Overview: This fourth of six parts series was done on September 13, 1995 at the Dayton Answers In Genesis Seminar with Dr. Gary Parker and his wife Mary. These interviews will maintain the verbal format with only changes to simplify repeats done in informal conversation. This interview will cover Gary's view of fossil hunting and how to not be over zealous interpreting evidence.

Ron: If we're successful in getting this message across, I think a lot of people will be more interested in looking for their own evidence in science. One of those areas is fossils. From the time of Darwin there was a great deal of evidence in the fossils and there still is a lot of interest. How do you suggest people in this area can do fossil hunting on vacations or weekends? And where have you been in this area to find fossils and what should they expect to find when they go?

Gary: Fossil hunting is something that Mary and I really, really enjoy; and a lot of our fossil collecting has been done near this area. Mary's home is Madison, Indiana and the greater Cincinnati area--Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana is world famous for sea creatures, sea shell fossils and a great variety of types and kinds. In fact, a greater variety of sea creatures and a greater variety of corrals can be found as fossils in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky then are presently living in the coral reefs of the Florida Keys or the great barrier reef over in Australia. And you don't have to go far. Usually all you have to do is go out in your driveway to find fossils. Creek beds, road cuts, abandoned quarries are great places to find fossils. Mary and I have a new book out, Dry Bones and Other Fossils. A new edition of that book I should say. The old edition, I think, was in eight or nine different languages. It was a result of one parent coming up to us after an Answers in Genesis program and asking: "Where can I hunt fossils, what kind of tools do I take, how will I identify them." Mary looked at me and said, "Let's do it, let's add a new section to that new book". And we did--with the tools, the techniques, and the identification charts. The good news is fossils are much easier to identify than people think because they are descendants of the created kinds and basically belong to the same groups of creatures we find today. It's sort of like shell hunting along the beach, except there is an even greater variety of things we cover from the past. One thing that we like to do, now that you asked me the question, makes me think we might try to do this more at our seminars. I do this with my classes; train the students in the so called geological column. There is a tendency for fossils to be found in certain groups and those groups to be found in a certain vertical order. That by itself, is not evolution. In fact, the original assumption was that there were stages in the burial of different environmental zones during the year of Noah's flood and still seems to be the best fit for the evidence. And so when we are looking, for instance, if I were looking for trilobites--this is a great area around here to look for trilobites--I wouldn't really expect to find dinosaur bones around here, not for evolutionary reasons, but ecological reasons. You didn't have a Diplodocus and a T-Rex wandering around on the deep ocean floor, but if they were living on the earth at the same time, we might expect occasional out of place fossils. They would be rare, but if they were found, they would be significant; so if we train young people in looking for fossils, then they may be the ones that discover some of these out of place fossils and know how to handle them. In other words don't pick it up and bring it back and say, "look at what I found." Leave it in place and get it thoroughly documented and so on. The vast majority of fossil discoveries are made by amateurs and there is a real opportunity to make major contributions to the science of paleontology, just from a weekend family fossil trip and a lot of that can be done in a creation context. Many contradictions of evolution have been found in the past; but they're dismissed because they weren't thoroughly documented or they were found by people who didn't realize how important there find was. So we would really like to help educate people on how to look for fossils, how to use them. There is also information in that book on how to display fossils as conversation pieces to open up questions that can lead right into witnessing and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ and making major scientific contributions to the advancement of the creationist cause.

Ron: Gary, creation scientists are trying very hard today to give evidence against evolution. Would you say there is a dark side to this, in the sense that sometimes our interpretations have been a little bit overboard; and that some people who may call themselves creationists have took some liberties with that term from a literal biblical sense?

Gary: Well, evolutionists have actually begun to give science a bad name in terms of drawing very big and very erroneous conclusions on the basis of very little evidence; and the evolutionist working in the field of human origins has been an embarrassment to scientists around the world for well over a century. And they are still at it. And so when we look at the matter of over interpretation of the evidence, although evolutionists have been far more guilty of it than any other group, nevertheless, it's a human problem and human beings can become over zealous about their own interpretations. And so there is a need to for communication among creationists, and a constant checking of ideas, the willingness to put ideas on the line and have them tested by other creationists, and so on, to see whether these things be so; and, of course, we have to be constantly checking against God's word that we're on the right track. One of the really unfortunate things now is the number of people who are using the label creationist, who are not honoring the scriptures, nor are they honoring science. They are actually taking the opinions of evolutionists and using them to interpret God's word, rather than recognizing, of course, that God's word has authority over the opinions of men and that the observational evidence of science has authority over the interpretations of evolutionists. So Hugh Ross, for instance, uses the term creationist but he doesn't argue directly from the data of God's world. He simply accepts the opinion of evolutionists about the Big Bang, and then uses the opinions of evolutionists currently, to use his words, and the 67th book of the Bible. Another person, David Jung at Calvin College is a man with whom I have had many conversations in the past; and we have been interviewed together in the church magazine, and so on. And he is one again, I don't know of any particular research work that David Jung has done; He has taken ideas evolutionists have had about what the evidence means, most of it 20 and 30 years old, and said, "Because of this data that we have from science, we are going to have to reinterpret the Bible." He used to say that the Bible teaches a global flood, but now he says the data and scientists won't allow that position, in spite of the clear teaching of scripture and the clear evidence from science. He is now arguing indefensively, logically, observationally, scientifically, and every other way in favor of a local flood. The arguments he is using, give no credit to science and no credit to scripture. So that becomes a real problem [for creationists]. Evolutionists are ecstatically happy about this because they were losing the war. They were trying to beat the creationists with science and weren't making any headway. Now they have people, who are willing to call themselves creationists, who are defending typically the views of evolution that are many, many decades out of date. They use their views to say the Bible doesn't really teach this. It confuses many Christians if the experts can't decide what the Bible says. If the experts can't decide what science says, I am just going to sit on the sidelines. That is not a new tactic. There's an editorial in the Biology Teacher for this month [Sept 95] in which the writer is saying Darwin did exactly that. That Darwin really didn't have many facts in support of his theory of evolution; but he had a long convincing argument. When Christians would side with him, he would count them, publish their works, honor them, and so on. Even though in private communication he believed nothing about what the Christians believed, but he was willing to use Christian compromisers to advance the case for a pseudo science designed to destroy the God of creation. So we really need to be checking one another. And the great thing is that in creation science we have a double check. In regular science there is the check, you know, one scientist against another, and the check of observation, that seems to be so dreadfully absent in the study of human origins. It's was basically Leaky's team or Johansan's team; they were slugging it out for a while. But now that they have gotten in cooperation, nobody checks their work. If those people that do, like Charles Oxon or Lord Zikerman, they never get published refuting what they have done. But in creation science, not only do we have the built in check of piers reviewing our work; but we also have God's word. And I think it's important that creation science, that the degree of confidence we have in our applications of our understanding to science, must meet that double standard of agreement with the evidence in God's world and agreement with the testimony of God's word. In that sense there is only a few things about which I'm completely convinced. You know, "This really is true: It's what God says; It's what's science says; We can really count on it." There are many particularly theories that I have that I think are good ideas. They pass the current test of peer review; they are consistent with what scripture says; but I have to hold them with a light hand. The evidence is not conclusive. So I think really, creationists ought to be men of few absolute convictions, namely: the authority of God's word, and the willingness to study the evidence from science, not just the opinions of people about that evidence.

Dr. Parker's interview continued in June.