Crinoids – No Change for Over ”200 Million Years”

Joel Kontinen

There is no shortage of living fossils. Time and again evolutionists have to explain why an animal or a plant has remained basically unchanged for assumed tens or even hundreds of years.

For instance, modern crinoids look almost exactly like their earliest ancestors in the fossil record.

How DId Kangaroos And Other Marsupials Get to Australia After the Flood?

It is not uncommon to see wallabies near small inland towns in Australia.



Joel Kontinen

Place names often reveal a lot about people and their desire to remember where they have come from. Thus, there is a Newcastle, Tottenham as well as other names we often associate with English soccer teams. It seems that Swedish settlers have also wanted to give a name to a town – Dalby – to remind them of where they have come from.

It seems that one of the most interesting names is Ararat in the state of Victoria – a place also mentions in Genesis chapter 8.

Moreover, there are big mountains near Ararat. It would thus not be very difficult for kangaroos and other marsupials to get from Ararat to other parts of Australia.

Of course, marsupials could also have used the land bridges that probably appeared during the ice age following Noah’s Flood. Marsupials could also have sailed on rafts formed from vegetation (This is a hypothesis evolutionists have also suggested in their own scenarios.).

The Peacock – The Bird That Showed Darwin’s Theory Does Not Work

Joel Kontinen

Charles Darwin did not understand why natural selection had produced so much beauty in nature. He assumed that nature should have been indifferent to aesthetical matters.

In many cases beauty hinders the survival of animals.

In 1870 Darwin tried to show in his book The Descent of Man that peahens were enthralled by the peacock’s long tail.

He came up with the theory of sexual selection in order to account for this beauty.

However, recent research has shown that peahens don’t think too much about the peacock’s tail. In other words. Darwin’s theory is wrong.

The Right Roots – And the Wrong Ones

Joel Kontinen


Many small towns in the Australian outback have murals depicting their former days of glory at the time of the early pioneers. However, in some cases an accompanying text mentions the assumed millions of yeras of geology. In such a case, the roots are all wrong.

Christmas reminds us of our real roots. They are in creation, as described in Genesis.

The Blessings of Christianity: Flying Doctors

This small turboprop plane (Nomad) became an icon in the TV series Flying Doctors.



Joel Kontinen


Those who do not like Christianity tend to focus on its assumed harmful aspects. However, in reality, Christianity has brought many kinds of blessings to mankind. Christians have founded most of the Just think many aid organisations, such as the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

The Australian Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) will help anyone suffering from a disease or accident in the Australian outback completely free of charge. Its founder, the rev. John Flynn was an Anglican priest who came up with the idea of carrying the sick in flying machines. This occurred after WWI, at a time when flying machines were used for dropping bombs on the enemy but not much more.

Flightless Birds Are Not Proof of Evolution

Joel Kontinen

Emus and other flightless birds are not proofs of evolution, as their change has gone into the wrong direction. They have lost a skill 8the ability to fly) that their ancestors once had.

Darwinian evolution would need diametrically different changes. A creature that was previously unable to fly should evolve the ability to fly. This has only happened in Darwinian storytelling but not in the real world.

Evolution Forgot the Cockroach for ”40- Million” Years

The cockroach does not care about evolution.

Joel Kontinen

Cockroaches have been cockroaches for at least 40 million, possibly even 50 ”million years”. Ancient cockroaches trapped in amber look just like their modern counterparts.

It seems that evolution forgot the cockroach for a long time. Cockroaches were already cockroaches when the alleged ancestors of humans were no bigger than moles.

Noah’s Flood Was Unique

Joel Kontinen

After the global flood of Noah’s days, God promised never again to destroy all life by a devastating flood.

Some people think that Noah’s Flood was merely a local deluge. However, God used the rainbow as a sign that He would never let such a devastating flood destroy the earth.

Since then, we have heard of many local floods. For instance in 1955 floodwaters rose high in the streets of the small town of Gilgandra in New South Wales, Australia.

But it was not at all like the global flood described in Genesis.

No Christmas without Christ

Joel Kontinen

Some people are offended by the words Christ and Jesus. They would not want to allow other to use words like Christmas, which, after all, mean’s Christ’s Mass.

It is the celebration of Jesus’ birth as a human being into our world. God’s eternal Son took on human form because of our great need for reconciliation with God.

The First Christmas Present

A Lutheran church in Dalby, Queensland mentions the first ever Christmas present.

Joel Kontinen

Why gave the first Christmas present? A Lutheran church in Dalby, Queensland, Australia, shows that Mary wrapped the very first Christmas present.

God gave His only Son as a gift to people who had sinned against Him. Without the very first present we would not even have Christmas.

The Wonderful World of Colours

Joel Kontinen

Why do we see the world in many colours? IF evolution were true, one would expect that a few basic colours would have been adequate for natural selection. Our species might have evaded extinction even if our forefathers had lived in a grayish black world.
.
The world around us looks like a Great Artist had designed it. It seems that He appreciates beauty and wants us to enjoy looking at His multi-coloured works that we see in nature.

Great human artists actually only copy that what they see in creation.

Salt Water Plants Thrived in Noah’s Flood

Joel Kontinen

Salt water does not necessarily kill trees. Actually, mangrove forests are quite at home in salty water.

Noah’s Flood probably brought a lot of salt into oceans. However, even today some trees will withstand salt water. While many trees were destroyed, we have no reason to doubt that all plants were unable to cope with the floodwaters.

Things Change – But That’s Not Evolution

A mural in the town of Bowen, Queensland, Australia, depicts old airplanes.



Joel Kontinen

Evolution is often (incorrectly) defined as change. However, even things that are definitely designed tend to change. Take airplanes, for instance, that a century ago were very much different from what they are now.

In other words, planes have been designed. They have not evolved via Darwinian processes.

Dragon Eggs in Australian Museum

Joel Kontinen

One can occasionally see interesting relics in museums, for instance, dragon eggs. Or at least a museum in Kuranda, Queensland Australia, claims that it displays them.

However, evolutionists will claim that dragons were not real animals but creatures stemming from the folklore of uneducated people. They have nonetheless many features in common ´with dinosaurs.

And legendary creatures have to be reasonably real in order to lay real eggs.

Australian Marsupials – Intelligently Designed to Cope in Harsh Environments

Joel Kontinen

Some of them (for instance, koalas) prefer the trees. Some others (kangaroos and wallabies) will rather stay on the ground when they’re not jumping. All of them have adapted well to their hot environment.

Conditions after the Fall and the Flood are challenging but God created animals with the ability to afapt to very different kinds of environments.

Australian marsupials have been programmed to thrive in harsh, hot conditions.

Days of Creation: Normal Days or Millions of Years?

Joel Kontinen

Recently, I saw and heard a visual/ audio presentation on creation in St. Monica’s Cathedral in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. The artist obviously assumed that God needed to prepare Planet Earth for life for millions of years before “primitive” life appeared and eventually Adam and Eve.

However, the Bible (Colossians 1:15-16 and John 1:1-3) shows that Jesus is the Creator. In the New Testament He turned water into wine in an instant and multiplied loaves and fish in no time.

Why would He have needed millions of years in the Old Testament?

The Timeless yet Timely Message of Genesis

A fitness club in Cairns has a fitting name.



Joel Kontinen

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is still a very timely book. Without it, we would be unable to understand the New Testament and the need for atonement.


A fitness club in Cairns in Queensland, Australia, has a fitting name that testifies of Genesis.

Butterflies – Bad Headaches for Evolutionists

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists will admit that butterflies have been butterflies during the age of the dinosaurs, roughly ”135 million years ago”. In other words, they have not changed during the time dinosaurs allegedly became birds and early rat-sized mammals evolved into humans.

Butterflies still change but in a way that is contrary to Darwinism. The larvae change into creatures that are completely different.

The change from larvae to butterflies speaks of very intelligent desogn.

The Bird’s Feather – Intelligently Designed for Flight

This one came down.

But this did not, until it was time to replace it.




Joel Kontinen

The bird’s feather is amazingly well designed. It is light and endurable. It will keep the bird in the air.

In contrast, the parts of an aeroplane look much less designed. And a bird is a much more efficient and reliable flier than a machine man has designed.

Beware of the Gap Theory

Joel Kontinen

Some gaps are real. Some are not. In the 19th century, some theologians suggested that there was a huge gap – lasting millions of years - between Genesis 1 1 and 1::2. There was no real theological evidence for such a gap in the Bible.

The Old Testament clearly states that God created everything in six days.

How Not to Make a Fossil – The Case of a Dead Frog

Joel Kontinen

A frog hit by a car does not fossilize easily in hot conditions. No matter how long we wait, the deceased froggie remains unfossilized.

What would be needed is exceptional circumstances, including a lot of water. Almost always when science publications report on the discovery of a fossil, they suggest that the animal died in a local flood.

But why local? The global flood in Noah’s days remains the best explanation for most (but not necessarily all) fossils.

Spiny Anteater – Problematic Creature for Evolutionists

Joel Kontinen

It is a mammal but it lays eggs. The spiny anteater is a monotreme, just like the platypus. It is obviously not about to evolve into a bird nor has it evolved from a bird.

Monotremes or egg-laying mammals are difficult to place in a Darwinian tree of life as they seem to be mosaics that do not belong anywhere.

They speak of the creativity of the Creator.

Cross on a Hillside Speaks of Hope

Joel Kontinen

The cross is a powerful symbol, even if one sees it on an otherwise empty and barren hillside.

Magnetic island is a smallish island near Townsville, Queensland, Australia. At least in November, there are more birds than people on this island.

Barely visible from a road leading away from the ferry terminal, there is a huge white cross on the hillside. One will have to take a winding path to take a closer look but it will be worth the effort.

Built on a large bounder, the cross is huge. in its silent way, it speaks of hope.

Fortunately, this is Australia and not USA or Europe where ”free thinkers” feel depressed at the sight of a cross and lose their peace of mind that they then try to regain through lawsuits.

The Non-evolution of the Crocodile – A Hard Challenge for Darwinism

Joel Kontinen

According to the Darwinian story, crocodiles were crocodiles when the early dinosaurs appeared. Their non-evolution has naturally given rise to inventive excuses for why crocodiles were so well adapted to their environment that they have not needed to change for over “200 million years”.

Like all other living fossils, crocodiles are a hard challenge to a worldview that is often (incorrectly) defined as change over time.

Evolution: When Magic Became Science

Charles Darwin gave natural selection a function that it does not have. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

In real life nothing comes from nothing and no organisms will adapt to their environment by chance. Typing errors (mutations) do not improve a text and nature cannot really be able to choose from existing mistakes or anticipate future evolution since the watchmaker that Dawkins and co. put their trust in is blind.

In other words, evolution is impossible.

Charles Darwin wanted to give nature a function that in real life only God has ever had.

Thus, when a science writer says that natural selection caused x (for instance a cave crab to lose its eyesight), he (or she) is relying on magical thinking because Darwinists cannot allow a Divine foot in the door).

(Losing a function would not be of much help, because evolution would need immense amounts of new genetic information. This has never been observed.)

A Fresh Reminder of Eden in the Bird Kingdom in Australia

Joel Kontinen

Birds in Queensland, Australia, can be quite noisy at times, especially in the evenings. However, at least some seabirds are surprisingly tame. In Brisbane, for instance, a big bird can suddenly land on a stretch of street reserved for pedestrians and start walking among humans.

Some seabirds can be very inquisitive. Yesterday, two big birds marched towards our verandah with their pencil-thin legs. For five minutes they kept on staring at us, without moving or giving any indication of fear or aggression. Finally, they calmly walked away.

These birds remind us of the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Adam was not afraid of the animals and the animals were not afraid of Adam. The only things about the non-predatory birds of Queensland that remind us of the Fall are the shrill calls at night. Otherwise one might almost imagine being in Eden – if only the weather were a bit cooler.

However, there are occasional reminders of the Fall, with eagles and other predators.

Scientific Evidence for a Young Earth

Answers magazine presents compelling evidence for a young earth.


Joel Kontinen

Many people assume that the millions and billions of years that we hear about in natural history museums and read about in science text books are scientific facts.

However, there is no shortage of scientific discoveries that suggest a much younger planet.

The latest issue of Answers magazine includes a section on evidence for a young earth. Several PhD scientists present facts that refute the dogma of an old earth.

The magazine lists the ten best evidences for a young earth. They are:

1) Very little sediment on the seafloor
2) Bent rock layers
3) Soft tissue in fossils
4) Faint sun paradox
5) Rapidly decaying magnetic field
6) Helium in radioactive rocks
7) Carbon-14 in fossils, coal, and diamonds
8) Short-lived comets
9) Very little salt in the sea
10) DNA in “ancient” bacteria


Source:

10 Best evidences from science that confirm a young earth. Answers 7:4, 44-57.

Trilobite Eye Speaks of Intelligent Design

Image courtesy of Moussa Direct Ltd, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

According to evolutionary thinking, trilobites are among the earliest of animals. However, the eyes of trilobites assumed to be 520 million years old are extremely sophisticated and hi-tech. Some trilobites even saw their world in three dimensions.

Evolutionists assume that eyes evolved from patches on the skin that were sensitive to light, However, fossils speak of an entirely different language – the finest eyes were the earliest ones.
Source:

Wise, Kurt. 2012. Trilobite eyes – ultimate optics. Answers 7:4, 26-27.

The Goldilocks Planet

Image courtesy of NASA.


Joel Kontinen

In many ways, Earth is a very special planet. It orbits the Sun at just the right distance. It’s not too hot or too cold. Everything is just right for life.

ICR’s latest That a Fact video discusses the uniqueness of planet Earth.

Mutations Cannot Cause Darwinian Evolution – They Arise Too Slowly

Joel Kontinen


Humans differ from chimpanzees in so many ways that Darwinian evolution will always be unable to turn an apelike creature into a human being.

This kind of change would simply need too many co-ordinated mutations. Evolutionists believe that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived six million years ago. As Dr. Ann Gauger, a Senior Research Scientist at Biologic Institute, explains in this brief video, even this time is far too short to turn an apelike creature into a human being. Even the assumed age of the universe would not be enough.




In other words, Darwinian evolution is impossible.

Dinosaurs in the Bible?

Joel Kontinen


What does the Bible say about dinosaurs? While the word dinosaur was not coined until the 19th century, there are some interesting hints in the Old Testament.




The Book of describes a huge land animal called behemoth:

“Look now at the behemoth, which I made along with you; He eats grass like an ox.
See now, his strength is in his hips, And his power is in his stomach muscles.
He moves his tail like a cedar; The sinews of his thighs are tightly knit.
His bones are like beams of bronze, His ribs like bars of iron.
He is the first of the ways of God; Only He who made him can bring near His sword.” (Job 40:15-19).

The description fits that of a huge sauropodian dinosaur.

Cavemen Were Surprisingly Smart

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Sophisticated is not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking about Neanderthal men. Yet that is exactly what Nature news suggests they were like.

A paper recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Neanderthals imitated H. sapiens. Jean-Jacques Hublin of Max Planck Institute and colleagues report on fossils and ornaments found in the Grotte du Renne cave in central France.

Reporting on the discovery, Nature news suggests that the artefacts Neanderthals made are so complex that similar objects are often attributed to modern humans.

This is just one of the many discoveries (read more here, here and here) that show that Neanderthals were fully human. According to the biblical model, they were descendants of Noah. They mostly lived in Europe during the ice age following the Genesis Flood.


Source:

Switek, Brian. 2012. Neanderthals smart enough to copy humans: Radiocarbon dates hint that human sister species was more sophisticated than previously thought. Nature News (30 October).

Iran Caused Superstorm Sandy, Syria Claims

Image courtesy of The Birkes, Flickr /Wikipedia Commons.





Joel Kontinen


Major catastrophes often give rise to outlandish explanations. According to CNN, a Syrian pro-government group claimed:

“Sources confirmed to us that Hurricane Sandy that is slamming the U.S. was set off by highly advanced technologies developed by the heroic Iranian regime that supports the resistance, with coordination of our resistive Syrian regime,” pro-government group News Network of the Syrian Armed Forces said in a Facebook posting.

This is the punishment for whoever dares to attack Syria’s (Bashar) al-Assad and threaten peace and stability.”

It is a common tendency to blame Israel or global warming for all kinds of calamities, so the Syrian claim is definitely a new kind of development.


Source:

Saad Abedine, Saad. 2012. 'Heroic' Iran, 'resistive' Syria behind Sandy, pro-Assad group claims.. CNN (31 October).

The Worst Holocaust Ever – It’s Still Occurring

Joel Kontinen


The worst holocaust of all time is occurring in our days. A new documentary produced by Shadowline Films opens our eyes to see what is happening in many countries.

The name of the documentary is It’s a Girl.

According to the Film’s website,

“In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called ‘gendercide’.”

Bogus Paper Accepted by a Peer-Reviewed Journal

Advances in Pure Mathematics (APM) is an openly accessible peer-reviewed journal.




Joel Kontinen

Proponents of Darwinian evolution often claim that those who are sceptical of evolution never publish papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The claim is false. However, one might be justified in questioning the validity of peer review, especially after a recent case in which a computer-generated mathematics paper was actually accepted for publication.

“Professor Marcie Rathke” submitted a paper entitled Independent, negative, canonically Turing arrows of equations and problems in applied formal PDE to the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics.

Advances in Pure Mathematics (APM) states that it “is an international journal dedicated to the latest advancement of ordered algebraic structures”.

The journal accepted Prof. Rathke’s paper but required some slight modifications to it.

What makes this interesting is that the entire paper was randomly generated.



Source:


Eldredge, Nate. 2012. Mathgen paper accepted! That’s Mathematics! (14 September).

The Whale That Almost Spoke

A beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas). Image courtesy of Steve Snodgrass, Flickr.




Joel Kontinen

A beluga whale known as NOC has recently become a celebrity, five years after its death, for its ability to mimic human speech.

NOC lived most of its life in captivity. A paper published in the journal Current Biology acknowledges that the whale was not as clever in imitating humans as parrots are.

However, NOC’s articulation differed somewhat from that of the average beluga whale, prompting evolutionists to write a research paper on it.

It seems that the motive behind the whale tale was the desire of evolutionists to show that the gulf separating humans and animals is not as unbridgeable as was assumed. But in the real world, only humans can speak like humans. Even a linguist has difficulty in deciphering NOC’s ”speech”.


Source:

Callaway, Ewen. 2012. The whale that talked: Captive beluga was able to mimic speech (sort of). Nature News (22 October). The article has an accompanying recording of how NOC “spoke”.

“Grandmother, Why Do You Have Such a Big Brain?”

Cambrian animals were by no means simple. A fossil of Marrella splendens (Marrellomorpha). Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.





Joel Kontinen

Early animals should not be as complex as modern ones, at least not according to Darwinian evolution. But sometimes they are.

Gregory Edgecombe, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and colleagues recently published a paper in Nature. Among other animals, they examined the fossil of a well-preserved small invertebrate called Fuxianhuia assumed to be 520 million years old.

Edgecombe acknowledges that the brain of Fuxianhuia is "fairly sophisticated” and strikingly similar to today’s insects and some crustaceans.

If a brain does not change in “520 million years”, then evolution is in big trouble. After all, the Cambrian Explosion was a huge dilemma for Darwin. It still seems to be – at least for his modern successors.


Source:

Switek, Brian. 2012. Picking an ancient brain: Traces of an early arthropod’s neural tissue might be evidence of a long-running evolutionary arms race. Nature News (10 October).

Teeth Evolution - A Huge Darwinian Dilemma

This ancient fish was not supposed to have teeth, but its fossil says otherwise. Image courtesy of Dmitry Bogdanov, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Fossil discoveries tend to bring more problems for evolutionists than they solve. Darwinists have assumed that early vertebrates such as fish did not have teeth. They believe that teeth evolved later.

New research published online in Nature shows that they were wrong. A research team lead by Martin Rucklin of Bristol University looked into the mouth of the early fish Compagopiscis with powerful x-rays and found teeth.

In other words, teeth did not evolve from non-teeth but have belonged in the mouth of these fishes from the beginning.

Sources:

Evolutionary Origins of Our Pretty Smile. Phys.org (17 October).

Rucklin, Martin et. al. 2012. Development of teeth and jaws in the earliest jawed vertebrates. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature11555. Published online on 17 October.

Latest Exoplanet Is Scorching Hot

An artist’s impression of the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Image courtesy of ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org).




Joel Kontinen

This week Nature reported on the discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B 4.37 light years from us. Its proximity prompted at least one evolutionist to speculate that Earth’s twin would be discovered soon.

Astronomers at the University of Geneva made the discovery that Nature published online.

Dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb, the Earth-sized rocky planet orbits closer to its sun than Mercury ours so it is no paradise. Little green men would soon loose all their greenness and be turned into little scorched men.

A. Centauri is a triple-star system. Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri are just fractions of a light year from each other. With three suns in the sky, nights on Alpha Centauri Bb will probably be short.

Exoplanet hunters have not found a single genuinely Earth-like planet. Nature News reported that although NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has found 3,000 potential exoplanets, not even one of the Earth-sized planets orbits its sun in its habitable zone.

Earth seems to be a very special planet.

Source:

Hand, Eric. 2012. The exoplanet next door: Earth-sized world discovered in nearby α Centauri star system. Nature News. (16 October).

The New Testament on the Creator

Joel Kontinen

The New Testament is not silent about the identity of the Creator. In Colossians, the apostle Paul writes about Jesus Christ:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.” (Col. 1:15-16, NKJV)

The Gospel of John (1:1-3, NKJV) says:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”

It would be impossible to see evolution in either of these passages:

New Research Buries “Arsenic Loving” Bacterium

NASA researchers found the bizarre microbe in Lake Mono, California. Image courtesy of Michael Gäbler, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

In December 2010 NASA announced that it was about to disclose an important discovery that had to do with extraterrestrial life.

It did not have anything to do with little green men, however. Published in the journal Science, the discovery was about a bacterium that was believed to be able to use arsenic instead of phosphorus.

Within a few days, scientists began expressing their scepticism of the discovery.

Recently, a paper published in Nature found that the “arsenic loving” bacterium was not so weird after all.

According to Nature News, “A bacterium that some scientists thought could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorus it can find.”

The article went on to say,

“Dan Tawfik, who studies protein function at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have now teased out the mechanism by which some of the bacterial proteins bind to phosphate and not arsenate. The study … suggests that just one chemical bond holds the key, and shows that the ‘arsenic-life’ bacteria have a strong preference for phosphorus over arsenic.”

It seems that a belief in weird life forms produced by evolution motivated the original arsenic paper, which, of course, says something about the naturalistic faith of some researchers.


Source:

Cressey, Daniel. 2012. Transport proteins show 4,000-fold preference for phosphate over arsenate. Nature News (3 October).

Cambrian Explosion - a Real Headache for Evolutionary Biologists

The Cambrian animals were by no means simple. A fossil of Marrella splendens (Marrellomorpha). Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.





Joel Kontinen

Hardly a day goes by without news of great difficulties for Darwinian evolution. Science Daily reports that the Cambrian Explosion, which used to be a dilemma for Charles Darwin, is still a real headache for evolutionists.

Matthew Wills, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath, acknowledges:

“The fossils from the Cambrian period can cause a real headache for evolutionary biologists. Instinct tells us to expect simple organisms evolving over time to become increasingly more complex. However during the Cambrian period there was an apparent explosion of different major groups of animals, all appearing simultaneously.”

This is definitely not that what we would expect of evolution.

Source:

Marine Worms Reveal the Deepest Evolutionary Patterns. Science Daily Oct. 9, 2012.

Cavemen in the Bible?

Joel Kontinen

This might come as a surprise to many people, but the Bible does speak about people living in caves.

They were not dim-witted brutes, however. One of them was Lot, who after escaping from Sodom, sought refuge in a cave. Later David and his men also lived in caves.

Biblical history shows that there never was a time called pre-history. Man was intelligent from the beginning of his sojourn on earth.

CMI has produced a brief video on cavemen:

Freud, Marx, the Berlin Wall and Darwin

The Berlin Wall was supposed to last forever. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen


Some things were never supposed to tumble down. There was a time when Freudian psychotherapy was science. Not so long ago, when the Berlin Wall was still standing, some people adamantly promoted the Marxist view of history. They regarded it as fact.

Then the Wall came down.

Darwin might well be the next icon to follow the path of Humpty Dumpty, who, as we might remember, had a great fall.

Soft Tissue Found in Mammoth Bone

Charles R. Knight: Woolly mammoths near the Somme River, AMNH mural (1916). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

The recent discovery of a well-preserved mammoth in northern Siberia has brought an earlier discovery into the news.

According to The Guardian, “Russia's North-Eastern Federal University said in early September that an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow some 100 metres underground during a summer expedition in Yakutia.”

While finding soft tissue in mammoth fossils assumed to be some tens of thousands of years old is not as spectacular as finding it in a T. rex bone, it is nonetheless interesting.

Recent years have brought to light other intriguing details about mammoths. In 2007 the journal Science published a paper on DNA extracted from mammoth hair shafts. Some of the mammoths were assumed to be over 50,000 years old. This should cause us to use critical thinking skills: Does DNA really last that long, even in Siberia? If not, then there obviously is something amiss in the dates assigned to these fossils.

According to the creation model, woolly mammoths lived during the ice age following the Genesis Flood. We would not be surprised by the discovery of soft tissue and DNA in their fossils.


Sources:


Gilbert, M. Thomas P. & al. 2007. Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing of Mitochondria from Ancient Hair Shafts Science 317: 5846, 1927 – 1930.

Well-preserved mammoth found in northern Siberia The Guardian. 5 October 2012.

Ex-Atheist: Secularists Bend the Facts into Their Worldview

Secularists are bowing down to Darwin and see everything in the light of Darwinism. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Ex-atheists are often more honest than practicing atheists. Recently, an American ex-atheist named Gary stated:

“Doesn't it strike you as odd that secularists are extremely creative in their interpretations and imaginations to bend the evidence into their worldview and paradigm, and then oddly enough insist that their conclusions are facts and everyone else is silly. It always amazes me.”

Gary was writing about the age of the earth on the Creation Ministries International website. He concluded:

“Sadly many Christians but [sic] into this madness [i.e., they accept evolution and millions of years of earth history] and are unable to see the folly and somehow think they are being scholarly and sophisticated.”

Source:

Creation Ministries International

G. K. Chesterton: “Why Are We Not Grateful to God for Filling our Stockings with Legs?”

G. K. Chesterton. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen


Many sceptics assume that eyeglasses are the result of intelligent design but the eyes behind the glasses came about through blind Darwinian processes.

It might perhaps be good to remember what English author G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who is known as a great defender of Christianity, said:

“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

Source:

Brainy Quote.com.

Miracles Without God: The Naturalistic Origin of Life

Joel Kontinen

Even if man rejects the supernatural, he still has to believe in the miraculous. While he does not have a miracle-maker, he still needs miracles.

One of the biggest naturalistic dilemmas is the origin of life. Life simply does not come from non-life, so the evolutionist has to resort to a naturalistic miracle or blind luck, as some would say.

This brief video from CMI illustrates the problem:

Design in Nature: the Bacterial Flagellar Motor

The bacterial flagellar motor. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.


Joel Kontinen


The bacterial flagellar motor displays the hallmarks of design that is both intelligent and much more advanced than thousands of hours of hi-tech development could have brought about. It not only looks designed but it functions like it has been designed, as this video from Essential Cell Biology shows:

The Cockroach That Forgot to Evolve for “300 Million” Years

This cockroach is assumed to be “40-50 million years” old. Image courtesy of Anders L. Damgaard, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

New living fossils are found almost weekly. The latest addition is the cockroach. Russell Garwood and colleagues report on “300- million-year” old insects in PloS ONE, including a cockroach that according to Nature news “resembles a modern cockroach”.

It is no secret that Darwinian evolution should be about change but it often isn’t.

Source:

Catanzaro, Michele. 2012. Ancient insects pictured in 3D. High-resolution fossil scans give detailed portraits of 305-million-year-old juvenile insects. Nature news (26 September).

Objections to Noah’s Flood Don’t Hold Water

Joel Kontinen


Hardly a week goes by without someone on the Internet doubting the Genesis account of Noah’s Flood. It seems that most sceptics have not really thought about the issue in depth but are nonetheless eager to doubt that what they do not like.

A recent example of this trend is an article entitled The Story Of Noah's Ark Just Doesn't Float on EzineArticles.com. The writer assumes that conditions before the Flood were more or less identical to what they are today, with Mount Everest reaching its present height. She even thinks that there were polar bears in the pre-Flood world.

As conditions before the Flood were different, there is no need to assume that there even were polar bears, which belong to the same biblical kind as grizzly bears. Once we realise that the Genesis kind is a wider concept than “species”, the need to take millions of animals on board vanishes.

Some of the assumed difficulties border on the bizarre, such as the suggestion that animals disembarking from Mt. Ararat (the Bible actually speaks about the mountains of Ararat) would “have frozen to death at that elevation in a matter of hours” even though conditions there would initially have resembled those at sea level, so freezing would have been impossible.

After the flood, the animals could easily have migrated to the farthest reaches of the globe either on floating rafts or using land bridges.

The ancients were not simpletons. Contrary to what the sceptics say, Noah’s Ark was a very seaworthy vessel, as Korean naval engineers have attested. There is no reason for us to doubt that Noah was capable of seeing to it that the animals on board had enough to eat and drink and that he and his family could dispose of animal waste.

Interestingly, we can find evidence for Noah’s Flood all over the world.

AoG Journal Does Not Take a Stand on the Age of the Earth

The latest issue of Enrichment Journal focuses on science and the Bible. It fails to take a stand on the age of this planet. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

The latest issue of Enrichment Journal surveys the views Christians have of science. It includes a debate on the age of the earth, with Kurt P. Wise presenting the traditional six day creation (with twenty-four hour days), Hugh Ross the day-age view (a day as a long period of time) and Davis A. Young taking the literary framework approach.

Old-Earth views have huge theological problems, for instance they make it impossible to regard death as the wages of sin.

Dr. Wise concludes, “The old-earth position is not derived from Scripture. It is derived from science and used to distort the interpretation of the Bible. A proper exegesis of Scripture leads to a young-earth position.”

The problem with Enrichment Journal is that is regards all three views as being equally valid.

Source:


Faith and Science: Interpreting God’s Word and God’s World. Enrichment Journal

“Jesus Had a Wife”, 4th Century Document Claims

El Greco (1580): Christ carrying His cross. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.


Joel Kontinen

From time to time, historians find old documents that bring up some unexpected aspects about Jesus. Recently, Karen L. King, a historian at Harvard University, introduced a paper on a fourth-century document fragment with these words:

“Published here for the first time is a fragment of a fourth-century CE codex in Coptic containing a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in which Jesus speaks of 'my wife.' This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century.”

The fragment is small, 4 cm (1.6 inches) x 8 cm (3.2 inches). At least some experts say that it is authentic, i.e. it is not a modern forgery.

While the New Testament Gospels are eyewitness accounts written a few decades after the events that they describe, this fragment is at least a hundred years younger, and probably even more. It could be 300 years younger than the earliest written Gospel.

Most Jewish men were married, but given Jesus’ exceptional life and ministry, He almost certainly was not. He came to die, to atone for the sins of mankind. A wife and children would have been a distraction for Him and a potential source of theological difficulties. There is nothing in the Gospels that suggests that Jesus was married.

There have been all kinds of more or less bizarre “discoveries” about the life (and death) of Jesus in recent years, but all claimed documents or artefacts hail from a much later period than the authentic Gospels.

We should also remember that later accounts of Jesus’ life were not inspired. There is no evidence that Jesus ever called anyone His wife. The Coptic document is too young and was written in a language and culture that differed from the original setting of the Gospels.

Source

King, Karen L. 2012. “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’” A New Coptic Gospel Papyrus.

New Research Kills Evolutionary Genetics?

Interesting conclusions in Nature.



Joel Kontinen

Junk DNA was not the only casualty of the recently published ENCODE project. A paper in Nature authored by Djebali and colleagues recommended that the concept “gene” should be re-defined. They concluded:

“This supports and is consistent with earlier observations of a highly interleaved transcribed genome, but more importantly, prompts the reconsideration of the definition of a gene. As this is a consistent characteristic of annotated genomes, we would propose that the transcript be considered as the basic atomic unit of inheritance. Concomitantly, the term gene would then denote a higher-order concept intended to capture all those transcripts (eventually divorced from their genomic locations) that contribute to a given phenotypic trait.”

This is rather interesting, as there is a field of studies called evolutionary genetics, which relies heavily on Darwinian evolution. What should we now call it? Junk science, perhaps?


Source:

Djebali, Sarah et al. 2012. Landscape of transcription in human cells. Nature 489 (7414): 101-108.

Darwinists Still Struggling to Accept the Demise of Junk DNA

Dr. Jonathan Wells predicted the downfall of “junk DNA” in his book published last year.


Joel Kontinen


The response of some Darwinians to the recent demise of ”junk DNA” is interesting. Larry Moran, for instance, does not want to let the facts spoil a theory that he believes is good. Commenting on an article in the Washington Post, he writes:

“This is wrong. Most of our genome is still junk in spite of what the ENCODE Consortium says… Here's the important question. Who is going to take responsibility for this PR fiasco?”

It’s a rather peculiar statement from a scientist.

However, we should probably not be surprised, as many well-known evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins (1976), Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel (1980), Michael Shermer (2006), Jerry Coyne (2009) and PZ Myers (2011) have also promoted the concept of junk DNA as evolutionary leftovers.

Crick and Orgel regarded “junk DNA” as “the ultimate parasite”. Dawkins described it as “a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.” Coyne called it vestigial.

While a few orthodox Darwinians might have disagreed with the strict parasite view, the early breakthroughs were made by scientists who to at least to some extent were dissenters. For instance, in 2005 James Shapiro and Richard von Sternberg published a paper entitled Why repetitive DNA is essential to genome function.

Interestingly, some Darwinists are still trying to re-write their past views on junk DNA. But Google has made their task somewhat harder.


Sources:

Moran, Laurence A. 2012. Washington Post: "‘Junk DNA’ concept debunked by new analysis of human genome". Sandwalk (September 9).

Shapiro, James A. 2012. Bob Dylan, ENCODE and Evolutionary Theory: The Times They Are A-Changin' Huffington Post (12 September).