Evolutionists Look For Curtains

The constant mad scramble to discredit the Biblical record of a 6,000-plus-year-old earth will continue, in spite of the fact that the antagonists continue to post their dismal record of 100% failure. This incessant drive is motivated by man's desperate effort to escape accountability. Escaping accountability was the basis of Satan's sales pitch to our great-grandmother Eve in the Garden of Eden. After all these years, he has not found it necessary to change his presentation. Genesis 3:1-5:

1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Unfortunately for Adam and Eve and their progeny, the wrong choice was made; and the result has been the reign of the law of sin and death. Those who follow the contradictory serpent abhor the absolute truth of the inerrant God. If the Bible is true, they will be held accountable for their sins as they stand before an angry God at the White Throne Judgment. They will have eternity to pay in outer darkness, in a place called the lake of fire.

Are you of that number? Have you repented and turned from your sins, surrendering your all to Christ Jesus? If the answer is no, click on to "Further With Jesus" for immediate entry into the Kingdom of God. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:31-2:2:

1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

MAN SAID: There is no God, therefore He could not be the author of the Bible! We just exploded out of nothing, and "poof," here we are!

Now THE RECORD: The anti-God and Biblical minimalist crowds remind me of an event that took place in my life when I was a very young child. My brother, who must have been around four years old, had just taken a bath and was unclothed, preparing to put on pajamas for bed. Someone had called him down to the living room to get his pajamas when the front door opened and a visitor entered the room. My brother, in a panic, ran and stuck his head behind a window curtain, unaware that the rest and most conspicuous part of him was exposed. This event is a great analogy of the anti-God group: They have their aggregate heads behind the curtain, and they're not aware that their posterior region is on display for the entire world to see.

The research, discoveries, and observations continue to pour in, challenging and shaking evolution to its very foundation, again and again. Reading through Creation, a quarterly publication distributed by Answers In Genesis, I came across four more such contradictions that have evolutionists looking for the curtains.

In 1999, geologists found, in Switzerland, a fossil from an ichthyosaur, which is thought to be an extinct marine reptile that gave birth to live young. What was astonishing about the fossil was that it was buried nose down. Its nose penetrated three geological layers that, according to long-agers, represent a million-year span. The following excerpts are from the autumn 2005 issue of Creation magazine:

The skull was enclosed vertically within three geological layers, which have been dated according to long-age beliefs, by reference to the fossils they contain. Curiously, the layers span an "age" of about one million years, and that presents something of a problem for long-age geologists.

How could anyone conceive of an ichthyosaur head being buried in a vertical position slowly over a million years, yet remaining preserved along its whole length? The obvious implication is that the "millions of years" are fanciful.

So how would a long-ager deal with this problem? The scientist who discovered it, Dr. Achim Reisdorf, was interviewed in depth in a German-language publication that is sympathetic to the Bible. It is fascinating to watch him wrestle with the evidence, while trying to hold that the sediments were deposited over a million years.

He proposed that soon after the creature died, before rigor mortis (stiffening of the body after death) set in, it started to sink. The increasing water pressure progressively collapsed its lungs, tipping it onto its nose, and causing it to sink faster and faster in a "kamikaze" plunge. When it reached the bottom, its head thrust into the mud as far as its neck.

But why would a large marine animal die suddenly unless it was attacked by a predator? Why wasn't it scavenged? How could the rib cage remain flexible, allowing the lungs to collapse, but the snout remain rigid, allowing it to push so far into the sediment?

Even if such a scenario were believable to this point, the "long ages" assigned to the rock layers create extra problems. If the sediments on the bottom were a million years old, why were they still soft? And if they were still soft, why was the fossil preserved? Why didn't bacteria or worms demolish the remains of the animal in a short time as they normally do?

According to Dr. Reisdorf, the sediments remained soft for at least one million years, allowing the ichthyosaur's complete head to sink right in. Then the material surrounding the skull hardened immediately afterwards—so quickly that the skull was beautifully preserved.

These sorts of mental gymnastics highlight the fact that there is no tension between the Bible and scientific facts—only between certain interpretations of the fact in relation to the past. Long-age beliefs lead to the idea that the layers were laid down over millions of years. It's those beliefs that create the problem.

When we abandon the preconceived belief in long ages, we are free to understand the evidence in a straightforward manner. The layers were laid down, and the ichthyosaur buried, as a result of rapid, catastrophic happenings. Moreover, the same processes that deposited the next layer of sediment probably removed the rest of the body. All this is consistent with evidence we would expect for Noah's Flood. [End of quote]

Do you remember concepts such as the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age? The man responsible for creating the three-age system was not an archaeologist, geologist, or paleontologist, but rather a coin collector appointed as the first head of the Danish National Museum. He was commissioned to create a structure which could catalog all the archaeological discoveries that were accumulating at the museum. The following excerpts are from "The Stone 'Age,' A Figment of the Imagination?" published in Creation:

His successor at the museum, an archaeologist named J.J.A. Worsaae, went looking for evidence of this sequence at dig sites around Europe—beginning with an excavation of burial sites in Ireland, where he found lots of stone, brass and iron tools.

It is commonly claimed that Worsaae found these artifacts in the three layers proposed by his predecessor—but in fact, if you check his work, he actually said that you can establish nothing from the tools he dug up directly from the peat moss, because in such a peat bog, the iron, bronze and stone tools are all mixed together.

Modern archaeologists now acknowledge that the Stone/Bronze/Iron Age system is not very helpful outside Europe.

One wonders if it is valid anywhere. It appears to be mostly just another instance of dogma about "human progress" that has been imposed on the evidence. [End of quote]

A concept known as "irreducible complexity”—a term I believe to have been coined by microbiologist Michael Behe—continually has the anti-God crowd with their heads behind the curtain. Part of an interview published in Lee Strobel's book, The Case for a Creator, with Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, defines "irreducible complexity." It reads:

Meyer said, "Then there's the evidence for design in molecular machines that defy explanation by Darwinian natural selection. These integrative, complex systems in biological organisms—which microbiologist Michael Behe calls 'irreducibly complex'—include signal transduction circuits, sophisticated motors, and all kinds of biological circuitry."

"What's the argument based on?" I asked.

"You see, these biological machines need all of their various parts in order to function. But how could you ever build such a system by a Darwinian process of natural selection acting on random variations? Natural selection only preserves things that perform a function—in other words, which help the organism to survive to the next generation. That's survival of the fittest.

"The problem with irreducibly complex systems is that they perform no function until all the parts are present and working together in close coordination with one another. So natural selection cannot help you build such systems; it can only preserve them once they've been built. And it's virtually impossible for evolution to take such a huge leap by mere chance to create the whole system at once.

"Of course, this forces the question: how did the biochemical machine arise? Behe says maybe these biological systems look designed because they really were designed. After all, whenever we see irreducibly complex systems and we know how they arose, invariably a designer was the cause." [End of quote]

The above background information brings us to a feature article in Creation dealing with giant insects found in the fossil record. The largest known is a dragonfly touting a two-foot five-inch wingspan. Science has found it puzzling how these giant creatures existed, flew, or even breathed considering that common knowledge says they don't breathe the way we do. The following excerpts are from Creation:

A recent amazing breakthrough seems to have given an answer, overturning the long-held idea that insects don't breathe. Researchers used new X-ray technology to look inside live insects—which showed that insects pump their air tubes much as humans expand and contract their lungs.

"Previously, we all thought that most insect breathing tubes were fairly stiff, but they are anything but stiff," said Dr. Mark Westneat, leader of the research team. "We could watch the tracheal tubes in the head and thorax, which are not squishy parts of the body, really squeezing and releasing."

Even while at rest, the insects exchanged up to half of the air in their main tubes about every second. As Dr. Westneat observed, "They are really pumping some gas." (This is comparable with birds and mammals—e.g. humans at rest have a lung ventilation of about 10%, but this may reach 75% during exercise.)

This remarkable discovery solves the mystery of how colossal insects could have existed in the past without the need for higher oxygen levels in the atmosphere.

Recognizing the implications of their work for evolutionary theory, Dr. Westneat and his colleagues said: "Active tracheal breathing in the head and thorax among insects may have played an important role in the evolution of terrestrial locomotion and flight in insects, and be a prerequisite for oxygen delivery to complex sensory [neurological] systems and the brain [emphasis added].

But Thomas Miller, an insect physiologist at the University of California, said of insect breathing, "It looks like there's a very complicated neurological system to keep all this coordinated." So if breathing had to evolve to get a neurological system, which in turn is needed to coordinate the breathing, this would be a classic case of irreducible complexity, where all the complex features could not have arisen step-by-step but had to have appeared at the same time.

Certainly, in relation to how insect bodies work, there are levels of complexity which are only just becoming apparent as researchers probe deeper. Indeed, "there's even emerging evidence that insect breathing is synchronized with the pulsing of the creature's circulatory systems, a level of physiological sophistication few had imagined."

Complicated, coordinated, sophisticated—all of which speak of insects having been designed rather than being the result of some blind process of evolution. [End of quote]

If you have ever wondered how cosmologists make such definite statements about planets so far away, you are not alone. In a 1990 issue of Nature, an article by Arp, Burbidge, Hoyle, Narlikar, and Wickramasinge called "The Extragalactic Universe: An Alternative View," made this telling statement regarding cosmology: "Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on a very few facts." [End of quote]

The final excerpts taken from Creation are from the article "Other Solar Systems Challenge Evolution:"

The solar system we live in is not the only one that exists. Over the last several years, astronomers have discovered over 130 planets orbiting stars other than the sun. You might expect that very little could be known about planets so far away, and you would be right. Nevertheless, astronomers have been able to coax a few details about these worlds from the meagre data available, and it turns out that these extrasolar planets, as they are called, are a serious challenge to evolutionary ideas.

According to the accepted evolutionary theory, planets form by accretion. That is, bits of dust orbiting young stars collide and stick together to form clumps of dust. These stick together, or accrete, to form larger objects, until eventually a planet is formed. But there is a problem with this idea.

Scientists have discovered a planet in the globular cluster M4. (A globular cluster is a very tight, spherical grouping of hundreds of thousands of stars.) The problem is that, according to the accretion model, grains of dust are needed to form planets. But globular clusters, like M4, are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, and are practically a dust-free environment. For this reason, most evolutionists had not expected to find any planets in globular clusters.

Evolutionists generally believe that globular clusters are very old, around 12 billion years. According to their evolutionary scenario, there would not have been much dust in the universe when these clusters formed, which is why, they believe, they are still so dust-poor today. Thus, one might say that this planet is too "old" for evolutionary ideas. [End of quote]

Information is pouring in from all directions. This short review sees the anti-God crowd challenged by the fossil record, their own foundational theory of ages, irreducible complexity, and in their flawed evolutionary theory of the solar system. They have their heads stuck behind the curtains with their posterior parts exposed for the world to see.

In carnal academia's constant state of flux, it is to be expected that their "truth" of yesterday is debunked by their "truth" of today. Their "truth" of today will be debunked by their "truth" of tomorrow. But know this: God's Word is truth—real truth—and it never changes. That's the nature of truth, and God is truth. The Bible teaches that the earth was created by the hand of God just over 6,000 years ago, and of course, the mountains of empirical evidence say "Yes!"

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:31-2:2:

1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

MAN SAID: There is no God, therefore He could not be the author of the Bible! We just exploded out of nothing, and "poof," here we are!

Now you have THE RECORD.




References:

Authorized King James Version

Arp, Burbidge, Hoyle, Narlikar, Wickramasinghe, "The Extragalactic Universe: An Alternative View," Nature, vol. 346 (8-30-90), pp807-812

Catchpoole, D., "Insect Inspiration Solves Giant Bug Mystery," Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2005, pp44- 47

Morris, H.M., That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, Institute For Creation Research, 1997

Strobel, L., The Case for a Creator, Zondervan, p79

Taylor, J., "Other Solar Systems Challenge Evolution," Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2005, pp40-42

"The Stone 'Age,' A Figment of the Imagination?" Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2005, p13

Walker, Wieland, "Long-Age Thinking Dealt a Lethal Body Blow. Kamikaze Ichthyosaur?" Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2005, pp10-12

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