2021: The Silver Lining

Global warming apparently comes under the umbrella of 'settled science' these days, much like evolution and the millions of years it took to gouge out the Grand Canyon. Because the near-universal acceptance of stuff like that is taken at face value it's a bit disconcerting to find that if you dig a little deeper (har-de-har) a lot of it doesn't seem to add up.

All I needed to do was to stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon and look at it; I'm no scientist, never went to college and barely escaped high school with a diploma, but the Canyon certainly doesn't look to be millions of years old. If that were so wouldn't it be a wide flat valley by now? Most of those walls down there are just a few degrees off vertical, and I've lived long enough to have observed decades of erosion. Erosion over time doesn't do vertical. I don't believe a small amount of water moving over eons made what you see there, it looks to have been carved by a whole bunch of water cutting a violent passage over a very short amount of time—weeks or maybe even days. I don't think I'd have fallen for the storebought version without all the millions-of-years signage and the park ranger's lectures.

And, of course, the constant repetition from all sides about how brain-numbing old the universe is. Astronomers speak in terms of light years, which is the distance light can travel in a year. I have no idea how it was initially measured, but somebody came up with the speed of light to be 186,000 miles per second, a measure that is clearly incomprehensible. So how far does light go in a year then? Um…a long, long ways. Far enough that if you believe everything started from a single point of light it would take billions of years to get so far away, which is pretty much the accepted Big Bang explanation.

Going hand in hand with that is our space program. Before the space program began it was a known fact that our moon was very hostile place, that with the absence of wind and water there had been no erosion up there for the millions of years that meteorites had been impacting with such force that you could easily see thousands of craters with even early telescopes. Therefore, the scientists said, there would be no smoothness on whatever rocks the moon was made of; everything up there would forever be razor-sharp edges and needle points. Mankind, they speculated, would need suits of armor just to walk around on that stuff.

Well, we all know how that turned out.

Since those Apollo days other NASA findings have chipped away at the foundations of known fact, turning them back into what they should have been called in the first place; theories. One of the longest running and most perplexing of these is Triton, the large moon of Neptune. It circles the planet in the wrong direction. All other moons in the solar system move in the same direction as their planet rotates, which was necessary to their formation according to science, and then along comes Triton. It was even featured on TV; a planetary scientist on “NASA’s Unexplained Files” stated that Triton’s contrary orbit could not be attributed to natural processes because it would “destroy all we know about planet formation”, and the best her accompanying commentators could come up with was that an unknown civilization millions of years more advanced may have used a tractor beam to pull Triton into an orbit they needed for some unknowable reason.

Really?

And then there is the issue of dinosaurs; in the past few years soft tissue and blood cells have been discovered in several dinosaur remains. At first it was attributed to contamination from an accident-prone digger, because intact proteins and enzymes have no business at all being around after millions of years in the ground, or anywhere else for that matter, and it took several more specimens to convince the many skeptics. Still, there it is and scientists the world over are apparently scrambling to find more of those alien civilizations with tractor beams. All they’ve come up with so far is that some kind of attached iron stuff might perhaps be responsible somehow for the long-term preservation of short-lived soft tissue.

There is a common thread running through all of these explanations and many more; no mention is ever made that perhaps the foundation is faulty, in that the universe and all contained within it must be explained without so much as a nod to the written account of creation.

Not that I blame them. Creation, after all, requires a Creator, and therein lies the rub. If it should turn out to be true how in the world would you cope with it at this stage of the game? Everything that’s been written since the 1925 Scopes trial has persistently nudged the United States away from creation and towards evolution until now it hasn’t been taught in public school for decades and can barely be tolerated in everyday conversation. There have been some attempts at compromise but there can be no blending of the two; either we were created or we weren’t, and the ‘we weren’t’ side has taken over decisively.

But then…

I’ve loved those words ever since we sat enthralled at Saturday Matinee movies back in the 1950’s. The heroine was always left in a real pickle as the hero was dehorsed and denied until the next Saturday’s matinee, but then….still gives me goosebumps; but then…just after the nick of time here he comes like gangbusters and upsets the whole applecart, winning so unexpectedly that a guy could easily choke on his JuJu beans.

2020 reminds me of those Saturday matinees, but instead of having to wait until next Saturday to see how it turns out we creationists read the Book and we already know the ending.

Let not your heart be troubled. It’s a good ending.