[EPCC]
Creation/Evolution
ResearchProject


Jesse K. Hyder, Instructor
El Paso Community College


INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC CREATIONISM (VHS VIDEO)

Dr. Henry Morris
Institute for Creation Research        click on URL    www.ICR.org
P.O. Box 2667
El Cajon, CA 92021
(ph 619-448-0900)

"Henry Morris (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is founder and president of the Institute for Creation Research, as well as author of a number of books on both Biblical and scientific creationism."

"Dr. Henry Morris uses scientific data only, showing that the facts of biology, geology, and other sciences support the Biblical teaching of recent, special creation."

The following is an attempted word for word transcript of the video "The Scientific Case for Creationism" by Dr. Henry Morris. The transcript may not be 100% complete and the spelling may not be 100% correct but an attempt has been made to be as complete and accurate as possible. (Transcriber, J. K. Hyder, Astronomy Instructor, EPCC)

"Only two options, evolution or creation, make up the theories of origin. Two world views that embrace everything in their scope.

The Evolution Model/Idea/Theory/Concept is that we can explain all origin and development of all things in terms of natural process, which is going on today, which we can observe in action, we can actually see evolution taking place. That is the evolution model. It has been going on for billions of years, from primordial particles to complex people. Everything is embraced in the concept of evolution. Everything is explained by continuing natural processes.

The Creation Model is that you cannot explain everything by natural processes which are continuing today. At least the basic systems of nature, the basic universe, the basic structures, the basic systems have to be explained by completed supernatural processes which are not going on today.

This is recognized by the evolutionary community also: "Creation and evolution between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things". "They either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state they must have been indeed created, by some omnipotent Intelligence." (D. J. Futuyma, Science on Trial; 1983, p. 197)

So, those are the two possibilities, evolution or creation. Many people would say "Evolution is science and Creation is religion and that is why you can't have creation in schools as that is religion. you have to teach evolution in school as that is science."

Science, of course, gets credit for a lot of things. Our marvelous standard of living today, we live in a scientific age. I am a scientist, all our staff are scientist, we are certainly not against science. But, as a matter of fact, science does not deal with evolution. Evolution is not science and it does not produce any of the scientific benefits that the scientific method has done over the recent centuries.

Let me quote from another article. The author, who is an evolutionist, Dr. Horace Judson, was reviewing all the great contributions that science has made over the past couple centuries, since the industrial revolution. He said "Still even today certain major sciences offer scant prospect of any practical applications. Astronomy and cosmology are of little earthly use. Evolutionary theory has not bred a single new species of animal or vegetable ... lit alone improve the intensity of our pleasures or the intelligence or docility of our children". (Horace F. Judson, Century of the Sciences, Science 84, Nov 1984, p.42)

I would challenge anybody who thinks that evolution is science to recall one contribution that evolution has made to true science and to scientific advance, or standard of living, any of the scientific benefits that we know of in science today. The founding fathers of science, the origins of the scientific revolution, were almost all Christian Creationists who believed in God, believed in Creation, believed in the Bible. That is not true today.

We had better define the terms. What exactly is evolution? Many people would say evolution is change, any kind of change is evolution. No, all of us believe in change, any kind of change is evolution. No two individuals are exactly alike. There are different varieties of dogs and cats, etc. No one will argue that there is not change taking place. But evolution is not just change, it is a certain type of change.

Let me quote from Sir Julian Huxley. He was the leading evolutionist of the 20th century. Grandson of Thomas Huxley, known as Charles Darwin's bulldog. Julian Huxley was probably the leading promoter of what is known as neo-Darwinism or the modern Darwinism synthesis as it is called. Probably the top evolutionist of the 20th century, he was also the 1st director general of UNESCO. He had a profound influence on education in all the world societies in general. His definition of evolution, he has written several books on the subject, should be authoritative and here is what he says:
"Evolution in the extended sense can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an increasingly high level of organization ... in its products. Our present knowledge indeed forces us to view that the whole of reality is evolution ... a single process of self-transformation." (Julian Huxley, in What is Science?, p. 278)

Everything in the universe is involved in this evolutionary process occurring in time, right now. Further, don't impose God on this process. It is a single process of self-transformation. The universe is transforming itself into higher and higher levels of organization and complexity.

In another place he (J. Huxley) says "The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields. Inorganic subjects such as the life history of stars and the formation of the chemical elements on the one hand ... and on the other hand subjects like linguistics, social anthropology and comparative law and religion, began to be studied from an evolutionary angle ... Until today we are enabled to see evolution as a universal and all pervading process." (Julian Huxley, in What is Science?, p. 272) Everything is involved in evolution as a world view, not just an isolated speciality that some people deal with, it embraces everything that we study and know about in our experience.

That being the case, we should be able to see it take place. The Scientific Method deals with things we know, science means knowledge. Science, in the proper sense, is what we observe, what we can experience, what we can experiment on, what we can repeat in an experiment, reproducibility of the experiment is the essence of the scientific method. Science evolution should be observable as a present process (Creation by definition is not a present process). Evolution should be testable scientifically.

On the other hand, creation is not going on now, so we would not expect to see creation take place in a scientific laboratory or in nature as it is an event of the past. Creation is not going on now, it was completed in the past. So, therefore it is not accessible to the scientific method and we have to acknowledge that. It is true, as the evolutionists sometime charge, that we can not test creation scientifically as it took place in the past and we can't reproduce it now.

But, evolution supposedly is taking place now, and therefore we ought to be able to see it and understand how it operates and see it functioning and see evolution taking place. So, it is accessible, supposedly, to the scientific method. But, the fact is that when the scientific method is applied to evolution, it fails every single scientific test. There is NO evidence of 1) present evolution 2) past evolution 3) possible evolution and the only other option is Creation.

There is no evidence that evolution is occurring in the present. Nobody has ever seen it take place. There is no evidence that it has occurred in the past. There are no transitional forms to indicate it took place in the past. As far as what we know about the laws of science and laws of nature, as far as we can tell it is not even possible at all. Therefore, evolution has been tested scientifically and proved false as far as we can possibly test it.

That means if evolution is not true, and scientifically it seems not to be, and there are only 2 models, and the only other option is creation, therefore the alternative is bound to be right. When we talk about the scientific case for Creation, it is exactly the same as the scientific case against evolution because there are no other options. We talk about the evidence against evolution. By the same token, those same evidences are positive evidences for creation.

Now, look at the three aspects of evolution, present evolution, past evolution, possible evolution. First, there is no present evolution. Has anybody ever seen evolution take place? No. We see many varieties produced. Varieties of fruit flies, varieties of roses, varieties of dogs, varieties of cats. No one has ever seen anything between a cat and a dog or between a house and an elephant. The variation that we do see take place is not evolution, although it is sometimes called micro-evolution. But it is not even that because it is variation, it is re-combination, it is variation within limits within a kind. There is a basic kind. A dog kind, cat kind, etc. You can vary horizontally within a kind, but never from one kind to a different kind, and certainly not from one kind to a higher kind.

There are examples of when they go down and become extinct. Modern ecologists say at least 1 species of plant or animal is becoming extinct every day. If that has been going on during human history it means that thousands have become extinct but in all of human history no one has seen one new species or kind evolve out of another kind. So, evolution does not seem to be taking place in the present.

Let me make one more quote from Dr. David G. Kitts, a prominent evolutionist paleontologist, a state university professor, from an article in the Evolution magazine. "Evolution, at least in the sense that Darwin speaks of it, cannot be detected within the lifetime of a single observer" (David G. Kitts; Evolution, Sept 1974, p. 466)

You cannot see evolution take place. But science is supposedly what you can see and observe and experience. No one has ever seen evolution take place, not only in the lifetime of a single observer but in all human history no one has observed it. No one can document a single species of due kind evolving.

Dr. Patterson, a leading world evolutionist said "No one has ever produced a species by mechanism of natural selection. No one has ever gotten near it ...". (Colin Patterson; Cladistics; Interview with Peter Franz, March 4, 1982)

Yet, Charles Darwin 125 or so years ago became world famous and influenced all history since because he supposedly solved the problem of how evolution took place by natural selection. But no one has ever seen a new species evolve by natural selection and evolutionist acknowledge that. So, it isn't something that you see in the present.

Somebody might say what about the peppered moth experiments in England. Some say this is the best example of evolution in action now. The moth was a light species but with coal dust of the industrial revolution, they became darker to hide from birds. Now that things are cleaner, the moths are going back to being a lighter color. But that is just horizontal variation within their own kind. If you think that is evolution, look at a quote from an evolutionist. "The (peppered-moth) experiments ... do not show evolution in progress, for all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston Betularia." (L. Harrison Matthews, FRS, in the introduction to the 1971 edition of Darwin's Origin of Species) That is the classic example of evolution in action. The result is that we can conclusively conclude that there is no evolution taking place today that anyone has ever seen or has documented or observed.

We make that point when we talk to our evolutionary colleagues and they say that you have to understand that this big evolution, macro-evolution, takes millions of years, that is why you can't see it now. But, this is supposed to be science and science is what you see. So, where do you see that kind of evidence? What they say is that you go to the fossil records.

Fossil records are remains of plants and animals that once lived on the earth and died and were buried and now are preserved in the rocks of the earth. The fossil records have been organized by paleontologists and historical geologists into a system of geological ages where in the oldest ages there is no life, then about 3 billion years ago simple life forms evolved out of non-living chemicals, then about 700 million years ago complex invertebrates in the sea began to evolve, then some of these evolved into vertebrates in the sea, those into amphibians, those into reptiles and birds and mammals and finally into man. All this has been organized into a system of geological ages supposedly beginning about 4.6 billion years ago when the earth supposedly evolved out of a dust cloud or something in the solar system.

That system of geological ages is taught as the history of life on the earth. It sounds convincing when you first see it. Here there are simple forms of life a long time ago, now more complex forms of life and finally human life. Looks like evolution until you look at it more closely in detail. The facts that remain that after you look at all the billions of fossils in the sedimentary rocks in the crust of the earth is that there are lots of invertebrates, not so many vertebrates, lots of fossils of all kinds including human fossils. The fact is that in all of this array of fossils, there is not one transitional form from one kind to a different kind in all the billion of fossils.

We probably need to go back further than that, for many say you have to begin with the evolution of the stars, and then the evolution of the solar system and so on. How did the universe evolve?

A popular theory is that there was a big bang (there have been others). This is the idea that about 15 to 20 billion years ago a primordial atom exploded and it produced hydrogen and helium and maybe a little lithium but that is about as far as that could go. You have to find other ways to produce the more complex elements. But all this begin with hydrogen.

As Dr. Shaffley of Harvard used to say, "Instead of in the beginning God, we ought to say in the beginning hydrogen". Every thing evolved out of hydrogen gas. Someone defined it as a "colorless, odorless gas that given enough time becomes people." There are many nominal creationists who say they will agree with the big bang but that God created the big bang. But the evolutionist is not satisfied with that, they have to find the origin of the primordial atom too.

The great majority of cosmologists, at least those who write in the journals, have an explanation of the origins of the primordial particle or atom. Remember that this primevally particle is not just a little electron or something that exploded. It was nothing, it was not something that existed in time and then got bigger in time. Even time itself is connected with space so this particle of space-time exploded in the big bang and out of that evolved the elements, the galaxies, the stars and everything.

Well, where did that primordial particle of space-time come from? There is a modification of the big bang theory that is somewhat popular now, called the Inflationary Cosmology, which says that before the hot big bang there was a period of inflation, a rapid period of inflation up to about the size of a grape-fruit from the primordial particle. One astronomer who was influential in originating this theory says that before the hot big bang there was a cold big whoosh. Where did that come from? One of the originators wrote "So I CONJECTURED that our universe had its physical origin as a quantum fluctuation for some pre-existing ... state of NOTHINGNESS." (March 8, 1984, p. 15 / Edward P. Tyron; New Scientist)

In other words, somehow, in quantum theory in a mathematical exercise, nothing can change into something. You can take a +1 and a -1 and combine and get zero. So, why not take zero and separate it into +1 and -1 and get a universe and anti-universe out of nothing.

They used to criticize creationist for believing in creation our of nothing. We don't believe in creation out of nothing, we believe in creation ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), creation out of the power of God. At least creation out of nothing has someone able to do that involved but evolution out of nothing has nothing, is just there all of a sudden. Out of nothing comes a cold big whoosh, then a hot big bang then all of the galaxies and stars etc. has taken place.

Maybe so, but you should not call that science. That certainly is not capable of being studied in the laboratory. you can't reproduce that sort of thing. It is not something that you can see. It is strictly philosophical metaphysical speculation.

Lets go to the origin of life, how did life begin? Some folks have the idea that in the primordial soup, some 3.5 billion years ago, complex chemicals became somewhat more complex, and somehow in reaction with electrical discharges in the atmosphere these chemicals evolved into different chemicals. Protein molecules evolved and that evolved into forms of life eventually. They think maybe that could be reproduced in the laboratory so there have been lots of experiments to try to reproduce the simpler forms of life in the laboratory. Many people think that maybe that has been done but it has NOT been done, it is no ways near to being done.

A quote from Klaus Dose (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol 13, No. 4, 1988, p.348) in summary says "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life ... have led to a better perception ... of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on earth, rather than to its solution." They don't know how life originated.

You see, the only way you can originate a complex entity like life is by a system that already has life. Life can produce life, but non-living chemicals can not produce life. There is more information required in the simplest DNA molecule or in the simplest replicating protein molecule than in all the books of the world. Too much information has to go into the specification of the reproduction of even the simple form of life than anyone can do or even learn. No one knows what life is yet, let alone be able to reproduce it.

Going a little further, lets go to the fossil record again. Now, once we have life, then supposedly these simple forms evolve into more complex forms of life. The fact is though when we go to the fossil records we see NO transition forms. For example, in the Precambrian period, there are many one celled organisms, bacteria, and a few many celled organisms, but even these are not connected to the other many celled organisms of the Cambrian period beginning some 600-700 million years ago.

So you have simple one cell organisms and all of a sudden very complex many-celled marine invertebrates like starfish, clams, jelly fish ... etc. These are very complex organisms, not as complex as human beings but very complex organisms. And there are no transition from the one cell organisms to the complex many celled organisms. No one has found a two celled or 3 cell organism, it is one cell, then many cells. There is no transition.

If evolution is true there must have been long series of transitional forms from the one celled to the many celled invertebrate but no one has ever found any. In all of the fossils that have ever been found, there are lots of invertebrate and one celled organism but nothing in-between.

When you go from the invertebrate to vertebrates, the invertebrates have to evolve into a fish, a vertebrate. The hard part, the shell on the outside of an invertebrate had to evolve into the hard part on the inside, the bone structure. That would take a tremendous amount of evolution over a long period of time and there ought to be plenty of documentation on that somewhere. In all of the billions of fossils that have been found no one has found a transition from the invertebrate and the vertebrate. You can carry this on from fish to amphibian etc. There are no transitions found there etc.

Let me summarize from another statement from scientist Dr. Steven Stanley in Bio Science. He is a professor in paleontology at John Hopkins University. He has written a very influential book on natural evolution and he certainly believes in evolution (we had a debate with him several years ago). He says "Evolution happens rapidly in small localized populations, so we're not likely to see it in the fossil record." (Steven Stanley, Bioscience; Dec 1986, p.725)

Seems like what they (evolutionists) are saying is, evolution is a proved fact of science and you can only teach evolution in school as that is science. Where is the proof, where is the evidence? We don't see it in the present world and they say it takes too long, it goes too slow, we have to have millions of years so we can't see it in the present world.

So, where do we see it. They say go to the fossil records, there you have millions of years. We go there and don't see it either and they (evolutionists) say the reason we don't see it there is because it took place rapidly in a small population and didn't leave any evidence. In other words, in the present evolution goes too slow for us to see and in the past it went too fast for us to see. You don't see it anywhere. Evolutionists have to walk by faith, not by sight. They believe it but they don't see it.

Somebody might say what about the horses, isn't there a good documented series of horses? Let me read what Dr. Stanley has to say about that. "The horse is the most famous example, the classic story of one genus turning into another. Now it is becoming apparent that there is an overlap of these genera, and that there were many species belonging to each one. It's a very bushy sort of a pattern, much more in line with the punctuation model ... There isn't just a simple, gradual transition from one horse to another. This is becoming well known." (Steven Stanley, Bioscience; Dec. 1986, p.726.

So, they are changing the exhibits in a lot of museums. It is not a nice family tree of horses, it is a bush, and different kinds of horses that lived at the same time as each other. It is not an evolutionary series but are rather different variations of the same kind. Some have become extinct, but there are still several kinds of horses such as Zebra and so on.

What about human origin, that is where we are really concerned, for now we are talking about ourselves. We are told (by evolutionists) that humans are evolved from some ape or ape-like creature. This should be well documented for supposedly the origin of humans is a most recent event in the geological record. This took place in relative modern time. We don't have to go back a billion years for fossils of man, that is very recent. So this should be well documented. Besides, there are more people looking for human fossils because anthropologist are very anxious to document the evolution of man.

The fact is that these change too. When I was going to school I was taught that there were 3 main proofs of human evolution. One was Jade man, Peking man, and Piltdown man. Java man was rejected long ago when the discoverer decided that the two fossils that he found in two different location, a year apart, didn't belong to the same creature at all. The skull was a gibbon and another part (femur) was of a man and maybe the teeth was from man but were found in different location too. So Jave man was gone.

Peking man, whatever that was. Many of the anthropologists who examined it before WW II said these were monkeys but some said it was an ape-man. At any rate the fossils were lost during WW 2 and no one can look at these now. Piltdown man was proved to be a hoax and is completely rejected now.

Now, there have been others that have come and gone. The ones more popular now are Australopithecus . More recently most anthropologists are acknowledging that Australopithecus is an extinct ape. Then there was Homo erectus. Whatever it was it is Homo, it is within the range of modern man. The skull capacity is within the range of modern man. So, it is probably just an extinct variety of man. Once again there are no true transitional fossils but all the paleoanthropologists have different ideas leading to human evolution.

Let me read one statement from Dr. Christopher Stringer an evolutionist "The study of human origins seems to be a field in which each discovery raises the debate to a more sophisticated level of uncertainty." (Christopher B. Stringer, Scientific American; May 1993, p.138). The more we know, the less we know about it.

So, we conclude there is no evidence of past evolution anymore than any present evolution. Then we ask how come that is? If evolution is a proven fact of science why don't we see evidence of it anywhere. The evidence that is cited is like: 1) we look something like a chimpanzee so we must be related, 2) the DNA of a chimpanzee is similar to DNA of a human being.

Well certainly the DNA of a chimpanzee would be a lot closer to a human than that of a spider would. So all we have is an array of similarities and differences and the differences are not explained by evolution. The similarities maybe could be but they could be explained much better by creation. The creator would create the same types of structure for same types of function. That seems obvious to us. The reason that fish have eyes and humans have eyes is not because humans evolved from fish but because both fish and people have to see and the creator knew that so He made eyes for them. So, these similarities do not prove anything. The differences prove much more than that and they are not explained by evolution.

See, if evolution is really true and if the total of reality is in evolution as Huxley says, than we should see evolution all around us. We ought to see not just one or two possible transitional forms in the fossils, all would be transitional forms. And we should see an evolutionary flux in all kinds today. How do we explain the stability, the status as they call it. The dominate idea in evolution today is status, that means standing still. Each species stays exactly the same for maybe 120 thousand generations and all of a sudden it becomes a new thing, it evolves rapidly without leaving any fossil because it takes place so quick. Then it stays stable for another 120 thousand generations. Status means exactly the opposite (from evolution), it means standing still not evolving. But status seems to be a main theme in evolution today.

So, there is no evidence in the present or in the past of a scientific nature that evolution takes place.

Dr. Stephen J Ragoe(spelling?), the most articulate evolutionist today, Harvard University, has written a lot of books, articles, etc. He is very much an evolutionist. He does not like me to quote him as he says I make him sound like a creationist, he certainly is not. What he says is the main proof of evolution is imperfections. He says so many animals have things that are not perfect about them and that proves that they were not created as a creator would have made them perfect.

You see, the creation model says that the creator did make things perfect, but not that it stayed that way. In fact, an extraneous factor did come in to cause things to go down and that is why we have death, entropy, disease. There are things that happened after the creation that are not a part of an on-going creation. So imperfections are a poor part of evidence for evolution.

It seems to us that evolution is not possible at all. We ask if we do not see it at all, why is it possible to have evolution on a big scale from one kind to a more complex kind to take place? When you ask that question you run into a very strong argument based on the laws of nature, know as the laws of thermodynamics. In particular, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or the law of increasing entropy.

Now the idea here is in every field, engineering, chemical, physical, astronomical, biological, etc. The idea is simply this, energy is conserved in quantity, that is the 1st law of thermodynamics, but decays in quality, which is the 2nd law.

Energy is the capacity to do work, to get things done. Work is moving forces through distances. Anything that happens then involves exchanges of energy.

The law of conservation of energy is the 1st law of thermodynamics and one of the most basic law of science. It says that you can change the forms of energy. This universe is being conserved.

The 2nd law says that although conserved in quantity, it decays in quality. In particular in relation to energy, of the energy put into a system, some has to overcome friction and goes to heat energy which escapes into space to warm space a bit but can not be used anymore. So the availability of the energy runs down although the total energy stays the same.

So, the 1st law says the total energy stays constant, the 2nd that the available energy goes down. This can be applied in all processes, everything tends to go down. The 2nd law simply says that if you let anything go, it goes down, everything is involved in the principle.

Evolution is just the opposite. It says that things are getting better and better. Things are going from simple to complex, primeval particles in the big bang to one called organisms, to many called organisms, to intelligent human beings over the ages. A tremendous increase in complexity.

But the 2nd law says it goes in the opposite direction, everything goes downhill. No wonder we have imperfections. It certainly is in conformity with the Creation model but not with the evolution model.

Let me give you one quotation on this "Not only do living things die, species go extinct, and stars burn out, but the apparently immutable protons in the nucleus of every atom are slowly dissolving ... Eventually nothing will be left of the universe but a dead mist of electrons, photons, and neutrinos" (Fay Flam; Science; Sept. 25, 1992, p.1862)

If it went on like this it would happen. Everything would die, the sun will burn out, the stars will go out, the earth is going to decay, everyone will die, and finally there will be nothing if things go on like they are now. These are the laws of science. It is not going to evolve into something better, just the exact opposite.

The evolutionists might say that the laws of thermodynamics apply to a closed system and that the earth is a open system for the energy of the sun comes in. Therefore for geological ages you can have evolution on the earth even though eventually the sun and earth may die. If anyone says that, they just don't know the law of thermodynamics. If you know anything about the equation of thermodynamics you know that the very definition of increasing entropy and if you have heat energy coming into the system like the heat of the sun coming into the earth, an influx of heat energy into the system, the entropy of system increases not decreases, which means disorder increases. So, applying raw energy to a system doesn't make it better, it makes it get worse unless you do something special in addition.

We would say that in order to have a growth process of any kind like a growth of an embryo into an adult, a pile of bricks into a building, anything where you have a growth in complexity, they don't automatically do it, you need a plan, program, blueprint, or something. In the case of the embryo, you have the marvelous complex mechanism of the DNA genic code which is the program that tells it how to grow. You have mechanism of photosynthesis that converts the raw energy of the sun into useful plant growth of the structure. If you didn't have both you would not get growth.

Evolution doesn't have either one, there is no known mechanism or program of evolution. No one has ever seen evolution take place, no one knows how it works. Natural selection does not work, they have shown that and no other known mechanism makes it work. No mechanism, no observation of it and certainly no blueprint that tells, say a group of worms, how to evolve into say crocodiles or something. So, evolution does not have the necessary criteria to produce a increase in an open system and therefore the law of entropy says it will decay like any other system, open or closed.

It seems that there is no present evolution, no past evolution, no evidence of possibility of evolution. Why is it called science? It's not science. It is a faith in the scientific impossible.

On the other hand, the creation model is exactly what you would expect. You expect the gaps in the fossils, you expect the laws of thermodynamics in the creation model. you would predict variations within a kind, horizontal changes within a kind so that the kind will not become extinct when the environment changes, within limits. Put gaps between the kinds, and decay and entropy because of the introduction of a decay principle in the world after creation.

So, the creation models predicts these evidences which is against the evolution model. So the scientific case for creation is the exact same as the scientific evidence case against evolution.

Let us go back to the fossil records. We have this great array of fossils in sedimentary rock in the crust of the earth. There are many people who do not believe in evolution but believe the earth must be billions of years old because we have these geological ages to prove that. It all started 4.6 billion years ago and we have a geological column as it is called. The column is a cross section through the sedimentary rocks in the earth's crust. Water deposited it and life that lived at the time was deposited and became fossils so we supposedly have a record of evolution of life over the ages in the geological column.

But, where do you go to check this geological column. All the real human history we have goes back only a few thousand years, that is all we know. Anything beyond that you have to guess because you don't know because no one was there. Whatever assumption you make can't be checked for there was no one there. So, how do we know these geological ages ever took place? How do you check out the sequence? How do ;you know the simplest organisms are on the bottom, and the complex on the top. Where can you go to see it. Can you go to the grand canyon to see the geological column? No, the fact is that the only place you will see the geological column is in the textbook. It does not live in the real world, it is not there.

What has been done over the couple of centuries that it has been developed? It started with a concept of the great chair of being back in Plato's time, carried over into the middle ages and finally they felt everything had to be arranged in great series from complex to simple or simple to complex, and then during the time of Darwin the evolutionary concept was added.

The fact is the fossils are not found in that order. A statement from A. H. Cutler and K. W. Plessa of the University of Arizona "Any sequence in which an older fossil occurs above a younger one is stratigraphically disordered ... Scales for disorders may be from mm to many meters ... stratigraphic disorder at some scale is probably a common feature of the fossil record" (A. H. Cutler and K. W. Plessa; Palaios, June 1990, p.227) So, it is very common in the geological column to find them out of order.

The general order you would expect in the creation model, because you expect if they were all deposited at the same time, instead of over billions of years, that the ones that lived at the lowest elevation would be buried at the lowest elevation and that is the simple marine invertebrate. The ones at the highest elevation, buried at the highest elevation, that is the human being and in between.

How do you determine the age of a rock? How do you know the geological age? If you go out on a mountain and you want to know which age a rock belongs to, or if you find a fossil and want to know which age it belongs to? How do you do that.

Here is how you find the age of a fossil. This is from the World Book Encyclopedia in an article on fossils which should be authoritative. Dr. Wells, who wrote this, as at the museum of paleontology at UCLA says "Scientist determine when fossils were formed by finding out the age of the rocks in which they lie." (Article on fossils by S. P. Welles, World Book Encyclopedia, 1978, Vol. 7, p.364). That is how you find the age of the fossils, you find the age of the rocks.

But, how do you find the age of the rocks. In another volume in an article on Paleontology, Dr. Wells says "Paleontology, the study of fossils, is important in the study of geology. The age of rocks may be determined by the fossils found in them." (Article on "Paleontology" by S. P. Welles; 1978 World Book Encyclopedia; Vol. 15, p.5). The age of the rocks are determined by the fossils.

Seems like that is circular reasoning. It would take time to document that further, it is over simplified. But basically, that is it. No one was there, so as one author said, you have to use circular reasoning if you are going to have any type of geological time scale because no one was there to prove your assumption. And so, the best assumption is that the chain of being has to be from simplest to complex and naturally the oldest has to be at the bottom. The simplest has to be at the bottom and you have to arrange them that way.

But, if that is not necessarily true, if evolution is not necessarily true and we don't really have this evolutionary series of geological ages, and if we can't really tell one age from another because you can only tell the age of the fossil by the rock and the age of the rock by the fossil, and that is a circle of reasoning, therefore you can't tell for sure the age of one from another age. Maybe they were all deposited at the same time as far as you can tell by looking at them. If that is the case, then you have to say they weren't formed slowly over millions of years but very rapidly. Could this have been?

You know the principle by which historical geology has been developed over the past 150 years, it is known as uniformitarianism. That's the idea that uniform processes have prevailed through all of geological history, so the present rate of sedimentation, for example, is the same as it has always been. And the rate of earth movement is the same as it has always been. The present is the key to the past was the watchword.

But now they (evolutionists) are giving up that ... they have gone back to what they call now neo-catastrophism. Most of the geologists are moving in that direction. One of the leaders in this field is Dr. Derek Ager, died about a year ago, he was president of British Geological Association ... he wrote a book called the nature of the stratigraphic record, 1981. He discussed all the different geological formations and systems. He found that all of them could not be explained by slow process, all of them were formed rapidly. He says "The hurricane, the flood, or the tsunami may do more in an hour or a day than the ordinary processes of nature have achieved in a thousand years." (Derek Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 1981) ... that is true ... In the last sentence of his book Dr. Egar says "The history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." (Derek Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 1981 p.107)

Everything you see in the geological record is a record of catastrophe. He doesn't think that it all was one catastrophe ... He says that what happened was a local flood and then a long time of erosion and then another flood etc. but with millions of years in between.

But we say, all you see is these catastrophes, so how do you know there were millions of years in-between? Where is the evidence for that. Well the evidence for that is that you have to have it to make evolution possible. But, if evolution isn't the issue, how do you show they weren't all the same catastrophe?

I think they have to be (the same catastrophe) ... because there is no world wide time gap in the sedimentary strata. A time gap in a sedimentary sequence is called a un-conformity.

A statement from Dr. Amos Salvador says "Unconformity bounded units became very popular at the time tectonic episodes were considered essentially synchronous world-wide ... but did lose favor among geologists when synchroneity was found not to hold true." (Amos Salvador, Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, F eb, 1987, p.232).

What he is saying, is that back in early days of geology, they believed that every geological age was separated by great world-wide revolution ... many world wide catastrophes over time. They believed that every major geological age was separated from next one by world wide discontinuity, unconformity, or time gap. A period of uplift and erosion instead of sedimentation.

But as more regions were explored, it was found that world wide synchronization did not hold true. It may have held true in England and New Your and western Europe, but it did not hold true in India or South America. So there is no world wide unconformity so there is no world wide time gap in the sedimentary rock. There may be local time gaps, there may be a local un-conformity, but it does not go all around the world. So, there is not a worldwide time gap in the geological column.

That means you can start down at the bottom, at the crystal base rocks, before there were any sedimentary rocks, and you can work your way up to the top, you may have to zig-zag around to avoid crossing a time gap, but since there is no world wide time gap you can do that. So you can start at the bottom anywhere and go to the top without crossing a time gap. that means along that trace sedimenting was going on continuously, no time gap.

Since Dr. Ager said every unit was formed rapidly and the whole series is continuous without a time gap, that means that what you have essentially is a world-wide complex of local catastrophes all essentially contemporary and continuous forming finally a world wide hydrological cataclysm. That sounds like a world wide flood to me.

People would say yes, but haven't we proved these great ages by radioactive dating or other methods of dating? Where do you get the 4.6 billion years. That is not just a geological age, but an actual number of years.

The idea there is that you have got radioactive minerals. You have Uranium ... that decay into a long series of products finally into lead. The idea is that if you find a mineral that has Uranium and lead in it, you assume that there was no lead to begin with, then you can calculate how old it is, how long the Uranium has been decaying into lead.

But, that dating method and any other dating methods involves the assumption of uniformitarianism. That is the problem. Uniformitarianism is not valid, can't be valid as the whole series of geological formations were formed catastrophically, not uniformly. Uniformitarianism is not a valid assumption, but you have to use it to get a date.

There are many different methods you can use. You can use the increase of sodium in the ocean, or the increase of any chemical element in the ocean, all the chemical elements have been measured. All will give ages for the ocean much less than a billion years. You can use the rate of erosion of a waterfall, or the erosion of sediment on the continent, or the buildup of sediment on the bottom of the ocean ... You can measure the rate of buildup of radio-carbon in the atmosphere. You can measure the increase of human populations on the earth. There is a list of 60-70 world-wide processes, all of which will give an age for the earth much less than a billion years.

They may all be wrong for they are all based on the assumption of uniformitarianism. And you can't be sure that the rate has always been the same or that the system has always been closed, or that there were none of the daughter products like lead in the Uranium system to begin with. There are all these assumptions and you can document this at great length. The assumptions make the whole system, I think, indefensible. It simply does not prove anything about the age of anything. Because all these are based on assumptions which cannot be tested, which are not provable, not testable, not reasonable.

How do you get the age of anything then? Let me read from a book titled "Before Civilization" by a evolution archeologist. "Until the discovery of radio-carbon dating, there was really only one reliable way of dating events in pre-history after the end of glaciers around about 8,000 BC One way to date the neolithic, bronze age and iron period. This is by the early records of the great civilizations which extended in some cases as far back as 3,000 BC Mesopotamia, the Assyrians, Sumerians have records extending back as far as 2,000 BC "The Egyptian King lists go back to the First Dynasty of Egypt, a little before 3,000 BC Before that, there were no written records anywhere." (Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization 1974,p.25)

So, all the history we know about goes back only a few thousand years. Anything beyond that you have to apply Uniformitarianism. Applied to some system and since every system changes with time, there is an infinite number of systems you can use. But, there are only 3 that gives ages of about a billion years; Uranium, Rubidium (?), potassium. The others will give you younger ages. None of them may be right.

The only way you can really know the age is if someone who was there could tell you when it was formed for these are historical records and the historical records only go back about 3000 BC

One other quote from Wm. Stanfield "Several methods have been devised for estimating the age of the earth and it's layers of rock. These methods rely heavily on the assumption of uniformitarianism ... i.e. natural processes have proceeded at relatively constant rates throughout the earth's history." (Wm. D. Stanfield; The Science of Evolution; 1977, p.80)

He acknowledges that in order to be valid, you have to assume uniformitarianism, and that is something that cannot be proved. In the absence of any written testimony or observation testimony when it took place, there is no way of knowing.

It does seem to us that the scientific case for creation is equally strong as the Biblical case for creation. Each is the same as the other, the same God who wrote the Word made the world. They do say the same thing.

We don't need to be intimidated by the pressure of evolutionary socialist, psychologists, biologists, etc. because the evidence supports the recent literal creation just like the Bible itself says.

But some say that is religion and you can't teach that in school. Let me remind you that I have been talking about the scientific case for creation and I have not used a single verse from the Bible. I have just been quoting scientific statements from scientist, all of whom are evolutionists. I have not even quoted a creationist.

Make what you want of it. Seems to me that the case is strong that there is no evidence for evolution in the present, none in the past, none in terms of the laws of nature that is even possible, nor is there any real evidence that there has been time enough for it even if it were possible.

So, therefore if you want to believe in creation, and it is a choice that you make, a spiritual choice in the last analysis, but you can do it in good conscience that you are in accord with all known scientific facts."
(End of Video)
 


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