Bismarck Tribune

By KAREN HERZOGBy KAREN HERZOG

Arlo Moehlenpah gets two questions from almost any audience that hears him speak about creation versus evolution:

How do you explain radiometric dating, what most people call "carbon dating," of fossils and rocks, which holds the earth to be ancient?

And what about dinosaurs?

Moehlenpah, who holds a doctor of science degree in chemical engineering from Washington University and is the author of "Creation vs. Evolution: Scientific and Religious Considerations," developed responses to those and other questions as part of courses he has taught at Christian Life College, Stockton, Calif., and in six years of speaking at more than 150 churches in the United States, Chile, Brazil and France.

Moehlenpah is in Bismarck as part of First United Pentecostal Church's "Stand Your Ground"conference. He is scheduled to give two more presentations, today and Wednesday at 7 p.m., at the church, 26th Street and Avenue A, Bismarck.

Moehlenpah has what he describes as an aptitude for science; he also, as a sophomore in college, "received the baptism of the Holy Ghost, which changed my whole pursuit from wanting to make money to helping people," he said.

And those questions:

First of all, the theory of evolution is not a science, Moehlenpah said.

"Science is observable, subject to experimentation, repeatable and verifiable," he said. "Evolution isn't a science; it doesn't fit one of the four categories."

Life evolving from chance is as mathematically improbable, he said, as an explosion in a print shop producing a dictionary, a tornado passing through a junkyard producing a Boeing 707 and a thousand blind men simultaneously solving a Rubik's Cube puzzle.

Moehlenpah calls it "common sense" that a sculpture needs a sculptor, a painting an artist and a building an architect. "Everything that is designed has a designer," he said.

The so-called "intelligent design"movement holds that life is so irreduceably complex that it couldn't have come about by chance, he said.

But beyond mere "intelligent design," he said - "Iclaim I know who that designer was, and Ieven know his name."

Moehlenpah finds flaws with radiometric dating's assumptions, he said. As far as dinosaurs go, "I do believe they existed," he said.

He also believes that biblical descriptions of creatures - behemoth, leviathan, dragon - might refer to them, and that they may exist as smaller, shorter-lived creatures today, as crocodiles and other reptiles.

Darwin's theory of evolution appeals to some people, he said, because they don't want to believe in a creator, "because a creator can set some rules, can say 'thou shalt not.'"

Over the years, people have tried to develop theoretical bridges between evolution and faith, he said.

"A person cannot believe both evolution and creation," he said. "The next step after evolution is atheism."

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