HOW DO I FEEL ABOUT CREATION?

My wife, Nancy, gave me this assignment this morning to express my feelings about creation in a two page double-spaced paper. She, like most women, are more attuned to emotional feelings than I am or think I am. I had never thought much about creation until I was about 33 years old when I read a short book by Dr. Henry M. Morris entitled The Bible and Modern Science. It challenged evolution and I responded that everyone knew evolution was true and started my looking into the subject. I told myself that I was educated in the physical sciences, but evolution was in the biological and anthropology areas that I had no knowledge of. So I went to the Fort Worth Public Library and looked at some of the anthropology journals. This was in 1957 or 8 and the Piltdown Man had just been discovered to be a hoax. The articles in the journal fascinated me by the caustic remarks and attacks on the beliefs of other scientists. I had read a lots of technical papers by engineers and we never used that kind of language when we disagreed.

About that time I got a case of flu or something that put me sick in bed for about a week. I had realized that I had never read the Bible so I took the opportunity to read it from cover to cover. As I read thinking about the creation-evolution controversy I told myself that if God didn't create the world then the Bible stories didn't make sense because all the way through they referred to creation.

I then discovered apologetics literature and read more about the history of the criticism of the Bible starting with the Germans around WWI when they used "scientific" methods to examine the writings to argue that parts attributed to one writer were obviously written in a different style and must be questioned as to the authorship. They also argued that historical facts were not known and that the Bible stories about peoples were questionable. Thus they questioned the authenticity and validity of the writings. By the time I read the apologetics literature, a great deal of archaeological findings between WWI and WWII had discovered artifacts that supported the Biblical stories and verified Biblical history as being accurate. This was what I wanted to believe which is an emotional response.

At this time I was completing four semesters of graduate work in nuclear engineering and as I looked at the arguments about whether the world was 4 billion or 6000 years old, my response was that radioactive dating would prove accurately the age of the earth. I then went back to the library to look for work on radiocarbon dating and immediately found a problem. The dating technique was based on assumptions of no change in the atmosphere composition and no change in the rate of high energy solar radiation that caused the conversion of N to C14. By this time I had read THE GENESIS FLOOD and the theory about a different atmosphere with a water canopy prior to the Flood and realized that all theories of the earth had a problem of not knowing what the original composition and history of the earth surface or atmosphere consisted of. I said that if my ideas were correct then the C14 dating would have a discontinuity in the dates as earlier artifacts were dated and I found that the dates were fairly accurate back a couple of thousand years but then began to give high dates that would agree with my assumptions of changes in the atmosphere. Recent findings have confirmed that supposedly millions of years old carbon such as oil, gas, diamonds and coal have some C14 but if they were that old would have none.

As I read and studied more my emotions came to believe that my interpretations of the scientific facts supported creation and questioned how scientists could have ever come up with such ridiculous ideas of billions of years and natural forces creating life and making it more complex through millions of years when my observations were that as things aged they deteriorated and became less complex. When I read about how DNA and RNA are so complex with information encoded into life forms to control the reproduction processes I can only believe in an intelligent designer, not any kind of random natural process.  What confounds me is how the evolutionists become so emotional and attack any question about their beliefs. They frame the argument as science against religion without questioning the validity of their science and not permitting any questioning. Emotional is the only game that they play. I grow more and more emotional about my feelings also.