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Origins of life              21/9/13

 

Sir,

In his letter (18th September) Prof. Paul Braterman makes some statements which ought not to go unchallenged.

The Prof. says: "we do not know the origins of life." Obviously such a statement is only correct if divine revelation on the subject is set aside. If Prof. Braterman wishes to reject the testimony of the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis then that is up to him but he does not need to make agnostics of those of us whose preference is to receive the Scriptures as true and authoritative on the matter.

As I thought I made clear in my previous letters I have no difficulty in accepting the idea of evolution within the different animal and plant kinds, whether driven by natural or artificial selection. The question is whether the mechanism involved, namely genetic mutation, can cause one kind to develop into another kind so that ultimately microbes give rise to men. The observation of science is that mutations do not create meaningful new information leading to new and better structures.

The Prof. says: "Museums are full of intermediate forms." The description 'intermediate' owes more to the imagination and wishful thinking than proven fact. Although billions of fossils have now been discovered there is not one unequivocal transitional form among them proving a causal relationship between any two distinct animal or plant kinds. The situation is not helped in that in addition to the misleading claims made by scientists for certain fossils we have media which are only too ready to embellish these claims by the use of sensationalist commentary and speculative graphics: the result is what has well been called the "disneyfication of palaeontology".

The Prof. says: "The age of the earth is dated at over 4 billion years using some half-dozen different radiometric techniques." These techniques are notoriously unreliable: some of them have dated rock of known recent age, such as that formed by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1986, at several millions years old. Geologists wedded to the evolutionary idea will not accept a radiometric date for a rock sample unless it agrees with what they already believe about the age of the sample on other grounds. The fact is that the only foolproof method for determining the age of something involves an eyewitness report and generally a written record.

Prof. Braterman's conclusion highlights the conflicting presuppositions of the two sides in this vital debate. It is obvious that he uses natural revelation (in this case, fossils) to interpret special revelation (the Bible): in contrast creationists use special revelation to interpret natural revelation. The fossil record only deceives those who are determined to study it without the Bible and so believe mistakenly that it is the product of a uniformitarian geology instead of the catastrophe of the universal Flood recorded in Genesis chapters 7 & 8.

The Bible provides us with an eyewitness report and written record of the origin of all things, including man. There is no other and we ignore it at our peril.

Rev. David Blunt
17 Knockline
Isle of North Uist
HS6 5DT


 

 

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