Tag: Religion

After more than one debate over the importance of Creation vs Evolution studies with one individual, and plumbing the depths of its veracity as a ministry, a simple comment about soft tissue and carbon 14  having been found in dinosaurs led  quickly from a cordial discussion to being accused of idol worship, being told to stop harmonizing the bible with science,  and assertion that the entire group of Christians, including many with advanced degrees the world over,  who happen to believe in the chronology presented in the Old Testament are wasting their time and resources.

Once cooler heads prevailed this question was presented, as a challenge that I accepted.

“Will you please address the issue of the misrepresentation of Mrs. Sweitzer’s data. I would like to ask you to study her findings and using google, a library, the bible, and your own research, refute those findings by backing it up with real tangible data.
Then tell me how that data or her data in any way lies in contradiction to the creation of the universe by an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent Creator.”

It was worded well, and once asked, I felt it would be an opportunity to extrapolate on a few issues I have written about before.

Mrs. Sweitzer’s data came from this article:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/

and was copied and ker-plasted as a retort to my simple acknowledgement that soft tissue and Carbon 14 had indeed been found in dinosaur bones, and this was a problem (one of many) for evolutionists who cling to the molecules to man scenario.

Firstly we must declare off hand, and as I have taught many times on line and in person, that presupposition plays a rather large role in this debate, and as the article so adeptly googled and flung was from none other than the Smithsonian, not exactly a bastion of Christian thought and intellect, we can expect absolutely nothing from them but strong religious adherence to Darwinism, and the beating drum of millions of years. I have searched its archives dozens of times for artist renderings of hominids never found, and claims of a 4.5 billion year old earth. Since the challenge that was presented requested research to analyze the dumpster fire that is evolutionary theory, I’d like to point out this article from that very website answering  the difficult question, “How do we know the earth is 4.6 billion years old.”

Rather than admitting plainly that they don’t… they have instead presented – under “SMART NEWS” no less – that the reason is radiometric dating. As an example, they mention Carbon dating, which renders a sample ‘carbon dead’ after 80,000 years, uranium-lead dating, a measurement fraught with assumptions and bad data, and zircon of all things, which the RATE team, a group of 8 Christian doctors who studied radiometric dating in an 8 year long study, is presently using to show helium diffusion rates prove even these supposedly old rocks have way to much helium  to be old. This is the same group that published their findings of Carbon 14 in diamonds, a hardened carbon that evolutionists claim are billions of years in the making, and should have lost their carbon 10,000 times over.

You may ask, “but don’t they use these dating methods to date the fossils?”

The answer is no. They use the made up geologic column to date the fossils, and the made up fossil dates to date the rocks they are found in. Classic circular reasoning, and a thorn in the sides of evolutionists who dare to challenge the dogma. Don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for it:

If you look up Paleontology  in World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 15, 1978.) – p. 85 “Paleontology (the study of fossils) is important in the study of geology. The age of rocks may be determined by the fossils found in them.”
And then look up Fossils – p. 364 “Scientists determine when fossils were formed by finding out the age of the rocks in which they lie.” These books were in every university in the country.

What about our biology text books?
“Often, the layers of rock can be dated by the types of fossils they contain…. Scientists have determined the relative times of appearance and disappearance of many kinds of organisms from the location of their fossils within the sedimentary rock layers.” (Glenco, Biology Textbook, 1994, pp. 306-307.)

But surely the atheist evolutionists who tout the importance of radiometric dating use it to date the rocks, no? Here are two such atheists:
“I can think of no cases of radioactive decay being used to date fossils.” (Ager, Derek V., “Fossil Frustrations,” New Scientist, vol. 100, 1983, p. 425.)
“The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately.” (O’Rourke, J.E., “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53)

For more studies on dating issues, please see this post.

To the issue at hand. The article (not in its entirety because of length) is below in green. My comments from my creationist position will be in blue. Note, I was asked to “refute those findings”, which since it was her discovery, I won’t be doing, but will be addressing her conclusions. And also I was asked to speak on how her conclusions lie in contradiction to the creator God of the bible, which is the crux of the issue, and a wonderful question. Let’s get started:
After 68 million years in the ground,

This date was obtained based on the presupposed accuracy of the geologic column. We “know” how old T-rex’s are because of evolution, therefore if we find one, it is this old. Part of our Jurassic classification. Many times during my debate similar presuppositions were stated as definitive truth, such as “we know the rocks are billions of years old”. Two quotes from other atheists:

“Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so, we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory.” –  Ronald R. West, “Paleontology and Uniformitarianism,” Compass, Vol. 45, May 1968, p. 216.

“The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity.” – B. Schaeffer, M.K. Hecht and N. Eldredge, “Phylogeny and Paleontology,” Ch. 2 in Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (edited by Th. Dobzhansky, M.K. Hecht and W.C. Steere; New York Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972) p. 39.

 a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen.

It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. 

This of course is also based on the presupposition that evolution is true. From the dates of the bible, Noah’s 600th year was approximately 4500 years ago, which is when all or close to all dinosaurs were buried and fossilized, along with explaining the earth’s plentiful biomass oil reserves from buried forests etc. This means anomalies such as soft tissue and carbon in diamonds doesn’t defeat, but supports the biblical timeline. We would expect to find all sorts of catastrophic evidence as well, which we do. Polystrate fossils are a notable one, one organism passing through different strata rock. Article

Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors.

“It has been well established that such biological structures and molecules should not last beyond a few tens of thousands of years, and could not possibly survive millions of years. So why are they there?” – Brian Thomas, M.S.  

“The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both.

It is also interesting to note that though Schweitzer’s T-rex is the most notable soft tissue sample, many other samples have been found as well. One in 2013 was the soft tissue in a triceratops, which Schweitzer had nothing to do with – Armitage, M.H., and K. L. Anderson. Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus. Acta Histochemica. Published online before print, February 13, 2013.

In almost all cases, including Schweitzer, scientists scrambled to disprove soft tissue genuinely that of the speciment itself. “One popular pushback asserts that the soft tissues are not from the dinosaurs at all, but from bacteria that somehow infiltrated their bones and built biofilms in the same shapes as dinosaur tissues and cells.” – Brian Thomas, M.S.

Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

I never met Schweitzer, but have no reason to doubt her salvation. Not once during my debate did I suggest evolutionists couldn’t be Christians. The person I was debating, before declaring it supremely unimportant, debated staunchly for evolution’s obviousness, then declared he was not an evolutionist, and then that he was a Christian evolutionist. The two are mutually exclusive. You do not need one to be the other, nor do I teach that, but I will say it causes biblical inconsistencies. More on that later.

 

In 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”
Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”

What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.

They used to teach that it took millions of years to create a fossil. Then they taught at least 10,000 years (some sites still do). Now we have fossilized pallets, cowboy boots, a hat, a mason jar with a pickle in it, etc. Evolutionists have had to back off of this particular track, like many others due to observable science. Interestingly, scienceviews.com states, “Fossils are formed in a number of different ways, but most are formed when a plant or animal dies in a watery environment and is buried in mud and silt. Soft tissues quickly decompose leaving the hard bones or shells behind.” Water and mud. During my lectures, I show many examples of dinosaurs in death throes from asphyxiation due to being buried quickly in water and mud. Strangely, evolutionists postulate numerous un-provable ideas about how the dinosaurs became extinct (meteor, asteroid, global warming, flatulence (i wish that was a joke) global warming, etc) and yet we find them buried by water in mud all over the earth.

i.e. – World’s Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death, By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor – “The way the fossils are linked together in the same layers of earth within these bonebeds suggests all these Centrosaurs were wiped out simultaneously. The likely culprit in this scenario was a catastrophic storm, which could quickly have routinely made the waters flood up as high as 12 to 15 feet.”

Drowned dinosaur eggs’ fossil remains reveal embryos grew fast, Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2013|By Amina Khan

Yellowstone National Park – Mammoth Site in South Dakota. Mammoths and other megafauna got trapped in a sinkhole and drown about 26,000 years ago

I just wish there was a book somewhere with eye-witness accounts of what happened so we could piece together how all these animals were buried simultaneously in water and mud all over the earth. Oh, wait?

In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world.

Just a point here. This guy saw something sticking out of a wall, and it was dated 68 million years. You know… cause its a T rex.Okay. Carry on…

 

Most paleontologists now agree that birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives.

This is probably true, based again on presupposition that if evolution is true, and we have no reasonable theory for extinction, then macro-evolution theory must have turned dinosaurs in to feathered birds.

This means: heavy tail to feathered plumage; dense to hollow bones, cold to warm blooded in some cases, limbs to wings – these are serious physiological changes, and is absurd as it sounds. Fossils have been found that suggest dinosaurs with strange features, but creationists  view dinosaurs having woolly plumages and collagen fibers as –dinosaurs with woolly plumages and collagen fibers, nothing more.

This idea started with the find ‘Archaeopteryx’, a supposed transitional fossil, like many others jumped on publicly, and then backtracked privately and quietly, as it was simply an extinct type of flightless bird. This occurred with many supposed transitions, from Darwin to the present, and the fossil record remains strangely devoid of any transitions, just extinctions, and fully developed kinds, or baramin. They all appear suddenly, and no one teaches that if evolution were true, there should be billions of transitions found making taxonomy and classification impossible. 

Let’s take an aside, and hear just some quotes  (there are hundreds) from our evolutionary scientists about the fossil record:

“The majority of evolutionary movements are degenerative. Progressive cases are exceptional. Characters appear suddenly that have no meaning toward progress [i.e., that do not evolve into anything else] . . The only thing that could be accomplished by slow changes would be the accumulation of neutral characteristics without value for survival.”—*John B.S. Haldane, quoted in Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations, p. 91 [English geneticist].

“We still do not know the mechanics of evolution in spite of the over-confident claims in some quarters, nor are we likely to make further progress in this by the classical methods of paleontology or biology.”—*Errol White, Proceedings of the Linnean Society, London 177:8 (1988).

“Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.”—*Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), p. 358.

“. . . there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world.” G.R. Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, ( N.Y: Harper and Row, 1983) p. 60.

“Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless.”—*Bounoure, Le Monde et la Vie (October 1983) [Director of Research at the National Center of Scientific Research in France].

“Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.”—*Steven Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb (1882), pp. 181-182.

“The more one studies paleontology, the more certain one becomes that evolution is based on faith alone . . exactly the same sort of faith which it is necessary to have when one encounters the great mysteries of religion.”—*Louis Trenchark More, quoted in Science and the Two-tailed Dinosaur, p. 33.

In fact, they say that birds are dinosaurs—colorful, incredibly diverse, cute little feathered dinosaurs. The theropod of the Jurassic forests lives on in the goldfinch visiting the backyard feeder, the toucans of the tropics and the ostriches loping across the African savanna.

To understand her dinosaur bone, Schweitzer turned to two of the most primitive living birds: ostriches and emus.

Primitive, again based on presupposition of evolutionary theory. For creationists, these are just kinds of birds.

In the summer of 2004, she asked several ostrich breeders for female bones. A farmer called, months later. “Y’all still need that lady ostrich?” The dead bird had been in the farmer’s backhoe bucket for several days in the North Carolina heat. Schweitzer and two colleagues collected a leg from the fragrant carcass and drove it back to Raleigh.

As far as anyone can tell, Schweitzer was right: Bob the dinosaur really did have a store of medullary bone when she died. A paper published in Science last June presents microscope pictures of medullary bone from ostrich and emu side by side with dinosaur bone, showing near-identical features.

In the course of testing a B. rex bone fragment further, Schweitzer asked her lab technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, to put it in weak acid, which slowly dissolves bone, including fossilized bone—but not soft tissues. One Friday night in January 2004, Wittmeyer was in the lab as usual. She took out a fossil chip that had been in the acid for three days and put it under the microscope to take a picture. “[The chip] was curved so much, I couldn’t get it in focus,” Wittmeyer recalls. She used forceps to flatten it. “My forceps kind of sunk into it, made a little indentation and it curled back up. I was like, stop it!” Finally, through her irritation, she realized what she had: a fragment of dinosaur soft tissue left behind when the mineral bone around it had dissolved. Suddenly Schweitzer and Wittmeyer were dealing with something no one else had ever seen. For a couple of weeks, Wittmeyer said, it was like Christmas every day.

In the lab, Wittmeyer now takes out a dish with six compartments, each holding a little brown dab of tissue in clear liquid, and puts it under the microscope lens. Inside each specimen is a fine network of almost-clear branching vessels—the tissue of a female Tyrannosaurus rex that strode through the forests 68 million years ago, preparing to lay eggs. Close up, the blood vessels from that T. rex and her ostrich cousins look remarkably alike. Inside the dinosaur vessels are things Schweitzer diplomatically calls “round microstructures” in the journal article, out of an abundance of scientific caution, but they are red and round, and she and other scientists suspect that they are red blood cells….

Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”

You can say that again! In regards to the mammoth, we have here yet another soft tissue found to go with the many others. The scientific reaction to these tissues is “don’t understand decay.” Evolutionists are so ingrained in billions-of-years thinking, it would never occur to ask the more obvious question, perhaps these haven’t been decaying as long as we first thought. I am reminded of the Scientists in a lab that made coal in 6 hours. At a different time, in 1982 the British made oil in 10 minutes. Noel McAuliffe of Manchester University triumphantly stated, “We are doing in 10 minutes what it has taken nature 150 million years to do.” This is yes another stellar example of our presuppositions determining our interpretations. Another, more obvious conclusion, if one were not blinded by evolutionary theory would be to instead triumphantly announce, “It doesn’t take nearly as long as we thought for coal and oil to form!”

Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”

This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says.

A shame and nothing I’d condone. I like healthy debate, and prefer to present logical material for consideration. It usually isn’t until the ad hominem attacks, accusations, and lies come in that I start getting snippy. 

“They twist your words and they manipulate your data.”

The data is the data. What is observable is the geology of Hell Creek, the bones themselves, and where they were located, and the soft material inside. As a scientist, she is allowed to conclude as she wishes how to interpret this data, but it will be interpreted, no doubt, based on her world view, which in this case is evolution, and the fact that she “already knew” this site was 68 million years old. 

Another scientist who may believe in intelligent design is welcome to take these same facts, and look at them through the presupposition that 4500 years ago this animal was most likely a victim of a world wide catastrophic flood, and that part of it was preserved and didn’t fully fossilize. Forensic or historical sciences, such as archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, and forensics are historical sciences. In other words, results cannot be repeated in a lab. This animal cannot be buried again for all to see. Her emotions in this case are irrelevant. 

For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science.

Breaks HER rules of science, and no doubt the rules of those who educated her. I am grateful she didn’t lose her faith like so many others, but this is a subjective opinion, not a scientific law. Conversely there exists the well known anthropic principle which states that the universe appears to be carefully designed for the well-being of mankind. This is quite recognized, and is in direct opposition to her approach and personal philosophy, since teleologically, we can observe a design and purpose, and therefore can conclude a designer.  

After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence.

Yes it is correct God asks for faith. No it is not correct that God doesn’t want you to use intellect, reason, and consider evidence. Or else He wouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to provide so many prophecies in the word (hundreds fulfilled, over three hundred by Christ alone). He would not have so meticulously recorded the history of the Jewish nation, the forming of their laws, kings, lineages, and travels. He would not have mentioned the cities founded and lived in that archeology has been using since to unravel the past accurately (for more on this please read Josh MacDowell’s New evidence that Demands a Verdict, and Cooper’s Authenticit of the Book of Genesis). Cities such as Nineveh, Ur, Jericho, all found. God used historians like Luke to record eye witness accounts and the history of the early church in Acts, precisely because evidence was so important. In Acts and John alone, over 140 eye witness details have been verified by scholars, because it WAS so important to be able to defend the scriptures. The miracles were actuallyseen, the prophecies  actually fulfilled, and the promise of His return hangs on these events occurring in real history, in real time. The bible implores us to study, and defend it over and over, not to believe blindly in it, and to them follow man’s theories:

1 Peter 3:15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give a defense to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.

1 Peter 1:16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Isaiah 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord
Philippians 1:7 – in the defense and confirmation of the gospel
Philippians 1:17 – knowing I am appointed for the defense of the gospel

2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

So we must ask, shall we apply it only to Christ’s life, or apply it to the bible as authoritative? More on that later when we discuss the second part of the question.

“If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”

Romans 1: 20 states, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” 

Psalms 19:1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

We are without excuse if we do not see God in the wondrous creation He has made for us. A huge point of contention, because simply put, evolutionists must conclude that all this came about by accident. Matter created itself, slowly gave rise to order, to chemicals, to suns and systems, and eventually abiogenesis, life from non-life, another scientific impossibility. From there through millions of years of death, and change for survival, man developed from animals. We must then conclude that at some arbitrary point, after 4 billion years of using death to create mankind, a mere highly evolved animal, a God who started it all 14 billion years ago decided to impart souls, make up a mythology with specific years, and including a flood, and then “really began telling a redemption story” some time around Abraham?

It is clear that Schwietzer is “driven crazy” by people who disagree with her world view, and with her philosophy. But in her defense, they are not disagreeing with the forensic science she conducted. Not agreeing with creationists and thinking it’s kind of cool to not know God has no bearing whatsoever on what was found. And the simple fact remains, soft tissue cannot last 65 million years before breaking down. 

By definition, there is a lot that scientists don’t know, because the whole point of science is to explore the unknown.

In my opinion, when they let go of the presupposition of evolution, much of what they observe in the field will fall in to place, like it already has with Dr. Snelling at the Grand Canyon, Dr. Sanford the geneticist who studied the genetic entropy of the human genome, and fifty others I could name (see in six days: why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation). But let’s hear from more of our evolutionist friends about it:

“Evolution is baseless and quite incredible.”—*Ambrose Flemming, president, British Association for Advancement of Science, in The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought.

Paleontologist Alan Cheetham, a gradualist evolutionist, summed up decades of his own research: “I came reluctantly to the conclusion that I wasn’t finding evidence for gradualism.” Reported by R.A. Kerr in “Did Darwin Get It All Right?” Science 276:1421, 10 March 1995.

“The theory [of evolution] is a scientific mistake.”—*Louis Agassiz, quoted in H. Enoch, Evolution or Creation (1986), p. 139. [Agassiz was a Harvard University professor.]

“Fundamental truths about evolution have so far eluded us all, and that uncritical acceptance of Darwinism may be counterproductive as well as expedient. Far from ignoring or ridiculing the ground-swell of opposition to Darwinism that is growing, for example, in the United States, we should welcome it as an opportunity to reexamine our sacred cow more closely.”—*B. Storehouse, “Introduction,” in *Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), p. 12.

“To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all.”—*H. Lipson, “A Physicist Looks at Evolution,”

“I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.”—*Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” Discover 2(5):34-37 (1981).

By being clear that scientists haven’t explained everything, Schweitzer leaves room for other explanations. “I think that we’re always wise to leave certain doors open,” she says.

I hope this is the case for all who discount the veracity of scripture.

 

The article can be read in full at the top of this page.

The second part of our question:  “Then tell me how that data or her data in any way lies in contradiction to the creation of the universe by an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent Creator.”

Again, her data, the actual hard data does not lie in contradiction to anyone. They are simply hard facts. Bones. Certain testable content, location, etc. Evolutionists are adept however at blurring the lines between hard facts, and interpreted data, as well as always insisting they have a monopoly on the sciences. This is simply in gross error. I can’t count the times it has been suggested that Christians need to stop being anti-science, or that we hate or ignore science because of our bibles.

This same accusation was levied at me by this debater as well, and several times at that. But he also did say one thing I agreed with, and that is that the bible is not a science book. Of course it isn’t! Creationists do not claim it to be so, nor do they claim it to be a book on taxonomy or dinosaurs. The bible contains what it contains, and from it, we must derive conclusions based on what God told us. But in it creationists would expect, unlike Schweitzer, to find a Creator God who does speak sense when referring to the natural world, which is precisely what we find. i.e. the hydrological cycle, fountains of the deep, springs under water, pathways of the sea, curve of the earth, hanging it on nothing, etc. In all instances God’s word is correct regarding natural occurrences, and only varies during supernatural events, such as creation. This stands in contrast to all ancient mythology origin stories, and is logically what we’d expect from a God who is outside of space, time and matter.

Through studies, we can learn the culprits that brought us the evolutionary theory, and what their intent was. Lyell wanted to save the sciences from Moses, and from Buffon, to Lamarck, to Darwin, the enlightenment brought us the unsubstantiated theories about the decent of man that we teach today.

The result of these teachings? Rampant racism.

The Decent of Man – 1871 , Darwin – “At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.”

Then, “No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man.” Huxley.

Then – “At the lowest stage of human mental development are the Australians, some tribes of the Polynesians, and the Bushmen, Hottentots, and some of the Negro tribes. ” Heckel, pre WWII, and major influence on Germany and Hitler.

These ideas permeated government, politics, and societies such as Japan, China, Russia, and Nazi Germany, and in the 20th century alone caused over 150 million deaths. This, the same theory that an evolutionist Christian may call harmless, and declare  a meaningless fight to teach and disciple people about the truth of our origins. From a creationist perspective, our origins are the same, a family of 8, 4500 years ago, a fact which is corroborated by population growth analysis, genetics, anthropology, and a study of flood legends the world over with similar details (over 300 flood legends exist today).

And what does the bible say about the tribes of the earth? Revelations 7:9-10:   After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.

It states we will be standing shoulder to shoulder together.

Furthermore, these two opposing views cannot be married so easily, for as you will see, they are diametrically opposed in almost every way:

Billions of years – Life from non-life (violates law of causality)
All animals descended from common ancestor from 3.5 billion years ago
Animals change in to completely different animals, modifications are virtually unlimited, and additional information is always being added (never observed)
Fossils were laid down over time, slowly over millions of years
Death came before sin, before man
Sun before light
Sun before Earth
Sun before Plants
Creation took billions of years
Dinosaurs came before birds
Land came before oceans
Man just a slowly evolving animal
Man created God

Special 7 day creation – Life comes from life
Animals were created as distinct kinds
Changes within a kind of animal is due to design allowing changes, microevolution. Always due to a loss or rearranging of existing genetic material
Fossils were formed quickly due to a catastrophic flood all over the whole earth
Death Came after sin, and after the first Man
Light before sun
Earth before Sun
Plants before Sun
Creation took six days
Birds came before dinosaurs.
Oceans came before land
Mankind was highly intelligent from the beginning
God created Man

This is a lot of opposites!

And we would be wise to consider Christ’s words in Matthew: “But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female.”

Question?

If there is 3,845,000,000 years between mankind and the beginning, was Christ lying?

At what point did God think animals were “human enough” to impart souls to them?

When was the fall?

Did death bring man into the world, or man bring death into the world?

And if there is a curse that Christ came to undo, was it here for the full 4 billion years before man arrived and sinned?

Romans 5 : 12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned…
14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses…
17 For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.
18 Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.
19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.

Make no mistake, in the victory of Christ, there will be a curse that is lifted: Colossians 1:20 and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross
Revelations 21:4 And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away
Revelations 22:3 And there shall be no more curse

But if the fossil record is full of death, thorns, cancer, disease, arthritis, abscesses, tumors, rickets, syphilis all before man, and the fall in fossil record; if billions of years of chance and extinction occurred to arrive at us, does this not fully undermine the teaching on the full redemptive work of Christ?

There is much much more to this study, how day is literally defined in the bible as morning and evening, and how day “yom”  is used over 2300 times, and how we can easily conclude its meaning based on context. The particulars of the ark. Speciation vs baramins. How both Lamarkism and Neo-Darwinism fail on every level. And so much more. But perhaps the best way to end would be a warning from the bible itself. Read carefully this passage:

2 Peter 3 – Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.

It is as if the bible literally predicted uniformitarian world view in the Last Days. Things continue as they were. This is the battle cry of evolution. Given enough time, anything can happen. But the logical conclusion of many a thinking person who has been indoctrinated by evolution is that if we evolved, than the bible is wrong, man made religion up along the way, and when you die you die. There was no fall, there is no curse, it is as it was from the beginning. This belief will determine behavior, as it has with the 20th century, and as it is doing with millennials in the 21st. They leave the church in droves, because the bible has been robbed of its authority.