Posted on 05/26/2007 9:24:34 AM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
Some Scientists Worry That Sophisticated Center Will Distort Children's Views of Science
According to an ABC News poll, 60 percent of Americans believe God created the world in six days. In Petersburg, Ky., this weekend, a creation museum is opening that depicts a story far from what you may have learned in science class.
Exhibits at almost every natural history museum teach that dinosaurs are millions of years old, and that they died out long before human beings existed. But at the Creation Museum, they say God created dinosaurs and humans at the same time.
The Creation Museum, designed by the same man behind some of the attractions at Universal Studios in Florida, is a $27 million, high-tech sensory experience with animatronic dinosaurs and a movie theater with seats that shake.
The museum is intended to convince visitors that evolution is wrong and that the biblical story of life on earth from Adam and Eve to Noah's ark is scientifically verifiable.
The museum depicts Adam living with animals, including a dinosaur.
Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, the group that is funding the museum, says that only "secular scientists" would maintain that the first humans never lived with dinosaurs.
"[Scientists] can say that, but what's their evidence?" Ham says, insisting that "All land animals were made on day six."
Mainstream scientists worry that because the museum is so technically sophisticated, it could be effective in giving children a distorted view of science.
"That they'll show up in classrooms and say, 'Gee, Mrs. Brown, I went to this spiffy museum last summer and they say that everything you're teaching me is a lie,'" said Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education.
Ham believes that's what should happen.
"And I say, great. Amen. That's what this place is all about," he said. "It's meant to challenge people."
The stakes are high. The museum argues that evolution jeopardizes people's belief in the Bible and leads to social ills like pornography and abortion.
"In an evolutionary world view, why should you have things like absolute morality? Why would it be wrong to kill someone?" said Jason Lisle, of Answers in Genesis. "I'm not saying that evolutionists aren't moral. I'm saying they have no reason to be moral."
[more at the link]
Thanks for the words of Augustine...they are always appropriate on these threads...
Weren't they a 60's Californicate garage band?
And yet Saint Augustine of Hippo disgreed with you about whether the first chapters of Genesis were literal, or figurative.
Sure we do...we have the exact same facts the secularist scientists have...the difference is our presuppositions.
A fossil is a fossil is a fossil.
A bone is a bone is a bone
It is the interpretation of that fossil and the bone that separates the secularist from the creationist. And the interpretation is based on what we believe to be true of the world. The secularist assumes no supernatural intervention in history; the creationist assumes the supernatural to be part of the history of the universe
The secularist assumes everything happened by chance and natural selection; the creationist assumes God created the universe, and life on Earth, and that natural selection accounts for the vast speciation we see on Earth. The secularist assumes that pure matter can account for the vast amounts of information in the universe necessary for life; the creationist assumes an intelligent Creator implanted the vast amounts of information in the life that He created on this Earth.
We have the same facts...we just have a different interpretation of those facts.
How does an evolutionist explain the Universe coming from nothing, life from non-life?
That is not a part of the theory of evolution. And it is a change of subject.
LOL!
Oh, that's right, you guys like to start with everything already existing and just 'evolving'.
Found any of those missing links yet?
Where are the dinosaur bones? Until you can come up with dinosaur bones, not fossils, you haven't a leg to stand on.
Now, why should we have to come up with dinosaur bones when you can't come up with any transitional fossils.
There are transitionals all over the place.
Where are the dinosaur bones?
Yep. People I know who hate Christianity and everything associated with it usually give this kind of stuff as the reason.
On a related note, there's an interesting parable in the sci-fi TV series Gundam Seed: People are debating the desirability of creating a new, superior, genetically-engineered strain of humans. Various religions oppose this and use their influence to restrain it. But then the discovery of the fossilized remains of a "winged whale" on an asteroid near Jupiter blows the credibility of the churches, they lose their moral authority, the genetic engineering goes ahead full speed, and disaster follows.
That is indeed funny to me. I am afraid to say that I do not believe into the co-existance of dinosaurs and humans at the same time. As everybody here knows I have some reason to this assumption. Nevertheless I accept wide parts of the bible as reality. Even the Genesis has its justification to me if I see it in a wider coherence. But holding on to dates and details that can not be true does not make any sense. Evoloution happened. But it happened under the control of God. This is a very simple truth.
In Europe were I live we do not have this discussion. If someone doubts such proven scientific context on our continent he makes a complete clown of himself. Except of a handful extremely fundamentalistic Christians (whose mental health is regulary questioned from the official side) nobody in Europe (as I already said) is questioning evolution. We had this dispute when Darwin came out with his book in 1858. A comparable museum (even in staunch christian countries like Poland or Italy) would be a maximum joke. A funny Disneyland of creation.
It is extremely interesting that Americans feel so different about this issue. Is it possible that the resticted access to information (i.e. through homeschooling) of certain levels of the American population leaves many people unknowing?
There are transitionals all over the place.
There are no transitional fossils.
Stop your kidding!
Where are the dinosaur bones?
Maybe they are wasted away over the last 5000 plus years, since the Flood.
So how did the Universe come from nothing?
bttt
It has been my experience that people who accept a literal interpretation of the Bible don’t give any authority to the writings of Augustine or other Fathers of the Church.
lots of dinosaur bones in Alaska, They have even have some red blood cells with fragment of DNA.
Stop your kidding!
That is a creationist falsehood not supported by science.
Where are the dinosaur bones?
Maybe they are wasted away over the last 5000 plus years, since the Flood.
There is no scientific evidence for a global flood.
What you don't seem to realize is that the last 5,000 years are quite well known. Archaeologists and soil scientists have been poking their noses into every nook and cranny of the earth for a couple of centuries.
There have been no dinosaur bones found in these sediments, nor has there been evidence found of a global flood.
You are mistaking your religious belief for scientific evidence, and refusing to see the massive amounts of evidence to the contrary.
It has been my experience that people who accept a literal interpretation of the Bible don’t give any authority to the writings of Augustine or other Fathers of the Church."
Agreed. It is truly amazing - and sad - that so many fundamentalist Christians act as if the books of the Bible were originally written in English.
Obviously, no language can be literally translated 'word-for-word' into another language and still be understandable. I can go into a secular bookstore, or a Christian book store and choose from many versions - i.e. - translations - of the Bible printed in English.
Since I am a religious Jew who is respectful of, and interested in studying Christian Theology, could someone please tell me which one is the correct version - you know - the one that's infallible, etc.
At least with the Torah, it can be read in the language in which it was originally written.
The Fathers of the Church were the authors of books in the Bible.
Read "It Takes A Village" by one of Americas Fathers, Hillary Clinton. Hillary is less removed from the Founding Fathers of America than Augustine was from the Fathers of the Church.
What baffles me is when people ignore John, Matthew, Peter, Mark, Paul, James, Jude and Luke in order to agree with guys like Augustine. Augustine explained away a large percentage of the New Testament and sank the Catholic Church into A-Millennialism, basically dubbing the Apostle John a superstitious mystic with no grasp of reality.
One need only review the writings of Jeremiah, Ezekiel & Daniel (of which were viewed as overly superstitious by their contemporaries) and witness the literal fulfillment of their prophecies in the Person of Jesus Christ, to realize the mistake of explaining away passages.
As usual when dealing with Biblical truths, the mistake of trumping straightforward passages with "Modern Understandings" wreaks havoc on the lives of the trumpees. One word: Europe!
There is nothing new under the sun.
That is a creationist falsehood not supported by science.
Really?
Your 'scienctists' had to make a change in the theory of evolution from gradual transitions to radical jumps, to explain the absence of any transtional forms in the fossils!
Where are the dinosaur bones? Maybe they are wasted away over the last 5000 plus years, since the Flood. There is no scientific evidence for a global flood. What you don't seem to realize is that the last 5,000 years are quite well known. Archaeologists and soil scientists have been poking their noses into every nook and cranny of the earth for a couple of centuries. There have been no dinosaur bones found in these sediments, nor has there been evidence found of a global flood. You are mistaking your religious belief for scientific evidence, and refusing to see the massive amounts of evidence to the contrary.
Save your phony 'science' line for someone else.
Evolution is one of the great fables in human history.
My next post has an article about finding actual dinosaur bones in the fossils.
Dinosaur bones—just how old are they really?
An evolutionary dinosaur expert reveals some fascinating facts!
by Carl Wieland
[Ed. note: In late 2005, a report in TJ provided an update on the scientific appraisal of some of the bones discussed in this article. See John H. Whitmore, ‘Unfossilized’ Alaskan dinosaur bones? TJ 19(3):60.]
Most people think that fossil bones (of which the most well-known examples are those of dinosaurs) must be very, very old—because, after all, they have turned to stone, haven’t they?
Even millions of years might, to some, not even seem long enough to allow for natural processes to gradually, molecule by molecule, replace the original substance of the bone with rock minerals.
But this common picture is misleading. A recent book, co-authored by a world expert on dinosaurs, points out some things about dinosaur bones that are of great interest to creationists.1
For one thing, it says:
‘Bones do not have to be “turned into stone” to be fossils, and usually most of the original bone is still present in a dinosaur fossil.’2
Ok, but even if the actual bone is not replaced by rock minerals, some fossil dinosaur bones are rock-hard, and show under the microscope when cut that they have been thoroughly ‘permineralized.’ This means that rock minerals have been deposited into all the spaces within the original bone. Doesn’t this show that the formation of these fossils, at least, must represent a long time? Think again. The same authoritative work also tells us:
‘The amount of time that it takes for a bone to become completely permineralized is highly variable. If the groundwater is heavily laden with minerals in solution, the process can happen rapidly. Modern bones that fall into mineral springs can become permineralized within a matter of weeks.’
So even a rock-solid, hard shiny fossil dinosaur bone, showing under the microscope that all available spaces have been totally filled with rock minerals, does not indicate that it necessarily took millions of years to form at all.
Now of course if a dinosaur bone is indeed permineralized, it would give it great protection from the normal processes which cause things such as bone to just naturally ‘fall apart.’ So a permineralized bone might indeed be anything from a few weeks to millions of years old.
However, in a situation where the dinosaur bone has been prevented from being invaded by mineral-rich water, one would expect that over millions of years, even locked away from all bacterial agents, dinosaur bone would, in obeying the laws of thermodynamics,3 just disintegrate from the random motions of the molecules therein.
There are actually instances, mentioned in the same book, in which dinosaur bones in Alberta, Canada, were encased in ironstone nodules shortly after being buried. We are told:
‘The nodules prevented water from invading the bones, which for all intents and purposes cannot be distinguished from modern bone.’4
This is a stunning revelation. Evolutionists are convinced that all dinosaur bones must be at least 65 million years old. Those who take Genesis as real history would predict that no dinosaur bone is more than a few thousand years old, so the existence of such totally unmineralized dinosaur bones that have not disintegrated is perfectly consistent with our expectations.
We have previously told you about the unfossilized dinosaur bone which still contained red blood cells and hemoglobin.5 Also, we wrote about ‘fresh dinosaur bones’ in Alaska.6 Let the evolutionist experts writing this book confirm this:
‘An even more spectacular example was found on the North Shore of Alaska, where many thousands of bones lack any significant degree of permineralization. The bones look and feel like old cow bones, and the discoverers of the site did not report it for twenty years because they assumed they were bison, not dinosaur, bones.’
In summary, therefore:
Most fossil dinosaur bones still contain the original bone.
Even when heavily permineralized (‘fossilized’), this does not need to require more than a few weeks. The Creation/Flood scenario for fossilization would allow many centuries for such permineralization to occur, even under less than ideal conditions.
Where bones have not been protected by permineralization, they are sometimes found in a condition which to all intents and purpose looks as if they are at most centuries, not millions of years old.
The Bible’s account of the true history of the world makes it clear that no fossil can be more than a few thousand years old. Dinosaur bones give evidence strongly consistent with this.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v21/i1/dinosaurbones.asp
For whatever it’s worth, I went to a conservative Christian college (Grove City), and one of the science professors there gave a very cogent presentation on this topic. The gist of it was that no honest examination of the evidence points to a so-called “young earth,” a literal six-day creation or the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs.
This was a very smart man, a devout Christian and an all-around nice guy, but I remember the annoyance and embarrassment in his voice when he spoke of some of the more contrived “theories” hatched to reconcile scientific evidence with biblical literalism: for instance, the notion that God created the earth and its geological formations to “appear” billions of years old. My prof said essentially that the God Christians believe in does not aim to deceive and that a notion like this is an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
I’m not scientist myself (far from it), so this is just my prof’s two cents.
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