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Creation 34(3):6, July 2012

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‘Time is the hero’

Editorial

by

©iStockPhoto.com/Andrew Rich

Millions and billions of years. We hear and read it so often that it just seems natural to many people now. Indeed, there are even Christians who rightly oppose biological evolution but accept the millions and billions of years of geological and cosmological evolution. They sometimes chide biblical creationists for speaking out about the age-of-the-earth issue, for allegedly ‘bringing Christianity into disrepute’.

However, it’s the billions-of-years concept that brings Christ’s own words into doubt, and therefore disrepute. This is because He taught that God created Adam and Eve “from the beginning of creation” not billions of years later (Mark 10:6),1 and affirmed that Noah’s Flood really occurred (Luke 17:26–27). Thus the age of the world is actually a key battleground area for Christians. This is easily confirmed by asking some non-Christians why they disbelieve the Bible. In the evolutionized West, the age issue is very often the #1 objection.

It’s not hard to see that, strategically, the ‘millions and billions of years’ are an indispensable part of the evolutionists’ armoury. It’s a do-or-die, line-in-the-sand issue for which they will fight tooth and nail. Because without time, evolution is ‘dead in the water’. Evolutionary biologist (and subsequent Nobel Laureate) George Wald wrote in

Scientific American in 1954 about the origin of life that, however improbable:

“ … given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once … . Time is in fact the hero of the plot … . Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs the miracles.”2

That profound, blind faith3 in the millions and billions of years is even more in evidence today, especially in the increasing number of evolutionary books targeting young people, such as the recently-published Billions of years, amazing changes: The story of evolution, by Laurence Pringle.4 Commissioned by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Pringle writes that they “honored me with a fellowship to write about evolution for children”. Such foundations would hardly bestow a fellowship ‘to write about creation for children’, of course. So, how can Christians counter the increasingly pervasive ‘billions of years’ evolutionary catchcry?

Children targeted with evolution

Creation magazine is designed to do exactly that. This issue addresses head-on the billions-of-years paradigm, with articles about the flaws in radiometric and other ‘dating’ methods (p. 28 and p. 40), ‘out-of-order’ fossils (p. 23 and p. 48), and rapid rocks (p. 47)—there’s no need for millions of years! We show how Christians can counter billions-of-years tourist signage (p.51), and use cultural memories of ‘iconic’ extinct creatures in witnessing (p.12). What’s more, we also point out that time, far from being a ‘hero’ of evolution, actually makes matters worse (see ‘Time—no friend of evolution’, p. 30).

Without the billions of years, of course, evolutionists would have no hope of getting away with their handwaving attempts to ‘explain away’ the overwhelmingly evident design in nature (e.g. p. 56), co-opting God’s handiwork as evidence of evolution. As long-time atheistic anti-creationist Jerry Coyne writes in the Foreword of Pringle’s Billions of years:

“ … evolution explains all the marvelous adaptations of animals and plants—the grasping trunk of the elephant, the sturdy beak of the woodpecker, the prickly spines of the cactus”.

We’re confident that readers of our articles on the elephant’s trunk (p. 16), woodpecker (p. 43), and spines (p. 52) will see that the Bible’s account of history provides a far better explanation for these things—indeed, for everything. Bye-bye, billions of years.

Posted on homepage: 1 May 2012

References and notes

  1. Wieland, C., Jesus on the age of the earth , Creation 34(2):51–53, 2012. Return to text.
  2. Wald, G., The origin of life, Scientific American 191(2):44–53, August 1954. (Quote on p.48.) Return to text.
  3. See creation.com/evolutionary-faith-and-the-cosmic-zoo and creation.com/atheism-a-religion. Return to text.
  4. See also Richard Dawkins’ recent book for children, The magic of reality, reviewed by P. Bell, J. Creation 26(1):31–36, 2012; creation.com/review-magic. Also creation.com/pringle-review. Return to text.

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