Focus: creation news and views
Not enough phosphorus
Out of big bang cosmology and evolution theory comes the idea that the Earth, dated at 4.5 billion years old, is the product of nuclear reactions in the stars billions of years earlier. So we too (and all other living things) are assumed to be the product of the stars.
But there’s a problem. While certain chemical elements in our bodies, such as oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, are indeed also abundant elsewhere in the cosmos, phosphorus is not. Yet phosphorus is an essential component of DNA, RNA as well as many other important molecules of life.
This leaves evolutionists trying to explain how phosphorus could have become concentrated on Earth, ultimately becoming part of us. Enrique Maciá, writing in Chemical Society Reviews, says he and other researchers are so ‘motivated by this apparent paradox’ that they are scouring the cosmos using satellite and other technology in hopes of detecting the missing phosphorus. ‘We hope that such detections will shed light on phosphorus’s journey from the stars to Earth,’ he says.
Notice how this fervent and costly search for an evolutionary answer to the conundrum of the ‘missing’ phosphorus is based on the starting premise that life happened by chance. But there is no phosphorus ‘missing’—life didn’t happen by chance, it was intelligently designed. And the Designer has told us that Earth is not the product of the stars; rather He made the Earth before He made the stars (Genesis 1:1–16). And our ancestor, the first man Adam, was made from the dust of the Earth (Genesis 2:7), not stardust.
Nature, 9 February 2006, pp. 636–637.
Saturn’s rings ‘too clean’
Photographs from the Cassini spacecraft continue to reveal unexpected features about Saturn and its rings. New Scientist quipped that ‘Saturn’s rings just get weirder and weirder the closer we look’ and ‘it remains to be seen whether Cassini can solve the deepest mystery of the rings—their origin.’
Cassini has confirmed that Saturn’s rings are made of ice fragments ranging from a few centimetres up to tens of metres across. It had been thought that the rings were four billion years old—orbiting leftovers from the formation of the Saturn system. But the problem with that idea is that the rings’ material is clean and bright—99% pure ice.
As planetary scientists have realised, if the rings really had been gathering space dust for billions of years, their ice ought to be dark and grimy by now—but they’re too clean to be that old.
New Scientist, 14 January 2006, pp. 34–35.
In response to the question ‘What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?’, renowned atheist Richard Dawkins said:
‘I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.’
While many people (including Dawkins) believe evolution is a fact, his own response to this particular question makes it clear that ultimately his belief is something that can’t be proved, i.e. a starting assumption based on (blind) faith.
Edge, www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge152.html, 1 March 2005.
‘Simple’ organisms aren’t simple
According to evolutionary reasoning, ‘the more genetically complex an organism is, the loftier its place on the evolutionary tree.’ Or, put another way, ‘simpler animals ought to have correspondingly simpler genomes’.
So when researchers started identifying active genes in cnidarians, e.g. ‘the lowly sea anemone—one of the simplest animals on the planet’, they got a surprise. ‘We estimate they have somewhere between 20 and 25,000—the same ballpark humans are in,’ said one researcher.
This was not what evolutionists expected.
‘The genomic complexity of … cnidarians is much greater than expected,’ said John Finnerty, an evolutionary biologist at Boston University. ‘There is no simple relationship between the numbers of genes an animal p