’ll go there and see all kinds of evidence for catastrophic interpretation of the Grand Canyon. And then you’ll say a lot of water and a little bit of time cut the Grand Canyon.

And there are evolutionary old earth geologists today who are saying that. They are getting close to the proper interpretation.

Neo-catastrophists still have one problem- they believe in millions of years.

The neo-catastrophists are old earth. They believe in millions of years. But they believe that as we look at the rocks without uniformitarian brainwashing, we’ll see evidence (if we look at this rock layer carefully) for rapid deposition, catastrophic deposition of these sediments. And if we go up also to this layer we’ll see evidence of rapid catastrophic deposition, and the same in the next layer. They still believe in millions of years. Where do they put the time? It’s not in the layers. Time is between the layers.

The young earth creationists say, you neo-catastrophists are on the right track. We agree with you that there is evidence of rapid catastrophic deposition of these layers, but there’s no evidence that there are millions of years between layers. In fact, if you look carefully at the boundary here, you’ll see that there’s actually evidence of rapid deposition of one layer after the other without long passages of time.     I’ll give you an example, and there’s books out there that will show much more.

The Grand Canyon layers don’t allow millions of years between catastrophes.

Let’s suppose with the neo-catastrophists that you have a catastrophic event and it lays down several layers of sediments, shale, limestone, sandstone in a very short period of time. And then that surface lays exposed for millions of years either on the bottom of the ocean or on a land surface, where we would expect after millions of years that there would be erosion, with rivers and valleys, earthquakes here and there, volcanic eruptions, so that that nice smooth surface would become eroded. Then let’s suppose that in the neo-catastrophist view that there’s another catastrophic event after millions of year and it deposits more sediments and fills in the irregularity and keeps piling up and develops a new surface, and in the process repeats itself. If that is true, we would expect to see a complex geological record, showing all kinds of erosion going on. But instead, this is what we generally find in this power point picture. Here’s a cross cutting of the Grand Canyon, which is 4 to 18 miles wide 270 miles long and a mile deep. Look at the extensiveness of the layers that you see at the edge of the Grand Canyon. And they are just as flat as a pancake. There is no evidence that there was erosion from millions and millions of years at one of those layers, that the old earthers claim was once the surface of the ocean or the surface of land for millions of years before the next layer was laid down.

FOSSILS AND THE AGE OF THE EARTH

Let’s turn to the fossils and the age of the earth. In The Museum of Western Colorado (Grand Junction) in the Dinosaur Valley you’ll find this definition of a fossil “Any evidence of life more than 7000 years old.” That’s a strange definition of a fossil; and it’s wrong. A fossil is a former living thing that is turned to stone. It’s not something that is over 7000 years. That’s evolutionary bias. How do they know how old the fossils are? Do fossils come with labels saying I’m 654 million years old? No, so how do they know? How did they know in the early 1800’s? They didn’t know. They assumed, because of an evolutionary view of earth history even before Darwin developed his theory of biological evolution. They were already assuming things about the order in which life came. They had no evidence; they just assumed.

But how long does it take to make a fossil? A thousand years? A million years? A 100 million years? Not long at all. There’s a miners cap found in a mine in Australia, probably less than 50 years old and its completely fossilized. Here’s a water wheel turned to stone in just a short period of time. The wood molecules have been changed to stone. If you get Creation Magazine you could have read the article about that. There are also fossils that indicate that fossilization and the burial process happened very rapidly. Like this mother ichtheosaur that was buried and then fossilized as she was giving birth to her young. She was swimming along giving birth and a wave of sediment-chocked waters came upon her and buried her so quickly that no micro-decay organism and moving water could tear that skeleton apart. Here we see fish that are fossilized in the position of eating their lunch. We’re talking about rapid burial and rapid fossilization because fish decay very quickly. If you see a dead fish on the side of the lake, it will decompose in hours or at most days. But there are many, many fish that are highly preserved in the fossil record. You can see their scales, very thin fins.

RADIOMETRIC DATING METHODS

What about those radiometric dating methods? Surely they prove that the earth is millions of years old.

The first thing we need to know is that the dates are always selected dates. Here’s an evolutionary geologist at a university who says, “In general dates in the correct ball park are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in discrepancy, in disagreement with other data are seldom published, nor are the discrepancies fully explained.” So every time you read an article in the newspaper and they tell you that these bones were x-million years old, you now know that that was the selected date. It’s not the actual date. That’s the one the evolutionist chose to fit their theory.

And there are lots of examples in the literature where the radiometric date is not consistent with what we know the date to be from other reasons!!!!!!!!

For example, in 1968 there was an article about dating of volcanic rocks in Hawaii. The abstract in the article in a technical journal said “The radiogenic argon and helium contents of the three basalts” (rocks produced by lava flow) “which erupted into the deep ocean from an active volcano have been measured. Ages calculated from these measurements increase with sample depth up to 22 million years for lavas deduced from our knowledge of when the volcano erupted to be recent, probably less than 150 years”, says the article. These rocks were produced by a volcano that erupted in Hawaii in the early 1880’s and there is documentation of the eruption. Yet the radiometric dating method that gave ages for those eruptions go up to 22 million years. Something is wrong.

Most rocks cannot be dated directly by radiometric dating methods. Most rocks in the geologic column of fossils are sedimentary rocks. Sedimentary rocks from sand and mud do not contain radioactive materials. It is volcanic rock made from ash or volcanic lava that can be dated by these methods generally. And in the Grand Canyon most of the rock layers cannot be dated by radiometric dating. (See the link on radioactive dating and sedimentary rocks:

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/radiometric-dating/does-radiometric-dating-prove-the-earth-is-old/)

But in the Grand Canyon are two sources of volcanic rocks. 1)Down here at the bottom of Grand Canyon, below the mile of sedimentary rocks, and 2) then volcanic lava which flowed over the top of the rim of the Grand Canyon. Steve Austin is a creation researcher at the Institute for Creation Research. He took samples of these two volcanic rocks, one from the top, one from the bottom of the canyon. Steve was trained at Penn State U. , trained under leading evolutionists on how to do this correctly, and so he took very careful samples. He prepared the samples, sent them off to highly professional labs in the USA to do this analysis. He did not tell them where the samples came from, because he wanted an analysis with no bias. The results came back and gave interesting results. Look at this physically. These rocks on the bottom have to be older than these rocks on the rim a mile higher. All these sedimentary rocks were laid on top of the bottom volcanic rock. Then the canyon had to be cut, and then the volcano had to erupt near the top and pour its lava over the edge of the canyon. If the canyon had been cut after the top surface volcanic eruptions, there wouldn’t be any lava over the side of the canyon. So the physical evidence is clear that these rocks on the bottom are older than the rocks going over the edge. The radiometric dates came out and the top rocks are older than the bottom rocks by 300 million years. There’s something wrong with the dating methods!!!!!

Another example. In Australia 1994 they found partly petrified wood entombed in basalt lava from a volcano. Now the basalt has to be younger than the wood because the basalt is on top of the wood and is surrounding it and some of the wood goes down into the lower layer. You don’t get trees that will come after the lava, trees which somehow bury themselves into lava that is already solidified. They took the Carbon 14 dates of the wood, and a different substance for the radiometric dating of the basalt. (You don’t date rocks with carbon 14 because rocks are not made of carbon.) The lab reports came back for the basalt: the basalt was 45 million years old, and the wood was 45,000 years old. That’s impossible. So which date is the correct date? Neither. Both dating methods are based on evolutionary assumptions about how these radioactive substances decay.

Consider this statement reported by a cave specialist: “From 1924 to 1988, there was a visitor’s sign above the entrance of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico that said that Carlsbad was at least 260 million years old. In 1988, the sign was changed to read 7 to 10 million years old. Then for a little while the sign read that it was 2 million years old. Now the sign is gone.” Why is that? The age of the cavern is not decreasing over the last 70 years, it’s increasing. What’s happening? The dating methods are faulty and so they have to keep rearranging them.

You can learn more about how the sedimentary rocks were laid down rapidly, but also a simple explanation of the radiometric dating methods and how they work and why they are not trustworthy.

So we have the fossil record of all this death and carnage. It’s not the record of millions of years It is primarily the record of Noah’s flood.

Evolutionists are now talking about Noah’s flood.

The evolutionists are talking about the Flood these days: “A flood of Biblical proportions, enough to fill the Mediterranean Sea, gushed down from the highlands of Mars a billion or so years ago, the latest pictures from the Pathfinder confirmed today.”

Another scientist writing says “The total release of gases from the Tharsis Magnum may have produced the equivalent of a global layer of water nearly 400 feet deep. At the very end of the Noachian epoch, volcanic activity dissipated.” The Noachian epoch??? On Mars?? They’ve got the flood on the wrong planet! Now we have something really bizarre going on here. There is no liquid water as far as we know on the planet Mars, and yet the evolutionists say there was once a global flood of 400 feet deep on Mars. Yet they scoffingly say to creationists: it’s ridiculous to believe in a global flood on this planet. Yet our planet is 70% covered with water, liquid water. And they say there is no evidence of a global flood on this planet. That’s because they are brainwashed.

Why don’t evolutionists see the evidence rightly?

What does Paul say? “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” The reason that the geologists cannot see the evidence for the flood on this planet is because sin has darkened their mind, and they don’t want to see. Why?

There are many scientists today who are evolutionists who will acknowledge that maybe there is some kind of Creator God, a vaguely defined God, and intelligent designer, but they don’t want to accept a global flood. Because what does the global flood say about God? He is the holy judge of all the earth. And if He did that, four and a half thousand years ago, because of sin, then woe is me. And these kind of people will not, I believe, will never accept the flood, although they may accept some kind of designer God, because they do not want to accept that there is a God to whom they are morally accountable. That’s what Paul said.

Why do they believe on a global Noachian flood on Mars but not on the earth? Here is what Derek Ager said: “We’ve allowed ourselves to be brainwashed.” It is the assumptions, the brainwashing in the mind that entered into the minds of young geology students before they ever went and looked at their first rock, that kept them from seeing the evidence.

So evolution is not science, it is a philosophy. It is a religion. It is the religion of atheism, imposed on the scientific evidence.

And the church compromised 200 years ago. Most of the church compromised. Most of our greatest most godly OT scholars and systematic theologians have compromised for 200 years and said “The age of the earth doesn’t matter.” It matters.

I’d like to give you an example. Gleason Archer, a great OT scholar, and evangelical, who has taught me much, whose writings I appreciate: “From a superficial reading of Genesis 1, the impression would seem to be that the entire creative process took place in six 24 hour days.” He doesn’t believe that though. He believes in the day-age theory and he doesn’t believe in a global flood. “If this was the true intent of the Hebrew author, it seems to run counter to modern scientific research which indicates that the planet earth was created several billion years ago.” See what has happened?

If Derek Ager as a geologist was brainwashed, then what about the rest of us, including most of our theologians, who don’t ever look at the rocks themselves. We’ve all been brainwashed. What theologians are doing is reinterpreting the Bible on the basis of what the scientific establishment which is controlled by evolutionists has said. The text does not support a local flood. Gleason Archer only believes that because he believes he has to make the Bible fit millions of years.

The issue is not science. The issue is which authority are we going to believe? Are we going to believe the authority of the Word of God who was there at the time of the flood, who was there at the creation, who always tells the truth, who knows everything, who inspired the Word of God to be written without error, or are we going to believe the fallible opinions of sinful men who are in rebellion against God, who are trying to think of theories to explain away God, and explain away the truth of the Bible, explain away the witness of the rocks to Noah’s flood, so that they don’t have to , in their own minds, be accountable to God. Which are we going to believe? It’s a question of authority. It’s a question of whether we are going to use the non-Christian world view to interpret the Bible or whether we are going to use the Bible to critique the non-Christian world view.

A seven part lens or a three part lens?

The non-Christian world view is: as they are looking at the world, they are looking through lenses, the lens of death, blood-shed , disease for millions of years as the process that produced man. That’s how they look at the world, and they get a distorted view.

I’ve just graduated from single lens glasses to bifocals, and it’s been a difficult experience. My head goes up and down trying to see things. If I look at you through the bottom half, you’re out of focus. So also these lenses of the evolutionists are distorting what they are looking at. They can’t even see the evidence for catastrophe and God’s judgment.

So we need to look at the world through Biblical glasses. And it has seven lenses, the seven “C’s”. And when we look at the Bible through these seven lenses of Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion (at the tower of Babel), Christ, the Cross, and the Consummation, we will see the world clearly and we will make sense of everything, from the rocks and the fossils to 9-11 and the fall of the twin towers, and everything in between, race and everything else. It will make sense. See Luke 13: 1-5 for Jesus’ explanation of sudden deaths by violent kings, or other causes.

But the sad thing is that the church over the last 200 years has been looking at the world through a faulty Christian worldview that has thrown away the first four lenses, and so they don’t have a clear view of the world and what’s going on in the world, and don’t have a consistent answer to the world.

We’re teaching Bible stories in church and in Sunday School, but a lot of times we’re not teaching them as if it’s true history. So the young people learn the Bible stories and then go out into school and listen to their evolutionary biology teacher, astronomy teacher, anthropology teacher, and evolutionary every-other-kind-of teacher, because every discipline in the University has been brainwashed with evolution. It effects everything. I was talking to a man recently who said “psychology is evolutionized.” And the young people say: I’m learning the true science in school, and I’m learning Bible “stories” in church.

No, the Bible is the true history of the world.

Many godly theologians, I had some of them in seminary when I went to seminary, would say that the key is to believe the theology and the morality of the Bible. The history doesn’t matter that much, so it shouldn’t bother if some of its historical things are wrong. We must say a resounding no to this view. The Bible bases is morality and its theology on its history. The Bible is a book about God’s acts in time-space history. And if the history is not true, the theology and the morality is not reliable.

When Paul said, “For as through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men”, was Paul teaching us theology or history? Both. And the theology of sin is not true unless Paul’s history is true.

When Paul said, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and He rose from the dead on the third day”, was he telling us history, or theology? Both. And if Jesus did not rise in time space history, then the theology of the resurrection is destroyed. And that’s what Paul goes on to argue in I Corinthians 15. If Jesus is not really risen from the dead, then our faith is in vain and we are of all men to be most pitied.

The Bible’s history is the foundation to its theology and its morality.

But the early chapters of Genesis are history that relate to biology, geology, and astronomy. So we can really say the biology, geology, and astronomy of the Bible is foundational to the theology and the morality. If the Bible is not true when it says that God made separate kinds of biological life to reproduce after its kind, and Darwin is really right, then how can I trust anything else in Genesis? If the Bible is not true that there was a global catastrophic flood as it clearly and irrefutably teaches, then how can I trust what it says about salvation?

Jesus understood the importance of this. It’s a very interesting Gospels study to look at all of the passages of the OT that Jesus referred to. Do you know which stories in the OT Jesus refers to? It’s the ones that our modern skeptical age can’t believe in. Jesus believed there was a Sodom and Gomorrah, that there was a Cain and Abel, and that Cain killed Abel, that there was a global flood. Concerning the flood he said: “For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah, for as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage till the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand till the flood came and took them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” If I said to you, “Just as Santa Claus came last year and brought presents to all of your homes for your family, so Jesus is coming again.” How strong would your faith be in the second coming of Jesus? (I’m assuming you don’t believe that a real Santa Claus came.) So if I based the promise of his coming on a mythology, it has just destroyed the promise. But Jesus spoke of Noah’s flood to make us tremble at the fact that He is coming again. And you know why you should believe that He is coming again in judgment? Because God judged the world once before, and it was a global flood and a global judgment, and the next time when Jesus comes it will also be a global judgment.

There was only one door into the ark, only one way into the way of salvation, and there is only one way to be saved from the coming judgment, the cross of Christ.

And Peter saw the same thing when he talked about scoffers that would come saying “Where is the promise of His coming?” And why did they scoff? Because they thought “Ever since the father’s died everything has gone on as it has since the beginning of creation.” There you have, 1800 years before uniformitarian geology developed, a perfect summary statement of uniformitarian thinking: “All continues just as it has from the beginning.” Peter goes on to say: When they say this, “they deliberately forget that long ago, by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed by water and out of water and the world of that time by water also was deluged and destroyed.” Peter is saying that “the scoffers deliberately forget.” It is a “willful ignorance” as the King James says. And what do they reject? The supernatural beginning and the global catastrophic flood of Noah. They reject that both creation and the flood came about “by God’s Word.” “He spake and it came to be.” Creation and the flood happened as supernaturally as Jesus saying to Lazarus by his Word: “Lazarus come forth.” That eliminates the long processes of evolution. What could be clearer?

There is only one way of salvation. It is the cross of Christ. And if you were here today listening and you’re not a Christian, I want to say to you that the rocks and the fossils are screaming out Noah’s flood. God did judge this world because of wickedness, and there is a coming judgment. It is not a fictitious myth. It is a sober reality. And you need to be ready to meet your Maker. And maybe you won’t live till Jesus comes. Maybe you will die, maybe unexpectedly as in 9-11, or maybe prematurely just as Stephen J. Gould the atheist old earth geologist who died last May of cancer in his early 60’s. The Bible says “Today, if you hear God’s voice, do not harden your heart.” We need to repent, turn from our sin, and get in the ark of Christ.

So the flood is critically important, for understanding the rocks and the fossils, and for understanding the promises of Jesus and of Peter about the second coming.

 

The above lecture by Terry Mortenson was typed out by Gary Vander Hart from a CD lecture given by him in 2005. In my opinion Terry Mortenson will some day be viewed as the John Calvin of the Biblical creation apologetic, because he is not only a well versed theologian who knows the Bible in its original languages and not only has a doctorate in the history of geology, but he also knows how to systematize all this material in a winsome logical way just as John Calvin did in his Institutes and in his commentaries.

P.S. by Gary Vander Hart: Whitcomb and Morris in their important book The Genesis Flood, 1961 present many more Biblically based arguments for a universal flood on pages 1-33 that totally convinced me after I read it in 1963. One of dozens of arguments is found on page 26, 27 and posits that during the 1,600 years of Gen 5 between Adam and Noah, the world population was more than a billion. If that were true, there goes the local flood theory, because a billion people wouldn’t have limited themselves to the Mesopotamian Valley. This figure was arrived at by positing that each family had 6 children and assumes 18 generations during those 1,600 years. It is an extremely, extremely conservative figure to say 6 children per family when you consider that the Hebrew tradition says that Adam and Eve had 33 sons and 23 daughters, and when you consider that Noah became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth at the age of 500, showing that the powers of procreation lasted hundreds of years, not just 40 years as today. If each family had as many as Adam, there might have been 10 billion people on earth, and that means they would have covered the globe. Good bye local flood theory!

Rev. D. James Kennedy Interviews Dr. Gary Parker in 2005.

Kennedy:  How much evidence did Darwin have for evolution?  How accurate were his theories?  Is there evidence you can share with your friends to refute that supposed evidence?

We will ask these questions of Gary Parker, a biologist, paleontologist, educator, lecturer, and author of many books.  One book is Creation, facts of life.

What is your present ministry?

Gary Parker:  My wife Mary and I in Arcadia, Florida have the Creation Adventures Museum, where we have on display fossils from around the world, although we feature Florida fossils, including replicas of the discoveries of Creations Studies Ministries led by Tom De Rosa.  Mary and I do programs for Christian schools and public schools.  We have public schools coming through regularly as well as home schoolers.  We do day programs and week long programs, calling them creation adventure vacations.  We also do graduate programs for the Institute for Creation Research.

Kennedy: Many think that Darwin grew up an atheist and a materialist.  But surprisingly he grew up in the church and for a time went to seminary.  What caused him to make such a great change from faith to atheism?

Parker:  It seems that the change for Darwin was based on a factor that affects many people.  He looked at the world personally and as a man with a scientific interest and saw cruelty.  When he sailed around the world and stopped at the Galapagos Islands and watched the little sea turtles hatch and how many of them get killed by birds before they ever got into the sea, it looked like nature was horribly cruel.  The death of his oldest daughter, Annie, at the tender young age of 9 made it personal.  How could there be an all-loving, all-powerful God with so much cruelty?

He wound up,  and that is the real tragedy of it,  rejecting God as the only deliverance from the cruelty in this world, and replacing God with what he himself called  “The war of nature, struggle and death.”  He substituted millions of years of struggle and death for the plan and purpose of redemption  of the Lord God in Christ.  He looked at the world, missing the evidence for creation,  blaming what he saw on God at first, and then on nature without God later on.  He failed to recognize that God had created a perfect world and it was our sin, our rebellion, that brought death, disease and disaster, and the judgment of the flood on the world, and that it was Jesus Christ who came to conquer that death, to put an end to pain and misery, and raise us to new life, and a living relationship with our risen Lord.

Kennedy:  Natural selection is one of the key elements of Darwin’s theory.  In fact Darwin at one time referred to natural selection as “my God.”  But isn’t natural selection also a reality in nature, though it is very different from the way that Darwin distorted it?

Parker:  I say to my students and audiences  “Natural selection, yes.  It’s a process we can see and observe.  Evolution NO!”   In a world ruined by man’s sin and God’s judgment on man and man’s domain, death did enter.  There is a struggle for survival.  Darwin’s concept is deceptively simple.  I used to teach and preach evolution.  I would say to my students,  “Observe the variety everywhere you look.  There is a struggle for survival everywhere you look.  If there is this constant struggle for survival,  if there are different varieties,  then some are more likely to survive than others.  “Survival of the fittest.”  That’s what came to be called “natural selection.”  It is a fact based on observation.

Problem:  all that is true.  But it is true only after sin ruined God’s perfect world  and brought in struggle and death.  But it doesn’t change things from one kind to another.  It only explains how and where things live and survive as they multiply and fill a fallen world.  The examples that Darwin used are actually contrary to evolution.

One of his examples was the origin of the finches on the Galapagos Islands, with their little beaks and big beaks.  Some ate seeds, some ate insects.  How did he explain the origin  of the different beaks?  Exactly the way a knowledgeable Biblical Christian would.  When he sailed around and stopped on the So. American mainland,  he noticed finches with a variety of beak types.  Variation already existed.  They didn’t get some new trait.  As the birds blew out from the mainland (perhaps on a mat of vegetation) to the island archipelago about 600 miles west of Ecuador,  they scattered out into different environments.  The ones with big beaks survived where there were large tough seeds;  the ones with little beaks, did not survive in the tough seed environment, but did survive where they could eat insects.  This is how and where they survived.  But the finches did not change from one kind to another kind.  This is horizontal or lateral variation.   There is not a hint of vertical evolution that evolutionists insist on, such as fish to philosopher or amoeba to man.  Nothing like that is implied  or even hinted at in natural selection.

Kennedy:  One of the supposed evidences that evolutionists love to use is the peppered moth.  Tell us how this does not support evolution at all.

Parker:  It is especially embarrassing to me because when I was teaching and preaching evolution in my classes, I would say,  “I can prove evolution is a fact.  Look at the Galapagos finches;  look at the peppered moth.”

Back in the early 1800’s the moth species, Bison Bitularia, in the forests of England existed in a variety of color forms from very light to very dark.  In those days lichen encrusted the trees like it does here in Florida, and the light colored peppered moth fit into the background better.  The moth would rest on the trees during the day.  The birds would fly around looking for something to eat, and they could see the dark colored moth more easily than the light colored.  So in those days the population was 98 % light and 2% dark.  Then the industrial revolution with its coal dust sooted up the trees and killed the lichen.  Now the dark form were more camouflaged.   In just a 100 years,  the evolutionists used to say, as I used to say, “the population went from 98% light to 98% dark.  Evolution going on today!”  Except what?  The moth never changed at all.  It didn’t even get a new trait.  All the color forms exist from the earliest observations in moth and butterfly collections made for centuries before the 1800’s in England.

So there was no change at all in the moth.  All that changed was the environment.  Again the theory explains how and where they survive.  But it doesn’t change them from one kind into another.   Not at all.  This is not evolution  at all.

Kennedy:   Isn’t it amazing that all these supposed evidences, which on the surface,  when they are told by a teacher like you used to be, are accepted so easily as possible explanations.  Yet, when you look at them more deeply,  it turns out that they are just the opposite of what they are supposed to say.

Critics say that given enough time, evolution would produce a change in species. Is time really the answer to the problem in cases like this?

Parker:  Not at all.  I like to use an example like this: How long would it take you to roll a thirteen on a pair of dice?   You just roll and roll and roll.  No matter how you roll, the numbers are never going to add up to thirteen.  The possibility is not there.  The probability is absolute zero.  It’s not close to zero.  Its not 10 followed by 10 million zeros.  Its much lower than that.  It’s just absolute zero.  Until  the evolutionists come up with some kind of process to add information, to increase the number of functioning genes, evolution is impossible.  Period.  Absolute zero.  Therefore the time doesn’t matter.  Millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, zillions af years, it’s just not going to happen.

Kennedy:  How important are mutations to the evolutionary hypothesis?  Can they really produce the kind of changes evolution requires, especially in cases where compound traits are involved like the woodpecker for example?

Parker:  Again it’s like natural selection, yes;  evolution, NO.  Mutations, yes; evolution, NO. Mutations really do occur.  And that’s unfortunate, because mutations are normally identified by the disease or defect they cause.  So mutations do an excellent job of explaining the origin of birth defects, disease , disease organisms.  But evolutionists, and I’m embarrassed to say that this included me at one time,  say  “Once in a while there’s a good mutation that adds genetic information. It makes things better.”  But they don’t have any examples of that.  The example that they still use from the 1950’s all the way to the present in textbooks is sickle cell anemia.  That certainly doesn’t sound like a good mutation.  It sounds like a blood disease, and it is.  People with sickle cell anemia are sick enough that malaria will leave them alone.  The malaria parasite eats hemoglobin and the parasite doesn’t like the taste of sickle cell hemoglobin.

But to get evolution you have to have some kind of a change in DNA.  Mutations don’t make new DNA,  they change old DNA that already exists.  Already you are looking at variations in created kinds.

When Richard Dawkins, the leading spokesman for evolution today, the Englishman,  (Sagan and Gould have died here in America,)……

Kennedy:  (They’ve had a post graduate course in creation.)

Parker: …. when Dawkins was asked in a film by the narrator, “Would you please give us an example of a mutation that adds information.”   That’s a very simple straight-forward question.  And he starts to talk, then stammers, then his eyes start to dart back and forth, then he starts to talk again.  This actually went on for 19 seconds before he finally said:  “Cut, cut.  I need time to think.”  If evolution were true he would have just rattled on:  “Oh, my favorite example of a mutation that adds information is this.  My next favorite is this.  There are pages of them listed in the handbook.”  But no there aren’t.  The handbook of biological data just lists those that cause disease and defects.

Kennedy:   Tell us some other examples of creatures whose combination of traits can not be explained by evolution, like the dentist fish.

Parker:  If you don’t mind, I’ll back up for that woodpecker you mentioned. That’s one of my personal favorites.  Here’s a bird that makes its living banging its head into trees.  To do so without knocking itself silly, it needs a heavy duty bill, a heavy duty skull, shock absorbing tissue between the two.  To get that by time, chance, the struggle of death, random mutations taxes credulity to say the least.  If it got the heavy duty bill first, tried it out, it would smash in the front of its face, crush its skull. It would be dead.  No gradual evolution for that bird.  If it got the heavy duty skull first, it would krinkle up the bill or knock it off. No gradual evolution for that bird either. Both of those would have to happen at the same time before either one could have survival value.  And that’s what evolution can’t do.  It can’t plan ahead.  It can’t save one mutation, hoping later on another one would be added.

In the case of the woodpecker after the fall when it is doing more than drilling holes to store acorns,  and tries to reach beetles or their larva who crawl down tunnels under the bark, it needs a long sticky tongue.  If you get a long sticky tongue just by chance,  it would be dangling out of the bill.  You trip over it while you are hopping along.  Or you wrap it around a long twig as you’re flying along.  That’s not going to work.  The answer for the woodpecker is to slip that tongue in a sheath that goes all the way around the skull under the scalp and inserts into the right nostril.  But again there would be no point in having a tongue sheath without a tongue to put in it.  It would be dangerous to have a tongue without that tongue sheath.  You must have both at the same time. So you are right back to what some evolutionists like Richard Lewontin of Harvard have grudgingly admitted is the chief evidence of a supreme designer.

Here in Florida we have that dentist-fish that you mentioned.  Big fish get their mouth full of junk and debris, fish like the barracudas you see in the Florida keys.  There are little cleaner-fish, little dentist-fish that will swim inside their mouth,  even some shrimp, who will take off the junk and debris.  Then the big fish lets them back out again, and the big fish goes off eating other little fish.

A famous evolutionist, Albert Szent-Györgyi,  a noble prize winner, when he looked at relationships like that,  said it was impossible to conceive how these could have originated without at least an impersonal creative force.  We know it was a personal creator God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Kennedy:  How do evolutionists today deal with these exceptions to their rules?

Parker:  They have a lot of practice in dealing with exceptions to their rules, because that is all they ever find, are the exceptions.  Sometimes, and I don’t mean to be cruel, historically we can document that the wide-spread acceptance of evolution was based on ignorance of biochemistry, ignorance of cell biology, ignorance of genetics, ignorance of ecology, ignorance of biosystematics.  When Darwin was a young man in the early 1800’s and then in 1830 sailed around the world, people thought of cells as just sacks of enzymes,  they are just drops of liquid with some proteins in them.  Now we’ve seen how fantastically intricate living cells are.  Biochemists even refer to proteins and protein complexes that are within the cell as “factories” and as “machinery.”  And those are just parts of the living cell.  The bacterial flagellum, not the complex flagellum, the bacterial  flagellum, with a rotary motor way ahead of Mazda,  has complex parts that show irreducible complexity, as some call it.  I would like to call it “transcendent simplicity”,  just an evidence of creation, so brilliantly displayed.

When Darwin wrote, he believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. For example many people then assumed that if a man grew huge biceps by lifting weights a lot, his son would be born with this new characteristic of big biceps.   The laws of genetics weren’t really discovered until a few years after the Origin (1859).  In 1865, Mendel, a monk, after 8 years of study, came up with the modern laws of heredity, by studying variations in peas.  But they weren’t discovered by scientists until nearly 40 or 50 years later.  And they showed that traits are not just made up.  They don’t come from use and dis-use, from inheritance of acquired characteristics.  The DNA for those traits already exist ahead of time, and you are limited to variations within the kinds of DNA chains that exist.  If ecology had been known as a science, a lot of what Darwin saw would just be a little rule, a little paragraph in ecology textbooks about what happens when different varieties encounter different environments,  not at all some revolutionary transformation of species.

Kennedy:   Darwin’s book was The Origin of Species,   but did Darwin ever really explain the origin of species, as the title of his book claims?

Parker:   No.  He never even explained the origin of a single trait, let alone the origin of species.  So it was an ambitious title.  Of course the full title was The origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.  All he ever talked about really , and gave examples of,  was the second half of the full title:  the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.

In a fallen world ruined by human sin, there is a struggle for life, and natural selection in that context is not a creative process.  It is a preservative. It conserves genetic variability.  It directs adaptation as living things multiply and fill the earth into the right environment.  But it does not change one kind into another.  What he really discovered was how natural selection preserves variations among the created kinds.  And because so little was known about science, it got misinterpreted by people who were really using evolution to justify their ungodly life style.

Kennedy:  It does seem clear that more and more people are ready to take on the battle over creation vs. evolution,  especially in our schools.  What are some of the key areas they should focus on to help bring creation teaching or at least the concept of intelligent design back into the public arena?

Parker:  The one thing that I really like is that so far, it’s not illegal in our ACLU schools……  (and unfortunately that’s what we are stuck with in many parts of the country.  The schools are no longer public schools, not even government schools,  but ACLU schools.)…. but even the ACLU so far has not made it impossible for students to raise their hand and ask a question.  An informed student who is familiar with some of the programs of Coral Ridge, or who has read some of the literature on creation,  and in the spirit of I Peter 3:15 “Be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within you, but in gentleness and meekness”,  can raise questions in class.

For example, lots of key questions can be asked when you look at fossils.  How do you know that it is a fossil and not a rock?  It is evidence for design that you see in fossil material that points to creation.  It’s dead, it may be diseased so it points to the corruption of the created order.  It was rapidly buried and turned to stone before it had time to rot, so it is evidence of a world wide flood on a world wide scale.  And yet you see the re-population of the earth with different kinds of organisms like those that once existed.  This renewal is a foretaste of the renewal in Christ.  So that whole Gospel message can be shared by students willing to raise their hand and ask questions about fossils, or questions about the genetic code, about mutations, about natural selection.

I’d like to see a shift in the debate.  Right now in schools,  the last line always seems to be “separation of church and state,”  the establishment clause.  But the constitution also has the prohibition clause:  “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion,  nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”   We have a lot of courageous Christian young people as was demonstrated at Columbine School in Colorado.  They could raise their hands, and not skip the issue.  Bring God in. God is relevant.  The Bible is the history book of the world.  Then when problems arise and the ACLU tries to stop, you say to the ACLU :  you are prohibiting the free exercise of my religion, you are violating my constitutional right in your arguments and in your attempt to censor me.   That C in ACLU really stands for censorship.

Kennedy:  That is a good strategy.  I like that.  There has recently been a controversy over a peer-reviewed intelligent design article that was published in a scientific journal.  Tell us about that.

Parker: That is just plain humorous.  An intelligent design scientist published an article about interacting parts in complex systems and gets it published.  The editor, an evolutionist, who does not like the creationist argument,  but is just being fair scientifically, printed it.  And then this editor got all kinds of flack for that.  In a way it’s kind of amusing to think about it.

In this story of this editor, the evolutionists are illustrations of Proverbs 18:17. “The first to plead his case seems just; until another comes and examines him.”  In other words,  a man arises and tells a story and people are awestruck with his wisdom.  But then another man arises and tells a different story,  that makes sense of the evidence.  Now people have to think about it.  The evolutionists in this proverb are “the first”.  But they don’t want anybody thinking about the other who “comes along and examines him.”  The ACLU,  the American Censorship League United,  wants to make sure people don’t hear the other idea, even the evidence.  You’re not even supposed to criticize the evolutionary view with scientific evidence,  because they know it can’t stand up to the evidence.

I like to chide my evolutionist friends with this.  Back in the 20’s, when the public schools read the Bible in class and taught creation,  you said, “It is wrong to teach only one view, when there is evidence on the other side.”  Now in our day, why is it suddenly right to teach only one view?

Kennedy:  In the 20’s it was called  “The height of arrogance to teach just one view.”   And now they are on the heights.

Parker:  That’s right. They scaled the heights of arrogance and now call that arrogance wisdom, unfortunately.

Kennedy:  Today we are told there is life on other planets.  A lot of popular science fiction stories tell about moving to all kinds of other worlds,  all kinds of different people.  And now there is a current remake of The War of the Worlds where creatures from Mars invade America.  Of course this involves life on other planets.  Say a little about that.

Parker: I am kind of a “trekky”.  I’ve always enjoyed  science fiction about life on other worlds.  But I realized it’s science fiction. As a young man I wrote the constitution for the first Martian government.  I wanted to help colonize those other planets.  But in reality when we look out at these other worlds, and we’ve had the privilege of exploring some of them closely,  it’s kind of like opening Christmas presents from God, because these planets reveal how special His Christmas present, the earth is.

The Bible tells us how unique and special the earth is.  Every time we visit another world,  we say , “Wow, God you didn’t tell us the whole story.  We, the people on earth, are just fantastically unique and special.”  And this is one of the sad things about evolution. Evolutionists spend all their time trying to explain why the earth is really nothing special,  because people are nothing special; people are just another species, destined for extinction.  But praise God, when we read God’s Word, when we look at these evidences from God’s heaven, we get the exact opposite view from the view of evolution.  The earth is an incredibly special place.  People are incredibly special.  We have coded information in terms of the science of DNA that makes us absolutely unique,  each one of us with a  special place in God’s plan.  And all those heavens are not a waste of space that God created.  It was created for the glory of God, for the glory of Christ.  And also it was created for us to explore.  We botched it when man sinned.  But we may one day have an infinite amount of time to explore an infinite amount of space and learn about our infinite God that created us special in this very place right here.

Kennedy:  Yes, it is a fascinating world that God has given to us.  And we thank you Gary Parker for helping us understand more of it today.

Parker:  Thank you.  And praise God for your ministry .

* Gary Parker is a special friend of mine who taught biology at Dordt College in the early 70’s. This conversation with Pastor James Kennedy PhD was on radio in 2005 from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (PCA), in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.    Gary Parker  spoke at a week-end creation conference at Dordt around 1998.    Gary likes to use humor. He is such a gentle fellow, and our family got to really love and appreciate his generous and humble family.  He is one third Cherokee Indian.  (Transcribed by Gary Vander Hart from a CD named “Dismissing Darwin.”)

Gary Parker’s  educational background:  He received his BA in biology and chemistry,  his Master of Science in biology and physiology, and his Ed Doctor’s degree in biology and geology all from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  After teaching at Dordt, he joined the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego,  then joined with Answers in Genesis as senior lecturer (1994-1999), then headed the science department at Clearwater Christian College in Florida.   He presently hosts students in his creation museum in Florida, while lecturing from time to time in various countries.

Dr. Parker earned several academic awards, including admission to Phi Beta Kappa (the national scholastic honorary), election to the American Society of Zoologists (for his research on tadpoles), and a fifteen-month fellowship award from the National Science Foundation.

He has published five programmed textbooks in biology and six books in creation science. These last  six books have been translated into eight languages. He has appeared in numerous films and television programs, and has debated and lectured worldwide on creation.  The following link is an interview with Gary telling about his present work in digging fossils for his museum.  https://creationtoday.org/what-made-a-biology-professor-evolve-into-a-creationist/

GVH

Part one:  how I went from atheistic evolution to theistic evolution:

I used to believe evolution and taught it for several years in college biology classes.  I taught it as one who believed in evolution, not just a little bit.  I believed it a lot.  It wasn’t just a simple scientific theory for me, it was a substitute for God, an alternate religion.  It was a religion that answered my basic questions about the universe and my place in it. I thought that as a scientist I could help bring utopia right here on earth.  We had a better plan than the one you could read about in the Bible.

Given that beginning, what changed me from belief in evolution to belief in what the Bible says? I’ll admit I don’t get any credit for this. I was not looking for God.  Little did I know He was looking for me.  The change began with my first college teaching position. It was at Eastern Baptist College in St. David’s Pa, a suburb of Philadelphia.  I’ll get back to that in a moment.  I told them at the time I wasn’t a Christian. I believed in evolution.  But I had all the right academic essentials and background.  So I got hired.

The chemistry professor noticed that my wife and I didn’t do Christian things like go to church, so he invited us to his home for a Bible study.  At the time I thought it was positively amusing that people in the 20^th c. would still study an old outmoded book like the Bible.  But free coffee and donuts.  Those are three of my favorite words.  So for all the wrong reasons we took off for the Bible study.  I had to admit the Bible told a radically different story about the beginnings of the world; not “in the beginning hydrogen”, but “ in the beginning God.”  And God created a perfect world in peace and harmony. It wasn’t until man’s sin corrupted the world which God had created “very good,”  that death entered the world and disease and disasters and things like we see going on around us in the present time.  In fact the Bible told us that things got so bad that God had to destroy that first world with a flood to give it a fresh start with Noah and his family.

But praise God he is not finished with his world.  Today sin is ruining the world that God created very good.  The Scripture tells us this present world is stored up for fire.  But just as God saved those who would believe in the coming flood, so we can believe in Jesus Christ and his coming again when He will create a new heavens and a new earth where the wolf and the lamb will lie down together.

This is so dramatically different from the evolutionary story. I had to admit that the Bible story was much much better.  In the evolutionary story it all begins with death.  There is this explosion and it all ends in death.  The universe will expand itself into oblivion or come back together again and crush itself into oblivion.  Death wins.  But not in the Bible.  In the Bible, life begins in the life of God.  Death is a temporary intruder.  And in Christ we can be raised into a new rich and abundant life that goes on forever.  I thought, “Wow. What a wonderful story. Too bad, it isn’t true.”  That’s the way I felt at that time.  But we got free coffee and donuts.  So I kept going back to that Bible study anyway.

About that time, I got a copy in the mail of the first book I wrote, a book on DNA, that famous molecule of heredity.  It was a science text-book.  It had been reviewed by experts in the field and represented the latest and greatest knowledge in the field in that subject.  But as the Lord would have it, seeing that book with my name on the title page had a life changing impact on me.  Up until that time I thought that people who wrote books knew what they were talking about. Though I had written a book considered up to date, I knew all of the mysteries and uncertainties that went into that book.  Five years later I wrote the second edition.  I thumbed through the first edition and just laid it aside because so much had changed in just five years.  I started over on blank paper.

Maybe someone told you, “You can’t take the Bible as a science textbook.”  I like to say, “You are right about that.  I’ve written five science textbooks.  They all have had to be rewritten.”  The Bible did not have to be rewritten at all.  God had it right the first time.  So I began to pay attention in that Bible study.  And God convinced me through the Spirit that he was really what he said he was in his Word.  And I became a Christian.

Ah, you know the sequel to that story.  As soon as I became a Christian, my wife and I got along ever so much better; our four little children began to behave like perfect little angels. Well, not quite.  The time of first belief however is really special.  Some of you may remember the time.  You seem to float along the ground.  Your feet hardly touch the ground.  It was so fabulous to be in tune with the Lord God, Maker of heaven and earth.  But a lot of times the Lord lets us go through a time of second thoughts, of doubts, so we can measure for ourselves what our new faith really means.

For me all of those doubts centered on all those so called “mountains of evidence for evolution.” Then, aha.  A light bulb went on. All that stuff about evolution is true, but God did it. Now at the time, I thought that was an original idea.  I found out since, it is a fairly common idea, sometimes called theistic evolution, sometimes called progressive creation. At first it seemed to be a perfect combination.  I could go to church on Sunday and believe everything in the Bible.  I could go back to class on Monday and still teach my students all that stuff about evolution that I had been forced to learn. It seemed like the ideal solution.

We all know Christians who try to put evolution and the Bible together, and like me at that time, these Christians have a false romanticized idea about the evolutionary process.  Some people just think of evolution as this step by step upward onward progress.  It sounds like something God might do. 

Part two:  Reasons I went from theistic evolution to Biblical creation.

1. Reason one – the God of theistic evolution is not good.
   

This is the way this progress is described by Darwin.  “From the war of nature, famine and death, the production of higher animals directly follows.” From the WAR of nature, FAMINE and DEATH.  And I began to think: does that way of death sound like the way God, who created the heavens and earth, calls all “very good”? This same God who tells us in Genesis 6 that he “was grieved to his heart at the violence” and corruption that filled the world?

In Hunter’s book Darwin’s God, we learn that evolution was born not first of all from a study of changes in finches or pigeons, but from Charles Darwin’s struggle to explain violence and cruel death.  On the Galapagos Islands he saw hundreds of baby turtles just coming out of their shells crawling on the sandy beach toward the ocean only to be eaten by the birds. That was “nature raw in tooth and claw.” Annie, his favorite 9 year old daughter died after a year of great stomach pain and he was angry with God for this. So Darwin decided he couldn’t believe in a cruel God.  So he created the idea that God had no control over any of what we call creation, so he couldn’t be blamed for this violence and corruption. So Darwin proposed evolution in which all things happen by directionless chance. Later he even gave up this low form of deism of a powerless absentee God, and believed there was no God at all.

But the Bible teaches that God is good.  Psalm 107 says, “O praise the Lord for he is good, his chesed (Hebrew for kindness, mercy, and loyalty) is forever.” It was our sin that ruined the world that God had made.  So I began to think about that.  I said to myself:  “There is no way God would use death and accidents as his means of creation.”

Yet that is what evolutionists still believe.  Carl Sagan, was on the cover of Time Magazine, and told the story of how humans began.  Sagan said that only through an immense number of deaths, death and accident, death and accident, death and accident over millions of years, are you and I, brains and all, here today.

Jacques Ellul, a famous biochemist and atheist, said it this way: “I am surprised that any Christian would believe that God would use such a cruel, wasteful, and inefficient process as evolution for his means of creation.”

So now I could see that evolution was not just a simple scientific theory.  It was the whole opposite of the Gospel message.  If the world we live in now was a world as God created it, full of death, disease, and violence, why would Christ come to conquer death, why would he come to heal, why would He come to raise us to newness of life, if death and disease were the way God made things when it was called “very good.”

But it was not that way at all.

But I wondered.  How am I going to get out of this?  Well, I didn’t have to do it on my own.

Help came to me in the form of a new biology professor who came to our university that year.  This time this Christian University also hired someone who was really a Christian, as well as a creationist.  And he showed me at his home the famous, or infamous book, The Genesis Flood by the hydrologist Henry Morris and the theologian, Whitcomb.  He wanted me to go through this book together and show me the problems in evolution and the evidence for creation.  We read a few paragraphs together, and I got upset, angry, and irate.  I said, “Don’t these people know this, don’t they know that???”  Alan got me calmed down, and we started reading the next evening.  The same thing.  I got angry and irate.  Finally Alan said, “Maybe you ought to read this on your own.  We’ll talk about it when you are done.” Little did I know that God was beginning to work in my heart.

2. The Genesis Flood book showed me so many evidences against evolution.

My record for seeing doubts about evolution arising in other people, was a one hour lecture at Fresno State University in California followed by five hours of questions.  One of these university students stayed for five hours and would say, “But… but…but.”  I thought, “The Lord is beginning to work with him as he did with me.”

By the time I finished reading that book, I began to feel cheated.  Why had no one ever pointed out to me the problems with evolution?  Why had no one ever pointed out the abundant evidence of creation?  That book dealt mainly with geology, so I began to look into my own specialty of biology and the evidence for creation was everywhere.  I still can’t imagine how I missed it.

3. A woodpecker developing from a normal bird by chance is impossible. Also called the argument from irreducible complexity.

One of the clearest and simplest evidences, one of my favorites, is the birds that make their living banging their heads into trees, the ones we call woodpeckers.  Did you ever wonder what would make a woodpecker peck wood?  Was it frustration over loosing the worm that the early bird got first?  And if he began pecking for that reason, wouldn’t he just knock himself silly?  When the woodpecker hits the tree, the deceleration experience is over a thousand times gravity.  Most of you have watched the astronauts take off into space, and get pushed back in their seats.  But that is just a few times gravity.  The force of the woodpecker is so great that it has to be a dead-on hit.  A slip to the left or right, and the speed of the sheering force would literally take the cover off the brain.  So it has to have good muscle and nerve co-ordination, a heavy duty bill, a shock absorbing tissue behind it, a reinforced skull, all that to be able to drill holes in a tree.

How did all that happen?  I can’t believe that I once taught this as the fact of evolution.  But in evolution you always have to begin with something simple.  For example you begin with a bird that isn’t a woodpecker yet, flying around minding its own business. Evolution would say that a normal bird got hit with a cosmic ray, that being  the first step in the woodpecker’s evolutionary progress, making some kind of random change in heredity that we call a “mutation.”

Now mutations really do occur.  In fact we have identified over 3500 of them responsible for various diseases in human beings alone.  But the evolutionists say  “Maybe once in a while we get a lucky mutation, a lucky accident.”  So here a baby bird is born with a mutation, giving it a heavy duty bill, and decides to try it out.  Whack. He throws his head into the tree.  His bill is strong enough, but he squishes in the front of his face..  He has a massive cerebral hemorrhage.  One dead bird.  End of evolutionary progress.  So now you see why evolution is so slow.

An evolutionist might say, “Well, now maybe it was the other way around.  Maybe the bird got the heavy duty skull first by accident.” Now the bird throws his head into the tree, this time the skull was OK, but krinkle, krinkle krinkle, his bill folds up like an accordion. He dies.  So it’s still nowhere into being a successful woodpecker. He has to have both of those at the same time before either one has survival value.

It is to Darwin’s credit that he recognized that.  He calls “adaptation”, (the marvelous fit of living things to their environment), not “evidence for the theory of evolution”, but “difficulty with the theory.”

Since the fall, since death entered the world, some of those woodpeckers are doing more than drilling holes to store acorns.  They are looking for beetles under the bark.  The beetles hear all this pounding and just crawl further down the bark tunnel they had eaten.  So what does the bird need if it’s looking for beetles for lunch, for this treat of a live beetle?  It needs a long sticky tongue.  But if it has a long sticky tongue just by chance, where will you put it?  It is dangling out of your bill so you keep biting your tongue or tripping over it.  Or imagine flying over a low twig with your tongue hanging out, and it wraps around the twig, and you hang yourself.  There are real hazards here.  The answer for the woodpecker is to slip that tongue in a sheath that goes all the way around the skull under the scalp and inserts into the right nostril.

So the next time you see a woodpecker on your tree taking bark beetles out you can watch the scalp twitch as the tongue goes in and out.  And praise the Lord again for his incredible marvel of creation and design, that could never be put together by time and chance and the struggle for survival.

4. Contrary to so many liberal theologians, Genesis is the foundation for all aspects of life

So I thought, this is pretty neat.  It’s time that I start sharing this evidence of creation with my students. By now I had been teaching at this Christian College for 3 years, and since I had changed from evolution to creation, it was time to put my faith into practice in the classroom.  But in this case I got into trouble.  With whom?  With members of the Bible department!

At this particular “Christian” College, and maybe I should put that in quotes now, the Bible department was teaching that the Old Testament was a collection of Babylonian myths and fables, and that Jahweh or Jehovah was a tribal war God of the Hebrew nation with no relation at all to Jesus Christ or the God of love in the New Testament.  So in the Bible classes, teachers were pointing out all the errors and mistakes and bad theology in the Bible, and here I was in the science classes saying  “This is the Word of God.  You can believe everything, from Genesis 1:1 right to the end.” (Audience laughs heartily)

Well, that was a little too much for the Bible department, so they challenged me to a debate.  Well, there were three of them, but only one of me.  They didn’t want me to have the underdog sympathy, so they said, “You may go and get some help.”  So I got the chemist who led the Bible study and the biologist who helped lead me to understand Genesis.  So here was the great debate.  The Bible department defending  evolution, and the science department defending creation.  (Audience laughs and claps)

Unfortunately, that is a world wide phenomenon.  I’ve had the pleasure of being on many speaking trips with Ken Ham, the Australian creationist. Maybe you have heard from him that in Australia they have mandatory religious education classes in public schools.  But it was harder to get into those religion classes, than into the science classes.

Yet Christians need to be reminded what a treasure trove Genesis is.  Jesus quoted from Genesis more than from any other book in Scripture.  When Jesus was asked about divorce he went back to Genesis one and two.

If your daughter decides to wear almost nothing as swimming gear, and you dialogue with her like this:  “You can’t wear that.”  “Why not”? “It’s wrong” “Why is it wrong?”  “Well, it’s not right”  “Why is it not right?”  “Because it’s wrong?”……. The daughter thinks it’s just a matter of your opinion.  You’re just an old fogy.  Let’s go back and see what God says about clothing, when he clothed Adam and Eve as a symbol that our sinful nakedness needs a covering. It’s not your opinion or my opinion. It’s what God says.

Where did we come up with this radical idea that marriage is for one man and one woman for all of life?  Right back to Genesis one and two.  Where did Paul go? “In the beginning God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Bruce.” This in contrast with the world we live in now.

Especially now, we must not surrender those things taught us in Genesis.  The beginning of nations, (Gen. 10), the proper role of government( Genesis 9), all is spelled out in that fabulous book of beginnings.

5. My courses in geology only showed more problems with evolution.

At the end of that debate, no one asked questions about biology any more; but some friends of mine said, “Look, Parker, if you only knew something about fossils, then you would give up this creation nonsense, and come into the 20^th century with the rest of us.”

About that time the Lord gave me a grant from the National Science Foundation to go back and work on a doctoral degree in biology and add paleontology, the study of fossils as a minor.  It was the  richest I’ve been in my life.  I would like to thank the American tax payers for your generous support.

At that time I knew I was a Christian.  I was pretty sure I was a creationist.  But if the fossils didn’t work out, I just wouldn’t tell anybody about it.  Sorry to say, I’m not a man of great courage.

But interestingly enough, although all my professors believed in evolution, the things that they taught, the fossil facts in God’s world, made it hard to believe in evolution, and easy to believe what the Bible teaches us about Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, and the Cross, our redemption in Christ.

6. My course in fossil plants did not prove evolution

One of the first courses I took was in fossil plants.  I showed up on the front row.  I didn’t want to miss a thing.  The prof comes in, fashionably late, and says  “I suppose you are all here to learn a little about the evolution of plants.” I nodded.  I wanted to know how big the problem was going to be.  He said:  “Well, you aren’t going to learn much.  Charles Darwin wrote 150 years ago that the origin of flowering plants is ‘an abominable mystery.’  Nothing has happened in the last 150 years to change that.  What you are going to find is that our modern plant groups go way back in the fossil record.”

Professor Horner at Cambridge University, an evolutionist, put it this way: “I still think to the unprejudiced, if you just look at the fossil facts, the fossil record of plants is in favor of creation.”

7. My course in animal fossils disproved evolution: stasis, polystrate fossils.

So a man of a little courage was beginning to take a little heart at that.  So I signed up for the course in animal fossils.  This had mostly geology majors in it.  I warned my wife that I would have to come home late, and stay up late to catch up with all the background of the geology students had, but I got into the animal fossil course, and they were talking about gastropods, stall isopods, cephalopods, decapods, dodecapods, and arthropods, and all the other pods that biology is famous for.  I was right at home.  I already knew all of those names.  It was the geology majors that were saying, “How come you make up such big names for such little things?” Why did I already know the names of all the fossil animals?  Because they were the same as the animals that are living on the earth today.  Except there used to be more animals and plants living on the earth and they are now extinct.  Instead of a record of  upward, onward progress, it looked like things were created well designed to multiply after their kind and something happened.  Something happened to cause a decline in size and variety.  Many forms became extinct.  So what I was learning there in geology classes was supporting what the Bible had to say about these very topics.

In fact, if you dig as deep as you can in the earth, the Bible is still supported.  Anybody wonder where snails came from?  Snails come from snails.  Anybody wonder where clams came from?  Clams come from clams.  You have the oldest fossils on earth laid right next to the same kind we find living in the ocean today. You find clams, snails, corals. What’s the one thing you never find?  You never find snams, or clails or snorals.

What about those rock layers, layers stacked on top of one another, like you see in Grand Canyon?  According to the usual version of evolution it takes millions of years to stack up those layers of rock.  Well, the professor in the stratigraphy class was talking about  layers of rock that involved 20 million years of evolution.  Then he said, As I examined these layers down by the creek bed, here was a shell fish, an ammonite, with a shell shaped like an ice cream cone, perched on its tip end, the rest of its body through all those layers that lasted 20 million years.  How could that be?  How could that ammonite perch there for 20 million years without falling over, or decaying through that long period? He said, these things are real mysteries, and wrote on the board, “polystrate fossil.” That means fossils that cut through many rock layers.  Those polystrate fossils are common in coal deposits.  In the coal deposits we find  trees that stand up through what some would say was thousands of years of coal deposits, and the top of the tree hadn’t even rotted.  Something is wrong with that theory of thousands of years.  It looks like it was not a lot of time involved in depositing these rock layers, but a lot of water mixed with sediment burying the tree in such a short time that none of the tree rotted.

8. The Grand Canyon layers deny evolution.

In the Grand Canyon itself…… I would like to stake the canyon out with Bible verses, going from the bottom to top, reading stages in Noah’s flood as described in Scripture.  In the Grand Canyon, there is one point that rock layers are being stacked on top of each other so fast that they skipped 150 million years of evolution without skipping a beat.  So when you are a tourist with your heavy back pack and little steps going up the canyon, in one little step upwards you skip  150 million years.

Now the evolutionists know there is supposed to be a lot of sedimentary rock in that gap or a lot of evidence of erosion.  Neither one is there.  At least the evolutionist has been honest enough to realize that they have not found any evidence of erosion.  It looks like one layer of sediment was laid down smoothly right on top of the other, then formed into rock.  The professor, even though he believed in evolution put it this way: How can land just lie there, neither depositing nor eroding for millions of years and then just pick up as if nothing had happened?

Well, on a geology test, I suggested an explanation for that, that in terms of the ecology of the flood, when water changed directions, it deposited plants and animals from one environment directly on top of another.  The good news is I got an A on the test and the essay.  The prof said that would be a good theory, but I don’t think it could happen with all that time missing.  So he was thinking as many Christians think:  if only there is a lot of time, then the evidence makes sense.

But exactly the opposite is true. If you believe in huge amounts of time, geology becomes a mystery.  You don’t know how those rock layers in the Grand Canyon are the way they are, you can’t explain the polystrates, you don’t know how those huge boulders got moved at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  You don’t even know what was going on at Mt. St. Helens.

9. The events at Mt. St. Helens prove that mighty canyons can form in a few days

Mt. St. Helens was a laboratory demonstration by the Lord God Almighty of what a little tiny volcano can do with a lot of water and a short period of time.  At the first eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, a mud slide came down into Spirit Lake that sheared off enough trees on the side of a hill that would make 2 and a half million board feet of timber.  The trees were sheared off  and deposited in the lake, and the logs  gradually went from horizontal to vertical with the broken off roots below the surface, some sinking down into the mud at the bottom of the lake, where layers of mud wrapped around the sunk logs.  Some day someone may call them polystrate fossils.

And what happened two years later?  There was a second eruption which spilled a huge amount of mud and water into the north fork of the Toutle River, carving a deep canyon. Five days later, not 5 million years later, when the dust settled, one could see a small version of the Grand Canyon, a 1/40^th sized scale model of Grand Canyon.  And as you stand in the bottom of the canyon, and look at these newly formed sides, 16 stories high, you see banded layers.  You see side canyons also, as you see in the Grand Canyon.  The Mt. St. Helens canyon was eroded in five days. How many days did Noah’s flood take?  More than 360 for swelling and decaying.  Thus there would be plenty of time to see those features we see there in the Grand Canyon that is 40 times the size of the Mt St Helen’s canyon.  It was formed by a lot of water, not a lot of time.

10  Radioactive decay dating has huge uncertainties

So that may raise the question of radioactive decay dating.  Surely since we live in the 20^th century, we must accept the idea that radioactive decay proves the earth is millions of years old.  So I signed up for the course in geophysics, and the unit on radioactive decay dating.  The prof explained the method and then gave us a problem, to calculate the age of the rock based on rubidium strontium, much better than uranium-lead or potassium argon.  So I worked on this problem.  I did the age of the earth on one sample, the age of the rock on another sample, and one was nearly 10 times bigger than the other.  Ah no, just like my check-book the arithmetic didn’t work.  So I went back and tried it again to make it work out.  I did stay up past midnight that time.  As I walked to class the next day, I asked my friends, “Did you get that problem?”  “No, we didn’t get it to come out.”  So we all sneak into class, with slumped shoulders, thinking the prof is going to get mad at us for not understanding the method.  Instead he said: “I just wanted to show you the method doesn’t always work.” We could have tarred and feathered him.

Where do you have to go to find out uncertainties like that?  Just ordinary science magazines and science newspapers.  They are running problems like this all the time.  Some of you have heard of this fossil called Lucy. Lucy was once considered THE missing link between apes and man.  Well, now we have found both ape fossils and human fossils BELOW the level where Lucy was found.  It’s just another of those  ism’s  that have become wasm’s, because they turn out to be false.  When Lucy was first found, Donald Johansen wanted her to be older than anything that the Leaky family had found.  The first date he got was only 3million years.  He thought it has got to be older.  So he waited for a while.  The examiner said “I have a new date for you.  It’s 3 ½ million years.”  Johansen said, “I’ll take it.” Nobody bothered to ask why the second date would be any good if the first date checked four different ways was wrong.  Other scientists got involved in studying this volcanic ash, and concluded that Lucy was younger than the first date.  An editor from Science News interviewed the scientist who had been wrong 4 times so far and asked “What do you think about these people who tell you that you were wrong all four times?”  He replied, “I can live with it.”  He was so used to being wrong, being wrong one more time was no big deal.  The editor for science news wrote that article up under the interesting title : “Lucy, the trouble with dating an older woman.”

This is mentioned by William Stansfield in a textbook on evolution written by an evolutionist for evolutionists down at Cal Poly, one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world.  And in that book, written by an evolutionist for evolutionists, he talks about all the problems in setting ages.  He says age estimates by different methods are often quite different, sometimes by 100’s of millions of years.  We are not talking about one or two per cent errors, or 10 or 20 % error, but 99.9999  per cent error. And he doesn’t even stop there.  He says there are a lot of problems in believing that the earth is old, because there is evidence for a young earth.  For example: 1) the rapid formation of coal deposits; 2) the pressure still in oil wells.  That pressure would have been gone if all the oil in the earth is less than 200,000 years.  Yet a lot of oil is there still. A lot of it is in the wrong place politically, but a lot of oil is left indicating the earth would have to be far younger.

11. Carbon 14 dating has huge problems

3) Then he gets to my personal favorite, Carbon 14.  Misinformation about carbon 14 has been used effectively by the devil to confuse a lot of Christians.  The information we have is something quite different.  Stansfield mentions there is only enough carbon 14 in the atmosphere for an earth less than 20 thousand years old, in fact a lot closer to 10.  He believes in evolution, but he believes in being honest with the evidence.  What’s wrong here? There’s not enough carbon 14.  So you can see his answer right there in the textbook.  He says perhaps there was a greater concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere prior to the Biblical flood, so that carbon 14 could not have been formed as much as today. That’s Biblical with a capital B  in this evolution textbook.  And he went on … “approximately 5000 years ago.”  That’s better dating than many theologians yet.  So here is an evolutionary scientist who says:  I know why carbon 14 is out of balance.  It was the Biblical flood, 5000 years ago  that shook up the earth’s atmosphere. I say, Amen, it sounds good to me.

And so just when Christians are having trouble with these things, scientists themselves are discovering that the facts that we have in God’s world are really pointing to the facts that we read in God’s word.

12. 14 assumptions in radioactive dating, making this dating method uncertain.

The final assignment on that unit on radioactive decay dating in that university class, was to list  all the assumptions you have to make before you can begin to date a rock. I had a list of 14 different assumptions.  As we were going over these in class, the prof stopped in the middle of it, and said, “If a Bible believing Christian ever got hold of all this, he would make havoc out of the dating system.”  So he said, “Keep the faith.” At bottom that’s all there is to radiometric dating, at bottom that’s all there is to evolution.  A FAITH. THE FACTS HAVE FAILED.

13. Maintaining evolution is not based on facts. The facts have failed. 

I thought.  “Wow.  If it’s a matter of keeping the faith, I have another faith I’d rather really keep.” And that faith stands on the Rock.

And that’s not just my faith.  1000’s of scientists around the world have come to that same conclusion, that the faith that fits the facts is the faith that we read in God’s Word, Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, and the Cross with redemption in Christ.

That should not surprise us.  That’s what Psalm 19 says:  The heavens DECLARE the glory of God.” They don’t disguise his glory.  The things God made testify to his eternal power and deity.  Romans 1:20  “The invisible things of God are clearly seen in the things that have been made” , God’s power as Creator and Sustainer, as Judge and Redeemer are all present in the things that have been made.

Where else do we read about clearly known truths?  “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”

Why would Dr. James Kennedy’s conference here on Reclaiming America invite my reflections on creation?  Because creation belongs at the very foundation of the US Declaration of Independence.  Where did the founding fathers say our rights come from?  Are our rights given to us by the government?  Not at all.  Our rights are given to us by our Creator, who made us in His image.  And we have chosen to delegate those rights to our government.  It’s we the people receiving our rights from God who delegates their protection to the government.

I recognize that is not politically correct anymore. Today to be politically correct, it is the government, not God, who gives us our rights.  We thought we had the right to pray, because it was guaranteed in the bill of rights.  But now somebody tells us we don’t have that right, at least not in our schools, and many times in any public place. But those are OUR schools.  Remember when PARENTS were in control of the schools?  Now they have become GOVERNMENT schools and the government who can give rights can take them away. We used to think for sure that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (then it meant pursuit of using our talents).  But now the government says, “No, not if you are still in your mother’s womb.  That right does not belong to you anymore.”  Think of all the other rights that have been taken away.  That should frighten us. A government that can give rights is a government that can take it away.  We need to get back to that foundation, that our rights come from God who has created us.

How do we do that?  God would not leave us in the dark about this.  I Peter 3:15  gives the secret to reclaiming America:  informed Christians ready to give a reason for the hope that is within.  Peter writes:  “Be ready always to give a reason for the hope that is within you, in gentleness and meekness.”  Informed Christians putting their faith into practice.  That’s our job, to challenge and equip you to be ready and able to reclaim America for Christ, through the Gospel of a God who is good, not the evil God of the chaos of evolution.

 

Bios

* Gary Parker is a special friend of mine who taught biology at Dordt College in the early 70’s. His three gentle girls all took violin lessons with me at the Sioux Center Christian School, and when he moved to a different Christian college, he insisted on paying me double what I was asking in the rent up to that point.  Gary Parker  spoke at a week-end creation conference at Dordt around 1998.  Gary likes to use humor. He is such a gentle fellow, and our family got to really love and appreciate his generous and humble family.  He is one third Cherokee Indian.  What you just read about his journey was transcribed from a lecture given in 2005 at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church at a conference organized by James Kennedy, Ph.D. The summaries in bold print were mine (Gary Vander Hart)

Gary’s educational background:  He received his BA in biology and chemistry, his Master of Science in biology and physiology, and his Ed Doctor’s degree in biology and geology all from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  After teaching at Dordt, he joined the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, then joined with Answers in Genesis as senior lecturer (1994-1999), then headed the science department at Clearwater Christian College in Florida. He presently hosts students in his creation museum in Florida, while lecturing from time to time in various countries.

Dr. Parker earned several academic awards, including admission to Phi Beta Kappa (the national scholastic honorary), election to the American Society of Zoologists (for his research on tadpoles), and a fifteen-month fellowship award from the National Science Foundation.

He has published five programmed textbooks in biology and six books in creation science. These last  six books have been translated into eight languages. He has appeared in numerous films and television programs, and has debated and lectured worldwide on creation.  The following interview with Gary tells about his present work in digging fossils for his museum.  https://creationtoday.org/what-made-a-biology-professor-evolve-into-a-creationist/

 

GVH

 

THE AGE OF THE EARTH – DOES IT MATTER?

By Terry Mortenson 2005  (Part 4 of a 5 part CD series called Standing Against the Myth.)

Introduction

Before I joined Answers in Genesis four years ago, I worked for Campus Crusade for Christ from ’75 till ’01 right out of college, and spent much of that time serving in Czechoslovakia and Hungary before and after the fall of Communism.

And I’ve had a chance to speak on the creation issue for all of those decades, in America, in England, in most countries of Eastern Europe, and I have found that 100 % of the Christians that I have ever talked to believe the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s a unanimous belief in the body of Christ worldwide.

But what percentage of the Christians do you think believe this statement: God created the universe and everything in it about 6000 years ago in 6 literal days of creation and then he judged the world with a global catastrophic flood at the time of Noah? What percentage of Christians worldwide believe that statement without hesitation? I would say on the basis of my experiences, far less than 50%; in some countries less than 5% of Christians believe that statement.

But it has not always been that way. Up until the beginning of the 19th c., almost all Christians believed that without hesitation. Something happened in the early 19th c.

If you want to learn about that history, you can get the tape from my talk “Noah’s flood, rocks and fossils.” In the early 19th c, late 18th c., the deists and atheists began to develop new geological theories for the history of the earth and said the earth was much, much older than the Bible said, that Noah’s flood was not responsible for the geological record of sedimentary rocks and fossils.

And so Christians began to scramble to reinterpret the Bible to fit what the geologists had proven was true.

So they had to do a number of things: First of all they had to come up with re-interpretations of Genesis 1. The traditional view in the church for 18 centuries, was that these were literal days: 24 hour days, like our days today.

1. “Gap theory”. But in the early 19th c., some Christians began to advocate the “gap theory,” that there was a gap of time, of untold ages, millions of ages between Gen. 1:1 and Gen. 1:2. And the geologists could put all of their theories between those verses, and then we have literal days of re-creation and we solve the conflict between the Bible and geology. How many of you have heard of the gap theory? It’s a 200 year old theory.

2. “Day age theory”: In the 1820’s, an evangelical Anglican minister said, “No, that’s not a good way to harmonize geology with the Bible. If we just make each of the day long ages, figurative days, then we can harmonize the Bible with the geological ideas. Now that idea was not original with him, but he developed and advocated it. It was not popular initially because the Christian geologists said there is a stark difference in the order of events in what we view as geological history and the order of events in Gen. 1. It didn’t become popular till it was promoted about 30 years later by a Christian geologist.

3. “Day-gap-day theory” Then there has developed in the 20th century the day- gap-day theory. How many have heard of that? Not many. The day-gap-day theory says that the days are literal but there are gaps of millions of years between the days.

4. “Theological framework” And then there is the theological framework view. This is becoming rather popular among evangelical theologians. This view says that Genesis one is not really history. It is a theological framework, a literary framework for teaching theology. So we shouldn’t even try to harmonize Gen. 1 with what science is saying. This is really just a very tricky way of saying that it is mythology. But evangelicals don’t like to say that anything in the Bible is mythology. So they say it is a theological framework.

5. “Promised land” Then there is the promised land view. This is a view of one of my OT professors in seminary, that Genesis 1:1 is talking about the creation of the heavens and the earth, everything; but from verse 2 on, where we see the word “earth” it should be translated “land” and is referring to the promised land. So this is the creation of the promised land and the atmosphere above the promised land, and the things living in the promised land. That’s a really interesting one.

6. The liberal view. And then the liberals say, “You’re all wrong. This is mythology. It never happened. If you believe in Santa Claus and you believe in the tooth fairy, you can believe in Genesis 1, but it is mythology.”

Not only did people have to reinterpret Genesis 1, they also had to reinterpret Genesis chap. 6, 7, 8, and 9, the flood account.

The historic view of the church, virtually unanimous, was that this was a historic global catastrophe. It happened in time-space history, it covered the whole planet and it was unimaginably destructive. And it was responsible for the fossils that we see in the rock layers in the earth.

But in the early 19th century as they abandoned belief in the Biblical chronology and as they abandoned the geological significance of a global flood, some began to say “No, it was a historical local catastrophe. It was actually a flood in the Mesopotamian valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, modern day Iran and Iraq, and it is just described in Genesis in exaggerated language just to emphasize things.

Others said, “No, it was a historic and global flood, but it was tranquil. It left no geological evidence. It was so peaceful, the water rose up, didn’t damage anything, but it killed all the people, they all drowned, and then it all went back down again.

Nobody holds the global tranquil flood view today that I know of, because it is an oxymoron. It is like talking about square circles. There “ain’t no such thing,” as tranquil floods. All floods are destructive; all floods erode; all floods carry sediments and drop these sediments someplace else. There is no such thing as a flood that does not leave any evidence.

And then of course the liberals say,“It’s mythology.”

Now, out of those reinterpretations we come to the beginning of the 20th c. and there are basically three views of earth history in the church.

1. There is the Biblical creation view, the young earth creation view, which says that there was a supernatural creation week of 6 literal creation days and one literal day of resting from creation, followed by a flood about 1600 years later, bringing us up to the present. And all of that is 6 to 10 thousand years old in the young earth view. There is not complete agreement among young earthers about whether there are any gaps in the genealogies of Gen. 5 and 11. But there’s thousands of years.

2. Then there is the theistic evolution view, the view that says the “Bible tells us that God created, science tells us how God created.” And evolution: 1)cosmic evolution, the big bang theory, 2)geological evolution of how the earth gradually changed to become the inhabitable planet we live on, and 3)Darwinian, biological evolution: that’s how God created everything. And so in this view 15 billion years and evolution is a fact; the “whole 10 yards.”

3) Then there’s another group that have various views, and they are what we call progressive creationists. And they believe in billions of years, they accept the big bang theory, they accept earth history as evolutionists present it, but they reject Darwinian evolution. They say, “No, no, you can’t explain how all these complex living creatures, that are so wonderfully designed, evolved from one common ancestor by natural selection and mutation.” Yesterday we looked at the problems of biological evolution on my first talk.

So they believe that every so often, over those billions of years, God stepped into time and supernaturally created new kinds of creatures. So he created some fish and they evolved a little bit for a while, and then God wanted some reptiles so he supernaturally created reptiles, and then they evolved among themselves to get different kinds of reptiles, and then to get mammals, he had to supernaturally enter into the situation and create mammals. And then a few million years later he supernaturally created man. That’s progressive creation.

Now, one thing you need to understand is that evolution is a three part theory.

It is 1) astronomical evolution, the theory of how the cosmos came into existence, how the stars and the galaxies and planets came into existence by time and chance and the laws of nature.

2) Then there is geological evolution which picks up the story when earth is a hot molten ball, which had condensed from the solar gas cloud that became the solar system, and then by time and chance and the laws of nature over millions and millions of years, the earth slowly developed a crust, then localized seas, then eventually became the habitable planet we live on.

3) Then biological evolution picks up the story when you had an earth ready for life and by chance a spark happens that causes non-living matter to change into the first living cell which then reproduces and mutates to become all the different kinds of plants and animals, including us, that we see on the planet today. That is the theory of evolution.

Now the theistic evolutionists, I call 3/3rds evolutionists, because they believe in all three strands of evolution.

Progressive creationists will often say, “We don’t believe in evolution.” What they mean is that they don’t believe in biological evolution. What they do believe in is geological and astronomical evolution. So I call them 2/3rd evolutionists.

I’m a 0/3rds evolutionist, the whole thing is false.

Now I want to talk to you about some reasons why I believe the age of the earth is important, because most, if not all, theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists in the church today are quite emphatic in saying: “The age of the earth doesn’t matter. It’s a side issue. It’s not that important. What we really need to do is fight Darwinism. What we really need to do is fight philosophical naturalism.” But if you listen to the two tapes that I gave yesterday, you’ll see that geological evolution is philosophical naturalism just as much as biological evolution is. So we’re not really fighting naturalism if we don’t deal with the age of the earth.

So let’s look at Psalm 11: 3. It says, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do.” Here’s a typical house in England where I lived for 10 years. It’s a beautiful house. It has square walls, well most houses in England don’t have square corners, they have so much subsidence. It has square windows, a nice roof, it’s water tight. Inside is carpeting, wallpaper, furniture. It’s a beautiful house. But there’s one thing about this house you don’t see: the foundation. And if the foundation is not good, it’s only a matter of time before that house looks like that. If you don’t worry about the foundation and you get ready to sell the house, you won’t sell the house, if the perspective buyer comes in and sees cracks in the foundation, rising damp, (a problem they have there), or subsidence. So foundations matter, even though foundations are rarely visible.

There are five foundational reasons why I believe this issue is so important.

I. First, the Bible’s teaching is clear and church history confirms it.

The Bible’s teaching about the days of creation and the global flood and that this all happened a few thousand years ago is crystal clear.

I want to mention 7 reasons why we should believe the days of creation are literal days.

1. The Hebrew word for day is “yom” and appears almost 1600 times in the OT. In the vast majority, over 95% of the cases, it means a literal day, and it is obvious from the context. So we should assume a literal day as we come to Genesis one, unless there is something that is in the context that indicates that it is one of those figurative, non-literal uses of ‘yom”. When we come to Genesis one, we find that there are plenty of reasons in the context that this is a literal day.

2. First of all it is defined in verse 5. The earth was shrouded in darkness, and God made the light and said the light was called day and the darkness was called night, and there was evening and morning one day. So there “yom” is the light portion of a light-dark cycle, and the whole light-dark cycle, the two literal meanings of day that we use. We are having a meeting right now in the day, and you’re going to go through this meeting and go home and wake up on the next day. It’s the same in Czech, German, and every language you’ve heard of. Those are the literal meanings of day.

3. Then we see in Gen. 1, that day is defined as with an ordinal adjective: “first day, second day, third day, fourth day.” Everywhere without exception, where “yom” is used with a cardinal number in the rest of the OT, it means a literal day.

4. Then there is “yom” used with evening and morning. “There was evening and morning the first day” “evening and morning the second day” “evening and morning the third day”. Everywhere without exception, where “evening and morning” are used in conjunction with day it means a literal day. In fact everywhere where evening and morning are used together or separately, it means a literal evening and a literal morning.

5. And then if we’re still not certain, “yom” is defined again in verse 14 in reference to the heavenly bodies. God said he made “the sun moon and stars so that we could measure seasons, and days, and years.” The years are literal, determined by the heavenly bodies, the seasons are literal determined by the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the days are literal.

6. Then it’s the order of creation. A lot of old-earthers will say, especially if they are in favor of the day-age theory, “If we just made the days into long ages, we resolve the conflict between Genesis and science,” which really means between Genesis and evolution. Hugh Ross is a famous proponent of this. But this view reveals either an ignorance of what the Biblical text actually says, or an ignorance of what the evolutionist say is the order of events in history. Here are 4 contradictions between the Bible and evolution.

a)The Bible says all land plants were created on day three, fish were created on day five. But according to evolution fish evolved 4 to 6 hundred million years ago, then cone bearing trees evolved 125 million years later, but not all plants evolved at the same time. They evolved over hundreds of millions of years. That’s the exact opposite order of Genesis.

b) The Bible says fish and birds were created on the same day. According to evolutionists, fish were evolved into existence, hundreds of millions of years before the first birds.

c) Here’s a big one. The Bible says the earth was created first and the sun moon and stars were created on the fourth day. It’s just exactly the opposite, not by millions, but this time by billions of years.

d) And then the Bible says there was a universal ocean on day one, and then the dry land appeared. The evolutionists say that the earth was initially a hot molten lava ball which developed a hard crust, and eventually developed localized seas. According to evolution theory there has never been a universal ocean on this planet. According to the Bible there have been two: the first two days of creation and Noah’s flood.

Throwing millions of years in Genesis one does not harmonize Genesis with evolution. So what do you have to do? You have to play fast and loose with the text. So day-agers will start to say, “Well, the plants were not actually created on day three. That’s when most of them were created; but some were created before, some after on day four and five. And the sea creatures were primarily created on day 5, but some were created on………..” No, that’s just cutting and pasting. That’s not Bible study.

7. Lastly, is Jesus’ teaching about the age of the earth. It’s amazing that Jesus deals with all the issues that skeptics today have the most problems with. In Mark 10 Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees with a question about divorce, and He says in His answer, “But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.” From the beginning of creation” He’s talking about Adam and Eve. He quotes from Genesis 2 in the next two verses. In Jesus’ view Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning. They were at the beginning.

Then in Luke 11, Jesus is talking about the blood of all the prophets which was shed “from the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacharias.” According to Jesus Abel was the first prophet, he prophesied by his life and his actions. And Jesus says that “Abel was at the foundation of the world.” Now Abel was probably conceived just a year or a year and a half after they were created, because they had no reason to wait for kids, so they got pregnant, I’m sure, right away. Cain was born and as soon as they nursed him, they had another one. There was no world government, no UN saying “We’ve got to control the size of families”. So from Jesus’ perspective, 4000 years later, Abel is at the foundation of the world. A year compared to 4000 is at the foundation.

So let’s grasp it this way. The evolutionist is saying that the cosmos has been in existence for about 15 billion years and man has only been in existence a few hundred thousand at most: “homo sapiens sapien”. So if we made this 15 billion year time line into 24 hours, then man appeared on the scene less than one second before midnight. Most of the history of the cosmos was before man came into existence. From our perspective we would have to say man came into existence at the tail end of creation. Jesus says, Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation; Abel was at the foundation of the world. Jesus was a young-earth creationist. And really the whole argument can be stopped right there. If I’m a follower of Jesus, and Jesus is my Lord, I dare not have a different view of this subject than my Lord has. But most old earth creationists as I have studied this, never pay any attention to what Jesus said about this subject. They only look at Genesis one.

We talked about Noah’s flood yesterday. I won’t go through that. I encourage you to get the tape about the reasons why we believe in a global catastrophic flood. If Noah was describing a local flood in the Mesopotamian valley or Moses was recording that, he could not have been more misleading. Put it another way, if the flood of Noah was a global catastrophe, Moses could not have been more clear. He is emphasizing in numerous ways that this was a global catastrophe.

Why we believe in a young earth:

I. Because the Bible tells us. The genealogies in Genesis 5 tell us how many years it was from Adam till Noah. And chapter 11 tells us how many years it was from Noah to Abraham. And from other passages in the Bible, we can get a pretty accurate date for the life of Abraham up to the time of Christ. So Bishop Usher back in the 16th c. was not the bumbling idiot that he is often presented as. He was one of the most brilliant scholars of his day. And 4004 B.C. is probably not too far off.

And this is the belief of the church until the 19th c. Even old-earth geologist, Davis Young at Calvin College in Michigan, who has influenced many seminary professors and other Christians to doubt the Biblical teaching about the flood and the age of the earth, says, “It cannot be denied, in spite of frequent interpretations that departed from the rigidly literal, that the almost universal view of the Christian world until the 18th c. was that the earth was only a few thousand years old.” He’s just slightly off on his history. It’s really the 19th c. when the church abandoned this belief.

Now we don’t believe something just because the majority of the church believed it. But if our exegesis, our interpretation of Scripture, leads us to believe that the Bible is teaching something, and most of the church also believed that, we dare not ignore the history of the church.

Why old-earthers do not believe what all of our forefathers believed before the 19th c.

Well, the old-earthers make it very clear, and we could multiply quotes like this. Paddle Pun, professor of biology at Wheaton College: “It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of the Genesis record, without regard to all the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science, is that God created heaven and earth in 6 solar days, that man was created on the 6th day, that death and chaos entered the world after the fall of Adam and Eve, and that all of the fossils were the result of a catastrophic universal flood which spared only Noah and his family and the animals therewith.” (He has it a little distorted here. Young earth creationists have never believed that all of the fossils are a result of the flood. Most, the vast majority are, but some are pre-flood and some are post flood. ) But notice, why doesn’t he believe this obvious straightforward reading of the text, (and it is obvious and straightforward in English or Czech or German or Hebrew.) It’s because of all the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science. No, not science, evolution. He has swallowed evolutionary thinking.

Now Paddle Pun does not believe in Darwinian evolution. He is a progressive creationist. In his own field of study, he rejects evolution. But in the fields where he does not have expertise, where he is just a layman like all of you, geology and astronomy, he blindly accepts what the scientists tell him about geological and astronomical evolution.

II. So that leads me to my second point, that science has not proven that the earth is old. Contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, science has not proven that. ( explained in parts 1,2,3 in this series of 5 CDs)

III.The third reason why this issue is foundational and why we cannot compromise on the age of the earth is because belief in millions of years assaults the character of God.
And the evolutionists see this more clearly than most Christians. Here is a statement by a philosopher writing in the British journal, Nature, the leading science journal in Great Britain. It’s in a book review of a book attacking Darwinism purely from a scientific perspective. And this is what this atheist philosopher says: “The problem that biological evolution poses for natural theologians is the sort of God that a Darwinian version of evolution implies. The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror. Whatever the God implied by the evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not” (that’s not quite an accurate description of God, but if we put the real description of God in here, the quote is even more powerful), “He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galapagos” (the Galapagos Islands where Darwin birthed his theory) “is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.”

Now why would he say that? Because he understands that the theory of evolution is not just about time. It’s about what happened in all those millions of years. And it was evolutionary dead ends, mass extinctions. According to the evolutionists all the dinosaurs were wiped out about 65 million years ago by a massive asteroid impact. It’s a story of carnage. And if you are a progressive creationist and you believe that God supernaturally created the different kinds, you still don’t erase this problem of the carnage and the dead ends, and the non-functioning nature of the creation. If that is the process that God used in creation over millions of years, He must be a wicked bumbling idiot, not the wise intelligent creator revealed in Scripture.

Bertrand Russell was the 20th century’s most famous atheist. He gave a lecture in London in 1927 entitled, “Why I am not a Christian” and it was published as a book. And this is one of the reasons he said he is not a Christian. “When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people believe that this world with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best the omnipotent and omniscient God is able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.” You see what he is saying? He is looking at the world’s defects, mutations, mistakes, and he is saying, if this is what God made, what kind of a God is it? I can’t believe in that kind of a God.

Carl Sagan put it this way, (he’s the famous atheist cosmologist who died a couple of years ago) “If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants it? Why is he constantly repairing and complaining. No there’s one thing the Bible makes clear. The Biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design. He’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.”

That’s what the world thinks.

Over the last 200 years the church has compromised with old earth geology, old universe astronomy, and said: “It doesn’t matter. You can believe that. Just believe the Gospel.” And what has happened over those 200 years? Has the non-Christian world said, “Oh, this makes the Gospel a lot easier for me to believe.”? No. They say, “If your God made the world the way we say it happened, I don’t want to know Him.”

IV. Belief in millions of years
I. not only contradicts what the Bible says,
II. not only is it contrary to science,
III. not only does it assault the nature of God,
IV. belief in millions of years contradicts the Bible’s teaching on death. And this follows on from the point that I just made. But I want to drive this home.

Charles Darwin wrote this at the end of his Origins book:
“Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object that we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”

In Darwin’s view, the process of death is what brought man into existence.

You see evolution, and creation-and-the-Bible, have a completely different view of death. In evolution, death over millions of years, bloodshed, suffering, disease, and extinctions led to man’s existence. And even if you are a progressive creationist and believe that God supernaturally created different kinds, you are still accepting the history. And so you are accepting that there was a history of death and bloodshed and violence even if God created supernaturally the reptiles, and supernaturally created the first birds.

The Biblical history says God created a perfect creation, man rebelled, and that brought sin and death and disease and suffering into the world, just the exact opposite.

As we talked about yesterday, the fossil record is a record of death and violence and struggle and extinction and disease. And that’s where they got the idea of millions of years: from the fossil record. For the evolutionist, this has always been the way it has been. Nature has always been “red in tooth and claw”. It’s “the survival of the fittest.” And it applies to every level of the biological tree. “It’s a dog eat dog world.” It’s an amoeba eat amoeba world. It’s a dinosaur eat dinosaur world. And it’s been that way from the beginning.
But that is absolutely contradictory to everything the Bible says about death. In Genesis one it says that God “saw all that He had made,” (after the 6th day), “and behold it was very good.” That’s a Hebrew way of saying it was perfect. It was just the way God wanted it.

But something happened, because two chapters later we find that Adam and Eve have sinned, God has judged the serpent which had physical implications, he judged Eve which had physical implications, he judged Adam which had physical implications, and in Gen. 3 it says He also judged the ground. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” God judged not only man spiritually at the fall, he judged man’s domain.

And in Genesis 5:29 when Noah was born we see the impact of this curse on the minds of people living 1600 years later, because Noah’s father named him Noah saying, “This one shall give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands, arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed.” And then at the end of the flood, Noah comes off the ark, and the Lord smelled the soothing aroma of the sacrifice that he had made, and the Lord said to Himself: “I will never again curse the ground.” He cursed it at the fall, he cursed it the flood. And the geological record is a record of the curse of God on this earth for sin.

When we go to the NT, Paul summarizes this teaching in Romans 8 where he says that the whole creation is waiting eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God, for our final redemption. The whole creation was subjected to futility. The creation itself will also be set free from its slavery to corruption. The whole creation groans and suffers. God didn’t make the creation like that; it became that way because of God’s judgment at the fall. And it will be set free from that corruption when our redemption is completed and Jesus comes again.

In Acts 3:21, Peter preached that Jesus went to heaven and now “heaven must receive Him until the period of the restoration of all things.”

In Colossians 1, Paul talks about “the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him (Jesus Christ) and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether things on earth, or things in heaven.” Jesus’ redemption was not just about saving us spiritually. It was about redeeming the whole creation, which is under the judgment of God.

And in Isaiah, we get a picture of what that redeemed state will be like when he says that “the wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The little suckling child will play by the hole of the asp.” Creatures which are now dangerous to man, which are carnivores, will one day be completely harmless and herbivores, just like in the garden of Eden, when all the animals and man ate plants.

And then we come to the last book of the Bible, Revelation, and it says that there will be “no more death, no more tears, no more sorrow”, and what does it say? “No more curse.” From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is absolutely consistent. Death came because of sin. Evolution says: death was always here.

If we really believe in the geological ages, then we have a problem because if God cursed the earth with thorns after Adam sinned, and that’s what Gen 3:18 says, then why do we find fossil thorns in rocks that are supposedly millions of years old before man? And we do. We find fossil thorns in rocks that “are” hundreds of millions of years old.

You know what else we find? We find disease in the fossil record. Here’s a record of the diagnosis of the first dinosaur tumor in a dinosaur fossil of “100 million years old”. And he says here: “diseases look the same through time.” It makes no difference if it is now or 100 million years old. They found cancer and arthritis in dinosaur bones. There’s a whole field of science that developed called “paleopathology,” the study of disease in the fossil record. If the fossil record is all before man, then what did the curse cause? Nothing. But that’s not what the Bible says.

Here’s a picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a rare photograph. And Eve says to Adam: “Oh, what a perfect world.” “Yes Eve it’s very good just like God said.” But what Adam and Eve didn’t know, if the earth is really millions of years old, is, that under their feet, under the grass of the garden of Eden, were thousands of feet of sedimentary rock containing billions of fossils of former living plants and animals that had all died before they had been created. That is not what the Bible teaches. That is absolutely contradictory to what the Bible teaches. Those fossils are the result of Noah’s flood 1600 years after Adam and Eve sinned, not billions of years before they sinned.

So this issue of the age of the earth is a battle between two histories of death. The Bible says no death in the beginning; man sinned and rebelled against God, and that brought death into the creation. The Bible consistently teaches that death is temporary. It is an intrusion into history, and it will one day be done away with. But evolution says death has always been here. It has always been part of the process. As long as there has been life there has been death, and as long as there will be life there will be death. It’s not an intrusion, death is a permanent part of history. And if we believe in millions of years, what we’re really saying is that for millions of years before the fall of Adam, there was death and God called that very good. That’s just not what the Bible teaches.

V. The next reason that this issue is so foundational is belief in millions of years undermines the proclamation and belief in the Gospel. And the evolutionists again see this more clearly than many Christians.

I want to read a quote by Thomas Huxley. He was the bulldog defender of Darwin in the 19th c., a close personal friend of Darwin. He was one of Britain’s leading biologists. And more than any other single individual, he was probably the most responsible for the success of evolution in the minds of people in Great Britain, and especially in the church. And yet he had no respect for the Christians who compromised with evolution. And he wrote a book called “Science and Hebrew Tradition Essays.”

This is what he said in 1897: “I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how anyone for a moment can doubt that Christian theology must rise or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history. The identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value, unless they possess the historical character assigned to them.” Those early chapters are historical. He goes on and gives examples of his reasoning: “If the covenant with Abraham was not made,” (if that really did not happen in history), “if Abraham was more or less a mythical hero such as Theseus, if the story of the deluge is a fiction, if that of the fall is a legend, and that of the creation the dream of a seer, if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more real value as history than the stories of the regal period of Rome, what is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, the Gospel, which is so much more clearly enunciated in the Old Testament.”

He goes on: “And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the NT who on this theory have not only accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksand.”

Do you see what he is saying? If Christians don’t believe the early chapters of Genesis, they have just destroyed the whole foundation for believing the Gospel and everything else that the Bible teaches. And I would submit to you that over the last 100 years since he made that statement, that is exactly what has happened in the Western world that was once heavily influenced by Biblical Christianity. And you see it most clearly in Britain and America where the Gospel made such an impact through the Great Awakening at the time of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers.

The world is looking and they are saying, “You Christians don’t believe the early chapters of Genesis? Why should we believe the rest of it that is built on the foundation of the early chapters of Genesis?”

Here is an atheist saying the same thing, almost 80 years later. “It becomes clear now that the whole justification of Jesus’ life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.”

And that’s how most of the world today thinks, because they have been brainwashed with the lie of evolution and the lie of millions and billions of years.

The Bible traces the genealogy of Jesus in Luke all the way back to Adam
And it gives us the names of those people, so that we know that Jesus was a real person in time-space history. And he was a real descendant of Adam to solve the problems that Adam caused. But if we don’t believe the early chapters of Genesis, then what we are saying is that Jesus is a descendant of a metaphor, of a myth.

In I Cor. 15, Paul says that Jesus is the “last Adam” “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Can you have the Gospel without Jesus? Of course not. But you can’t have the Gospel without Adam, because Jesus died to solve the problems that Adam caused. And if Adam didn’t really exist, or he didn’t really sin as the Bible says, then Jesus died for a mythological problem. And if Jesus died for a mythological problem, then Jesus is a mythological savior. And if he is a mythological savior, then He has promised us a mythological hope. The whole Gospel message collapses.

As I said yesterday, Michael Denton, an agnostic, author of “Evolution, a theory in Crisis” (1985), said this: “Today it is the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and skeptical outlook of the 20th century.” And what was the foundation of Darwin’s theory? His theory would have never been born if the geologists had not already given him, supposedly proven, millions and millions of years.

Here’s a statement by a former Baptist who is now one of the leading opponents of Christianity at Harvard University, a professing atheist, a senior scientist there, E,O, Wilson. He wrote in the Humanist Magazine in 1992, “As were many persons from Alabama, I was a born-again Christian. When I was 15, I entered the So. Baptist Church, with great interest in the Fundamentalist religion. I left at 17, when I got to the University of Alabama and heard about evolution theory.”

Martin Lang is probably right when he says that “More cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution than to anything else. It has destroyed the faith of millions, literally, millions.” And we need to grasp the true Biblical history of creation, corruption, the catastrophe of Noah, the confusion at the tower of Babel, Christ’s coming. Why did he come? He came, born as a man, born as a baby, to live His life to show us what man was supposed to be, how Adam should have lived, and didn’t. But he didn’t come just to give us an example. He died on the cross to solve the problem that was started in the Garden. And he’s coming again to liberate this world from all the dark results of that sin.

SUMMARY
So reviewing,the theory of “millions of years” is not a scientific fact and if you have lingering doubts about that I encourage you to become informed with some of the literature out there.

Old earth thinking assaults the character of God. Old earth thinking contradicts the Bible’s thinking on death. Old earth thinking undermines the proclamation and belief in the Gospel.

I was talking to one of the most famous Christian leaders in America about a year ago. If I told you his name, I think most of you would know who he is. We were having a private conversation about this whole subject, and he said to me: “Terry, the age of the earth just doesn’t matter. I believe God could have created in 6 seconds, 6 days, 6 million years, it doesn’t matter. I believe God is a great God.” You know what he was really saying when he said that? He is a sincere godly man, who has led more people to Christ than I ever will. He was really saying: “It doesn’t matter what the Bible says.” Because the Bible says God created in 6 days, not in 6 seconds, not 6 million years, 6 days.

And so it does matter. It matters because God has spoken, it matters because he has told us the origin of death. It matters because he has explained the Gospel to us and shown us in the Word of God that the Gospel is based on Genesis, and the Gospel is taught from Genesis to Revelation. It matters. The real problem is that most of our theologians in most of our seminaries have bowed the knee to the authority of science, really the authority of evolutionists.

What’s our authority?
Is it the infallible Word of God who knows everything, who was there at the beginning, who always tells the truth; or is it the fallible opinions of sinful men,
who don’t know everything, who make mistakes, who don’t always tell the truth, sometimes deliberately telling us false things, and who are in rebellion against God and try to explain the world so they don’t have to be accountable to God?

For 200 years the church has bowed the knee to the scientist and not to the Word of God. The scientist says “The earth is billions of years old. Take my word for it.” God says “I created in 6 days. Take my word for it.”
In Isaiah God says this: “For my hand made all these things. Thus all these things came into being, declares the Lord. But to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit and who trembles at my word.” We need to stop trembling at the words of scientists, and tremble at the Word of God. And we need to call other Christians to do the same, including sincere, godly pastors, sincere godly OT scholars, sincere godly theologians who have been brainwashed through their education just like all the rest of us. And we need to call them back to the word of God.

And I submit to you that we are really not a humble person unless we humbly bow before the Word of God, not to worship the Bible, but to worship the God who has spoken in the Bible.

We’re in a battle; we’re in a huge battle. And for the last 200 years the evolutionists have been destroying the foundation of the church and they have built their humanistic philosophy of moral relativism on the foundation of evolution. There is no God, there is no one to whom we are accountable, there is no one who makes the laws. So you can do whatever you want. If you want to be married to a man if you are a man, that’s OK. If you want to rape someone, if you want to go into school and shoot someone, there’s no law of God that you will have to answer to. That’s the product of evolutionary thinking. So we have a battle, and we need to rebuild the foundations. We need to understand the truth that science does not prove evolution. What we actually know, and it’s increasingly becoming the case, that the scientific evidence fits what the Bible says. It does not fit what evolution says.

So we are in a battle. And if you’re going to win the battle, you understand that the battle is for the minds of men, because if you think wrongly, you live wrongly. And so we must get our thinking reoriented, and we have to learn answers. And there are a lot of resources out there. I encourage you, I plead with you to become informed.

30 years ago, I was converted to Christ at a university, and there were just a handful of books, maybe about 5, defending the truth of Genesis. And today there are 100 times that many, and not just in the English language. So please get informed. Read. Stop watching TV for a few months, and read some books, or buy some creation videos, and become informed. We are in a battle and we are losing in our church and in our culture. God bless you.

I offer the following as a parable to show how to view the relationship between general and special revelation. Sometimes a parable can give clearer understanding than normal discourse.  This parable parallels the claim of Biologos that DNA proves we descended from 10,000 monkeys, (or hominids) not from 2, Adam & Eve.

National Geographic reported  on Sept 25, 2017  the astounding discovery in Jerusalem of the bones of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  There is no question it was the Mary of the Bible because a small clay tablet over her bones says she was the mother of Jesus and of James, Joses, Jude and Simon, brothers precisely so named in Mark 6:3 and Matt 13:55.  A week later bones were discovered in a tomb in Jerusalem showing scars of nails on the ankles and wrists.  And yesterday, a DNA test of Mary and this crucified person showed they had the exact same DNA.  Therefore we can confidently say that Jesus never rose and Christianity is a fraud.

The following are several responses I’ve heard to this new discovery in Jerusalem that parallel the responses to the latest discoveries of science that prove that there was no Adam and Eve,  and no literal Genesis one.

1. We have to give careful attention to these scientific discoveries, because science is God’s general revelation.
2. We just can’t decide which one is right,  because God has two books : general revelation and special revelation,  and they sometimes appear to contradict.  To help us fit them together, we have to limit the Bible to salvation issues, and be skeptical of some of its historical claims. Often science is a better source of past history.
3. We can’t reject this new science with claims that the Bible denies it, because the Bible is always an interpreted Bible.  And we may have the wrong interpretation.
4. Maybe the church believed the resurrection, for 20 centuries (18 centuries in the case of Gen 1-3),  but  we have such sophisticated scientists today, some with several doctor’s degrees from the most prestigious universities, that we must give them a lot of weight for what they say.  Those discoveries in Jerusalem were made by the finest geologists trained at Harvard and Yale. Besides some famous Reformed theologians studied this science and believe it is correct.
5. I believe the Bible because  God never lies, because  the resurrection of Christ is prophesied in the Old Testament and God always keeps his promises, and because  I believe the infallible witness of the Holy Spirit and the more than 500 witnesses of the risen Christ, rather than scientists living millennia after the events, men who were not there and are fallible.
6. Without doubt this “scientific discovery” is just another case of the Piltdown hoax. (Bones were planted in 1912 in gravel in Piltdown, England  to prove the missing link, using the skull of a man and the jaw of an ape, with acid and files to make the two match. 500 people wrote papers on it, before the hoax was discovered in 1953).  Similarly, the clay tablet in Mary’s grave was also probably forged. Much origin science is put together by people who have a vested interest in doing the devil’s work to deceive and make us doubt the truth of the Bible. The Jerusalem “discovery” is no doubt the same because the hammer (man’s scientific ideas) breaks, the anvil (the Bible) stands.

The first four answers are based on a false idea of how we must define general revelation.  Our definition must come from the Bible itself. According the the Bible, general revelation teaches two things: 1) the nature of God:  Romans 1: 20 “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”  “The heavens declare the glory of God.”    And 2) general revelation teaches the law of God:  Romans 2:14-15 “The Gentiles… show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness….”   These two things: God’s nature and his law are revealed to everyone,  that’s why it is called general.   But the age of the earth,  how Adam was made, and the resurrection of Christ, are are not part of general revelation.  They can be known infallibly only by special revelation. Special revelation is called special because it is known only by some people, not all people, by people to whom God reveals it in His Word.

General revelation does not come through the minds of men: it is directly from God through what he has made and by the law in the heart. It is our direct view of the sunrise, the growth of plants from seed, the steadiness of the constellations, the regularity of our heartbeat, the giving of fruitful seasons (Acts 14).  It is so direct that we are “without excuse” for not seeing God in it.

Science, however, comes through the mind of man, and in the area of origins science, (which analyzes events where no man was present), man’s heart affects what he sees or wants to see.  Because man is a sinner he is going to willfully ignore the creation and the flood  according to II Peter 3:5-7  – “They willfully ignore that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed being flooded with water.”   Because it is filtered through the mind of man, we are not “without excuse” if we don’t agree with the scientific theory of the big bang, or the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, or the goo-to-you-via-the-zoo theory.  Such things may not be considered “the second book”, for they are not general revelation.

The problem with answer 3 is that it casts doubts on all Bible interpretation.  But   correct interpretations are possible if they 1) take account of the type of literature, whether it is history or poetry ( and Genesis one is absolutely clear that it is history), 2)take the meaning of words according to near context . So day has to mean “day” a) because of “evening and morning” and because of the numbers given to each day; and b)   because of the use of the word elsewhere as in Exodus 20 , “for in 6 days…”  For if God wanted to say a day was a million years, there is a Hebrew word for it called “age” , eon.  But he did not say “6 days you shall labor, for in 6 eons I made heaven and earth.”  If the days were eons, but God said days, he is lying to us.

Answer 4 is based on a logical fallacy called  argumentum ad authoritatem.  If Luther had accepted this kind of argument, there would have been no Reformation, because the majority of theologians accepted transubstantiation, indulgences, the immaculate conception of Mary, and infused rather than imputed righteousness as the basis of justification.

Only answers 5 and 6 are correct.

Musings of Gary from the heart

After the entertaining story of Harry Ironside, you will read about more than ten examples of people who went from confessing the Christian faith to totally rejecting it, after being convinced of evolution.  Then follow testimonies of those who were brought back to faith or strengthened in it after being convinced that  biology, geology and astronomy do not contradict the young earth teaching of the Bible.

Here is a wonderful story of the power of the Gospel.  It is found on pages 64 and 65 of Boice’s Foundations of the Christian Faith.  

           Early in the ministry of Dr. Harry A. Ironside, the great evangelist and Bible teacher  was living in the San Francisco Bay Area  working with a group of believers called “Brethren.”  One Sunday as he was walking through  the city he came upon a group of Salvation Army workers holding a meeting on the corner of Market and Grant Avenues.  There were probably sixty of them.  When they recognized Ironside they immediately asked him if he would give his testimony. So he did, giving a word about how God had saved him through faith in the bodily death and literal resurrection of Jesus.

As he was speaking, Ironside noticed that on the edge of the crowd a well-dressed man had taken a card from his pocket and had written something on it. As Ironside finished his talk this man came forward, lifted his hat and very politely handed him the card. On one side was his name, which Ironside immediately recognized.  The man was one of the early socialists who had made a name for himself lecturing not only for socialism but also against Christianity. As Ironside turned the card over, he read, “Sir, I challenge you to debate with me the question “Agnosticism versus Christianity” in the Academy of Science Hall next Sunday afternoon at four o’clock.  I will play all expenses.”

Ironside reread the card aloud to the audience and then replied somewhat like this.  “ I am very much interested in this challenge…Therefore I will be glad to agree to this debate on the following conditions namely, that in order to prove that Mr._____________ has something worth fighting for and worth debating about, he will promise to bring with him to the Hall next Sunday two people, whose qualification I will give in a moment, as proof that agnosticism is of real value in  changing human lives and building true character.

‘First he must promise to bring with him one man who was for years what we commonly call a “down and outer.’  I am not particular as to the exact nature of the sins that had wrecked his life and made him an outcast from society- whether a drunkard, or a criminal of some kind, or a victim of his sensual appetite-  but a man who for years was under the power of evil habits from which he could not deliver himself, but who on some occasion entered one of Mr.——–“s meetings and heard his glorification of agnosticism and his denunciations of the Bible and Christianity, and whose heart and mind as he listened to such an address were so deeply stirred that he went away from that meeting saying, “Henceforth, I too am an agnostic!’  and as a result of imbibing that particular philosophy found that a new power had come into his life.  The sins he once loved he now hates, and righteousness and good-ness are now the ideals of his life.  He is now an entirely new man, a credit to himself and an asset to society – all because he is an agnostic.

“Secondly, I would like Mr.__________ to promise to bring with him one woman- and I think he may have more difficulty in finding the woman than the man- who was once a poor, wrecked, characterless outcast, the slave of evil passions, and the victim of man’s corrupt living… perhaps one who had lived for years in some evil resort… utterly lost, ruined and wretched because of her life of sin.  But this woman also entered a hall where Mr._______ was proclaiming his agnosticism and ridiculing the message of the Holy Scriptures.  As she listened, hope was born in her heart, and she said, ‘This is just what I need to deliver me from the slavery of sin!’    She followed the teaching and became an intelligent agnostic or infidel.  As a result, her whole being revolted against the degradation of the life she had been living.  She fled from the den of iniquity where she had been held captive so long;  and today, rehabilitated, she has won her way back to an honored position in society and is living a clean, virtuous, happy life- all because she is an agnostic.

“Now” he said, addressing the gentleman who had presented him with his card and the challenge, “If you will promise to bring these two people with you as examples of what agnosticism can do, I will promise to meet you at the Hall of Science at four o’clock next –Sunday, and I will bring with me at the very least 100 men and women who for years lived in just such sinful degradation as I have tried to depict, but who have been gloriously saved through believing the gospel which you ridicule. I will have these men and women with me on the platform as witnesses to the miraculous saving power of Jesus Christ- and as present-day proof of the truth of the Bible.”

Dr. Ironside then turned to the Salvation Army captain, a woman, and said,  “Captain, have you any who could go with me to such a meeting?”

She exclaimed with enthusiasm, “We can give you forty at least just from this one corps, and we will give you a brass band to lead the procession!”

“Fine” Dr. Ironside answered.  “Now, Mr._______, I will have no difficulty in picking up sixty others from the various missions, gospel halls, and evangelical churches of the city;  and if you will promise faithfully to bring two such exhibits as I have described, I will come marching in at the head of such a procession, with the band playing ‘Onward, Christians Soldiers, and I will be ready for the debate.”

Apparently the man who had made the challenge must have had some sense of humor, for he smiled wryly and waved his hand in a deprecating kind of way as if to say, “nothing doing!” and then edged out of the crowd while the bystanders clapped for Ironside and the others.

Applying this story to our present situation:  What has been the fruit of teaching evolution and what has been the fruit of teaching the Biblical truth?

First THE FRUIT of starting out as a Christian and then accepting evolution. These stories bring me great grief:
1. Harvard sociobiologist, E. O Wilson said,

“As were many persons from Alabama, I was a born-again Christian.  When I was fifteen, I entered the Southern Baptist Church with great fervor and interest in the fundamentalist religion. I left the church when I got to the university of Alabama and heard about evolutionary theory.”

2. Michael Ruse, the Canadian philosopher of science and anti-creationist:

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science.  Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion- a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality.  I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but the creationist Duane Gish is absolutely right- evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution today.

3. Charles Templeton. He went from being the most famous evangelist in the 1940’s to an agnostic who wrote Farewell to God because he accepted evolution.

Charles Templeton began with concern about the spiritual state of post-Depression youth, so mass evangelism exploded onto the American scene in the 1940s. Thousands of young servicemen and civilians streamed to arenas to see the programs, which included preaching, music, and various acts.

One of the leaders in this movement was a young man from Canada, Charles Templeton, born in 1915. He was generally acknowledged to be the most versatile of the new young evangelists. Templeton soon rose to prominence, even surpassing another dynamic young preacher, Billy Graham. In 1946, he was listed among those best used of God by the National Association of Evangelicals.4

As the pastor of the rapidly growing Avenue Road Church in Toronto, which he had started with only his family and a few friends, Templeton also became one of three vice-presidents of the newly-formed Youth For Christ International organization in 1945. He then nominated his good friend, Billy Graham, to be field evangelist for the new ministry. Templeton, Graham, and a few others regularly spoke to thousands, winning many to Christ both in America and in Europe.

Newspapers and magazines carried reports of his meetings informing readers he was winning 150 converts a night. In Evansville, Indiana, the total attendance over the two week campaign was 91,000 out of a population of 128,000. Church attendance went up 17%.

However, despite his popularity and seeming success as an evangelist, all was not well with Charles Templeton. The more he read, the more he found he was beginning to question the essentials of the Christian faith, because he could no longer believe God’s Word beginning with Genesis.

In a conversation with Billy Graham concerning Templeton’s desire to attend Princeton Theological Seminary, Templeton stated:

‘But, Billy, it’s simply not possible any longer to believe, for instance, the biblical account of creation. The world wasn’t created over a period of days a few thousand years ago; it has evolved over millions of years. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s demonstrable fact.’5

Templeton warned Graham that it was ‘intellectual suicide’ to not question the Bible and to go on preaching God’s Word as authoritative.

With this background of doubt about God’s Word welling up inside, and lacking any type of formal education, he decided to pursue a degree in theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Resigning from the church he had pastored for several years, Templeton began, with special permission, his coursework at Princeton in 1948.

Rather than assuage his doubts by providing sound theological answers for the questions he had concerning the authority of the Bible, the historical veracity of Genesis and the deity of Christ, Princeton only served to increase his qualms. This is not surprising, considering the influences that had infiltrated Princeton through people like Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield concerning one’s approach to the Scripture in Genesis. For instance, Hodge, who accepted the millions of years and rejected literal creation-days, taught:

‘It is of course admitted that, taking this account [Genesis] by itself, it would be most natural to understand the word [day] in its ordinary sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict with facts, [millions of years] and another sense avoids such conflict, then it is obligatory on us to adopt that other.’6

Warfield (1851–1921) went further and, unlike Hodge, even accepted Darwinism. Templeton, like generations of others, was taught at Princeton to reject parts of Genesis in favor of man’s beliefs concerning such things as billions of years.7

After graduating from Princeton, Templeton accepted a position with the National Council of Churches, conducting preaching missions across the United States and Canada. However, he faced increasing health problems, specifically frequent chest pains. He visited a specialist in Pennsylvania who encouraged him, after finding nothing wrong with his heart, to clear up the conflict in his life—namely the doubts he harbored about the authority of the Bible from which he so fervently preached to thousands each night.8

This reminds of another who suffered illness because of a great conflict in his life regarding teaching that undermined God’s Word. Charles Darwin, who started out in training to be an Anglican minister, ended up rejecting Christianity the more he believed in evolution. It has been said that inner conflict, because of knowing that evolution would wipe the idea of God from the minds of millions, contributed greatly to Darwin’s psychosomatic illness.9

Templeton’s struggles affected others, too. As Templeton wrestled with the ‘demonstrable fact’ of evolution which made it impossible for him to believe ‘the biblical account of creation’,10 he sought out his close friend, Billy Graham. This caused Graham as well to grapple with tough questions that shook the very roots of the faith he professed and preached daily—namely, ‘was the Bible completely true?’11

With ‘science’ pulling Templeton one way and the Bible seemingly pulling him in an altogether different direction, he resigned from his position with the National Council of Churches and took over the Department of Evangelism of the Presbyterian Church USA. At the same time, he hosted a CBS TV series, called Look Up and Live.

Finally, however, the doubts about everything he stood for became too great and he decided to leave the ministry.

In his autobiography, Farewell to God, Charles Templeton lists his ‘reasons for rejecting the Christian faith’. Most of these relate to the origins issue and thus the accuracy of the book of beginnings—Genesis

• Physicists who say ‘it took billions of years for the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and our world to evolve to its present … form.’12
• Anthropologists who say that ‘our earlier ancestors did not suddenly appear fully formed, but were anthropoid creatures who lived on the earth millions of years ago.
• Geneticists who say it is ‘nonsense’ to believe that the ‘reason for all the crime, poverty, suffering, and general wickedness in the world’ is sin.13
• Geologists who say ‘there is no evidence whatsoever of a worldwide flood’ as told in Genesis.13
• The two ‘Creation stories … each differing from the other at almost every point.’14
• The ‘fables’ (in Genesis 1 and 2) which have ‘remained the grounds of Christian theology across the centuries.’15
• Noah and his family were too primitive to have built the Ark.16
• All the animals could not possibly have fitted on the Ark.16
• Where did the water come from for the Flood?17
• Those Christians who ‘reject any advance in science or learning that contradicts the Genesis account of the creation of the world, the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and God’s curse on the world and humankind … and who believe that the only deliverance from this curse and eventual banishment to an eternal hell is to be “born again”.’18
• The ‘grim and inescapable reality’ that ‘all life is predicated on death. Every carnivorous creature must kill and devour another creature. It has no option.’19

4. Stalin, from a Russian Orthodox seminary student in Georgia (one of the Soviet republics) to the violent atheist. The following is taken from Nancy Pearcey’s book Total Truth.   Nancy spoke at Dordt 3 years ago.

Particularly startling is the corrosive impact of Darwin. e.g. Ch 8 Darwins of the Mind p 227: She describes reading a biography of Joseph Stalin

. . .when the young Stalin was a seminary student, studying to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. As one of his friends relates, they were discussing religion:
“Joseph heard me out, and after a moment’s silence, Joseph said: “‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God …’
“I was astonished at these words. I had never heard anything like it before.
“How can you say such things, Joseph?’ I exclaimed.
“‘I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense,’ Joseph said.
“‘What book is that?’ I inquired.
“‘Darwin. You must read it,’ Joseph impressed on me.”

We all know what happened after that: Having become an atheist, Stalin went on to murder literally 20 to 40 million of his own people in his attempt to construct an officially atheistic communist state.

Between Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, etc. Darwin’s corrosive principles laid the foundation for the murder of more than 125 million people in the 20th century. About three times more than the 38 million killed in all the wars of the 20th century!

This is detailed in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, et al. Harvard University Press (October 1999)ISBN: 0674076087  (I’ve read this book, by 6 French journalists who simply report on the archives in Russia and elsewhere opened up after Communism fell.   Gary)

Pearcey goes on to describe the impact of Darwin on

5. 6. 7, 8 . John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., causing them to loose their faith and develop philosophical pragmatism etc. It is sad to see another victim fall. “Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” Matthew 7:20

   9. Howard Van Til, CRC professor at Calvin College, from around 1970 – 1995. s – from Calvinist to pantheist.

Howard Van Til taught animal ancestry at Calvin, and was told by the Synod of 1990 (I was on the synodical committee that recommended this) to no longer “espouse animal ancestry in a church sponsored college” .

After he retired he revealed his true colors:  he said he did not believe in the Creator- creature distinction of the Bible, but believed that God was part of the creation, a being he said we should call the SGT, something greater than.

I went to his church’s blog and found him conversing with his RCA pastor (who was defrocked from the Spring Lake Reformed Church) over how to combine evolution and the Hindu teaching of the transmigration of souls .

10. Harry Kuitert 1924 – 2017 – In the 70’s many times the CRC Banner had articles about his teaching of animal ancestry in the free University, and the Banner was warning against that teaching spreading to the USA.

In 1967 he succeeded the illustrious theologian G. C. Berkouwer as professor of systematic theology at the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam, and in 1989 he retired from this chair. Kuitert in the course of his life moved from Reformed orthodoxy to Reformed middle orthodoxy following his mentor and Ph.D. supervisor Berkouwer, for whom he wrote his dissertation on the Divine Co-Humanity (Dutch: medemenselijkheid, Afrikaans: Medemenslikheid) (De mensvormigheid Gods (1962); German edition 1967). Then, after writing voluminously, critically, and yet appreciatively on Karl Barth, Kuitert later also moved on to a totally unorthodox stance on Jesus Christ, skipping Neo-Orthodoxy altogether. Kuitert developed his views beyond those of Berkouwer whose views seemed definitive.

According to Ecumenical News International, Kuitert, after his own emeritation in 1989, and by now the most widely read theologian in the Netherlands, broke completely with Berkouwer and “Middle Orthodox” tradition (the theological mainstream of the reformed church) in his book, Jesus, the Inheritance of Christianity (1998). “Jesus supported the Jewish view of God, so he never saw himself as God on earth. He is not a Second God, nor the Second Person of the Holy Trinity,” said the 80 years-old Kuitert, adopting publicly an informal unitarian stance on the key doctrine of Christian faith, much to the grief of those who continue to love and appreciate the work of Kuitert’s mentor Berkouwer.

One could fill hundreds of pages with similar stories.

Now what has been the FRUIT of teaching the Biblical view of creation?   I’ll just quote many letters sent to Answers in Genesis, about how their internet site, their books, and museum have strengthened faith in Scripture.

1,  R.C. Alabama “My son in law, daughter, and grandchildren paid a visit to the ark.  My son-in-law was not saved. We had been praying for him for so long.  At the Ark, he surrendered to the Lord Jesus.  It was just a wonderful moment.  We are all indebted to you for putting together a wonderful place for him to find the Lord Jesus. We appreciate you all for that.  Praise God!  (Nov. 2017)

2. G. K. Minnesota “The information in Answers in Genesis new book   “Replacing Darwin; the New Origin of Species” is what prompted me to write this. Thank you for improving my understanding of God through a better understanding of Genesis.  March 2018

3. B.H. Virginia “I am a ministries pastor. My pastor gave me a video series to watch put together by Answers in Genesis. Now I see the world in light of God’s Word. This past week we brought 18 of our kids from church to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, which amazed the kids.   I thank you so much because from the first video got me hooked to this content. I purchased the Foundations 6 DVD set, which has made the Bible’s authority on all things so clear now to me, and it all makes sense now.  Oct 2017

4. J. B. Kentucky “Thank you for helping us with our outreach Friday night with AIG resources at a school event. What a source of real science you provided for so many children and their parents. When people see you love them and their children more than you love money, it makes an impact on their hearts and that leads them to a receptiveness to your tracts, magazines, and DVDs. I would also like to thank you for helping me be a better Sunday school teacher. I am so thankful for how God used you to strengthen my understanding of Scripture. I’m also thankful for what our God has done at the Creation Museum ever since you opened in 2007.  Dec 2017

5.B.T. I’m a 16 year old junior who is ridiculed in high school for being a Christian, especially as a Christian who believes in Genesis.  I want to  thank you for providing answers because I can refute evolution beliefs with ease now.  Please continue your work for the Lord and may God bless your ministry. Sept  2017

6. A.C. Washington Answers in Genesis has greatly strengthened my ability to share my faith in the authority of God’s Word.  My confidence in knowing what I believe has soared.  It is so exciting.  March 2017

7. Ray Comfort, President, Living Waters “Many had told me that the Ark is incredible, but they grossly understated it.  It is utterly amazing, completely overwhelming, and wonderfully incredible’’ far above anything I was expecting.  I have been through the Smithsonian in DC and the Louvre in Paris, and the Ark is so much better in a hundred different ways.  It excels in excellence.  You don’t just see it.  You experience it.  Take your family and friends.   Feb  2017

8. M.M. Georgia “I am a 17 year old college student who grew up reading and watching many of your resources. When hearing that you were coming to my state this weekend, I was thrilled. I have been able to use many of your teaching examples in my biology class as I interact with my professor and my classmates.  Thank you. sir. You and all of Answers in Genesis have had a tremendous influence on me, and God has used you to see the truth behind the curtain of darkness that our culture tries to throw over the eyes of many young people!   Sept.  2016

I could go on with hundreds more testimonies like this. By their fruit you shall know them.
Musings of Gary From the Heart.