In the beginning, God created the world.
So says the Christian Bible, the Jewish Torah, the Islamic Qur'an – the three great monotheistic Scriptures.
As a practising evangelical Christian, I accept the inviolable authority of the Bible as God’s word.
However, I don’t accept the creationist version of God’s creation.
Creation Ministries will be in Red Deer for a conference Oct. 20-13 and Oct. 14 in Didsbury at Zion Evangelical Missionary Church's morning services. The Creation Ministry website, at creation.com, has 10,995 articles and 717 videos on creationism that make an interesting study.
Creation Ministries says that God created the universe, and all in it, in October 4004 B.C in six calendar days and evidence to the contrary is planted by Satan to lead us away from God.
Creationists hold the earth’s surface geology was laid down by the flood of Noah in the spring of 2348 B.C.
Creationist flood geology has a stratigraphic record of a 6,000-year-old sequence of the rocks.
Conventional geology has a stratigraphy down to the Precambrian, more than four billion years old.
The 4004 B. C. date of creation was determined by Irish Bishop James Ussher, publish in 1658, by meshing Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories with the Bible, scholarship that Creationists endorse.
The two fundamental scientifically-tested methods that have established a universe billions of years old and the corresponding age of fossils and rocks are radiometric dating and light years – but creationists reject all results that contradict the 4004 B.C. date of creation.
Creationism says any method errs that dates the universe older that 6,000 years.
They ask us to make a choice between a young universe and the findings of biology, geology, paleontology, physics, astronomy and archaeology that they oppose.
Montana-born cellular paleontologist, evangelical Christian and former creationist Mary Schweitzer set out to disprove evolution but instead changed her career from high school teaching to dinosaur paleontology.
She was the first scientist to study the cells inside dinosaur bones by dissolving sections of a fossil bone in acid and examining microscopic cross-sections of the bone. No one before had used acid on dinosaur bones.
Schweitzer discovered blood cells and soft tissue in a gravid (pregnant) female in a 63-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil.
She quelled skepticism by repeating the experiment on another Tyrannosaurus fossil. Then her results were hijacked by creationists who said that the blood cells proved that the bones could not be very old.
Scientists disagree with the creationists.
Schweitzer takes the hijack personally. She calls herself, “a complete and total Christian.”
In her workspace is a plaque with Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you’, declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
The still-unfolding universe manifests God’s omnipotent, loving creativity and imagination.
Ironically the Pentateuch, which includes Genesis, is older than Ussher’s world. Portions of it are in texts 2,700 years old, derive from sources an additional 2,000 years old of Bible stories of events that happened between 2,300 and 4,500 years before they were first written.
Why do the Creationists pit science against faith and the life of the spirit?
The two are compatible and operate in different spheres.
Physicist Albert Einstein said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
Biologist and chemist Louis Pastuer said, “science brings us nearer to God.”
The choice is not the creationists’ arbitrary choice between creationism and evolution.
It’s the choice between a small God and an unfathomable God.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist.
