Coal

By Richard Gunther

As a layperson, I am often amazed at the way those who have had many years of training in some scientific field can completely miss the obvious. 

One example is the Grand Canyon, which is a sedimentary landmass of about 100,000 square miles, with many of the layers running horizontally across much of the area, which indicates that they were laid down as a single sheet of sediment. Some ‘experts’ have said that the Colorado River gradually caused these layers to build up over thousands of years, yet common sense totally contradicts this. Rivers never lay down vast areas of horizontal sediment – they cut into their own beds, twist, turn, and leave a chaotic mess. Only a single, massive flood, could cause such wide, flat sediment beds.

Another example is the dating of fossils. Sometimes fossils of very different species are discovered, all in the same sedimentary rock layer. The ‘experts’ deliberately date the fossils in conformity to the theory of evolution. They say one creature came millions of years before the other, yet common sense tells us that because the two creatures were buried together, they must have been alive together before they were buried together.

A letter in a science magazine, from Trevor Fenning, of the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology made the following assertion, “(Old) forests lay down carbon from the atmosphere as ever deeper layers of partially decomposed leaf litter in the soil. This offsets the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere from volcanic emissions, and it is how oil and coal reserves were formed in the first place.” (New Scientist March 2004)

Anyone who examines coal will notice that, in many cases, it is not composed of compressed leaves. Coal is usually made of wood or bark. It comes in many grades, depending on how well the wood is preserved – anthracite, bituminous and lignite. The encyclopedia says, “blackish mineral substance of fossil origin, the result of the transformation of ancient plant matter under progressive compression.”

Both Mr. Fenning and the encyclopedia make the same assumption that coal comes from “ancient” plant material. The evidence for coal being “ancient” is not exactly overwhelming; in fact, coal could just as easily be quite ‘young’ too, as it depends quite a bit on one’s assumptions rather than hard evidence. It is possible to produce coal in only a few hours, by applying heat and compression to ordinary wood, so there is no need to believe coal is “old” or “ancient”.

Looking at the evidence, coal does not match the descriptions given to it by evolutionists. It is not currently building up on the floor of any forest anywhere in the world today. Leaf litter generally turns into humus and is recycled, rather than forming ever-thickening masses, and even if it did form ever-thickening masses, it would also need to be covered by many layers of sediment to compress it – which implies a massive flood, and that never happens either. Local floods have never produced coal, except in very small quantities – and never on the scale in which coal is found today. Some coal deposits are a mile thick and 100 miles long! Peat bogs never produce coal either. They are the wrong consistency to produce, for example, anthracite, which is a shiny, woody coal of high quality.

Once again common sense has more to say about coal than the grand statements of well-qualified experts. Coal is made from the remains of trees, sometimes millions of them, all piled together and jammed into a heap at every angle, and then covered by enormous amounts of sediment – gravel, mud and silt carried by water. The evidence for coal, and oil, speaks to us of a global-scale flood, not a gradual, painstakingly slow build-up of leaf litter. The idea that coal forms slowly is contradicted by the fact that in many coal seams whole tree trunks are found standing vertically through the layers. If formation of coal was slow, the upper parts of the trees would have decomposed long before they were buried.

From all round the world, in many cultures, there are stories of a worldwide flood. It is not just the Bible that describes this event. A worldwide flood provides the forces and methods of quick burial of wood, and matches with the evidence – coal and oil. Once again, common sense prevails, and the Bible is shown to be accurate and factual in its historical data.

Organic molecules

By Richard Gunther

What is an “organic molecule?” When scientists announce that they have found one, the impression that a layperson gets is that this molecule can, like magic, suddenly produce life! It is, after all, “organic” and organic things are living things, right?

A science magazine recently announced, “A speck of dust that drifted into the Earth’s atmosphere from the edge of the solar system shows that complex molecules can form even in the chill near-emptiness of interstellar space.” (New Scientists March 2004) The article makes a few assumptions based on its evolutionary worldview and then gets backs to real facts again: “Simple organic molecules have been detected in this dust before . . . dust particles could have seeded the young Earth with organic matter.” Could they? Let us consider this leap of false logic.

A chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, John Bradley, said, “Its another hint that extraterrestrial carbon may be implicated in the origin of life.” The dust particle, named Benavente, was very small – it was only one femtogram, which is one millionth of one billionth of a gram, yet from this a mass spectrometer was able to detect molecules of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen. These molecules were found to differ from similar molecules on Earth – there were fewer carbon atoms and the nitrogen atoms were heavier, not that this means much to a lay person, but to scientists it is remarkable because it shows that molecules can still form in the near zero temperatures of space, despite the lack of energy to help them.

Could such dust particles have seeded the young Earth with organic matter? There seems to be no dispute about the fact that “organic” molecules do fall out of space and land on Earth, but we have to be careful about the word “seeded” because it implies that the molecules have within them some intrinsic power to cause life to begin – which they do not. The idea that if enough of them fall, and conditions are right, they will automatically start “life” is a giant leap of hope against all odds. Life is far, far more complicated than a pile of organic molecules.

What does “life” need? A large number of different things, only two of which are listed below:

Polymers. These are large molecules that are built from many simple molecules, called monomers. Polymers grow as more and more specially shaped bifunctional monomers are added. These combine with two others to form the polymer, but polymers would never end if it were not for unfunctional monomers, which block one end of the growing chain.

Left and right-handed molecules. Many of life’s molecules come in two forms, ‘left-handed’ and ‘right-handed’. Life requires polymers with all building blocks having the same ‘handedness’, so a protein will not be of any use unless it is completely ‘right-handed’, while DNA and RNA will not be any use unless they have all ‘right-handed; sugars.

In just these two areas it is obvious that for “life” to happen, a deliberate, intelligent design must be imposed on the molecules, because left to themselves they could never sort themselves out to supply a living cell with perfect polymers. It is therefore quite irresponsible for a scientist to say that because he has found “organic molecules” he has therefore found a trigger for “the origin of life” – nothing could be further from the truth.

It would be just as valid so say, if we found a round pebble, that we had discovered the “origin of the Empire State Building” simply because there was some stonework in it. “organic molecules” are simple molecules which are also found in living things. We might find stone in the Empire State building, but that doesn’t mean the stone caused the building to appear. Common materials do not cause anything to happen. Molecules simply react with each other in the ways they were designed to do.

The origin of life was brought about by a command from the God of Life, who is the Source and Sustainer of all life. He did not need to shower Earth with molecules in some clumsy, haphazard manner and hope for something to happen – He spoke with power and authority and created life the way He wanted it to be.

Movies and reality

By Richard Gunther

‘The Day After Tomorrow’ movie is a highly entertaining collection of disasters, and its visual effects are a roller coaster ride of ruin and mayhem. One reviewer thought the movie might have been designed by some kids writing their ‘wish list’ of destruction scenes they’d like to see. Another reviewer said, “This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart surgery.”

Tornadoes roam the streets of major cities around America, enormous cracks appear in the poles, tidal waves the size of mountains roll in from the sea and snap freezing entombs millions – though strangely enough the frost moves at just the right speed to enable the heroes to outrun it – just like good old fashioned monster movies.

But it has to be said that behind all the fun and frolic is a supposedly serious message about our environment. Many scientists seriously believe the world is heading for a new ice age, which will include several ‘hypercanes’, expected to blow up from the Arctic in all-engulfing freezing vengeance and all the usual disasters – as depicted in the movie. The prophets of environmental doom predict these things in the not too distant future, and the blame, they say, is mainly ours. Too much burning of fossil fuels, too many CFCs released into the atmosphere, too many forests removed, too much warm water from Nuclear power plants . . . yes, its all Man’s fault.

A few years ago a book came out called ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ in which a statistician looked at the public domain data on such things as trends in . . well, basically in all the areas where environmentalists are predicting doom. The result was a total refutation of every single trend. The truth is, according to freely available information, everything is getting better and better. Obviously such a book would not be welcome on the set of ‘The Day After Tomorrow’!

Another problem which doomsayers need to deal with is the fact that around the year 1000 there was a global warming effect which had nothing to do with Man. 

The Bible describes many major natural disasters on this planet, but none of them were caused directly by Man, unless you want to include fires and bursting dams, oil slicks and chemical accidents. The disasters which the Bible records were far bigger. One was the fall Man. When Adam and Eve sinned. As a result of this God brought in some drastic changes . . . animals which normally ate plants now began to eat meat. Plants which were safe and harmless began to grow spines and poisons. This state of degeneration went on for over a thousand years until about 1300 AC (After Creation) when an even bigger disaster struck.

A global flood, which Noah and his family, with some representatives of land animals survived, was sent by a good God on a wicked planet. After the flood came an ice age, and then began the droughts and famines which the world is so accustomed to.

Environmental scientists will insist on talking about an ‘ice age’ as depicted in the movie, as an event triggered by very cold air coming from the poles, or high altitude air (maybe minus 150 degrees) being drawn down, but this would not produce an ice age – all this would cause is a ‘frozen Earth’ age.

What conditions would you need to have an ice age? First, you would need a great deal more snowfall than we currently experience. Snow would have to fall steadily and freeze, and then slowly build up and compact down to form ice. In order to get these conditions you would need to increase evaporation from the oceans and precipitation over the land. In order to increase evaporation you would need to warm the oceans. How could that be done?

To warm the oceans perhaps a solar flare would help? No, that would not provide the cooling effect needed to cause rain, and the heat would dry and warm the land – a self-defeating cycle. How about removing clouds, so heat could be lost more rapidly to space? No, that would simply cool the Earth. It would not provide a mechanism for increasing evaporation. The only other option would be to release heat from the interior of the Earth itself.

The Bible says that during the flood the water came up from the interior of the planet – hot water no doubt, and volcanoes would also have contributed their share, so warmer oceans existed for perhaps 300 years after the flood, before the oceans cooled again – sufficient time for an ice age. We can therefore be assured that ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ can never happen, because God has promised never to flood the Earth ever again – Genesis 9:11 – and the movie exists to remind us of the folly of trying to outthink God’s Word.

Viking ships

By Richard Gunther

Modern is better – or so some people think, yet the crafts, techniques and technologies of the past continue to surface as superior to our so-called ‘modern’ improvements on them. The Viking ship’s sail is a good example of this.

As early as 1400 BC Norwegian farmers kept sheep and burnt the heather, Villsau, the breed of sheep they preferred, must eat a rich variety of grasses in the summer to gain the weight they need to survive winter; fire augments the suppression of heather and young pines, and keeps the land clear for new grass. Over the centuries the Vikings continued to raise their sheep and use the wool for many purposes, including of course, clothing.

But when it came to making sails for their ships they excelled. For example, it is believed that the Danish king Knut II had more than 1700 ships at his command when he laid plans to oust William 1st from England in 1085 AD. The sails for this fleet came from sheep, and the wool was worked by women, who laboured year after year using drop spindles and looms. 

A Norse law dating from about 1000 AD says, “The man on whom responsibility falls and who lives near the sea, shall store the sail in the church. If the church burns, this man is responsible for the sail.” The sail was a prized possession. It was crucial to the defense of Norway’s long coast against rival clans and foreign invaders.

A few years ago the remains of one of these sails was discovered in a church ceiling in Trondenes. It was analyzed and found to be made of woven wool, from the villsau sheep, so plans were made to reconstruct a woolen sale exactly as the Vikings did it.

Even a simple sail is a highly complex tensile structure. The fabric must be heavy enough to withstand strong winds, and also the strain from the rigging, but not so heavy that it slows down the ship, or is difficult to raise or lower. It must be elastic, so that it fills with enough wind to form an area of low pressure in front of the sail, but not so elastic that it forms irregular pockets. The sail’s form must also be correct: too flat and it won’t propel the boat, but too bowed and the boat won’t maneuver in the wind. The trick to achieving this balance lies in the strength of the different threads, the tightness of their twist, and their interlacing and water-tightness.

The remains of the cloth showed, under a microscope, that only the long, coarse hairs of the villsau were used, and so a team set out to harvest sufficient of this wool to weave a sail. (They also added some similar wool from a similar breed, the spelsau) Both types of wool had to be worked by hand to preserve the lanolin, but even before this painstaking work began the wool had to be “rooed” or pulled from the villsau in midsummer. One sail, of 85 square metres, consumed 2000 kilograms of wool, from 2000 sheep. All the longer. Outer hairs had to be separated by hand, a task that took four people six months to do. Spinning the wool into 165,000 metres and weaving the sail took two and a half years. 

The ship made her maiden voyage in 1995 and was christened the Sara Kjerstine.

You would think that a heavy woollen sail would be no match for today’s modern technologies, with their carbon fibre, and synthetics, but scientists who tested the Viking sail found that the woollen sails actually powered the Viking ships about 10% faster upwind, and could sail closer to the wind than modern sails.

Just as supposedly ‘old fashioned’ inventions quite often turn out to be proof of great intelligence and ingenuity, the Bible records several examples of the same thing from much earlier in human history: the building of the ark in Noah’s day, and the tower of Babel after the flood. Both examples demonstrate that Man’s intelligence has not grown in any significant way since those times, and the discovery of the Viking sail is further proof of this.

Signals from space

By Richard Gunther

What if it really happened? What if an intelligent signal was received from space, and verified as a genuine signal from another intelligent race of creatures? What if there was absolutely no mistake about it – this was the real thing, a coded message sent as a communication to Earth, to let us know that we were not the only sentient life in the universe?

For many people it would be a thrilling, wonderful discovery – their reaction might be to break open the champagne and celebrate for many days, but for others it would be as scary as hell! What if this extraterrestrial was aggressive and hunting for food? What if it was infectious, or poisonous? What would the military forces of Earth do? 

Among the many revelers would be the evolutionists. They would say that because life was found elsewhere in the universe, this proved that life could evolve by accident from non-living materials, without the help of a Divine Being. The implications of this are that life is essentially meaningless, and that Man is not significant in any way. But this is not a logical line of thinking.

First, God could have created intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, just as easily as He created it here on Earth. The incoming intelligent signal would prove only that there was an incoming intelligent signal. It would not prove evolution at all. Second, science has never shown how life can evolve from non-living materials, so it is by no means certain that it can happen here, or anywhere else in the universe. Third, no amount of wishful thinking, creative statistics and theory can turn a hope into a reality. The fact is, no intelligent signal, at least of the sort many scientists are looking for, has ever been received from space, and it seems likely that it never will be.

A leading light in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California is Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute’s senior astronomer. He places a lot of hope in the world’s increasing computer processing power and improvements in radio telescope technology. With these things constantly improving, he claims that Earth may detect alien transmissions within two decades.

Shostak, whose calculations were published in the space science journal ‘Acta Astronautics’ first estimated the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy that might currently be broadcasting radio signals. For this he used a formula created in 1961 which factors in aspects such as the number of stars with planets, how many of those planets might be expected to have life, and so on. Shostak came up with an estimate of between 10,000 and one million possible transmitters in the sky.

To find these transmissions will involve observing and listening to radio emissions from most of the 100 billion stars of our galaxy. Impossible though this sounds, Shostak is undaunted. Within a generation, he thinks, with ever-faster and more powerful computers, the first contact will be made, but what if this happens? It may take Earth 200 to 1000 years to send back a reply!

What Shostak has done is leap wildly into the world of speculation. He fails to accept certain realities, such as the fact that just because technology improves, this does not lead to discoveries of the sort he hopes for. Even if the entire Earth’s surface was bristling with receivers, if there is no transmission to receive, it will not be received. (By analogy, if one person listens for conversation in an empty room, a thousand people listening will fare no better.)

Shostak defends himself by saying, “I have made this prediction using the assumptions adopted by the first SETI research community itself.” Which means, basically, he is not the only one who hopes for success against all the odds. What he, and his friends need to do, is turn their receivers in a different direction – towards Palestine. There, about 2000 years ago, an Intelligent Message was sent to Earth from space, and, as Jesus said, “I have given to them the words which You gave me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from You, and they have believed that You sent me.” John 17:8

Erosion

By Richard Gunther

Not long ago some scientific papers were published on the rates at which soils were being carried away by erosion. The final tally, after all the different measurements were taken, was that, at present rates of erosion, all land masses above sea level will be gone in about 10 million years.

This figure raised many eyebrows, because it brought into question many assumptions about evolution and the age of the Earth.

If, for example, evolution needed 400 millions years, then the land on which it happened would not be there at least 40 times – at present rates of erosion! There is also some strong evidence to show that rainfall was much greater globally in the past – i.e. great dried up lake beds in Australia and elsewhere. Perhaps the land is being pushed up out of the sea at about the same rate it is being washed away? There is no evidence to support this theory, so evolutionists are stuck with a problem.

Another statistic came in recently, based on average sediment movements in the Yellow river, China. Every year some one billion tonnes of sediment makes its way to the sea.  Where does all this sediment end up? At the river mouth, and then further out as the river produces a ‘fan’ under the sea. But if the Yellow river deposits 1 billion tones every year, and has been doing that for say, 100,000 years, where is all the sediment? There should be an enormous fan under the sea – but there isn’t. Does this mean that the Yellow river deposited a very small amount of sediment for 100,000 years and then, within just the last roughly 10,000 years it really started to ‘chew through the dirt’? That would be absurd. Does it mean ocean currents have been constantly sweeping the sediments away? There is no evidence for that either.

The only reasonable explanation which matches the evidence is that the Yellow river has been washing sediment away for just a few thousand years. It is as if the land and the sediment just appeared, very recently – and this fits exactly with what the Bible says in Genesis.

All around the world, wherever there are rivers dumping sediment, the river fans are so small they could only have begun forming some 4-5000 years ago. This is hard, real-time evidence and not theory.

If one visits the mountains of New Zealand, where the rock faces soar into the sky, one may notice the steady, never-ending sound of little stones tumbling and bouncing down from the heights. This is caused by erosion, as gravity and weather, ice and rain and wind, chip away at the stone. When the air heats up, as in Europe during the last few years, the rate at which the rock crumbles can become quite dangerous. 50 people died in the Alps in 2003, due to falling rock, and many mountain paths were closed because of the danger. The magazine Geophysical Research Letters vol. 31 said, “Our model suggests that higher summer temperatures will heat some rock face to such an extent that the permafrost, which glues the cracks and joints together, will melt and decrease the stability of the rock face.”

Another aspect of erosion is the question of what exactly is eroded? Obviously, the softer the material, the more easily it is eroded, but considering that about 80% of all land above sea level is sedimentary rock, we have another problem. How did all that sediment get there? Sometimes the series of layers are over a mile thick, sometimes they contain vast amounts of fossilized trees (coal) and other times they cover small oceans of fossilized plant material in another form (oil and gas). These deposits are evidence of enormous floods, and not the result of slow, incremental build up of materials.

Again, the evidence points to the Bible. Many of the rivers in the world have left behind banks that show that at some time in the past they were perhaps 1000 times larger, but have since dwindled to their present volume. This is all evidence of a global flood. Erosion is one of many indicators, not of an ancient planet, but of a young Earth and a reliable Bible.

Fraudsters

By Richard Gunther

Someone ought to write a book called ‘In The Name Of Science – Fraudsters Within’ because quite a few pronouncements made in the name of science have been accepted as true, but soon after have been found to be deliberate fabrications. Not that the bulk of scientists do not try to be honest and unbiased in their work, but some have no scruples, and will say anything to ‘prove’ what they want people to believe.

Take the German zoology professor Ernst Haekel (1834-1919). He was so keen on the theory of evolution that he drew a series of embryos in such a way as to make them all look similar. He believed that all life had a common origin, so all embryos ought to go through an ‘evolution’ from fertilized seed, to embryo, to newborn which reflects that evolution. Haekel ignored actual embryos and drew what he wanted to see. His fictions were published and accepted into scientific textbooks, and even today many people are unaware that they have accepted blatant lies in the name of science.

Another scientist (H.B.Kettlewell) fraudulently used peppered moths to support his case. He claimed that certain moths in England demonstrated evolution because as the tree trunks the moths were supposed to rest on gradually became darker due to industrial soot, the moths evolved into a darker-winged variety. Since then some of the world’s leading journals, for example ‘Nature’ 396, admit that the moth ‘proof’ is bunk. The peppered moth almost never rests on tree trunks during the daytime, and to bolster their theory the fraudsters actually glued or pinned dead moths where they wanted them to be.

Anther ‘scientific’ fraud was the now infamous ‘Piltdown Man’ which turned out to be nothing but some doctored fragments of bone deliberately placed where they would be discovered, and interpreted as a ‘missing link’ until 40 years later when the fragments were examined more closely.

Another kind of fraud practiced by ‘science’ is the removal of, or refusal to admit evidence that contradicts a point of view already held. After all, most people don’t like to be proved wrong, and scientists are no exception. But when only the evidence that supports a point of view is selected, and anything which undermines that point of view is rejected, what do we have but deliberate dishonesty?

A case in point is a fossil that used to be on public display in the British Museum. The fossil depicts the bones of a woman, embedded in Miocene rock (limestone), which was discovered on the island of Guadalope, in the Caribbean. The remains are of a modern type of woman, obviously fully human, but the rock her bones are preserved in is dated at around 25 million years. Evolutionists generally agree that ‘modern’ man did not appear until about 4 million years ago. The display was removed and hidden in the basement of the Museum.

Within the world of scientists there is pressure on dissenters, especially if they dissent in the areas of Biblical truth, to keep quiet or leave. As Professor Whitten, Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia said, “Biologists are simply naïve when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with their predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants.” (1978)

What does God think about all this deliberate fraud, this dishonesty and parading of lies ‘in the name of science’? Romans 1:18-22 is one of His responses: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth  . . .”

Science

By Richard Gunther

Science frequently moves from one position to another. As soon as a statement is made, defining some property of matter, or some finding has been established as certain, a revision appears in which the former statements have to be scrapped or modified. Many scientists have had to retreat from what they originally thought and ‘swallow their words’. A few examples follow, drawn from the pronouncements of qualified experts, past and present:

If a vehicle travels faster than 30 mph the air will be sucked from the interior and suffocate the passengers. The universe is expanding/collapsing/neither expanding or collapsing.  Stars are always being ‘born’. The Grand Canyon was formed slowly over millions of years. Fossil beds contain millions of transitional forms. The moon was captured as it passed Earth a long time ago. A huge amount of human DNA is useless junk. An exclusive diet of meat is not good for you. Gem stones take millions of years to form. Oil takes about the same time.  There are only about 5000 stars in the universe.

It has often been said, by scientists, that Neanderthals were one of the ‘missing links’ between primates and modern humans, and many textbooks pictured them as primitive ape-like humans, but as more evidence has coming to light this view has had to be revised. A recent book ‘Neanderthals and Modern Humans’ by Clive Finlayson points out that it was “a combination of intellectual mindset and the skeletal remains of an old and decrepit Neanderthal man led to the idea that they were all thuggish in looks, temperament and intelligence.”

There is now abundant information about these remarkable people which shows that they were “very robust, barrel-chested” and physically powerful hunters, adapted to the harsh conditions of an ice age, with “strength and endurance required for high mobility and close contact hunting.” Their remains have been found with musical instruments, well-made tools and evidence that they cared for their dead and believed in an afterlife.

Unlike changeable science, the Bible makes pronouncements about the real world that have never needed to be revised. For example long before Man understood the orbit of Earth through the vacuum of space, the Bible said that God “hangs the Earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7), long before the whole hydrologic cycle was understood, in which salt-free water evaporates off the ocean and falls on the land, only to flow back to the ocean and repeat the cycle endlessly, the Bible described the exact same thing in Ecclesiastes chapter 1. Long before telescopes were turned on the sky and the untold billions of stars discovered, the Bible already said the stars were numberless – in fact the Bible compared the number of stars to the grains on sand on Earth (Gen.22:17), which is a very good approximation.

But the Bible is not just accurate when it comes to describing present real things; it has also proved absolutely accurate in describing future real events.

One hundred and twenty years before the flood of Noah’s day, Noah accurately predicted it – to the very day. Four hundred years before the Hebrews left Egypt, God foretold their departure, to the very day. God spoke through His prophets many times, predicting the downfall of nations and cities, and all has happened precisely as He said.

God also foretold the coming of His Son, named His family tree, His place of birth, His manner and character, His place of childhood, and His journey to and from Egypt. He also told us what His Son would do, how He would be received, who would betray him, how He would die, and what would happen after that. Every essential detail was described sometimes hundreds of years before the event.

No scientist would be bold (or stupid) enough to predict what was going to happen in the world even ten years from now, yet many of them do make statements, with total assurance, about things which they really do not know anything about – such as the origin of the universe, or of life, of language, or of even something as basic as the origin of sex – just why and how did male and female come about?  Where science has no answers, the Bible has clear statements. Logically, if the Bible has been shown to be correct in all the areas in which it can be investigated, why is it assumed to be wrong in what it says about origins and ancient history?

Perhaps the Neanderthals can teach us something here? Their descendants are probably with us, mixed into the general population of the planet, and some of them may be Bible-believing creationists.

Features of DNA

By Richard Gunther

A heading to an article in the New Scientist magazine reads, “DNA shows how different we are.” It went on to say, “Humans and their closest relatives, chimpanzees, may be more different than geneticists have realized.”

The evidence comes from studies by the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium, (as reported in Nature, vol. 429, page 382) To begin with the article described the similarities: “A comparison of the chimpanzee’s chromosome 22 and its counterpart, human chromosome 21, shows that just 1.44% of the chromosome’s 33.3 million DNA bases are different.” Only 1.44% is not much, so where are the differences?

The study revealed “nearly 68,000 insertions or deletions of DNA, most of which were only a few bases long.” “Because each gene contains hundreds or thousands of bases, even these differences are enough to alter more than 80% of the proteins produced by those genes.”

80% is a lot of difference.

Evolutionists work from the worldview that primates come from some earlier form of life, which evolved gradually into many ape and chimp species, and eventually one of these groups evolved into humans. This is why, they say, humans and chimps share so many similar features. The creationist responds by pointing out two things: First, similar design does not prove similar origin. (Cars are all similar in many ways, but they come from many different factories.) Secondly, the fact that common parts are used actually points to some intelligent designer, who assembled the parts in different ways to get different results. (To illustrate this, see how a nut and bolt may be used in a huge number of different machines.) Humans share about 50% of their DNA with bananas, but no evolutionist would suggest humans are descended from bananas!

The New Scientist heading contained the phrase, “Humans and their closest relatives.” This is an evolutionary assumption smuggled into the sentence. It is assumed that chimpanzees are relatives of humans, and the public generally accepts it without question.

We also hear phrases like “humans and other animals” and variations of this, coming from the evolutionists, yet we seldom hear the creationist point of view. Behind the scenes the enemy of Man, Satan, is using his educated and intelligent puppets to mouth out his lies and deceptions. He works in the halls of academia and in universities. He dresses his spokespeople in black suits and white coats. He preaches his lies from the liberal pulpits, and publishes his treachery in learned books and highly acclaimed novels and movies. He decorates his lies with technology and the façade of science, but all the while, behind the scenes, he grinds his teeth in utter hatred at the place God has given to Man.

The answer to the question “Is Man an animal?” is not a simple one. The shortest answer is “No” but it takes a while, and some thought to sort out what we mean by “animal”. Obviously, Man is not a plant, or a bacterium. He shares many things with all creatures – he has a backbone so he is classed as a vertebrate, and Man suckles his young so he is classed as a mammal. Female humans have placentas, so Man is classed as a placental mammal. Man also shares some things in common with primates, so he is assumed to be an extension of the primate family.

But Man is much more than an animal. For example, as Ray Comfort found out, a human cannot take an orangutan on to an airliner, because the creature is not classed as a human – despite all that evolutionists say about orangutans being just like humans. The airline’s rules are far more sensible than evolutionists.

Apes cannot use verbal language as humans do. Apes never pray. Apes never love and communicate with their Creator. Apes are not lower level humans – they are creatures designed to fill certain functions within the whole biosphere. Humans study them – they never study humans. Humans can read and write, and express their thoughts and feelings non-verbally. Humans can override their instincts and produce great music. Humans were made in the image of God, designed to be part of His royal heavenly family – apes never were.

Fossilized Cells

By Richard Gunther

A couple of years ago the BBC reported that several dinosaur experts had discovered samples of what appeared to be soft tissues from a tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone.  The US researchers told Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels.

Of course the news was greeted with surprise, disbelief and astonishment, because it totally contradicts the assumption held by many scientists that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago. How could soft tissues survive so long? The explanations, devised by various scientists to answer this question, are quite ingenious.

One explanation is that “fairly remarkable conditions must have existed in the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago.” Another suggests that ‘tough’ molecules replace the dinosaur tissues, cell by cell.

Normally, when an animal dies, worms and bugs and bacteria will quickly eat up anything that is soft, then the remaining bone material is weathered away and dissolved. Even a very large cattle beast, if left on a paddock, will totally disappear in only a year or two - only a few large bones will remain. Even if a beast sinks into mud, it will not remain intact for a thousand years, let alone 68 million! Again, if the beast is covered quickly and sealed by sediment, it will become mineralized, and all soft tissues will be lost.

When Dr. Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina Stat University, dissolved away the minerals in one of the samples, she found transparent, flexible filaments that resemble blood vessels. There were also traces of what look like blood cells, and others that look like osteocytes – cells that build and maintain bone.

She told the BBC’s Science in Action program, “. . . its from an extinct animal but it doesn’t have a lot of the characteristics of what people would call a fossil . . . it still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and its not any more dense than modern bone; its bone more than anything.”

There is one explanation that fits all the facts, but most scientists will not even consider it because it cuts right across their assumptions. The fossil is YOUNG! If the dinosaur died only a short time ago, maybe only a thousand or two years ago, you would expect to find its soft tissues still intact. The normal processes of decay and dissolution have not had time to destroy the tissues, therefore the sample is not as old as it is supposed to be.

The Bible gives a very young age to the Earth, only about 6000 years. Dinosaurs were created on day six, along with cattle and other land animals. At this stage all creatures were vegetarian, and the world was a safe and benign environment. From the time of creation, for the next 1300 years Man lived with dinosaurs, but then a global flood came as a judgement and all land creatures were destroyed. Their remains are still to be found in the sedimentary rocks laid down by the flood.

Noah, however, preserved a sample pair of all land animals in the Ark and released them when the flood receded. These ancestors of all of today’s land creatures re-populated the planet, but the climate had changed, and it was not so easy to survive. Creatures which did not adapt to the new conditions died out, along with most dinosaurs. Man hunted these creatures through the centuries, and finally all the very large ones were gone. The T. rex remains found in Montana may have been one of the last of that species to die, perhaps by some natural disaster?

The tissue sample is a challenge to thinking scientists. It exposes the bankruptcy of their assumptions about evolution and the age of the Earth, and points them to the only viable alternative explanation, that the world is young. If the sample is still fresh, it must be young. If it is young, the theory about dinosaurs dieing out millions of years ago must be wrong.