Creationism In The Schools

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Speaking of creation/evolution being taught in Arkansas schools - well that's not a buzz right now. At least not like it was back in the early '80s, when there was a buzz and court cases, including  McLean vs Arkansas. The Supreme Court, in the tradition of Dred Scott vs Sandford in 1857 (declaring that African Americans could not be citizens) and Roe vs Wade in 1971 (declaring that fetuses were not people) declared in 1987 in Edwards vs Aguillard that creationists were not scientists. Well, we have since discovered that black people are citizens and fetuses are people. And in the tradition of the avant-garde knowledge of the US Supreme Court being wrong, we may now be discovering that creationists are scientists.

 

As feasible as Darwin's theory was, it has run into much difficulty -  "... even Darwin himself struggled with the fact that the fossil record failed to support his conclusions. "Why," he asked, "if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?" The Origin of Species, 1859.

 

"The fossil record has been thoroughly explored and documented. Darwin's excuse of "extreme imperfection of the geological record" is no longer credible"  Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,1985, 

 

Since Darwin's angst over fossils, many problems for his theory have cropped up in science - like carbon dating. Via eating, all living stuff has an atmospheric composition of carbon (plants absorb it from air). This is almost all stable C12  with some unstable C14,  formed with space radiation. When a once living thing dies, it stops taking in carbon, so measuring the C14/C12 ratio tells when something very old died. C14 has a half-life of 5730 years, so you should be able to find lots of dead things with all of the carbon-14 decayed, disproving a young earth.

 

"However, modern technology has produced a major fly in that uniformitarian ointment"  per  Carbon Dating Undercuts Evolution's Long Ages ( icr.org ) In short, they've found way more C14 in the fossil record than should be there.

 

But to me, there is one big problem with evolution that seems overlooked. 

 

We have come to think of the simplistic Christian version of origins as being the fragile half of the debate easily shattered with each advance of science. That is now very questionable as each advance of science now seems to be shattering Darwin's theory. But think about this for a minute. It only takes one case of the supernatural to nullify the entire uniformitarian (pure natural law) argument. If you have an intervention over natural law by a higher sphere, this sphere can intervene anyway it wants, and thus has the right to explain origins, or anything, rather than natural law. It is actually the uniformitarian view that is fragile since just one superseding of natural law upsets the whole apple cart.

 

There are many such interventions. The most well known case is the murder of Jesus and his resurrection. He was dead for three days, then walked around for 40 days and was seen by hundreds of people with the wounds of the crucifixion visible in his new body. It has been described by historians as the most verifiable event of the ancient world.

 

If you'd like to learn more about the status of the evolution/creation debate, you can attend a series of presentations at The Global Outreach Center in Rogers AR (google for directions) beginning at 9 am Sunday mornings starting on 10/20 in the Men's Class (upper Landing area).