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S. M. Campbell #fundie fpchurch.org.uk

Dinosaurs were an interesting group of animals. We cannot tell exactly what they looked like because all that remains of them today is their skeletons, many of which are incomplete. There is much guess work in the attempt to form a picture of what a dinosaur looked like. The scientists have to piece together the skeleton, filling in the gaps for the missing bones, and then try to work out what the fleshy parts of the animal looked like. Often scientists disagree about some of the details. For instance: what kind of skin had they, and what colour was it?

Evolutionists would have us believe that dinosaurs evolved from a type of reptile about 235 million years ago. They say that these creatures dominated the earth for long ages and then mysteriously became extinct about 60 million years before our first ancestors supposedly began evolving. On the other hand, creationists believe that dinosaurs, like all the other animals and man, were created during the six days of creation about 6000 years ago.

Both evolutionists and creationists do agree that at some stage in history, the environment became unsuitable for dinosaurs, causing them to become extinct. While the circumstances surrounding the extinction of dinosaurs is a mystery to evolutionists, creationists understand that following the Genesis flood there would have been huge environmental changes.

This would have affected the habitat of the dinosaurs. Combined with changes in lifestyle, as man began to populate the world again, this resulted in many types of plants and animals becoming extinct. Dinosaurs could not adapt to all the changes they were experiencing and so gradually died out. We see similar threats to other species today. Often at zoos or wildlife parks you can see campaigns to save some of these creatures. Does the possibility of endangered animals such as tigers becoming extinct indicate that they are evolving? No, of course not! Extinction is not proof of evolution.

It is generally accepted that the majority of dinosaurs were not large animals but that their average size was about the same as a sheep. Some were even smaller – about the size of a mouse. There were also very large ones like the tyrannosaurus rex and the brachiosaurus. The word dinosaur is quite a modern term. It was first used in 1841 by a British scientist, Sir Richard Owen, and is Greek for “terrible lizard”. Before 1841 the larger dinosaur-like creatures would have had local names or possibly they would have been called monsters or dragons.

Does the Bible have anything to say about dinosaurs? Obviously the word dinosaur does not appear in the Authorised Version as it was translated before the word became part of our vocabulary. Yet, in the Bible, creatures are described which may fall into the dinosaur category. There are several references to dragons; what exactly these were we cannot say, but obviously they were some sort of animal. For example, we read: “The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet” (Psalm 91:13), and, “The dragons of the wilderness” (Malachi 1:3).

There are also references to dragons that lived in water. You can look up the references yourself: Psalm 74:13, Isaiah 27:1 and Ezekiel 29:3. Job also refers to a great sea-creature called leviathan, which he describes as breathing fire (Job 41). Also, in chapter 40, God describes a great animal He created, which was unbelievably large and strong; it is called behemoth. Some commentators think this behemoth could be an elephant or a hippopotamus, but it could possibly have been a large dinosaur like brachiosaurus. In Isaiah there is a reference to a “fiery flying serpent”; this could possibly have been a type of flying dinosaur like a pterodactyl (Isaiah 30:6).

There is evidence to support the view that dinosaurs and man lived on earth together. There are accounts of mankind and dinosaurs clashing. In many cultures there are legends of heroic battles between man and monsters or dragons. No doubt many of these accounts have become distorted and exaggerated with the passage of time but they do point to the existence of various types of fierce reptiles. The most recent medieval account of such a battle is from Bologna in Italy in 1572.

A peasant called Baptista killed a creature which, from its description, could have been a small dinosaur called tanystropheus. Even today there are giant lizards which are a threat to other sizeable animals, including man. The Komodo lizard, living on the Indonesian island of Komodo, is considered by many to be a type of prehistoric lizard. Yes, it is a lizard, but it is no more prehistoric than you or me! They can grow up to three metres in length and have powerful jaws and sharp teeth. They are strong and fast, in spite of their short legs. Some people have described them as land-crocodiles.

There is further evidence which might give weight to the legends passed down through our history. A sixteenth-century European scientific book contains descriptions of several living animals from that period which would now probably be classified as dinosaurs. Ancient paintings of various dinosaur-like creatures have been found in caves in Utah and Arizona and also in France. Pottery paintings, mosaics and sculptures from many ancient cultures – such as Greek, Egyptian, Sumatran and Roman – are proof that these amazing creatures were seen by mankind.

Dinosaurs are a part of our natural history. We should not be put off trying to explore the facts about them just because they have been hijacked by the evolutionists as supposed proof of an evolutionary timeline. They are part of God’s creation just as we are. Man was created on the same day as the dinosaurs that lived on land. But man was created in the image of God with an immortal soul, to be a creature that would glorify his Creator in a special way. “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17).

S M Campbell #fundie fpchurch.org.uk

As you are reading this article perhaps you are smelling something. Maybe someone is cooking in the kitchen or perhaps someone has walked past you who is wearing some perfume or after-shave. If so, some of the six million smelling cells inside your nose have been stimulated. Have you ever noticed that, when you have a cold, you cannot taste your food so well? That is because the sense of smell helps to identify the finer flavours.

It is also why our noses are where they are; they help us make sure we are only putting good things in our mouths. There are tiny hairs on the smell-receptor cells inside our nose and they detect smells by their shape. Yes! I am sure you did not know smells had shapes. The different smell shapes fit into different hair sensors which then send electrical messages to the brain, where the smells are organised and analysed.

The average person can detect up to 10 000 separate smells. How could this ability to smell have evolved? How could the smell receptor hairs have evolved? Evolutionists might argue that a mutation produced a hair shape that matched the smell of a dangerous predator; so the animal survived because it could smell the predator and get away more quickly. All this might sound plausible, until you consider that this would have needed at least another 10 000 such positive random mutations. Remember, we still do not have evidence of even one positive random mutation!

As you read this, maybe you are sitting in a comfortable chair with a cushion on your lap, or perhaps you are sitting on a hard chair wishing you had a soft cushion to sit on. How do you know how to hold this magazine without letting it fall from your hands? How are you able to turn over the pages one by one without crushing them? All these sensations and actions come about because of your sense of touch.

We can detect four different types of sensation: heat, cold, pain and pressure – and these combine to give lots of different feelings. Our skin surface is constantly monitoring our contact with the environment. There are different types of receptors all over our bodies constantly taking in information about the world around us and about what we are doing. All the different signals being sent to the brain are important for our protection, pleasure and well-being. Does this sound like the work of lots of random mutations or does it sound like an intended design feature?

Perhaps, while you are reading this article you are having a snack: maybe some coke or coffee; perhaps a bag of crisps; or, if you are trying to keep healthy, an apple. Maybe you have a sweet tooth, and you like chocolate and sugary things; or perhaps you prefer savoury snacks like crisps and nuts. Whatever our personal preferences, we all recognise different tastes in the same way.

On our tongue there are over 10 000 taste buds. As food passes through our mouth, the taste buds collect molecules from the food by their shape, size or electrical charge and then send that information to the brain to be interpreted. Meanwhile other sensors detect the texture, temperature and moistness of the food. As we chew and break up the food, our saliva glands are at work producing saliva to make the food easier to swallow and digest.

There is no evidence of primitive animals with partly-formed tongues, lips or mouths. What use would a partly-formed mouth have been? And what use would a mouth have been without the food pipe to connect it to the intestines? Clearly, all the parts of the eating system would need to be formed at the same time before a person or an animal could eat and get nourishment. Yet Evolutionists have to assume that many random mutations took place over a very long period of time, and that natural selection recognised these random mutations as useful. Their theory gives rise to more questions than answers. Creationists accept that God has given us the gift of taste and that this is how He designed and created us.

The brief overview of our five senses given here demonstrates how amazingly complex and intricate our bodies are. The different aspects we have been looking at are highly complex, but the fact that they all fit together and can work in harmony for the benefit of the individual is even more wonderful. It would be good if everyone could say as David did: “I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalm 139:14).

If people who believe in evolution would really consider how complex is the world around them, they would have problems. They would have to conclude that, no matter how many random mutations occurred, human beings could not have been produced, nor could any of the wonderful plants and animals in the world around us. The evidence from the past that is available for scientific analysis fits easily into a Creationist’s view of the world; but it needs a lot of speculation to make it fit even partially into the evolutionary view. Evolution is the only branch of science where speculation is accepted as reliable evidence.

Although it is good and right to acknowledge God’s wisdom and power as our Creator, He has given an even greater demonstration of His wisdom and power in His plan for saving sinners from their sins. So each one of us should ask God to “create a clean heart” within us (Psalm 51:10). Then we might know something of the experience which the Apostle Paul wrote about to the Corinthians: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

We hope these articles will encourage you to read more about the evidence for Creation and against Evolution – especially if you are likely to face questions on the subject during your education or in your workplace. There are many good books on the subject, and the quarterly magazines produced by Answers in Genesis are also an excellent source of information.`

S. M. Campbell #fundie fpchurch.org.uk

The Bible tells us how man came to exist. We are told clearly and simply that “God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:27). God made man different from all the animals: man was created in God’s image with a responsible and never-dying soul, and he was able to think. What a wonder!

Evolutionists reject the Genesis account of how man came to exist. They have to find some other theory to explain our amazing separate existence in this world, distinct from the animal kingdom. In many books about the history of mankind you are confronted with man’s supposed animal ancestors, and you are told that apes and chimpanzees shared these same ancestors. You might find a series of drawings of ape-like creatures becoming progressively less hairy and more erect as they adapt to walking on two feet.

Evolutionists are looking for evidence to prove that we descended from some animal; that somehow, millions of years ago, a group of animals started to walk on two feet; and that natural selection caused some survival advantage in this. But, in fact, if we applied the theory of natural selection we might conclude that a weaker, less agile animal in the process of learning to walk on two feet would have a distinctly-smaller chance of survival from its enemies. The sort of explanation put forward by some evolutionists involves back-to-front reasoning along these lines: our early ancestors who were good at walking on two legs were clearly at an advantage on dry land “because millions of years later, we walk on two legs instead of four”.

Much of the supposed evidence which is presented as support for the evolution of man from ape-like ancestors falls into one of the following three classes:

1. Hoaxes, where human and ape fossil bones have been combined and people have been led to believe the bones belonged to one individual. An example is the Piltdown Man, where the skull was from a modern human and the jawbone and teeth were from an orangutan. Then there was the tale of Nebraska Man – an ape-man derived from one tooth, which turned out to be from a species of extinct pig.

2. Emphasis is placed on the ape-like qualities of fossilised human remains. The-best known example is probably Neanderthal man who is depicted as a club-dragging, unintelligent, hairy ape-man, but was actually just a type of ordinary man. Some fossil evidence suggests that rickets and arthritis may have caused the rather unusual stance in some of these people.

3. Similarities between remains of ape-like creatures and human remains are exaggerated, with the aim of making the ape-like remains appear more like those of humans. “Lucy” is possibly the most famous of the fossil finds which fit into this category.

Lucy was found in 1973 in northern Ethiopia by a Professor Donald Johanson. She was considered to be an important find because those that found her appeared to be able to identify a knee joint which indicated that she had walked upright. In their desire to show the supposed progress from ape-like creatures to man, evolutionists latch on to any suggestion that a creature from the past walked upright. One commentator on the BBC website states that this form of movement, “known as ‘bipedalism’, is the single most important difference between humans and apes, placing Lucy firmly within the human family”.

However, there is further evidence which suggests that Lucy was actually a “knuckle-walking” creature, employing a specialised four-limbed walking method used by some living apes; it is quite different to walking upright. Further analysis of Lucy’s remains, and other remains similar to hers, also reveals that she belonged to a group of animals that had the long arms and curved fingers and toes of animals that swing through trees. Evolutionists dismiss these facts by saying they are just the evolutionary “left-overs” from previous generations.

Scientists who have studied Lucy’s remains doubt that she walked with straight legs like humans; they think it more likely that she kept her hips and knees bent, like chimpanzees do when they walk. These scientists go on to say that “there was an even closer match between Lucy’s proportions and a type of bipedalism shown by orangutans”. What does this lead you to conclude? That Lucy was probably just some type of ape, a relative of chimpanzees or orangutans?

There is no definitive scientific proof that man, known to scientists as homo sapiens, descended from ape-like creatures. One leading scientist who believes in evolution stated: “The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin.”

Not only do the evolutionists have a problem on their hands as they try to find physical evidence of our supposed amazing transformation into physically-inferior bipedal creatures, but they also have the much greater problem of trying to explain how the human mind “evolved” with the capacity and desire for spiritual activity, thought and language.

In our natural state, our hearts rebel against the fact that we are created by God and so are accountable to Him. Many people detest this thought and, in an attempt to dismiss God from their world, they prefer to believe that they are descended from apes. David, who lived thousands of years ago, had a far greater insight into the natural world around him than many of today’s scientists. Read the whole of Psalm 8 but especially verses 3 to 5:

“When I look up unto the heavens, which Thine own fingers framed,
Unto the moon, and to the stars, which were by Thee ordained;
Then say I, What is man, that he remembered is by Thee?
Or what the son of man, that Thou so kind to him shouldest be?
For Thou a little lower hast him than the angels made;
With glory and with dignity Thou crowned hast his head.”

S. M. Campbell #fundie fpchurch.org.uk

So what exactly is the theory of evolution? It tries to explain how life first began; and it tries to explain how this first form of life changed over long periods of time, producing new life forms, which then changed into other life forms.

When we consider evolution, it is important to remember that it is not a scientific fact but a belief; so it is a religious approach to how life began. Those who believe in evolution like to present it as scientific fact, but the evidence to support this approach just does not exist. There are some things in the Bible which we accept on faith because we do not have hard evidence for it; as the Bible itself says, “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb 11:3).

Creationists and evolutionists have the same evidence but interpret it in different ways and so come up with different conclusions. This is because they are starting from different belief viewpoints. Evolutionists will argue against this but, as we go on to look at their “evidence” in future months, God willing, we will come to see that “faith” is required to make the link between this evidence and their final conclusions. We will also consider evidence which clearly supports a belief in the Bible’s account of creation.

Evolutionists outline a general progression for the evolution of living organisms. It starts, they claim, with a single-cell organism which evolved into one with lots of cells. Then some of these organisms evolved into different plant forms and others into fish, some of which evolved into land amphibians, which in turn evolved into reptiles, and so on. Various timelines are produced showing the different branches of evolution for the different categories of living organisms and ending with the appearance of mankind, supposedly evolving, at last, from apes.

Scientists have carried out many experiments trying to prove that nonliving material can come alive. A well-known experiment, sometimes called the Urey-Miller Experiment, was carried out in 1953 at the University of Chicago. Its aim was to demonstrate that amino acids, which join together to make up proteins, could have come into existence by chance billions of years ago on the lifeless earth. Miller managed to synthesise three out of 20 amino acids, and the evolutionary world was delighted. Here was the proof they had been looking for!

But there were serious flaws in the experiment and in the conclusions drawn from it. Even scientists who believe in evolution accept that the experiment does not prove very much – just that some amino acids can be synthesised under rigorously-controlled laboratory conditions which are not even the same as those on early earth.

Proteins are known to be the “building blocks of life”; as already mentioned, they are made up of different combinations of amino acids. Another scientist, Sydney Fox from Florida State University, tried to advance on Miller’s experiment by showing that proteins could bring the evolutionary world one step closer to synthesising life. Fox managed to join a number of amino acids together under specific artificial conditions. These linked amino acids were supposed to be similar to protein molecules, but were not actually protein molecules, Fox named them “proteinoids”. So the “building blocks” of life have not yet been synthesised. Even if they had been, it would have needed faith and imagination then to conclude that, just because proteins had been made, life would follow.

Until the late 1800s many people believed in spontaneous generation – the idea that life could arise spontaneously from non-living matter. For instance, people thought that rats could form from flour in bags on a bakery floor, that one could get mice by mixing sweaty clothes with husks of wheat! Such beliefs seem ridiculous to us today but they are no more ridiculous than the “spontaneous generation” beliefs of many evolutionists. They insist that, with the right mixture of chemicals and the right amount of energy in the right sort of conditions, life started on this planet.

Charles Darwin is possibly the name most associated with the idea of evolution. But what made Darwin put forward this theory of organisms evolving without a “Designer”? He had a daughter called Annie who died as a young girl. He could not come to terms with this and began to question God and His goodness. He asked himself: If God is good, how could He have allowed my daughter to die? As a result, he could not accept that God exists and decided that Annie was the unfortunate victim of the laws of nature. And so Darwin tried to expel God out of his world; he did so by denying the truth of God’s existence. He then had to find other explanations for how life began, and so put forward the theory of evolution. Many evolutionist sources like to play down the fact that Darwin turned his back on Christianity.

So evolution is the belief that the universe and all living organisms within it arose from chance. Holding tightly onto this belief, scientists who believe in evolution look for evidence and try to interpret it in such a way as to justify their belief.

S. M. Campbell #fundie fpchurch.org.uk

Just over three years ago there was great excitement when geologists in Canada discovered volcanic rocks which they considered to be about 4 billion years old. This made them, apparently, the oldest rocks in the earth. In the news a couple of years ago much attention was given to the small human being found in Indonesia and described as a “Hobbit”; it was said to be about 18,000 years old. At the end of last year there was an article on the BBC website about the fossilised trail of a giant scorpion found in Scotland, in rocks supposed to be about 330 million years old. About a month ago the BBC reported on a fossil of a beaver-like creature found in China. It was estimated to be about 164 million years old.

Scientists want to know how old things are because they think they can then get closer to answering the question, How old is the Earth? The answer is relatively straightforward. By considering the history of the world, starting at creation week in Genesis and going right through the Bible to the present, the age of the earth has been calculated to be about 6,000 years.

Why then is the age of fossils and rocks, or the age of the Earth, given in tens of thousands, millions or even billions of years, as in the examples at the start of this article? The main reason for this drive to make the age of the Earth so large is that evolutionists need huge periods of time in order to have any hope of their ideas working out. In previous articles we looked at natural selection and mutations. According to evolutionists, billions of years are required to give time for all the supposed mutations in simple organisms to occur and for natural selection to work on them to produce, at last, complex organisms. So evolutionists conclude that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

Evolutionary scientists assume lots of theories to be true when they develop the tests they use to try to work out the age of things; they use these tests to piece together their ideas about when the universe came into existence. Carbon dating is one of these tests. However, it is less than reliable.

Carbon dating works on the basis that a radioactive form of carbon (carbon 14) decays over time. When scientists want to find the age of an object, they test to find out the percentage of radioactive carbon in it and compare it with the percentage of the other form of carbon (carbon 12). They then work out how long it would have taken for the radioactive carbon to fall to that level compared with the current levels of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. The older the object is, the smaller the percentage of radio active carbon, because this means that there has been more time for the radioactive carbon to decay.

The main difficulty with this method of testing is that it assumes that the level of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere has been constant. But it is more than likely that this was not the case. For instance, the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century would lower the percentage of radioactive carbon. The testing of atomic bombs in the 1950s would increase the level. There would also have been significant changes in the atmosphere after the Genesis flood.

Indeed many results from carbon dating have turned out to be seriously flawed. For instance, some mortar taken from a section of an Oxford castle built about 800 years ago was dated by this method at 7,370 years. Shells from living snails in Nevada were carbon-dated at 2,700 years old. And a seal which had recently died appeared to be 1,300 years old when it was tested in this way.

Evolutionists resort to the usual excuses, claiming exceptional circumstances; they state that they are aware of the problems and take them into account when they are doing their calculations. One professor who believes in evolution went so far as to say, “If a carbon-14 date supports our theories we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely ‘out of date’, we just drop it.”

But there is scientific evidence which fits in with the timeframe of biblical creation. This evidence supports the 6,000 years of the Bible rather than the evolutionist’s billions of years. A few of these evidences are listed in the rest of this article, but there are many others.

It has been found that processes relating to rocks and fossils do not need thousands or millions of years, in spite of what evolutionists claim. There are many examples of stalactites and stalagmites being formed in short periods of time, in spite of what evolutionists claim. In a cave in New Mexico a dead bat fell on a stalagmite. It was cemented into the stalagmite showing that the stalagmite grew faster than the bat decomposed. Researchers at laboratories in Chicago have produced high-grade black coal by mixing wood, water and clay at 150 degrees Celsius for several weeks – not thousands of years! Some people think it takes millions of years to form opal, but one Australian researcher makes it himself by mixing the right chemicals together.

The continents are eroding quickly. If they truly were billions of years old there would be nothing left of them today – assuming, of course, that the rate of erosion did not change much. From this erosion, which has supposedly been happening for billions of years, you would expect the mud on the seafloor to be several kilometres thick, choking up the oceans. Instead it is only 400 metres deep. Henry Morris, who wrote the book, The Genesis Flood, studied the amount of salt in the oceans. He discovered that there was much less salt and other minerals than would be expected if they had been added to the oceans at the same rate for billions of years.

There is also the fact that the population of the world is small enough to fit into the biblical timeframe. The number of people is much smaller than you would expect if you believed evolutionary ideas of when mankind first appeared and if you take into account the way the population is growing.

So evolutionists cannot produce scientific evidence which proves the age which they claim for the Earth. Nor can creationists produce evidence that is so definite that no one can argue against it. But we do have the firm basis of the Word of God, and the evidence that exists fits easily into that framework. God is eternal; He has always existed and always will. And we are to praise Him for this, knowing that “before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting, Thou art God” (Psalm 90:2).