O'REILLY SYNDROME

      Bill O'Reilly commented on the new TV show, The Bible, by saying that he considers the Old Testament to all be allegory. He questioned the story of Adam and Eve as well as Noah as being historical fact. He challenged the pastor of the Dallas Baptist Church by asking him if he believed in Adam and Eve and all of that incest story and asked him if he believed in science and Carbon 14 dating that challenges the idea of a young earth.
       The pastor said he believed in Adam and Eve but not a young earth. I am looking forward to reading O'Reilly's book Killing Jesus. There have been a lot of books lately challenging our beliefs in the New Testament about the life of Jesus and I am interested in how much O'Reilly has been taken in by those stories.
      This is the problem that I see. We no longer believe in the basic Bible story. We don't think that God created the heavens and the earth and we really don't think that He did it in six days and rested on the seventh. We don't believe that God continues to control the weather: that is what TV forecasters do. Therefore we really don't believe that Christ controlled the weather when he calmed the storms on the seas, or that he was able to feed thousands of people from a few scraps of bread and fish.
     Why don't we believe? Because we have bought into the evolution story and now believe the lies that have been told for the last couple of hundred of years that the cosmos is billions of years old. (In my lifetime it has been doubled and tripled in length.) What is amazing to me is how many facts are discovered daily by modern science but they refuse to see and believe. Carbon 14 dating is the one thing that I first thought of when I was introduced to the idea of a young earth. I was taking nuclear engineering graduate courses at the time and immediately said that we could solve the time problem with radioactive dating techniques. That was when I discovered that all the dating techniques assume long times as a given. For C14 in 1959 they assumed that the atmosphere and high intensity solar radiation had been constant for 100,000 years. I immediately saw a problem with my assumption of an early creation atmosphere that had a water canopy protecting the atmosphere from solar radiation. The thought occurred to me that the C14 dates should have a discontinuity. They should be fairly accurate for the most recent couple of thousand years and then the dates should have a jump that would be interpreted as much longer times. And if you look at the dates you will see that happens. What has really thrown a kink in the geological time scales is the discovery of small amounts of C14 in diamonds, coal, gas, and oil deposits. Any amount at all would show that those carbon sources are only a few thousands and could not be the millions of years that are accepted as fact by modern geologists. The use of other radioactive decay observations again make an assumption that the original material was deposited with no daughter atoms. We have no idea what the composition of the original depositions were whether we use an evolutionary or creation model. We just don't know.
    Recent discoveries of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils again support the idea of a recent creation, but scientists just can't see it that way. Our exploration of the other planets have shown that there are no other creatures that have evolved on any of them. But just a few years ago our science fiction writers had strange creatures on the moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and when Star Wars came out we just knew that there were other civilizations and that they must be more advanced than ours. But we have listened carefully for over 40 years for any transmission from intelligent extraterrestrials and have heard nothing. We just can't believe that God would have created this planet and then created the universe around us. I look at the universe in all of its beauty (and all of those beautifully colored images have been colored by artists, not nature, who imagine what the colors should be) and I am even more impressed with the natural beauty of DNA, the new flowers, butterflies and sunsets that are prepared by God and much more complicated than anything man has been able to create, build or paint.

O'REILLY AND THE MOVIE THE BIBLE

Bill O'Reilly commented on his TV show that the movie The Bible was fundamental and questioned whether Adam and Eve were real, whether The Flood occurred and other old testament stories. He called the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and asked him if he believed in a recent creation or believed in Carbon 14 dating. The pastor said he didn't believe in a 6000 year history of the world, but argued for Adam and Eve. Bill commented that the Adam story meant that there was incest because only the family were available for families. In the next segment he stated that he believes that all of the old testament is allegorical.

I had to put in my two cents with the following email to Bill:

Bill,

Thousands of scientists believe evolution is impossible and the Bible story of creation may be correct.

You mentioned carbon 14. Carbon 14 has been found in coal, natural gas, oil, and diamonds which means they can not be millions of years old.

Evolution can not produce complicated life DNA required in all living matter that contains explicit information on reproduction and how to survive. Therefore we must reject evolution and all of the science that is attached to it.

Read creation science literature.

Adam and Eve could have resulted in all of the people today and Noah and his family could also produce all the people today in 4000 years.

MORE ON NASA

This is part of my next Livestock Weekly column:

Speaking of space, NASA is still concentrating on looking for signs of life on Mars. I can’t believe that there are still grown people who think that life will occur if you have water with chemicals like hydrogen and carbon along with some energy source like solar radiation or lightning. For many years we have known that life forms are highly complex DNA molecules containing an enormous amount of information in the cells that control the growth, life and reproduction. These complexities do not occur naturally. They must be the result of a really smart engineer who designed them in the first place. Apparently only the earth contains life forms. We have looked with all of our scientific tools for life elsewhere and found absolutely nothing. We have listened for messages from extra-terrestrials and heard nothing for 40 years. And yet we can’t believe that we earthlings are unique in the cosmos. The latest theory of how life got here on earth, since it could not have evolved, is that life came from space travelers years ago. The History Channel shows document graphic representations of beings clad in space suits on Egyptian and Mayan tombs supporting their idea of ancient extraterrestrials bringing life.

     It just may be that we are unique living plants and animals and there are no other planets with life forms in spite of all of the science fiction stories and movies to the contrary. The big question is whether we have been here for millions of years or for only 6,000. Which leads to the next question of how long we will continue to be here. Will the Sun play out in millions of years or will electromagnetic storms suddenly blast off from the Sun next week and wipe out all electric power and all computer driven vehicles in one storm rendering the modern world helpless? Only the subsistent farmers will be able to survive if they don’t get too sunburned. The end of the world has been argued forever and I enjoy listening to the ideas.