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Test of Faith DVD

Does science threaten belief in God?

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Test-of-faith

This is the title of a 3-session DVD, with accompanying Study Guide (titled Science and Christianity Unpacked), for small-group discussion on the subject of alleged conflict between science and religion.1 It is not a Bible Study, but promotes the paradox of theistic evolution. The materials are published by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, UK. Although this Institute was named after the great creationist physicist and chemist Michael Faraday (1791–1867),2 it was established in 2006 with a $2 million grant from the extremely evolutionist Templeton Foundation.3

DVD Session 1: “Beyond Reason”

Prof. Peter Harrison, a leading expert on the history of religion and science, tells viewers that modern science emerged out of Christian Europe. Indeed, in a monumental book he has shown that the objective approach to the Bible in the Reformation was vital to the rise of modern science.4 In a subsequent book, he documented that a strong motivator to Francis Bacon and other scientists in the 17th century was the quest to recover the encyclopedic knowledge that Adam supposedly enjoyed before the Fall.5

Prof. Harrison attributes the modern wedge between science and religion to Thomas Huxley’s promotion of Darwinism. He could have added that for atheists today to maintain their worldview they have needed to manufacture naturalistic explanations for everything which the Bible attributes to the action of Almighty God. Hence the modern claim that the universe originated as the result of a big bang some 14 billion years ago, rather than being created by God in the way that Genesis records, and in the time frame and with the order of events that the Bible indicates.

Oxford University theoretical physicist Dr Ard Louis then says: “At the deepest level, the debate between science and religion is really a debate about how do I obtain reliable knowledge about the world—how do I know that something is true or false?” As all the DVD’s speakers are presented as ‘scientist believers’, one might think that they would begin their search for the truth about origins by referring to what God has said in the Bible. But no, this does not happen. Instead, everything that all the speakers say is based on their personal beliefs in the spurious ‘evolution-is-a-fact’ philosophy.

The big bang—a precarious origin for everything

Rev. Dr John Polkinghorne (a former particle physicist now an ordained Anglican minister) tells viewers: “We have very good scientific reasons for believing that the universe as we observe it today started about 14 billion years ago in a very hot, very dense, very concentrated state, and it’s expanded and it’s also complexified.”

He does not tell viewers any of these reasons,6 but actually, there are many much-more-cogent scientific reasons for not believing in a big bang, some of which are now being advanced by secular scientists themselves because of the many fudge factors needed to prop up the big-bang theory.

See:

Antimatter no solution

Next, Dr Ard Louis tells viewers about the concept of antimatter. This is presented as “pointing to a mathematical order behind our universe”. This may be an oblique reference to the problem for big-bang theorists of how nothing produced anything, let alone everything, including us (which otherwise is not discussed).

Actually, antimatter is a massive problem for big-bang theorists, because standard particle physics requires that if energy is converted to mass (via the famous formula E = mc²), equal amounts of matter and antimatter must be produced. So where are the hundreds of billions of galaxies of antimatter that had to form to balance the hundreds of billions of star galaxies, for the big-bang theory to ‘work’?

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Multiple universes

wikipedia.orgGrasshoppe
Galaxies, yes; multiverses, no!

Another of the many problems with the naturalistic theory of the big bang is: Why is the universe so finely tuned for life? (aka the Anthropic Principle). Viewers are told: “A multiverse now seems to provide the materialist [i.e. atheist] answer. After all, why can’t ours be the universe with the winning ticket for life in a lottery of millions?”

NASA astrophysicist Dr Jennifer Wiseman says what it means for her as a ‘believing scientist’, if our universe is just one of many: “I think the simple answer to that is, you know, so what? … Wow, the God that we worship is ever more great.”

However, CMI’s Dr Jonathan Sarfati writes:7

Multiverses supposedly explain the existence of ours with special characteristics. But this is really special pleading, i.e. an explanation these atheists accept for the universe but would not tolerate for a second to explain anything else. Consider if we found a pattern of markings on a beach which spelled your name. Naturally you would conclude that an intelligent agent had written it. This is more plausible than thinking that wind and wave erosion somehow produced that pattern by chance, even though there is an extremely tiny probability of this happening.

But under multiverse reasoning, there are an infinite number of parallel universes containing every possible quantum state, “In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.”8

So if a person had an a priori bias that no one could have written your name, he could argue that we just happen to be in one of the tiny fraction of universes where this improbable erosion pattern arose naturally. If this sounds totally unreasonable, then by the same logic, so is the atheistic preference for an infinite number of universes over a Creator.9

See:

DVD Session 2: “An Accident in the Making?”

Session 2 of the DVD deals with: How did we get here? Are we made with any purpose? Or is life utterly ruled by chance? The program’s answer is to all this is ‘theistic evolution’, summarized with the statement: “We were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us, the way we have something of stardust.” Stardust is the evolutionary theory propounded by Rev. Dr Polkinghorne in Session 1, where he says: “Every atom of carbon in our bodies was once inside a star. We are people of stardust.”

Polkinghorne does not give his reference for our being “created in God’s image and likeness”. It is Genesis 1:26-27. But then, if you are going to quote those verses from Genesis 1, the obvious question is: Why don’t you believe the rest of what Genesis 1 says, that humans were created on Day 6 of Creation Week? God has told us that we are not the product of the stars; nor did Earth form from stardust. Rather God made the Earth before He made the stars (Genesis 1:1-19), and our ancestor, the first man Adam, was made from the dust of the Earth (Genesis 2:7), not from stardust.

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Radiometric dating

The program states: “On the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, many fossils are estimated by science to be over 100 million years old.” And then says that this is science that Paul Taylor, a Young-Earth Creationist who believes in the historic truth of the Bible, vigorously contests, because of the circular reasoning involved. I.e. a fossil is given the age of the rock it is found in, and the age of the rock is determined from the fossil(s) it contains.

The program then says: “Science estimates the earth to be four-and-a-half billion years old.” To which Taylor further explains that he is skeptical of anything that can’t be tested directly in the laboratory. “… you’re extrapolating something back and assuming something that you were not there to see. For example, you can’t take a group of inorganic molecules and produce life from them in the laboratory, that’s not something that is reproducible.”

hour-glass

Taylor could have added that science is not a person, so science per se does not make estimates. Rather, scientists (i.e. human beings) can and do observe radioactive decay in the present. But this is not a direct measurement of age, because the age, e.g. of a meteorite, is calculated from the beliefs the scientists have about what they think happened in the past. Another word for this is their worldview. So their age pronouncements are not scientific facts, but their beliefs. This is because, in any radiometric dating procedure, they do not know:

  1. What percentage of all the various materials was there initially.
  2. Whether the rate of radioactive decay has always been the same for that object.
  3. Whether elements have been gained or lost for other reasons than radioactivity.

Dr Simon Conway Morris,10 described as “a committed Christian and a professor of paleontology at Cambridge University”, who believes in evolution, admits: “I think one just has to keep on saying, first of all the science is a hypothesis. You’re never going to prove it’s right.” But he then opines: “But there is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is extremely ancient.”

Actually there is overwhelming evidence that the Earth and the universe are both extremely young. See 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe.

And a further fifty articles in ‘Young’ age of the Earth & Universe Q&A.

Morris asks why creationists do not accept evolutionary long ages, if they do accept the science that allows an aeroplane to fly, or a microwave, or digital watch to work. The answer is exceedingly simple: there is actually observable, testable, repeatable, scientific evidence for gravity, fluid dynamics, absorption of microwave quanta,11 and regular crystal oscillation, respectively! Indeed, many of the principles were discovered by biblical creationists. But as explained above, the long ages are not the measurements but the beliefs imposed upon the data.

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Genesis 1 and orthodox Christian belief

Rev. Dr David Wilkinson, an astrophycisist and Methodist minister, says:

For me, that way of reading Genesis 1, as a creation only six thousand years ago, is probably only a century old in terms of being stated as orthodox Christian belief. If you look at the early church fathers, Augustine, for example, is very clear about how the first chapter of Genesis is not meant to be read literally. It’s meant to be read in terms of pictures and images. And Augustine was very clear that the message of Genesis was an introduction to the creator God, an excitement with just how great God is.

Actually, accepting Genesis as teaching the straightforward history of six consecutive normal-length days about 6,000 years ago is the standard view of Christian and Jewish interpreters throughout the last two millennia. Proponents include Josephus and later Jewish scholars, most church fathers including Basil the Great, medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and all the Reformers including Luther and Calvin. In fact, reading long-age beliefs into Scripture is the modern aberration, as theologians became intimidated by the uniformitarian geology of the Bible-opposing James Hutton (1726–1797)12 and Charles Lyell (1797–1875)13. A small minority treated Genesis as allegory. But this was mostly in addition to—not instead of—history. And even Augustine was adamant that the universe was under 6,000 years old at the time he wrote, precisely because of the Genesis chronogenealogies.

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Katherine Blundell, a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, adds:

I think it’s worth pointing out that Genesis was written by a non-scientist for non-scientists, and so it’s a bit of an abuse of Scripture to pretend, or to treat it, as though it’s a scientific textbook that can only be understood by people in the latter half of the 20th century or the early 21st century. It’s wrong; it’s not trying to be that. That’s not to say that Genesis isn’t speaking some very profound truths which are really important for us to take on board.

Notice:

  1. She doesn’t believe that God was the ultimate author of Genesis.
  2. Her straw-man argument. Creation is not just a modern interpretation of Genesis, nor do we regard it as a scientific textbook; rather we say it is accurate history.
  3. Any child will tell you what Genesis means—namely what it says. More importantly, the rest of the Bible understands and proclaims Genesis as history.
  4. What profound truths are left for us to ponder, if the words God used in Genesis don’t mean what they say?
  5. If we can’t believe what the Bible says about origins, how can we trust what it says about anything else, e.g. the forgiveness of sin?

See:

Genesis and the age of the Earth

Curiously, the program then says, referring to young-earth creationists: “For these believers, then, Genesis has nothing to say about the age of the Earth.”

Hardly! For young-earth creationists, Genesis has everything to say about the age of the Earth. Namely, God tells us in Genesis chapter 1 that He created the earth on Day 1 of Creation Week. And God says He created the first man, Adam, on the Day 6 of that week. And it’s from the genealogies in Genesis chapters 5 and 11 (as well as the genealogy of Christ in Luke chapter 3 that goes all the way back to Adam), that we understand the age of the earth is about 6,000 years, not about 14 billion years.

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Intelligent Design dismissed

Illustration Wikipedia

Bacterial
The bacterial flagellum (with rotary motor) has many features which people recognize as design features, such as a clutch. (Click image to enlarge)

Next, Dr Denis Alexander, Emeritus Director of Faraday Institute (that produced this DVD), says that irreducible complexity is “the old God of the gaps argument warmed up a bit and given a different spin”! Actually, no, it is not based on gaps in our knowledge, but precisely on what we do know about chemistry, biology, and information theory. In particular, many biological machines can be observed to have a functionality threshold, below which the machine would not work.

Concerning the bacterial flagellum with its ‘little outboard motor’, Alexander says that at some time in the future: “as science advances … we will have scientific explanations how those things came into being by an evolutionary process.” But surely this is ‘special pleading’. Note that the common explanation that the flagellum evolved from a type of secretion system is fallacious—evolutionary experts regard the secretionary system as devolved from the flagellum.

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DNA—evidence for Darwinism?

Then, Dr Francis Collins,14 former Head of the Human Genome Project that sequenced human DNA, tells viewers: “As we compare the DNA of multiple species, including our own, we can see the evidence for descent from a common ancestor in a truly compelling and digital way.” In particular, he itemizes our chromosome 2 as evidence that we share a common ancestor with chimps, gorillas, other primates.

This is highly complex, so we refer readers to some of our several articles on this subject. But the facts about human chromosome 2 and its counterparts in other primates are certainly not evidence for ape ancestry of humans and are entirely consistent (we would say, fit much better) with the separate creation of humans and ape kinds by God.

See:

Dr Collins continues:

And so, as soon as one is willing to set aside an insistence on that ultra-literal interpretation of Genesis, then you arrive at a conclusion which is actually quite comfortable for me as a believer and as a scientist, that, yes, Darwin was right, and a brilliant insight he had, but that all he was really doing was to deduce the mechanism of God’s creation.

Darwin wouldn’t thank you for saying that, Dr Collins. In a letter to Charles Lyell, Darwin wrote: “I would give absolutely nothing for theory of nat. selection, if it require miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”15 And Richard Dawkins, who has been called the ‘Apostle of Atheopathy’, has written: “In Darwin’s view the whole point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. … For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all.”16

Collins has actually deviated far from biblical truth, since he denies a real historical first man Adam; he is just inconsistent in that he still believes in the Last Adam, Christ (1 Corinthians 15:45). Geneticist Dr Robert Carter refutes his weak scientific excuses in: The Non-Mythical Adam and Eve! Refuting errors by Francis Collins and BioLogos.

Personal suffering, and ‘physical evil’ in the events of nature

The program attempts to give an answer to the problem of human suffering. This appears to be quite difficult from within the evolutionary paradigm, as Dr Collins says:

The consequences of the evolutionary process are admittedly at times things that cause suffering for individuals. Even today, a child with cancer may well be seen as one of those side effects of the fact that DNA copying is not perfect. It’s important that DNA copying not be perfect or evolution wouldn’t be possible, but if it results in a cancer arising in a child, isn’t that a terrible price to pay?

Yes, mutations cause cancer, so it is strange indeed that anyone confessing to be a Christian would promote the idea that God (who is the measure of goodness, love, light) used evolution to create the diversity of life.

Actually, one could argue that in a cancer cell, the copying is too perfect, in that it copies itself far too much at the expense of the rest of the body. In fact, one thing this should teach us, besides the fact that we live in a fallen world, is the huge difficulty in a single-celled organism evolving into multi-celled creatures. Shaun Doyle writes:

Evolution faces a tough dichotomy to get around if multicellularity is to evolve: cellular selection vs organismal integrity. At the single cell level, selection will favour cells that reproduce better. But if those cells are allowed to reproduce uncontrollably in a multicellular organism, they will inexorably destroy organismal integrity, and harm or kill the organism, also causing the ‘fitter’ cells to die. …

However, this leads to a mystery for the evolutionist: how do multicellular organisms evolve from single celled creatures when cellular selection and organism-level selection are totally contradictory to each other? The multicellular organism seeks to control the reproduction to what is needed at a higher level of organisation; a single cell seeks to reproduce more than its competitors.17

Theologian Rev. Dr Polkinghorne adds his contribution:

What has driven the development of life on Earth is genetic mutation. But if germ cells are to be able to mutate, and produce new life forms, it is inevitable that somatic cells18 will also be able to mutate, and sometimes when they do that, they will become malignant. So the fact that there is cancer in the world is not gratuitous, or something that God if he was a bit more compassionate or a bit more competent could easily have disposed of. It’s the inescapable shadow side of a creation in which creatures make themselves.

graveside
For Christians, death now ushers us into the glorious presence of Christ.

Not so! To pursue this line of thought, it’s the inescapable shadow side of an evolutionary worldview in which creatures make themselves!

So do young-earth creationists have a biblical answer to the problem of suffering?

Yes. God tells us in Genesis that the world and everything in it that He created was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), which means there was no death or suffering in it. What changed things was the Fall—when sin entered the world and God was told to shove off, He partially did, and withdrew some of His sustaining power (Genesis ch. 3).

But, as the Gospels record, God the Son stepped into our shoes as a man. By His death and Resurrection He paid the penalty for sin, so that all who place their trust and faith in Jesus Christ receive His free gift of forgiveness for sin, and of admission into God’s family. For Christians, death now ushers us into the glorious presence of Christ.

For a fuller answer, including the problem of natural disasters, see:

DVD Session 3: “Is Anybody There?”

Session 3 of the DVD begins:

We run on rails laid down by our biology. This is the disturbing claim made by much contemporary science. The Book of Genesis says we are free agents, created in the image of God. But neuroscience and genetics are presenting us with very different possibilities. What if we don’t have freewill and purpose given us by a creator? What if we’re genetic survival machines, computers made of meat? What if we only dance to music of our neurons and our DNA? Now science and faith must debate the very question of what makes us human.

The theistic-evolutionary answer: there may well be something more

To answer these questions, the ‘believing scientists’ on the DVD try and validate their religious beliefs / spiritual experience from within their worldview that humans have evolved from apes. This transpires to be a formidable task, because having rejected what God says in the Bible about origins, they can no longer proffer as truth anything that God says in the Bible on other matters, such as how He communicates with us, or that He takes any initiative in our lives, or that He loves us, or why everyone needs forgiveness of sin and how this is obtained.

Instead, the speakers talk about the source of our identity, our mind, freewill and consciousness, our personhood, our ability to make meaningful moral choices, our creative capacity, and our capacity for moral reasoning and pure altruism. A couple of them (Drs Coles and Wilkinson) mention God.

Dr Alisdair Coles, a neurologist at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, addresses the atheistic claims: What if God hasn’t made us? What if we make God? He tells viewers:

Clearly, people of faith believe that they are truly encountering God, or the divine.

But he then says:

A spiritual experience is associated with a neural correlate, but that does not mean that religious experience is nothing but a neural correlate. There may well be more to it that isn’t accommodated by the scientific method.

Rev. Dr David Wilkinson addresses the question: Is there something more to a person than just our genes? He says:

The experience of human freedom, the experience of transcendence of religious experience, the experience of self-reflection, not just on our own identity but on death, means for me that there is something going on here. The complexity of the human person and the complexity of the human brain, means that there are questions that we can’t understand fully without reference to some other, wider context. And that context, for me, is relationship with God.

At the end of the DVD, Prof. Bill Newsome, a neurobiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine, summarizes the theistic-evolutionary belief position when he answers the question: What does it mean then for a scientist to have faith?

My faith ultimately informs, I think, my values, and what I’m really striving most to accomplish here on this Earth. … I’m more than a scientist. I’m ultimately a person here who has landed in this world, and my consciousness has emerged out of this evolutionary process of the species, and out of the gestational developmental process of my own body and my own nervous system, and I have to try and figure out how do I make certain choices? On what basis do I make certain choices? And to me that traces deeply back to what kind of universe ultimately do we live in. The religious point of view is that it’s the truth itself that sets us wishing in the first place, and those wishes, those hopes, and intuitions are built into our nervous system through an evolutionary process through an evolutionary process that ultimately had an author and a purpose in bring into being creatures like ourselves.

That declaration of what Prof Newsome has faith in should ensure that he is not ‘expelled’, at least from any secular establishment.

See

The biblical (‘young-earth’) creationist answer: God has spoken

In answer to the above rhetoric, we at CMI say that God has given us abundant evidence of Himself, so Christian faith is not irrational or contrary to logic and reason (Romans 1:18-20). Indeed, the Apostle Peter commands us: “Always be prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). Our reasons for believing in God are based on the fact that God has revealed Himself to humankind, primarily in the following three ways:

  1. There is a book, called the Holy Bible which proclaims the fact that God is, because only divine revelation can explain the book’s existence. The divine authorship of the Bible is seen in its amazing unity, its amazing preservation, its historical, scientific, and prophetic accuracy, its civilizing influence, its absolute honesty, and above all, its life changing message, which mends lives broken by sin and disbelief, which separate us from our holy Creator. For a more detailed account of the above, see:

  2. God is revealed in Jesus Christ. The Gospels record that Jesus did things that only God can do, such as raise the dead to life (John 11:17–44), calm storms (Matthew 8:23–27), and forgive sins (Mark 2:1–12); He claimed to send prophets (Matthew 23:34) and the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49), and accepted worship (Matthew 14:33). He was much more than just a prophet or a good man. The converted atheist, C.S. Lewis, said that there are three options (after accepting the first point, that the Bible reported Jesus accurately): Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord (God). His life and Resurrection proved that He was indeed Lord. No wonder that soon after His death, the New Testament authors recognized Him as God and Creator (John 1:1–3, Colossians 1:15–20; Hebrews 1:3).

    See:


  3. To those who are genuine Christians, there is no doubt about God’s existence. The Bible says, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. … The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:14–16). This is the testimony of those who have realized their sinfulness and its dire consequences in the sight of Almighty God, have repented of their sin, and have accepted the forgiveness of God made possible through Jesus’ death and Resurrection. All such genuine Christians have experienced the truth of what the Bible proclaims, and have received the Holy Spirit of God and so have assurance that they are ‘children of God’. They can indeed know that they have eternal life (1 John 5:13).
  4. See:

Summary and Conclusion

The theistic evolutionists in this DVD erroneously believe that evolution is a fact, and they erroneously equate evolution with science. They say they believe in something or someone whom they refer to as ‘God’, but they do not believe that their God created Adam and Eve as the first human beings, through whom sin entered the human race because of Adam’s disobedience, as recorded by Almighty God as historical fact in Genesis. In fact, Dr Denis Alexander, Emeritus Director of Faraday Institute (that produced this DVD), in his book Creation or Evolution: Do we have to choose? says that Adam and Eve were Neolithic farmers in the east, and human art, culture and religious endeavours had been going on for many years before them.19

It is truly sad that being a theistic evolutionist apparently precludes one from appealing to the Bible for answers to atheists. Their rejection of what God says in Genesis means they are reduced to human reasoning to counter atheistic arguments, and this comes down to little more than ‘there must be something there that science cannot explain’.

In the Bible, Christian faith is inseparably linked with repentance from sin (Acts 16:31; 17:30–31). But God’s salvation—through Jesus paying the death penalty for sin on the cross and then rising from the dead—has no meaning if any of the following are true:

  1. If death was the process through which God produced Adam over millions of years.
  2. If sin did not enter the human race by the disobedience of the first human being, Adam (contrary to the affirmation of Genesis 3 and Romans 5:19).
  3. If Adam would have died anyway, as he would have done if he was an evolved animal, and if the account of the Fall in Genesis 3 is not history but only a symbolic story.

Richard Dawkins, who despite his atheism, understands the Gospel better than any of the theistic evolutionists in this DVD, has this to say about such ‘believers’:

Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn’t it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad!20

See:

We who believe the Bible to be the Word of God note that the very first temptation of anyone by Satan was to doubt the truth of what God had said (Genesis 3:1). We also note that Satan followed this by denying that the judgment of God for disobedience is death (Genesis 3:4).21 So, for readers who may be toying with the idea that God could have used evolution, we will close this article with one verse of warning from God’s Word:

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

Published: 16 September 2014

References and notes

  1. The DVD does not define ‘science’ so here is a ‘dictionary.com’ definition: “systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained by observation and experimentation”. (Emphasis added!) Return to text.
  2. Lamont, A., Michael Faraday—God’s power and electric power, Creation 12(4):22–24, 1990; creation.com/faraday. Return to text.
  3. For background to the Templeton Foundation see Grigg, R., The Dalai Lama, the Templeton Prize and Buddhism, creation.com/buddhism, 20 November 2012. Return to text.
  4. Harrison, P., The Bible, Protestantism and the rise of natural science, Cambridge University Press, 2001; see review by Weinberger, L., J. Creation 23(3):21–24, 2009; creation.com/protestantism-science. Return to text.
  5. Harrison, P., The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge University Press, 2007; see review by Weinberger, L., J. Creation 24(3):18–21; creation.com/fall-science. Return to text.
  6. Evidence claimed is usually summarized as (1) the red-shift of light from galaxies is interpreted as expansion of the cosmos which is then extrapolated backwards to a point, (2) the cosmic microwave background radiation, and (3) the abundance and ratio of hydrogen and helium in the universe. Our responses are contained in the various hyperlinked articles throughout this web article. Return to text.
  7. From Sarfati, J., Hawking atheopathy: Famous physicist goes beyond the evidence (a review of The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow), J. Creation 25(1):25–29; creation.com/hawking. Return to text.
  8. Tegmark, M., Parallel universes: Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations, Scientific American 288:30–41, May 2003. Of course, there is no actual observation of these other universes, just observation of fine-tuning in ours that is explained away by multiverses. Return to text.
  9. See too Sarfati, J., Refuting Compromise, chapter 5, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 2004. Return to text.
  10. See also ReMine, W., Evidence for Message Theory (A review of Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris), J. Creation 20(2):29–35, 2002. Return to text.
  11. Microwave photons are just the right energy to match the quantized rotational energy levels of water molecules. Thus microwave radiation causes water molecules to rotate, and they collide with other molecules and cause them to vibrate. This vibrational energy is heat. It takes a little ‘standing time’ for the energy to equilibrate among rotational and vibrational modes. Return to text.
  12. See Grigg, R., James Hutton: the man who warped time, Creation 36(3):20–23; creation.com/james-hutton. Return to text.
  13. See Grigg, R., Charles Lyell: the man who tried to rewrite history, Creation 36(4):36–39; creation.com/charles-lyell. Return to text.
  14. Founder, in 2007, of the organization Biologos, which promotes theistic evolution. Return to text.
  15. Darwin to Lyell, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 2503 dated 11 October 1859. Return to text.
  16. Dawkins, R., The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 248–249, Penguin, London, 1991. Return to text.
  17. Doyle, S., Evolution of multicellularity: what is required? J. Creation 23(1):5–7, 2009; creation.com/multicellularity. Return to text.
  18. I.e. “cells that take part in the formation of the body, becoming differentiated into the various tissues” (dictionary.com). Return to text.
  19. Alexander, D., Creation or evolution: Do we have to choose? pp. 236-37, 241, Monarch Books, New York, 2008. For a review of his book see Anderson, D., Creation or evolution: choose wisely! J. Creation 23(2):41–45, 2009 https://creation.com/alexander-review. Return to text.
  20. Dawkins, R., The root of all evil? (broadcast on UK Channel 4, 16 January 2006). Return to text.
  21. See: Why did God impose the death penalty for sin? Return to text.