Book Report: The New Answers Book 1

The New Answers Book Volume 1

            Ken Ham’s book The New Answers Book: Volume 1 gives scientific answers on Evolution/Creation and the Bible. Different authors like Jason Lisle, Mike Riddle, and Ken Ham himself, answer the following questions and more: Why shouldn’t Christians accept millions of years?  Couldn’t have God used Evolution?  How did defense/attack structures come about? The New Answers Book explains that genetic information cannot be added, but on the contrary decreases and that millions of years cannot be proved scientifically.

          

            One of the main topics is that genetic information can only decrease. The chapter titled “Does Natural Selection Produce Design?” says that we can witness the great variety within species-- the variety within the wolf/dog kind: Poodles, coyotes, wolfs, dingo, collie… and on. “But the point is that no new information was produced—these varieties of dogs have resulted from a rearrangement, sorting out, and separation of the information in the original dog kind.” (13) In everyday life, we do not see kinds turning into other kinds: We do not see dogs turning into frogs.  Information can never increase.

            Another topic talks about how millions of years cannot be proved scientifically. It is summarized in the topic “Does Radiometric Dating Prove the Earth is Old?” Radiometric Dating is the principal methods used to “prove” the age of the earth. But this chapter states that many assumptions are made when dating things with this method. It uses the illustration of an hourglass, when trying to determine how much time has the hourglass has been running. One makes three assumptions (pg. 117):

      -    “Was there any sand at the bottom when the hourglass was first turned over (initial conditions)?”

      -    “Has any sand been added or taken out of the hourglass? (Unlike the open-system nature of a rock, this is not possible for a sealed hourglass).”

      -    “Has the sand always been falling at a constant rate?”

            As with the case of the hourglass, scientists make three critical assumptions when trying to determine age (pg. 116):

-                   -  “The initial conditions of the rock sample are accurately known.”

-                  -    “The amount of parent or daughter elements in a sample has not been altered by processes other than radioactive decay.”

-                 -    “The decay rate… of the parent isotope has remained constant since the rock was formed.”

             Then the chapter mentions that this method has been know to be  mistaken when dating rocks. For example, a rock sample from the 1986 lava dome in Mount  St. Helens was dated using this method. The results stated that the age for the rock was between 0.5 and 2.8 millions of years! Using these and much more, the book proves that the concept of millions of years is not backed up by science.

            Ken Ham uses science to show that Macroevolution and millions of years are not remotely possible. The New Answers Book uses biblical foundations to interpret science and give answers to Christians. It uses the Bible as authority, and shows that science, in all aspects, agrees.