Welcome to CS4K!

We all know the key to changing society is to win the hearts of children. In just a few years they develop into leaders: of families, communities, and the world. As followers of Jesus, we recognize their eternal destiny will be shaped by their willingness to accept Him as their Rescuer and Lord.

There is a wealth of information available to help people see how trustworthy God and His testimony in the Bible is. Scores of scientists publish articles showing how their finding fit a Creationist worldview far better than Naturalism. However, being written by scientists, things can seem really complicated at first. The key is to explain concepts simply so they can be understood by anyone. This is my goal and I’ve had a lot of fun tackling areas where the world tests our faith.

CS4K is also designed to be a go-to place for finding resources in the Creation Science field. Every time I run into a ministry website, it gets plugged into one of the Links pages. There are a number of Children’s Resources and a growing collection just for Teens.

RightKeep up with what’s new! You can catch the headlines by email or on Twitter.

If you’re on facebook, not only will you find out about new posts, but also receive lots of encouragement and find out about events in the Creation Science world.

Thank you for visiting!

For from him, and by him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. Romans 11:36 

Math Time! The Scientific Lottery or Powers of Ten

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Dice I

Dice I (Photo credit: aranarth)

Yesterday I was reading a great post on Dr. Jay Wile’s blog talking about a most interesting “proof” for Evolution. His ideas are great for high schoolers and up (your brain gets a great cardio workout on his blog!), but one idea was so important I decided to jumpstart my post with it:

Well, according to the evolutionist, the probability is absurdly low: about 1 in 1×1039. But wait a minute. The chance that one of the simplest proteins of life, ribonuclease, formed by random chemical reactions is 1 in 10152. The formation of chemicals like ribonuclease must have been incredibly common at some point in earth’s history in order for life to appear as a result of chance.

Do you know what those little numbers next to the 10s are? They show powers of ten. Here’s how it works:

When someone needs to talk about a really big number, it gets hard to write after reaching 12 zeros (1 trillion). For example, what if we wanted to write the number of human cells in the world right now. There are 7+ billion people with roughly 40 billion cells each. Add those two numbers together and you get an answer like this:

28,000,000,000,000,000,000

What would you even call this number?! There is a name for something with this many zeros, but everyday people don’t usually know it. But scientists have to work with numbers this size all the time. So, what do they do?

They use powers of ten.

Turns out, those tiny numbers to the right tell you how many zeros to put in if the whole number was written out. So, our human cell count would look like this:

28×1018

Is that easier to read? Here’s where things get mixed up. It’s hard for most brains to remember just how big a number like this really is. Let’s look at the size of Dr. Wile’s quoted number, 1×1039. Here’s what it would look like in plain digits:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Whew, it was a lot of work just making sure I put in the right number of zeros!

Dice five

Dice five (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

The next thing to know about powers of ten is how to multiply them. Say you’re an American boy and want to know what the odds are for you to be struck by lightning the same day you find out you’ve been drafted by a major league football team.

The odds of you being struck by lightning in a year are roughly 1 in 280,000, so the odds on the day of the draft are 365 times smaller = 1 in 1.022×108. The odds of being drafted to the NFL in your lifetime is 1 in 100,000, so, let’s say the odds of it happening on our “special” day are 1 in 8.03×109 (assuming you could be drafted from ages 18 and 40). So, what’s the odds of both things happening on the same day?

1 in 820,666,000,000,000,000

Or, 8.2066×1017

Think you need to worry? You can also see the power of ten number didn’t get way bigger like multiplying usually does. In fact, it works exactly like adding. So if you have 1×106 times 1×1022 your answer is 1×1028, which doesn’t look that much bigger.

Now you have an idea why Evolutionists are pretty sure something that has odds of happening 1 in 1039 times isn’t likely to happen.

What they don’t want you to know is the odds of what they believe did happen are.

The chances of a cell just showing up out of nonliving material without a creator is:

worse than 1×1057800

Do you need to know more?

Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return to you, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son. Genesis 18:14 

PS, we figure there are only about 7.5 x 1018 grains of sand on earth.

Amber: Part 2

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Continued from Part 1:

Here are some other clues about what you would need to make amber:

A huge piece of Baltic amber (9,7 kg). The piece is stored at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. (By Anders L. Damgaard)

  • Flood conditions are known to cause trees to make extra resin (you can find out about this by reading a paper from the U. of Georgia)
  • Amber sometimes is found in chunks weighing 21 pounds [9.7 kg] or more. Whatever happened, those trees were oozing like crazy (if you have enough money, you can easily buy a fairly big chunk of amber)
  • Some forms of amber are known to be from a badly damaged tree (click on the link to see a drawing of what this damage and resin looks like)
  • We know amber came from trees, but we never find amber with whole trees. The wood found with it is always broken to bits

    English: Since amber in the Dominican mountain...

    Amber in the Dominican mountains is tightly imbedded in a lignite layer of sandstone, mine shaft opening

  • Amber is sometimes found with soft coal (called lignite) which is made from bark
  • Amber is often found covered with “marl” or limestone clay. This was laid down as think, heavy mud (see the coal link)
  • Other times it is covered with sandstone: another rock made from wet sediment (same link)
  • Often, geologists can tell the amber ended up far away from where the trees came from. Something moved them far from the original forests and then buried them. What geologic process has that kind of power?

Water

Could a quiet forest make amber like this? Hardly! You need water. Resin doesn’t melt away in water right away. It stays sticky and scientists have seen it collect bugs and things when dropped into water.

Barnacles, shellfish, green algae at low tide

Barnacles, shellfish, green algae at low tide (Photo credit: Martin LaBar)

Scientists have also realized you need to put the resin in water to explain all the diatoms, sponge bits, water bugs, shrimp, oysters, barnacles, and other sea creatures found in it.

Some amber has wood bits, mushroom caps, or flowers stuck in it. All sorts of land creatures were sometimes trapped inside, such as lizards, frogs, worms, something like a shrew, bird feathers, and fur. But, the most common fossils we find preserved are insects.

Imprisoned

Imprisoned (Photo credit: Rockman of Zymurgy)

Many times, the insects and spiders found in amber are just like their living cousins. They haven’t changed at all. Others are a bit different, but are still easy to recognize. These things leave two options: you can either believe these bugs evolved a lot before 100 million years ago and then just stopped changing, or that they weren’t buried so very long ago and were created a lot like we see today.

God is not a man, so he does not lie.
    He is not human, so he does not change his mind.
Has he ever spoken and failed to act?
    Has he ever promised and not carried it through? Numbers 23:19 NLT

The BBC has a couple short videos on amber including mining in the Dominican Republic and how resin oozes out to trap bugs and then gets buried under water. The first one only mentions “30 million years ago” once at the end, but you hear it a lot on the second one. You still wouldn’t want to miss the frog and lizard in amber or the great footage of resin in water, though.

It’s just one more example of our story being a lot like theirs, just way faster!

Amber: Part 1

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASome time ago, my brother went to visit missionaries in the Dominican Republic. When he came home, he gave me a rather unusual piece of jewelry: an amber drop with a dead fly in it.

It’s an odd little object. If I didn’t know better, my senses would tell me it was made of plastic. Amber doesn’t suck heat away from you like rock does in a cool room. It’s lightweight and you can see right into it to that bug I would sweep off the windowsill if it had died at my house. But, because it got preserved in amber, it’s a treasure. Or, it would be if I could bring myself to wear the thing!

Just what is amber and how do it help scientists piece together the environment of earth’s past?

Français : Shorea ovalis - Foret Research Inst...

Shorea evergreens are some of the best known sweet resin trees. Chinese amber comes from these trees.

Amber is tree resin [thick, sticky stuff], often from pines, but can come from all sorts of trees, which got really hard somehow. Some of the trees we know make enough resin to develop amber from are

  • evergreens in the Shorea family,
  • the Sweetgum tree,
  • “broad leafed conifers” in the araucaria family,
  • the “bald cypress” family which includes the giant redwood
  • a legume (think nuts and beans) tree still used for its resin
  • and more legumes including the balsam family

These trees produce resin in the bark as a protection from being eaten by bugs and fungi. A tree will make a lot more resin when something hurts it or puts it into shock like volcanic ash or violent storms with lightning.

From the first day of the Flood, the trees would have been in danger of these kinds of damage. Scientists have found it only takes 3 weeks or less for a modern tree to make way more resin than normal.

 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. Genesis 7:17

If you read carefully in Genesis, you will notice it took a full 40 days after the rains and “fountains of the great deep” opened before the ark started floating. There was plenty of time for the trees to start mass producing extra resin before the waters climbed high enough to rip their forests apart.

English: Resin on the bark of a cherry tree

Resin on the bark of a cherry tree (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Even if trees are smashed apart quickly, we know they still leak a lot of resin and usually float around instead of sinking quickly. The question is, how did the resin get preserved and hardened into amber?

Many people will tell you it takes “millions of years” underground for amber to harden. Why? Because ‘everyone knows’ it takes millions of years for the rocks around the amber to get hard. Another puzzle is that scientists haven’t figured out a way to make true amber in a lab. Amber also often contains “index fossils” so the scientists assume it’s millions of years old. (I need to write about those here!)

But, we know the resin had to get fairly hard quickly or the bugs wouldn’t be preserved so beautifully. Do you know what we use tree resins for today? Varnish used to always be made with tree resins because it dries hard, strong, and as quickly as the mix will allow!

We also know you have to cover the resin with watery sediments to protect it from oxygen and drying out. Check out this quote from a Uniformitarian website:

floating log

floating log (Photo credit: svacher)

Amber Gallery: If the resin had been deposited on the forest floor, it would have been destroyed by oxidation and drying processes. Therefore the first and most essential step to conservation was rapid transport by rivers out of the forest into oceans or lakes, where the amber was protected from weathering.

Do we need to know more? Well, there is more, coming up on Part 2

The trees of the LORD are full [of sap/resin]; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted; Psalm 104:16

I found the list of different trees we get amber from on this PDF: STRUCTURE AND STRUCTURAL DIVERSITY IN RESINITES AS DETERMINED BY PYROLYSIS-GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY-MASS SPECTROMETRY

And the Institute for Creation Research told me what science-speak words to look for in their article on Fantastic Australian Amber Supports Young World

Can You Spot the Common Ancestors? Part 2

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Warning: this post is really long, but it’s got an important point at the end. You can make it!

All right, let’s get back to our hunt for a common ancestor for seagulls!

English: Modified version of http://en.wikiped...

 

After the grouping Theropoda on the Tree of Life Web Project we are still following a “containing group”. No one is willing to say which one of these organisms is their grandparents at all. Next comes Dinosauria, which is easy to figure out, but have you ever heard which one is supposed to be their ancestor?

On that page there’s a name where two branches join, “Saurischia”. Could it be a dino they believe turned into the others? When you search around for what “saurischia” means, it’s just another group name. No dinosaur has that name for itself.

Next comes Archosauria, which doesn’t have a chart again. Let’s see what we find on the next link with the tongue twister name Archosauromorpha. Oooh! Look at this:

UofC Museum of Paleontology: The phylogenetic definition of Archosauria is the most recent common ancestor of birds and crocodiles, and all of its descendants.

We’ve got a common ancestor! But what does the Tree of Life page show? A single animal? It does have a picture of a bird (it’s a cormorant), which is supposed to have evolved from dinosaurs, it can’t be the dinosaurs’ common ancestor. There’s also a list of all different forms of extinct creatures, but no sign that one of them was the original version they all developed from. :-(

Reptile

Next comes the “containing group”, Diapsida which has a connecting chart. At the top, those archosauromorphia are connected to other lizard types with a line labeled “sauria”. Think this will be a common ancestor? A dictionary tells us “saurian” is just the ancient name for lizards.

We still are using classifications (except lumping birds in) that a creationist would have no problem with and no hint of a single “common ancestor”. This is getting discouraging.

Oh, goody, Amniota, has two names where branches come together towards the “first living cell”: Romeriida and Reptilia. The only websites using the term Romeriida (not a common name) were Evolutionary wikis, so I won’t link to them. Mostly they talked about a group of “earliest form reptiles” but didn’t pick one out. They did list one particular fossil “Romeria” but said it has been thrown out as a possible common ancestor.

As for “Reptilia”, you can figure this one out; it just means “reptiles”.

Terrestrial Vertebrates  is the containing group for Amniota and gives us two more names where branches meet: Reptilomorpha and Tetrapoda. I bet you know what the first one means “has the form of a reptile”. It is not a particular animal. Neither is “tetrapoda”:

Hynerpeton bassetti, a basal tetrapoda from th...

Hynerpeton bassetti, a “basal tetrapoda” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dictionary Reference.com Tetrapod: any vertebrate having four limbs or, as in the snake and whale, having had four-limbed ancestors.

I would disagree with them on the whale, but you get the idea.

The terrestrial vertebrates page is perfect for showing what a common ancestor ought to look like. See all those branching steps? Each place where the lines join should be a real animal, but all the lines are blank; they don’t try to make any suggestions on what any of them could be.

The Sarcopterygii group is listed under the Gnathostomata group that has several more groups on the lines. What do you think of that “Node 1″. That’s an strange scientific term.

The Vertebrata  page turns out to have 3 of these Nodes. Below the chart is a list of what they mean. Turns out they are just more ways to organize animals. Except for the way they draw lines showing they believe “Node 1″ turned into “Node 2″ Creationists would probably set this up the same way.

A family Tree

What a real family Tree looks like

On to Craniata (we have to be getting there soon!), this is the grouping for any animal with a skull. Then comes Chordata, or, any animal with a spinal column. No common ancestor there. Deuterostomia doesn’t make a suggestion either.

I’m guessing most of you are taking my word for it on most of these links, but I’d really like you to click on Bilateria. See those short lines, white space, followed by a question mark and short lines on the right? That’s the way a creationist would set up all the genaeologies for creatures once you get to the “kind” level. They started on Creation Days 4, 5, or 6 from ancestors who already looked something like their grandchildren today (or would if they’d survived).

You don’t even need an explanation for the next page name, Animals. We know they can’t be talking about some particular version (except maybe a puppet) and the next, Eukaryotes, is just a fancy way to say ‘any creature whose cells have a nucleus’.

This page is followed by a page titled Life on Earth. That is not the name of a common ancestor! And when we click on the arrow to the left we find…. there isn’t a link. It just has an arrow to nothing.

What do we see in all this exhausting search? The Evolutionists think we’re crazy for believing in a genius Creator God. They say any one with a brain knows life can develop all by itself from nothing. They claim the facts are all on their side and we Christians only have blind faith.

Looking at the Tree of Life website, who has faith even when things become crazy from thinking that way? Are the facts really on their side?

O LORD, how your works are multiplied! in wisdom you made them all: the earth is full of your riches. Psalm 104:24 

Parents, Churches, have a Listen to Young Atheists’ Journeys

Another creation page on facebook, Returning to Genesis, shared an article today that I found so powerful I decided to pass it on to all of you.

It’s great to know this message isn’t just coming from Answers in Genesis and other creationist groups, this is a wide spread reality. When we understand the stakes, it helps us stand strong for God and motivates us to prepare ourselves and our young people!

The Atlantic: Listening to Young Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity

To encourage you to check it out, here are the headers:

  • They had attended church
  • The mission and message of their churches was vague
  • They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions
  • They expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously
  • Ages 14-17 were decisive
  • The decision to embrace unbelief was often an emotional one
  • The internet factored heavily into their conversion to atheism

And a quote so Pinterest can pick it up:

CS4K-idealist

Can You Spot the Common Ancestors? Part 1

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A phylogenetic tree showing the three-domain s...

“Evolutionary tree showing the divergence of modern species from their common ancestor in the center. The three domains are colored, with bacteria blue, archaea green, and eukaryotes red.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Do you know the basic definition of biological evolution (The idea that life developed from non-living things)? This is actually something people who believe in Evolution don’t like to talk about and we’re going to find out why.

Here’s part of Websters’ Online Dictionary’s definition of the Evolution of living things:

(3) The development of each species from different, usually simpler ancestral forms. The more similar are two species, the closer in time are they likely to be to a common ancestor. (Arbib) . . .

For example, these DNA sequence comparisons have revealed the close genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees and shed light on when the common ancestor of these species existed. (I made the important bits bold)

Whether the evolutionists like it or not, they have to believe everything alive today developed from organisms who had some children that turned into one thing while other children turned into a completely different kind. Let’s see if we can find some examples of such a many-talented animal.

For example: some Evolutionary scientist want to make Sharovipteryx the great grandpa of the pterasaurs, but others recognize how crazy that idea is. The more you look at Evolutionary stories for grownups, the more you find out how crazy all their ideas are.

Let’s see what the Tree of Life Web Project thinks about common ancestors. You can pick any creature you like (there’s a search box on the left, it’ll give you the Latin name to click on).

Here’s an example of what you’ll find:

Birds

Birds (Photo credit: Kenny Teo (zoompict))

I started with “gulls” which led me to the Larus group.  Under the great pictures (it’s fun to hunt around on that site because of the photos), you’ll find a long list of different seagulls with gray lines connecting groups (any species names on those lines?). On the far left you find an arrow that turns into a link when you scroll over it. It should lead us to their “common ancestor”, right?

No, it just links to the larger class of birds which include the gulls, called Laridae. It has more gray lines bunching birds into groups with another arrow on the left. Click on that and… surely they’ll have an ancestor now!…. you come to and even wider grouping of birds.

BTW, do we have any problem with grouping animals as Creationists? Hardly! The guy who invented the modern classification system was a Creationist.

English: Extinct Birds is a book by Walter Rot...Next stop brings us to a grouping called Neoaves (which means “new flyers”) and those are part of the Neornithes (“new birds”) class. The following arrow leads us to Aves which has a bunch of names with a cross next to them (parents, don’t you love it; even on the evolutionary page, they still can’t escape Jesus!). I’ve written about archaeopteryx, plus there are 5 other birds which used to live and aren’t around any more. :-(

OK, now we’re getting to the ancestors of birds, or are we? The “Aves” page doesn’t even have any arrows! But, there is a link to a “containing group” Coelurosauria.

For some reason they don’t even pretend to know how each group here is “related” to the others. But you will see they’re pushing the idea of dinosaurs evolving into birds with their page, though. You can see they really mean this when the next “containing group” is called Theropoda or “Bipedal predatory dinosaurs”.

Would a Creationist have put birds into this group, or skipped right to the “four-limbed” category?

Let’s stop here for now, but we aren’t even close to the end! I’ll post Part 2 next time.

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Romans 1:23 

For an idea of what it would take to turn a dino into a bird, check out the Institute for Creation Research article: What Would Need to Change for a Dinosaur to Evolve into a Bird

Sharovipteryx, the Living Glider Reptile

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English: Multicolored nylon lattice delta kite...Ever seen or flown a kite shaped like this? They are called a delta-wing after the Greek letter shaped like a triangle and are popular because they are so easy to fly. Something about that triangle shape is really good at catching a breeze. Changing the design just a bit also lets you build a sturdy kite able to handle strong winds without problems.

Sharovipteryx [shar-ohv-ip-ter-iks] mirabilis is the name we’ve given to a fossilized reptile found in 1971 in Kyrgyzstan. We’ve only found a single fossil of it, but the one we have is really cool. The guy who found it, A. G. Sharov, tried to give it a name meaning “foot wing” but a bug already had that one, so others named the fossil after him instead.

This reptile is really tiny; from nose to tail tip it was only 20 cm [7.8 inches] long and over half of that length was a thin tail.

Sadly, when they dug the fossil out, the rock around the front legs was damaged, so we have to guess whether they had skin stretched between them. What they did notice was something odd and amazing about its back legs.

English: Life reconstruction of Sharovipteryx ...

Life reconstruction of Sharovipteryx mirabilis

This painting is one artist’s version of how sharovipteryx could have looked. Another artist’s version is my favorite, but you’ll have to follow this link to see since it’s under copyright.

That webbing you see around its back legs is made of skin and called a membrane. (Membrane is the name we give to any “thin and pliable sheet or layer” of tissue.) Bats use membranes for their wings and so did pterosaurs.

It’s a little hard to picture how sharovipteryx’s body worked because it’s so different from the animals we still have around today. Can you imagine trying to explain how one looks to someone who’s never seen it before! Now, picture what this little guy would have looked like when it folded its legs to climb or move when it wasn’t flying? Wild, huh?

Sharovipteryx mirabilis David Peters

Sharovipteryx mirabilis drawn by David Peters. Check out the bottom drawing for an idea of how it looked standing

Here’s where things get really interesting. Some scientists decided to study how an animal like this would be able to keep from crashing and go where it wanted. Do you think they found everything was crazy and ready to send this evolutionary experiment to an early grave? Hardly!

The study discovered the Sarovipteryx’s “triangular hindlimb membrane would have allowed for efficient gliding flight across a range of speeds.” Its wings would work well going fast or slow.  They figure it could control how fast it went by moving its knees and tipping its body as needed.

They really wished there was enough information about those front legs, though. If they had membranes too, it would have made things even easier for sharovipteryx to go in the direction it wanted. But, the study figured even if the front legs didn’t help at all the tail would make it possible for it to glide. It makes me wonder if it was possibly designed to be able to grasp things in front when it needed to.

It would be really cool if we ever find another fossil of this kind of creature. What do you bet it will show sharovipteryx was even more amazingly designed than we already can see?

Longisquama insignis, a reptile from the Early...

Longisquama insignis, a reptile from the Early Triassic of Kyrgyzstan, pencil drawing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The guy who discovered this little fossil also found another cool lizard nearby: the Longisquama. Can you guess what Evolutionists really wish those things on its back were? Yup, they are still trying to make the case that these very cool spines are proto-feathers. Why? Because birds HAD to evolve from something! Or, did they?

We know there is an all knowing, genius, Creator who has an imagination to beat ours all hollow!

With them in the boat were pairs of every kind of animal—domestic and wild, large and small—along with flying creatures and birds of every kind. Genesis 7:14 

Oh, yes, these land reptiles were found in deposits known to have been laid down by water.

You can make your own Delta kite with these directions

PS I first heard about sharovipteryx at Master Books facebook party last month. Thanks!