PNAS Reports Youngest Meteor Impact Yet

Posted in Genesis Flood on September 28th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

This article speaks of the two previously known mass extinction events believed to be caused by meteor strikes, one at supposedly 65 million years ago (mya) and another at 38 mya. But now, PNAS has a new article on the youngest meteor impact yet which is asssociated with an extinction event, supposeldy dated at only 12,900 years ago … !!!

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0706977104v1

This is quite interesting in view of Dr. Walter Brown’s Hydroplate Theory which postulates that Meteors, Asteroids and Comets are ejecta from the catastrophic breakup of the “fountains of the deep.”  But the “ages” of these impact events reported by these articles are based upon the basic assumption that the earth is very old (~4.5 billion years), thus various additional assumptions are made when using radiometric dating to “date” rocks so that “ages” fall into the “correct” ranges.

If these arbitrary assumptions are NOT made, and ALL relevant data is considered, and the reality of the Global Flood of Noah is acknowledged as occurring ~5000 years ago, then ALL of these impact events can be placed in the Flood timeframe … probably during the the Inundation Phase or the Receding Phase after sediments had been deposited but were still soft.

Evidence of Pre-Flood Sacred Writings … Source Material for the Book of Genesis?

Posted in Biblical on September 27th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

I have been studying the Book of Genesis for some time now and I am particularly intrigued by the recent rise of “Tablet Theories” of Genesis. My interest came about as a result of the late Henry Morris’ “Defender’s Study Bible” in which he speaks of the Wiseman Hypothesis and dated by the discoverers around 5500 years ago, which is very close to the approximate date of the Great Flood of Noah. Quite a few of these early post-Flood tablets have now been found, but to my knowledge NO pre-Flood tablets have been found. This is not surprising, given the fact that the Flood was global in scope and destroyed everything. Yes, we have found fossils buried during the Flood, but the majority of them have been marine organisms which would have been abundant. Clay tablets would not have been near so abundant and to my knowledge, no pre-Flood human artifacts have been found. Yet there are many traditions not only of the Great Flood, long-lived patriarchs, a Golden Age before the Flood, and many other details paralleling the accounts in Genesis, there are also traditions of Sacred Writings handed down from these patriarchs. It is some of these writings that we postulate were the source material for Moses when he compiled the Pentateuch and added his own material. Many folks have asked me for evidence of these writings, so I present this now. Linked below is a scan from Volume 2 of a fascinating 3 volume set I have by George Stanley Faber, entitled The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (London, 1816).

“Respecting the Sacred Books”

I have referenced him before and his Volume 1 is available in a Google Full View Book HERE. Various forms of “Genesis Tablet Theories” are now coming to the fore and the previously reigning theory, the Documentary Hypothesis, is garnering more and more skepticism.

LINKS
My Book Review on the Wiseman Hypothesis
“Modified” Wiseman Hypothesis by Curt Sewell
Wikipedia Article on Wiseman Hypothesis which references my blog article.
See also Garrett, Duane, Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch, Baker Book House, 1991, referenced in my recent Formal Debate on Genesis.
Current ongoing debate on The Documentary Hypothesis.

How to Convince A Skeptic That God Exists

Posted in Christianity/America on September 23rd, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

I like to discuss science, God and the Bible online with self-professed atheists and skeptics. One of them (screen name “Notta_Skeptic” … but she is really) has been heckling me for a very long time now. She is an award winning science teacher and would describe herself as a former Christian.

I recently asked her what it would take to convince her that God exists. “What would you do if you were God,” I asked, “to convince people that you exist?”

She gave a surprising answer. She said …

Well, I think appearing in person would be a great place to start. Why not just show up in neo-natal intensive care units, lay hands on all the babies there, and miraculously cure them? Sure would go a long way towards convincing people that he/she/it/they actually cared about human beings, by showing compassion to the littlest and most vulnerable ones.
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=4784991#post4784991

!!!!!! What ?????!!!!! Does this throw any switches in anyone else’s brains besides mine?

Appear in person? That’s exactly what God did. Miraculously cure babies? Close. He healed lots of people. And He walked on water. And He fed the five thousand miraculously. And He raised the dead. And he fulfilled many Old Testament prophecies. And He himself was raised from the dead. And and and … !!!! Did most people believe in Him after going to all this effort? ……….. NO.

And the important question …

Does Notta_Skeptic believe in Him considering all this? Considering that God has already done almost exactly what she herself said would be convincing proof that He exists?

Only Notta can answer that one.

The Fossil Record: Another Confirmed Creationist Prediction

Posted in Creation/Evolution on September 20th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

We should actually call it a “retrodiction,” not a “prediction” (see my article on Karl Popper and retrodictions), but very few people know what a “retrodiction” is, so call it what you will. The interesting thing is that within the Creation/Flood paradigm, one would expect that …

1) Most fossils would be marine fossils. And they are. See the chart above (from The New Answers Book by Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, 2006, p. 179)
2) Most mammals would escape fossilization because of their mobility and ability to escape rising floodwaters for a long time. When they finally get drowned, they would not normally be buried by sediment, but would float and be eaten by scavengers. See link in (3) below.
3) Marine fossils would be sorted hydrodynamically. See Hydraulic Engineer Henry Morris’ discussion on this in The Genesis Flood, quoted HERE. Search the page (CTRL-F) for “hydrodynamic”.
4) Most of the supposed evolutionary history of life would be missing entirely from the fossil record. And this is exactly what we find …

Furthermore, useful fossils are either rare or totally absent in rocks from Precambrian time, which constitutes more than 87 percent of Earth history.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-69753/dating

Read more »

“Selling Evolution” is Getting Harder Each Day

Posted in Creation/Evolution on September 18th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

There is an interesting article in Nature, the leading international journal of science, entitled “Selling Evolution,” which is a book review of Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson, Delacorte Press: 2007. 400 pp. The author of the Nature review notes …

Evolutionary biologists — those enthusiastic foot-soldiers of Darwin’s grand notion that life evolves by a process of descent with modification — cannot understand why so many people reject the great man’s theory, and often in favour of some form of creationist account of the existence and diversity of life on Earth. In the opening pages of David Sloan Wilson’s new popular-science book, hopefully entitled Evolution for Everyone, we discover that 54% of adults in the United States prefer to believe that humans did not evolve from some earlier species. What makes this figure surprising is that it is up from 46% in 1994.

Where have the evolutionists gone wrong?

Mark Pagel, “Selling evolution,” Nature 447, 533 (31 May 2007) | doi:10.1038/447533a; Published online 30 May 2007

Where have the evolutionists gone wrong? I have an answer for them. Their theory is wrong. Period. It’s unsupported by the scientific evidence.

I got into a discussion yesterday with some skeptics at IIDB and there was a new thread by someone named “Johnny Skeptic” entitled … “Maybe YEC’s [Young Earth Creationists] are good for skepticism.” Comparing the above survey with the history of Answers in Genesis International (they are the leading YEC organization in America), I found something fascinating. Look what I found … the Nature survey covered the last 13 years and recorded +8% for the creationist side. How long has Answers in Genesis has been in existence promoting the YEC view? 13 years exactly.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about/history.asp
Hmmm …. So I would say, “No, Johnny Skeptic, YECs are NOT good for skepticism.” They are fighting a much needed war to restore the Book of Genesis and the entire Bible to its rightful position of respect in our culture.

Disney Returning to Family Roots

Posted in Christianity/America on September 18th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

From Dale Mason, Vice President of Marketing and Media for Answers in Genesis International …

One unexpected but very interesting part of our time there in L.A. [for a meeting with the National Religious Broadcasters Association] was that when the chairman of Walt Disney Studios (Richard Cook) heard that we were coming, he asked us to stay and meet with several of their lead people (including their lead animator, Glen Keane, who is a believer). They had us on the lot until after midnight Tuesday. They gathered us in a posh, relatively small motion picture theater and announced to us that, basically, they have heard the collective voice of the Christian community and committed that, “going forward, there will no longer be profanity or sexual innuendo in Disney family films.” That’s a great start. Now the Church needs to help them understand that they need to remove the evolution that permeates so many of their productions as well. The bigger problem is that first the pastors need to be convinced to remove it from their pulpits! (God is in control.)” http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/aroundtheworld/#714

About Disney Studio Chief Richard Cook

Atheist Conundrums

Posted in Creation/Evolution on September 17th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

Atheists, I believe, are in a pickle. They have a contradictory world view which appears not to be consistent with reality. Let me give you a recent example. I spend quite a bit of time discussing Biblical topics with atheists at IIDB. They are constantly accusing creationists of being liars (false in my opinion), so recently I asked them to tell me why they are so concerned about other people lying. And while they are at it, why would they have a problem with ANY type of ‘immoral’ behavior … not just lying, but cheating, stealing, killing, etc.?? They most certainly DO have a problem with these behaviors … but WHY? What in their world view requires it? The answer I think is ‘nothing requires it.’ They must borrow (steal?) from the Christian world view, which they repudiate, in order to have these values at all. And my view is that they actually have these basics values built in to their minds … put there by God when He created the human race … C.S. Lewis calls it Universal Morality and uses it as evidence for the existence of God. See my article on this HERE. Interestingly, when discussing Universal Morality, atheists will tell you that there is no such thing, but then when you start asking why they, being atheists, have morality, they will tell you that it IS universal after all. Yet another contradiction … a conundrum. which they cannot explain. Click HERE for this discussion at IIDB.

The solution for the atheist is for him or her to realize the contradictory nature of their view and repudiate it. Everything makes sense if you accept the most evidentially supported position that the God of the Bible really exists and the Bible truly is His Message to Mankind. (Picture credit: Wiki)

A 4800 Year Old Living Tree: Confirmed Prediction of Creationism

Posted in Creation/Evolution, Genesis Flood on September 14th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

The scientific Theory of Special Creation and the Flood, commonly referred to as Creationism for short, predicts that the oldest living plant could not be much over 5000 years old because this is the approximate oldest date for the Great Flood of Noah, in which all terrestrial life (including plants) was destroyed. It turns out that this prediction is correct as demonstrated by the discovery in 1957 of Methuselah. Wikipedia has this to say about “Methuselah” …

Methuselah (estimated germination 2832 BC) is a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, which was 4,789 years old when sampled in 1957 (when the trees were originally being surveyed by Schulman and Harlan). It is the oldest living organism currently known and documented. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_%28tree%29

There is another bristlecone called Prometheus which is a bit older than Methuselah, but it was cut down in 1964.  Numerous claims of older plants of other species have been made, but these are all of clonal colonies, not individual plants. One such claim appears below in Science, but it is debunked as you can see … Read more »

The K/T Extinction Event and the Return to Catastrophism

Posted in Creation/Evolution, Genesis Flood on September 14th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

Most mainstream geologists were catastrophists prior to Darwin and Lyell and the one big catastrophe that explained the upper layers of the geologic record was The Great Flood of Noah. But that all changed with Charles Lyell (a lawyer) who introduced Uniformitarianism to Geology, i.e. “The Present is the Key to the Past.” But at least two men — Immanuel Velikovsky with Worlds in Collision and Henry Morris with The Genesis Flood were writing about catastrophism again in the 1950’s and 60’s. They were ignored by many but they persisted in spite of the ridicule. Then in 1980, mainstream science finally woke up and published Alvarez’s paper on the K/T Impact. (K/T means Cretacious/Tertiary and refers to the boundary … Picture credit: Wiki “K/T Extinction”). Nature had this to say about it this week …

The science of the K/T impact (K is the customary abbreviation for Cretaceous) began in a more modest way, with attempts to get a sense of how quickly a thin layer of clays in the Italian Apennines had been deposited. No one foresaw that it would change how scientists and others see the world, and reintroduce catastrophism to the Earth sciences. Explanations that ignore the once-canonical principles of uniformitarianism — the gradualist paradigm in which the present is the key to the past — are now rife in studies of the history of Earth.
(Nature, 6 September 2007, p. 2)

In other words, “Dear Mr. Lyell … Thanks, but no thanks! Have a nice day.” Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell will ultimately go down in history as men whose theories were wrong. That’s not to say that both men didn’t contribute something. Small parts of their theories are useful, for example, the principles of uniformitarianism are roughly applicable in the post-Flood era and microevolution by natural selection does occur. But in the main, their theories were wrong and thus not very useful. In science, theories that are most useful are those which most closely approach the truth about reality … and, as it turns out the Bible is the most reliable source of truth about reality that the world has ever known … not only is it a reliable guidebook for life from the Author of Life, but it is an excellent source for scientific hypotheses as well.

“Ultraconserved DNA” … Another Failed Prediction of Evolution

Posted in Creation/Evolution on September 13th, 2007 by dhawkinsmo

Editorial

Nature 449, 1 (6 September 2007) | doi:10.1038/449001a

Life as we know it

The paper in question focuses on segments of ‘ultraconserved’ DNA — sections that have stayed exactly the same throughout recent vertebrate evolution, and are identical in humans, rats and mice (see page 10). The available evidence suggests that this extreme example of DNA conservation is no accident: the sequence stays because there is a strong selective force weeding out mutations in it. In other words, it is likely to be important to its host.

Yet when researchers based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California removed four pieces of ultraconserved DNA from different mice, it had absolutely no effect on the rodents (N. Ahituv et al. PLoS Biol. 5, e234; 2007). This counterintuitive result contradicts predictions based on genetic conservation and the shaping of our genomes during evolution. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7158/full/449001a.html (Picture credit: Wikipedia “DNA”)