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LELAND ACKER chreporter@mediactr.com
A popular word these days is "Blind Faith." While there are times we have to have faith without seeing everything for ourselves, I do not believe the Bible teaches that we are to have "blind faith."

Isaiah 1:18 says "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

The word "reason" means to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic. Based on this verse and principle, God wants you to make a reasoned decision... He wants you to know what you believe and why you believe it.

He does not want you to believe something just because someone told you to believe it.

Jesus even told the Pharisees to search the scriptures in John 5. He said "They are those which testify of me."

This is where creation science and secular science often part ways.

Creation science claims that scientific data obtained through research supports the idea that God created the world in six days. Secular science demands a proof of God's existence and without that proof assumes he is nonexistent.

So, as Pilate asked Jesus, "What is truth?" Secular science points to a process called "carbon dating" to prove the earth is millions of years old, that dinosaurs lived millions of years before man lived on earth, and so on and so forth.

Carbon dating is a process which measures the ratio of Carbon-12 to Carbon-14 isotopes. As Carbon-14 decays, it becomes Carbon-12. Hence, the more Carbon-12 is in an organic substance, the older it is.

The fault in this reasoning is that one assumes that all Carbon was Carbon-14 at the beginning of creation. That's probably not the case.

If I go to the classifieds desk here at office, and notice that Tara has a glass halffilled with water, I might assume she drank half of a glass of water. On the other hand, she may have only filled the glass half full.

When God created man, He created a full-grown mature man. When He created animals, He created fully grown mature animals. Logically, since everything was created in a mature state (in Genesis 1), the earth was created in a mature state. Which means when God created the earth, he created Carbon-14 and Carbon-12 isotopes. So even using carbon dating, we can not scientifically prove the age of the earth.

Having fun reasoning? Let's do more next week.