Last week, young earth Creationist leader Ken Ham lashed out at Pat Robertson for disputing the belief that Earth is approximately 6,000 years old. Now the American Family Association’s news arm OneNewsNow is out with a story, “Christian Broadcaster Straying From Scripture?” The AFA quotes a member of Ham’s Answers in Genesis skewering Robertson for insisting that humans did not live side-by-side with the dinosaurs:
Dr. Terry Mortenson of Answers in Genesis (AIG), who disagrees with Robertson, notes that the television show host challenges James Ussher, the renowned former archbishop of Ireland who traced the earth's creation based on the Bible and took the Bible as the Word of God.
"[Ussher] came up with a date of 4004 [B.C.] for creation by taking the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 as complete chronologies with no missing names, which is the way the church took those genealogies for 1,800 years," Dr. Mortenson explains. "So, he was just being a very, very careful student of the Scriptures and the chronological information given in Scripture."
Moreover, the AIG researcher notes that Robertson's claim that dinosaurs existed before biblical times is illogical, because there is no pre-biblical time; the Bible starts with the creation of the world.
Robertson also mentioned science's reliance on carbon dating, which Dr. Mortenson says reveals Robertson's ignorance on the subject.
"Carbon-14 is never used to date rocks or dinosaur bones; it's other dating methods which have much longer half-lives," Mortenson reports. "The maximum age you could date anything with radio carbon dating is about 80,000 or 100,000 years at the max, and dinosaurs supposedly lived 65 million to 245 million years ago. So he's really not informed on the dating methods."
AIG maintains that the Bible remains the true and final authority on the subject.
