Lesson 4: Evolution – The Lie #4

The Scientific And Scriptural Case Against Human Cloning

A clone is a genetically identical copy of a living organism, such as the famous sheep ‘Dolly’ (unveiled in 1997).  The cells of any living thing contain a complete set of genetic information or ‘instructions’ for itself.  Dolly was a copy or ‘clone’ of a sheep.  (By the way, human clones are never absolutely identical to the original; for example, so-called ‘identical’ human twins, while clones, are still two different people who possess their own separate souls.)

Should Christians view the cloning of animals differently than humans?   In Genesis 1:28, humans were appointed by their Creator to rule over ‘every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (as well as fish and birds—verse 26).  Therefore, if the cloning of animals could benefit mankind (e.g. producing cows that yield more milk that would feed more people), then there seems to be no Biblical reason not to clone animals.

What about cloning humans? Cloning of humans can be opposed for a variety of reasons:

The Bible draws a very clear line between the nature of animals and humans.  People are created differently (‘in the image of God’—Genesis 1:27) and separately from the animals.  In verses 2:6 and 2:8, God entrusts humans with dominion over the animals, but humans are never told to have the same kind of dominion over other humans.

Each fertilized human egg, including any that results from cloning, is a new human individual.  Perfecting the cloning technique requires several experiments, and many embryos will be destroyed in the process. Indeed, the dark experiments in Massachusetts have so far been a massive failure—the embryos died before they became large enough to produce stem cells (the very goal of the researchers).

Human cloning is closely tied to the issue of abortion and the real beginning of human life; for one, if defects are noticed in developing clones, abortion would be the preferred solution.  Furthermore, no serious biologist who is familiar at all with the human body would argue against the clear fact that all the DNA coding needed to build each individual’s physical features is there right at the egg’s fertilization.  No new genetic information is ever added to a developing embryo.  An embryo is human from the beginning.  And according to the Bible (Exodus 20:13) and virtually all ethical standards, it is wrong to intentionally kill such innocent human life.

Cloning is in opposition to the Biblical institution of the family.  Because a manufactured human clone could never have two parents, the process of cloning would go against the doctrine of the family (a father and mother) as ordained by God in the Book of Genesis.

In a world that increasingly denies the authority of the Bible and its very first book, Genesis, people who view the Creation account as a myth will disregard standards such as the divine institutions of the family and dominion, as well as the sacredness of human life made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  Sadly, human cloning will become more      acceptable to those who reject the Creator and His Word.

How Accurate Is Carbon-14 dating?

People who ask about carbon-14 (14C) dating usually want to know about the radiometric dating methods that are claimed to give millions and billions of years—carbon dating can only give thousands of years. People wonder how millions of years could be squeezed into the biblical account of history.

Clearly, such huge time periods cannot be fitted into the Bible without compromising what the Bible says about the goodness of God and the origin of sin, death and suffering—the reason Jesus came into the world.

How The Carbon Clock Works

Carbon has unique properties that are essential for life on earth. Familiar to us as the black substance in charred wood, as diamonds, and the graphite in ‘lead’ pencils, carbon comes in several forms, or isotopes. One rare form has atoms that are 14 times as heavy as hydrogen atoms: carbon-14, or 14C, or radiocarbon.

Carbon-14 is made when cosmic rays knock neutrons out of atomic nuclei in the upper atmosphere. These displaced neutrons, now moving fast, hit ordinary nitrogen (14N) at lower altitudes, converting it into 14C. Unlike common carbon (12C), 14C is unstable and slowly decays, changing it back to nitrogen and releasing energy. This instability makes it radioactive.

Ordinary carbon (12C) is found in the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air, which is taken up by plants, which in turn are eaten by animals. So a bone, or a leaf or a tree, or even a piece of wooden furniture, contains carbon. When the 14C has been formed, like ordinary carbon (12C), it combines with oxygen to give carbon dioxide (14CO2), and so it also gets cycled through the cells of plants and animals.

We can take a sample of air, count how many 12C atoms there are for every 14C atom, and calculate the 14C/12C ratio. Because 14C is so well mixed up with 12C, we expect to find that this ratio is the same if we sample a leaf from a tree, or a part of your body.

In living things, although 14C atoms are constantly changing back to 14N, they are still exchanging carbon with their surroundings, so the mixture remains about the same as in the atmosphere. However, as soon as a plant or animal dies, the 14C atoms which decay are no longer replaced, so the amount of 14C in that once-living thing decreases as time goes on. In other words, the 14C/12C ratio gets smaller. So, we have a ‘clock’ which starts ticking the moment something dies.

Obviously, this works only for things which were once living. It cannot be used to date volcanic rocks, for example.

The rate of decay of 14C is such that half of an amount will convert back to 14N in 5,730 years (plus or minus 40 years). This is the ‘half-life.’ So, in two half-lives, or 11,460 years, only one-quarter of that in living organisms at present, then it has a theoretical age of 11,460 years. Anything over about 50,000 years old, should theoretically have no detectable 14C left. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. In fact, if a sample contains 14C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of years old.

However, things are not quite so simple. First, plants discriminate against carbon dioxide containing 14C. That is, they take up less than would be expected and so they test older than they really are. Furthermore, different types of plants discriminate differently. This also has to be corrected for.

Second, the ratio of 14C/12C in the atmosphere has not been constant—for example, it was higher before the industrial era when the massive burning of fossil fuels released a lot of carbon dioxide that was depleted in 14C. This would make things which died at that time appear older in terms of carbon dating. Then there was a rise in 14CO2 with the advent of atmospheric testing of atomic bombs in the 1950s. This would make things carbon-dated from that time appear younger than their true age.

Measurement of 14C in historically dated objects (seeds in the graves of historically dated tombs) enables the level of 14C in the atmosphere at that time to be estimated, and so partial calibration of the ‘clock’ is possible. Accordingly, carbon dating carefully applied to items from historical times can be useful. However, even with such historical calibration, archaeologists do not regard 14C dates as absolute because of frequent anomalies. They rely more on dating methods that link into historical records.

Outside the range of recorded history, calibration of the 14C clock is not possible.

What Date Would You Like?

The forms issued by radioisotope laboratories for submission with samples to be dated commonly ask how old the sample is expected to be. Why? If the techniques were absolutely objective and reliable, such information would not be necessary. Presumably, the laboratories know that anomalous dates are common, so they need some check on whether they have obtained a ‘good’ date.

The Ice Age

There is strong evidence that, following the Flood, for a time ice and snow covered much of Canada and northern USA, northwestern Eurasia, Greenland and Antarctica. Evolutionists believe there were many ice ages, but it’s more likely they were advance/retreat cycles within a single Ice Age.

Evolutionists find the cause of the Ice Age a mystery. Obviously the climate would need to be colder. But global cooling by itself is not enough, because then there would be less evaporation, so less snow. How is it possible to have both a cold climate and lots of evaporation?

The creationist meteorologist Michael Oard proposed that the Ice Age (possibly referred to in Job 37:10 and 38:22) was an aftermath of Noah’s Flood. When ‘all the fountains of the great deep’ broke up, much hot water and lava would have poured directly into the oceans.

This would have warmed the oceans, increasing evaporation. At the same time, much volcanic ash in the air after the Flood would have blocked out much sunlight, cooling the land.

So the Flood would have produced the necessary combination of lots of evaporation from the warmed oceans and cool continental climate from the volcanic ash ‘sunblock’. This would have resulted in increased snowfall over the continents. With the snow falling faster than it melted, ice sheets would have built up.

The end of the Ice Age

This ice buildup would probably have lasted several centuries. Eventually, the seas gradually cooled, so evaporation would decrease, therefore the snow supply for the continents would also decrease. And as the ash settled out of the atmosphere, it would allow sunlight through. So the ice sheets began to melt. Sometimes the melting would have been rapid enough for the rivers that drained these ice sheets to flood. These catastrophes would have happened about 700 years after the Flood.

Mammoths and the Ice Age

In areas worst affected by the Ice Age, natural selection would have eliminated creatures lacking genes for survival in the cold. It would favor creatures with existing genes for long fur for insulation; and small ears, tails and trunks (to prevent heat loss from large surface areas). Again, this is not evolution, because it generates no new genetic information. Indeed, modern elephants never develop thick hair even when exposed to below-freezing temperatures at night for months, simply because the genetic information is lacking.

Elephants can breed quickly enough that the population could double four times per century, so the population could have easily exceeded a million in the centuries of the Ice Age. However, most mammoths have left no trace: there are fewer than 50 known woolly mammoth carcasses, only about a half-dozen of which were complete. But an estimated 50,000 tusks have been found. Man hunted mammoths extensively, and even recorded this in cave paintings. Fierce predators like the Sabre-toothed tiger also took their toll.

God and the Extraterrestrials

Believe it or not, there is an astronomical object called LGM, the letters of which stand for “Little Green Men”. This was the first pulsar ever discovered. A pulsar is a very dense star, which rotates so rapidly that it sends out extremely regular “pulses” of radio waves.

The scientists who discovered this hitherto unknown, strangely regular signal, flashing its pulses every one-and-a third seconds, were puzzled. Perhaps this was in fact some alien civilization trying to contact us, they somewhat facetiously suggested to each other. Anyway, the name stuck. But would scientists seriously contemplate such an idea as Little Green Men?

In 1992 millions of US taxpayers’ dollars were spent on a massive search for just that. NASA magazine in 1991 stated that on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing, on October 12, 1992, scientists were to begin exploring for other worlds by “listening to distant stars for signs that humans are not alone in the universe”.

This search is managed by NASA’s Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program office, based solely on belief in evolution as a fact. A SETI information sheet indicates that since evolution has happened here on earth, why shouldn’t it have happened throughout the cosmos? They say that “there may now be about 10 million advanced civilizations in our galaxy alone.”

How will they look for these? Briefly, by using radio telescopes and other electronic equipment designed to look for pulsed signals and other ordered signals or sequences (as distinct from random radio “noise”). If their assumption of evolution is not true (and it is not) then 10 million tax dollars per year for the next 10 years will have been spent on merely demonstrating what is obvious and what the Bible makes clear man did not evolve.

What is so illogical and inconsistent about all this is that these same scientists would only have to change their telescopes for microscopes, as it were, and observe the DNA in the chromosomes of any living creature. They would see a highly complex code, an ordered language, making up the most highly complex, ordered information sequence in the universe. When scientists look at it, they say -chance! Yet if they received the simplest of ordered sequences possible from outer space, they would say – intelligence!

No scientists have ever seen a complex language system like our DNA evolve by chance. They know that it takes information to get information, that information never arises unless an intelligence is operating. Yet they refuse to consider the possibility that the vast amount of information contained in life on earth was programmed by intelligence. They refuse to accept the possibility that the God of creation as spoken of in the Holy Scriptures is that intelligence – the infinitely intelligent Creator. Why?

It would mean that this Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, is Lord over them, and they must kneel and worship Him, and accept their sinfulness and the need for salvation.

As those scientists look into outer space, it is as if they are shaking their fists at Jesus Christ, defiantly saying “we refuse to accept you as Lord over us.”

If only NASA would realize that they don’t have to waste millions of dollars of other people’s money searching for an intelligence out there. Without even using a telescope, look up at the night sky. What do you see?

“The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handiwork” (Psalm 19: 1).

“The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the people see his glory” (Psalm 97:6).