Overview: This is the fifth of this series of six 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 discuss two authors's books: "Starlight and Time" by Dr. D. Russell Humphreys and "The Biotic Message, Evolution versus Message Theory" by Walter James ReMine.

Ron: There are some exciting evidences for creation, some of which are pretty recent in the literature. One significant one is from Dr. D. Russell Humphreys. I'm sure you've read at least his preliminary work and probably are a little excited about his possible conclusions. Would you like to elaborate?

Gary: Dr. Russell Humphreys was a guest speaker at some Answers In Genesis seminars with Ken and I at Albuquerque and Los Angeles last January [1995]. It was a thrill to hear his information in person. This has to do with the gravitational effect on time. Now in this particular case we are not actually talking about scientifically theory or conjecture, but an experimentally measured effect of gravitation on time. So what Dr. Humphreys has done is say "Let's take a look at big bang theory in light of gravitational time dilation." See the evolutionists have chosen to ignore that, and in that sense really working from a 19th century scientific point of view; and they have ruled it out by fiat assumption, trying to assume the universe has no edge and no center. Well, that's an assumption. If you make that assumption, then, of course, there is no variation in gravity from one part of the universe to the other. But that's not a particularly reasonable assumption, and certainly not the only assumption. So Dr. Humphreys says let's make the opposite assumption that the universe does have an edge and it does have a center and that the Earth is somewhere near the center, not exactly in the center. That would be an uninteresting position, but somewhere near that. Then you take the known measurements of science, plug them into exactly the same equations that big bang theorists use, and what you wind up with is a universe that is created during six days of what Dr. Humphreys calls Earth Standard Time. If you were here on Earth during the time that God was creating the heavens and the Earth just as described in Genesis One and you looked to the Heavens as God was stretching out the heavens from the second to the fourth day of Creation, then you would see all the events that we talk about here. It would be like a video running in fast forward as God stretches out the Heavens and produces a big universe that's also a young universe. It's a very dramatic idea. It's consistent with the evidence from science. It's consistent with the best scientific theories, 20th century science, not the 19th century science that [Dr.] Hugh Ross is stuck with, for instance. And so we have reason to be very excited about it. But Russ Humphreys himself says. "This is an idea. It's consistent with scripture. It's consistent with science. But it's not necessarily the last word. I'm [Russ] just proposing this. I need to have other creation scientists check the data. I want them to check the equations that I have done. I want them to check how I have read the Bible." So he is putting it out there to be checked. He is also planning to develop the ultimate scientific test. That is to predict in advance of observation. And so the mathematics needs to be refined further in order for him to make predictions that could be tested as a means of confirming or rejecting the theory he is proposing. And it's the epitome of good science. It's a good idea, carefully argued from the evidence and from the principle. And yet Dr. Humphreys would be the first one to abandon it, if it didn't stack up to either Biblical or scientific testing. He did this earlier. He made a prediction about reversals or remnant magnetization in rocks that has been interrupted to indicate shift from the magnetic pulls, of shifted positions and so on; and he predicted that rather than taking a long time of hundreds of thousands of years and so on, it would happen rapidly and for reasons that have nothing to do with the north and south magnetic pulls of the earth, but local phenomena. And he said, "Within small lava flows in recent times you see this reversed remnant magnetization." Between the time he made that prediction at the International Congress on Creation in 1990 and the next meeting in 1994, experimental confirmation was in on that particular topic. So it's an exciting time to be a creationist. [Note: AIG is offering the Progressive Creation "Attack Pack" - "Starlight and Time" by Dr. Humphreys and "Creation and Time: A Report on the Progressive Creationist book by Hugh Ross" by Van Bebber/Taylor for only $10.95. We can order it for you as a service to our members.]

Ron: Gary, there is a book that has been out a couple or three years by Dr. ReMine that has a new theory on what he calls the biotic message. I kind of think of it as information messages, or something like that. I think it is a well written book, covers a lot of things, and he talks about some messages that are in evolution that you might say is the hat trick, the magic trick. The word itself, evolution, is a hat trick. He talks about the information content in genetics and many other things. What most impressed you about the biotic message and do you think this is a real good creation message.

Gary: Yes, I was indeed impressed by Walter ReMine's book and one negative and one positive. The negative was what you mentioned, is that, his hobby is magic, the art of illusion. And he was saying that he recognizes that evolutionists are masters of illusion. You know, they come up with this idea that looks impossible and yet they rule out this way, that's not now he did the trick, that's not how he did the trick, and so on; and so using the time on earth and effective rhetorical methods of the magician, they convinced people that the impossible has really happened right before their very eyes. Evolution is a master piece of illusion. And I think that was very clever and it makes it somewhat easier to understand how evolution, in spite of having no evidence to support it and making preposterous claims, you know, it still has the allegiance of so many rational people. So I think that was developed very well. Then the other is the positive side, the biotic message itself. It is that God in the genetic code and in the structure of living things is communicating information to us and that's very obvious. In my work on DNA, for instance, I talk about the enzymes that I have named translases, that are a whole different category of enzymes. They don't simply speed up a reaction that would occur anyway; and in the absence of these enzymes they impose, a grammatical linguistic relationship on a group of bases relating them to a particular amino acid R group. A relationship that has no basis in chemistry at all, but conveys a message. That's an argument that I have used, and what Walter ReMine is saying. You see this kind of message throughout the handiwork of God and it's a double message. God has two things to communicate. There is a God, as opposed to time and chance. And so you see all the evidence of design that shows it couldn't possible be the result of a just chance phenomenon. But the other part of the message is that there is only one God. There are not many Gods. So when you look for the design, it's theme and variation, there are patterns of coherence that point us back to one God, not many Gods. So in the design of the living world God has actually answered critics of both the pantheistic nature, that there are many Gods, and the atheistic, no God concept, of evolution. That I find very helpful. Sometimes evolutionists use the speciation argument, that if there was a God we would expect each organism to be created differently; there wouldn't be any reason, you know, for the human arm and the bone pattern in a dog's leg, in a horse's leg and in a bat's wing and so on, to have a pattern; but ReMine is saying, "No. God is creating a pattern to show a unity in diversity." That biotic message contradicts both the idea of chance; no God, and the idea of many God's with many separate creations. Ken [Ham] once said, quoting Carl Sagon as looking for an intelligent message from outer space; desperately needing a message from outer space to give us the secrets of life and immortality; Ken likes to say that message is here; that message is here; it's the Bible; it's here, it's been translated, and so on. And it is in God's word and that message in God's word is the same one we read in the biotic message; the design of the living world that tells us about a God of plan and purpose, not time and chance. And one God, not many Gods.

Ron: I believe there is another piece to that biotic message as I recognized it; and that is the message denies a lot of things. It denies that it could have been done any other way; it denies that there are intermediate species or kinds, more particularly. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Gary: One of the other neat things of ReMine's biotic message is that the message is designed to resist any other interpretation. So there are lots of codes like that, that have built in checkers that say, "No, it doesn't mean this, it doesn't mean this, it doesn't mean the other thing." So the message is specifically designed to thwart the interpretations that evolutionists try to place on things. God, you know, is not surprised at all that people would try to explain away His existence, and blame everything on evolution. So he designed a nature to make sure that they would be constantly frustrated in those particular attempts. For instance, in trying to evolve fish from amphibians, you need a certain kind of behavior; you need an aquatic animal that would like to come out of the water and flop around on the land. Well there is such an animal, it's the mud skipper; but you also need an animal that has some kind of bone pattern in it's fins so they could potentially, at least, evolve into legs. Well you have such an animal, it's a Coelacanth. The catch is that the Coelacanth is a fishy fish that lives in the deep ocean, has no desire, no capability at all of flopping around on land. So the parts the evolutionists are hoping to find are completely separated ecologically, anatomically and everything else; so that no matter which of those two organisms they begin with, they have to independently re-evolve, either the limb bones for the mud skipper or the behavior pattern for the Coelacanth. And then an entirely different organism, the lung fish, has the attachments to the lungs that enables it to gulp air; but it lives in pools that dry up; and it doesn't walk anywhere. And you know, it curls up in a ball of mud that resists dehydration until rains come again. So God is actually in a sense saying how can that happen. And the very things that are tantalizing the evolutionists, they see what they want, but they are written in different messages that can't be transcribed into one another. It is the same with the algae. The message for the right pigment for land plants is in one group; the right reproductive pattern is an entirely different group; the right anatonomical feature in an entirely different group still; so that you have to keep rewriting the message--revolving, going backwards in order to go forward. It's just a constant frustration to the evolutionist to try to do that. So God designed that message to resist any other interpretation and that is a particularly strong feature of that biotic message.

Dr. Parker's interview continued in Aug.