The Denver Post        Sunday, January 30, 2000        Perspective          Section H          Page4H

Many scientists accept creationism

By Edmond W. Holroyd III
There has been much discussion recently about origins, how this world came into being.
Naturalism claims that no God was involved and that everything evolved from some primitive
conditions over long periods of time. Alternate views have God as creator. No side has absolute
proof. All viewpoints must ultimately rely upon faith and are therefore religious.
The dominant viewpoint in universities and the media promotes evolution over billions of years,
excluding alternatives. The creationist viewpoint -- that the Earth is young, only thousands of
years old, after being created directly by God -- is held by a seeming minority but supported by
the conservative branches of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Why do we persist in this
young-Earth viewpoint?
Modern science, developed in Western culture, initially taught that a rational God created all
things relatively recently in an orderly manner and that humanity could study the creation and
benefit thereby. Yet today, many evolutionists claim that creationists cannot be scientists. The
books "Men of Science, Men of God" and "21 Great Scientists Who Believed the Bible" show the
strong religious beliefs of many of the founding fathers of our modern science, including
post-Darwin scientists. Every quarterly issue of Creation Magazine interviews a modern scientist
who is a leader in his or her field and also a creationist. In the first of a growing number of
creationist organizations, the Creation Research Society's voting members (more than 600) are
required to have post-graduate scientific degrees. So it is not true that creationists cannot be
scientists. For many decades our scientists have been documenting evidences for a young Earth.
A few of the post-Darwin creationists who have benefited society are Louis Pasteur, Gregor
Mendel, G.W. Carver, the Wright brothers, Werner von Braun and R.V. Damadian, inventor of
the MRI scanner. Dr. J. Baumgardner's supercomputer model at Sandia National Laboratory,
designed for studying earth-mantle dynamics, has been the world's best for more than a decade.
Good predictions, are the life-blood of science. Dr. R. Humphries, a creationist physicist at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, is the only scientist to correctly predict: 1) the size of the magnetic
moments of Uranus and Neptune; 2) that Mars would have no magnetic field but would have
remnant magnetism from an ancient field; and 3) that lava flows on Earth would be found that
captured a magnetic field reversal in the time it took for them to cool.
Good scientists must object to the teaching of speculations as fact, to misrepresentations (such
as gluing peppered moths to trees), to fraud (such as Haeckel's embryo diagram and several
supposed hominids) and to unwarranted extrapolations (such as frogs turning into people over
millions of years). We must acknowledge observable phenomena such as variation within a type
of creature (like dogs) and natural selection (which keeps a species within fixed limits). The
Kansas Board of Education rightly excluded the speculative evolutionary concepts from state
testing while strengthening the teaching of the observable processes.
There is a design complexity so great in life that numerous basic parts must be simultaneously
present for an organism to live and function. There is an intelligent language, which we are
beginning to learn, within the DNA molecule that indicates the even greater intelligence of a
designer. Probabilities for correct protein sequences by random processes are essentially zero.
Such topics are addressed in the new book "In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in
Creation." We still have challenges to explain the data from astronomy (speed of light) and
geology (radiometric dating) that indicate vast periods of time, as addressed in my chapter,
viewable at www.kingofkings.org/creation/6days.htm.
During the holidays just past, Christians again proclaimed that the Creator joined us here on
Earth in the human form of Jesus Christ. He affirmed the biblical account of the creation. An
important issue for me and many Christians is whether there was death (for people and the
"higher" animals) before Adam sinned. Death (physical and spiritual) is the declared penalty for
sin. If death is not the penalty for sin, then Jesus died needlessly and the Christian faith is in vain.
At Easter we celebrate that this creator suffered our abuse, died to pay the penalty for our sin and
came back to life again to offer us eternal life with himself.

Edmond W. Holroyd III is a scientist in the Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Group
at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and a board member of Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship
(www.youngearth.org). He holds a Ph.D. in atmospheric science. Guest Commentary
submissions may be sent to The Post editorial page.

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