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How Creationists See the World
Dr Colin Groves

Does 'creation science' affect archaeology at all?

The world was created about 6000-l0,000 years ago. It took six days, and every organism was created in much the same form in which it now exists (though not necessarily exactly identical: everything 'after its own kind' could mean that, say, lions and tigers separated out within the 'cat kind'). Adam and Eve, the first humans, disobeyed God and so brought death into the world (for themselves, their descendants, and all living things). Being perfect, they had perfect genes, so the fact that their sons and daughters had to mate with each other didn't cause inbreeding depression. Before the fall (or, in some versions, until the flood) all animals were vegetarian, and leopards lay down with lambs; afterwards, because death had been brought into the world, they could eat each other.

After a while God decided he'd done the wrong thing by creating the world, and destroyed it again in a global flood, bringing water down from the sky (creationists speak of a 'vapour canopy' over the earth before that) and from within the earth (the mysterious 'fountains of the deep'). Only Noah and his family and a pair (or was it in some cases seven?) of each species 'after its own kind' were saved. Most (or, in some versions, all) of the geological column was formed by sediments laid down in the flood. When the flood dried up the animals all ran back to their original homelands, the koalas just managing to reach Australia before the tigers (who weren't allowed further east than Bali) could get them. Afterwards, Noah was mocked by his son Ham and therefore laid a curse on Ham's son Canaan and all his descendants.

Finally human beings built the Tower of Babel; God was frightened that they might build it as high as heaven so he confused their languages, perhaps by making them deaf for several years according to Taylor (1983), and dispersed them. After that the races were formed: as Adam and Eve were created perfect, the two of them possessed all the genes now possessed by different races. Cultural evolution is summarised by one creationist writer as follows:

...the culture (technology, religion, etcetera) of each racial group in the world started at a common point - Noah! Each began with ancestors who had a full knowledge of God and a sophisticated ocean-liner technology. The current cultural status of the races, which varies from Stone age to Space age, from animal worship and spirit worship to Christianity, is not a result of innocent ignorant people searching for improvement. It is a direct consequence of whether the ancestors of any race worshipped the living God or deliberately rejected him. (Ham 1983:11).

All cultures which do not have a correct knowledge of God have got that way by the deliberate rejection of revelation (Romans 1:21-32). They are not primitives in need of education and technical aid so that they can understand the gospel. but spiritual degenerates in need of the gospel of the Creator Christ so they can appreciate education and the relevance of technology. (Ham 1984:12)

So much for geology, palaeontology, biology, genetics, anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, racial equality, and Aboriginal rights.

But, lest there be any mistake, Barry Setterfield (the speed-of-light man) has gone further, and has produced a glossy coloured wall poster of world history, Creation and Catastrophe. I am not sure if the world is really ready for this, but I will try to explain it:

World history was divided into five eras, separated by four catastrophes. Because of the slowdown of the speed of light, so many million atomic years equal so many hundred actual years, and lo! the fossil ages can be equated with periods in (mainly Biblical) history. The principles of life on earth are writ large at the top:

All kinds of life-forms were present originally. Each catastrophe resulted in some extinctions. The changed conditions allowed some remaining types to dominate.

We begin with the creation, which was not in 4004 B.C. as you might have thought, but 5792 B.C. equivalent to 5 billion or so atomic years. The Archaeozoic Era came first; because of the predominance of 'warm, geologically active areas', fossils are 'mainly soft-bodied forms' (the others were there, you see, but were just not common enough to leave fossils). The Era ended with the Flood in 3536 B.C.

The following palaeozoic Era was humid. 50 favouring ferns, fishes and amphibians which left lots of fossils. There are a few human traces: a skeleton from the USA (?), footprints, a sandle, and metal artefacts, e.g. a hammer embedded in Ordovician rock in Texas (!). It ended with another catastrophe, causing continental drift and linked to the Babel Dispersal (which makes the supposed occurrence of human traces in the Americas a bit curious); this was at 230 million atomic years = actual date 3301 B.C.

In the Mesozoic Era it was warm, dry and windy, which as everyone knows favours dinosaurs (also 'high C [speed of light] aids giantism'). Among the human traces were human footprints alongside those of dinosaurs at Glen Rose, Texas (most creationists nowadays regard these supposed human footprints with suspicion). It ended at 63 million atomic years = 3005 B.C., with the Peleg Disaster (Genesis 10:25: 'in his days was the earth divided').

The Cenozoic Era had lots of mammals, of course, and human remains in plenty (including Africa at last); it ended at 1 million atomic years = 2826 B.C., with Job's test, marked by vulcanism and rifting, tsunamis, ice-ages and people taking to caves.

We are now in the Recent Period, but a catastrophe - the destruction of Sodom, marked by tilting of the earth's axis - seems to have occurred in the middle of it, at 2345 B.C. Not to worry, people emerged from their caves and built pyramids ('This is not an evolutionary trend... it is simply the recovery sequence from a series of huge natural diasters').

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