Posted on 01/08/2006 2:56:32 PM PST by Dichroic
Most paleontologists look into the mouth of an allosaurus and see a prehistoric eating machine with a jaw full of flesh-tearing teeth.
Peter DeRosa peers into that mouth and sees the hand of God.
Working from a business park about 80 miles north of Tampa, Fla., DeRosa and his family are hammering away at two bedrock principles of modern science: evolution and the notion that Earth is about 4 billion years old.
The DeRosas are part of a small but growing band of creationists using dinosaurs - the icons of an ancient Earth - to argue that the world is only 6,000 years old. The DeRosas' tool of choice? The fossilized bones of Ebenezer the allosaurus and other creatures cramming their makeshift laboratory.
"It's very clear in Scripture. God's word is true," said DeRosa, 22.
"Everything we've found supports that." The DeRosas run Creation Expeditions, a ministry that relies on dinosaurs to spread what they say is the infallible word of the Bible.
The family operation includes Peter, his brother Mark, sister Leah, and parents Pete and Linda.
The DeRosas have no formal training but have studied dinosaurs and fossils for more than a decade. .......... The DeRosas' digs have produced impressive results. They have uncovered a 22-foot-long allosaurus - a smaller relative of the T. rex - and a 15-foot-tall edmontosaurus, a plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur.
The DeRosas and their movement, in essence, are trying to turn science against itself.
By digging up fossils and interpreting their finds, some creationists hope to convince others that evolution and a 4-billion-year-old Earth are nonsensical notions unsupported by the data.
They maintain, for example, that they've found organic plant matter buried with fossils indicating the animals died only a few thousand years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at macon.com ...
They are starting with a conclusion - that the Bible is 100 percent accurate - and gathering evidence to support that idea. True science, they say, actively looks for problems with a hypothesis. And over the years, a tremendous amount of research has been conducted specifically to find major flaws in the theories about evolution and the age of Earth. The fundamental principles of both have held up.
Is this any different than evolutionists starting with their conclusion that there is no intelligent designer/creator? No, it isn't!
If true science actually looks for problems with a hypothesis, then evolution is not a science. Evolutionists simply ignore the problems and major flaws.
"The evidence is overwhelming," said Skip Pierce, the chairman of the biology department at the University of South Florida. "These theories are essentially established fact."
Implying that a theory is a fact is intellectually dishonest. If evolution was a fact, why call it a theory? any honest evolutionists would admit that their 'theory' includes a considerable amount of speculation; because it does.
Described most famously by Charles Darwin in 1859, the basics of evolution are fairly simple. The theory holds that all life evolved from earlier, generally more primitive forms.
Speculation.
Organisms survived based on how well-suited they were to their environment. Beneficial traits passed on from parents - genetic variations in speed, size or eyesight - gave some offspring an advantage over competitors. Those offspring - with their unique inherited traits - stood a better chance of surviving and reproducing.
No ider/creationists disputes this.
Darwin suggested that over millions of years those incremental changes reach a point of no return. At some stage, the organism changes so much, it can no longer breed within the species.
suggested = speculated
If its inherited differences are adaptive, it can evolve into a new species.
"If" involves speculation. It has never been observed. At best, evolutionists say it is predictable in the future. If that is not speculation, thee must be a new definition of speculation of which I am unaware.
Agreed - too many Christians want to build on erroneus past assumptions rather than use today's knowledge to strengthen the understanding of the Bible, which can still stand up just fine on its own two legs.
"In fact, there is very strong evidence in the Bible that man walked the Earth long before Adam, even though he became extinct and left no progeny."
Could you please expound scripturally on "even though he became extinct and left no progeny,"?
#50 Excellent points.
Name one natural history museum that charges $500 per ticket.
These folks are just setting up their "ministry". They are living proof that 'there's a sucker born every minute'. It's laughable.
Name one natural history museum that charges $500 per ticket.
These folks are just setting up their "ministry". They are living proof that 'there's a sucker born every minute'. It's laughable.
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That's to go on a five day dig. That's not your typical admission pass.
You're kidding, right? Have you ever heard of Down Syndrome? Just one of the many mutuations that goes wrong, quite frequently, actually, and millions of people immense suffering every year.
Harmful mutations happen all the time in nature.
A Being of few words: no wonder He assigned taxonomy to man.
Sorry, but I must be having a senior moment. I don't follow.
Led by people that clearly don't even know what they are digging up. It's a scam.
If I were to pay to go on an archeological dig, it certainly wouldn't be with a group that has no understanding of geology, paleontology, archeology, or anything other than theology (and a very limited understanding of even that). If people want to pay these folks to be deceived, fine, power to them. They have the right to spend their money on worthless things. It's a free country.
That wont stop me from laughing at them, however.
Says there He named everybody he created Adam. Men, women, children, people in the next valley.
You know I never understood that. I know in my heart God created the heavens and the earth, but I just never understood the necessity of trying to stick it within 6,000 years.
Me neither.
<<<<
The absolute age of the Earth is so well documented (as being well over 3 billion years) by radioisotope studies that anyone who does not accept the results just doesn't understand. There are many people who don't like to face facts.
>>>>>
http://www.apologeticspress.org/modules.php?name=Read&cat=13&itemid=2354
At the 2003 International Conference on Creationism, Russell Humphreys delivered a report that is sure to have evolutionists calling in their spin doctors. Dr. Humphreys, a physicist at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Dr. John Baumgardner, a geophysicist currently working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, along with Dr. Steven Austin and Dr. Andrew Snelling, both geologists at ICR, are all members of a collective effort known as the Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth (RATE) group [see Vardiman, 1999]. The RATE project is a collaborative venture composed of professional scientists primarily from ICR and the Creation Research Society. In 2000, the group met and delineated a five-year plan of research to explain the apparent disparity between conventional and biblical dates. The basic question the RATE group wants to address with these research projects is: How did large amounts of radioactive products get in the rocks and minerals? Both old Earth and young Earth views find anomalously high levels of radioactive daughter material. Thus, every year the RATE group convenes to analyze data, progress, and future projects.
The report Dr. Humphreys delivered was just one of many updates delivered by the RATE group over the past couple of years. He and Dr. Baumgardner built on the work of Dr. Robert Gentry, investigating helium retention in zircons. While the technical aspects of the research can be quite overwhelming, the conclusion is rather straightforward and simple: When uranium decays to lead, one of the by-products is helium. If creationists are correct, and the Earth is young, this helium (with its extremely small, lightweight, and unreactive atoms) would be expected to still be trapped in rocks. An old-Earth scenario, however, would result in minimal helium being held in the rocks, since the tiny helium atoms would be expected to have already escaped. Also, one would expect that the more deeply collected samples would be older and thus, contain less helium.
Humphreys and Baumgardner set out to measure the amount of helium still inside zircons. (Zircons are crystals that contain uraniumsome of which has decayed to lead, giving off heliumthat are found deep within granite.) After obtaining samples from specified depths, they sent the zircon samples to independent laboratories to allow world-class experts to measure helium amounts and rates of escape. Carl Wieland summarized the project as follows:
When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas, which readily escapes from rock.
Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium, which has partly decayed into lead.
By measuring the amount of uranium and radiogenic lead in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic age assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
There is a significant amount of helium from that 1.5 billion years of decay still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole Earth) could not be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years worth (at todays rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5,680 (+/- 2000) years (Wieland, 2003).
The Earth-shaking (pardon the pun) news is that since non-creationist laboratories performed the helium analyses, evolutionists have some heavy explaining to do. The results document that there is too much helium in the zircons for them to be millions (let alone billions) of years old! Since evolutionists cannot question the data (measured in their own laboratories), and they cannot reinterpret the results to fit an old Earth scenario, the only avenue left for evolutionists is to attack the researchers, or argue that their collection methods were seriously flawedneither of which will alter the truth. Not enough helium escaped the zircon crystals to support a 4.5 billion year old Earth.
REFERENCES
Humphreys, Russell et al., (2003), Helium Diffusion Rates Support Accelerated Nuclear Decay, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, ed. John Ivey Jr. (Creation Science Fellowship: Pittsburgh, PA). This article can be accessed on-line at: www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/Helium_ICC_7-22-03.pdf.
Vardiman, Larry (1999), Rate Group Prepares Status Report, [On-line], URL: http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-314.htm.
Wieland, Carl (2003), RATE Group Reveals Exciting Breakthroughs!, Answers in Genesis, [On-line], URL: http://aig.gospelcom.net/docs2003/0821rate.asp.
I figured I was having a senior moment. You were referring to verse 2, not the verse 4 I directed you to for the answer to where Cain's wife came from. (his sister)
Adam didn't have any daughters until after Cain, until after Seth.
Gregor Mendel had no formal training either.
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