This relates to concepts about the “age of dinosaurs,” but let’s put aside that concept for the moment. Have you ever encountered a statement similar to the following?

“Evolution is a proven scientific fact.”

True scientific progress requires working with details, and “evolution” (meaning Darwinian theory) has been compared to a room full of smoke, according to David Berlinski, in the documentary Expelled-No Intelligence Allowed:

One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian Theory is: man that thing is just a mess. It’s like looking into a room full of smoke. Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined and delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from Mathematical Physics. And Mathematical Physics lacks all of the rigor one expects from Mathematics. So we’re talking about a gradual decent down the level of intelligibility, until we reach Evolutionary Biology.

Unlimited Common Ancestry

We can blow away some of that smoke by being specific. Many persons assume there is only one concept of biological evolution and they just call it “evolution.” But the General Theory of Evolution mainly involves the philosophy of unlimited common ancestry, so let’s look deeper. Yes indeed it is philosophy and not science, although many persons have assumed it is pure science.

What is unlimited common ancestry? (I like to use that phrase for it is specific.) It’s when a person assumes that when two different biological organisms may have had a common ancestor then they did have one. That is not scientific, it is philosophical.

Darwin used that approach in his books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and countless of his followers have continued to use that philosophy. One of the big problems is that this philosophy has been forced into our consciousness (or subconsciousness) in the name of “science.”

When I say unlimited common ancestry (we’ll use UCA), I don’t mean insistence that all living organisms must have had one common ancestor; it’s not quite that. The concept that all plant life had one common and all animal life had another common ancestor—that could fit well into the philosophy of UCA, if the evidence was convincing enough that the two basic forms of life had different original ancestors. The point of this philosophy, in that case, would be insisting we then assume that there were not more than two original ancestors. Notice the insistence.

What do we learn from Genesis? Biological details are scarce indeed, but it seems that this planet originally had many original ancestors of modern organisms, perhaps thousands of original life forms. That’s a far cry from both the insistence of UCA and the countless species that now exist in our wonderful world. Hardly anybody denies all forms of evolution, for humans themselves have caused a wide variety living things to come forth, for example: domesticated animals, including many varieties of cattle, horses, dogs, and cats. But those many kinds came about by human intelligence and from a variety or original ancestors. We did not start with mud puddles but with wonderful early forms of animals. Environment may play a part in shaping some characteristics in animal life, over long periods of time, but the shaping was done in selecting from among many of the wonderful genes that had already existed “after their kind.”

Dating Problems With Dinosaurs

I refer to carbon-14 radiometric dating problems, not dinosaur extinction from those animals hanging out in groups and avoiding serious courtship dating.

The two problems with C14 testing of dinosaur bones comes from two perspectives:

1. The dates are shocking
2. The dating has been discontinued, because of shock

Soon after the 2012 geology conference in Singapore, carbon-dating laboratories, at least in the United States, stopped testing any materials that might be dinosaur remains.

Why? It could make them look silly, for the dates always turn out to be in the range of tens of thousands of years, with radioactive carbon always present. How shocking!

Directly testing the ages of dinosaurs bones always shows them to be only a tiny fraction of the ages that we have been indoctrinated into believing. Dinosaurs really did live alongside humans, and that knowledge comes from carbon-14 dating.

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Carbon Radiometric Dating of Dinosaur Bones

Scientific methods and instrumentation have greatly improved since the earlier days of dinosaur dating, and those old assumptions are now being tested.

Carbon dated dinosaur fossils

Members of the Paleochronology group presented their findings at the 2012 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore, August 13-17, a conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS).

The Gospel and the Scientific View

The worldwide flood of Noah’s time has been accepted as a benchmark historical event by Jews and Christians for thousands of years—and similar traditions appear among the Greeks, Mesopotamians, and some American Indian tribes.

Evolutionary Boundary

Darwin’s Natural Selection actually PREVENTS ANY major biological-development change in ANY organism.

LDS Nonfiction Book

Three nonfiction books by the L.D.S. author Jonathan Whitcomb—each can take you into an astonishing world of cryptozoology, into a narrow field of the paranormal-like investigations of eyewitness accounts of apparent living pterosaurs.

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Since childhood, I have enjoyed watching films depicting Bible stories, with a very early memory of the depiction of some of Christ’s apostles. I probably saw several versions of the Genesis Flood story, with Noah and the Ark.

With all the various treatments, in films, of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and his wayward brothers, I came to understand that portions of those movies were purely fictional, with words and actions not taken from the Bible but from the imaginations of those who wrote and directed those dramatizations. Yet I found joy in those parts that were from Genesis. I cannot, however, recommend the 2014 film Noah, which gets further and further away from the Biblical account and is foreign to the real man Noah.

I stopped watching the movie (which I borrowed on DVD from a library) when Noah, who was protecting animal life on the Ark, became determined to kill his only baby grandchild, even before that child was born. How could anyone imagine any characterization more foreign to the actual character of the person whom we call Noah?

I know that the film creators were not intending to portray the Genesis account; they were creating a fantasy based upon a few principle parts of that scriptural record. But why use the name Noah? Why not create a fantasy without tearing down that name? I can only plead with everyone to avoid this film. The violence has almost few boundaries and the spirit of the original record of the Genesis Flood is absent.

In contrast, I highly recommend the film 17 Miracles. How inspiring that Mormon pioneer historical dramatization is!

I recently watched part of a documentary that appeared to try to convince people that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew, ahead of time, of the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. I don’t intend the following to be a deep examination, but only a few observations.

But first, consider the virtue of doubting the worst we hear about another person, holding back negative judgment, at least until we hear from the defense. We need to be objective, especially when somebody’s character is being attacked.

An hour before the first Japanese planes were launched from the decks of aircraft carriers, many miles from the nearest coast of Hawaii, nobody knew how devastating the attack would be. Prior reports indicated that the military forces at Pearl Harbor were not generally on high alert, but nobody could be certain, when that launching commenced, that the Americans would be completely taken by surprise.

Not even the Japanese who trained for that military mission could be sure it would be successful. Everything depended on surprise. Why do we now understand the devastation of that December 7th attack? Hindsight. We can see the photo of giant plume of water shot up from the explosion of a torpedo on the hull of a ship. We can read of the thousands of American lives lost and the many airplanes and ships damaged or destroyed. We can hear the words of those who survived that devastation.

But hindsight should not blind us to the ignorance that everybody lived in right before that attack began. Everybody was ignorant of the devastating attack, one hour before the first planes took off from those carriers.

Japanese losses were comparatively light, with only 29 aircraft lost, compared with 188 American planes destroyed, most of which were sitting on the ground. But things could have gone differently. The weather was getting rough after the second wave of attacks, instead of earlier. Somebody might have alerted the Americans in time for some of those 188 planes to have gotten into the air.  The American carriers could have been close enough to have launched an attack on the Japanese carriers. Even some of the ground aircraft might have threatened the Japanese fleet, if the advantage of surprise had been lost.

The point? Even the Japanese did not know for sure that their attack would be devastating, an hour before their planes were launched. So why believe that the president of the United States knew about that devastation, before the attack, when those men on those Japanese ships knew nothing for sure? Franklin D. Roosevelt had no idea that a devastating attack was about to take place.

Of course there’s much more that we can learn from various researchers. But let’s not get carried away with believing President Roosevelt had any sure pre-knowledge of anything related to the Pearl Harbor attack, even if he had access to many bits of evidence. Remember that when we look back at the evidences that the president may have had from advisors, we today have the advantage of looking back at a historic event; he did not.

As an aside, when I was a young man, I worked with a Charlie White, as we maintained the sprinkler systems on the campus of California State University Long Beach. He told me what he experienced during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Charlie was on a small destroyer; as I recall, they were on training out at sea. When they were attacked by a Japanese plane, they replied with live return fire. The pilot gave up the attack and looked for an easier target, or at least a safer target.

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Nazi Germany Versus 21st Century America Regarding 9-11

How do our present freedoms in the USA compare with the freedoms of citizens of Germany during the rule of Adolf Hitler?