Penny Press Machine travels...

We will be at the West Bend Farmer's Market this Saturday (June 21, 2014) from 7:30 - 11 am.
WB Farmer's Market

Creation Conference June 30-July 2, 2014

This looks very worthwhile for those who wish to understand Scripture both scientifically and for its spiritual significance. 
http://www.societyofcreation.org/conferences.php

"The Origin of Life:

The Improbability of Chance, Mutation, and Natural Selection" (2014)

            The next creation conference take place on June 30 to July 2, 2014, Monday to Wednesday. Concordia University Wisconsin will once again host us in a larger meeting area in order to accommodate the larger crowd that is expected. We will start at 1:00 p.m. on June 30 and end at noon on July 2. As plans continue to develop, we will post and update information about the next conference. That conference will focus on the origin of life, and secondarily the amazing complexity of DNA and the individual cell.
            Please check this website from time to time for more information. Much of the same information, which appears below, will apply to this next conference, such as housing, registration procedures, contacts with conference organizers, etc. Please use the registration form that appears below in pdf format. We plan to offer meals as part of the conference, adding the cost of each meal you sign up for (and including one noon meal in the registration fee). One of our keynote speakers will be Jay Seegert, who comes to us from the Creation Education Center, Waukesha, Wisconsin. He has spoken widely on issues related to creation, speaking more than 1,300 times in 26 states and three foreign countries. Dr. Kevin Anderson, from the Creation Research Society, is our other plenary speaker. Both Dr. Gary Locklair and Dr. Joel Heck will also be presenting, as indicated below. We will also offer a selection of workshops, or concurrent sessions.

Our Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Kevin Anderson is an author, speaker, and editor-in-chief of the Creation Research Society Quarterly. He holds the Ph.D. in microbiology from Kansas State University. He has been a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois, professor of microbiology at Mississippi State University, and research microbiologist for the United States Department of Agriculture.
Jay Seegert is an author and international speaker and is the Co-Founder of the Creation Education Center. He has degrees both Physics and Engineering and has been lecturing on the authority of Scripture for over 28 years.  In addition, Jay serves on the Board of Directors for Logos Research Associates and is a Representative Speaker for Ratio Christi.  He is also a former adjunct speaker for Creation Ministries International and the former President of the Creation Science Society of Milwaukee.

Abstracts of Plenary Addresses:
Kevin Anderson
"Evolution's Flawed Principles"
Evolutionary transformations are claimed to result from natural selection acting upon mutational change. However, this view reveals an incomplete understanding of natural selection and an inaccurate understanding of mutations. 
 "The Human Genome: An Icon for Creation Science"

Since the publication of the human genome sequence, our understanding of the function and structure of chromosomes has increased dramatically. In light of these new discoveries, evolutionists' arguments, such as Junk DNA, evolutionary lineages, and Human/Chimpanzee genetic similarity, are now being discarded as erroneous.  The genome exhibits a clear evidence of design, possessing an intricate organization of overlapping genes, dual coding systems, and 4-dimensional informational activity - fully consistent with a recent creation model.

Jay Seegert

“Evolution: Probable or Problematic?”

Even though certain aspects of evolution occasionally seem fairly plausible, when you "peek under the hood" to see what actually has to go on inside (in the DNA) we see a very different picture.  Presenting some cutting-edge information about DNA, this presentation clearly demonstrates that molecules-to-man evolution is virtually impossible. “I ‘Hear’ that Evolution is Impossible” Using the human ear as the main example, this topic briefly addresses the origin of "information" and the origin of species, showing that mutations and natural selection are completely incapable of producing molecules-to-man evolution. Gary Locklair "Positive Creation Evidences"God created life as matter with teleonomy (information content). All life on planet earth was originally fashioned by God. Since this is true, there should be a number of scientific evidences that can be used as support. What are these evidences and what is an effective way to present and discuss the evidence? From the Law of Biogenesis to probability; from complexity to information theory, there are many evidences to support the origin of life by God's creative activity. Any evidence can be expressed either as a negative argument against evolution or as a positive argument in favor of creation. This presentation will focus on defining and presenting positive arguments in favor of the creation of life.
 Joel Heck
"The Grand Canyon and the Flood of Noah"
The Grand Canyon is often presented as evidence for uniformitarianism and an old earth, but in reality it speaks of a cataclysmic worldwide deluge in the recent past. Belief in a worldwide flood in Noah's day, based on Genesis 6-9, usually goes hand in hand with a high view of Scripture and a natural reading of the creation account in Genesis 1. Drawing on a week-long trip in the Grand Canyon with one of the world's foremost Grand Canyon geologists, this topic will present evidence for the flood of Noah as seen in the fossils and sedimentary rock layers of the Grand Canyon with photos and videos taken on site. He who created all life also at one point destroyed most of that life, except for the family of Noah.

Fairs Summer 2014

Sauk County
July 9-13
Life Fest
July 10-13
Dane County
July 16-20
Waukesha County
July 16-20
Washington County
July 22-27
Ozaukee County
July 30-August 3
Sheboygan County
 August 28-Sept 1

Noah, the Flood, Pitch and Salvation

I spent a wonderful morning today with almost 200 school children. I taught on the Biblical flood and Noah, the ark and salvation. Did you know God told Noah to cover both the inside and outside of the ark with pitch? The pitch was a covering that kept Noah, his family and the animals safe inside the ark and protected from God's judgment of the world. This pitch is a picture of salvation through Jesus Christ for us from God's judgment for our sin. His blood covers us and keeps us safe from judgment just like the pitch covered the ark, keeping the passengers inside the ark safe. There are so many lessons to learn from Genesis! The penny press machine came with me and each child pressed a penny and took one of our cards. Enjoy the pictures:

Jay Seegert Weighs in on Ham/Nye Debate and Offers Scientific Insight

Full article HERE
Ice Cores & Tree Rings
The age of the Earth was front and center throughout much of the debate. Much could be said about this, but the most significant thing in my mind is that this particular issue is one of the easiest things to use to poke fun of the biblical creation account. Not because there isn’t a vast amount of evidence for a relatively young Earth, but because when dealing the general public, the vast majority of them have grown up being taught that the Earth and universe are billions of years old and that it has been “proven” by the best science we have. That is, it’s not something that’s up for discussion. Anyone who rejects this “fact” is obviously not living in the “real” world. To reject an old Earth and universe requires, in most minds, a blind commitment to religion and an abject rejection of science altogether. With that backdrop, it is very difficult to convince people otherwise, in just a few minutes. I am personally convinced that given enough time, the vast majority of people would agree that young Earth creationists have a very strong case for their view, even if they wouldn’t immediately change their own mind. It’s a topic that takes much more time to address properly, therefore, making it very easy to throw out challenges that cannot properly be addressed in the confines of the current debate. I have included three entire chapters in my book Let There be Light regarding this issue. The first of which deals with the relevance of this issue (i.e. why are we even talking about it), the second covers what Scripture actually says and the third deals with what we know from science.
One of the evidences highlighted by Nye was ice core dating. It seems pretty straight-forward… you drill through the ice, count how many layers you see and instantly know how many years passed from bottom to top. The obvious assumption here being that one layer formed per year. Here’s the rub… there are examples where multiple layers have formed in a single season. These are instances in which there are other factors that allow us to know the age in advance. If we know from instances where we can check the layers per year against known dates and see that there are multiple layers per year, why would we assume, when the age is not known to begin with, that only one layer would appear per year?
The most famous example is that of a World War II P–38 Lightning fighter plane. It crash-landed in Greenland in 1942 and was buried by the subsequent snowfalls. A recovery effort was made, but instead of finding the plane under a small amount of ice, it was found under 250 feet of ice, much to everyone’s amazement! In just 50 years (1942-1992) 250 feet of ice had accumulated… much more than had been expected.
It is a similar situation with tree-ring dating. In many circumstances, we see one ring per year, but there are others where we see multiple rings per year. The Bristlecone Pines are typically referenced in defense of the trees being almost 9,000 years old. However, the environment in which these trees grow (White Mountains of eastern California) have been known to produce multiple rings per year. While there is still much research to be done, it is clear that assuming one ring per year is one that can easily lead to misleading age estimates.
Swimming Between Layers
While stating that there was no evidence for the flood, Nye said that if there really was a flood, we should expect to see fossils of creatures “swimming between the layers”. This is a very uneducated statement, because it shows a lack of understanding as to what exactly would have happened during the flood and was just another attempt to mock and ridicule the biblical text. The fact is that there are many examples of things that stretch through many layers. One example is that of polystrate fossils. These are usually fossils of trees that cut through many layers, providing compelling evidence for rapid catastrophic deposition of sediment, as opposed to slow, gradual accumulation. If the typical “millions of years” view that Nye holds to is true, it would require these trees to begin growing in one layer and then stand there (without rotting away) for hundreds of thousands or millions of years while waiting to be buried by subsequent layers. This is quite preposterous and goes against known science and common sense.
Another key point here is that just because a certain creature was around during the time of the flood, doesn’t mean it would get fossilized in each layer. This is another one of Nye’s misunderstandings. For example, we have fossils of the coelacanth fish that are believed by secular geologists to have become extinct 70 million years ago. However, these creatures have been found still alive today, and not only are they still alive… they haven’t changed in 70 million years! The point is that even though these creatures have been alive the whole time (from their first appearance in the fossil record supposedly about 360 million years ago until today), they apparently didn’t leave any fossil evidence for the past 70 million years! It makes much more sense that those layers were not laid down over millions and millions of years, but rather rapidly in a worldwide flood as described in Genesis 6-8.
The Ark
Commenting on the building of the ark, Nye stated that Noah and his family were “unskilled” and could never have built such a large vessel. How does he know they were unskilled? He doesn’t. In fact, people of that era (specifically just after the flood) built huge pyramids which we cannot reproduce today with the best equipment known to man! Unskilled? I don’t think so. As far as only 8 people building the ark, God gave them the design and there’s no reason that Noah could not have contracted other’s to help in its construction. We have no indication one way or the other, but I think it is very likely that there were those among the scoffers who said, “I think you are crazy and delusional, but if you are willing to pay me, I’ll help you build this silly thing!”

Do Ice Cores Show Many Tens of Thousands of Years?

Michael Oard

October 1, 2004

Featured In

In the sequence of events in the creation-Flood Ice Age model, at the end of deglaciation, the Ice Age was effectively over. Yet some ice sheets continued to grow. The Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets are remnants left over from the post-Flood Ice Age (figures 12.1 and 12.2). They were protected from melting by their location in the polar latitudes and by the high altitude of the ice deposited during the Ice Age. The altitude of the ice is an important factor since the atmosphere cools at an average of 3.6°F per 1,000 feet (6°C per 1,000 m).
It is interesting to note that the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets may never have grown to their present size, if it were not for the initial thickness of ice at the end of the Ice Age. Some scientists believe that if the ice somehow disappeared, it probably would not return in the present climate. This is especially the case for Greenland.

Figure 12.1. Map of Greenland showing ice thickness above sea level with major ice core locations. (Redrawn by Ron Hight.) View full-size.

Many ice cores have been drilled deep into both the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets since the 1960s (see figures 12.1 and 12.2). It is observed today that these ice sheets incorporate dust, acids, pollution, etc. that cycle with the seasons. Near the top of the ice sheets, annual layers can be distinguished by measuring the many variables related to the seasons. From the top of the Greenland ice sheet, glaciologists further claim that they can count the annual layers downward, like counting the rings in a tree to determine its age. They arrive at 110,000 years for the top 90 percent of the ice sheet.¹ Is their claim justified?
 Full article HERE

Promotional Video for Ken Ham/Bill Ney Debate Feb. 4, 2014

Click Here

Live Streaming of Ken Ham/Bill Nye Debate

Sign up here for the live streaming of the Feb. 4th debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. Tickets sold out within 2 minutes, but we can watch online!
http://www.answersingenesis.org/outreach/event/Nye-Ham-Debate/

FOSSILS FIT FLOOD MODEL

Fossils are amazing specimens that reveal an extraordinary occurrence from the past. This article focuses on a fossil pit in Germany which is full of exquisitely preserved animals.

Secrets of the Messel Pit, a Fossil Graveyard

News to Know

by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell

January 4, 2014

The Messel Pit preserves animals suddenly and catastrophically buried in the wake of the global Flood.
The travel section of the January issue of Smithsonian Magazine features a fine photo gallery of specimens from Germany’s famous fossil graveyard, the Messel Pit. The photos are accompanied by an ode of gratitude proclaiming the “debt humans owe to animals that died out 48 million years ago.” And what is it exactly that we are supposed to be grateful for, according to the Smithsonian’s writer? For the “evolutionary secrets” preserved in this fossil graveyard.

This three-foot-long rodent (Ailuravus macrurus) from the Messel Pit looks like a squirrel. Evolutionists believe it convergently evolved the same features as a squirrel but consider it outside the squirrel lineage. Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

Like other turtles fossilized in the Messel Pit, this pair of turtles resembles modern turtles. Also like other turtles in the fossil graveyard, they appear to have been suddenly buried while in the process of reproducing after their kind. Image: Jonathan Blair Corbis, Smithsonian Magazine

The vibrant colors of this stag beetle fossil from the Messel Pit are still visible, its preservation likely associated with a sudden burial. Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

This species of ant, Titanomyrma giganteum, from the Messel Pit fossil graveyard was as big as a hummingbird. Read more about such megafauna in “Why Were the Animals So Big?” Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

This cockroach grew about two inches long. A wide variety of insects is well-preserved in the Messel Pit, though cockroaches are among the less common ones. Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

Animals Through Biblical Glasses

By contrast, we rounded out our News to Know year on the 31st with our own photo-essay “Life Lessons Illustrated in the Animal Kingdom” recalling many of 2013’s favorite animal stories. We reviewed what evolutionary biologists claimed about them and what they could teach us about God’s wonderful designs. Thus it seems fitting now to take a look into the Messel Pit to see what evolutionary secrets it is supposed to reveal, what some of the marvelous animals there can show us, and what we should see as we peer into the pit through “biblical glasses”—in other words, how God’s Word can help us understand what we see.

Messel And Mammalian Success

The Messel Pit in central Germany is a 200-foot-deep gouge through a forest. Located at an old strip mine from which oil shale (shale impregnated with oil) was once mined, the big ditch almost became a garbage dump, but paleontologists lobbied for its preservation and since 1995 it has been a protected UNESCO World Heritage site. The Messel Pit is a fossil graveyard in which a wide variety of animals and plants are exquisitely preserved. Classified as Eocene rock, evolutionists believe the fossils there are the remains of animals buried around 48 million years ago and thus provide insight into the progress of mammalian evolution following dinosaur extinction.
Evolutionists believe that mammalian evolution started at the same time as dinosaur evolution but only took off with great success when dinosaurs became extinct and vacated many ecological niches. This is how they explain the appearance of a wide variety of mammals in the fossil record in the layers above those containing dinosaurs. Such is the case with the Messel Pit. Because they think the animals in the pit—believed to have once been a deep, steep-sided lake—died during this mammalian heyday, they believe the fossils in the Messel Pit reveal the secrets of mammalian evolutionary success.

Sudden Death

Why are so many animals—45 mammalian species as well as reptiles, fish, insects, 43 species of birds, and a few amphibians—preserved in Messel Pit? Many of the animals are preserved intact with fur, colored feathers, or dinner in their stomachs, and nine pairs of turtles are preserved mating. How did their very activities get frozen in time? What caused so many animals to suddenly die? Evolutionary paleontologists propose that toxins or carbon dioxide bubbled up through the lake and ended their lives. The lack-of-oxygen hypothesis is called into question, however, by the presence in the Messel Pit of water-beetle larvae that can only survive in highly oxygenated water.¹ For that matter, even the idea that the Messel Pit was a lake is questionable given the relative scarcity of mosquitoes and other water-dependent insects, the rarity of amphibians among the fossils (only one salamander and three species of toads or frogs), and the absence of fossil tadpoles.²
In any case, according to evolutionists, something killed animals visiting a deep lake quite suddenly, they fell in and sank, and then over centuries each was gradually covered by fine clay—with 250 years required to form each inch of sediment—and eventually fossilized. And why didn’t these dead animals simply decompose or get scavenged on the lake bottom? Evolutionists propose that there wasn’t much oxygen at the deep lake’s bottom and that there was therefore shortage of scavengers and bacteria down there.

Moderns And Megas But No Transitions

Some of the animals in the Messel Pit are extinct, and others are pretty much like those we have today. Some, like pygmy horses, are small species of familiar animal kinds. Others are examples of now-extinct gigantic species—megafauna—such as a giant cockroach and a giant ant. There is an extinct three-foot-long squirrel-like mammal called Ailuravus macrurus—hailed by evolutionists as an example of convergent evolution because it looks like a big squirrel but doesn’t fit into the evolutionary lineage proposed for squirrel. (You can learn more about megafauna in “Why Were the Animals So Big?”) There are also modern-appearing hedgehogs and mice, frogs and turtles in Messel Pit. There are bats with the same impressive specializations as today’s bats. And there is “Ida,” a controversial furry lemur-like primate that some evolutionists claim is a missing link in human evolutionary history. Nothing about this lemur-like primate, of course, indicates it was anything but an extinct lemur-like creature. (You can read more about Ida at “Ida (Darwinius masillae): the Missing Link at Last?”)
As we have explained many times, sharing a few similarities with other organisms does not demonstrate an animal is a transitional form. Common designs and similarities can never demonstrate evolutionary relationships. While evolutionary paleontologists sort through the Messel Pit labeling many extinct and modern-appearing organisms, large and small, what they actually have found is that some animals are highly developed just like their modern counterparts and others are highly developed but extinct. Those findings do not demonstrate anything evolving into anything.

Time Capsule

Evolutionary paleontologist Ken Rose comments, “Everyone in vertebrate paleontology knows Messel. There’s really no place in the world that compares. A great deal of what we know from that time period is from there.” But what time does it tell us about? Given that the animals in it are so wonderfully preserved, we must attribute their preservation to a sudden catastrophic burial.
The Messel Pit is a fossil graveyard. The exquisite preservation of the animals in the Messel Pit is consistent with rapid catastrophic burial, not centuries of gradual burial allowing for distortion and decomposition. The global Flood of Noah’s day, around 4,300 years ago, is recorded in biblical history in the book of Genesis (chapters 6–9), confirmed by Jesus Christ Himself in Matthew 24:38–39, and attested to by a large portion of the fossil record in general as well as fossil graveyards around the world. The Flood itself and post-Flood catastrophes swept away and sorted countless animals and plants and buried them in water-borne sediment. Some were buried en masse, creating fossil graveyards.
Layers in the fossil record reveal the order of burial, not the order of evolving life. There are fossil graveyards found at many different levels in the geologic column around the world. This particular fossil graveyard, in Eocene rock, is fairly high in the geologic column—high enough that many creationist geologists believe it represents a group of animals suddenly and catastrophically buried amid the unstable conditions in the aftermath of the global Flood. Read more about fossil graveyards in “The World’s a Graveyard.”

Biodiversity Is Biblical

So what's wrong with the idea that mammals diversified to fill the niches left by extinct dinosaurs? After all, animals fill niches vacated by other animals in ecosystems all the time. After the Flood, the animals preserved on Noah’s Ark were released to replenish the earth, but some eventually became extinct, just as animals today become endangered and go extinct. (Learn more about this in “How Did Dinosaurs Die?”) Doubtless various animals did move into ecological gaps left as dinosaurs and other now-extinct animals began diminishing in the centuries after the Flood. The natural processes of speciation and variation within the existing created kinds of animals would have resulted in animals that filled those niches.
The problem with the scenario extolled in the Smithsonian’s article is the evolutionary spin it puts on the pit. The notion that increasingly complex animals evolved over millions of years is conjecture imposed on the fossil record. Such a process is unsupported by biological observations. The Messel Pit fossils don't demonstrate upward evolution or transitional forms. They attest to the existence of many diverse, well-developed, fully functional animals that populated a portion of the post-Flood world.
By peering into the Messel Pit through the lens of biblical history, we can see it as a record of a diverse group of animals, including some now extinct, replenishing the earth but cut short by catastrophe and sudden burial. We do owe a lot of our knowledge of these species to the Messel Pit, but the fossils do not track the evolution of mammals or of anything else.
Article from Answers in Genesis

Merry Christmas!

The promise of the Father to send the Son came to Adam and Eve in the garden after they sinned and began to die. Our redeemer came 2,000 years ago. Born to die...
 Genesis 3:15, And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Galatians 3:13, Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.
1Co 15:22,  For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

To see this Christmas display, visit the 1st floor rotunda in the state capitol in Madison, WI.