December 20, 2005
CRYSTAL RIVER -- Most paleontologists look into the mouth of an allosaurus and see a prehistoric eating machine with a jaw full of flesh-tearing teeth.
Peter DeRosa peers into that mouth and sees the hand of God.
Working from a business park about 80 miles north of Tampa, DeRosa and his family are hammering away at two bedrock principles of modern science: evolution and the notion that Earth is about 4 billion years old.
The DeRosas are part of a small but growing band of creationists using dinosaurs -- the icons of an ancient Earth -- to argue that the world is only 6,000 years old.
The DeRosas' tool of choice? The fossilized bones of Ebenezer the allosaurus and other creatures cramming their makeshift laboratory.
"It's very clear in Scripture. God's word is true," said DeRosa, 22. "Everything we've found supports that."
The DeRosas run Creation Expeditions, a ministry that relies on dinosaurs to spread what they say is the infallible word of the Bible. The family operation includes Peter, his brother Mark, sister Leah, and parents Pete and Linda.
The DeRosas have no formal training but have studied dinosaurs and fossils for more than a decade.
They lecture at private schools, churches and anywhere else that will have them. Several times a year, they conduct digs in Florida and out West, serving as guides for others -- usually Christians -- interested in dinosaurs. They charge $500 per person for five-day excavations. They also take in contributions from religious groups and other sponsors.
The DeRosas' digs have produced impressive results. They have uncovered a 22-foot-long allosaurus -- a smaller relative of the T. rex -- and a 15-foot-tall edmontosaurus, a plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur.
The DeRosas and their movement, in essence, are trying to turn science against itself. By digging up fossils and interpreting their finds, some creationists hope to convince others that evolution and a 4-billion-year-old Earth are nonsensical notions unsupported by the data.
They maintain, for example, that they've found organic plant matter buried with fossils indicating the animals died only a few thousand years ago. Some say they've found human footprints next to dinosaur tracks, a claim the vast majority of paleontologists consider preposterous.
Organisms didn't evolve, they say -- they were created by God largely as they appear today.
The vast majority of scientists consider the movement badly misguided, or worse, intellectually dishonest. Creationists, scientists say, aren't doing real science.
They are starting with a conclusion -- that the Bible is 100 percent accurate -- and gathering evidence to support that idea. True science, they say, actively looks for problems with a hypothesis. And over the years, a tremendous amount of research has been conducted specifically to find major flaws in the theories about evolution and the age of Earth. The fundamental principles of both have held up.
"The evidence is overwhelming," said Skip Pierce, the chairman of the biology department at the University of South Florida. "These theories are essentially established fact."
Fairly simple theory
Described most famously by Charles Darwin in 1859, the basics of evolution are fairly simple. The theory holds that all life evolved from earlier, generally more primitive forms.
Organisms survived based on how well-suited they were to their environment. Beneficial traits passed on from parents -- genetic variations in speed, size or eyesight -- gave some offspring an advantage over competitors. Those offspring -- with their unique inherited traits -- stood a better chance of surviving and reproducing.
Darwin suggested that over millions of years those incremental changes and mutations reach a point of no return. At some stage, the organism changes so much, it can no longer breed within the species.
If its inherited differences are adaptive, it can evolve into a new species.
"Its explanatory power is just incredible," said Peter Harries, a USF professor who studies ancient marine animals. "And the data that has been accumulated to support it is enormous."
But creationists remain unconvinced.
Where scientists see an elegant, powerful theory, the DeRosas see an effort to deny the existence of God. The theories of evolution and an ancient Earth are riddled with problems, they say.
If erosion has been a force for millions of years, they ask, how is it that fossils are still being found just below the surface? After millions of years of erosion, Mark DeRosa said, those fossils should have disappeared long ago.
"At that rate," he said, "there shouldn't even be any continents left."
They point to a lack of so-called transitional fossils -- organisms that clearly demonstrate one species turning into another. They reject any suggestion that inorganic material can be transformed into even the simplest life forms.
And citing the second law of thermodynamics, they insist that all systems tend to break down. Organisms, they say, devolve, not evolve, into more-complicated creatures.
Longstanding criticisms
Most scientists have heard the criticisms and, by now, are almost weary of addressing them. They say there are many transitional fossils and plenty of instances of organisms growing more complicated. A seed, for example, becomes a flower.
As for how inorganic material first turned into life, they freely admit they don't yet know. Research, however, has demonstrated that amino acids, the building blocks of life, can be produced from nonliving material.
Early this year, young-Earth creationists jumped on an announcement that researchers had found soft tissue in the thigh bone of a T. rex. This proved, they said, the animal could not have been 68 million years old because soft tissue wouldn't last that long.
But the scientist who discovered the tissue said it shows no such thing.
Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist with North Carolina State University, said it's unclear whether the material is original tissue. Even if it is, Schweitzer said, that doesn't mean the leg bone is only 8,000 years old. Far more likely, she said in an e-mail to the Sentinel, is that scientists don't yet fully understand how tissue is preserved.
"It is very, very obvious that the earth and the solar system are very, very old -- billions of years," she wrote. "It is far more likely we are wrong about how molecules degrade, than that we are wrong about the age of dinosaurs."
Meanwhile, the DeRosas push ahead with their ministry, chipping at evolution as patiently as they chip stone off the skull of Ezekiel, the duck-billed dinosaur they uncovered out West.
There is no chance that any scientific find will sway their views, they say, because the Bible's account of history is complete and unerring. They even reject as "lightweight Christianity" the newer notion of intelligent design, which holds that some higher power created Earth and the universe but does not necessarily give credit to the Christian God.
"We know who the creator is," said Pete DeRosa, brushing dust off the massive skull. "It's the God of the Bible. It's Jesus Christ. It's our Lord.
"We won't find anything contrary to that."
That line of thinking doesn't really bother biologist Skip Pierce. He just doesn't think faith should pass for science.
"If it makes you happy, fine," Pierce said. "But calling it science is just misleading."
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