Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had
the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a
fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a
species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,
nor is the "tail" on an embryo an actual tail -- it only resembles one.
Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would
violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,
creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was
deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The
reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is
because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were
the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.
Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem
laughable, but *The Genesis Flood* is not a silly or comic work. It is
five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward
and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.
*The Genesis Flood* has sold over 200,000 copies and gone
through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry
M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world's most influential
creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,
California.
It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on
the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are
accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream
institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has
written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.'s monthly
newsletter, *Acts and Facts,* is distributed to over 100,000 people.
The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from
its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.
In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had
an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.
Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.
The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the
top and the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon yield incongruent
ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the
thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile-
deep canyon were in fact all deposited at the same time and that
conventional radiometric methods are, to say the least, gravely
flawed. A second I.C.R. effort should demonstrate that certain ice-
cores from Greenland, which purport to show 160 thousand years of
undisturbed annual snow layers, are in fact only two thousand years
old and have been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.
Mr. Hoesch expressed some amazement that his Institute's
efforts are poorly and privately funded, while mainstream geologists
and biologists often receive comparatively enormous federal funding.
In his opinion, if the Institute for Creation Research were to receive
equivalent funding with their rivals in uniformitarian and
evolutionary so-called science, then creation-scientists would soon be
making valuable contributions to the nation's research effort.
Other creation scientists have held that the search for oil, gas,
and mineral deposits has been confounded for years by mistaken
scientific orthodoxies. They have suggested that successful flood-
geology study would revolutionize our search for mineral resources
of all kinds.
Orthodox scientists are blinded by their naturalistic prejudices.
Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Hoesch described as a "great hypocrite," is a
case in point. Carl Sagan is helping to carry out a well-funded
search for extraterrestrial life in outer space, despite the fact that
there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for extraterrestrial
intelligence, and there is certainly no mention in the Bible of any
rival covenant with another intelligent species. Worse yet, Sagan
boasts that he could detect an ordered, intelligent signal from space
from the noise and static of mere cosmic debris. But here on earth
we have the massively ordered and intelligently designed "signal"
called DNA, and yet Sagan publicly pretends that DNA is the result of
random processes! If Sagan used the same criteria to distinguish
intelligence from chance in the study of Earth life, as he does in his
search for extraterrestrial life, then he would have to become a
Creationist!
I asked Mr Hoesch what he considered the single most
important argument that his group had to make about scientific
creationism.
"Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion," he
told me. "It's the science of one religion versus the science of
another religion."
The first religion is Christianity; the second, the so-called
religion of Secular Humanism. Creation scientists consider this
message the single most important point they can make; far more
important than so-called physical evidence or the so-called scientific
facts. Creation scientists consider themselves soldiers and moral
entrepreneurs in a battle of world-views. It is no accident, to their
mind, that American schools teach "scientific" doctrines that are
inimical to fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity. It is not a
question of value-neutral facts that all citizens in our society should
quietly accept; it is a question of good versus evil, of faith versus
nihilism, of decency versus animal self-indulgence, and of discipline
versus anarchy. Evolution degrades human beings from immortal
souls created in God's Image to bipedal mammals of no more moral
consequence than other apes. People who do not properly value
themselves or others will soon lose their dignity, and then their
freedom.
Science education, for its part, degrades the American school
system from a localized, community-responsible, democratic
institution teaching community values, to an amoral indoctrination-
machine run by remote and uncaring elitist mandarins from Big
Government and Big Science.
Most people in America today are creationists of a sort. Most
people in America today care little if at all about the issue of creation
and evolution. Most people don't really care much if the world is six
billion years old, or six thousand years old, because it doesn't
impinge on their daily lives. Even radical creation-scientists have
done very little to combat the teaching of evolution in higher
education -- university level or above. They are willing to let Big
Science entertain its own arcane nonsense -- as long as they and
their children are left in peace.
But when world-views collide directly, there is no peace. The
first genuine counter-attack against evolution came in the 1920s,
when high-school education suddenly became far more widely
spread. Christian parents were shocked to hear their children
openly contradicting God's Word and they felt they were losing
control of the values taught their youth. Many state legislatures in
the USA outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1920s.
In 1925, a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John
Scopes deliberately disobeyed the law and taught evolution to his
science class. Scopes was accused of a crime and tried for it, and his
case became a national cause celebre. Many people think the
"Scopes Monkey Trial" was a triumph for science education, and it