By Roger Ebert
Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:
Q. When was the earth created?
A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.
Q. What about oil and coal, which seem to have been generated from ancient forests millions of years ago?
A. They are evidence of a Great Flood about 4,400 years ago, which laid down all the layers of sediment at once. They are nowhere near as old as evolutionists and archeologists say. A fossil claimed to be 200 million years old, found in Nevada in 1917, shows a shoe print. [See photograph]
Q. What about bones representing such species as Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man?
A. Created at the same time as man. They did not survive. In fact, all surviving species and many others were created fully formed at the same time. At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours.
Q. Were there ice ages lasting millions of years?
A. No, but a recent and catastrophic Ice Epoch.
Q. Did the Colorado River carve out the mile-deep Grand Canyon over eons?
A. It was the result of Ice Epochs, the Great Flood and other catastrophes within the last 64 to 100 centuries.
Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?
A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.
Q: What about dinosaurs?
A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.
Q. What did the creatures on the Ark eat?
A. Food on board, fish, and possibly trapped sea birds.
Q. How long did the Great Flood last?
A. We know that Noah was 600 years, two months and 17 days old when he sailed. Using that as a starting point and counting forward, Genesis tells us it lasted for 40, 150, 253, 314 or 370 days.
Q. Since the earth was completely covered, even to the highest mountains, where did the waters go?
A. This is explained in Psalm 104, verses 6 and 7: “Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.”
Q. What about such cosmic phenomena as the rings of Saturn?
A. Evidence of a catastrophic collision between Saturn and another object within the same 10,000-year span.
Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?
A. In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself.