ITB: Fossils, Dinosaurs and DNA
Resource: Lead Pastor Justin Dosch
Topic: Evolution and the Facts of Creation
So one time a young daughter came up to her mom and was like, “Mommy, can you tell me, how did the human race come about and how did we get here?” The mom looked at her and said, “well honey, a few thousand years ago God created the world and human beings. He did it in six days and then on the last day he created man and woman and that's how we got here.” She thought about that a little bit longer and decided to ask her dad a couple days later. “Daddy can you tell me how human beings came to be?” Her dad looked at her and said, “well honey a few billion years ago an amoeba kind of grew into a fish and then that became cats and then that became monkeys and then we eventually evolved from monkeys.” So you can imagine in this little girl's mind she's wondering, “how can mommy be saying one way and daddy be saying the other? So she goes back to her mom and she says, “Mommy I went and I talked to Daddy and he said we came from monkeys but you're telling me that God created us.” The mom looked at her daughter and said, “well honey, I told you about my lineage and your dad told you about his.”
While that story may be funny, it illustrates the truth about our world. When it comes to evolution vs creation it can be very polarizing. A large majority would say to believe God created the universe is irrational. If you believe in God you better check your brains at the door. Well, we want to change that.
Theologian Phil Johnson said this, “whether you believe in evolution, that everything came from nothing, or you believe that God created it, both of those things require us believing in a miracle.” Think about that. Both of those are truly miraculous. Johnson said that the likelihood of the universe just happening by chance is the same as a tornado whipping through a junkyard and on the other side creating a Boeing 747 with the random parts. That really isn’t rational at all. Why? Because things that are unordered, that don’t exist, don’t create things that are ordered.
Last week we began a series that we're calling In the Beginning, where we're looking at the creation story and what God's word says about it. More importantly we're looking at some of the actual evidence that there is an intelligent designer to the universe. We left off making this statement; either everything came from nothing or;
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Genesis 1:1
Today let’s look at some of the evidence and answer some of the biggest questions surrounding this topic.
Is the world old(billions of years) or young(thousands of years)?
At the heart of evolution is the idea of “uniformitarianism” which says the earth has always changed consistently and constantly in the same way;
For instance, the Grand Canyon was formed over millions of years from water eroding rock.
Opposite view is “catastrophism” which says the earth changes through sudden catastrophic events, greatly reducing the amount of time needed for changes to occur. Some examples;
“Little Grand Canyon” in Georgia which formed over 150 years as trees were removed and erosion occurred
Its features are indistinguishable from canyons that geologists claim took millions of years
Mt. St. Helens left formations similar to the Grand Canyon
If we hadn’t seen it ourselves we’d be saying it took millions of years to form just like the Grand Canyon
Evolutionists explain it by continually increasing their estimate of the age of the earth to keep up their theory, but it's just as likely that cataclysmic events have shaped the earth
What about fossils?
Evolutionists greatest “evidence” is the existence of fossils which they claim formed over millions of years
Do you know how fossils are actually formed?
For a living organism to become fossilized it must be buried quickly under a mass of sediment usually caused by flooding, otherwise decay happens too quickly
Apart from a cataclysmic event, like a flood, how do we explain fossil beds like the Karoo fossil field in South Africa where there are some 800 billion fossils? There's no way there could be that many concentrated in one area if there wasn’t a catastrophic event burying them at once
Every continent has fossil beds like this as if they were all buried in one massive event. There are fossils of sea creatures that have been found on the highest mountaintops. How else do you explain this other than a cataclysmic event like say, a worldwide flood?
The Great Flood explains A LOT
"In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights." Genesis 7:11-12
The flood also explains how there was a supercontinent that split apart due to the “fountains of the deep” being broken up.
Earthquakes and tectonic plates moved, pushed up mountains that used to be on the bottom of the sea
The fossils we find are the result of the flood, not millions of years of evolution
What about dinosaurs?
Kids love dinosaurs, so when they hear that they were alive 65 million years ago it creates a major conflict
First, I want to make sure I don’t crush anyone’s dreams, dinosaurs were 100% a real thing! BUT, they did not live 65m years ago.
Again the evidence is in THE FLOOD. The flood account says the animals were brought aboard the ark by, “two of each kind;”
In the same way there were only a small number of “kinds” of canines, birds, etc., there were only about 55 “kinds” of dinosaurs
Canines would eventually “mutate” into all the breeds we see today but on the ark there were TWO (more on this in a bit)
Without getting into the math, the ark was 300x50x30 or 2.2 million cubic feet, there were approximately 8000 “kinds” including dinosaurs meaning only about half the ark would have been filled
What about the huge dinosaurs? Well shockingly, most dinosaurs were only about the size of a bison AND most likely the largest creatures were brought on as infants.
So why don’t we have dinosaurs today? Well that goes along with why we don't have African Black Rhinos or Tasmanian Tigers. EXTINCTION.
The Creator’s Fingerprint; DNA
Darwin had NO CLUE about DNA
They didn't have the technology or the science to understand this and I would argue if Darwin was alive today and he had come up with this theory that most scientists would have laughed him out of the room because of this one thing, this tiny amazing miracle that is DNA.
Every single living thing has a code and t