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.”

God could only create through evolution yet have you ever seen complete fossil evidence to prove this?

I was once as strident in my support of Creationism as you are today, until (as I mentioned in an earlier post) I was confronted with a series of skulls beginning with Australopithicus and ending with Homo Sapiens. Once I had time to examine them myself, compare cranial sizes, orbits, manibles, etc., I could no longer believe that God simply inserted man (as Homo Sapiens) into the equation.

Maybe you can explain how any creatures DNA got the message to evolve to something else?

You obviously do not know much about alleles, genetic variability or mutations, much less the effect environment plays in the success or failure of polymorphs. I am not a biochemist or geneticist, but I have taken courses in biology, anthropology, evolution, and genetics and have come to my own conclusions through study. Have you?

So was there a DNA study done on these remains to prove they were all interlinked?

As I said, my epiphany came upon close examination of the skulls. I don't know if DNA tests were conducted on the remaining teeth. I'm not even sure that is a relevant question as the great apes genetically are very close to us, with only a few differences in their genetic code.

Forget he said in his own image, he really wouldn't do that.

This depends entirely of your definition of "image". Does this mean that God has arms and legs as we do, or does that reference imply that God endowed us with more intangible characteristics similar to His own, such as emotions, the ability to reason, etc. In my opinion, if God exists, He exists as spirit since He is able to be everywhere at the same moment. Therefore, He would have given each of us a spirit along with all of our personality traits, wrapped in a corporeal body...else why would Christ have been born, other than to give Him a physical form?

So far nothing you have said is proof of evolution.

My intention is not to prove or disprove anything to you, my intent is to participate in civil discourse on the matter. I don't give a rat's rump whether you believe in evolution or creationism, because neither view alone will get either of us into Heaven. According to the Bible, something else is required for salvation.

Man has always lived near water. The "whole earth" in that context meant the inhabited part; we are now living on areas which were viewed as plateaus prior to the flood and were sparsely if at all inhabited.

How do you decide what parts of scripture to ignore, and what parts to ~~interpret~~ re-write so that you can shoe-horn it into a fit for your theories?

I'm sorry, I made the assumption that you were a mainstream Genesis-is-literal-truth creationist. Are you not? Have you received some kind of personal revelation from God? Aliens? Um... Art Bell?

It is written... Gen 7:19 - "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered." Gen 7:23 - "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground..." Sounds like a lot more than a little coastal flooding to me. Looks like everything's wiped out right up to the tree-line (about what? 11,000 feet above sea level?). Another big problem for mainstream creationists: after 150 days to 1 year underwater (Gen 7:24-8:13), pretty much every form of surface plant life has been killed off, but only fauna was herded on board the ark. So how come we still have a couple thousand species of plants on land? Heaven knows, they couldn't have evolved from waterplants....

The waters of the flood have not gone anywhere; there was simply not as much water on the Earth before the flood as there is now.

The ark settled on the mountains of Arrarat (Gen 8:4) and the waters "decresed continually" (Gen 8:5). And "the waters were dried from off the face of the earth" (Gen 8:13).

As to salt, that apparently came with the flood. There is no reasonable theory as to a source of the salt in the oceans, on this planet at least.

So what are you proposing? A "reasonable" theory that during the flood it rained saltwater, even though that flies in the face of science and isn't mentioned by scripture? You realize what that means, don't you? Noah had to stock a 1 year supply of fresh water for his family and all the animals. Like Roy Scheider said in Jaws: "We're gonna need a bigger boat."

I say again, the evolutionists are looking at the wrong end of the "lineup" or whatever you want to call it of hominid and human types. The problem is at the near end and not the far end.

Recent studies of neanderthal DNA turned up the result that neanderthal DNA is "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", and that there is no way we could interbreed with them or be descended from them via any process resembling evolution. That says that anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid, i.e. a plausible ancestor for modern man, and that the closer hominid would stand closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal, and that his works and remains should be very easy to find, since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map. Of course, no such closer hominid exists; all other hominids are much further from us than the neanderthal.

An evolutionist could try to claim that we and the neanderthal both are descended from some more remote ancestor 200,000 years ago, but that would be like claiming that dogs couldn't be descended from wolves, and must therefore be descended from fish, i.e. the claim would be idiotic.

That leaves three possibilities: modern man was created from scratch very recently, was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal, or was imported from elsewhere in the cosmos.

There is no rational way to believe that modern man evolved here on Earth. Only a wilfully ignorant person could believe that.

So what are you proposing? A "reasonable" theory that during the flood it rained saltwater, even though that flies in the face of science and isn't mentioned by scripture?

It IS mentioned in Midrashim and other very ancient literature. The waters of the flood were encountered, and did not come FROM the Earth.

It is a dogma of establishment science that the tale of the biblical flood is a fairytale or, at most, an aggrandized tale of some local or regional flood. That, however, does not jibe with the facts of the historical record. The flood turns out to have been part and parcel of some larger, solar-system-wide calamity.

In particular, the seven days just prior to the flood are mentioned twice within a short space:

Gen. 7:4 "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights;...
Gen. 7:10 "And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."

These were seven days of intense light, generated by some major cosmic event within our system. The Old Testament contains one other reference to these seven days, i.e. Isaiah 30:26:

"...Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days..."

Most interpret this as meaning cramming seven days worth of light into one day. That is wrong; the reference is to the seven days prior to the flood. The reference apparently got translated out of a language which doesn't use articles. It should read "as the light of THE seven days".

It turns out, that the bible claims that Methuselah died in the year of the flood. It may not say so directly, but the ages given in Genesis 5 along with the note that the flood began in the 600'th year of Noah's life (Genesis 7:11) add up that way:

Gen. 5:25 ->
"And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years and begat Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.
<i.e. he lived 969 - 187 = 782 years after Lamech's birth>
And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years and begat a son. And he called his name Noah...
<182 + 600 = 782 also...>

Thus we have Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood; actually seven days prior to the flood...

Louis Ginzburg's seven-volume "Legends of the Jews", the largest body of Midrashim ever translated into German and English to my knowledge, expands upon the laconic tales of the OT.

From Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews, Vol V, page 175:

...however, Lekah, Gen. 7.4) BR 3.6 (in the week of mourning for Methuselah, God caused the primordial light to shine).... God did not wish Methuselah to die at the same time as the sinners...
The reference is, again, to Gen. 7.4, which reads:
"For yet seven days, and I shall cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights..."

The week of "God causing the primordial lights to shine" was the week of intense light before the flood.

What the old books are actually telling us is that there was a stellar blowout of some sort either close to or within our own system at the time of the flood. The blowout was followed by seven days of intense light and radiation, and then the flood itself. Moreover, the signs of the impending disaster were obvious enough for at least one guy, Noah, to take extraordinary precautions.

The ancient (but historical) world knew a number of seven-day light festivals, Hanukkah, the Roman Saturnalia etc. Velikovsky claimed that all were ultimately derived from the memory of the seven days prior to the flood.

If this entire deal is a made-up story, then here is a case of the storyteller (isaiah) making extra work for himself with no possible benefit, the detail of the seven days of light being supposedly known amongst the population, and never included in the OT story directly.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.