Essay - part 4

Appendices

Appendix 1 Theistic Evolution

Appendix II - Other quotes.

Appendix III - What the bible says about creation and the nature of man.

Appendix IV: Apparent age.

Appendix V- The water vapour canopy - how I first got interested in creation/evolution

Appendix 1 Theistic Evolution

This is a compromise between evolution and creation in which God used evolution as His method of creation or that God was behind evolution, the driving force. Theistic evolution is in contrast to atheistic evolution. Theistic evolution arises from the attempt to remain a theist while accepting the naturalistic mechanism of evolution. Thus theistic evolution retains God as the who but uses evolution as the how of creation.

The major problem with theistic evolution is that the Bible says the God made man from the dust of the ground and not from the animals (Gen 2:7). If God had made man from previously created animal life he could easily have said so, look at how careful the Bible is to say that Eve came from Adam, she was made out a part of Adam which indicates that she is of the same substance as Adam and therefore she is a suitable helper for Adam, while no suitable helper could be found among the animals.

(Gen 2:7 NIV) the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

(Gen 2:18-23 NIV) The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." {19} Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. {20} So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. {21} So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. {22} Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. {23} The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman, ' for she was taken out of man."

The second problem is that the evolution part is not proven and is not supported by the evidence, so one half of the theory is already weak. The third problem is that when God finished creation he pronounced it very good. In the case of evolution life is still supposed to be evolving upwards, in the case of creation life is degenerating as the fall illustrates. Forthly evolutionist are looking for transitional forms according to Genesis God created creatures after their own kinds so we should not expect to find transitional forms. In Genesis the bible declares that we are made in Gods image, evolution declares that we are descended from the apes, that ought to be enough to stop compromising our belief in scripture.

Theistic evolution conflicts with the sudden creation and catastrophism of the great flood, which the evolutionary scientists deny ever happening ( see 2 Pet 3:3-7), it does not form part of the evolutionary scheme of things which involves gradual changes and slow formation of the geological strata. The great flood is now denied by the majority of people concerned with origins. As far as the bible and Jesus is concerned the flood is one of the greatest facts of history (Mat 24:27-39). If Jesus believed in Gen 1 and 2 and the flood so should bible believing Christians. The scriptures declares the flood to be a world-wide event.

Gen 9:11 (NIV) I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth."

2 Pet 3:3-7 (NIV) First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." 5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgement and destruction of ungodly men.

Mat 19:4 (NIV) "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' (Gen 1:27) 5 and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? (Gen 2:25)

Mat 24:37-39 (NIV) As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.

The big lie: I think that it is also necessary to add a comment on a fundamental lie that is usually implicit in this debate. The lie is that if evolution is true then there is no need for God or that he does not exist. This is simply not true, suppose that evolution was true, does that mean that there is no Creator? If evolution does turn out to be true then it simply means that God gifted his creation with the means to produce diverse life. Evolution does not answer the question about the origin of the scientific laws that allow life to exist or even the origin of the big bang. Now this view would commonly be called theistic evolution, which I would not espouse, simply because we have not found a mechanism to produce complex life from simple molecules and I would certainly reject chance plus natural selection as a mechanism for the formation of the first living cell. If such a mechanism is found then it will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries this century, but once again it does not make God redundant. In fact it should give us more reason to praise God as Creator. While science is naturalistic, it has nothing to say about the origin of the 'natural' laws which it investigates. Genesis 1:1 simply says 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth' it is implicit that God also created the laws that sustain the universe and which scientists seek to discover and understand, that is thinking God's thoughts after him. Science is the study of God's works whether we acknowledge him or not. To the atheist we should ask who created the laws that gave rise to such an intricate universe? I would suggest that the choice is between happenstance or God. While many of us would reject the theistic evolution view we should note that it still belongs to creedal Christianity, which acknowledges God as Creator. We should be aware of the false dichotomy between choosing between God or evolution, at a fundamental level evolution does not do away with God, it is this lie that has done so much damage.

We can summarise the various views as follows:

1. Naturalistic Evolution
2. Theistic evolutionists believe in Gen 1:1 - In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (after that God rested).
3. Progressive creationists believe that God intervened supernaturally and progressively at specific periods during the creation period as shown by Gen 1 and then rested.
4. Fiat creationism - instantaneous creation out of nothing (ex nihilo)

Among the creationists we have the following subdivisions:

• The Gap theorists believe in a long gap between Gen 1:1 and 1:2.
• The day age people believe that a day can be a thousand years or much more
• The young earthers believe in a literal account of Genesis which means that the earth is about 7,000 years old
• The old earthers see the scientific evidence for an old earth and therefore need to fit God's Word with His Works since the two should agree beause God does not lie.

I would consider myself to be an old earth progressive creationist.

Appendix II - Other quotes.

There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God...there is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility...that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can't accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation lading to evolution.

Dr George Wald (Professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard, Nobel Prize winner in Biology 1971. (1)

The explanation value of the evolutionary hypothesis of common origin is nil! Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, it seems to convey anti-knowledge. How could I work on evolution ten years and learn nothing from it? Most of you in this room will have to admit that in the last ten years we have seen the basis of evolution go from fact to faith! It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not be taught in high school, and that's all we know about it.

Dr Colin Patterson (senior Palaeontologist for the British Museum of Natural History, one of the worlds leading evolutionists and regarded as the worlds foremost fossil scientist) Spoken to the American Museum of Natural History November 5, 1981.

The only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world is the notion of Special Creation.

Dr Niles Eldridge (2)

Micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical theory. I suppose that no one will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what happens in biology:... I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will pose the question: "How did this ever happen?"

Dr S Lovtrup, 1987. (30)

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Darwin himself, when applying his own theory to the evolution of the eye and its amazing capabilities. (33)

All palaeontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imaginations, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches: the rest is inference however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.

Dr Stephen J Gould, evolutionary palaeontologist from Harvard.

I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book (Evolution). if I knew of any, fossil or living, I would have certainly have included them... yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils... I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.

Dr Colin Patterson.

It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student... have now been debunked The point emerges that, if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find - over and over again - not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.

Dr D V Ager, President of the British Geological Association.

Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup ever existed on this planet. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario 'the myth of the prebiotic soup.'

PhD Charles B Thaxton, PhD Walter L Bradley and PhD Roger L Olsen in their book The Mysteries of Life's Origin.

Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realise that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.

Michael Denton PhD.

The probability for the chance of formation of the smallest, simplest for of living organism known is 1 to 10^240,000,000. (That is 1 to 1 followed by 240 million zeros). The size of this figure is truly staggering, since there are supposed to be approximately 10⁸⁰ electrons in the whole universe!

Professor Harold Morowitz. (9)

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of Evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

Sir Fred Hoyle. (12)

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be an indistinguishable from a miracle.

Dr Michael Denton. (14)

Supposing the first cell originated by chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard filled with airplane parts and form a Boeing 747.

Sir Fred Hoyle. (15)

The main reasons for inventing these macromutations is that there are some features of plants and animals which can hardly be imagined as arising by gradual steps; the adaptive value of a perfected structure is easily seen, but intermediate steps seem to be useless, or even harmful. For example, what use is a lens in the eye unless it works? A distorting lens might be worse than no lens at all... How can the segment of an animal like the earthworm or centipede arise bit by bit? An animal is either segmented or it is not. The usual answer to such a question is that they are due only to a failure of the imagination.

Dr Colin Patterson. (26)

But how do you get from nothing such an elaborate something of Evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favoured by natural selection? You can't fly with 2% of a wing or gain much protection from an iota's similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated forms? .... one pint stands high above the rest: the dilemma of incipient stages. Mivart identified this problem as primary and it remains so today.

Dr Stephen J Gould (27)

It is entirely in line with the accidental nature of mutations that extensive tests have agreed in showing the vast majority of them detrimental to the organism in its job or surviving and reproducing, just as changes accidentally introduced into any artificial mechanism are predominantly harmful to its useful operations... good ones are so rare that we can consider them all bad.

Dr H J Muller. (28)

No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of Evolution. The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding. A single plant or a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with infinitesimal probability could no longer fail to occur... There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it.

Dr Pierre-Paul Grosse. (30).

.... the whole vast structure of modern naturalism [seems to] depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice [and is] devised not to get in facts but to keep out God.

C S Lewis, They asked for a Paper (London, 1962), p163.

statements about ancestry [of species] are not applicable in the fossil record... [but] are made up stories... not part of science,

Colin Patterson, Harpers, Feb 1985, p45.

Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.

D M S Watson, Douglas Dewar and L M Davies, 'Science and the BBC', The Nineteenth Century and after, Apr 1943, p167.

Astronomers are curiously upset by... proof that the universe had a beginning. Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind - supposedly a very objective mind - when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of faith in their profession...

There is a kind of religion in science; a faith that... every event can be explained as the product of some previous event ... This conviction is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid... the scientist has lost control.

If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatised. As usual, when the mind is faced with trauma, it reacts by ignoring the implications...

Robert Jastrow, Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1978, Part VI, pp 1,6.

Several years before, based on a comparison of DNA found in the mitochondria of modern human cells, a team of biochemists in Berkeley, California, had concluded that all humans on Earth could trace their ancestry back to a woman who had lived in Africa only 200,000 years earlier.

Every living branch and twig of the human family tree had shot up from this 'mitochondrial Eve' and spread like kudzu over the face of the globe, binding all humans in an intimate web of relatedness.

To me the Eve hypothesis sounded almost too good to be true. If all living people can be traced back to a common ancestor just 200,000 years ago, then the entire human population of the globe is really just one grand brother-and-sisterhood, despite the confounding embellishments of culture and race....

But Eve bore a darker message too. The Berkeley study suggested that at some point between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, people from Africa began to disperse across Europe and Asia, eventually populating the Americas as well. These people, and these alone, became the ancestors of all future human generations.

James Shreeve, Discover, September 1995, p 72.

(Gen 3:20 NIV) Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

(Acts 17:26-27 NIV) From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. {27} God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

Many quotes come from The Illustrated Origins Answer Book : Concise, Easy-To-Understand Facts About the True Origin of Life, Man, and the Cosmos by Paul S. Taylor

Appendix III - What the bible says about creation and the nature of man.

We have shown in the foregoing sections that the evidence for evolution is not compelling enough to force us to believe in this theory. The bible is not a scientific document and does not set out to prove either that God exists or that he created the universe. The bible documents Gods self revelation to man down through the centuries. It starts with the declaration:

Gen 1:1 (NIV) In the beginning God (elohiym) created (bara) the heavens and the earth.

Thus it declares both Gods existence and the fact that he created the universe in one simple, bold sentence. Heb 11:3 indicates that it is by faith that we understand that God created the universe out of nothing and if it is by faith then it is not by sight, because if we could prove from the evidence that God clearly and unequivocally created the world it would not be by faith it would be by sight.

(Heb 11:1-3) Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. {2} This is what the ancients were commended for. {3} By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Heb 11:6 also points out the importance of faith believing in Gods existence in pleasing God.

Heb 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

One day in the future Christ will come again and clearly manifest himself to the whole world and every eye will see him and thus vindicate the faith of those who believe in him who is invisible. The scripture clearly states that God is invisible (Heb 11:27, Col 1:15-16, 1 Tim 1:17) and because he is invisible he sent Jesus to make him visible to mankind (Col 1:15).

The bible also declares that unlike the animals God created man in his own image (Gen 1:26-27) and that he formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Gen 2:7) it later goes on to say how Adam could not find a suitable helper from the animals that were brought to him (Gen 2:19-20) so that God made Eve out of a part of Adam. Note firstly that Adam was made out of dust from the ground not from another animal, secondly that God breathed (his) life into Adam, thirdly that Eve was made out of part of Adam and would therefore share in his characteristics the most important of which is that he was made in the image of God and not that of an animal. Later we find that when man died he returns to the dust of the ground from which he was made (Gen 3:19), he does not return to some animal like state because he was not formed from an animal. The differences between man and animals is also emphasised in 1 Cor 15:38-39:

(1 Cor 15:38-39) But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. {39} All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.

Genesis also says that God created the creatures after there kind (Gen 1:21ff). Clearly there is a great difference with the theory of evolution in which there must be a continuous progression from animals to man.

Theologically the fact that Adam was made in Gods image is important because it enables Jesus to reflect Gods image when he came to earth. In other words when God created man he knew that this body and soul must be a fitting vehicle for him to come to earth in some time later and express himself and his nature in and through Christ who the bible declares is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15) and is the radiance of Gods glory and the exact representation of his being (Heb 1:3). This is argued at some length by Arthur C Custance in Vol. IV of the Doorway papers (Zondervan). Also when fashioning man he gave man a body and soul that could relate and commune with God, Gen 3:8ff shows that man was designed to walk and talk with God. This is also found in Revelation when there is a new heaven and new earth and God will dwell with men and live with then (Rev 21:1-4) in that age man will be restored to his pre-fall state and will live forever.

The scripture even goes so far to maintain that the creation clearly reveals Gods invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature (Rom 1:20) but that mankind perverted this preferring to worship created things and in so doing degraded himself so that he became animal like in his behaviour (Rom 1:18-32). It is remarkable how much man has morally decayed when he prefers to be made in the image of an ape to that of God.

God has not so revealed himself to mankind in such a way as to force mankind into believing him or that he is the creator. If he had then faith would not be required. He has not left himself without a witness, firstly the created order declares that there is a God and his revelation to individuals which is recorded through the bible witnesses the fact that there is a God. Finally he came to earth as a man performed miracles died on a cross and rose from the dead. It has to be said that God is so pleased by those who exercise faith in him that it is worth all the possible mis-understanding this may cause.

To those who do believe in Jesus one of the primary reasons for believing in God is that Jesus believed also in creation. Jesus uses the example of the creation of man and woman to argue against divorce and incidentally this argument is the most fundamental argument against homosexuality because it goes back to how God created us. He created a man and a woman and brought them together so that they became one flesh, thus the man and woman are physically complimentary.

(Mat 19:3-6) Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" {4} "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' {5} and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? {6} So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Eve was originally made from part of Adam, so that they were originally one flesh, so that when a man and a woman unite in marriage they become one flesh again. God officiated at the first marriage and brought the man and woman together and Jesus argues that man has no right to separate those who are brought together by God.

Jesus also mentions the creation during his prayers on Gethsemane.

(John 17:24) "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

Usually people who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour do not have any problem in believing that God created the earth. Conversely the evolutionary theory makes it difficult to believe in creation and therefore in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. The argument of Gods existence from creation belongs to apologetics, but it argues that the created order shows evidence of design and therefore of a designer or God. Typical evidences are the design inherent in the human eye, human body, human emotions and moral qualities such as love, justice, conscience etc. Such natural features such as the metamorphosis of caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly may also be mentioned which still defy human imagination.

Appendix IV: Apparent age.

The age of the earth is apparently old and one question that we need to pose is whether the universe is very old or whether it was created recently but with an apparent old age. From the point of view of scripture it is probably not a fundamental question of belief, that is that God exists and created the universe. It does not force us to believe in a young earth although the creation of life takes place over the third to sixth day of creation. The purpose of Genesis is to explain how we got here, only God was present at creation and only he could tell Adam how he got to the garden of Eden.

An example of apparent age is illustrated by the first miracle Jesus did when he turned the water into wine. The miracle was instantaneous and yet the wine had the appearance of being an old wine that was naturally aged over time to make it a good mature wine.

Appendix V: The water vapour canopy.

It was particularly the concept of a water canopy around the earth combined with the biblical data that first got me interested in evolution/creation back in about 1974 or 1975. Malcolm Bowden a creationist gave a talk to some young people from my church, he has written several books. The water canopy is only a theory and is about as provable as evolution.

The key concepts were:

1. The decline in the age of the patriarchs after the flood
2. The absence of rain before the flood combined with the appearance of the rainbow after the flood.
3. The effect of the water canopy on carbon 14 dating

The age of the patriarchs

It is clear if you plot the age of the patriarchs from Adam to Joseph that all those before the flood (apart from Enoch) lived to over 900 years, but after the flood the life-span dropped to 500 and then decayed down to 110 for Joseph. See graph. The suggested reason for this is that the water vapour canopy acted as a filter and filtered out much harmful radiation. After the flood when the water vapour canopy disappeared the radiation would increase the mutation rate in cells causing man's life-span to decrease.

There are some other interesting facts to come out of a study of the geneologies in the bible. Noah's father, Lamech, died five years before the flood. His grandfather Methuselah, who lived the longest any man has lived (969 yrs), died the same year as the flood. In addition a literal reading of the geneologies indicates that Noah lived for sixty years after the birth of Abraham and that Shem lived for ten years after the birth of Isaac. For an explanation read a good commentary.

The absence of rain prior to the flood and the appearance of the rainbow after the flood.

There is a hint in the scriptures that before the flood there was no rain but a mist or a heavy dew watered the ground (see Gen 2:5). At the time of the flood the rain was no ordinary rain but the water canopy causing a deluge on earth (see Gen 7:11). Rain as we know it would only occur after the flood which is why the appearance of the rainbow would be so significant (see Gen 9:12 ff.).

(Gen 2:5 NASB) Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth; and there was no man to cultivate the ground. (Gen 2:6 NASB) But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.

(Gen 7:11 NASB) In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.

(Gen 9:12 NASB) And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant which I am making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all successive generations; (Gen 9:13 NASB) I set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. (Gen 9:14 NASB) "And it shall come about, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud, (Gen 9:15 NASB) and I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and never again shall the water become a flood to destroy all flesh. (Gen 9:16 NASB) "When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." (Gen 9:17 NASB) And God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth."

The effect of the water canopy on carbon 14 dating.

During its life a living organism absorbs carbon from the environment including the unstable carbon 14. When the organism died it stopped absorbing carbon 14, which then starts to decay. Carbon dating measures the amount of C14 in organic remains. From the ratio of C14 to C12 we can calculate how much carbon 14 has decayed and knowing the half life of C14 we can determine the age of the organism. However we have to assume the initial ratio of C14 to C12 when the organism was living. Normally we assume that the ratio is the same as it is today. However since C14 is formed by the interaction of nitrogen in the air with cosmic radiation, if there was a water vapour canopy the amount of C14 would be negligeable, and in fact would only start forming after the flood, giving very much higher apparent ages. Malcolm Bowden has a diagram illustrating this in his book 'Science vs. Evolution'.