More Anti-Christian Bias in the UK Media

On Thursday the Times newspaper had an article titled “Creationist Presenter Dan Walker to Host BBC Breakfast.”1 It was commenting on the BBC’s decision to make Dan Walker, not only a committed Christian but also a biblical creationist, the host of its breakfast show. A section of the article reads:

Dan Walker has just landed one of television’s most coveted jobs as star of the BBC Breakfast sofa, covering stories that could range from celebrity babies to evolutionary science for its 1.5 million viewers.

His appointment to the prime-time show has set tongues wagging in the corporation, as fellow journalists ponder how the devout Christian is going to deal with some of the stories that come his way.

It is not because the 38-year-old sports presenter and son of a Baptist preacher insists on taking Sundays off to practise his faith. It is because he is also a creationist, as confirmed by his spokeswoman last night.

Creationists believe that the Earth was created by God, with some believing in the literal truth of the Bible’s account that the world was created in six days within the past 10,000 years.

A senior BBC figure claimed that Walker believed in the truth of the story of creation as told in Genesis. The source had nothing against Walker replacing the current presenter, Bill Turnbull, from the end of this month but found the whole thing a “bit nutty”.

“It’s quite rare to be a young Earth creationist,” the insider said. “It’s pretty loopsville stuff to believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old and that the animals went two-by-two into the ark. As a journalist, how can that be?

“It could create difficulties on some stories—say they have a story about an exciting new dinosaur fossil. How is he going to square a fossil that is 75,000 years old with his belief that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old?”

Once again we see the bias in the media by highlighting the beliefs of someone who believes in the biblical account of creation. Of course, to anyone who has not actually taken the time to understand and interact meaningfully with what biblical creationists believe, it is “loopsville.”

However the media is comfortable with not highlighting the fact that the BBC has atheists such as David Attenborough and Brian Cox presenting and promoting their religious evolutionary worldview on its leading science programs. These atheistic evolutionists are the same people who believe that living organisms evolved from non-living chemicals. Is this not “loopsville”? The vast amount of information contained in the nucleus of a living cell shows that living systems could not have evolved from non-living chemicals.

Unfortunately, the media, like many individuals in this country, fails to understand that science is interpreted through a worldview. In this case the worldview is naturalism vs. biblical theism. This is important to keep in mind when it comes to considering fossils that are dated to be very old and relating them to the biblical timeframe.

Biblical creationists do not deny scientific evidence nor the methods of measurement that are used to determine the age of things when devoid of millions-of-years presuppositions. Again, what we do point out is that all evidence is interpreted through a bias and that all dating methods to interpret the evidence make several assumptions: 1) the initial conditions are known, 2) the decay rate has stayed constant, and 3) the amount of parent and daughter element is known not to have been altered by other processes in the past.

For example, Carbon-14, or C-14, actually confirms a young age for the Earth. C-14 breaks down relatively quickly with a half-life of 5,730 years. Material older than about 95,000 years should have no detectable C-14, yet we still find it in coal and diamonds, which are supposed to be millions of years old. The fact that we find C-14 in diamonds confirms the biblical timescale of creation and is a problem for evolutionists.

But will we see the media highlighting these facts anytime soon? Probably not, since the evidence that the world was created only reminds them that they are accountable to their Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:1–3; Acts 17:30–31).