New evidence makes it necessary to continually revise the
theory of evolution. In fact, according to US
News and World Report, the theory is radically being revised.[1]
An article several years ago by William F. Allman says, “The
branches of the human family tree are being given a thorough shaking.”
One of the recent shakings, Allman said, concerns Lucy, a
primate thought by evolutionists to walk upright and represent the oldest known
human ancestor. But he said a number of distinct creatures, and possibly ten
different species of upright, large-brained ape-like creatures, have been
discovered, changing thought about Lucy’s species being the evolutionary link. Some
creationists discount Lucy entirely because pygmy chimps wander about upright
much of the time in rain forests today.
One of the most hotly debated issues among experts on human
origins concerns Neanderthals—stocky, primitive hominids thought to be a direct
ancestor of modern humans.
Researchers recently recovered DNA from a Neanderthal fossil
and decoded it to see how closely it resembles human DNA. The Neanderthal DNA
differed from human DNA in twenty-seven places, while human DNA differs from
person to person by an average of just eight variations in genetic sequence.[2]
The author of the article in US News and World Report concluded the DNA tests showed Neanderthal
men died out and were not the ancestors of modern humans.
The “prehistoric” models used by evolutionists also are
sometimes built on a very few bones and often rely on artists for fossil
reconstruction. For instance, Science
Magazine showed a half whale and a half land animal on its cover on April
22, 1983, and according to Dave Nutting of the Alpha Omega Institute in Grand
Junction, Colorado, the picture was reconstructed from teeth, a small fragment
of the jaw, and one bone at the back of the skull.[3]
IMAGINE CREATION
One of the biggest
stumbling blocks to belief among educated people is the idea that the Earth was
created in six days.
Recently a young man asked, “But how can Christians be
right? I heard someone counted genealogies of the Bible and figured the Earth
is about six thousand years old. We know it’s older than that!”
Do we? How do we know scientific dating is correct? During
the early 1960s in Leadville, Colorado, I worked at the Leadville Herald Democrat and did a story on the town’s old opera
house. On display in a small museum at the opera house was what appeared to be
a petrified foot in a high-topped shoe. The toe of the shoe was torn and a very
real-looking big toe and toenail protruded from the end. Every detail,
including the eyelets and strings, appeared real, but the shoe and foot, broken
off above the ankle, were stone. The specimen was found in a mine.
Years later I tried to find this artifact again to get more
information, but it was gone from the opera house, and I couldn’t discover
where it was taken.
Dr. Carl Baugh of Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose,
Texas, believes man and dinosaurs walked together. In his museum is a
fossilized human finger and fossilized human footprints in dinosaur paw prints.
He says there are other human and dinosaur footprints together in the Paluxy
River Basin in Texas.[4]
Baugh[5]
believes Earth’s atmospheric pressure before the flood in Noah’s day was 2.18
times what it is today, and the air was super oxygenated—enabling dinosaurs to
live and pterosaurs to fly. Ultraviolet light was filtered out, and this
atmosphere also gave man a longer life span.[6]
Dating methods are being challenged by some of today’s
Christian scientists. The potassium-argon dating method, which dates the
Earth’s age in billions of years, is said by scientists to be valid because of
the amount of time needed to make evolution seem reasonable, say textbook
authors Emmett L. Williams, a former metallurgical engineering professor at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and George Mulfinger Jr., a physics specialist
(Physical Science for Christian Schools).
[7]
The dating method, however, assumes no argon was present when the rocks were
formed. Yet, when volcanic rocks known to have been formed in 1800 to 1801 were
tested, their age was said to range between 160 million and three billion
years!
The radiocarbon dating method also is challenged by Williams
and Mulfingers, who say it is unreliable because the calibration curve cuts off
at about five thousand years ago and because the amount of carbon-14 in the
atmosphere does not remain constant and appears to be continually increasing.
But suppose scientific dating is correct. It does nothing to
undermine faith in God. Many Bible-believing Christians accept a very old
Earth.
Often people try to make the Bible say something it doesn’t.
The Bible doesn’t say the Earth was created in six twenty-four-hour days,
although some people believe it was. Neither does the Bible say when “the
beginning” was.
Here are some Christian ideas about the days of creation:
Twenty-four Days of Re-creation:
The belief there was a creation before Adam that was somehow destroyed. (This
idea leaves a gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.)
Age-Long Days of
Creation: The belief that creation occurred over six different ages
that could have been thousands of years in length.
Revelatory Days of Creation: The
idea that the days had nothing to do with creation but with the amount of time
God took giving Moses, the writer of the Book of Genesis, information about
creation.
Twenty-four-hour
days of creation: The belief
that God literally created the Earth and all that is in it in six
twenty-four-hour days, as we know days.
So when Genesis says, “So the evening and the morning were
the first day,” “The evening and the morning were the second day,” and so forth
until God rested on the seventh day, the length of time can be interpreted
several ways.
One thing that makes me believe in a young Earth is
population. Scientists use the “population J curve” to show exponential growth
of the number of humans. The “J curve” is any system that grows by
doubling—one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc., or geometric growth.
Experts estimate the world’s population was two hundred
million in 1 AD and population continued to double and double until 1850—the
curve of the J— when eight hundred million people lived on the Earth. Estimates
and censuses showed two billion by 1930, three billion in 1960, four billion in
1976, five billion in 1990, six billion in 2002, and an estimated seven billion
in 2011.
It took nearly two thousand years to quadruple the number of
people from the time Jesus walked the earth but only eighty years for the
population to grow from one to two billion between 1850 and 1930 and twelve
years to grow a billion between 1990 and 2002. The US Census Bureau estimated
the world population to be 7.073 billion in 2012.
This increase is
despite diebacks because of disease and epidemics, natural catastrophes, and
wars. In my mind, there is no way man could have been here millions of years.
Again, science uses millions of years to make evolution seem plausible because
we can’t see any evidence for it in a lifetime of one hundred years.
But the length of
time that it took to create the Earth is not exceedingly important. What is
important is that we know and believe Genesis 1:1, that “in the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth.”
The whole world’s scientific thought constantly changes and
often contradicts what scientists thought was solid evidence. On the other
hand, the Creator and his witness never change and will never be outdated.
[1]
William F. Allman, “A Family Legacy for Lucy,” US News & World Report, April 11, 1994, 55.
[2]
Laura Tangley, “Not So Close After All,” US
News and World Report, July 21, 1997, 9.
[3]
Pueblo Chieftain, Pueblo, CO, Jan.
12, 1991, page 1B; and The Alpha Omega Institute, bulletin, Grand Junction, CO.
[4]
Ada Brownell, Pueblo Chieftain, Nov.
4, 1989, 1B; and Carl Baugh and Dr. Clifford Wilson, Dinosaur (Orange CA: Promise Publishing Co., 1987).
[5]
Baugh’s credentials for making these claims are challenged by some experts,
however, and even some creationists are skeptical about the Paluxy footprints,
although they are in a protected national or state park.
[6]
Carl Baugh, Panorama of Creation
(Oklahoma City, OK: Southwest Radio Church), 55-62.
[7]
Bob Jones University Press, Greenville, SC, 1974, 271.
*Excerpt from Ada Brownell's book, Imagine the future You http://ow.ly/TY6uO
*Excerpt from Ada Brownell's book, Imagine the future You http://ow.ly/TY6uO
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