Creationists Gather...Dinosaurs Subject of Discussion

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.”

Bob Bass writes:

I haven't seen the movie but I have read the transcript of the entire Scopes trial (and many books on it -- and several books on the recent Supreme Court case "Scopes-2" such as those by Wendell Byrd [two thick volumes -- containing written endorsements by Evolutionists as "eminently fair"]).

If all you are insisting upon is the trivial fact that life has a certain plasticity and variability within each (Biblical[?]) "kind " -- such as what breeders can achieve with dogs & pigeons -- wherein, in nature, Darwinian "selection of the fittest" visibly operates (such as industrial melanism with Kettlewell's moths), then EVERYONE who is not certifiably insane AGREES that "micro-evolution" is an established fact -- but one of little significance.

People who doubt evolution are those who doubt MACRO-evolution, i.e. that every form of animal life observed today had a single ancestor, and that if we could line up the genealogy (as in the adult fairy tales purveyed by LIFE-TIME books and all Established popular media) we would see something recognizably "apish" or "monkeyish" gradually having descendants who became more and more "humanlike" until Homo Sapien Sapiens arrives on the scene.

I once read the book "Human Evolution" by UCLA anthropologist Birdsell, and when he came to plotting cranial capacity of various pongids/pithecoids/anthropoids as allegedly traced through time (using conventional uniformitarian dating), showing australophithecus, homo erectus, homo sapiens, etc. I had to laugh out loud because they were essentially _parallel_ horizontal straight lines! Evidently some of Birdsell's colleagues twisted his arm to fudge the graph lest he confuse the laity, because in the Second Edition, using the SAME data, he had fudged each line to tilt it upward going from left to right so that the gullible could imagine that each cranial capacity was "evolving to a larger size" and with glossed-over vertical jumps one could be brainwashed into believing that modern man had "evolved" from some more brutish creatures.

The Scopes trial shows clearly that the only reason that people who fancy themselves scientifically enlightened is that the current geological party-line is that the earth was once a molten ball, and if you accept that, then there has to be an explanation as to how animal life appeared on this ball after it cooled off enough to allow liquid water.

Evolutionists DEFINE "scientific" as precluding "miracles" such as "creation ex nihilo" (although the evidence for the Big Bang has forced most astrophysicists to admit that time had a beginning and that "before" this beginning neither space nor time existed, i.e. there was at that ONE admitted "singularity" true "creation ex nihilo"), and therefore they are forced by their assumptions to deduce that life must have spontaneously arisen by "natural processes" (meaning chemistry and physics as observed today). But this is simply an aesthetic choice. People who want to push "naturalistic materialism" as the ONLY metaphysic behind science are welcome to see how far they can get with that arbitrary choice. But with only one exception that I know of, the smartest of the atheistically inclined (such as Sir Francis Crick and Sir Fred Hoyle) all end up with "directed Pan-Spermia" -- that is, life originated somewhere else and was brought here by cosmic winds (Hoyle) or "space-alien missionaries[!]" (Crick) -- because they can easily calculate that the spontaneous formation of an information-containing molecule with enough information encoded in it to survive & replicate would take 10^(10^(10^10)) years, i.e. is a practical _impossibility_. Richard Dawkins admits the problem, but then fudges the answer with a faked--up computer code which he convinces himself by wishful thinking and lack of rigorous logic demonstrates that the probability against spontaanneous biogenesis is not really as formidable as Crick and Hoyle have long admitted.

I once studied carefully a lengthy book containing at least one page on each, and careful photos and measurements of _every_ known fossil alleged to have a bearing on human evolution. If you remove the artist's reconstructions (which have time and again been discredited by later discovery of more complete skeletons which show that the artists were dreaming), and concentrate on the ACTUAL bones themselves, you could put them all in one corner of a small trunk! Absent the tendentious "reconstructions" of propagandizing artists, if you could revive the actual creatures and see them in action, a child could tell that (in the family of monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.) they are just EITHER "extinct apes" OR "genuine humans" with not the tiniest trace of any real transiitional forms between them.

All of the intellectually honest palaeontologists (such as Otto Schindewolf and Edridge & Gould [the latter, with their "punctuated equilibrium" using bafflegab to shield the public from understanding their gigantic admissions]) have admitted in writing that the fossil record is as complete as it ever will be and there is not the tiniest trace anywhere of truly coercive evidence (as understood in the hard sciences) that any "transitional" forms between the different (Biblical[?]) "kinds" have EVER existed. The fossil record is just a record of abrupt appearances, [allegedly] long persistences with only trivial changes ("micro-evolution," like the beaks of Darwin's finches or the protective coloration of Kettlewell's moths), and then extinction. The connections are 100% imaginary and "projected" onto the theory by the PRESUPPOSITIONS of the theorist. (In Eldridge-Gould "punk-eek" the "macro-evolution" always takes place off-stage, which invisibility they explain away wiith ad hoc arguments.)

If you are familiar with Cremo's book (denounced because he is a Hinduism-convert and not because of any lack of coercive quality in his documentary evidence) there have been fully human skeletons found in EVERY stratum of the alleged uniformitarian past, no matter how many "millions" of years one goes back; they also document the FACT that in the 20th century these embarrassments are covered up by the Establishment and not permitted to be published!

I once corresponded with an ex-Young-Earth Creationist (an oil geologist) who said that he had suffered for his beliefs at the hands of skeptical colleagues (eventually getting fired), and finally gave up and accepted the "eons" of time orthodox geology. He challenged me to explain away the varves somewhere that gave a continuous record of 20,000 or 30,000 years at some lake-site. I told him that at the time I had no good answer, but would eventually get back to him. Now have a _coercive_ quality answer. The Creationists took videos of the environs of Mt. St Helens before it blew up, and then went back 10 years after it blew up, and then videotaped the identical areas to show layers of thousands upon thousands of varves! (Apparently a _daily_ rather than an "annual" phenomenon!)

Lord Kelvin stopped Darwinism dead in its tracks when he made an irrefutable thermodynamic calculation that at the rate which the Earth is cooling off (and heat is being conducted from the interior to the surface and then radiated into space) the Earth could not possibly be more than 2 to 20 million years old. This really put "the fear of God" into the staunchest Darwinists for a while.

But when radioactivity was discovered, the uniformitarians rejoiced because they had found a "new" source of heat to prolong the Earth's life-span. But they _failed_ to repeat Kelvin's calculation, because the results would have been too embarrassing. I once found in a geology text-book an account of Kelvin's calculation, which (using Fourier transform solution) I modernized by incuding on the right-hand side of the equation as a "source" of energy inside the Earth the _maximal_ modern estimates of abundance of radioactive materials inside the Earth (which I got from publications by famed Princeton physicist Dicke). Part of the reason that I was fired from BYU is that I circulated a copy of my paper showing that with inclusion of the heat sources which Lord Kelvin had not known about, the _MAXIMAL_ age of the Earth gets revised upwards from his 20 Million years to only about 200 Million years (a far cry from the billions proclaimed by uniformitarian geologists who are about to experience a sudden fall when my friends start to market cheap Radio-Shack type gadgets by means of which high-school labs & home workshop hobbyists can cause Uranium and Thorium to do in 20 minutes what the Establishment claims would take "45 billion years"!). [Stay tuned, o ye of little faith!]

The uniformitarian Editor of "Nature" has admitted that the rate of efflux of helium from the Earth's crust into its atmosphere, and escape from the atmosphere into outer space, sets an upper limit to the age of the Earth's atmosphere at 2 million years (or more precisely he called it the "biggest anomaly that had ever crossed my desk" and others in numerous technical papers have worked out the 2 million years and admit that this is a "puzzle" and a "mystery" which remains "UNEXPLAINED and will not go away!")

When geology-Ph.D. holding geologists (such as Dr. John D. Morris) subject the Grand Canyon to an unbiased scrutiny, they find that the strata on TOP are dated at eons older than the strata at the bottom! This has been documented elaborately in papers, books and videos from the qualified geologists of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), but this coercive-quality hard evidence has neither been rebutted nor refuted, it is simply IGNORED because "those jerks are Fundamentalists anyway, so who cares what they say!" In the ICR books addressed to trained scientists (not laymen) there are listed DOZENS of ways of dating the earth's features (amount of time for all the salt to get into the oceans by the rates that it is now getting in from rivers, etc.) which come up with dates less than 200 million years (many of them with ages less than tens of thousands!). This evidence has never been refuted, merely ignored, but as a trained mathematician I know that a SINGLE counter-example disproves any alleged generalization and as a onetime Full Professor of Physics & Astronomy at a WASC-accredited university I know that it is not science but PSEUDO-SCIENCE to ignore a theory's predictions which are falsified by experimental observations and unquestionable FACTS.

I am enough of a believer in "the scientific method" that I wold believe in "stochastic macro-evolution" if there were truly coercive evidence in its favor.

Instead, the whole idea is a house of cards held together by nothing more than the RELIGION of "secular humanism" which is explicitly atheistic _by definition_ and excludes the possibility of "miracles" by definition.

OUTLINE OF REASONS for SKEPTICISM toward neo--Darwinian stochastic macro-evolution:

1. Irreducible complexity [high information-content] at the molecular level reqiures design (or waiting for a Hindu-style eternity to pass, which is contradicted by the coercive evidence for the Big Bang);

2. Geological dating schemes are fundamentally flawed because

2.1 in sedimentary rocks the reasoning is circular and assumes that no global catastrophes have ever occurred (contrary to evidence by the formerly Establihment, now neo-catastrophist, Derek V. Ager, in his penetrating book "The Stratigraphic Record");

2.2 in igneous rocks the radiometric dating is fundamentally flawed because

2.2.1 results are often inconsistent; anomalies are not published;

2.2.2 Cook's nuclear physics proofs from coercive evidence pertaining to the _three_ ratios one gets from the 4 dates obtained by Uranium-Thorium-Lead dating of the same rock are consistent only with hypothesis that rock was subjected to a neutron-flux (like spinning the hands of a clock wildly) or other clock-resetting physical phenomenon, namely the 3 ratios are what his nuclear physics argument PREDICTED they would be if Uranium-Thorium-Lead dating were spurious!;

2.2.3 Brightsen's patent-pending process for radiation remediation shows that radionuclide decay rates can be altered to instantaneous decay by a passing photon of correct low energy (e.g. infrared-ray or heat or lightning strike) and so "the most sacrosanct principle in all science" is demonstrated by coercive evidence to be a modern MYTH!

3. the fossil "record" (assuming for sake of argument that uniformitarian geological dating were correct, even though we know that it cannot be) is clearly one of abrupt appearance, "long" persistence with no significant change, and extinction.

3.1 the fossil "record" is demonstrably imaginary in many cases, because creatures which we have been authoritatively told "have been extinct for scores of millions of years" are sometimes discovered still living on the Earth.

SUMMARY: there is not the tiniest scrap of hard evidence which would suggest that "evolution has occurred" except to those who already believe that the doctrine of the formerly molten-earth plus suspect validity of creation ex nihilo REQUIRES them to _assume_ that evolution "must" have occurred.

(But this is not an induction from evidence, it is a deduction from tacit/covert presupposititions!)

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