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