Questions and answers about creation – 2025

The Bible gives a selective history of the earth from its creation to its re-creation. Many question this. Did you know that there are answers to your questions? Here’s the answers to some questions that were asked recently.

This post is based on questions and answers after presentations by Dr Don Batten of Creation Ministries International (CMI).

1. How do we bridge the gap between secular science and creation science? Can peer review help bridge the gap?

The fundamental thing is that the gap is all about God. That’s the problem in bridging the gap. If someone doesn’t want to believe in God, doesn’t want to believe in a creator, then they’re forced to believe some sort of naturalistic idea about how everything came to be, which is what evolution is. Cosmic evolution, that’s what it is. And so, I don’t think there is a bridge between secular science and creation science. The Creation Ministries International “Journal of creation” is peer-reviewed, but usually not by secular scientists because they’re not on the same page. Evolutionists reject the idea that the flood existed, no matter what the evidence shows.

Romans 1:19-20, says that the fact that God exists is obvious from the creation. It’s obvious unless the truth is suppressed. But evolution says there’s nothing obvious about God existing. It all made itself. Evolutionists believe that there’s no evidence God exists at all. So, it’s all about God. If people want to be atheists, they’re not going to agree about creation. They’re going to dig their toes in and use whatever rescue devices they can find. They’ll use those to try and hang on to their atheism, which is hanging on to how everything came to be without God.

Creationists start with the Bible, which we believe is the word of God, and look at the history the Bible tells us about. So, based on what the Bible tells us, what do we expect to find in God’s world? For example, fossils are consistent with a global flood. And with the dating of the flood, it is not surprising that some organic matter has been found in dinosaur bones. It’s very clear that the Bible’s history is relatively easy to defend today. You may have a different view because you don’t want to believe in God. If we look at this from a biblical point of view, what would we expect to find? We go into the world and we find things that back up what God’s word says. Now, we’ve got to be very careful that we distinguish between understanding what God’s told us in the Bible versus our scientific models, which might explain things we see. For example, I talk about the water coming off the land at the end of the flood in sheets. The Bible doesn’t say that, but it’s a reasonable conclusion from the fact that the earth was covered in water, which the Bible does say, and the water flowed off the land at the end of the flood (Ps. 104:8), and the water did subside at the end of the flood, it came off the land. And so, physical principles allow us to say there would be sheet flow, then there would be channel flow, and that explains the landforms we see around the world. So, it’s a big question, but basically the answer is it’s about God. Those who don’t want to believe in God have to believe evolution. If we believe God and believe God’s word then certain things flow from that and so we have a different way of looking at the same data. We have the same data but a different way of looking at it. Which one makes the best sense of the data? I think the biblical view makes the best sense of the data. Not that we know everything. But there’s an enormous amount of information available today that backs up what God’s word says.

2. Where did the flood water go?

The Bible doesn’t tell us where the water went to, but about 71% of the earth in covered by water. So most of the flood water went into the oceans. There’s a model based on rapid plate tectonics called catastrophic plate tectonics which has a lot of evidence going for it. And the newly formed ocean basins took the water off the land. So what was the oceans and the land sort of almost reversed places. Mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Alps were formed at the end of the flood. In fact, there are sea creatures buried in the sedimentary rocks on the top of Mount Everest. Everybody agrees it was once under the water but the question is what’s the time frame and the catastrophic plate tectonics model does explain the building of mountains at the end of the flood because the rapid movement of the plates pushes up mountains. If you have a car accident at the speed of 3 cm a year not much happens but if you have a car accident at 100 kilometers an hour there’s stuff pushed up in the middle. It’s a bit like that with the catastrophic plate tectonics model, which explains the mountains; whereas the slow and gradual (uniformitarian) plate tectonics doesn’t. So again, this is not what the Bible teaches, but it’s consistent with there being a global flood and the mountains being built at the end of the flood. Psalm 104:8 talks about some of this stuff about the mountains and valleys at the end of the flood.

3. How old is the world?

The only reliable way we can know the age of the world is by the historical method, which is an eyewitness account. And we have an eyewitness account in the Bible. There were the six days of creation (Gen. 1). Then there are chrono-genealogies that enable us to add up all the ages, to give 1,656 years up to the flood (Gen. 5). And there is another chrono-genealogy up to the time of Abraham (Gen. 11:10-26). Abraham lived in about 2,000 BC. That gives us a time frame of about 6,000 years, give or take a couple hundred years.

4. Who was Neanderthal man?

See my message on Why as a biologist I believe in creation and the video, Where is the evidence for ape-to-man transition? These show that Neanderthal man was a human being.

5. Who was Mungo Man?

Mungo Man was human. Nobody disputes that – evolution is not claiming Mungo man’s not human. So it’s just a variety of humans.

6. How could Mungo man have lived about 42,00 years ago?

The time frame is fiction. It’s all part of the assumption of deep time in the geologic column. There’s lots of other things we could talk about like the absence of bioturbation (disturbance of sediments by burrowing animals) in the rock record. Instead, most sedimentary rocks have distinct layers, and undisturbed interfaces between adjacent layers. This shows that the layers were deposited rapidly, and not slowly. So the alleged time frame is fiction. It’s part of the fictious story about millions of years.

7. If it was a dinosaur on Bishop Bell’s grave, there would have been dinosaurs on the ark. How did Noah fit all the animals in the ark?

Yes, Bishop Bell died in 1496 and there would have been dinosaurs in the ark. God brought the animals to Noah. He would have brought the most appropriate animals. The average size of an adult dinosaur is about the size of a sheep. They’re not all massive but some of them are very big when they’re fully grown. Scientists have done studies on the growth rings in dinosaur bones. Dinosaurs are reptiles so their growth rate depends on the temperature of the environment. When it’s summer-time they grow quicker. When it’s winter-time they grow slower. So you get growth rings like with trees and so you can see in the growth rings in the bones of the dinosaurs that they go through a growth spurt (a bit like boys do when they’re about 12-14 years old). The biggest dinosaur egg is about the size of a rugby football because you wouldn’t be able to get enough oxygen into it to keep it alive if it was larger. So even the biggest dinosaur comes from such an egg and the largest newly hatched dinosaur would be about the size of a fully grown turkey. God would have sent juvenile animals onto the ark, maybe just before their growth spurt, so when they came off the ark, they would be ready to reproduce. And many animals look after themselves straight after they’re born, especially reptiles.

8. Why haven’t any human skeletons been found with the dinosaur bones? That would put an end to the evolutionary story.

Absolutely it would. But the historical records of people seeing these creatures should be sufficient. And also the fact that blood cells and proteins can be found in dinosaur bones shows that they’re not millions of years old. But would we expect to find human fossils with dinosaurs? There is a separation of things in the fossil record. And we think that dinosaurs were swamp dwelling creatures. They were like crocodiles and hippopotamus that lived in the swamp. And so, would humans be living with the dinosaurs? Not likely. We do find fossils of creatures living today with dinosaurs. For example, a lot of seabirds are found buried with dinosaurs. But evolutionists don’t have displays of this at the museum, they just say that the birds evolved from dinosaurs. But in reality fossils of ducks and loons [divers] and all sorts of water birds are found with the dinosaurs. Evolutionists are selective in what they show us. I don’t think paleontologists will find a human fossil. If we think about the volume of sediments on the earth and how many people there might have been at the time of the flood (a relatively small population) the chances of finding a human with the dinosaur, even if it’s randomly mixed, which it’s not, would be pretty remote.

9. My question is around the funding of science and the theory of evolution because at the end of the day that’s really what’s driving it. I work in science; in oncology. A lot of secular scientists that I come across as cell biologists or even molecular geneticists reject the theory of evolution because it’s changing constantly. The funding of research like the NH and MRC is controlled by the scientists who work in the field. And publication in journals is controlled by the scientists who work in that field. And it’s the same in all western countries. They’re setting that agenda at the funding level and at the publication level. And when it comes to Christian-based science with these sort of findings it seems to be outright rejected even though secular scientists who find evidence that supports that will get published unless they brand it as being Christian science. How can we change that?

Yes, that’s one of the reasons that there are specialist creationist in-depth journals like the Journal of Creation, the Answers Research Journal, and the Creation Research Society Quarterly. These were started because creationist scientists even working in secular universities found that they couldn’t get anything published which contradicted the dogma. And you ask a very relevant question which I don’t really have an answer to. I think we need a complete revolution in society [a revival] where the vast majority of the people get on board with what God’s told us rather than the other story; that would change everything. The problem at present is that society is so secular, so anti-Christian that the consensus is that you must be off with the fairies to believe that type of thing. And I can’t see that changing without a fundamental change in the whole ethos of society, which means revival. So you’re right. In fact that’s happened. Dr. Steve Austin of the United States is a geologist and he thought a very good project would be to look at whether a creationist approach to finding oil and coal would be more effective than an evolutionary approach. And so he put up a project to compare the two but it was rejected. So no matter how good the science, if it doesn’t conform to the secular way of thinking, which is naturalism, it will be rejected. There’s no need for God. In fact, if you invoke God into anything, it’s not science anymore. That’s the mentality. That wasn’t the view of the scientists who founded modern science. People like Isaac Newton and Faraday and Boyle and many of the units in the metric system are named after famous Christians who were scientists who founded these fields of science. Most of the universities established around the world in the 19^th century were founded by Christians to further knowledge. And before the reformation, universities were established to train priests as ministers of the gospel. So things have changed radically in the last 200 years.

It’s interesting you’re an oncologist. Mutations cause cancer. In fact, one of the interesting things with cancer is the researchers discovered that we have error correcting systems in our bodies which correct mutations. About 40% get some sort of cancer in their lifetime. About 60% of people never get cancer. Some people can smoke all their lives and never get cancer. Why? Their error correcting systems are working really well. And it’s those of us who have mutations which have just damaged the error correcting systems which will get cancer. There’s three major categories of these error correcting systems and when they go faulty through mutations we get vulnerable to cancer. So again mutations wreck us they don’t create us.

10. Is there integrity in peer review? You talked about consensus and whether it’s talking about climate change, creation, or evolution, that’s what we are told – If it’s not peer reviewed, it’s called junk science. And I struggle because I want to believe in the integrity of peer review but more and more I don’t have a lot of faith in peer review. How much do I question and how much do I have faith in peer review and has peer review changed since the time of the early scientists? Did it have more integrity years ago than now?

Well, I think the demise of the Christian worldview in the west is impinging upon the honesty of scientists. That’s a problem because in the past people had personal integrity and had an impulse to tell the truth. But today there is a problem with the funding of research because you don’t get further funding unless you get some results and so there’s a pressure there to fudge it if you don’t get the results you expect and so even the secular world now is saying that the peer review system is broken. And it’s a serious problem and as a scientist I’m concerned about it because you’re not quite sure what you can believe when you’re reading scientific papers.  How thoroughly has this been checked? When you get a paper to review everybody’s busy and what tends to happen is if it has a big name author you think “this must be good” and you take shortcuts in terms of reviewing it. But if it’s a new person they tend to get reviewed more thoroughly. So some of the big names have been exposed as being involved in fraud. So, it is a problem. For example, here is a list of scientists that have been accused of scientific misconduct.

One of the things about experimental science is that it has got to be reproducible. If someone publishes a paper and it’s quite radical in terms of the findings, you should wait until someone else confirms it from a different laboratory. That’s what I try to do; outstanding claims need outstanding evidence. With things like new drugs there’s real pressure because companies are driven by profits. But on the other hand they don’t make profits unless they have something effective. So if the drug doesn’t work then it’s not going to be very long before they’re found out. So it’s not just the money they’ve got to have something that actually works. So the pressure is on and people may fiddle the data a bit here and there to get a good result. This is the sort of problem we have. So, there is a crisis of integrity in peer review and some fraudulent material gets published.

11. In the comparison between humans and apes, initially the whole genome was claimed to have a 1.6% difference. But this study actually was talking about the protein coding part of the genes. Then you brought up the other study where there was a 15% difference between ape and human genomes. I think that this is still a significant amount of similarity between the two genomes. And it’s not logical to explain this by saying that they have the same creator.

Yes, the 1.6% came from just comparing the bits that already align. If you align the bits that are similar, you get about 1.6% difference. That was ignoring all the rest that doesn’t align. And this latest study enables us to compare all the bits that don’t align. And that’s where you get the 15% difference from. Now, nobody creationists or evolutions has ever predicted what the similarity would be because we don’t know enough about it to make that prediction because if you look at a chimp and a human, we have a lot of similarities. So you would expect similarities in the DNA. But what would be the expected percentage? Nobody ever predicted it. But 15% is a huge problem for the idea that we evolved from a chimp-like ancestor over 7 million years. As we say, only two letters line up after 84 million years. And that’s making assumptions in favor of evolution.

Now the second part of your question was about the 85%. We would expect there to be more similarity with a chimp than we would with a dolphin, for example, because people are much more similar in our bodily features. That’s not controversial. And I used the similarity between two cars (with the same designer) for when God’s creating a human. He has already made a chimp. Next He is making a creature made in His image. Engineering wise it makes sense to not start from scratch, but to use a lot of the bits used in the chimp to make a human and to change them to make it a human. In fact, because we’ve all got DNA and there’s four letters in the DNA, if you take two random sequences of DNA the same length, there’ll be 25% the same just by random chance. So 25% similarities is the rock bottom if you like. In fact one evolutionist made a quip that we might be 50% the same as a banana (we aren’t) but it doesn’t mean we came from bananas! So similarity is due to a common designer. 85% is because we have a common designer. And as we have many similarities with chimps, we’d expect there to be some similarity in the DNA. I don’t think it’s problem.

12. I think at the bottom of all of this is Satan himself. He said to Adam and Eve, “did God really say?” (Gen. 3:1). So I think that Satan created evolution as a way to take people away from the creationist viewpoint as you showed in your graph. Do you think that’s what Satan’s really doing? He’s using it as a way for people to accept evolution as a way to get away from God.

Exactly. That’s what it’s all it’s all about, God. And Satan’s clever in hoodwinking people into thinking that things can make themselves. It’s crazy stuff. I wrote an article called “Five miracles atheists believe”. And the thing is that evolutionists don’t just believe in miracles, they believe in magic because in the first second of the big bang there’s actually four miracles without any rational explanation. The first one is nothing becoming everything. And then there’s three more in what’s called “inflation”. It’s a very rapid expansion of the universe; many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. And everybody knows the speed of light’s a limit that can’t be exceeded (but they say that this does not violate relativity, because the expansion of space itself was occurring). But this is 60 orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light for a fraction of a second and then it stopped. So what started it? How can that happen? And what stopped it? That’s three more miracles. And we haven’t even got past a second of the beginning of the universe. The other miracles are things like the origin of life, the origin of intelligence, the origin of morality, and the origin of the diversity of life. None of them can be explained by naturalistic processes and they require incredible faith to believe them. The alternative is to believe in God.

Evolutionary geneticist, Professor Richard Lewontin said: “We take the side of (evolutionary) science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism … Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” (Lewontin, 1997). For him the alterative was unthinkable. And what’s the alternative? God.

13. The laws in this country are based on the Bible. And you said that most of the old universities had a Christian foundation. But today people think differently. Do you think that this change with more people diverting away from following God and Christianity is caused by the changes in our DNA due to mutations?

Mutations and genetic deterioration can affect our ability to think and reason. Our brains are not immune to mutational degradation and today there’s a lot of depression. Some of that is due to the fact we kick God out but there’s also the other element which is basically we are decaying genetically. But I think the most important thing is spiritual. When people kick God out, God gives them over to futile thinking which is prevalent today (Rom. 1:21-32). Like telling children they can change their gender. It’s just madness. But it’s the sort of madness that arises when we kick God out. And things happening in the legal system, like same-sex marriage. They’re a consequence of futile thinking which people are given over to when they kick God out rather than due to our genetics.

14. What about a male that says that they were meant to be born female. From the moment they were born they say that that’s how they were thinking. Do you think it’s them saying that or do you think it’s more the deterioration in their DNA that they think that way?

I think the evidence is of social influence. A few years ago it was never mentioned and so only a very tiny number of boys and girls ever thought that. But now they’re even telling children in infants school that they might be a boy trapped in a girl’s body and they sow these thoughts. It’s become like a mind virus especially with children on the autism spectrum. One of the talents of children on the spectrum is they can focus on something and exclude everything else. And they’re sort of aware that they don’t really fit and they’re a bit different. And so someone says to them, “Oh, you’re a boy trapped in a girl’s body”. And they think “Oh, that’s why I feel so unusual.” And then they focus on that to the exclusion of all else. And it becomes an obsession with them to change because they’ve been told the lie that they can change their gender. But every cell in our body either has a Y chromosome or it doesn’t. And we can’t change it! It’s a hopeless offer to children or anybody to tell them they can change their gender. They’ve got to change their thinking. It’s similar to anorexia. It’s a body dysmorphic disorder. They think They’re fat when they’re skinny. And people, girls particularly, but some boys as well, are starving themselves to become thin or slim and they’re already skinny. So what’s the problem? The problem is not that their doctor says, “Well, I’ll help you become skinny.” Instead, there’s something wrong with their thinking. They need to fix their thinking and get to realize they’re not skinny. That’s what we need to do with children with gender dysphoria. It’s a mental thing which we need to fix, not change their bodies irreparably and damage them for life. That’s evil. And it comes about because we live in a society which has kicked God out. It’s an example of futile thinking.

Prayer:

Heavenly Father, I thank you for your word which speaks truth from cover to cover. And Lord, we do live in a society where people are broken and being broken because we’ve turned our back on you. And we ask for your wisdom in reaching those who don’t know Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Help us, Lord, to be able to put a stone in shoes to cause people to think and to come back to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Lord, we ask that we would be a light to be able to reach those who don’t know Him and to know that abundant life that’s only available through the Lord Jesus Christ and to be able to get our thinking straight according to your word. Protect the families represented here. Lord, protect the children who are in the education system and are hearing things which are not true. Help them to realize when they aren’t true and to stand firm for the truth. And we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Reference

Lewontin, R, 1997, “Billions and billions of demons”, The New York Review, 9 Jan. 1997, p. 31.

Acknowledgement

This post is based on questions and answers after presentations by Dr Don Batten of Creation Ministries International on Genesis the real history of the universe and Why as a biologist I believe in creation.

Posted, September 2025