Readers' Forum: May 25, 2009

Creationist group simply asking serious questions

Earlier this month, the Greater Terre Haute Church Federation held its annual Community Focus event at Honey Creek Mall. About 40 faith-based organizations had booths, where they passed out information on their ministries and what they were doing in our community and the region.

Answers in Genesis was one of those ministries, a group which was harshly criticized in a letter to the Readers’ Forum (May 20) by a Terre Haute reader.

Answers in Genesis is a creationist apologetics ministry, believing that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God from cover to cover. As an AiG volunteer, my goal at this mall event was to interact with the crowd and promote critical thinking in the areas of creation and evolution. We posted a few questions and asked people for there answers.

One of the questions we posed was: how old are dinosaur fossils? I told people that there are really two answers, and your answer is determined by your starting point — your worldview. If you start with the worldview that in the beginning God created the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and in six approximately 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago, you will have one answer. If you start with the worldview that in the beginning everything created itself by random processes over long periods of time without a creator, then you will have another answer.

Ultimately, we should be able to use real science — the kind of science that is repeatable, observable, and falsifiable — to defend our view, no matter which one we start with.

This letter is in response to a reader’s opinion that AiG was deceiving children and adults, causing the downfall of science and education. It’s ironic that these same people who profess science as proof there is no creator God do not even use science to back up their arguments. Astute readers of the May 20 letter would have noted that in the several hundred words, not one single evidence for evolution was presented.

The writer also claimed that no “real” scientists are creationists. AiG, however, has many staff with earned doctorates in their fields, including two with Ph.D. degrees in biology from Brown University (an Ivy League school) and from Ohio State.

Also, the assertion that creation organizations like Answers in Genesis are “at the forefront of the push to sneak creationism (often cleverly relabeled ‘intelligent design’) into our science curriculum” is false. AiG says that is would be counter-productive to force schools to teach creation or ID in public schools, for an evolutionist science instructor would teach creation/ID poorly. The writer has it all wrong here.

The universe either came about by a Creator or it came about by evolution.

Ask a scientist where matter came from, and how did life start from non-life. Also, ask how does one kind of animal change into another, and where did the information in the cell originate?

As we say in our Creation Museum near the Cincinnati Airport: ultimately who should we believe? An infallible Creator God whose Word never changes? Or fallible humans, whose ideas change every day?

— David A. Brown

Terre Haute