It’s Déjà vu all over again

For those who have never heard a yogism before, there is a treasure trove of amusing statements that have come for the lips of possibly the greatest baseball player-manager-coach of all time, New York Yankee legend, Yogi Berra. Some of his more famous yogisms are, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” “I never said most of the things I said” and “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.” But, “It’s Déjà vu all over again” that I am using in reference to a famous discovery found lurking inside a dinosaur bone.

The first of these unusual discoveries was made by Professor Mary Higby Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who discovered what proved to be soft tissue inside of an allegedly 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex femur labeled MOR 1125. Her groundbreaking work also includes the discovery of soft tissue recovered from a 68-million -year-old fossil. While Schweitzer and company are dedicated to the evolutionary timeline, they admit that the preservation of soft tissue in partially fossilized specimens that are alleged to be tens of millions of years old is thus far something of an inexplicable miracle of preservation.

Enter California State, Northridge scientist Mark Armitage. While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, he discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed. Imagine his surprise when he discovered soft tissue while examining the horn using a high-powered microscope. Like Schweitzer, Armitage published his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. And that’s where his problems began. Not long after his discovery became known, the secular professors at California State, Northridge became irate. You see, Dr. Armitage is a Bible believing Christian as well as an unapologetic creationist. What happened next resulted in a lawsuit for wrongful termination and a two-year legal battle to clear his good name that only recently concluded.

Don’t get the impression that the Schweitzer and Armitage discoveries were isolated incidences, they were not. There have been others. Susannah Maidment, an Imperial paleontologist and one of the lead researchers on a 2015 study of 75 million-year-old T. Rex also found soft tissue. She noted the difficulty researchers have when trying to validate these findings. She said, “It’s really difficult to get curators to allow you to snap bits off their fossils. The ones we tested are crap, very fragmentary, and they are not the sorts of fossils you’d expect to have soft tissue.” Still, there are more and more of these types of discoveries being made now that researchers realize there are such miracles of preservation in the fossil record.

Two years after Armitage was ousted from his position, he was vindicated and was awarded a six figure settlement for wrongful termination. While his discovery was, with regard to Schweitzer’s earlier discoveries, “Déjà vu all over again,” creationists continue to be penalized for discovering evidence that the millions of years associated with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution may be in error.

Real science is supposed to be able to change its view when the evidence demands that they do so. That is not the case with Darwin’s theory. We find that any attempt to challenge the evolutionary timeline is automatically denied. You cannot even question the magic ingredient of Darwin’s grand theory, deep time. It is on the basis of this less than scientific principal, “given enough time, anything is possible,” that we can hypothesize inorganic molecules becoming organic molecules that self-organize into every lifeform on our planet.

That was the real source of the opposition to Armitage’s discovery. And don’t think that Schweitzer wasn’t challenged either. She too is a professing Christian, but she is also a theistic evolutionist who swears allegiance at the altar of deep time, therefore she was not fired from her job. When her findings were first published, dozens of critics quickly accused her of everything from sloppy lab work to misinterpreting the evidence. It was only after continued efforts on her part to rule out all other possibilities, and others had discovered similar miracles of preservation, that her work was eventually accepted by most of her peers.

Is it Bible believing people who take God at His Word and believe that the earth is relatively young who are wrong? Or is it scientists who readily admit that the bodies of living organisms begin to decompose shortly after death that are being incredibly naïve. I think it is the latter. At the Creation Studies Institute, we follow these discoveries very closely. We know that the evolutionary scientists refuse to submit their soft tissue for C-14 dating. Creationists have tried to get this done at their own expense. The refusal came with a declaration that if they did test it, and C-14 was indeed present, that it would be used against them as evidence in support of young earth creationism. That was the real reason these scientists will not perform this simple test. If this test gave any result at all, it would tend to falsify the entire timeline for molecules-to-men evolution.

Submitted by Pastor Steven Rowitt, Ph.D.

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