By Pastor Tom
Down through the years, "The Twelve Days of Christmas" has become connected to different symbols of the Christian faith. For example, the partridge in the pear tree, as shared during Christmas Day worship, can remind us of Jesus on the cross, and the four calling birds call to mind the four Gospel writers.
How about the six geese a-laying? They point to the six days of creation in Genesis 1. If some Christians were writing the song today, they might feel compelled to change that part, for many have been misled into thinking that millions of years is an open and shut case. Six literal creation days just don't seem to fit.
The good news is that there's no need to change the song to "six million geese a-laying" just yet. Or ever. In 1997, seven scientists from the Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society formed a group known as RATE: Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth. These scientists all found themselves skeptical of the "deep time" that is assumed by most of science. Yet skepticism, they realized, is not enough. They needed some good, hard data. For the next several years, RATE scientists conducted experiment after experiment using the best laboratories and most cutting-edge procedures available. They recently published their findings – the technical report is two volumes, both over 600 pages in length! I opted for the layman's version – only 182 pages. Their results are difficult to share in a brief article like this one. Let me summarize by saying this: you can feel very comfortable with a faith that takes the Bible at its word – that God created in six literal days several thousand years ago. Good scientific data supports that belief!
Here are some highlights.
As I reported some months ago, tiny zircon crystals that occur in granite contain much more helium than expected, as helium escapes crystal structures relatively quickly. Analysis of these crystals yields a date of only about 6000 years for pre-flood granite. One of the scientists working with the helium experiments also measured the effects increased temperature would have on helium escaping from zircon crystals. Without going into too much detail, the results of temperature experiments, when plotted on a graph, fit the creation time table perfectly. The evolution time table is off a little bit – by a factor of 100,000!
Carbon 14 is a radioactive form of carbon that decays over several thousands, not millons, of years. The RATE team analyzed coal samples supposedly 34 million to 311 million years old. Carbon 14 was found in each sample, meaning the coal cannot be more than 100,000 years old, maximum.
The RATE team also conducted experiments on numerous rock samples. On samples 30 to 55 years old, radioisotope measurements produced ages from 270,000 years to almost 4 billion years old, depending on the isotopes measured. That's a discrepancy of 7.8 billion percent! Rock samples classified by geologists as Pre-Cambrian (conventional age – 1.1 billion years) came out anywhere from 500 million to 1.5 billion years in age. Clearly, this disparity is not the accurate dates we're used to reading about in science textbooks. The RATE scientists think that there may have been factors causing an acceleration of decay in the past, or molten rock may have become contaminated in other ways before solidifying. (For more information, see me, or borrow the book!)
Taken from the book Thousands… Not Billions. Dr. Don DeYoung. Master Books, Green Forest, AR 72638. © 2005 |
