Frequently Asked Questions About Creationism | Short Answers to Big Questions

The history of an idea is always revealing. In the 16th century, the Europeans began to discover the colored peoples of the world. They assumed that Noah and his family were white, so for the colored peoples to have survived the Genesis Flood, it must have been local. The Church regarded this as heresy.

The carbon-14 method is slightly different from other dating methods. Normal carbon has an atomic weight of 12. Carbon-14 is the unstable form produced by cosmic ray bombardment of nitrogen in the earth's upper atmosphere. The C-14 combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which then takes its place in the great carbon cycle. That is, the carbon dioxide becomes the food for plants and trees, and these in turn become food for animals and humans. The net result is that every living thing contains normal carbon (C-12) and some C-14.

Evolutions believe that the Earth is billions of years old and that the Genesis Flood was local. The arguments used to claim these unimaginable eras of time are based upon early geological speculations of the history of the Earth and are seldom, if ever, made clear even to students of geology. Seventeenth century observers noted that layers of similar types of rock could be traced continuously from country to country across Europe. These rocks were correctly perceived to consist of sediments deposited from flood waters.

In our increasingly technological world we might become convinced that we are evolving to "supermen." People like Hitler thought so. However, both Scripture and the historical facts show that far from evolving ever upward, mankind is "devolving" downward, both physically and mentally. According to Scripture, God declared that everything He had created was "very good", and we can reasonably assume that Adam and Eve were perfect until their Fall and thus had no genetic defects.

Question: How many "kinds" or "species" were created to give the variety we now have? Also, how many animals would Noah have had on the Ark?

Answer: The answer to both questions is the same, presuming no extinctions during the first 1,500 years of world history. We don't even know how many "kinds" or "species" are alive today!

The gospel of John gives a brief description of the first miracle performed by Jesus – changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana (John1:1-10). The actual site of Cana is contested, but it is no more than a half day's walk north of Nazareth. The extended family of Joseph and Mary may have included, say, a cousin who lived at Cana or possibly it was a sister of Jesus (Matthew 13:55-56) who was being married to a man of Cana. In any case, the Jewish wedding was essentially a family affair and could have lasted several days.

No, it can't. From the start, Darwin's evolution depended upon vast spans of unprovable time to make his theory work, and Charles Lyell's geology seemed to provide multiple millions of years. As early as 1812, Thomas Chalmers, evangelical professor of theology at Edinburgh, proposed a gap of as many millions of years as geology may demand between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3. He argued that initially there had been a Pre-Adamic age that had been destroyed by a flood and then the strata and fossils found today were the remains of this former world.

God created Adam and Eve on the first Friday, and they were told to eat "of every tree whose fruit yields seed, to you it shall be for food" (Genesis 1:29-30). So they were vegetarians and ate the fruits from every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). We can reasonably assume God had not given them permission to eat meat because He gave that permission 1,657 years later to Noah when he disembarked from the ark following the Flood.

Anything that was once alive or that was produced by a living thing can be dated by using the radiocarbon method of dating. This method, which received widespread attention in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls, relies on the fact that all living things take in carbon, some of which is very slightly radioactive. But just how reliable is this method?