The Scientific Case for Creation
Apr 7, 2018 1:09:38 GMT
Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2018 1:09:38 GMT
The whole book can be found here:
www.sound-doctrine.net/scc.html
Excerpt:
THE SCIENTIFIC CASE FOR CREATION
131 CATEGORIES OF EVIDENCE
1) Life Sciences
Before considering how life began, we must first understand the term "organic evolution." Organic evolution, as theorized, is a naturally occurring, beneficial change that produces increasing and inheritable complexity. Increased complexity would be shown if the offspring of one form of life had a different and improved set of vital organs. This is sometimes called the molecules-to-man theory--or macroevolution . Microevolution , on the other hand, does not involve increasing complexity. It only involves minor chemical alterations or changes in size, shape, or color. Microevolution can be thought of as "horizontal" change, whereas macroevolution (if it were ever observed) would involve an "upward" and beneficial change in complexity. Notice that microevolution plus time will not produce macroevolution. [micro + time macro]
Both creationists and evolutionists agree that microevolution occurs. Minor change has been observed since history began. But notice how often evolutionists give evidence for microevolution to support macroevolution. It is macroevolution, which requires new abilities and increasing complexity, that is at the center of the creation-evolution controversy. In this book, the term "organic evolution" will therefore mean macroevolution.
Overall Conclusion: The Theory of Organic Evolution Is Invalid.
Supporting Conclusion: Organic Evolution Has Never Been Observed.
1. The Law of Biogenesis: Spontaneous generation (the emergence of life from nonliving matter) has never been observed. All observations have shown that life comes only from life. This has been observed so consistently that it is called the law of biogenesis. The theory of evolution conflicts with this law by claiming that life came from nonliving matter through natural processes.
2. Acquired Characteristics: Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. a For example, the long necks of giraffes did not result from their ancestors stretching their necks to reach high leaves. Nor can the large muscles acquired by a man in a weight lifting program be inherited by his child.
3. Mendel's Laws: Mendel's laws of genetics and their modern-day refinements explain almost all physical variations observed in living things. Mendel discovered that genes (the units of heredity) are merely reshuffled from one generation to another. Different combinations are formed, not different genes. The different combinations produce the many variations within each kind of life, such as in the dog family. A logical consequence of Mendel's laws is that there are limits to such variation. a Breeding experiments b and common observations c have also confirmed these boundaries.
4. Bounded Variations: While Mendel's laws give a theoretical explanation for why variations are limited, there is broad experimental verification as well. For example, if evolution happened, organisms (such as bacteria) that quickly produce the most offspring, should have the most variations and mutations. Natural selection would then select the more favorable changes, allowing them to survive, reproduce, and pass on their beneficial genes. Their offspring should tend to inherit short reproduction cycles and produce many "children." We see the opposite. In general, more complex organisms, such as humans, have fewer offspring and longer reproduction cycles. Again, it appears that variations within existing kinds of organisms are bounded.
5. Natural Selection: Natural selection cannot produce new genes; it only selects among preexisting characteristics. For example, many have mistakenly believed that resistances "evolved" in response to pesticides and antibiotics. Sometimes, a previously lost capability was reestablished, making it appear that something evolved. In other cases, a few resistant insects and bacteria were already present when the pesticides and antibiotics were first applied. The vulnerable insects and bacteria were killed, allowing resistant varieties, which then had less competition, to proliferate. While natural selection occurred, nothing evolved and, in fact, some biological diversity was lost.
The variations Darwin observed among finches on different Galapagos islands is another example of natural selection producing micro- ( not macro-) evolution. In other words, while natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest. Actually, natural selection prevents major evolutionary changes.
6. Mutations: Mutations are the only known means by which new genetic material becomes available for evolution. Rarely, if ever, is a mutation beneficial to an organism in its natural environment. Almost all observable mutations are harmful; some are meaningless; many are lethal. No known mutation has ever produced a form of life having greater complexity and viability than its ancestors.
7. Fruit Flies: More than ninety years of fruit fly experiments, involving 3,000 consecutive generations, give absolutely no basis for believing that any natural or artificial process can cause an increase in complexity and viability. No clear genetic improvement has ever been observed in any form of life, despite the many unnatural efforts to increase mutation rates.
8. Complex Molecules and Organs: Many molecules necessary for life, such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, are so complex that claims concerning their evolution lack any realistic experimental support.
There is no reason to believe that mutations or any natural process could ever produce any new organs--especially those as complex as the eye, the ear, or the brain. For example, an adult human brain contains over 10 14 (a hundred thousand billion) electrical connections , more than all the electrical connections in all the electrical appliances in the world. Just the human heart, a ten-ounce pump that will operate without maintenance or lubrication for about 75 years, is an engineering marvel.
9. Fully-Developed Organs: All species appear completely developed, not partially developed. They show design. There are no examples of half-developed feathers, eyes, skin, tubes (arteries, veins, intestines, etc.), or any of thousands of other vital organs. Tubes that are not 100% complete are a liability; so are partially developed organs. For example, if a leg of a reptile were to evolve into a wing of a bird, it would become a bad leg long before it became a good wing.
10. Distinct Types: If evolution happened, one would expect to see gradual transitions among many living things. For example, variations of dogs might blend in with variations of cats. Actually, some animals, such as the duckbilled platypus, have organs completely unrelated to their alleged evolutionary ancestors. The platypus has fur, is warm-blooded, and suckles its young like mammals. It lays leathery eggs, has a single ventral opening (for elimination, mating, and birth), and has claws and a shoulder girdle like most reptiles. The platypus can detect electrical currents (a.c. and d.c.) like some fish, and has a bill like a duck (a bird). It has webbed forefeet like an otter, a flat tail like a beaver, and the male can inject poisonous venom like a pit viper. Such "patchwork" animals and plants, called mosaics, have no logical place on the evolutionary tree.
There is no direct evidence that any major group of animals or plants arose from any other major group. Species are only observed going out of existence (extinctions), never coming into existence.
11. Altruism: Many animals, including humans, will endanger or even sacrifice their lives to save another--sometimes the life of a member of a completely different species. According to evolution theory, natural selection, which supposedly explains all individual characteristics, should eliminate such altruistic, or sacrificial, behavior. How could risky behavior that only benefits another ever be inherited, since its possession tends to prevent the altruistic individual from passing on its genes for altruism? If evolution is correct, selfish behavior should have completely eliminated unselfish behavior. Furthermore, cheating and aggressiveness would have "weeded out" cooperation. Altruism contradicts evolution.
12. Extraterrestrial Life?: No verified form of extraterrestrial life of any kind has ever been observed. If evolution had occurred on earth, one would expect that at least simple forms of life, such as microbes, would have been found by the elaborate experiments sent to the moon and Mars.
13. Languages: Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by capturing and editing the animals' successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer's hidden promptings.)
Chimpanzees have not demonstrated these skills in the wild and do not pass their skills on to other chimpanzees. When a trained chimp dies, so does the trainer's investment. Also, trained chimps have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No evidence exists that language evolves in nonhumans.
Did language evolve in humans? Charles Darwin claimed it did. If so, the earliest languages should be the simplest. On the contrary, language studies reveal that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, and verb form. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler rather than more complex. Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.
14. Speech: Speech is uniquely human. a Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that speech appears to be learned only from other humans. Apparently, humans do not automatically speak. If this is so, the first humans must have been endowed with a speaking ability. There is no evidence that speech has evolved.
15. Codes and Programs: In our experience, codes are produced only by intelligence, not by natural processes or chance. A code is a set of rules for converting information from one useful form to another. Examples include the Morse Code and Braille. The genetic material that controls the physical processes of life is coded information. It also is accompanied by elaborate transmission, translation, and duplication systems, without which the genetic material would be useless, and life would cease. Therefore, it seems most reasonable to conclude that the genetic code, the accompanying transmission, translation, and duplication systems, and all living organisms were produced by an extremely high level of intelligence using nonnatural (or supernatural) processes.
Likewise, no natural process has ever been observed to produce a program. A program is a planned sequence of steps to accomplish some goal. Computer programs are common examples. The information stored in the genetic material of all life is complex program. Since programs are not produced by chance or natural processes, the most probable conclusion is that some intelligent, supernatural source developed these programs.
16. Information: All isolated systems contain specific, but perishable, amounts of information. No isolated, nontrivial system has ever been observed to spontaneously increase its information content. Natural processes, without exception, destroy information. Only outside intelligence can increase the information content of an otherwise isolated system. All scientific observations are consistent with this generalization, which has three corollaries or consequences:
A. Macroevolution cannot occur.
B. Outside intelligence was involved in the creation of the universe and all forms of life. c
C. A "big bang" did not and could not precede life.
The Arguments for Evolution Are Outdated and Often Illogical.
17. A Common Designer: It is illogical to maintain that similarities between different forms of life always imply a common ancestor; they may imply a common designer. In fact, in cases where experiments have shown that similar structures are controlled by different genes or developed from different parts of embryos, a common designer is the more likely explanation.
18. Vestigial Organs: The existence of human organs whose function is unknown does not imply that they are vestiges of organs inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. As medical knowledge has increased, at least some functions of all organs have been discovered. For example, the human appendix was once considered a useless remnant from our evolutionary past. Today it is known that the appendix plays a role in antibody production and protects part of the intestine from infections. Its removal also increases a person's susceptibility to leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, cancer of the colon, and cancer of the ovaries. Indeed, the absence of true vestigial organs implies that evolution never happened.
19. Two-Celled Life? Many single-celled forms of life exist, but there are no known forms of animal life with 2, 3, 4, or 5 cells. a Even the forms of life with 6-20 cells are parasites. They must have a complex animal as a host to provide such functions as digestion and respiration. If macroevolution happened, one should find many forms of life with 2-20 cells as transitional forms between one-celled and many-celled organisms.
20. Embryology: As an embryo develops, it does not repeat an evolutionary sequence. Embryologists no longer consider the superficial similarities that exist between a few embryos and the adult forms of simpler animals as evidence for evolution. It is now known that Ernst Haeckel, who popularized this incorrect but widespread belief, deliberately falsified his drawings.
21. Rapid Burial: Fossils all over the world show evidences of rapid burial. Many fossils, such as fossilized jellyfish, show by the details of their soft, fleshy portions that they were buried rapidly, before they could decay. Many other animals, buried in mass graves and in twisted and contorted positions, suggest violent and rapid burials over large areas. These observations, together with the occurrence of compressed fossils and fossils that cut across two or more layers of sedimentary rock, are strong evidence that the sediments encasing these fossils were deposited rapidly--not over hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, almost all sediments were sorted by water. The worldwide fossil record is, therefore, evidence of the rapid death and burial of animal and plant life by a worldwide, catastrophic flood. The fossil record is not evidence of slow change.
22. Parallel Strata: The earth's sedimentary layers are typically parallel to adjacent layers. Such uniform layers are seen, for example, in the Grand Canyon and in road cuts in mountainous terrain. Had these parallel layers been deposited slowly over thousands of years, erosion would have cut many channels in the topmost layers. Their subsequent burial by other sediments would produce nonparallel patterns. Since parallel layers are the general rule, and the earth's surface erodes rapidly, one can conclude that almost all sedimentary layers were deposited rapidly relative to the local erosion rate--not over long periods of time.
23. Fossil Gaps: If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record. Fossil links are missing between numerous plants, between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates, between invertebrates and vertebrates, between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, between reptiles and birds, between primates and other mammals, and between apes and other primates. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly that it is safe to conclude that these gaps are real; they will never be filled.
24. Missing Trunk: The evolutionary tree has no trunk. In the earliest part of the fossil record (generally the lowest Cambrian sedimentary rock layers), life appears suddenly, full-blown, complex, diversified, and dispersed--worldwide. Complex species, such as fish, worms, corals, trilobites, jellyfish, sponges, mollusks, and brachiopods appear suddenly, with practically no known sign anywhere on earth of gradual development from simpler forms. These layers contain representatives of all plant and animal phyla, including flowering plants, vascular plants, and vertebrates (animals with backbones). Insects, a class comprising four-fifths of all known animals (living and extinct), have no evolutionary ancestors. The fossil record does not support evolution.
25. Out-of-Place Fossils: The vertical sequencing of fossils is frequently not in the assumed evolutionary order. For example, in Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive hoofprints of horses were found in rocks dating back to the dinosaurs. Dinosaur and humanlike footprints have been found together in Turkmenia and in Arizona. Sometimes, land animals, flying animals, and marine animals are fossilized side-by-side in the same rock. Dinosaur, whale, elephant, horse, and many other fossils, plus crude human tools, have reportedly been found in the phosphate beds of South Carolina. In the Grand Canyon, in Venezuela, and in Guyana, spores of ferns and pollen from flowering plants are found in Cambrian and Precambrian rocks--rocks deposited before life supposedly evolved. Coal beds contain round, black lumps called coal balls, some of which contain flowering plants which allegedly evolved 100 million years after the coal bed was formed. A leading authority on the Grand Canyon even published photographs of horselike hoofprints visible in rocks that, according to the theory of evolution, predate hoofed animals by more than a hundred million years. Similar hoofprints are alongside 1000 dinosaur footprints in Virginia.
Petrified trees in the petrified forest of Arizona contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are supposedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants which bees require) supposedly evolved 140 million years later. Most evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.
26. Ape-Men?: Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated. It is now universally acknowledged that Piltdown man was a hoax, and yet, it was in textbooks for more than forty years. Prior to 1978, the evidence for Ramapithecus consisted of a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. It is now known that these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakey and others in a form resembling part of the human jaw. Ramapithecus was just an ape. The only evidence for Nebraska man turned out to be a pig's tooth. Eugene Dubois conceded forty years after he discovered Java "man" that it was just a large gibbon. Dubois also admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thigh bones of apes, found in the same area, which supported that conclusion. The skulls of Peking man are considered by many experts to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man. The classification Homo erectus is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created. The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis have recently been discovered. They show that this animal clearly had apelike proportions i and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo). The Australopithecines, which were made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are quite distinct from humans. Several detailed computer studies of the Australopithecines have shown that their bodily proportions were not intermediate between man and living apes. Another study of their inner ear bones, that were used to maintain balance, showed a striking similarity with those of chimpanzees and gorillas, but great differences with those of humans. One Australopithecine fossil--a 3-foot-tall, long-armed, 60-pound adult called Lucy--was initially presented as evidence that all Australopithecines walked upright in a human manner. However, studies of Lucy's entire anatomy, not just a knee joint, now show that this is very unlikely. She probably swung from the trees and was similar to pigmy chimpanzees. The Australopithecines are probably an extinct ape. For about 100 years the world was led to believe that Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. Recent studies show that this erroneous belief was based upon some Neanderthals who were crippled with bone diseases such as arthritis and rickets. Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man were completely human. Artists' depictions of them, especially of their fleshy portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence. Furthermore, the techniques used to date these fossils are highly questionable.
27. Fossil Man: Bones of many modern-looking humans have been found deep in rocks that, according to evolution, were formed long before man began to evolve. Examples include the Calaveras skull, the Castenedolo skeletons, Reck's skeleton, and many others. Other remains, such as the Swanscombe skull, the Steinheim fossil, and the VertesszÖllos fossil, present similar problems. These remains are almost always ignored by evolutionists.
Supporting Conclusion: Life Is So Complex That Chance Processes, Even With Billions of Years, Cannot Explain Its Origin.
28. Chemical Elements of Life: The chemical evolution of life, as you will see in the next few pages, is ridiculously improbable. What could improve the odds? One should begin with an earth having high concentrations of the key elements comprising life, such as: carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. However, the closer one examines these elements, the more unlikely the evolution of life appears.
Carbon. The rocks that supposedly preceded life have very little carbon. One must imagine a strange, almost unreasonably carbon-rich atmosphere to supply the needed carbon. For comparison, today's atmosphere only holds only 1/30,000th of the carbon that has been on the earth's surface since life first appeared.
Oxygen. Did the early earth have oxygen in its atmosphere? If it did, the compounds (called amino acids) needed for life to evolve would have been destroyed by oxidation. But if there had been no oxygen, there would have been no ozone in the upper atmosphere, since ozone is simply a form of oxygen. Without ozone to shield the earth, the sun's ultraviolet radiation would destroy life. The only known way for both ozone and life to be here is for both to come into existence simultaneously--in other words, by creation.
Nitrogen. Nitrogen is easily absorbed by clay and various rocks. Had millions of years passed before life evolved, the sediments that preceded life should be filled with nitrogen. Searches have never located such sediments.
Supporting Conclusion: Basic chemistry does not support the evolution of life.
29. Proteins: Living matter is composed largely of proteins--long chains of amino acids. Since 1930, it has been known that amino acids cannot join together if oxygen is present. In other words, proteins could not have evolved from chance chemical reactions if the atmosphere contained oxygen. However, the chemistry of the earth's rocks, both on land and below ancient seas, shows that the earth had oxygen before the earliest fossils formed. Even earlier, oxygen would have been produced by solar radiation breaking water vapor apart into oxygen and hydrogen. Then some hydrogen, the lightest of all chemical elements, would have escaped into outer space, leaving behind oxygen.
To form proteins, amino acids must also be highly concentrated. However, the early oceans or atmosphere would have diluted amino acids to the point where the required collisions between them would rarely occur. Besides, amino acids do not naturally link up to form proteins. Instead, proteins tend to break down into amino acids. Furthermore, the proposed energy sources for forming proteins (the earth's heat, electrical discharges, or the sun's radiation) destroy the protein products thousands of times faster than they could have formed. The many attempts to show how life might have arrived on earth have only demonstrated the futility of the effort, the immense complexity of even the simplest life, and the need for a vast intelligence to precede life.
30. The First Cell: If, despite the virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance processes, there is not the remotest reason to believe that they could ever form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, metabolizing, living cell. a There is no evidence that there are any stable states between the assumed naturalistic formation of proteins and the formation of the first living cells. No scientist has ever advanced a testable procedure by which this fantastic jump in complexity could have occurred--even if the entire universe had been filled with proteins. b
31. Barriers, Buffers, and Chemical Pathways: Living cells contain thousands of different chemicals, some acidic, others basic. Many chemicals would react with others were it not for an intricate system of chemical barriers and buffers. If living things evolved, these barriers and buffers must have also evolved--but at just the right time to prevent harmful chemical reactions. How could such precise, almost miraculous, events have happened for each of the many millions of species?
All living organisms are maintained by thousands of chemical pathways, each involving a long series of complex chemical reactions. For example, the clotting of blood, which involves twenty to thirty steps, is absolutely vital to help heal a wound. However, clotting could be fatal, if it happened inside the body. Omitting one of the many steps, inserting an unwanted step, or altering the timing of a step would probably cause death. If one thing goes wrong, all the other marvelous steps that were performed flawlessly were in vain. Apparently, these complex pathways were created as an intricate, highly integrated unit.
32. Genetic Distances: Techniques now exist for measuring the degree of similarity between forms of life. These "genetic distances" are calculated by taking a specific protein and examining the sequence of its components. The fewer changes required to convert a protein of one organism into the corresponding protein of another organism, supposedly the closer their relationship. Similar comparisons can now be made between the genetic material (DNA and RNA) of different organisms. The results of these studies seriously contradict the theory of evolution. a There is not a trace of evidence at the molecular level for the traditional evolutionary series: simple sea life-->fish-->amphibians-->reptiles-->mammals. Each category of organism appears to be almost equally isolated. One computer-based study, using cytochrome c, a protein used in energy production, compared 47 different forms of life. If evolution happened, this study should have found that, for example, the rattlesnake was most closely related to other reptiles. Instead, based on this one protein, the rattlesnake was most similar to man. Since this study, hundreds of similar contradictions have been discovered.
33. Genetic Information: The genetic information contained in each cell of the human body is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books. The probability that mutations and natural selection produced this vast amount of information, even if matter and life somehow arose, is essentially zero. It would be analogous to continuing the following procedure until 4,000 books have been produced:
Start with a meaningful phrase.
Retype the phrase, but make some errors and insert some additional letters.
Examine the new phrase to see if it is meaningful.
If it is, replace the original phrase with it.
Return to step "b."
To accumulate 4,000 books of meaningful information, this procedure would have to produce the equivalent of far more than 10 40,000th power of animal offspring. (Just to begin to understand how large 10 40,000 is, realize that the visible universe has less than 10 80 atoms in it.)
34. DNA Production: To produce DNA, a cell requires more than 75 different types of proteins. But these proteins, in turn, are produced only at the direction of DNA. Since each requires the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the other. Apparently, this entire manufacturing system came into existence simultaneously. This implies creation.
35. Handedness: Left and Right: Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides. In living things, nucleotides are always "right-handed." (They were initially named "right-handed" because a beam of polarized light passing through them rotated like a right-handed screw.) Nucleotides rarely form outside of life, but when they do, half are left-handed, and half are right-handed. In other words, nucleotides that might have formed before life appeared on earth would be unsuitable for the evolution of life's genetic material.
Each type of amino acid, when found in nonliving material or when synthesized in the laboratory, comes in two chemically equivalent forms. Half are right-handed and half are left-handed--mirror images of each other. However, the amino acids in life, including plants, animals, bacteria, molds, and even viruses, are essentially all left-handed. No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or the right-handed variety. The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero.
A similar observation can be made concerning a special class of organic compounds called "sugars." In living systems, sugars are all right-handed. Based on our present understanding, natural processes produce equal proportions of left-handed and right-handed sugars. Since the sugars in living things are almost all right-handed, our present understanding leads to the conclusion that random natural processes did not produce life.
If any living thing took in (or ate) amino acids or sugars that had the wrong handedness, the organism's body could not process it. Such food would be useless. Since evolution favors slight variations that enhance survivability and produce more offspring, consider just how advantageous a mutation might be that switched (or inverted) a plant's handedness. "Inverted" (or wrong-handed) trees would proliferate rapidly since they would no longer provide nourishment to bacteria, mold, or termites. "Inverted" forests would fill the continents. Other "inverted" plants and animals would also benefit and would overwhelm the balance of nature. Why do we not see such species with right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars? Similarly, why are there not more poisonous plants? Why doesn't any beneficial mutation permit its carriers to swamp most other species? Apparently, beneficial mutations are rarer than evolutionists believe.
36. Improbabilities: The simplest conceivable form of single-celled life should have at least 600 different protein molecules. The mathematical probability that only one molecule could form by the chance arrangement of the proper sequence of amino acids is far less than 1 in 10 450th power. (The magnitude of the number 10 to the 450th power can begin to be appreciated by realizing that the visible universe is about 10 to the 28th power of inches in diameter.)
37. Symbiotic Relationships: Many different forms of life are completely dependent upon each other. Examples include fig trees and the fig gall wasp, a the yucca plant and the yucca moth, many parasites and their hosts, and pollen-bearing plants and the honeybee. Even the members of the honeybee family, consisting of the queen, workers, and drones, are interdependent. If one member of each interdependent group evolved first (such as the plant before the animal, or one member of the honeybee family before the others), it could not have survived. Since all members of the group obviously have survived, they must have come into existence at essentially the same time. In other words, creation.
38. Sexual Reproduction: If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, an absolutely unbelievable series of chance events must have occurred at each stage. The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have completely and independently evolved at each stage at about the same time and place.
Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reproductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct. The physical, chemical, and emotional systems of the male and female would also need to be compatible. The millions of complex products of a male reproductive system (pollen or sperm) must have an affinity for and a mechanical, chemical, and electrical compatibility with the eggs of the female reproductive system. The many intricate processes occurring at the molecular level inside the fertilized egg would have to work with fantastic precision--processes that scientists can only describe in a general sense. The environment of this fertilized egg, from conception through adulthood and until it also reproduced with another sexually capable adult (who also "accidentally" evolved), would have to be tightly controlled. Millions of species must have had a similar string of remarkable "accidents." Either this series of incredible and complementary events occurred by random, evolutionary processes, or else, an intelligent designer created sexual reproduction.
Furthermore, if sexual reproduction evolved, the steps by which an embryo becomes either a male or a female should be similar for all animals. Actually, these steps vary among the different animals. Finally, evolutionary theory predicts that nature would select asexual rather than sexual reproduction. But if asexual reproduction (the splitting of an organism into two identical organisms) evolved before sexual reproduction, how did complex sexual diversity arise or survive? Evolution cannot explain it.
39. Immune Systems: How could immune systems of animals and plants have evolved? Each immune system can recognize invading bacteria, viruses, and toxins. Each system can quickly mobilize just the right type of defenders to search out and destroy these invaders. Each system has a memory and learns from every attack.
If the many instructions that direct an animal's or plant's immune system were not already programmed into the organism's genetic system when it first appeared on the earth, the first of thousands of potential infections would have destroyed the organism. This would have nullified any rare genetic improvements that might have accumulated. In other words, the large amount of genetic information governing the immune system could not have accumulated in a slow, evolutionary sense. Obviously, for the organism to have survived, this information must have all been there from the beginning. Again, creation.
40. Living Technology: Most complex phenomena known to science are found in living systems--including electrical, acoustical, mechanical, chemical, and optical phenomena. Detailed studies of various animals have also revealed certain physical equipment and capabilities that cannot even be copied by the world's best designers using the most sophisticated technologies. Examples of these designs include the miniature and reliable sonar systems of dolphins, porpoises, and whales; the frequency-modulated radar and discrimination system of the bat; the aerodynamic capabilities and efficiency of the hummingbird; the control systems, internal ballistics, and combustion chamber of the bombardier beetle; the precise and redundant navigational systems of many birds and fish; and especially the self-repair capabilities of practically all forms of life. Each component of these complex systems could not have evolved without placing the organism at a selective disadvantage. All evidence points to a Designer.
Many bacteria, such as Salmonella , Escherichia coli , and some Streptococci , propel themselves with a miniature motor at up to 15 body-lengths per second. These extremely efficient, reversible motors rotate up to 100,000 revolutions per minute. d Each shaft rotates a bundle of whiplike flagella that act as a propeller. The motors, having rotors and stators, are similar in many respects to electrical motors. The electrical charges come from a flow of protons, not electrons. Several million dollars per year are being spent, primarily in Japan, trying to learn how these motors work. Since the bacteria can stop, start, and change directions and speeds, they probably have sophisticated sensors, switches, and control mechanisms. All of this is highly miniaturized. Eight million of these bacterial motors would fit in the circular cross-section of an average human hair. Evolutionary theory teaches that bacteria were one of the first forms of life to evolve, and therefore, they are simple. While bacteria are small, they are not simple.
41. The Validity of Thought: If life is ultimately the result of random processes or chance, then so is thought. Your thoughts--including what you are thinking now--would, in the final analysis, be a consequence of a long series of accidents. Therefore, your thoughts would have no validity, including the thought that life is a result of chance, or natural, processes. By destroying the validity of ideas, evolution undercuts even the idea of evolution.
We have all heard it said that humans use only a small fraction of their mental abilities. If this is true, how could such unused abilities have evolved? Certainly not by natural selection, since those capabilities are not used.
2) Astronomical and Physical Sciences:
Overall Conclusion: The Universe, the Solar System, the Earth, and Life Were Recently Created.
Supporting Conclusion: Naturalistic Explanations for the Evolution of the Solar System and Universe Are Unscientific and Hopelessly Inadequate.
42. Strange Planets: Many undisputed observations contradict the current theories on how the Solar System evolved. One theory says planets formed when a star, passing near our sun, tore matter from the sun. More popular theories hold that the Solar System formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, or larger particles. If the planets and their 63 known moons evolved from the same material, they should have many similarities. After several decades of planetary exploration, this expectation is now recognized as false. According to these evolutionary theories:
Backward-Spinning Planets. All Planets should spin in the same direction, but Venus, Uranus, and Pluto rotate backwards.
Backward Orbits. All 63 moons in the Solar System should orbit their planets in the same sense, but at least six have backward orbits. Furthermore, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune have moons orbiting in both directions.
Inclined Orbits. The orbit of each of these 63 moons should lie in the equatorial plane of the planet it orbits, but many, including the earth's moon, are in highly inclined orbits.
Hydrogen and Helium. Since about 98% of the sun is hydrogen or helium, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury should have similar compositions. Instead, much less than 1% of these planets is hydrogen or helium.
Angular Momentum. The sun should have 700 times more angular momentum than all the planets combined. Instead, the planets have 50 times more angular momentum than the sun.
43. Molten Earth?:If the earth formed by gravitational accretion (the infalling of small rocky bodies), heat released by the impacts would have made the earth molten. Had the earth ever been molten, dense, nonreactive chemical elements such as gold, which is almost twice as dense as lead, would have sunk to the earth's core. Since gold is found at the earth's surface , the earth was never molten and it did not evolve by gravitational accretion. If the earth did not evolve by gravitational accretion, it may have begun in nearly its present state.
44. Evolving Planets?: Contrary to popular opinion, planets should not form from the mutual gravitational attraction of particles orbiting the sun. Orbiting particles are much more likely to be scattered or expelled by their gravitational interactions than they are to be pulled together. Experiments have shown that colliding particles are much more likely to fragment than to stick together. Similar comments can be made concerning the improbability that particles orbiting a planet will ever grow into a moon. This is why the particles in the rings of Saturn, Jupiter, and Uranus show no evidence of clumping into larger bodies.
Despite these problems, let us assume that pebble-size to moon-size particles somehow evolved. "Growing a planet" by many small collisions will produce an almost nonspinning planet, since the spins imparted by impacts will be largely self-cancelling. All planets spin, some much more than others.
Growing a large, gaseous planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune) far from the central star, is especially difficult for evolutionists to explain for several reasons.
Gases dissipate rapidly in the vacuum of outer space, especially the lightest two gases--hydrogen and helium, which comprise most of the giant planets.
Because gas molecules orbiting a star do not gravitationally pull in other gas molecules, a rocky planet, several times larger than the earth, must first form to attract all the gas gravitationally. (The hydrogen and helium on Jupiter are more than 300 times as massive as the earth.) This must happen very quickly, before the gas dissipates.
Stars like our sun--even those which evolutionists say are young--do not have enough orbiting hydrogen or helium to form one Jupiter.
Based on demonstratable science, gaseous planets and the rest of the solar system did not evolve.
45. Origin of the Moon: Naturalistic theories on the moon's origin are highly speculative and completely inadequate. The moon did not spin off the earth, nor did it congeal from the same material as the earth since its orbital plane is too inclined. Furthermore, the relative abundances of its elements are too dissimilar from those of the earth. The moon's nearly circular orbit is also strong evidence that it was never torn from, nor captured by, the earth. If the moon formed from particles orbiting the earth, other particles should be easily visible inside the moon's orbit; none are. If the moon was not pulled or splashed from the earth, was not built up from smaller particles near its present orbit, and was not captured from outside its present orbit, only one hypothesis remains; the moon was created in its present orbit.
46. Evolution of the Solar System?: Evolutionists claim the solar system condensed out of a vast cloud of swirling dust about 4.6 billion years ago. Many particles that were not swept up as part of a planet would have then begun a gradual spiral in toward the sun. Colliding asteroids also would create dust particles that, over millions of years, would spiral in toward the sun. Particles should still be falling into the sun's upper atmosphere, burning up, and giving off an easily measured, infrared glow. Measurements taken during the solar eclipse of 11 July 1991, showed no such glow. Therefore, the assumed "millions of years" and this explanation for the origin of the solar system are probably wrong.
47. Mountains of Venus: Venus must have a strong crust to support its extremely high, dense mountains. One mountain, Maat Mons, rises higher than Earth's Mount Everest does above sea level. Since Venus is relatively near the sun, its atmosphere is 900°F--so hot that its surface rocks must be weak or "tarlike." (Lead melts at 622°F and zinc at 787°F.) Only if the subsurface rocks are cold and strong can these mountains defy gravity. This allows us to draw two conclusions, both of which contradict major evolutionary assumptions.
First, evolutionists assume that planets grew (evolved) by rocky debris falling from outer space, a process called gravitational accretion . The heat generated by the impacts of a planet's worth of projectiles would have left the inner planets molten. However, Venus was never molten. Had it been, its hot atmosphere would have prevented its subsurface rocks from cooling enough to support its mountains. Therefore, Venus did not evolve by gravitational accretion.
Secondly, evolutionists believe the entire solar system is billions of years old. If Venus were billions of years old, its atmospheric heat would have soaked deeply enough into the planet to weaken its subsurface rocks. Not only could Venus' crust not support mountains, the hot mountains them-selves could not maintain their steep slopes.
48. Space, Time, and Matter: No scientific theory exists to explain the origin of space, time, or matter. Since each is intimately related to or even defined in terms of the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the others. Naturalistic explanations have completely failed.
49. First Law of Thermodynamics: The first law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe, or in any isolated part of it, remains constant. It further states that although energy (or its mass equivalent) can change form, it is not now being created or destroyed. Countless experiments have verified this. A corollary of the first law is that natural processes cannot create energy. Consequently, energy must have been created in the past by some agency or power outside and independent of the natural universe. Furthermore, if natural processes cannot produce the relatively simple inorganic portion of the universe, then it is even less likely that natural processes can explain the much more complex organic (or living) portion of the universe.
50. Second Law of Thermodynamics: If the entire universe is an isolated system, then, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the energy in the universe that is available for useful work has always been decreasing. However, as one goes back in time, the amount of energy available for useful work would eventually exceed the total energy in the universe that, according to the first law of thermodynamics, remains constant. This is an impossible condition, thus implying that the universe had a beginning.
51. A Beginning: Heat always flows from hot bodies to cold bodies. If the universe were infinitely old, the temperature throughout the universe should be uniform. Since the temperature of the universe is not uniform, the universe is not infinitely old. Therefore, the universe had a beginning.
52. Decay: A further consequence of the second law is that when the universe began, it was more organized and complex than it is today--not in a highly disorganized and random state as assumed by evolutionists and proponents of the big bang theory.
53. Big Bang?: Three observations led to the general acceptance of the big bang theory: the cosmic background radiation (CBR), the amount of helium in the universe, and the redshift of distant starlight. All three have been poorly understood.
CBR. All matter radiates heat, regardless of its temperature. Everywhere astronomers look, they can detect an extremely uniform radiation, called the cosmic background radiation (CBR). It appears to come from perfectly radiating matter whose temperature is 2.73 K--nearly absolute zero. The CBR was initially thought to be left over from the big bang. Many incorrectly believe that the big bang theory predicted this radiation.
Since the CBR is so uniform, the matter from which it originated must have been spread uniformly throughout the universe. But if matter was uniformly distributed, it would hardly gravitate in any direction; even after tens of billions of years, galaxies would not evolve. Since the matter in the universe is highly concentrated into galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters, the CBR does not appear to be a remnant of a big bang.
Helium. The amount of helium in the universe is not explained by the big bang theory; the theory was adjusted to fit the amount of helium. Ironically, the lack of helium in certain types of stars (B type stars) and the presence of beryllium in other stars contradicts the theory.
Redshift. The redshift of distant starlight is usually interpreted as a Doppler effect; namely, stars and galaxies are moving away from the earth, stretching out (or reddening) the wave lengths of light we see. While this may be true, other possible explanations do not involve an expanding universe. Besides, many objects with high redshifts seem connected, or associated, with other objects of low redshifts. They could not be traveling at such different velocities and be connected for long. For example, many quasars have very high redshifts, and yet they statistically cluster with galaxies having low redshifts. Sometimes, quasars appear to be connected to galaxies by threads of gas. Finally, redshifted light from galaxies has some strange features that are inconsistent with the Doppler effect. If redshifts are from objects moving away from the earth, one would expect the amount of redshifting to take on continuous values. Instead, redshifts tend to cluster at specific, evenly-spaced values. Much remains to be learned about redshifts.
A big bang should neither produce highly concentrated nor rotating bodies. Galaxies are examples of both. A large volume of the universe should not be--but apparently is--moving sideways, almost perpendicular to the direction of expansion. A big bang would, for all practical purposes, only produce hydrogen and helium. Therefore, the first generation of stars to somehow form after a big bang should consist of only hydrogen and helium. Some of these stars should still exist, but none can be found. These observations make it doubtful that a big bang occurred.
If a big bang occurred, what caused the bang? Stars with enough mass become black holes, so not even light can escape their enormous gravity. How then could anything escape the trillions upon trillions of times greater gravity caused by concentrating all the mass in the universe in a "cosmic egg" that existed before a big bang?
If the big bang theory is correct, one can calculate the age of the universe. This age turns out to be younger than objects in the universe whose ages were based on other evolutionary theories. Since this is logically impossible, one or both sets of theories must be incorrect.
54. Missing Mass: Imagine seeing several rocks in outer space, moving radially away from the earth. If the rocks were simultaneously blasted away from the earth, their masses, changing velocities, and distances from the earth would have a very precise relationship with each other. When a similar relationship is checked for billions of observable galaxies, an obvious conclusion is that these galaxies did not explode from a common point in a huge "big bang." It is even more obvious that if such an explosion occurred, it must have been much, much less than billions of years ago.
Evolutionists try to fix this problem in two ways. They think the universe is filled with at least ten times as much matter as can be seen. This is maintained even though two decades of searching for this hidden mass has turned up nothing other than the conclusion that the needed "missing mass" does not exist.
A second "fix attempt" assumes that the rocks (or in the real problem, all the particles in the universe) were briefly, almost magically, accelerated away from some point. Supposedly, this matter reached speeds trillions of billions of times faster than the speed of light by an unknown, untestable phenomenon--not by a blast. Then this matter became controlled by gravity after it reached just the right speed to give it an apparent age of about 10 billion years. Such flights of imagination and speculation are common in the field of cosmology.
55. Interstellar Gas: Detailed analyses indicate that neither stars nor planets could form from interstellar gas clouds. To do so, either by first forming dust particles or by direct gravitational collapse of the gas, would require vastly more time than the alleged age of the universe. An obvious alternative is that stars and planets were created.
56. Fast Binaries: Perhaps half of all stars are grouped in closely spaced pairs called " binaries." Fortunately, our sun does not have a binary partner. If it did, the wide range of temperatures on earth would probably not permit life. The mutual gravitational attraction between a binary pair of stars causes them to orbit each other, just as the moon orbits the earth. The closer the paired stars are, the more rapidly they orbit. Distances between a binary pair should not change appreciably, even over long periods of time.
Two particular stars have been found so close together that they orbit each other every eleven minutes! This implies that their centers are about 80,000 miles apart. By way of comparison, our sun, which is a typical star, is more than 800,000 miles in diameter. There are other close binaries.
The theory of stellar evolution was developed by arranging (on paper) different types of stars in a sequence according to their brightness and color. Stellar evolutionists believe that stars slowly change from one type to another. However, scientists have never observed such changes, and some stars do not fit this pattern. According to stellar evolution, the volume of each star, late in its lifetime, expands to about a million times that of our sun. Finally, it supposedly collapses and becomes a small star about the size of the earth (a white dwarf) or even smaller (a neutron star).
Only such tiny stars could have their centers 80,000 miles apart and still orbit each other. Obviously, they did not evolve from larger stars, since larger stars orbiting so closely would collide. If two stars cannot evolve into a condition that has them orbiting each other every eleven minutes, one wonders whether stars evolve at all.
57. Star Births?: If stars evolve, star births should about equal star deaths. The deaths of many stars are bright and sudden events called "supernovas." Similarly, the birth of a star should be accompanied by the appearance of new star light when compared with the many photographic plates made decades earlier. Instruments, which could detect dust falling into and forming supposedly new stars, have not done so. Actually, the stars that some astronomers believe are very new are expelling matter. We have never seen a star born, but we have seen hundreds of stars die. There is no evidence that stars evolve, nor are there any sound scientific explanations for how they could evolve.
58. Stellar Evolution?: Stellar evolution is assumed in estimating the age of stars. These age estimates are then used to establish a framework for stellar evolution. This is circular reasoning.
59. O Stars: The most luminous stars in our galaxy (the so-called "O" stars) are "burning fuel" hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our sun. This is so rapid that they must be quite young on an evolutionary time scale. If these stars did evolve, they should show easily measurable characteristics such as extremely high rates of rotation and enormous magnetic fields. Since these characteristics are not observed, it seems quite likely these stars did not evolve.
60. Galaxies: There are good reasons why natural processes cannot form galaxies and why galaxies cannot evolve from one type to another. Furthermore, if spiral galaxies were billions of years old, their arms or bars would be severely twisted. Since they have maintained their shape, either galaxies are young, or unknown physical phenomena are occurring within galaxies. Even structures composed of galaxies are now known to be so amazingly large, and yet relatively thin, that they could not have formed by slow gravitational attraction. If slow, natural processes cannot form such huge galactic structures, then rapid, supernatural processes may have.
Supporting Conclusion: Techniques That Argue for an Old Earth Are Either Illogical or Are Based on Unreasonable Assumptions.
61. Hidden Assumptions: To estimate a date prior to the beginning of written records, one must assume the dating clock has operated at a known rate, the initial setting of the clock is known, and the clock has not been disturbed. These three assumptions are almost always unstated, overlooked, or invalid.
62. Corals and Caves: Estimated old ages for the earth are frequently based on "clocks" that today are ticking at very slow rates. For example, coral growth rates were for many years thought to be very slow, implying that some coral reefs must be hundreds of thousands of years old. More accurate measurements of these rates under favorable growth conditions now show us that no known coral formation need be older than 3,400 years. A similar comment can be made for the growth rates of stalactites and stalagmites in caves.
63. Constant Decay?:A major assumption that underlies all radioactive dating techniques is that the rates of decay, which have been essentially constant over the past 90 years, have also been constant over the past 4,600,000,000 years. This bold, critical, and untestable assumption is made, even though no one knows what causes radioactive decay. Furthermore, two lines of evidence suggest radioactive decay was once much greater than it is today.
64. Radiometric Contradictions: The public has been greatly misled concerning the consistency and trustworthiness of radiometric dating techniques (the potassium-argon method, the rubidium--strontium method, and the uranium-thorium-lead method). For example, geologists hardly ever subject their radiometric age measurements to "blind tests." In science, such tests are a standard procedure for overcoming experimenter bias. Many published radiometric dates can be checked by comparisons with the assumed ages for the fossils that sometimes lie above, or below, radiometrically dated rock. In more than 400 of these published checks (about half of those sampled), the radiometrically determined ages were at least one geologic age in error--indicating major errors in methodology. One wonders how many other dating checks were not even published because they, too, were in error.
65. Index Fossils: In the early 1800s, some observers in Western Europe noticed that certain fossils are usually preserved in sedimentary layers that, when traced laterally, typically lie above other types of fossils. Decades later, after the theory of evolution was proposed, it was concluded that the upper organism must have evolved after the lower organism. These early geologists did not realize that there were hydrodynamically sound reasons why, during the flood, the organisms were sorted in that order. Geologic ages were then associated with each of these "index fossils." Those ages were extended to similar animals and plants based on the faulty reasoning that they must have evolved at about the same time since they were similar. Today, geologic formations are almost always dated by their fossil content--which, as stated above, assumes evolution. Yet, evolution is supposedly shown by the sequence of fossils. This reasoning is circular. Furthermore, it has produced many contradictory results.
66. Geologic Column: Practically nowhere on the earth can one find the so-called "geologic column." At most places on the continents, over half the "geologic periods" are missing. Only 15-20% of the earth's land surface has even one-third of these periods in the correct consecutive order. Even within the Grand Canyon, more than 150 million years of this imaginary column are missing. Using the assumed geologic column to date fossils and rocks is fallacious.
67. Old DNA: When an animal or plant dies, its DNA begins decomposing. Before 1990, almost no one believed that DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years. This limit was based on measuring DNA disintegration rates in well-preserved specimens of known age such as Egyptian mummies. DNA has now been reported in magnolia leaves that evolutionists claim are 17 million years old. Fragments of DNA are also claimed to be in alleged 80 million-year-old dinosaur bones buried in a coal bed and in the scales of a 200 million-year-old fossilized fish. DNA is frequently reported in amber encased insects and plants that are supposedly 25-120 million years old. All this has forced evolutionists to reexamine the 10,000-year limit.
They now claim that DNA can be preserved longer if conditions are dryer, colder, and freer of oxygen, bacteria, and background radiation. The measured disintegration rates of DNA, apparently under these more ideal conditions, do not support this. Therefore, the previously measured rates were probably not several thousand times in error. If, as is likely, such a huge error is not found, then the method for arriving at those million-year ages needs reexamining.
Evolutionists have a similar problem with the protein preserved in dinosaur bones. As with DNA, no proteins should last 75-150 million years, as is claimed for those bones. The best evidence suggests that these plant and animal remains are not as old as evolutionists believe.
68. Human Artifacts: At various times and places, man-made objects have been found encased in coal. Examples include a thimble, an iron pot, an iron instrument, an 8-carat gold chain, and a metallic vessel inlaid with silver. Many other "out of place artifacts" have been found inside deeply buried rocks: nails, a screw, a strange coin, a clay figurine, a strange hammer, and other objects of obvious human manufacture. By evolutionary dating techniques, these objects would be hundreds of millions of years older than man. Again, something is wrong.
69. Humanlike Footprints: Humanlike footprints, supposedly 150-600 million years old, have been found in rock formations in Utah, Kentucky, Missouri, and possibly Pennsylvania. At Laetoli, in the east African country of Tanzania, a team headed by Mary Leakey found a sequence of apparently modern human footprints. They were dated at 3.7 million years. If human feet made any of these prints, then evolutionary chronology is drastically wrong.
70. Parallel Layers: Since no worldwide or even continental unconformity exists in the earth's sedimentary layers, those layers must have been deposited rapidly. (An unconformity represents a time break of unknown duration--for example, an erosional surface between two adjacent strata.) Parallel layers (called conformities) imply that the deposition was continuous and rapid. Since unconformities are simply local phenomena, one can trace continuous paths from the bottom to the top of the geologic record that avoid these time breaks. The sedimentary layers along those paths must have been deposited rapidly and continuously as a unit.
Frequently, two adjacent and parallel sedimentary layers contain such different index fossils that evolutionists conclude that they were deposited hundreds of millions of years apart. However, since the adjacent layers are conformable, the layers must have been deposited without interruption or erosion. Often, in an apparently undisturbed sequence, the layer considered older by evolutionists is on top! (See " Out-of-Place Fossils ") The evolutionary dating rules are self-contradictory.
Supporting Conclusion: Most Dating Techniques Indicate That the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe Are Young.
For the last 130 years the age of the earth, as assumed by evolutionists, has been doubling at a rate of once every 20 years. In fact since 1900, their estimate of its age has multiplied by a factor of 100! Evolution requires an old earth, an old solar system, and an old universe. Nearly all informed evolutionists will admit that without billions of years their theory is dead. Yet, by hiding the "origins question" behind a vast veil of time, the unsolvable problems of evolution become difficult for scientists to see and laymen to imagine. Our media and textbooks have implied for over a century that this almost unimaginable age is correct, but rarely do they examine the shaky assumptions and growing body of contrary evidence. Therefore, most people instinctively believe the earth and universe are old, and are disturbed (at least initially) to hear contrary evidence. Actually, most dating techniques indicate that the earth and solar system are young--possibly less than 10,000 years old. Here are some of these points of evidence.
71. Helium: The radioactive decay of only uranium and thorium would produce all of the atmosphere's helium in only 40,000 years. No known means exists by which large amounts of helium can escape from the atmosphere, even when considering helium's low atomic weight. The atmosphere appears to be young.
72. Lead and Helium Diffusion: Lead diffuses (or leaks) from zircon crystals at known rates that increase with temperature. Since these crystals are found at different depths in the earth, those at greater depths and temperatures should have less lead. Even if the earth's crust is just a fraction of the age claimed by evolutionists, measurable differences in the lead content of zircons should exist throughout the top 4,000 meters. Instead, no measurable difference is found. Similar conclusions are reached from a study of the helium contained in these same zircon crystals. In fact, these helium studies lead to a conclusion that the earth's crust is less than 10,000 years old.
73. Excess Fluid Pressure: Abnormally high oil, gas, and water pressures exist within relatively permeable rock. If these fluids had been trapped more than 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, leakage would have dropped the pressure far below what it is today. This oil, gas, and water must have been trapped suddenly and recently.
74. Volcanic Debris: Volcanoes are ejecting almost a cubic mile of material into the atmosphere each year. This is so rapid that if the rate were constant, about 10 times the entire volume of the earth's sediments should be produced in 4.6 billion years. Actually, only about 25% of the earth's sediments are of volcanic origin, and many volcanic deposits show much greater volcanic activity in the past. No means have been proposed which can remove or transform all of this volcanic material. The earth's sediments, therefore, appear to be much younger than 4.6 billion years old.
75. River Sediments: More than 27 billion tons of river sediments are entering the oceans each year. Probably, the rate of sediment transport was even greater in the past as the looser topsoil was removed and as erosion smoothed out the earth's terrain. Even if erosion has been constant, the sediments now on the ocean floor would have accumulated in only 30 million years. No process has been proposed which can remove 27 billion tons of ocean sediments each year. Therefore, the oceans cannot be hundreds of millions of years old.
76. Continental Erosion: The continents are eroding at a rate that would level them in much less than 25 million years. However, evolutionists believe that fossils of animals and plants at high elevations have somehow avoided this erosion for more than 300 million years. Something is wrong.
77. Dissolved Metals: The rate at which elements such as copper, gold, lead, mercury, nickel, silicon, sodium, tin, and uranium are entering the oceans is very rapid when compared with the small quantities of these elements already in the oceans. There is no known means by which large amounts of these elements can come out of solution. Therefore, the oceans must be much younger than a million years.
78. Shallow Meteorites: Meteorites are steadily falling onto the earth. This rate was much probably greater in the past since planets have swept much of the original meteoritic material from the solar system. Experts have, therefore, expressed surprise that meteorites are found only in young sediments very near the earth's surface. Even meteoritic particles in ocean sediments are concentrated in the topmost layers. If the earth's sediments, which average about a mile in thickness on the continents, were deposited over hundreds of millions of years, as evolutionists believe, many iron meteorites should be buried well below the earth's surface. Since this is not the case, the sediments appear to have been deposited rapidly. Furthermore, since no meteorites are found immediately above the basement rocks on which these sediments rest, these basement rocks could not have been exposed to meteoritic bombardment for any great length of time.
Similar observations can be made concerning ancient rock slides. Rock slides are frequently found on the earth's surface, but are generally absent from supposedly old rock.
79. Meteoritic Dust: Meteoritic dust is accumulating on the earth so fast that, after four billion years, the equivalent of more than 16 feet of this dust should have accumulated. Because this dust is high in nickel, the earth's crust should have an abundance of nickel. No such concentration has been found on land or in the oceans. Consequently, the earth appears to be young.
80. Magnetic Decay: Direct measurements of the earth's magnetic field over the past 140 years show a steady and rapid decline in its strength. This decay pattern is consistent with the theoretical view that there is an electrical current inside the earth which produces the magnetic field. If this is correct, then just 20,000 years ago the electrical current would have been so vast that the earth's structure could not have survived the heat produced. This implies that the earth could not be older than 20,000 years.
81. Rapid Cooling: If the earth was initially molten, it would have cooled to its present condition in much less than 4.6 billion years. This conclusion holds even if one makes liberal assumptions about the amount of heat generated by radioactive decay within the earth. The known temperature pattern inside the earth is only consistent with a young earth.
82. Moon Recession: As tidal friction gradually slows the earth's spin, the laws of physics require the moon to recede from the earth. This recession has been observed since 1754. Even if the moon began orbiting near the earth's surface, the moon should have moved to its present distance in several billion years less time than the 4.6 billion-year age that evolutionists assume for the earth and moon. Consequently, the earth-moon system must be much younger than evolutionists assume.
83. Moon Dust and Debris: If the moon were billions of years old, it should have accumulated a thick layer of dust and debris from meteoritic bombardment. Before instruments were placed on the moon, some scientists were very concerned that astronauts would sink into a sea of dust--possibly a mile in thickness. This did not happen. Very little space dust and debris is on the moon. In fact, after examining the rocks and dust brought back from the moon, scientists learned that only about 1/67th of the dust and debris came from outer space. Recent measurements of the influx rate of meteoritic material on the moon also do not support an old moon.
84. Crater Creep: A tall pile of tar will slowly flow downhill, ultimately spreading into a nearly horizontal sheet of tar. Most material, under pressure, "creeps" in this way, although rocks deform very, very slowly. Calculations show that large, high-rimmed craters on the moon should flow downhill and level out in only tens of thousands of years. Large, steep-walled craters exist even on Venus and Mercury, where gravity is greater, and temperatures are hot enough to melt lead. Most large craters on the moon, Venus, and Mercury are thought to have formed shortly after the solar system formed. These bodies appear to be quite young, since their craters show no sign of "creep."
85. Hot Moon: The moon has a hot interior. Since it has not yet cooled off, the moon is probably much less than a billion years old.
86. Young Comets: As comets pass near the sun, some of their mass vaporizes, producing a long tail and other debris. Comets also fragment frequently or fall onto the sun or other planets. Typical comets should disintegrate or disappear after several hundred orbits. For many comets this is less than 10,000 years. There is no evidence for a distant shell of cometary material surrounding the solar system, and there is no known way to add comets to the solar system at rates that even remotely balance their destruction. In fact, the gravitational attractions of the planets tend to expel comets from the solar system, rather than capture them. Consequently, comets and the solar system appear to be less than 10,000 years old.
87. Small Comets: Photographs, taken from earth-orbiting satellites, show small, ice-filled comets striking the earth's upper atmosphere at an average rate of one every three seconds. As each comet vaporizes, about 100 tons of water are added to the earth's atmosphere. If this began when evolutionists say the earth started to evolve, the earth's oceans should have several times more water than they now have. Actually, the rate of impact was probably greater in the past since the planets have swept many of these comets from the solar system. Therefore, the oceans and the earth look young.
88. Young Rings: The rings orbiting Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune are being rapidly bombarded by meteoroids. Saturn's rings, for example, should be pulverized and dispersed in about 10,000 years. Since this has not happened, planetary rings are probably quite young.
89. Hot Planets: Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune each radiate away more than twice the heat energy they receive from the sun. Uranus and Venus also radiate too much heat. Calculations show that it is very unlikely that this energy comes from nuclear fusion, radioactive decay, gravitational contraction, or phase changes within those planets. The only other conceivable explanation is that these planets have not existed long enough to cool off.
90. Solar Wind: The sun's radiation applies an outward force on extremely small particles orbiting the sun. Particles less than 100,000th of a centimeter in diameter should have been "blown out" of the solar system if it were billions of years old. Yet these particles are still orbiting the sun. Conclusion: the solar system is young.
91. Poynting-Robertson Effect: A large disk-shaped cloud of dust particles orbits the sun. The forces acting on these particles are so great that they should be destroyed or removed in less than 10,000 years. Since there appears to be no significant source of replenishment, the solar system is probably less than 10,000 years old. One of these forces is called the Poynting-Robertson effect. Here is how it works.
Rain falling on a speeding car tends to strike the front of the car and slow it down slightly. Similarly, the sun's rays that strike particles orbiting the sun tend to slow them down. For particles larger than those described in (above), this effect is strong enough to cause them to spiral into the sun. Thus, the sun's radiation and gravitational field act as a giant vacuum cleaner that pulls in about 100,000 tons of micrometeoroids per day. The best estimates are that less than half this dust is being continuously supplied by the disintegration of comets and asteroids.
As a comet disintegrates, it becomes a cluster of particles called a meteor stream. The Poynting- Robertson effect causes the smaller particles in a meteor stream to spiral into the sun more rapidly than the larger particles. After about 10,000 years, this segregation of orbits by particle size should be visible. Since this segregation is generally not visible, meteor streams must be a relatively recent phenomenon. Huge quantities of microscopic dust particles have also been recently discovered around some stars. Yet, according to the theory of stellar evolution, those stars are many millions of years old and should have blown the dust away. Unless one can demonstrate that some vast process continually supplies that dust, one should consider whether the "millions of years" are imaginary.
92. Solar Fuel: If the sun, when it first began to radiate, had any nonnuclear sources of energy, they would have been depleted in much less than ten million years. Theory and experiment indicate that nuclear reactions are not the predominant energy source for the sun. Our star, the sun, must therefore be young (less than ten million years old). If the sun is young, then so is the earth.
93. Shrinking Sun: Since 1836, more than one hundred different observers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the U.S. Naval Observatory have made direct , visual measurements that suggest that the sun's diameter is shrinking at a rate of about 0.1% each century or about five feet per hour! Furthermore, records of solar eclipses indicate that this rapid shrinking has been going on for at least the past 400 years. Several indirect techniques also confirm that the sun is shrinking, although these inferred collapse rates are only about 1/7th as much. Using the most conservative data, one must conclude that had the sun existed several million years ago, it would have been so large that its heat would have destroyed life on earth. Yet, evolutionists say that a million years ago all the present forms of life were essentially as they are now, having completed their evolution that began a thousand million years ago.
During the last 30 years, one of the most perplexing problems in science has been the lack of solar neutrinos. Neutrinos are extremely light subatomic particles produced in nuclear reactions inside stars, including the sun. If all the sun's heat is produced by nuclear fusion, the earth should be bathed in three times as many neutrinos as scientists have consistently measured. However, if much of the sun's heat is due to its shrinking by gravitational collapse, then the lack of solar neutrinos would be explained. But such a gravitational collapse could not have been going on very long.
94. Star Clusters: Stars moving in the same direction at significantly different speeds frequently travel in closely spaced clusters. This would not be the case if they had been traveling for billions of years because just a slight difference in their velocities would disperse them after such great periods of time. Similar observations have been made of galaxy and galaxy-quasar combinations that apparently have vastly different velocities yet appear to be connected.
95. Unstable Galaxies: Computer simulations of the motions of spiral galaxies show them to be highly unstable; they should completely change their shape in only a small fraction of the assumed evolutionary age of the universe. The simplest explanation for so many spiral galaxies, including our Milky Way Galaxy, is that they and the universe are much younger than has been assumed.
96. Galaxy Clusters: Hundreds of rapidly moving galaxies often cluster tightly together. Their individual velocities, as measured by the redshift of their light, are so high that these clusters should be flying apart. In other words, the visible mass of the entire cluster, is much too small to hold the galaxies together gravitationally. However, since the galaxies within clusters are so close together, they could not have been flying apart for very long. A similar statement can be made concerning many stars in spiral galaxies and gas clouds that surround some galaxies. These stars and gas clouds are moving so rapidly that they should have broken their gravitational bonds long ago, if they were billions of years old. If the redshift of starlight always indicates a star's velocity, then a universe billions of years old is completely inconsistent with what is observed. If redshifts can be caused by phenomena other than a star's velocity, then much of current astronomical thinking is wrong.
3) Earth Sciences
Overall Conclusion: The Earth Has Experienced a Worldwide Flood.
Supporting Conclusion: Archaeological Evidence Indicates That Noah's Ark Probably Exists.
97. Ancient Historians: Ancient historians, such as Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian, and Berosus of the Chaldeans mentioned in their writings that the Ark existed. Marco Polo also wrote that the Ark was reported to be on a mountain in greater Armenia. Over a dozen other Christian and Jewish leaders during the period 200-1700 A.D. wrote that the Ark was still preserved.
98. British Scientists: In about 1856, three skeptical British scientists and two Armenian guides climbed Mount Ararat to show that the Ark did not exist. The Ark was supposedly found, but the British scientists threatened to kill the guides if they reported it. Years later, one of the Armenians, then living in the United States, and one of the British scientists independently reported that they had found the Ark.
99. James Bryce: Sir James Bryce, a noted British scholar and traveler of the mid-nineteenth century, conducted extensive library research concerning the Ark. He became convinced that the Ark was preserved on Mount Ararat. Finally, in 1876, he ascended to the summit of the mountain and found, at the 13,000 foot level (2,000 feet above the timberline), a piece of hand-tooled wood, four feet long, that he believed was from the Ark.
100. Turkish Commissioners: In 1883, a series of newspaper articles reported that a team of Turkish commissioners, while investigating avalanche conditions on Mount Ararat, unexpectedly came upon the Ark projecting out of the melting ice at the end of an unusually warm summer. They claimed that they entered and examined part of the Ark.
101. George Hagopian: In the unusually warm summer of 1902, an Armenian boy, George Hagopian, and his uncle climbed Mount Ararat and reached the Ark that was reportedly sticking out of an ice pack. The boy climbed over the Ark and examined it in great detail. In 1904 Hagopian visited the Ark for a second time. Shortly before his death in 1972, a tape recording was made of his detailed testimony. This recording has undergone voice analyzer tests which indicate that his account is quite credible.
102. Russian Pilot: A Russian pilot, flying over Ararat in World War I (1915), thought he saw the Ark. The news of his discovery reached the Czar, who dispatched a large expedition to the site. The soldiers found and explored the boat, but before they could report to the Czar, the Russian Revolution of 1917 had begun. Their report disappeared, and the soldiers were scattered. Some of them eventually reached the United States. Various relatives and friends have confirmed this report.
103. Turkish Soldiers: In 1916, five Turkish soldiers, crossing Mount Ararat, claimed to have seen the Ark; however, they did not report their story until 30 years later when they offered to guide an American expedition to the site. The expedition did not materialize, and their services were not sought until after their deaths.
104. Ed Davis: In July 1943, Ed Davis, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was stationed in Iran. There he developed a close friendship with some Lourd tribesmen who told him that Noah's Ark was on Mount Ararat, which could be seen in the distance. When Davis asked to see the Ark, they first took him to their village. There Davis claims he saw items from the Ark: a cage door, latches, a metal hammer, dried beans, shepherd staffs, oil lamps, bowls, and pottery jars still containing honey. This Muslim tribe considered it a religious duty to prevent outsiders from seeing the Ark, even if it required murder. However, their unusually close friendship with Davis made him an exception.
The tribal leader, Abas-Abas, and his seven sons took Davis on a three-day climb up the northeast side of Mount Ararat. The steep, slick rocks, made worse by the cold rain, prevented them from getting closer than a half-mile to the Ark. Two broken portions of the Ark, lying half a mile apart on their sides, were visible during the moments when the fog and clouds lifted. Wooden beams, three decks, and rooms were seen. Abas-Abas told Davis other details about the Ark: its wood was extremely hard; wooden pegs were used in its construction instead of nails; its large side door opened from the bottom outward like a garage door; and the human quarters consisted of 48 compartments in the middle of the top deck. During 1985 and 1986, Davis successfully underwent several sessions of extensive face-to-face questioning by several dozen Ark researchers, and in 1989 he passed a lie detector test.
105. George Greene: George Greene, an oil geologist, took several photo- graphs of the Ark in 1953 from a helicopter. After returning to the United States, Greene showed his photographs to many people but was unable to raise financial backing for a ground-based expedition. Finally, he went to South America where he was killed. Although his pictures have not been found, more than 30 people have given sworn, written testimony that they saw these photographs that clearly showed the Ark protruding from the melting ice field at the edge of a precipice.
106. Gregor Schwinghammer: Gregor Schwinghammer claims he saw the Ark from an F-100 aircraft in the late 1950s, while attached to the 428th Tactical Flight Squadron based in Adana, Turkey. Schwinghammer said it looked like an enormous boxcar lying in a gully high up on Mount Ararat. He said that U-2 pilots had taken pictures of it.
Note: Many others claim to have seen the Ark. Some stories are of questionable validity, and others are inconsistent with many known details. Only the most credible are summarized above.
Supporting Conclusion: Many of the Earth's Previously Unexplainable Features Can Be Explained by a Cataclysmic Flood.
The origin of each of the following features of the earth is a subject of controversy within the earth sciences. Each feature has many aspects that are inconsistent with standard explanations. Yet all appear to be consequences of a sudden and unrepeatable event--a cataclysmic flood whose waters erupted from worldwide, subterranean, and interconnected chambers with an energy release exceeding the explosion of ten billion hydrogen bombs. The many consequences of this event, which include the rapid formation of the features listed below, involved phenomena that are well understood.
107. The Grand Canyon and Other Canyons
108. Mid-Oceanic Ridge
109. Continental Shelves and Slopes
110. Ocean Trenches
111. Seamounts and Tablemounts
112. Earthquakes
113. Magnetic Variations on the Ocean Floor
114. Submarine Canyons
115. Coal and Oil Formations
116. Glaciers and the Ice Ages
117. Frozen Mammoths
118. Major Mountain Ranges
119. Overthrusts
120. Volcanoes and Lava
121. Geothermal Heat
122. Metamorphic Rock
123. Strata
124. Plateaus
125. Salt Domes
126. Jigsaw Fit of the Continents
127. Fossil Graveyards
Supporting Conclusion: The Seemingly Impossible Events of a Worldwide Flood Are Really Quite Plausible, If Examined Closely.
128. Water Above Mountains?:Is there enough water to cover all of the earth's preflood mountains in a global flood? Most people do not realize what a large volume of water there is on the earth. The oceans have ten times more water than there is land above sea level.
Most of the earth's mountains consist of tipped and buckled sedimentary layers. Since these sediments were initially laid down through water as nearly horizontal layers, the mountains must have been pushed up after the sediments were deposited.
If these mountains were again flattened out while the ocean basins rose in compensation for this downward flow of mass, the oceans would again flood the entire earth. Therefore, the earth has enough water to cover the smaller mountains that existed before the flood.
129. Shells on Mountains: Every major mountain range on the earth contains fossilized sea life--far above sea level.
130. Flood Legends: Practically every ancient culture has legends telling of a traumatic flood in which only a few humans survived in a large boat. The same cannot be said for other types of catastrophes, such as earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions, disease, famines, or drought. These more than 230 flood legends contain many common elements, suggesting that they have a common historical source that left a vivid impression on the survivors of that catastrophe.
131. Was There Room?:Could the Ark have held all the animals? Easily. A few humans, some perhaps hired by others, could build a boat large enough to hold representatives of every air-breathing, land animal. The Ark, holding at least 1,500,000 cubic feet of space, was adequate to hold these animals and their provisions for one year. Figure 30: Ark in Football Stadium. The Ark is frequently shown as a small boat by people who have not bothered to check its dimensions. It was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. While there were several ancient cubits (generally the distance from the elbow to the extended fingers), they were typically 1.5 feet or slightly longer. A 450-foot long Ark would snugly fit in a football stadium and would be taller than a four story building.
The best and perhaps most credible, modern description of the Ark was by George Hagopian. (See page 40.) The Ark did not look like a boat. It had a flat bottom, was not streamlined, and had windows in its top. The flat bottom would have made its loading, which was on dry land, easier. Streamlined shapes are only important for a ship designed for speed and fuel efficiency--none of which applied to the Ark. Windows in the side might be nice for the passengers (or the proverbial giraffes to stick their necks out), but side windows limit the depth of submergence and the load that can be carried. Riding low in the water also adds great stability to a boat. Actually, the Hebrew word for Ark does not mean boat; it means box or coffinan apt description that Hagopian knew nothing about.
Since the flood, many of the offspring of those on the Ark would have become reproductively isolated in some degree due to mutations, natural genetic variations, and geographic dispersion. Thus, variations within a kind have proliferated. Each variation did not have to be represented on the Ark. For example, a pair of wolflike animals were probably the ancestors of the coyotes, the dingoes, the jackals, the foxes, and hundreds of varieties of domestic dogs. (This is microevolution, not macroevolution, since each member of the dog kind can interbreed and has the same organs and genetic structure.) Could the Ark have held larger animals, such as dinosaurs and elephants? Certainly, if they were young.
www.sound-doctrine.net/scc.html
Excerpt:
THE SCIENTIFIC CASE FOR CREATION
131 CATEGORIES OF EVIDENCE
1) Life Sciences
Before considering how life began, we must first understand the term "organic evolution." Organic evolution, as theorized, is a naturally occurring, beneficial change that produces increasing and inheritable complexity. Increased complexity would be shown if the offspring of one form of life had a different and improved set of vital organs. This is sometimes called the molecules-to-man theory--or macroevolution . Microevolution , on the other hand, does not involve increasing complexity. It only involves minor chemical alterations or changes in size, shape, or color. Microevolution can be thought of as "horizontal" change, whereas macroevolution (if it were ever observed) would involve an "upward" and beneficial change in complexity. Notice that microevolution plus time will not produce macroevolution. [micro + time macro]
Both creationists and evolutionists agree that microevolution occurs. Minor change has been observed since history began. But notice how often evolutionists give evidence for microevolution to support macroevolution. It is macroevolution, which requires new abilities and increasing complexity, that is at the center of the creation-evolution controversy. In this book, the term "organic evolution" will therefore mean macroevolution.
Overall Conclusion: The Theory of Organic Evolution Is Invalid.
Supporting Conclusion: Organic Evolution Has Never Been Observed.
1. The Law of Biogenesis: Spontaneous generation (the emergence of life from nonliving matter) has never been observed. All observations have shown that life comes only from life. This has been observed so consistently that it is called the law of biogenesis. The theory of evolution conflicts with this law by claiming that life came from nonliving matter through natural processes.
2. Acquired Characteristics: Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. a For example, the long necks of giraffes did not result from their ancestors stretching their necks to reach high leaves. Nor can the large muscles acquired by a man in a weight lifting program be inherited by his child.
3. Mendel's Laws: Mendel's laws of genetics and their modern-day refinements explain almost all physical variations observed in living things. Mendel discovered that genes (the units of heredity) are merely reshuffled from one generation to another. Different combinations are formed, not different genes. The different combinations produce the many variations within each kind of life, such as in the dog family. A logical consequence of Mendel's laws is that there are limits to such variation. a Breeding experiments b and common observations c have also confirmed these boundaries.
4. Bounded Variations: While Mendel's laws give a theoretical explanation for why variations are limited, there is broad experimental verification as well. For example, if evolution happened, organisms (such as bacteria) that quickly produce the most offspring, should have the most variations and mutations. Natural selection would then select the more favorable changes, allowing them to survive, reproduce, and pass on their beneficial genes. Their offspring should tend to inherit short reproduction cycles and produce many "children." We see the opposite. In general, more complex organisms, such as humans, have fewer offspring and longer reproduction cycles. Again, it appears that variations within existing kinds of organisms are bounded.
5. Natural Selection: Natural selection cannot produce new genes; it only selects among preexisting characteristics. For example, many have mistakenly believed that resistances "evolved" in response to pesticides and antibiotics. Sometimes, a previously lost capability was reestablished, making it appear that something evolved. In other cases, a few resistant insects and bacteria were already present when the pesticides and antibiotics were first applied. The vulnerable insects and bacteria were killed, allowing resistant varieties, which then had less competition, to proliferate. While natural selection occurred, nothing evolved and, in fact, some biological diversity was lost.
The variations Darwin observed among finches on different Galapagos islands is another example of natural selection producing micro- ( not macro-) evolution. In other words, while natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest. Actually, natural selection prevents major evolutionary changes.
6. Mutations: Mutations are the only known means by which new genetic material becomes available for evolution. Rarely, if ever, is a mutation beneficial to an organism in its natural environment. Almost all observable mutations are harmful; some are meaningless; many are lethal. No known mutation has ever produced a form of life having greater complexity and viability than its ancestors.
7. Fruit Flies: More than ninety years of fruit fly experiments, involving 3,000 consecutive generations, give absolutely no basis for believing that any natural or artificial process can cause an increase in complexity and viability. No clear genetic improvement has ever been observed in any form of life, despite the many unnatural efforts to increase mutation rates.
8. Complex Molecules and Organs: Many molecules necessary for life, such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, are so complex that claims concerning their evolution lack any realistic experimental support.
There is no reason to believe that mutations or any natural process could ever produce any new organs--especially those as complex as the eye, the ear, or the brain. For example, an adult human brain contains over 10 14 (a hundred thousand billion) electrical connections , more than all the electrical connections in all the electrical appliances in the world. Just the human heart, a ten-ounce pump that will operate without maintenance or lubrication for about 75 years, is an engineering marvel.
9. Fully-Developed Organs: All species appear completely developed, not partially developed. They show design. There are no examples of half-developed feathers, eyes, skin, tubes (arteries, veins, intestines, etc.), or any of thousands of other vital organs. Tubes that are not 100% complete are a liability; so are partially developed organs. For example, if a leg of a reptile were to evolve into a wing of a bird, it would become a bad leg long before it became a good wing.
10. Distinct Types: If evolution happened, one would expect to see gradual transitions among many living things. For example, variations of dogs might blend in with variations of cats. Actually, some animals, such as the duckbilled platypus, have organs completely unrelated to their alleged evolutionary ancestors. The platypus has fur, is warm-blooded, and suckles its young like mammals. It lays leathery eggs, has a single ventral opening (for elimination, mating, and birth), and has claws and a shoulder girdle like most reptiles. The platypus can detect electrical currents (a.c. and d.c.) like some fish, and has a bill like a duck (a bird). It has webbed forefeet like an otter, a flat tail like a beaver, and the male can inject poisonous venom like a pit viper. Such "patchwork" animals and plants, called mosaics, have no logical place on the evolutionary tree.
There is no direct evidence that any major group of animals or plants arose from any other major group. Species are only observed going out of existence (extinctions), never coming into existence.
11. Altruism: Many animals, including humans, will endanger or even sacrifice their lives to save another--sometimes the life of a member of a completely different species. According to evolution theory, natural selection, which supposedly explains all individual characteristics, should eliminate such altruistic, or sacrificial, behavior. How could risky behavior that only benefits another ever be inherited, since its possession tends to prevent the altruistic individual from passing on its genes for altruism? If evolution is correct, selfish behavior should have completely eliminated unselfish behavior. Furthermore, cheating and aggressiveness would have "weeded out" cooperation. Altruism contradicts evolution.
12. Extraterrestrial Life?: No verified form of extraterrestrial life of any kind has ever been observed. If evolution had occurred on earth, one would expect that at least simple forms of life, such as microbes, would have been found by the elaborate experiments sent to the moon and Mars.
13. Languages: Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by capturing and editing the animals' successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer's hidden promptings.)
Chimpanzees have not demonstrated these skills in the wild and do not pass their skills on to other chimpanzees. When a trained chimp dies, so does the trainer's investment. Also, trained chimps have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No evidence exists that language evolves in nonhumans.
Did language evolve in humans? Charles Darwin claimed it did. If so, the earliest languages should be the simplest. On the contrary, language studies reveal that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, and verb form. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler rather than more complex. Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.
14. Speech: Speech is uniquely human. a Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that speech appears to be learned only from other humans. Apparently, humans do not automatically speak. If this is so, the first humans must have been endowed with a speaking ability. There is no evidence that speech has evolved.
15. Codes and Programs: In our experience, codes are produced only by intelligence, not by natural processes or chance. A code is a set of rules for converting information from one useful form to another. Examples include the Morse Code and Braille. The genetic material that controls the physical processes of life is coded information. It also is accompanied by elaborate transmission, translation, and duplication systems, without which the genetic material would be useless, and life would cease. Therefore, it seems most reasonable to conclude that the genetic code, the accompanying transmission, translation, and duplication systems, and all living organisms were produced by an extremely high level of intelligence using nonnatural (or supernatural) processes.
Likewise, no natural process has ever been observed to produce a program. A program is a planned sequence of steps to accomplish some goal. Computer programs are common examples. The information stored in the genetic material of all life is complex program. Since programs are not produced by chance or natural processes, the most probable conclusion is that some intelligent, supernatural source developed these programs.
16. Information: All isolated systems contain specific, but perishable, amounts of information. No isolated, nontrivial system has ever been observed to spontaneously increase its information content. Natural processes, without exception, destroy information. Only outside intelligence can increase the information content of an otherwise isolated system. All scientific observations are consistent with this generalization, which has three corollaries or consequences:
A. Macroevolution cannot occur.
B. Outside intelligence was involved in the creation of the universe and all forms of life. c
C. A "big bang" did not and could not precede life.
The Arguments for Evolution Are Outdated and Often Illogical.
17. A Common Designer: It is illogical to maintain that similarities between different forms of life always imply a common ancestor; they may imply a common designer. In fact, in cases where experiments have shown that similar structures are controlled by different genes or developed from different parts of embryos, a common designer is the more likely explanation.
18. Vestigial Organs: The existence of human organs whose function is unknown does not imply that they are vestiges of organs inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. As medical knowledge has increased, at least some functions of all organs have been discovered. For example, the human appendix was once considered a useless remnant from our evolutionary past. Today it is known that the appendix plays a role in antibody production and protects part of the intestine from infections. Its removal also increases a person's susceptibility to leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, cancer of the colon, and cancer of the ovaries. Indeed, the absence of true vestigial organs implies that evolution never happened.
19. Two-Celled Life? Many single-celled forms of life exist, but there are no known forms of animal life with 2, 3, 4, or 5 cells. a Even the forms of life with 6-20 cells are parasites. They must have a complex animal as a host to provide such functions as digestion and respiration. If macroevolution happened, one should find many forms of life with 2-20 cells as transitional forms between one-celled and many-celled organisms.
20. Embryology: As an embryo develops, it does not repeat an evolutionary sequence. Embryologists no longer consider the superficial similarities that exist between a few embryos and the adult forms of simpler animals as evidence for evolution. It is now known that Ernst Haeckel, who popularized this incorrect but widespread belief, deliberately falsified his drawings.
21. Rapid Burial: Fossils all over the world show evidences of rapid burial. Many fossils, such as fossilized jellyfish, show by the details of their soft, fleshy portions that they were buried rapidly, before they could decay. Many other animals, buried in mass graves and in twisted and contorted positions, suggest violent and rapid burials over large areas. These observations, together with the occurrence of compressed fossils and fossils that cut across two or more layers of sedimentary rock, are strong evidence that the sediments encasing these fossils were deposited rapidly--not over hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, almost all sediments were sorted by water. The worldwide fossil record is, therefore, evidence of the rapid death and burial of animal and plant life by a worldwide, catastrophic flood. The fossil record is not evidence of slow change.
22. Parallel Strata: The earth's sedimentary layers are typically parallel to adjacent layers. Such uniform layers are seen, for example, in the Grand Canyon and in road cuts in mountainous terrain. Had these parallel layers been deposited slowly over thousands of years, erosion would have cut many channels in the topmost layers. Their subsequent burial by other sediments would produce nonparallel patterns. Since parallel layers are the general rule, and the earth's surface erodes rapidly, one can conclude that almost all sedimentary layers were deposited rapidly relative to the local erosion rate--not over long periods of time.
23. Fossil Gaps: If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record. Fossil links are missing between numerous plants, between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates, between invertebrates and vertebrates, between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, between reptiles and birds, between primates and other mammals, and between apes and other primates. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly that it is safe to conclude that these gaps are real; they will never be filled.
24. Missing Trunk: The evolutionary tree has no trunk. In the earliest part of the fossil record (generally the lowest Cambrian sedimentary rock layers), life appears suddenly, full-blown, complex, diversified, and dispersed--worldwide. Complex species, such as fish, worms, corals, trilobites, jellyfish, sponges, mollusks, and brachiopods appear suddenly, with practically no known sign anywhere on earth of gradual development from simpler forms. These layers contain representatives of all plant and animal phyla, including flowering plants, vascular plants, and vertebrates (animals with backbones). Insects, a class comprising four-fifths of all known animals (living and extinct), have no evolutionary ancestors. The fossil record does not support evolution.
25. Out-of-Place Fossils: The vertical sequencing of fossils is frequently not in the assumed evolutionary order. For example, in Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive hoofprints of horses were found in rocks dating back to the dinosaurs. Dinosaur and humanlike footprints have been found together in Turkmenia and in Arizona. Sometimes, land animals, flying animals, and marine animals are fossilized side-by-side in the same rock. Dinosaur, whale, elephant, horse, and many other fossils, plus crude human tools, have reportedly been found in the phosphate beds of South Carolina. In the Grand Canyon, in Venezuela, and in Guyana, spores of ferns and pollen from flowering plants are found in Cambrian and Precambrian rocks--rocks deposited before life supposedly evolved. Coal beds contain round, black lumps called coal balls, some of which contain flowering plants which allegedly evolved 100 million years after the coal bed was formed. A leading authority on the Grand Canyon even published photographs of horselike hoofprints visible in rocks that, according to the theory of evolution, predate hoofed animals by more than a hundred million years. Similar hoofprints are alongside 1000 dinosaur footprints in Virginia.
Petrified trees in the petrified forest of Arizona contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are supposedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants which bees require) supposedly evolved 140 million years later. Most evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.
26. Ape-Men?: Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated. It is now universally acknowledged that Piltdown man was a hoax, and yet, it was in textbooks for more than forty years. Prior to 1978, the evidence for Ramapithecus consisted of a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. It is now known that these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakey and others in a form resembling part of the human jaw. Ramapithecus was just an ape. The only evidence for Nebraska man turned out to be a pig's tooth. Eugene Dubois conceded forty years after he discovered Java "man" that it was just a large gibbon. Dubois also admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thigh bones of apes, found in the same area, which supported that conclusion. The skulls of Peking man are considered by many experts to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man. The classification Homo erectus is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created. The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis have recently been discovered. They show that this animal clearly had apelike proportions i and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo). The Australopithecines, which were made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are quite distinct from humans. Several detailed computer studies of the Australopithecines have shown that their bodily proportions were not intermediate between man and living apes. Another study of their inner ear bones, that were used to maintain balance, showed a striking similarity with those of chimpanzees and gorillas, but great differences with those of humans. One Australopithecine fossil--a 3-foot-tall, long-armed, 60-pound adult called Lucy--was initially presented as evidence that all Australopithecines walked upright in a human manner. However, studies of Lucy's entire anatomy, not just a knee joint, now show that this is very unlikely. She probably swung from the trees and was similar to pigmy chimpanzees. The Australopithecines are probably an extinct ape. For about 100 years the world was led to believe that Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. Recent studies show that this erroneous belief was based upon some Neanderthals who were crippled with bone diseases such as arthritis and rickets. Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man were completely human. Artists' depictions of them, especially of their fleshy portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence. Furthermore, the techniques used to date these fossils are highly questionable.
27. Fossil Man: Bones of many modern-looking humans have been found deep in rocks that, according to evolution, were formed long before man began to evolve. Examples include the Calaveras skull, the Castenedolo skeletons, Reck's skeleton, and many others. Other remains, such as the Swanscombe skull, the Steinheim fossil, and the VertesszÖllos fossil, present similar problems. These remains are almost always ignored by evolutionists.
Supporting Conclusion: Life Is So Complex That Chance Processes, Even With Billions of Years, Cannot Explain Its Origin.
28. Chemical Elements of Life: The chemical evolution of life, as you will see in the next few pages, is ridiculously improbable. What could improve the odds? One should begin with an earth having high concentrations of the key elements comprising life, such as: carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. However, the closer one examines these elements, the more unlikely the evolution of life appears.
Carbon. The rocks that supposedly preceded life have very little carbon. One must imagine a strange, almost unreasonably carbon-rich atmosphere to supply the needed carbon. For comparison, today's atmosphere only holds only 1/30,000th of the carbon that has been on the earth's surface since life first appeared.
Oxygen. Did the early earth have oxygen in its atmosphere? If it did, the compounds (called amino acids) needed for life to evolve would have been destroyed by oxidation. But if there had been no oxygen, there would have been no ozone in the upper atmosphere, since ozone is simply a form of oxygen. Without ozone to shield the earth, the sun's ultraviolet radiation would destroy life. The only known way for both ozone and life to be here is for both to come into existence simultaneously--in other words, by creation.
Nitrogen. Nitrogen is easily absorbed by clay and various rocks. Had millions of years passed before life evolved, the sediments that preceded life should be filled with nitrogen. Searches have never located such sediments.
Supporting Conclusion: Basic chemistry does not support the evolution of life.
29. Proteins: Living matter is composed largely of proteins--long chains of amino acids. Since 1930, it has been known that amino acids cannot join together if oxygen is present. In other words, proteins could not have evolved from chance chemical reactions if the atmosphere contained oxygen. However, the chemistry of the earth's rocks, both on land and below ancient seas, shows that the earth had oxygen before the earliest fossils formed. Even earlier, oxygen would have been produced by solar radiation breaking water vapor apart into oxygen and hydrogen. Then some hydrogen, the lightest of all chemical elements, would have escaped into outer space, leaving behind oxygen.
To form proteins, amino acids must also be highly concentrated. However, the early oceans or atmosphere would have diluted amino acids to the point where the required collisions between them would rarely occur. Besides, amino acids do not naturally link up to form proteins. Instead, proteins tend to break down into amino acids. Furthermore, the proposed energy sources for forming proteins (the earth's heat, electrical discharges, or the sun's radiation) destroy the protein products thousands of times faster than they could have formed. The many attempts to show how life might have arrived on earth have only demonstrated the futility of the effort, the immense complexity of even the simplest life, and the need for a vast intelligence to precede life.
30. The First Cell: If, despite the virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance processes, there is not the remotest reason to believe that they could ever form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, metabolizing, living cell. a There is no evidence that there are any stable states between the assumed naturalistic formation of proteins and the formation of the first living cells. No scientist has ever advanced a testable procedure by which this fantastic jump in complexity could have occurred--even if the entire universe had been filled with proteins. b
31. Barriers, Buffers, and Chemical Pathways: Living cells contain thousands of different chemicals, some acidic, others basic. Many chemicals would react with others were it not for an intricate system of chemical barriers and buffers. If living things evolved, these barriers and buffers must have also evolved--but at just the right time to prevent harmful chemical reactions. How could such precise, almost miraculous, events have happened for each of the many millions of species?
All living organisms are maintained by thousands of chemical pathways, each involving a long series of complex chemical reactions. For example, the clotting of blood, which involves twenty to thirty steps, is absolutely vital to help heal a wound. However, clotting could be fatal, if it happened inside the body. Omitting one of the many steps, inserting an unwanted step, or altering the timing of a step would probably cause death. If one thing goes wrong, all the other marvelous steps that were performed flawlessly were in vain. Apparently, these complex pathways were created as an intricate, highly integrated unit.
32. Genetic Distances: Techniques now exist for measuring the degree of similarity between forms of life. These "genetic distances" are calculated by taking a specific protein and examining the sequence of its components. The fewer changes required to convert a protein of one organism into the corresponding protein of another organism, supposedly the closer their relationship. Similar comparisons can now be made between the genetic material (DNA and RNA) of different organisms. The results of these studies seriously contradict the theory of evolution. a There is not a trace of evidence at the molecular level for the traditional evolutionary series: simple sea life-->fish-->amphibians-->reptiles-->mammals. Each category of organism appears to be almost equally isolated. One computer-based study, using cytochrome c, a protein used in energy production, compared 47 different forms of life. If evolution happened, this study should have found that, for example, the rattlesnake was most closely related to other reptiles. Instead, based on this one protein, the rattlesnake was most similar to man. Since this study, hundreds of similar contradictions have been discovered.
33. Genetic Information: The genetic information contained in each cell of the human body is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books. The probability that mutations and natural selection produced this vast amount of information, even if matter and life somehow arose, is essentially zero. It would be analogous to continuing the following procedure until 4,000 books have been produced:
Start with a meaningful phrase.
Retype the phrase, but make some errors and insert some additional letters.
Examine the new phrase to see if it is meaningful.
If it is, replace the original phrase with it.
Return to step "b."
To accumulate 4,000 books of meaningful information, this procedure would have to produce the equivalent of far more than 10 40,000th power of animal offspring. (Just to begin to understand how large 10 40,000 is, realize that the visible universe has less than 10 80 atoms in it.)
34. DNA Production: To produce DNA, a cell requires more than 75 different types of proteins. But these proteins, in turn, are produced only at the direction of DNA. Since each requires the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the other. Apparently, this entire manufacturing system came into existence simultaneously. This implies creation.
35. Handedness: Left and Right: Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides. In living things, nucleotides are always "right-handed." (They were initially named "right-handed" because a beam of polarized light passing through them rotated like a right-handed screw.) Nucleotides rarely form outside of life, but when they do, half are left-handed, and half are right-handed. In other words, nucleotides that might have formed before life appeared on earth would be unsuitable for the evolution of life's genetic material.
Each type of amino acid, when found in nonliving material or when synthesized in the laboratory, comes in two chemically equivalent forms. Half are right-handed and half are left-handed--mirror images of each other. However, the amino acids in life, including plants, animals, bacteria, molds, and even viruses, are essentially all left-handed. No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or the right-handed variety. The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero.
A similar observation can be made concerning a special class of organic compounds called "sugars." In living systems, sugars are all right-handed. Based on our present understanding, natural processes produce equal proportions of left-handed and right-handed sugars. Since the sugars in living things are almost all right-handed, our present understanding leads to the conclusion that random natural processes did not produce life.
If any living thing took in (or ate) amino acids or sugars that had the wrong handedness, the organism's body could not process it. Such food would be useless. Since evolution favors slight variations that enhance survivability and produce more offspring, consider just how advantageous a mutation might be that switched (or inverted) a plant's handedness. "Inverted" (or wrong-handed) trees would proliferate rapidly since they would no longer provide nourishment to bacteria, mold, or termites. "Inverted" forests would fill the continents. Other "inverted" plants and animals would also benefit and would overwhelm the balance of nature. Why do we not see such species with right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars? Similarly, why are there not more poisonous plants? Why doesn't any beneficial mutation permit its carriers to swamp most other species? Apparently, beneficial mutations are rarer than evolutionists believe.
36. Improbabilities: The simplest conceivable form of single-celled life should have at least 600 different protein molecules. The mathematical probability that only one molecule could form by the chance arrangement of the proper sequence of amino acids is far less than 1 in 10 450th power. (The magnitude of the number 10 to the 450th power can begin to be appreciated by realizing that the visible universe is about 10 to the 28th power of inches in diameter.)
37. Symbiotic Relationships: Many different forms of life are completely dependent upon each other. Examples include fig trees and the fig gall wasp, a the yucca plant and the yucca moth, many parasites and their hosts, and pollen-bearing plants and the honeybee. Even the members of the honeybee family, consisting of the queen, workers, and drones, are interdependent. If one member of each interdependent group evolved first (such as the plant before the animal, or one member of the honeybee family before the others), it could not have survived. Since all members of the group obviously have survived, they must have come into existence at essentially the same time. In other words, creation.
38. Sexual Reproduction: If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, an absolutely unbelievable series of chance events must have occurred at each stage. The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have completely and independently evolved at each stage at about the same time and place.
Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reproductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct. The physical, chemical, and emotional systems of the male and female would also need to be compatible. The millions of complex products of a male reproductive system (pollen or sperm) must have an affinity for and a mechanical, chemical, and electrical compatibility with the eggs of the female reproductive system. The many intricate processes occurring at the molecular level inside the fertilized egg would have to work with fantastic precision--processes that scientists can only describe in a general sense. The environment of this fertilized egg, from conception through adulthood and until it also reproduced with another sexually capable adult (who also "accidentally" evolved), would have to be tightly controlled. Millions of species must have had a similar string of remarkable "accidents." Either this series of incredible and complementary events occurred by random, evolutionary processes, or else, an intelligent designer created sexual reproduction.
Furthermore, if sexual reproduction evolved, the steps by which an embryo becomes either a male or a female should be similar for all animals. Actually, these steps vary among the different animals. Finally, evolutionary theory predicts that nature would select asexual rather than sexual reproduction. But if asexual reproduction (the splitting of an organism into two identical organisms) evolved before sexual reproduction, how did complex sexual diversity arise or survive? Evolution cannot explain it.
39. Immune Systems: How could immune systems of animals and plants have evolved? Each immune system can recognize invading bacteria, viruses, and toxins. Each system can quickly mobilize just the right type of defenders to search out and destroy these invaders. Each system has a memory and learns from every attack.
If the many instructions that direct an animal's or plant's immune system were not already programmed into the organism's genetic system when it first appeared on the earth, the first of thousands of potential infections would have destroyed the organism. This would have nullified any rare genetic improvements that might have accumulated. In other words, the large amount of genetic information governing the immune system could not have accumulated in a slow, evolutionary sense. Obviously, for the organism to have survived, this information must have all been there from the beginning. Again, creation.
40. Living Technology: Most complex phenomena known to science are found in living systems--including electrical, acoustical, mechanical, chemical, and optical phenomena. Detailed studies of various animals have also revealed certain physical equipment and capabilities that cannot even be copied by the world's best designers using the most sophisticated technologies. Examples of these designs include the miniature and reliable sonar systems of dolphins, porpoises, and whales; the frequency-modulated radar and discrimination system of the bat; the aerodynamic capabilities and efficiency of the hummingbird; the control systems, internal ballistics, and combustion chamber of the bombardier beetle; the precise and redundant navigational systems of many birds and fish; and especially the self-repair capabilities of practically all forms of life. Each component of these complex systems could not have evolved without placing the organism at a selective disadvantage. All evidence points to a Designer.
Many bacteria, such as Salmonella , Escherichia coli , and some Streptococci , propel themselves with a miniature motor at up to 15 body-lengths per second. These extremely efficient, reversible motors rotate up to 100,000 revolutions per minute. d Each shaft rotates a bundle of whiplike flagella that act as a propeller. The motors, having rotors and stators, are similar in many respects to electrical motors. The electrical charges come from a flow of protons, not electrons. Several million dollars per year are being spent, primarily in Japan, trying to learn how these motors work. Since the bacteria can stop, start, and change directions and speeds, they probably have sophisticated sensors, switches, and control mechanisms. All of this is highly miniaturized. Eight million of these bacterial motors would fit in the circular cross-section of an average human hair. Evolutionary theory teaches that bacteria were one of the first forms of life to evolve, and therefore, they are simple. While bacteria are small, they are not simple.
41. The Validity of Thought: If life is ultimately the result of random processes or chance, then so is thought. Your thoughts--including what you are thinking now--would, in the final analysis, be a consequence of a long series of accidents. Therefore, your thoughts would have no validity, including the thought that life is a result of chance, or natural, processes. By destroying the validity of ideas, evolution undercuts even the idea of evolution.
We have all heard it said that humans use only a small fraction of their mental abilities. If this is true, how could such unused abilities have evolved? Certainly not by natural selection, since those capabilities are not used.
2) Astronomical and Physical Sciences:
Overall Conclusion: The Universe, the Solar System, the Earth, and Life Were Recently Created.
Supporting Conclusion: Naturalistic Explanations for the Evolution of the Solar System and Universe Are Unscientific and Hopelessly Inadequate.
42. Strange Planets: Many undisputed observations contradict the current theories on how the Solar System evolved. One theory says planets formed when a star, passing near our sun, tore matter from the sun. More popular theories hold that the Solar System formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, or larger particles. If the planets and their 63 known moons evolved from the same material, they should have many similarities. After several decades of planetary exploration, this expectation is now recognized as false. According to these evolutionary theories:
Backward-Spinning Planets. All Planets should spin in the same direction, but Venus, Uranus, and Pluto rotate backwards.
Backward Orbits. All 63 moons in the Solar System should orbit their planets in the same sense, but at least six have backward orbits. Furthermore, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune have moons orbiting in both directions.
Inclined Orbits. The orbit of each of these 63 moons should lie in the equatorial plane of the planet it orbits, but many, including the earth's moon, are in highly inclined orbits.
Hydrogen and Helium. Since about 98% of the sun is hydrogen or helium, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury should have similar compositions. Instead, much less than 1% of these planets is hydrogen or helium.
Angular Momentum. The sun should have 700 times more angular momentum than all the planets combined. Instead, the planets have 50 times more angular momentum than the sun.
43. Molten Earth?:If the earth formed by gravitational accretion (the infalling of small rocky bodies), heat released by the impacts would have made the earth molten. Had the earth ever been molten, dense, nonreactive chemical elements such as gold, which is almost twice as dense as lead, would have sunk to the earth's core. Since gold is found at the earth's surface , the earth was never molten and it did not evolve by gravitational accretion. If the earth did not evolve by gravitational accretion, it may have begun in nearly its present state.
44. Evolving Planets?: Contrary to popular opinion, planets should not form from the mutual gravitational attraction of particles orbiting the sun. Orbiting particles are much more likely to be scattered or expelled by their gravitational interactions than they are to be pulled together. Experiments have shown that colliding particles are much more likely to fragment than to stick together. Similar comments can be made concerning the improbability that particles orbiting a planet will ever grow into a moon. This is why the particles in the rings of Saturn, Jupiter, and Uranus show no evidence of clumping into larger bodies.
Despite these problems, let us assume that pebble-size to moon-size particles somehow evolved. "Growing a planet" by many small collisions will produce an almost nonspinning planet, since the spins imparted by impacts will be largely self-cancelling. All planets spin, some much more than others.
Growing a large, gaseous planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune) far from the central star, is especially difficult for evolutionists to explain for several reasons.
Gases dissipate rapidly in the vacuum of outer space, especially the lightest two gases--hydrogen and helium, which comprise most of the giant planets.
Because gas molecules orbiting a star do not gravitationally pull in other gas molecules, a rocky planet, several times larger than the earth, must first form to attract all the gas gravitationally. (The hydrogen and helium on Jupiter are more than 300 times as massive as the earth.) This must happen very quickly, before the gas dissipates.
Stars like our sun--even those which evolutionists say are young--do not have enough orbiting hydrogen or helium to form one Jupiter.
Based on demonstratable science, gaseous planets and the rest of the solar system did not evolve.
45. Origin of the Moon: Naturalistic theories on the moon's origin are highly speculative and completely inadequate. The moon did not spin off the earth, nor did it congeal from the same material as the earth since its orbital plane is too inclined. Furthermore, the relative abundances of its elements are too dissimilar from those of the earth. The moon's nearly circular orbit is also strong evidence that it was never torn from, nor captured by, the earth. If the moon formed from particles orbiting the earth, other particles should be easily visible inside the moon's orbit; none are. If the moon was not pulled or splashed from the earth, was not built up from smaller particles near its present orbit, and was not captured from outside its present orbit, only one hypothesis remains; the moon was created in its present orbit.
46. Evolution of the Solar System?: Evolutionists claim the solar system condensed out of a vast cloud of swirling dust about 4.6 billion years ago. Many particles that were not swept up as part of a planet would have then begun a gradual spiral in toward the sun. Colliding asteroids also would create dust particles that, over millions of years, would spiral in toward the sun. Particles should still be falling into the sun's upper atmosphere, burning up, and giving off an easily measured, infrared glow. Measurements taken during the solar eclipse of 11 July 1991, showed no such glow. Therefore, the assumed "millions of years" and this explanation for the origin of the solar system are probably wrong.
47. Mountains of Venus: Venus must have a strong crust to support its extremely high, dense mountains. One mountain, Maat Mons, rises higher than Earth's Mount Everest does above sea level. Since Venus is relatively near the sun, its atmosphere is 900°F--so hot that its surface rocks must be weak or "tarlike." (Lead melts at 622°F and zinc at 787°F.) Only if the subsurface rocks are cold and strong can these mountains defy gravity. This allows us to draw two conclusions, both of which contradict major evolutionary assumptions.
First, evolutionists assume that planets grew (evolved) by rocky debris falling from outer space, a process called gravitational accretion . The heat generated by the impacts of a planet's worth of projectiles would have left the inner planets molten. However, Venus was never molten. Had it been, its hot atmosphere would have prevented its subsurface rocks from cooling enough to support its mountains. Therefore, Venus did not evolve by gravitational accretion.
Secondly, evolutionists believe the entire solar system is billions of years old. If Venus were billions of years old, its atmospheric heat would have soaked deeply enough into the planet to weaken its subsurface rocks. Not only could Venus' crust not support mountains, the hot mountains them-selves could not maintain their steep slopes.
48. Space, Time, and Matter: No scientific theory exists to explain the origin of space, time, or matter. Since each is intimately related to or even defined in terms of the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the others. Naturalistic explanations have completely failed.
49. First Law of Thermodynamics: The first law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe, or in any isolated part of it, remains constant. It further states that although energy (or its mass equivalent) can change form, it is not now being created or destroyed. Countless experiments have verified this. A corollary of the first law is that natural processes cannot create energy. Consequently, energy must have been created in the past by some agency or power outside and independent of the natural universe. Furthermore, if natural processes cannot produce the relatively simple inorganic portion of the universe, then it is even less likely that natural processes can explain the much more complex organic (or living) portion of the universe.
50. Second Law of Thermodynamics: If the entire universe is an isolated system, then, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the energy in the universe that is available for useful work has always been decreasing. However, as one goes back in time, the amount of energy available for useful work would eventually exceed the total energy in the universe that, according to the first law of thermodynamics, remains constant. This is an impossible condition, thus implying that the universe had a beginning.
51. A Beginning: Heat always flows from hot bodies to cold bodies. If the universe were infinitely old, the temperature throughout the universe should be uniform. Since the temperature of the universe is not uniform, the universe is not infinitely old. Therefore, the universe had a beginning.
52. Decay: A further consequence of the second law is that when the universe began, it was more organized and complex than it is today--not in a highly disorganized and random state as assumed by evolutionists and proponents of the big bang theory.
53. Big Bang?: Three observations led to the general acceptance of the big bang theory: the cosmic background radiation (CBR), the amount of helium in the universe, and the redshift of distant starlight. All three have been poorly understood.
CBR. All matter radiates heat, regardless of its temperature. Everywhere astronomers look, they can detect an extremely uniform radiation, called the cosmic background radiation (CBR). It appears to come from perfectly radiating matter whose temperature is 2.73 K--nearly absolute zero. The CBR was initially thought to be left over from the big bang. Many incorrectly believe that the big bang theory predicted this radiation.
Since the CBR is so uniform, the matter from which it originated must have been spread uniformly throughout the universe. But if matter was uniformly distributed, it would hardly gravitate in any direction; even after tens of billions of years, galaxies would not evolve. Since the matter in the universe is highly concentrated into galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters, the CBR does not appear to be a remnant of a big bang.
Helium. The amount of helium in the universe is not explained by the big bang theory; the theory was adjusted to fit the amount of helium. Ironically, the lack of helium in certain types of stars (B type stars) and the presence of beryllium in other stars contradicts the theory.
Redshift. The redshift of distant starlight is usually interpreted as a Doppler effect; namely, stars and galaxies are moving away from the earth, stretching out (or reddening) the wave lengths of light we see. While this may be true, other possible explanations do not involve an expanding universe. Besides, many objects with high redshifts seem connected, or associated, with other objects of low redshifts. They could not be traveling at such different velocities and be connected for long. For example, many quasars have very high redshifts, and yet they statistically cluster with galaxies having low redshifts. Sometimes, quasars appear to be connected to galaxies by threads of gas. Finally, redshifted light from galaxies has some strange features that are inconsistent with the Doppler effect. If redshifts are from objects moving away from the earth, one would expect the amount of redshifting to take on continuous values. Instead, redshifts tend to cluster at specific, evenly-spaced values. Much remains to be learned about redshifts.
A big bang should neither produce highly concentrated nor rotating bodies. Galaxies are examples of both. A large volume of the universe should not be--but apparently is--moving sideways, almost perpendicular to the direction of expansion. A big bang would, for all practical purposes, only produce hydrogen and helium. Therefore, the first generation of stars to somehow form after a big bang should consist of only hydrogen and helium. Some of these stars should still exist, but none can be found. These observations make it doubtful that a big bang occurred.
If a big bang occurred, what caused the bang? Stars with enough mass become black holes, so not even light can escape their enormous gravity. How then could anything escape the trillions upon trillions of times greater gravity caused by concentrating all the mass in the universe in a "cosmic egg" that existed before a big bang?
If the big bang theory is correct, one can calculate the age of the universe. This age turns out to be younger than objects in the universe whose ages were based on other evolutionary theories. Since this is logically impossible, one or both sets of theories must be incorrect.
54. Missing Mass: Imagine seeing several rocks in outer space, moving radially away from the earth. If the rocks were simultaneously blasted away from the earth, their masses, changing velocities, and distances from the earth would have a very precise relationship with each other. When a similar relationship is checked for billions of observable galaxies, an obvious conclusion is that these galaxies did not explode from a common point in a huge "big bang." It is even more obvious that if such an explosion occurred, it must have been much, much less than billions of years ago.
Evolutionists try to fix this problem in two ways. They think the universe is filled with at least ten times as much matter as can be seen. This is maintained even though two decades of searching for this hidden mass has turned up nothing other than the conclusion that the needed "missing mass" does not exist.
A second "fix attempt" assumes that the rocks (or in the real problem, all the particles in the universe) were briefly, almost magically, accelerated away from some point. Supposedly, this matter reached speeds trillions of billions of times faster than the speed of light by an unknown, untestable phenomenon--not by a blast. Then this matter became controlled by gravity after it reached just the right speed to give it an apparent age of about 10 billion years. Such flights of imagination and speculation are common in the field of cosmology.
55. Interstellar Gas: Detailed analyses indicate that neither stars nor planets could form from interstellar gas clouds. To do so, either by first forming dust particles or by direct gravitational collapse of the gas, would require vastly more time than the alleged age of the universe. An obvious alternative is that stars and planets were created.
56. Fast Binaries: Perhaps half of all stars are grouped in closely spaced pairs called " binaries." Fortunately, our sun does not have a binary partner. If it did, the wide range of temperatures on earth would probably not permit life. The mutual gravitational attraction between a binary pair of stars causes them to orbit each other, just as the moon orbits the earth. The closer the paired stars are, the more rapidly they orbit. Distances between a binary pair should not change appreciably, even over long periods of time.
Two particular stars have been found so close together that they orbit each other every eleven minutes! This implies that their centers are about 80,000 miles apart. By way of comparison, our sun, which is a typical star, is more than 800,000 miles in diameter. There are other close binaries.
The theory of stellar evolution was developed by arranging (on paper) different types of stars in a sequence according to their brightness and color. Stellar evolutionists believe that stars slowly change from one type to another. However, scientists have never observed such changes, and some stars do not fit this pattern. According to stellar evolution, the volume of each star, late in its lifetime, expands to about a million times that of our sun. Finally, it supposedly collapses and becomes a small star about the size of the earth (a white dwarf) or even smaller (a neutron star).
Only such tiny stars could have their centers 80,000 miles apart and still orbit each other. Obviously, they did not evolve from larger stars, since larger stars orbiting so closely would collide. If two stars cannot evolve into a condition that has them orbiting each other every eleven minutes, one wonders whether stars evolve at all.
57. Star Births?: If stars evolve, star births should about equal star deaths. The deaths of many stars are bright and sudden events called "supernovas." Similarly, the birth of a star should be accompanied by the appearance of new star light when compared with the many photographic plates made decades earlier. Instruments, which could detect dust falling into and forming supposedly new stars, have not done so. Actually, the stars that some astronomers believe are very new are expelling matter. We have never seen a star born, but we have seen hundreds of stars die. There is no evidence that stars evolve, nor are there any sound scientific explanations for how they could evolve.
58. Stellar Evolution?: Stellar evolution is assumed in estimating the age of stars. These age estimates are then used to establish a framework for stellar evolution. This is circular reasoning.
59. O Stars: The most luminous stars in our galaxy (the so-called "O" stars) are "burning fuel" hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our sun. This is so rapid that they must be quite young on an evolutionary time scale. If these stars did evolve, they should show easily measurable characteristics such as extremely high rates of rotation and enormous magnetic fields. Since these characteristics are not observed, it seems quite likely these stars did not evolve.
60. Galaxies: There are good reasons why natural processes cannot form galaxies and why galaxies cannot evolve from one type to another. Furthermore, if spiral galaxies were billions of years old, their arms or bars would be severely twisted. Since they have maintained their shape, either galaxies are young, or unknown physical phenomena are occurring within galaxies. Even structures composed of galaxies are now known to be so amazingly large, and yet relatively thin, that they could not have formed by slow gravitational attraction. If slow, natural processes cannot form such huge galactic structures, then rapid, supernatural processes may have.
Supporting Conclusion: Techniques That Argue for an Old Earth Are Either Illogical or Are Based on Unreasonable Assumptions.
61. Hidden Assumptions: To estimate a date prior to the beginning of written records, one must assume the dating clock has operated at a known rate, the initial setting of the clock is known, and the clock has not been disturbed. These three assumptions are almost always unstated, overlooked, or invalid.
62. Corals and Caves: Estimated old ages for the earth are frequently based on "clocks" that today are ticking at very slow rates. For example, coral growth rates were for many years thought to be very slow, implying that some coral reefs must be hundreds of thousands of years old. More accurate measurements of these rates under favorable growth conditions now show us that no known coral formation need be older than 3,400 years. A similar comment can be made for the growth rates of stalactites and stalagmites in caves.
63. Constant Decay?:A major assumption that underlies all radioactive dating techniques is that the rates of decay, which have been essentially constant over the past 90 years, have also been constant over the past 4,600,000,000 years. This bold, critical, and untestable assumption is made, even though no one knows what causes radioactive decay. Furthermore, two lines of evidence suggest radioactive decay was once much greater than it is today.
64. Radiometric Contradictions: The public has been greatly misled concerning the consistency and trustworthiness of radiometric dating techniques (the potassium-argon method, the rubidium--strontium method, and the uranium-thorium-lead method). For example, geologists hardly ever subject their radiometric age measurements to "blind tests." In science, such tests are a standard procedure for overcoming experimenter bias. Many published radiometric dates can be checked by comparisons with the assumed ages for the fossils that sometimes lie above, or below, radiometrically dated rock. In more than 400 of these published checks (about half of those sampled), the radiometrically determined ages were at least one geologic age in error--indicating major errors in methodology. One wonders how many other dating checks were not even published because they, too, were in error.
65. Index Fossils: In the early 1800s, some observers in Western Europe noticed that certain fossils are usually preserved in sedimentary layers that, when traced laterally, typically lie above other types of fossils. Decades later, after the theory of evolution was proposed, it was concluded that the upper organism must have evolved after the lower organism. These early geologists did not realize that there were hydrodynamically sound reasons why, during the flood, the organisms were sorted in that order. Geologic ages were then associated with each of these "index fossils." Those ages were extended to similar animals and plants based on the faulty reasoning that they must have evolved at about the same time since they were similar. Today, geologic formations are almost always dated by their fossil content--which, as stated above, assumes evolution. Yet, evolution is supposedly shown by the sequence of fossils. This reasoning is circular. Furthermore, it has produced many contradictory results.
66. Geologic Column: Practically nowhere on the earth can one find the so-called "geologic column." At most places on the continents, over half the "geologic periods" are missing. Only 15-20% of the earth's land surface has even one-third of these periods in the correct consecutive order. Even within the Grand Canyon, more than 150 million years of this imaginary column are missing. Using the assumed geologic column to date fossils and rocks is fallacious.
67. Old DNA: When an animal or plant dies, its DNA begins decomposing. Before 1990, almost no one believed that DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years. This limit was based on measuring DNA disintegration rates in well-preserved specimens of known age such as Egyptian mummies. DNA has now been reported in magnolia leaves that evolutionists claim are 17 million years old. Fragments of DNA are also claimed to be in alleged 80 million-year-old dinosaur bones buried in a coal bed and in the scales of a 200 million-year-old fossilized fish. DNA is frequently reported in amber encased insects and plants that are supposedly 25-120 million years old. All this has forced evolutionists to reexamine the 10,000-year limit.
They now claim that DNA can be preserved longer if conditions are dryer, colder, and freer of oxygen, bacteria, and background radiation. The measured disintegration rates of DNA, apparently under these more ideal conditions, do not support this. Therefore, the previously measured rates were probably not several thousand times in error. If, as is likely, such a huge error is not found, then the method for arriving at those million-year ages needs reexamining.
Evolutionists have a similar problem with the protein preserved in dinosaur bones. As with DNA, no proteins should last 75-150 million years, as is claimed for those bones. The best evidence suggests that these plant and animal remains are not as old as evolutionists believe.
68. Human Artifacts: At various times and places, man-made objects have been found encased in coal. Examples include a thimble, an iron pot, an iron instrument, an 8-carat gold chain, and a metallic vessel inlaid with silver. Many other "out of place artifacts" have been found inside deeply buried rocks: nails, a screw, a strange coin, a clay figurine, a strange hammer, and other objects of obvious human manufacture. By evolutionary dating techniques, these objects would be hundreds of millions of years older than man. Again, something is wrong.
69. Humanlike Footprints: Humanlike footprints, supposedly 150-600 million years old, have been found in rock formations in Utah, Kentucky, Missouri, and possibly Pennsylvania. At Laetoli, in the east African country of Tanzania, a team headed by Mary Leakey found a sequence of apparently modern human footprints. They were dated at 3.7 million years. If human feet made any of these prints, then evolutionary chronology is drastically wrong.
70. Parallel Layers: Since no worldwide or even continental unconformity exists in the earth's sedimentary layers, those layers must have been deposited rapidly. (An unconformity represents a time break of unknown duration--for example, an erosional surface between two adjacent strata.) Parallel layers (called conformities) imply that the deposition was continuous and rapid. Since unconformities are simply local phenomena, one can trace continuous paths from the bottom to the top of the geologic record that avoid these time breaks. The sedimentary layers along those paths must have been deposited rapidly and continuously as a unit.
Frequently, two adjacent and parallel sedimentary layers contain such different index fossils that evolutionists conclude that they were deposited hundreds of millions of years apart. However, since the adjacent layers are conformable, the layers must have been deposited without interruption or erosion. Often, in an apparently undisturbed sequence, the layer considered older by evolutionists is on top! (See " Out-of-Place Fossils ") The evolutionary dating rules are self-contradictory.
Supporting Conclusion: Most Dating Techniques Indicate That the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe Are Young.
For the last 130 years the age of the earth, as assumed by evolutionists, has been doubling at a rate of once every 20 years. In fact since 1900, their estimate of its age has multiplied by a factor of 100! Evolution requires an old earth, an old solar system, and an old universe. Nearly all informed evolutionists will admit that without billions of years their theory is dead. Yet, by hiding the "origins question" behind a vast veil of time, the unsolvable problems of evolution become difficult for scientists to see and laymen to imagine. Our media and textbooks have implied for over a century that this almost unimaginable age is correct, but rarely do they examine the shaky assumptions and growing body of contrary evidence. Therefore, most people instinctively believe the earth and universe are old, and are disturbed (at least initially) to hear contrary evidence. Actually, most dating techniques indicate that the earth and solar system are young--possibly less than 10,000 years old. Here are some of these points of evidence.
71. Helium: The radioactive decay of only uranium and thorium would produce all of the atmosphere's helium in only 40,000 years. No known means exists by which large amounts of helium can escape from the atmosphere, even when considering helium's low atomic weight. The atmosphere appears to be young.
72. Lead and Helium Diffusion: Lead diffuses (or leaks) from zircon crystals at known rates that increase with temperature. Since these crystals are found at different depths in the earth, those at greater depths and temperatures should have less lead. Even if the earth's crust is just a fraction of the age claimed by evolutionists, measurable differences in the lead content of zircons should exist throughout the top 4,000 meters. Instead, no measurable difference is found. Similar conclusions are reached from a study of the helium contained in these same zircon crystals. In fact, these helium studies lead to a conclusion that the earth's crust is less than 10,000 years old.
73. Excess Fluid Pressure: Abnormally high oil, gas, and water pressures exist within relatively permeable rock. If these fluids had been trapped more than 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, leakage would have dropped the pressure far below what it is today. This oil, gas, and water must have been trapped suddenly and recently.
74. Volcanic Debris: Volcanoes are ejecting almost a cubic mile of material into the atmosphere each year. This is so rapid that if the rate were constant, about 10 times the entire volume of the earth's sediments should be produced in 4.6 billion years. Actually, only about 25% of the earth's sediments are of volcanic origin, and many volcanic deposits show much greater volcanic activity in the past. No means have been proposed which can remove or transform all of this volcanic material. The earth's sediments, therefore, appear to be much younger than 4.6 billion years old.
75. River Sediments: More than 27 billion tons of river sediments are entering the oceans each year. Probably, the rate of sediment transport was even greater in the past as the looser topsoil was removed and as erosion smoothed out the earth's terrain. Even if erosion has been constant, the sediments now on the ocean floor would have accumulated in only 30 million years. No process has been proposed which can remove 27 billion tons of ocean sediments each year. Therefore, the oceans cannot be hundreds of millions of years old.
76. Continental Erosion: The continents are eroding at a rate that would level them in much less than 25 million years. However, evolutionists believe that fossils of animals and plants at high elevations have somehow avoided this erosion for more than 300 million years. Something is wrong.
77. Dissolved Metals: The rate at which elements such as copper, gold, lead, mercury, nickel, silicon, sodium, tin, and uranium are entering the oceans is very rapid when compared with the small quantities of these elements already in the oceans. There is no known means by which large amounts of these elements can come out of solution. Therefore, the oceans must be much younger than a million years.
78. Shallow Meteorites: Meteorites are steadily falling onto the earth. This rate was much probably greater in the past since planets have swept much of the original meteoritic material from the solar system. Experts have, therefore, expressed surprise that meteorites are found only in young sediments very near the earth's surface. Even meteoritic particles in ocean sediments are concentrated in the topmost layers. If the earth's sediments, which average about a mile in thickness on the continents, were deposited over hundreds of millions of years, as evolutionists believe, many iron meteorites should be buried well below the earth's surface. Since this is not the case, the sediments appear to have been deposited rapidly. Furthermore, since no meteorites are found immediately above the basement rocks on which these sediments rest, these basement rocks could not have been exposed to meteoritic bombardment for any great length of time.
Similar observations can be made concerning ancient rock slides. Rock slides are frequently found on the earth's surface, but are generally absent from supposedly old rock.
79. Meteoritic Dust: Meteoritic dust is accumulating on the earth so fast that, after four billion years, the equivalent of more than 16 feet of this dust should have accumulated. Because this dust is high in nickel, the earth's crust should have an abundance of nickel. No such concentration has been found on land or in the oceans. Consequently, the earth appears to be young.
80. Magnetic Decay: Direct measurements of the earth's magnetic field over the past 140 years show a steady and rapid decline in its strength. This decay pattern is consistent with the theoretical view that there is an electrical current inside the earth which produces the magnetic field. If this is correct, then just 20,000 years ago the electrical current would have been so vast that the earth's structure could not have survived the heat produced. This implies that the earth could not be older than 20,000 years.
81. Rapid Cooling: If the earth was initially molten, it would have cooled to its present condition in much less than 4.6 billion years. This conclusion holds even if one makes liberal assumptions about the amount of heat generated by radioactive decay within the earth. The known temperature pattern inside the earth is only consistent with a young earth.
82. Moon Recession: As tidal friction gradually slows the earth's spin, the laws of physics require the moon to recede from the earth. This recession has been observed since 1754. Even if the moon began orbiting near the earth's surface, the moon should have moved to its present distance in several billion years less time than the 4.6 billion-year age that evolutionists assume for the earth and moon. Consequently, the earth-moon system must be much younger than evolutionists assume.
83. Moon Dust and Debris: If the moon were billions of years old, it should have accumulated a thick layer of dust and debris from meteoritic bombardment. Before instruments were placed on the moon, some scientists were very concerned that astronauts would sink into a sea of dust--possibly a mile in thickness. This did not happen. Very little space dust and debris is on the moon. In fact, after examining the rocks and dust brought back from the moon, scientists learned that only about 1/67th of the dust and debris came from outer space. Recent measurements of the influx rate of meteoritic material on the moon also do not support an old moon.
84. Crater Creep: A tall pile of tar will slowly flow downhill, ultimately spreading into a nearly horizontal sheet of tar. Most material, under pressure, "creeps" in this way, although rocks deform very, very slowly. Calculations show that large, high-rimmed craters on the moon should flow downhill and level out in only tens of thousands of years. Large, steep-walled craters exist even on Venus and Mercury, where gravity is greater, and temperatures are hot enough to melt lead. Most large craters on the moon, Venus, and Mercury are thought to have formed shortly after the solar system formed. These bodies appear to be quite young, since their craters show no sign of "creep."
85. Hot Moon: The moon has a hot interior. Since it has not yet cooled off, the moon is probably much less than a billion years old.
86. Young Comets: As comets pass near the sun, some of their mass vaporizes, producing a long tail and other debris. Comets also fragment frequently or fall onto the sun or other planets. Typical comets should disintegrate or disappear after several hundred orbits. For many comets this is less than 10,000 years. There is no evidence for a distant shell of cometary material surrounding the solar system, and there is no known way to add comets to the solar system at rates that even remotely balance their destruction. In fact, the gravitational attractions of the planets tend to expel comets from the solar system, rather than capture them. Consequently, comets and the solar system appear to be less than 10,000 years old.
87. Small Comets: Photographs, taken from earth-orbiting satellites, show small, ice-filled comets striking the earth's upper atmosphere at an average rate of one every three seconds. As each comet vaporizes, about 100 tons of water are added to the earth's atmosphere. If this began when evolutionists say the earth started to evolve, the earth's oceans should have several times more water than they now have. Actually, the rate of impact was probably greater in the past since the planets have swept many of these comets from the solar system. Therefore, the oceans and the earth look young.
88. Young Rings: The rings orbiting Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune are being rapidly bombarded by meteoroids. Saturn's rings, for example, should be pulverized and dispersed in about 10,000 years. Since this has not happened, planetary rings are probably quite young.
89. Hot Planets: Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune each radiate away more than twice the heat energy they receive from the sun. Uranus and Venus also radiate too much heat. Calculations show that it is very unlikely that this energy comes from nuclear fusion, radioactive decay, gravitational contraction, or phase changes within those planets. The only other conceivable explanation is that these planets have not existed long enough to cool off.
90. Solar Wind: The sun's radiation applies an outward force on extremely small particles orbiting the sun. Particles less than 100,000th of a centimeter in diameter should have been "blown out" of the solar system if it were billions of years old. Yet these particles are still orbiting the sun. Conclusion: the solar system is young.
91. Poynting-Robertson Effect: A large disk-shaped cloud of dust particles orbits the sun. The forces acting on these particles are so great that they should be destroyed or removed in less than 10,000 years. Since there appears to be no significant source of replenishment, the solar system is probably less than 10,000 years old. One of these forces is called the Poynting-Robertson effect. Here is how it works.
Rain falling on a speeding car tends to strike the front of the car and slow it down slightly. Similarly, the sun's rays that strike particles orbiting the sun tend to slow them down. For particles larger than those described in (above), this effect is strong enough to cause them to spiral into the sun. Thus, the sun's radiation and gravitational field act as a giant vacuum cleaner that pulls in about 100,000 tons of micrometeoroids per day. The best estimates are that less than half this dust is being continuously supplied by the disintegration of comets and asteroids.
As a comet disintegrates, it becomes a cluster of particles called a meteor stream. The Poynting- Robertson effect causes the smaller particles in a meteor stream to spiral into the sun more rapidly than the larger particles. After about 10,000 years, this segregation of orbits by particle size should be visible. Since this segregation is generally not visible, meteor streams must be a relatively recent phenomenon. Huge quantities of microscopic dust particles have also been recently discovered around some stars. Yet, according to the theory of stellar evolution, those stars are many millions of years old and should have blown the dust away. Unless one can demonstrate that some vast process continually supplies that dust, one should consider whether the "millions of years" are imaginary.
92. Solar Fuel: If the sun, when it first began to radiate, had any nonnuclear sources of energy, they would have been depleted in much less than ten million years. Theory and experiment indicate that nuclear reactions are not the predominant energy source for the sun. Our star, the sun, must therefore be young (less than ten million years old). If the sun is young, then so is the earth.
93. Shrinking Sun: Since 1836, more than one hundred different observers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the U.S. Naval Observatory have made direct , visual measurements that suggest that the sun's diameter is shrinking at a rate of about 0.1% each century or about five feet per hour! Furthermore, records of solar eclipses indicate that this rapid shrinking has been going on for at least the past 400 years. Several indirect techniques also confirm that the sun is shrinking, although these inferred collapse rates are only about 1/7th as much. Using the most conservative data, one must conclude that had the sun existed several million years ago, it would have been so large that its heat would have destroyed life on earth. Yet, evolutionists say that a million years ago all the present forms of life were essentially as they are now, having completed their evolution that began a thousand million years ago.
During the last 30 years, one of the most perplexing problems in science has been the lack of solar neutrinos. Neutrinos are extremely light subatomic particles produced in nuclear reactions inside stars, including the sun. If all the sun's heat is produced by nuclear fusion, the earth should be bathed in three times as many neutrinos as scientists have consistently measured. However, if much of the sun's heat is due to its shrinking by gravitational collapse, then the lack of solar neutrinos would be explained. But such a gravitational collapse could not have been going on very long.
94. Star Clusters: Stars moving in the same direction at significantly different speeds frequently travel in closely spaced clusters. This would not be the case if they had been traveling for billions of years because just a slight difference in their velocities would disperse them after such great periods of time. Similar observations have been made of galaxy and galaxy-quasar combinations that apparently have vastly different velocities yet appear to be connected.
95. Unstable Galaxies: Computer simulations of the motions of spiral galaxies show them to be highly unstable; they should completely change their shape in only a small fraction of the assumed evolutionary age of the universe. The simplest explanation for so many spiral galaxies, including our Milky Way Galaxy, is that they and the universe are much younger than has been assumed.
96. Galaxy Clusters: Hundreds of rapidly moving galaxies often cluster tightly together. Their individual velocities, as measured by the redshift of their light, are so high that these clusters should be flying apart. In other words, the visible mass of the entire cluster, is much too small to hold the galaxies together gravitationally. However, since the galaxies within clusters are so close together, they could not have been flying apart for very long. A similar statement can be made concerning many stars in spiral galaxies and gas clouds that surround some galaxies. These stars and gas clouds are moving so rapidly that they should have broken their gravitational bonds long ago, if they were billions of years old. If the redshift of starlight always indicates a star's velocity, then a universe billions of years old is completely inconsistent with what is observed. If redshifts can be caused by phenomena other than a star's velocity, then much of current astronomical thinking is wrong.
3) Earth Sciences
Overall Conclusion: The Earth Has Experienced a Worldwide Flood.
Supporting Conclusion: Archaeological Evidence Indicates That Noah's Ark Probably Exists.
97. Ancient Historians: Ancient historians, such as Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian, and Berosus of the Chaldeans mentioned in their writings that the Ark existed. Marco Polo also wrote that the Ark was reported to be on a mountain in greater Armenia. Over a dozen other Christian and Jewish leaders during the period 200-1700 A.D. wrote that the Ark was still preserved.
98. British Scientists: In about 1856, three skeptical British scientists and two Armenian guides climbed Mount Ararat to show that the Ark did not exist. The Ark was supposedly found, but the British scientists threatened to kill the guides if they reported it. Years later, one of the Armenians, then living in the United States, and one of the British scientists independently reported that they had found the Ark.
99. James Bryce: Sir James Bryce, a noted British scholar and traveler of the mid-nineteenth century, conducted extensive library research concerning the Ark. He became convinced that the Ark was preserved on Mount Ararat. Finally, in 1876, he ascended to the summit of the mountain and found, at the 13,000 foot level (2,000 feet above the timberline), a piece of hand-tooled wood, four feet long, that he believed was from the Ark.
100. Turkish Commissioners: In 1883, a series of newspaper articles reported that a team of Turkish commissioners, while investigating avalanche conditions on Mount Ararat, unexpectedly came upon the Ark projecting out of the melting ice at the end of an unusually warm summer. They claimed that they entered and examined part of the Ark.
101. George Hagopian: In the unusually warm summer of 1902, an Armenian boy, George Hagopian, and his uncle climbed Mount Ararat and reached the Ark that was reportedly sticking out of an ice pack. The boy climbed over the Ark and examined it in great detail. In 1904 Hagopian visited the Ark for a second time. Shortly before his death in 1972, a tape recording was made of his detailed testimony. This recording has undergone voice analyzer tests which indicate that his account is quite credible.
102. Russian Pilot: A Russian pilot, flying over Ararat in World War I (1915), thought he saw the Ark. The news of his discovery reached the Czar, who dispatched a large expedition to the site. The soldiers found and explored the boat, but before they could report to the Czar, the Russian Revolution of 1917 had begun. Their report disappeared, and the soldiers were scattered. Some of them eventually reached the United States. Various relatives and friends have confirmed this report.
103. Turkish Soldiers: In 1916, five Turkish soldiers, crossing Mount Ararat, claimed to have seen the Ark; however, they did not report their story until 30 years later when they offered to guide an American expedition to the site. The expedition did not materialize, and their services were not sought until after their deaths.
104. Ed Davis: In July 1943, Ed Davis, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was stationed in Iran. There he developed a close friendship with some Lourd tribesmen who told him that Noah's Ark was on Mount Ararat, which could be seen in the distance. When Davis asked to see the Ark, they first took him to their village. There Davis claims he saw items from the Ark: a cage door, latches, a metal hammer, dried beans, shepherd staffs, oil lamps, bowls, and pottery jars still containing honey. This Muslim tribe considered it a religious duty to prevent outsiders from seeing the Ark, even if it required murder. However, their unusually close friendship with Davis made him an exception.
The tribal leader, Abas-Abas, and his seven sons took Davis on a three-day climb up the northeast side of Mount Ararat. The steep, slick rocks, made worse by the cold rain, prevented them from getting closer than a half-mile to the Ark. Two broken portions of the Ark, lying half a mile apart on their sides, were visible during the moments when the fog and clouds lifted. Wooden beams, three decks, and rooms were seen. Abas-Abas told Davis other details about the Ark: its wood was extremely hard; wooden pegs were used in its construction instead of nails; its large side door opened from the bottom outward like a garage door; and the human quarters consisted of 48 compartments in the middle of the top deck. During 1985 and 1986, Davis successfully underwent several sessions of extensive face-to-face questioning by several dozen Ark researchers, and in 1989 he passed a lie detector test.
105. George Greene: George Greene, an oil geologist, took several photo- graphs of the Ark in 1953 from a helicopter. After returning to the United States, Greene showed his photographs to many people but was unable to raise financial backing for a ground-based expedition. Finally, he went to South America where he was killed. Although his pictures have not been found, more than 30 people have given sworn, written testimony that they saw these photographs that clearly showed the Ark protruding from the melting ice field at the edge of a precipice.
106. Gregor Schwinghammer: Gregor Schwinghammer claims he saw the Ark from an F-100 aircraft in the late 1950s, while attached to the 428th Tactical Flight Squadron based in Adana, Turkey. Schwinghammer said it looked like an enormous boxcar lying in a gully high up on Mount Ararat. He said that U-2 pilots had taken pictures of it.
Note: Many others claim to have seen the Ark. Some stories are of questionable validity, and others are inconsistent with many known details. Only the most credible are summarized above.
Supporting Conclusion: Many of the Earth's Previously Unexplainable Features Can Be Explained by a Cataclysmic Flood.
The origin of each of the following features of the earth is a subject of controversy within the earth sciences. Each feature has many aspects that are inconsistent with standard explanations. Yet all appear to be consequences of a sudden and unrepeatable event--a cataclysmic flood whose waters erupted from worldwide, subterranean, and interconnected chambers with an energy release exceeding the explosion of ten billion hydrogen bombs. The many consequences of this event, which include the rapid formation of the features listed below, involved phenomena that are well understood.
107. The Grand Canyon and Other Canyons
108. Mid-Oceanic Ridge
109. Continental Shelves and Slopes
110. Ocean Trenches
111. Seamounts and Tablemounts
112. Earthquakes
113. Magnetic Variations on the Ocean Floor
114. Submarine Canyons
115. Coal and Oil Formations
116. Glaciers and the Ice Ages
117. Frozen Mammoths
118. Major Mountain Ranges
119. Overthrusts
120. Volcanoes and Lava
121. Geothermal Heat
122. Metamorphic Rock
123. Strata
124. Plateaus
125. Salt Domes
126. Jigsaw Fit of the Continents
127. Fossil Graveyards
Supporting Conclusion: The Seemingly Impossible Events of a Worldwide Flood Are Really Quite Plausible, If Examined Closely.
128. Water Above Mountains?:Is there enough water to cover all of the earth's preflood mountains in a global flood? Most people do not realize what a large volume of water there is on the earth. The oceans have ten times more water than there is land above sea level.
Most of the earth's mountains consist of tipped and buckled sedimentary layers. Since these sediments were initially laid down through water as nearly horizontal layers, the mountains must have been pushed up after the sediments were deposited.
If these mountains were again flattened out while the ocean basins rose in compensation for this downward flow of mass, the oceans would again flood the entire earth. Therefore, the earth has enough water to cover the smaller mountains that existed before the flood.
129. Shells on Mountains: Every major mountain range on the earth contains fossilized sea life--far above sea level.
130. Flood Legends: Practically every ancient culture has legends telling of a traumatic flood in which only a few humans survived in a large boat. The same cannot be said for other types of catastrophes, such as earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions, disease, famines, or drought. These more than 230 flood legends contain many common elements, suggesting that they have a common historical source that left a vivid impression on the survivors of that catastrophe.
131. Was There Room?:Could the Ark have held all the animals? Easily. A few humans, some perhaps hired by others, could build a boat large enough to hold representatives of every air-breathing, land animal. The Ark, holding at least 1,500,000 cubic feet of space, was adequate to hold these animals and their provisions for one year. Figure 30: Ark in Football Stadium. The Ark is frequently shown as a small boat by people who have not bothered to check its dimensions. It was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. While there were several ancient cubits (generally the distance from the elbow to the extended fingers), they were typically 1.5 feet or slightly longer. A 450-foot long Ark would snugly fit in a football stadium and would be taller than a four story building.
The best and perhaps most credible, modern description of the Ark was by George Hagopian. (See page 40.) The Ark did not look like a boat. It had a flat bottom, was not streamlined, and had windows in its top. The flat bottom would have made its loading, which was on dry land, easier. Streamlined shapes are only important for a ship designed for speed and fuel efficiency--none of which applied to the Ark. Windows in the side might be nice for the passengers (or the proverbial giraffes to stick their necks out), but side windows limit the depth of submergence and the load that can be carried. Riding low in the water also adds great stability to a boat. Actually, the Hebrew word for Ark does not mean boat; it means box or coffinan apt description that Hagopian knew nothing about.
Since the flood, many of the offspring of those on the Ark would have become reproductively isolated in some degree due to mutations, natural genetic variations, and geographic dispersion. Thus, variations within a kind have proliferated. Each variation did not have to be represented on the Ark. For example, a pair of wolflike animals were probably the ancestors of the coyotes, the dingoes, the jackals, the foxes, and hundreds of varieties of domestic dogs. (This is microevolution, not macroevolution, since each member of the dog kind can interbreed and has the same organs and genetic structure.) Could the Ark have held larger animals, such as dinosaurs and elephants? Certainly, if they were young.