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.