West Bromwich, on 26–28 October, saw 1,600 people from 16 nations, including 500 under-18-year-olds, attend the UK Mega Conference, sponsored by Answers in Genesis.
The programme, entitled ‘Inspiring a Genesis Reformation’, was instigated to echo the Reformation of 1517 standing on the authority of the Scriptures, especially with regard to the early chapters of Genesis.
The Reformers and Scripture
Each generation, Ken Ham reminded us, needed to measure itself against the standard of Scripture which the Reformers set before the church in the 16th century. The widening chasm between the secular and the biblical worldview has come to be through the ancient challenge, ‘Has God said?’, applied now from Genesis through to Revelation.
The church, he said, was complicit in this fundamental challenge over the historicity of the first man Adam and the doctrine of God’s grace achieved through the last Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ. Even science needs to become captive to the authority of the Word of God if we are to really understand what the Reformation is all about in speaking to the whole of human experience.
A line-up of ten speakers pressed home the many consequences of ignoring the biblical claim of inspiration to all aspects life, both history and experience.
If Darwin had known about DNA...
Dr Nathaniel Jeanson (Cell and Developmental Biology, Harvard) illustrated how science changes with increased knowledge and suggested that if Darwin knew what we now know about DNA and the genome, his conclusions would have been different concerning the origin of the species. It would have been a thicket rather than a tree.
Dr Stephen Lloyd, of Biblical Creation Trust, tackled the problem of loss of identity. If Adam was ‘one of many’ as evolution would claim, then his uniqueness as created in the image of God, male and female, is a myth and compounds the lostness of a current generation. He suggested that all need ‘identity reassignment’ in Christ as a gift, cast in the authentic image of God.
Paul Garner, geologist, illustrated the discrepancy that is apparent between radiometric dating and the thickness of sedimentary rocks; there is a 1,000-fold difference. He discussed the burrowing (‘bioturbation’) that should be present in sedimentary rocks if they had been laid down over eons but is almost completely absent compared with sediments being laid down today.
Ears and eyes
Professor Andy McIntosh with the ear and Professor Stuart Burgess the eye, dealt with the myth made popular by media scientists that both these organs showed poor design. It is not Christians who plug gaps with God, but those whose god is a blind watchmaker.
Three refreshing sessions came from Dr Voddie Baucham, Dean of African Christian University in Lusaka. Drawing from early Genesis, he showed the cultural mandate of a Christian worldview and the blessing it can be if we understand Genesis to be history. One example is the seven-day weekly cycle, unrelated to any planetary motion of the solar system, but pointing to God’s creation by fiat.
Danny Faulkner, an astronomer of many decades, took us on a cosmic grand tour, through the epicycles of Ptolemaic cosmology to the multitude of corrections that are needed to make the Big Bang work – another system of epicycles? Our rapid journey finished contemplating the unlikely event of meeting extra-terrestrial life, if we understand the biblical worldview as detailed in Scripture. Astrobiology anticipates a megafauna out there, but to date has found absolutely nothing.
Forming fossils
John Mackay from Creation Research, with Joseph Hubbard his understudy, showed us in his inimitable way the misconception that you need eons of time to form fossils or diamonds or opals or coal, when in fact all you need is the right process and conditions.
In all, over three days, 18 hours of detailed information about creation, preservation and the blessings of this life, but above all, everything pointing to the Word, the Lord Jesus, who created the cosmos and in his inestimable love came in the likeness of sinful man that he might redeem a fallen world to the hope of glory.
