Candid pic of lecturers at the creationist gathering
Posted on 07/20/2002 2:08:38 PM PDT by yankeedame
Saturday, July 20, 2002
Creationists gather today:Dinosaurs subject of discussion
By Cindy Schroeder, cschroeder@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
UNION — As children create models of dinosaurs, their parents can search for Biblical references to the giant creatures at a weekend conference hosted by a pro-Creationist ministry that vows to “defend scripture from the very first verse.”
The site of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Boone County is being graded. (Patrick Reddy photo) | ZOOM | Organizers of the program running today and Sunday at Big Bone Baptist Church in Union say the Answers in Genesis family conference is expected to draw between 500 and 600 people within a day's drive of the Tristate. They say it is part of an ongoing series of family conferences that the 8-year-old nonprofit ministry — now building a 50,000-square-foot museum in Hebron — has offered throughout the country to “give (believers) arguments to help debunk evolution.”
Answers in Genesis followers believe the Earth's creatures were created by God and were not the result of an evolutionary process as espoused by scientists such as Charles Darwin.
“Our purpose is to equip Christians to be able to defend Christianity against the evolutionary ideas (or) secular ideas that challenge the Bible,” said Ken Ham, executive director of Answers in Genesis and the conference's keynote speaker. He said organizers will present what they believe is the factual account of the history of the world as presented in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
Like those who promote Intelligent Design, Answers in Genesis followers believe that all life was the result of a creator. However, they carry that theory further, in that they maintain the creator “is the God of the Bible and you can trust the God of the Bible,” Mr. Ham said.
With the help of the writings of “Scriptural Geologists,” Terry Mortenson, a full-time lecturer with Answers in Genesis who has degrees in theology and geology, will attempt to show that dinosaurs walked the Earth with man.
Arnold Miller, a professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, challenged participants to “go out and examine the evidence themselves,” rather than allow others to interpret the evidence for them.
“I'm all for Answers in Genesis having every opportunity to say what they want,” Mr. Miller said. “But I would challenge anyone who goes to this conference to demand direct positive evidence that the creation of life took place over six days in 4004 B.C. or whatever they say. People should ask, "What's the evidence? Let's hear it.'
“It's one thing to provide misleading characterizations in scientific debates. It's another to say that the answers (to issues such as how life began) really are in Genesis.”
JOB 40:15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.JOB 40:16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
JOB 40:17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
JOB 40:18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
JOB 40:19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.
JOB 40:20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.
JOB 40:21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.
JOB 40:22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.
JOB 40:23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.
JOB 40:24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.
Midrashim (the rabbinical lore from which the OT is taken) includes descriptions of several things which could easily amount to a handful of leftover dinosaurs still around just prior to the flood, including the reem, the ziz bird, and one or two other kinds of things. One such text describes Noah lashing one such creature to the decks of the ark because he would not fit in any of the cages.
There's another possible location, but only for Clinton supporters: HERE.
If you're talking about any old tube worm, and with respect to the strict flood-geology, young-earth creationism Ken Hamm insists on, then this is indeed puzzling. Ken wants the flood to have created most of the earth's fossiliferous geology, and mostly in the space of one year. Think of all that strata held in suspension in the world ocean. It must have been a thick, hot slurry of rock, mud and minerals. The problem goes well beyond filter feeders requiring clean water. How did anything survive? Obviously there must have been aquaria on the ark, and Noah sealed the huge plexiglas plates with the same pitch he used on the "gopher wood" of the ark itself. (See, that was easy!)
If you have in mind the tube worms living in the deep ocean trenches, it used to be the case that the ICR brand of flood-geology included, if somewhat peripherally, the notion that the pre-flood earth had more-or-less uniformly shallow oceans (thus no deep thermal vents). The relief of the land was considered similarly subdued (thus few or no alpine environments).
Actually this was but a fancy of Henry Morris, included in The Genesis Flood co-authored with John C. Whitcomb, Jr. in 1961. Back in the day Morris' fancies had a way of becoming rock-ribbed doctrine. Morris was quite the doctrinal enforcer. I haven't followed the Institute for Creation Research closely enough in recent years to determine if his son has the same talent and inclination.
Another notion, which I think might have originated with Morris or Whitcomb, was that continental drift just started happening one day, after the flood (indeed not long after that whole Babel thing IIRC). Morris and Whitcomb wrote their breakthrough tome at a time when plate tectonics was still aborning, and quote-mined the early critics to dismiss the theory. The YECs later decided that maybe they did need to shove some continents around, and latched onto a couple of passing biblical reference to Peleg (son of Eber, father or Reu) "in [whose] time the earth was divided".
That may seem a thin biblical reed upon which to set continents skittering around the globe (they've slowed to their current rate of centimeters per year, you see) but then as Morris tells us in TGF, on the page I just happened to open my copy to, "the instructed Christian knows that the evidences for full divine inspiration of Scripture are far weightier than the evidences for any fact of science." Walter Brown still advocates this historical hyper continental drift today.
Anyway I must admit to being at a loss as to how the thermal vent communities got transplanted from Noah's aquaria to the deep ocean trenches. Maybe, while the rest of the biblical folk where messing around with that big tower, Peleg got himself some pitch and some gopher wood and made a submersible?
That's rich, you even respond to the spamming charge with a cut 'n paste!
If you were hit by a bus this afternoon and replaced by a Holden-bot, I'm not sure anyone would notice.
That's not good enough, though. Once an idea -- a principle or theory -- is adopted by working scientists, is actively and fruitfully employeed in ongoing research, it enevitably ends up being reported, elaborated, examined and tested, and all this is recorded in the science journals, the preceedings of learned societies, and so on. Once an idea becomes thus a documented part of science, and if it's an important or central idea, then it will enevitably end up in the textbooks.
This leaves thousands of portals that have to be guarded! (What are there, something like five thousand scientific journals now? Seven thousand?) Then you have professional societies like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that anyone with a degree can join as a voting member, and which have democratic procedures to allow for the calling of symposia. This is really huge. I'm not sure the evolutionists have the resources to run such large conspiracy and keep it airtight. Maybe they're getting help from the Jews? Or the Catholics? (I should email Jack Chick. He might know.)
Totally false. Science ignores evolution. All the major discoveries in biology in the last 150 years - mendellian genetics, the discovery of DNA, and the interrelatedness of the functions of the organism - support ID, not evolution. Further, no Nobel Prize has ever been given for anything which backed evolution. All the prizes have gone to discoveries that tended to disprove evolution.
[Note to moderator: there are no personal attacks in this post.]
Nobel prizes are given for PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, MEDICINE (or physiology), LITERATURE, and PEACE. No prize for biology, except insofar as medicine covers that terrain.
But in that respect consider the 2001 prize for Medicine. (Chosen pretty much at random, btw, as the first to come up on a google search.) It went to researchers who have elucidated the detailed molecular mechanisms of the cell cycle (the orchestrated process of cell reproduction, it's control and timing, cell death, etc).
This research showed that the basic mechanisms are highly conserved among all eukaryotes (organisms having cells with a separate nucleus). So let's assume these molecular mechanisms are the result of ID. This then would be perfectly consistent with the claim that all eukaryotes are one "created kind". This helps quite a bit with that overcrowded ark!
IOW it is in most cases empty, and logically wrong, to say that some result "supports ID" but doesn't support evolution. ID is, at least logically, potentially consistent with truly huge amounts of evolution having occured, right up at or near the Kingdom level. The specific examples of systems that (allegedly) must have been intelligently designed are most typically ones that are shared by a vast diversity of organisms, often whole Phyla or Kingdoms.
Unless IDers are willing to offer some specific suggestions about HOW and WHEN these "designs" are brought into actualization by the "designer" in real living organisms, ID doesn't really contradict the major part of textbook evolution. Stuff like the evolution of whales, of horses, of man from ape-like hominids, of amphibians from fishes, is basically untouched by clear or specific contradiction with "Intelligent Design".
Of course the reason for this is that ID is vacuous. This is also the reason it is scientifically useless, so far any way.
And God changed 'em in an instant so they could withstand the enormous pressure and not need sunlight for photosynthesis. Yep, that works.
And how is that different than God made the world this morning, complete with bogus memories of the past and posts from each of us backdated to yesterday?
Of course, since you've been using the same tactics for 10 years, I'd sooner expect to have the world stop turning right this second than you to change your ingrained ways.
Chalk up another victory for creation science.
If he's talking about that 60 million year-old shoe print they found in ashe that also hosted dinosaur remains, he needs to keep in mind that nobody had Rockports back then, except for maybe aliens. But that's another argument...
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