HEADLINE: An evolution revolutionary

BYLINE: Leonard Jackson, Staff Writer

    He is a science teacher who travels around much of the country
lecturing on the biblical view of creation. He disputes
conventional wisdom about evolution. He once was grabbed at the
shoulders by a Russian medical professor who heard him speak in St.
Petersburg.

    He is Dr. G. Thomas Sharp, president and founder of Creation
Truth Foundation, headquartered on Maguire Road in Noble.

      Its purpose, he said, is "to present the biblical view of
origins from a scientific perspective, or in light of what science
knows.

    "We chose 'creation' because we spend 99 percent of our time
dealing with challenges to the biblical view of creation," he said.
"We put 'foundation' in the name, not necessarily to identify it as
an organization, but to identify creation truths as foundational to
biblical reality."

    Sharp does a lot of traveling, speaking to school groups,
churches and Christian organizations generally. His engagements are
arranged through organizations like the Baptist Student Union and
the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Last year, the foundation
presented its program to 75,000 students, teachers and parents, he
said.

    "We travel from coast to coast, principally speaking in the
southern half of the United States from Florida to California.
Occasionally we go north of Missouri but not often."

    With him goes what Sharp calls a "traveling museum"- a trailer
full of dinosaur bones. They are 30 research replicas, the same
kind as one would see at the University of Oklahoma Museum of
Natural History and furnished by some of the same museums, he said.

    Trained as a science educator, he has taught in both private and
public schools since 1984, the last 10 years in the Oklahoma City
area. From 1985 to 1989 he taught at Noble Junior High School,
where he was science chairman for the science department. From 1990
to 1994 he taught biology and earth science at Bridge Creek High
School, including a stint of teaching the history of Western
  civilization to a gifted class of seniors.

    He resigned at Bridge Creek, he said, because the foundation had
grown so much it took all of his time.

    A native of Indiana, Sharp was graduated from Purdue University
in 1964 with a major in social studies and science. He has a master
of science degree from OU and a doctor of philosophy degree in the
field of religion and science from South Florida Seminary. He
started teaching in 1965, spending a year in Indiana before he
moved to Florence, Ala., where he became senior minister at Bible
Christian Church. He also did some teaching in the next 15 years at
nearby Muscle Shoals. He and his family moved to Oklahoma in 1980.

    He calls himself a "biblical creationist," using as his motto a
paraphrase of John 3:12: "Training disciples to trust the Bible's
history for its accuracy so they'll trust the Bible's promise for
their destiny."

    Sharp said most of his understanding about biblical creation
came between 1983 and 1988, when he was doing graduate and
post-graduate studies. He said he has been a believer since age 9
but that he had a "severe problem" with the book of Genesis as a
youth.

    "I just about lost my faith in college but then I read Darwin's
book and decided it didn't have a scientific basis. I began
studying what we really know about science. We know that life comes
from life. No one has seen life come from non-life."

    He said evolutionists assume a constant rate of decay from
uranium 235 to lead 206 for the entirety of the half-life and
that's how they arrive at 4.5 billion years as the age of the earth.

    "But we've only known about radioactivity for a little more than
100 years, so scientific observation of the decay constant is
impossible," he said.

    He places the age of the earth at between 6,000 and 10,000
years, allowing for some gaps in the genealogy in Genesis.

    Sharp said he was the first American professor, in 1995, to
speak at the International Conference of Science, Philosophy and
Religion, held at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna,
near Moscow. His appearance resulted from a lecture he gave in
about 1994 at the First Medical Institute of St. Petersburg.

    "At the conclusion of the lecture a friendly debate arose with
one of the Russian medical professors at this institute," Sharp
said. "He asked how I could possibly believe that all the variety
of living things could be the result of one creative source. I made
the argument on protein synthesis: The formation of protein in a
living system must be developed from 100 percent left-handed amino
acids. In nature, both left-handed and right-handed amino acids can
be formed with equal facility. Stanley Miller in his research
  learned this but didn't say anything about it.

    "Without intelligent guidance (the genetic code), chemistry will
form both left-handed and right-handed amino acids, making life
impossible. To guarantee the formation of only left-handed amino
acids requires a program to force chemistry to do what it normally
would not do."

    Sharp believes that "program" is God's work.

    The Russian medical professor, still wearing his white smock,
came out of the audience in the huge hall and advanced toward Sharp
at the podium.

    "I thought he meant to throw me out, but he grabbed me at the
shoulders, acknowledged that fact and inquired more about biblical
Christianity," Sharp said. "It aroused the interest of many
students, who asked about 'this Creator.'"

    Sharp expressed concern about what he considers the bias
favoring evolution teaching in school textbooks. Last fall he spoke
to 5,000 school teachers and pastors in a training session in The
Philippines on "How To Teach Biblical Creationism Across the
Curriculum."

    He indicated he is accustomed to meeting cynicism and skepticism
about this views. But that hasn't deterred him from proclaiming his
philosophy: "What we really know about science requires an
intelligent design. Life is far too complicated for random chance
to have been its author. The minimum requirements for life require
an intelligent design. The Creation Truth Foundation believes that
designer to be the God of the Bible."

GRAPHIC: Dr. Thomas G. Sharp speaks worldwide on behalf of the Creation
Truth Foundation, which has its headquarters on Maguire Road in Noble. -
STAFF PHOTO BY JACONNA AGUIRRE

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The Evening Post (Wellington), February 5, 2001, Pg. 13

HEADLINE: Ex-Wgtn man's book on evolution popular

BYLINE:  SHAW Bob

    A book written by former Wellingtonian Jonathan Sarfati, which aims to
refute the theory of evolution, has proved popular in Australia and the
United States.

    There are now 250,000 copies of Refuting Evolution in print, some also
being available in England and New Zealand.

      Described as a handbook for students, parent and teachers, it was
first published in the United States and Australia in 1999.

    Dr Sarfati said many books on evolution contrasted religion-creation
opinions with evolution-science facts. "It's important to realise that this
is a misleading contrast. Creationists often appeal to the facts of science
to support their view, and evolutionists often appeal to philosophical
assumptions from outside science."

    Dr Sarfati, whose parents live in Karori, studied mathematics, geology,
physics and chemistry at Victoria University, obtaining a Ph D in physical
chemistry in 1995. He has co-authored technical papers on superconductors
and molecules.

    A top chess player, he represented New Zealand in three Olympiads and
is a former national champion. A Christian since 1984, he was for some
years on the editorial committee of Apologia, the journal of the Wellington
Christian Apologetics Society which he co-founded.

    Dr Sarfati presently works as a research scientist and editorial
consultant in Brisbane for the Creation Science Foundation.

    "The debate between creation and evolution is primarily a dispute
between two world views, with mutually incompatible underlying
assumptions," he said.

    Evolutionists since Darwin predicted that the fossil record would show
many intermediate forms linking one kind of organism to a different kind.
Instead, argued Dr Sarfati, the fossil record showed that animals appeared
abruptly and fully formed, with only a handful of debatable examples of
alleged transitional forms.

    CAPTION:

    MIND PUZZLE - Scientist Dr Jonathan Sarfati - chess is his favourite
pastime.