Well, after a week of feeling a little rough, I decided against travelling half-way across the country and back again in one day. Instead, Sarah had twigged I wouldn’t be doing anything so asked if I wanted to go to a talk by Paul Taylor from Answers in Genesis at Hatfield Evangelical Baptist Church. Whilst I’m not a supreme fan of the AIG lot (ask me, and I might explain), I’m certainly no evolutionist, so I thought it would be interesting to find out what’s new on the creation/evolution debate. I came away with very little new information. This isn’t to say the exisiting information was bad – I just knew it already. I knew that evolution relied on a few suppositions, such as a very old earth (approximately 4.6 billion years old) and a necessity for a lot of beneficial genetic mutation, which a lot of the evidence didn’t support.

I did away with something new though. There has been found to be carbon-14 in coal. Now, according to evolutionary theory, coal was formed millions of years ago from dead plant material in mangrove swamps. However, carbon-14 has a very short half-life (relatively speaking) and only takes about 50,000 years to complete decay to carbon-12. The significance of this is that for carbon-14 to exist in this coal, it has to be less than 50,000 years old. The coal cannot be millions of years old. There you go.

Anyway, after two talks, we headed back to Sarah’s and sat around and chatted until we realised the time. A nice relaxing and slightly educational end to the week.