Creation

Does it Matter?

Evolution is incompatible with the Gospel

• 1. It has death long before there was sin.  The Bible says death is a result of sin.
• 2. If God did not create, he has no right to intefere in our world.
• 3. Evolution says that man is getting better, the gospel says man began perfect,     has fallen and needs a Saviour.
• 4. Man can only be accountable if he is fallen, not if he hasn't yet evolved.
• 5. NO CREATION => NO FALL => NO SAVIOUR => NO SECOND COMING
• 6. If God didn't create in the beginning, can he create a new earth as He promises.
• 7. Creation is the basis for the worship of God, for His authority to judge.

The Bible teaches creation from Genesis to Revelation

• Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
• Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
• Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day.
• Genesis 2:7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
• Exodus 20:11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
• 2 Kings 19:15 And Hezekiah prayed to the LORD: “O LORD, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth.”
• Nehemiah 9:6 You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.
• Psalms 33:6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.... 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
• Psalms 104:24 How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
• Isaiah 45:18 For this is what the LORD says-- he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited-- he says: “I am the LORD, and there is no other.”
• Jeremiah 10:12 But God made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.
• Matthew 19:4 “Haven't you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’”
• Mark 10:6 “But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.'
• Luke 3:38 the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.
• John 1:10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.
• Acts 4:24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them.”
• 1 Corinthians 15:22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
• Colossians 1:16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.
• Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
• 2 Peter 3:5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water.
• Rev 4:11 “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”

If Creation is true, we would expect all living things to:

• 1. Be too intricate and complex to appear by chance.
• 2. To appear in the geological record without ancestors.
• 3. To remain distinct from one another.
• 4. To resist change into different kinds by modern breeding.
• 5. To reveal mutations as being often neutral, harmful, or degenerative.
• 6. To show all basic types of living organism contained in the fossil record.

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1. Intricate and complex

The Cell
In Darwin’s time the cell was thought of as a simple blob of protoplasm. It is now known that the cell is anything but simple. It is complex beyond description. Biologists have termed it “the basic mystery of science”. It takes over 100 trillion cells to make an average human. 200,000 for ever cm² of skin and twenty trillion in the blood. There are different kinds of cells for different functions such as muscle, blood, nerve, bone, brain, reproduction etc. Each cell is like a mini factory. Listen to some of the things cells have to do:

• 1. Multiply themselves by dividing into two until the body is fully grown.
• 2. Manufacture repair cells for the healing of diseases and injuries throughout life.
• 3. Take in food from the blood stream, selecting what is good and rejecting what is not.
• 4. Manufacture from this food all the materials to multiply themselves.
• 5. Put these materials together in exact proportions to form the new cells.
• 6. Build cells non-identical to themselves including reproductive half cells.
• 7. Manufacture and store chemicals for fighting disease and give them off as needed.

Within each cell are “chromosomes”, infinitely slender strands which contain all the code for determining the physical characteristics of the offspring. The nucleus is 2/10,000 of a cm in diameter. It contains the 46 chromosome strands which if joined together would measure 2 metres in length. These chromosomes contain enough information to fill a 1000 books of 600 pages each. [Return to Top]

Density of Information Storage
Biological systems are ordered to such a high degree that any possibility that they developed by chance must be totally excluded. In the DNA molecule information is compressed to the unbelievably high density of 10²¹ bit/cm³ . In comparing the figures just mentioned to a computer's density of information which amounts to 10⁶ - 10⁷ bit/cm³ it is easy to realise what an astronomical range separates them. The same difference results if the total surface of the earth is compared to a relatively small chestnut!

A further comparison will demonstrate the miracle of information storage miniaturisation. Nowadays more scientists are living than ever before since the beginning of the world. ... Every 2 seconds, a scientific publication is issued throughout the world. We face a vast flood of information. The total knowledge in the world collected in books is known to be about 1016 or at the most 10¹⁷ bits. The same giant amount of information could be stored in 0.00001 cm³ or one hundredth mm³ of genetic material. In the Genetic material of DNA molecules we encounter the greatest known storage density of information.

The genes contained in the chromosomes of all life forms determine what the offspring will be.

The moth reproduces only a moth, The dog reproduces only a dog. Cattle reproduce only cattle. Insects, microbes, reptiles, fish, bird, flowers, animals and people give birth only to their own kinds, consistent with what the creation story said.

A human being has an estimated 100,000 different genes linked into its reproductive chromosomes. This number makes possible an enormous number of variations of physical and intellectual characteristics in the offspring. The number of possible variations is estimated to be 256 followed by 2,562.4 billion zeros. (it would take 45 years working 24 hours a day just to write the number) Yet the children would be unmistakably human like their parents.

Diagrams of cells, how they switch on and off at the right time for the next stage of growth or development look like the circuitry of a big computer. It is no wonder that scientists talk about the “wizardry of the cell”, its “intelligence”, “forbiddingly small, but infinitely complex.”

Even as they explore the frontiers of genetic engineering, scientists continue to confront the deep mystery of science: how did it all begin? The odds against the right molecules being in the right place at the right time are staggering.

It has been calculated that the probability of producing one particular protein molecule 101 amino acids long from a 1 metre layer of “reasonable” primordial soup under ideal conditions in 5,000,000,000 years is one in

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

These are actually exceedingly generous odds as the calculations assumed that the chemical reactions could occur as maximum possible speed, a highly unlikely situation even in the presence of the best catalyst available.

However all this is of little significance in the absence of supporting hardware which is another problem again. Having the molecule without the supporting hardware is as much use as a CD in the hands of a caveman.

The more that is known about the cell, the more unrealistic and mythical does the explanation that it just washed up out of the sea sound. This leads to the only alternative:

This highly sophisticated and diversified factory (the cell) containing precision machines so delicately tooled and so intricately regulated, can only be the product of an incomparable intellect. [Return to Top]

The Brain
The most complex thing in nature composed of 10 billion plus brain cells and divided into regions which control all the functions of the body:

The human brain consists of about 10,000,000,000 nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out 10,000 to 100,000 connecting fibres by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. The total number of connections in the brain approaches 10,000,000,000,000,000.

Imagine an area the size of New South Wales and Queensland covered with 10,000 trees per square mile. If each tree contained 100,000 leaves, the total number of leaves in the forest would be equivalent to the number of connections in the human brain AND each of the brain's nerve cells is immensely complex. [Return to Top]

The Body Structure
The body itself is a marvel of engineering. All the main structures are interdependent. They must all be present and functioning at once for the body to survive. The body could not wait for the heart, lungs, blood vessels, digestive tract, liver, kidneys or digestive system to evolve by some random method. Everything had to be fully functional and synchronised for the organism to live

The skeletal framework of bone supports and holds the body together. It is rigid yet made flexible by incredibly designed simple and complex joints which are controlled by motor nerves. The body parts are moved by the muscles, made up of fibres about the size of a human hair. One muscle fibre can support 1,000 times its own weight. The motor network controls all the movements of the body muscles.

Added to this are the blood vessels, the arteries and the veins, The average body contains 110,000 km of blood vessels through which the heart pumps the life giving blood. Blood carries oxygen and nutrient to every body cell, collecting up waste materials, toxins, broken down cells, dead bacteria and CO². These wastes are carried through the veins to be filtered out in the liver, kidney and lungs and recharged for another pass through the body.

The heart is a perpetual motion pump, contracting and dilating an average of 72 beats / min., which adds up to about 100,000 times a day or nearly 40,000,000 a year. The work it does is equivalent to the work you would perform if you lifted a 4 kg weight 1 metre off the ground twice a minute for a lifetime. During a day it pumps about 11 tons of blood. The only rest it gets is the fraction of a second pause between beats.

The Creator has fitted the body with an amazing oxygen exchange and extraction system. Air is breathed into about 1 billion tiny air sacs covered with a thin membrane only one cell thick. Here oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged “on the run”.

The skin is one of the body's most important organs. In the case of an average adult it covers nearly 20,000 cm² and weighs about 2.5 kg. It received ¹/₃ of all the blood circulating through out the body. It protects the body against invading bacteria, injury of sensitive tissues, the sun's rays and loss of moisture. It acts as a cooling system and hoses a complex sensory network. There are about 20 metres of nerves in 3 cm³ of skin and hundreds of pain, pressure, heat and cold receptors which let the brain know what is happening at the body's surface.

The digestive tract is a highly complicated factory in which food that is eaten is reduced to its basic elements by acids and enzymes. The stomach lining contains about 35 million glands which supply these digestive juices, yet it itself is not digested. When the food passes to the small intestine, more digestive juices are added to break it down further. There, the food encounters microscopic finger like projections called villi. These permit the absorption of water and food into the bloodstream. These tiny villi are in constant motion, swinging back and forth, changing in length constantly and absorbing the molecule of food which comes in contact with their surface. The digestive system from the chewing stage to the final absorption of food is one of the most remarkable “inventions” known.

Everything about the human body points to superlatively intelligent design, and not to mere happenstance. [Return to top]

The Miracle of Flight
From the tip of its beak to the end of its tail, a bird is built for the air. Literally thousands of parts would have needed to evolve simultaneously for the bird to be able to fly as it does. After thousands of hours testing, man has come up with wings very similar in design to the wings of birds.

Bird's wings have ailerons, flaps, convex surfaces and slotted leading edges which help them in flight in much the same way as the parts of a modern aeroplane wing help the pilot to manoeuvre his aircraft.

Birds have hollow flexible bones, strengthened with interior trusses. A bird's bones are lighter than its feathers. They are also an extension of its cooling system.

Feathers are not fixed and rigid as we might imagine. Thousands of tiny muscles can tilt and turn them in various directions to allow for up and down drafts and to cope with shearing stresses. They enable the bird to take off, fly slow or fast, soar, and then land at stalling speed.

There are different kinds of wings. The pelican is a heavy bird that can soar for hours because of the way its wing is structured. Likewise the albatross which can travel for hundreds of km across the ocean without a single wingbeat. It simply rides the updrafts that come off the ocean waves. The eagle, by finding thermal currents can soar hundreds of km across country and almost out of sight into the heavens while other birds such as the falcon are built for speed in excess of 200 km/h. The humming bird flaps its wings at about 50 times per second and can fly forward, backward, up, down, sideways as well as hover by altering the pitch of the wings without changing the beat rate.

Feathers are not as simple as we thought they were. They are incredible inventions constructed of keratin, the same substance as claws, nails, hair etc. Evolutionary thinking is they they evolved from frayed scales, but the gap is enormous. The quill of the feather carries small branches called barbs. these are edged with tiny hooks which interlock into one another to give the feathers a smooth firm surface. These interlocking hooks can be undone and done up, much like a zip fastener, when the bird preens.

The bird is as beautiful as it's feathers. Most feather colours are due to actual pigmentation while some are due to the splitting up of light rays such as occurs in a prism or rainbow.

Charles Darwin confessed he was at a loss to conceive how the peacocks feathers could have evolved. It gave him nervous prostration, he said.

In addition to a bird's ability to fly, its amazing colours, think of its ability to whistle, sing and imitate. It is not just the mechanical side of nature that speaks of a Creator, it is seen also in the beautiful such as seen in the bird's brilliant colours and heard in their magnificent songs. It is the spiritual and emotional qualities of life. Happiness, love, romance, kindness, sympathy. Man is much more than a machine or a complex arrangement of molecules. [Return to Top]

Migration
Some birds have navigational abilities which enable them to migrate over thousands of km of trackless ocean - in some cases without previous experience or parental guidance. Arctic terns migrate from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back within one year, a journey of some 40,000 km. To accomplish this they must fly non-stop for 8 months of the year. The wandering albatross flies eastward all its life, circumnavigating the globe many times. When gannet chicks are about 6 weeks old and able to fend for themselves, the parent birds leave them to their own devices and fly off to other climes.

For instance, gannets from the east coast of New Zealand migrate west across the Tasman to the SE coasts of the Australian mainland and Tasmania. Later, when the chicks have matured, they too take to the wing and fly westward. Both generations later return to the same breeding grounds. Birds travel back and forth from the wetlands of Australia to as far away as Siberia.

The wonder is not so much in the distances, but what it is that guides them so unerringly. It is now known that some birds have an in built mechanism that responds like a compass to the earth's magnetic field.

Experiments have proved that some kinds navigate by the sun, and/or moon and/or stars. European warblers placed in cages during the migration season flutter and face toward the direction of migration if they can see the stars. When placed in a room where they cannot see the stars they become disoriented and do not face any one direction. In a planetarium where the star pattern simulates the direction they would normally migrate the flutter off in that direction. If the pattern is changed to the opposite direction, they all try to fly that way. What ever star pattern is shown on the planetarium dome the birds react accordingly, without exception. It is extremely difficult to understand how this impression of the sky pattern on the mind of the bird could have arisen by any chance evolutionary development. [Return to Top]

Bees
These busy insects defy evolutionary explanation. Many people think their honey gathering instincts have been developed from thousands of generations of parent bees. But their parents - queens and drones do not collect a drop of honey in their lives, nor do they do any of the work done by the ordinary bee. The drone fertilises the queen who does nothing but lay eggs. The working bee, as an infertile female, almost never breeds. Born with milk glands its duties are:

1. To nurse young bees.

2. After a few days it drops that job and changes to feeding young larvae.

3. Having done this for a few days it begins to collect nectar from worker bees returning to the hive and store it away. At about 11 days honey sacks develop.

4. At 15 days the bee "turns her hand" to making wax for honeycomb. She constructs this with a hexagonal design which is known to be the strongest and most space saving geometrical pattern in the world of engineering.

5. At 18 days she switches from building honeycomb to guard duties at the entrance to the hive.

6. Then at 21 days she seems to forget all her former functions and flies out as a honey collector for the rest of her life.

7. If acting as a scout she finds honey, she flies back to the hive and communicates to the workers exactly where the honey is. By performing a dance she gives the direction, the type of flower, navigational data in relation to the sun, and information on how much fuel to take without either running out or carrying an unnecessary load.

Pollen hairs / comb / sacks. How would plants be pollinated with out them?

How could these incredible creature little creatures just have happened? [Return to Top]

Butterfly
Here is that pesky caterpillar which gobbles up your lovely broccoli. He gets there when a butterfly lays an egg on a leaf. the emerging larva eats the eggshell and then begins on a one large meal a day plan to consume huge amounts of greenery. Having grown to maturity as a caterpillar, it suddenly changes occupation and turns itself into a chrysalis, tying itself securely to a branch or tree trunk.

As a chrysalis it has a rather beautiful exterior, but inside it can only be described as a milky pulp. However, tremendous biochemical activity in that pulp soon results in transformation into an entirely new creature.

From an egg to a caterpillar to a chrysalis to a butterfly in a few weeks. This is surely one of the many clear evidences of intelligent design. And look at creatures with radar and sonar and ... [Return to Top]

2. Missing Links

The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.

Steven Jay Gould, 'Evolutions erratic pace'. Natural History, vol LXXXVI(5), May 1977, P.14

&ldquot ;It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution ... When a new Genus appears in the record it is usually well separated morphologically from the most nearly similar other known genera. This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders , classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.” ...

“These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life.”

Simpson, George Gaylord; "The History of Life" in The Evolution of Life. Sol Tax ed. The Univ. of Chicago Press, p.149

3. To remain distinct and
4. To resist change

Gould stated:“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’”.

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5. Mutations as harmful

The fossil record indicates a decline in size
Computer mutations - never improve the programme.

6. All kinds of life present in the fossil record

 Only if God created in the beginning can He recreate

2 Pet 3:13 But ... we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.

Rev 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth...

Rev 21:5 He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, ”Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
 

Copyright K Bird   © 2004