Who Is Banning Books Now?

CNN reported, “A new book offering a non-evolutionist view of how the Grand Canyon was formed, featuring essays from 23 scientists (most with PhD's, many having conducted serious geological scientific research at the Canyon), is the object of an intense book-banning effort by leading evolutionists. They have demanded that Grand Canyon National Park remove the book, Grand Canyon: A Different View, from bookstores within the Park.

The book, which claims the famous area can be no older than a few thousand years (contrary to the claims of traditional secular science, which contends the canyon is millions of years old), was unanimously approved by a panel of park and gift shop personnel, the Los Angeles Times reported.”

CNN reported that the National Park Service (NPS) in Washington, D.C. is “preparing to draft a letter telling Grand Canyon administrators the book makes claims that fall outside accepted science... so it likely won’t be restocked.” Meanwhile, an NPS spokesman has confirmed that the book has been moved from the natural sciences section of the bookstore to an ‘inspirational’ one (which would thus downplay the book’s legitimate scientific message).

What is this if it is not blatant censorship? The Evolutionists have formed what amounts to a ‘cartel’ of influential liberals and agnostics who are bent upon silencing all challenges.

On the basis of elaborate non-proven theories, the Evolution Cartel now protects itself from scientific challenge by banning all books that don’t agree with their arrogant claims, which are fundamentally based on enormous assumptions that are then supported by circular reasoning.

According to recent poles, at least half of Americans believe in a recent “creation” of no more than 10,000 years. Some of the greatest names in science are among those who believe in recent creation.

In the 1960’s, I had the privilege of leading a scientist from the Rocketdyne Propulsion Laboratories to faith in Jesus Christ. Charles Morse then spent the rest of his life studying the Biblical account of creation and the universal flood.

Using some the world's most sophisticated computers, he set up models from scientific information that established a global flood had to have taken place.

From these models, he was able to interpret the geological records in scientific terms so that they supported a recent creation.

Since Morse had been a naval officer in WW2, he had studied and had access to scientific oceanography data. This included the ‘mid-oceanic ridges’ with deep trenches traversing their length. These ridges extend along the length of all earth’s ocean. He also learned about the ‘river cones’, which are underwater river channels that extend along the ocean floor for over a hundred miles out from the mouth of every great river in the world.

Morse found that the Evolutionist’s explanation of the ‘river cones’ could never work. Evolutionists contend that the ‘river cones’ were etched into the ocean floor by slow moving currents that etched them out over ‘millions of years’.

(Whenever evolutionists are stuck for an explanation, they always seem to think that adding a few million more years solves everything.) But this could not explain how the underwater channels were formed.

These so called river cones are literally extensions of the rivers on the ocean floor. Only water moving at tremendous velocity would have the ability to carry the large rocks necessary to etch out such deep trenches on a line continuing out from the river on the ocean floor.

The same thing is true concerning the phenomenon of the Grand Canyon. If these were formed by slow moving currents over millions of years, why has this not taken place in other places where the rivers are about the same age?

Rivers such as Mississippi, Nile, Amazon, Euphrates, etc., should have produced similar phenomena. If the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, why has there not been more erosion of the steep cliffs?

The Biblical account of a universal flood better explains the geological phenomena of the Grand Canyon than does the evolutionist theory. If there was a universal flood, and it was caused to drain of the land rapidly as the Biblical account declares, then there would have been enormous amounts of water draining off at terrific velocity.

This would easily form the rivers and canyons we see today. And most important, it would also explain how the river cones were formed out from the mouth of every river into the ocean floor.

The fossil record is also explained best this way. Why do we find fossilized fish at the top of mountains all over the world? Why do we find evidence of sea life on land areas the world over?

Morse also dealt with the question of where the tremendous volume of water came from that would be needed to cover all the land mass of the planet.

The Bible says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.” (Genesis 7:11-12 NIV)

Morse observed that there could not have been enough water stored in the atmosphere to cover the whole earth. Most of the water came from what the Bible called “the springs of the great deep…” This is where the “mid-oceanic trenches” come in.

There is evidence that there were tremendously violent eruptions that took place in these Great fractures of the earth’s tectonic plates. There is also radioactivity coming from these areas. Morse reasons from the evidence that God used some kind of nuclear reaction to burst open the great fountains of the deep and release the water stored there.

Then Morse dealt with the problem of how that much water could be removed from the land masses of the earth. The geological evidence supports that God caused enormous forces under the continental plates to erupt and force them to rise upward. This caused the water to drain off with violent velocity.

This gives the best explanation of the evidence as to how the rivers, mountains and canyons were formed. The water velocity had the carrying power and force to move great rocks so as to quickly etch out what we see today.

In the final analysis, whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist, it takes faith to come to a conclusion about how the earth was created and formed.

I believe in creation because the God I worship has the power to do any of these things. And it explains the scientifically available fact better than the evolutionist theory.

As a matter of fact, even Charles Darwin came to that conclusion before he died. According to Frank Charles Thompson, God used the wife of the First Admiral of the British fleet to reach Charles Darwin with the Gospel. Here is what he reported:

“God used Lady Hope, wife of the first admiral of the British Fleet, to reach Charles Darwin with the Gospel during the last years of his life. He was bedridden, and she would often visit him. One afternoon, as he was reading this Bible, she asked, “What are you studying now?” “Still Hebrews,” he replied. “I call it the royal book. Isn’t it grand?”

When she mentioned how popular his theory of evolution had become he gave her an anguished look and said, “I was a young man then, with uninformed ideas. I thought out queries and suggestions, wondering all the time … and to my astonishment, those ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion out of them."

Later Darwin asked Lady Hope if she would share the Word of God with some of his friends in his summerhouse. She asked, “What shall I speak about?” He replied, “Jesus Christ and His salvation. Is that not the best theme?”

Dr. Victor Pierce, an Oxford scholar, says, “When some one tells you evolution explains everything, tell them that Darwin discovered a better theme — “Jesus Christ and His salvation.”

Much of the controversy between evolutionists and creationists concerns the age of the earth and its fossils. Evolution, depending as it does on pure chance, requires an immense amount of time to stumble upon anything remotely approaching the complexity we see in even the simplest living things. For over 100 years, geologists have attempted to devise methods for determining the age of the earth that would be consistent with evolutionary dogma. At the time Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published the earth was "scientifically" determined to be 100 million years old. By 1932, it was found to be 1.6 billion years old. In 1947, geologists firmly established that the earth was 3.4 billion years old. Finally in 1976, they discovered that the earth is "really" 4.6 billion years old. These dates indicate that for 100 years, the age of the earth doubled every 20 years. If this trend were to continue, the earth would be 700 thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion years old by the year 4000 AD. This "prediction," however, is based on selected data and certain assumptions that might not be true. As we will see, selected data and unprovable assumptions are a problem with all methods for determining the age of the earth, as well as for dating its fossils and rocks. It has all become something of a "dating game" in which only the evolutionarily-correct are allowed to play.

The most widely-used method for determining the age of fossils is to date them by the "known age" of the rock strata in which they are found. On the other hand, the most widely-used method for determining the age of the rock strata is to date them by the "known age" of the fossils they contain. This is an outrageous case of circular reasoning, and geologists are well aware of the problem. J.E. O'Rourke, for example, concedes:

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results" (American Journal of Science, 1976, 276:51).

In this "circular dating" method, all ages are based on evolutionary assumptions about the date and order in which fossilized plants and animals are believed to have evolved.

Most people are surprised to learn that there is, in fact, no way to directly determine the age of any fossil or rock. The so called "absolute" methods of dating (radiometric methods) actually only measure the present ratios of radioactive isotopes and their decay products in suitable specimens -- not their age. These measured ratios are then extrapolated to an "age" determination. This extrapolation is based on the fact that an unstable (radioactive) chemical element, called the parent isotope, breaks down at a presently known rate to form a more stable daughter isotope. In the case of radiocarbon dating, an unstable isotope of carbon (C14) decays to a more stable form of carbon (C12). This currently occurs at a rate which would be expected to reduce the quantity of the parent C14 by half every 5,730 years (the half-life). In other words, the less of the parent isotope (and the more of the daughter isotope) we measure in a specimen, the older we assume it to be.

Radiocarbon dating is actually of little use to evolutionists. There are several reasons for this. First, no rocks and very few fossils contain measurable quantities of carbon of any kind. Second, because of the short half-life of C14, the radiocarbon method can only date specimens up to about 40,000 years of age. Essentially nothing of evolutionary significance is believed to have occurred in this "short" time frame. The most commonly used radiometric methods for "dating" geological specimens are potassium-argon, uranium-thorium-lead, and strontium-rubidium. All three of these decay processes have half-lives measured in billions of years. None of these methods can be used on fossils or the sedimentary rock in which fossils are found. All radiometric dating (with the exception of carbon dating) must be done on igneous rocks (rocks solidified from a molten state such as lava). These radiometric "clocks" begin keeping time when the molten rock solidifies. Since fossils are never found in igneous rocks, one can only date lava flows that are occasionally found between layers of sedimentary rock.

The problem with all radiometric "clocks" is that their accuracy critically depends on several starting assumptions which are largely unknowable. To date a specimen by radiometric means, one must first know the starting amount of the parent isotope at the beginning of the specimen's existence. Second, one must be certain that there were no daughter isotopes in the beginning. Third, one must be certain that neither parent nor daughter isotopes have ever been added or removed from the specimen. And fourth, one must be certain that the decay rate of parent isotope to daughter isotope has always been the same. That one or more of these assumptions are often invalid is obvious from the published radiometric "dates" (to say nothing of unpublished dates) found in the literature.

One of the most obvious problems is that several samples from the same location often give widely-divergent ages. Apollo moon samples, for example, were dated by both uranium-thorium-lead and potassium-argon methods, giving results which varied from 2 million to 28 billion years. Lava flows from volcanoes on the north rim of the Grand Canyon (which erupted after its formation) show potassium-argon dates a billion years "older" than the most ancient basement rocks at the bottom of the canyon. Lava from underwater volcanoes near Hawaii (that are known to have erupted in 1801 AD) have been "dated" by the potassium-argon method with results varying from 160 million to nearly 3 billion years. No wonder the laboratories that "date" rocks insist on knowing in advance the "evolutionary age" of the strata from which the samples were taken -- this way, they know which dates to accept as "reasonable" and which to ignore. Of one thing you may be sure: whenever "absolute" radiometric dates are in substantial disagreement with evolutionary assumptions about the age of associated fossils, the fossils always prevail.

As far as the plausibility of evolution is concerned, it really doesn't make any difference if the earth is 10 billion years old or 10 thousand years old. Indeed, if the whole of evolution were reduced to nothing more than the chance production of a single copy of any one biologically useful protein, there would be insufficient time and material in the known universe to make this even remotely likely. Time by itself simply does not make the hopeless evolutionary scenario of chance and natural selection more reasonable. Imagine if a child were to claim that he alone could build a Boeing 747 airplane from raw material in 10 seconds, and another were to claim he could do it in 10 days. Would we consider the later less foolish then the former, simply because he proposed spending nearly a million times more time at the task? Our Creator tells that "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God."

(c) 1997, David Menton Ph.D., professor emeritus, Washington University

Climbing the "Ladder of Life" in the Grand Canyon

The walls of the 270-mile-long Grand Canyon in Arizona (photo, right) reveal 21 distinct layers of mostly sedimentary rock-the so-called geologic column. Presumably, or so an evolutionist would say, this pillar of succeeding layers, and the fossils contained therein, should reveal the progressive steps of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history. But consider these facts:
- Some of the lower (and thus, evolutionists would assume, far older) layers of the column contain marine invertebrates commonly found today: oysters, clams, corals, worms, etc. In not a single case is there fossil evidence-either in these layers or in anything below them-to show what these creatures' presumed ancestors looked like; they appear all at once and fully formed.
- in the next two layers, going up, are found simple organisms (foraminifers, among others) thought to pre-date the more complex oysters, clams, etc., found below them. What are these simple, one-celled organisms doing in this higher stratum in the geologic column? So far, this "ladder of life," supposedly constructed over untold eons, would seem to be a one-rung affair.

- An amazing point: No one has ever found a single fossilized bone of any kind in the canyon. While the footprints of more than 20 species of amphibians and reptiles appear in the Supai, Hermit and Coconino layers of the column, there are no fossilized feet! No fossilized bones at all. One has to go to higher strata-and then not canyon strata at all but strata located several miles from the canyon-to find the bones of the tetrapods (four-legged animals) that could have made these prints.

Those who believe in Noah's Flood might suggest that the common occurrence of footprints in strata below those bearing the bodies themselves says something about how long those tetrapods could climb and tread water before drowning!

- Even more amazing: Those footprints are, in the main, heading hi the same direction-toward higher ground to the north! Are we to believe that for, say, 10 million years, the amphibians and reptiles inhabiting the canyon all walked in the same direction?

- The Kaibab Limestone layer, at the very top of the column, shows the only evidence to be found in the canyon of fossilized sponges! This is embarrassing to evolutionists, because sponges are believed to be the first multicellular organisms to have evolved on earth. If anything, they should be at the bottom, not the top, of things.

In a word, there is no evidence of evolutionary progress in the fossils of the Grand Canyon's geologic column (or any other column, for that matter). Evolutionists are well aware of this fact, though you would never guess it from the evolutionary indoctrination presented in public schools, zoos, museums, science centers and in the popular media.

David Menton Ph.D., professor emeritus, Washington University

As far as i know, gravity and orbital mechanics aren't theories. And yes, i have heard of the atom bomb, but thanks for the reminder.

Gravity is a theory. Orbital mechanics is an application of that theory.

But you're right. There are lots of scientists out there who are 'cranks', along with their theories. i happen to think evolution, along with the Big Bang theory, are bull.

How many years have you studied those subjects? You seem to know enough to dismiss them out of hand.

Could i be wrong? Yes. But so could the scientists. The post i was respoding to expressed a general criticism of the way scientists base their theories when it comes to things like evolution, and i agreed.

Evolution is the best model we have to date that describes the diversity of life on this planet.

If you can give me any proof at all of the Big Bang Theory (i think that's the most ridiculous), i have to say i might be willing to change that opinion

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a good start. See here:

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bbtest3.html

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