Thursday, November 19, 2009

Didn't they create life in a test tube?

Ah Miller and Urey... Simply put, no they didn't. They did get successful results, just not ones indicating life. To the left you see their experiment. To the right you see a diagram of it.

Miller and Urey's experiment starts out (1) with a sample of the 'primeval soup' - the stuff that was in the ocean before life arose. They added heat to vaporize it. This vapor rose up as the 'primeval atmosphere'. (2) An electric spark was added to simulate lightening and the matter created was condensed (3) and filtered out (4) to be tested.


Here's why it didn't do what you were told it did.

(1) There is no sample of this supposed 'primeval soup'. Its not even known if it existed little lone what it was made of. Why did he choose the ingredients he did? Not because of any proof, but to get the specific results he needed. You see, they knew that to even stand a chance of getting their desired results their 'atmosphere' (2) could contain no oxygen because oxygen immediately destroys the amino acids they were hoping to create. So whatever mixture they used for this 'soup' could not produce any oxygen.

To simplify this, take a standard box of 8 crayons. Now melt them all until what color is the result? The color you end up with is a result of the colors that were actually there. But that's not the color you wanted so you remove all the colors from the next box that do not fit your color scheme and change the amounts of the remaining colors so that when you melt the second batch, you get the color teal. The problem is, you didn't use what was actually there in the box. You took out what was actually there and only left exactly what you needed.

This is not scientifically valid. To have this be valid, the soup must be a valid recreation of what was actually here when they claim. NOT simply a mixture of the chemicals they need in order to produce the desired results they want.

"Maybe they early atmosphere didn't have oxygen."

A good thought. We don't know, right? Wrong. According to evolutionary scientists, many millions of years before life formed, rocks formed. Every rock ever studied contains oxygen. So without a doubt, the atmosphere had to have oxygen unlike that used in the experiment. Not to mention the Earth's ozone is made of oxygen. No oxygen means no ozone. No ozone and the sun's radiation kills everything on the Earth.

So the experiment started with the wrong solution, produced the wrong conditions and killed everything on earth. Anything else? Unfortunately, yes. You'll notice after the 'atmosphere' is zapped, it goes down another tube (3) where it condenses and continues into a water trap. Why? Because the amino acids dissolve in water. So Miller and Urey had to devise a way to remove them from the solution before they dissolved, hence the trap. The problem is, there is no such trap in nature. So without this trap, any amino acids created would also be destroyed.

Surely that's all the problems with the experiment, right? No. First, the experiment never claimed to have created life. What they created were amino acids which are used to build proteins which one part of what is required for life (with the above crayon example, its like saying you have blue dye and therefore have a crayon without having wax or any process to combine, refine and finish one). Now, in the amino acid world there are two types: Left handed and right handed. For there to be life, these all have to be left handed otherwise they cancel each other out. Think of it like a race track, if everyone goes left it is all fine. But even one driver going right would cause a catastrophe!

But in the Miller-Urey experiment, they were nearly equal parts left and right handed. Again a fatal flaw.

So the experiment:
1) Started with the wrong solution
2) Produced the wrong conditions
3) Created a fatally radioactive earth
4) Relied on a trap not found anywhere in nature
5) Got the wrong results

Scientifically speaking, the experiment was a success in that it proved that with their starting solution, following all their procedures, you could make a nearly equal amounts of left and right handed proteins. Unfortunately, that doesn't relate at all to how life started on this planet.

In His service...

What about Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’ and things that have evolved?

Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’ is a familiar site to most of us. It helps us visualize the evolutionary path from single cell to man. However, it has many problems. When looking at one of the pictures, you see two things: fully formed animal kinds and lines. The lines are there to supposedly show the evolutionary progression, but how that progression is suppose to have happened is left to our imaginationn.

The reason for this is that imagination is the only thing evolutionary science HAS to fill those blanks! We mistakenly call these “missing links”. However there isn’t a link missing in the chain, it’s the entire chain that is missing. Scientifically, what we actually observe in nature and the fossil record are fully formed kinds of animals - no lines – making Darwin’s tree look more like this:



“But what about animals we have seen evolve like horses, finches, fruit flies and peppered moths?”

Exactly, what about them? Again, what do we see? We see horses giving birth to horses, finches giving birth to finches, flies giving birth to flies and moths giving birth to moths. This is exactly what God said would happen: animal kinds reproducing after their own kind. Is there variation within a kind? Most definitely. We see that throughout the world in every kind of animal and in humans as well. Tall, short, frail, well-built, big nose, small nose, blue eyes, brown eyes and teeth of all shapes and sizes.

We even see traits like large brows, forward-set jaws, long arms, dwarfism, hunched posture and other traits supposedly reserved for our ancestors.

{Note: I am by no means saying that these people are sub-human, but that these traits are not traits indicating our ‘ancient ancestors’ but are traits still here in twenty-first century humans.}

The point is this: just because children are not identical copies of their parent, does not mean that evolution has occurred; at least not the kind of evolving required to evolve outside of specific kinds (i.e. primate to man). Sure some traits are passed on and become more prominent. The evolutionist will claim that these small changes added together over millions of years, equals evolution. Again, what do we actually see? We see no examples of this ever happening. No examples of a species part way between one species and another. In other words, there is nothing on those magic lines in Darwin’s tree. Believing those lines are real is purely imagination and not science.

In His service...

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Mislead by Lucy

How many times have people been swayed against believing God's account of Creation because of supposed "missing links"? Finds like "Peking Man" which was a fraud, "Nebraska Man" which was only one tooth (which happened to be from a pig) or fossils like Cro-Magnon man and Neandertal man which are nothing more than modern, fully human skeletons suffering from arthritis or rickets (vitamin D deficiency). Finally there is the last group of supposed "missing links" such as "Ida", "Ardi" and Lucy which are fully primate.

Secular scientists blasted the claim that Ida is anything more than an extinct Lemur. "Ardi" is again a full primate. Claimed to be bipedal based on finger and toe length (which actually fit perfectly fine in primate categories) and a supposed bump found on its highly crushed pelvis. I will post more on Ardi in a later segment. For this segment, I want to focus more on the much more well-known "Lucy" fossil.

Lucy is from a group of fossils known as "Australopithecus afarensis". She was found in Ethiopia and has made her rounds in several museums and text books as the "missing link" between human and primates. We see her here walking with her mate and looking very human-like. Notice the straight posture and the fully human hands and feet. Not bent over with the "knuckle walking" hands and grasping feet of the primate at all. Very convincing and looking at this lovely couple, one does see the human likeness in her. However, here lies the problem.

What you see here is not Lucy. It is an artists rendition of what he imagined she might look like. So, how accurate was the artist? Lets look at the real Lucy.

Here is the real Lucy. Or rather this is a picture of all the bones found of her. Do you notice anything? Here's a hint: remember the human hands and feet in the model? Do you see them? No, because they aren't there! The human-like hands and feet were added by the artist not because Lucy HAD human-like hands and feet, but because they hoped she had them.

Through the years, more fossils of Australopithecus have been found and guess what? Their hands and feet are completely primate. So why do the museums and text books still show Lucy with human-like hands and feet?

But the hands and feet were only part of the case. Lucy also stands upright. This is partially determined by more bones that weren't found (leg this time) and partially by her hip bone. See, primate hips are very wide and flat. Human's hips are more curved. This changes the center of balance and allows us to stand upright. Here is Australopithecus' hip:


Very wide and flat. But that means primate, right? When the original fossil was found, they 'knew' Lucy stood upright because she had to. So what did they do? Click on the following picture to watch a video clip and see:



That's right! The pieces didn't fit, so they took a rotary tool to them and reshaped them until they fit together how they wanted them to fit. The only reason Lucy stands upright is because they so badly wanted her to that they were willing to do whatever it took to make her stand upright.

Fortunately, further discoveries of Australopithecus have continued to show the primate pelvis, hands and feet and now nearly all scientists, including secular ones, agree that Lucy did not stand upright and is merely an extinct primate. Unfortunately this has not changed the recreations in museums, zoos and text books. Why you ask? Because they have no other missing link to fill their gap.

In His service

Wouldn't it take starlight longer to reach the earth?

An often asked question is if the stars that we see in the night skies are really millions of light years away, how could we see their light if the universe were only a few thousand years old? Here is the dilemma:




The stars and earth are a long ways apart. We have wrapped a rubber band around the above star to simulate its light.




After the "short" amount of time the Bible allows, the light from the stars would not have enough time to travel the millions of light years required to be seen from the Earth. How can Creationists explain this? Easy, the answer lies in scripture.

Genesis says God created the "lights" in the sky so we could "mark seasons and days and years". For them to do this, they had to have been visible to Adam. So somehow, between day 4 and day 6 the light had to be visible. So God had to have made the "lights" (which would include stars, planets, etc) close enough to the Earth that their light was here. Like this:




"WAIT!" you say. "The stars aren't that close and if they were, we'd all be cooked. Explain that!" And in response I point you to any of the following verses: Isaiah 42:5, Isaiah 45:12, Isaiah 51:13, Jeremiah 10:12 or Jeremiah 51:15. All of these verses plainly state a variation of the following:

"It is I who made the earth, and created man upon it I stretched out the heavens with My hands And I ordained all their host."

You see, God didn't make the stars millions of light years away and sat around waiting for their light to arrive. God made the "lights" here and visible, THEN He stretched them out to where He ordained them to be in the sky. In other words, the rubber band started at earth and stretched the other way:



In His service

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Why Rock Layers Were'nt Laid Down Over Millions Of Years

Another "proof" evolutionary scientists claim show millions of years, are the layering we see in the rocks. You can see this anywhere in the world where the rock layers are exposed; from the Grand Canyon to places on the interstate where the road has been carved out. They claim that these rock layers have been laid down over millions and millions of years. But is this so?

First, look around you and what do you see? The whole world is flat as a pancake, right? Not at all! We see hills and gullies, mountains and valleys. "So what?" What do you see in the rock layers? Hills and valleys? No, all the rock layers are flat! But if the layers were laid down over hills and valleys, it should accumulate like this:

But look at the first picture again, they are flat. What would explain the flat layers?

On a trip to the Northwest US, I stopped off at a number of places and took samples from various rock layers and collected them in a jar. I then filled the jar with water and shook it up until it was all mixed up. I then let it sit. After a few days, guess what appeared? Flat rock layers!
What could explain this happening in the world? What could cover the world with water, stir it all up and then let it settle in layers? Secular science can't account for it, but Genesis 6-9 does quite well!

In His service... Arthur Smith

Why Dating Methods are Flawed

One of the main arguments in opposition to the Biblical Creation Account is the idea of "millions of years". The Biblical account simply does not allow for more than a few thousand years. So how can dinosaurs be millions of years old, rocks even older and yet have the Bible's claim of only a few thousand years be true? Simply put, they can't both be true. So, how does one believe the Bible over secular, evolutionary-based science? Lets see how the dating methods work.

When a fossil bone is found, it has no date on it. How it is dated is usually based on what layer of rock it is found in. How the rock is dated is usually based on what fossils are found in that layer of rock. The only thing that breaks this circle are various dating methods.

Contrary to popular belief, this does not include Carbon 14 dating because Carbon 14 is only able to date things a few tens of thousands of years old. So other radioisotopes are used. There are various ones, but they all work the same. They know these isotopes break down. So they measure the amount of the first isotope (the parent) verses the amount of the second isotope (the daughter), figure out how long it takes for one to turn into the other and from that they can see how long it would take to accumulate the amount of the daughter isotope that is found in the sample. Here, let me demonstrate.

Here we have two bottles connected by two caps. These caps have a hole in the middle so when connected as shown, drops of water will pass from the top bottle to the bottom bottle. Now, we can measure how much water is in the top bottle (the parent) and how much is in the bottom bottle (the daughter). We can measure the volume of the water drop and how fast that it drops. With some simple math we can then calculate how long it would take for the amount of water measured in the bottom bottle to have dripped down from the top bottle and therefore we would know how long ago the process started. All very simple, makes sense, right? This is basically how all the dating methods work. So how is this method flawed?

Simple. Let me ask you some questions. Looking at the picture, can you tell me...
1) How much water was in the top bottle when I started?
2) How much water was in the bottom bottle when I started?
3) At any point, was any water added or removed from either bottle?
4) At any time did anything happen to change the rate of the dripping (squeezing the bottle, laying them on their side, etc) or the size of the drop (hole made bigger or blocked by something in the bottle)?

Correctly answering each of these questions is crucial to correctly calculating the time it took for the change to take place. From the sample provided, you cannot answer any of those questions. You can guess, but guessing is not science. This is the same problem secular scientists have. They first guess that the parent element was 100% and the daughter was at 0%. They then guess that nothing contaminated the specimen that might have added or taken away some of one of these elements. They then guess that nothing happened over millions and millions of years that could have changed the rate at which the conversion happened. They support these guesses by saying that in the last 50 - 75 years that these rates have been recorded, nothing has happened, but to assume that means that nothing has happened in 100 million years is not scientific.

So what happens when these methods are applied to rocks of known age? Meaning rocks newly formed in recent volcanoes? They fail 100% of the time. Secular scientists claim this is because you cannot use a test that measures by the scale of millions of years to measure something only a few thousand years old because the method would fail. However, if the entire world were only a few thousand years old as Scripture says, then dating rocks by these methods would fail exactly as observed.

Do not let scientific words like "radio-isotopic decay" and "Potassium-argon" scare you. The principles are simple, as is pointing out why they are impossible to believe. It takes far more faith to believe in the unprovable, unknowable guesses of secular scientists' than to trust God to know how He created everything.

In His service... Arthur Smith