Quick Comments on Lots of Recent News

Canyon Lake flood, Guadalupe River, Texas–70,000 cubic feet per second of water in July 2002.

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A road that was washed away by flood

Rather than wait until the weekend for AiG's News to Note web feature (which offers analysis on recent news items that relate to creation/evolution and the authority of the Bible), we want to briefly comment on a few items that are now appearing in the world’s media:

• A Texas canyon, 80-feet deep in spots, was seen to form in short order: in only three days. (See the Associated Press article at news.yahoo.com.) If its formation had occurred in the unobservable past, most geologists would have insisted that it took millions of years to carve it. (The flooding that carved the canyon happened in 2002, but it has been only in recent times that the public has been able to conduct tours and thus the canyon has become more newsworthy.) Note that the AP article we have linked to still makes the claim, though, that “it took water around 5 million to 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon” in Arizona. But why not more rapidly than that, since we have examples like the canyon in Texas, Mount St. Helens in Washington State, etc.? How about the after-effects of a huge (Noah’s) flood, just a few thousand years ago?

  Read our article on rapid canyon formation—and a connection to the Flood of Noah's time—Mount St. Helens—evidence for Genesis!.

• Has life really been created in a lab (as an upcoming news announcement is about to confidently declare)? Newspaper articles over the weekend have been reporting that a team of scientists “has already constructed a synthetic chromosome” and may make their findings more public in a day or two in California, see, for example, at www.guardian.co.uk.

  Read our articles about the experimentation which AiG's Dr. Georgia Purdom has been monitoring at Have Scientists Created a New Life-form in the Lab? and Semi-Homemade Life.

• In a story that could be best described as ”well, what's new?” researchers are declaring that they have found a purpose for the human appendix (www.foxnews.com). For years, creationists like Dr. David Menton of AiG have debunked the notion that the appendix is a useless leftover of our evolutionary past. Dr. Menton, who taught anatomy for decades at a prestigious medical school, has frequently echoed what many in the medical community have been saying for years: the appendix has a role to play in our gut-associated immune system. While we can live without the appendix when removed, it nevertheless serves a useful purpose.

• Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, after giving a speech about a “war on science” allegedly being conducted by some Republicans, gave an interview last week in which she declared her belief that dinosaurs and bacterial resistance to antibiotics are proofs of evolution.1 To rebut those assertions, read our dinosaur article, Dinosaurs and the Bible, and then an article on the supposed relation between evolution and bacteria.

  By the way, we have already commented on the Republican presidential candidates’ views on evolution (most of them don't doubt evolution).

Check this website next Saturday on our News to Note feature for more details about the Texas canyon and the latest “origin of life” claim; Ken Ham, on his blog, has already commented on the pro-evolution stand by Hillary Clinton (see the second half of the blog).