I'm spending my Saturday night hanging out on the ground floor of a nondescript office building in Don Mills. The Canadian Christian College is the venue of choice for the Toronto stop of the Boomerang Tour, a cross-country event featuring Australian geologist and creationist, Tas Walker.

A mixture of working-class Christians, Bible scholars, and young Bible-campers shuffle around the lecture hall waiting for the talk to begin. They are here so Walker can equip them with some hard, geological "facts" they can use to disarm evolutionists who think their literal belief in a 6,000-old Earth is weird.

Before Walker speaks, the CEO of the Canadian chapter of Creation Ministries International (CMI) hits the stage. Richard Fangrad is a practised speaker and immediately makes the audience feel comfortable with their confusion over the prevalence of "evolution talk in the mainstream media."

CMI describes itself as "a group of autonomous ministries in several countries that supports the church in proclaiming the truth of the Bible ... We provide real-world answers to the most-asked questions in the vital area of creation/evolution ..."

Science and religion are not old foes, says Fangrad, and have comfortably lived together for centuries. In fact, the model supported by creationists should be treated as legitimate scientific theory.

"Creationists accept the same science that evolutionists do," he says. "Creationists and evolutionists have the same set of facts. The difference is all about the starting assumptions and the interpretation of those facts."

Considering geologists are trying to describe the creation of the Earth, something no scientist was personally around to witness, he considers Christians lucky.

"We have an advantage!" he tells the rapt audience, "we have the history book of the universe right here! We have an eyewitness account. God the creator was there when the universe was made and He wrote it all in the Holy Bible."

Fangrad describes everything from dinosaur fossils to strata in the Grand Canyon with the care of a devoted naturalist. These scientific phenomena are interpreted as proof for the events in Genesis and proof that traditional models of evolution are wrong.

When Tas Walker hits the stage,he focuses on the geological evidence that supposedly supports creationist belief that the Earth was created on Sunday Oct. 23, 4004 BC, and that this event was soon followed by a global flood that only Noah's family survived in the Ark.

Fresh from the Canadian east coast, Walker bolsters his claim by referring to structures around the Bay of Fundy. He points at strata surrounding a petrified tree trunk.

"This must have happened very quickly," he says. "To preserve trees and fossils like this, you need a grand catastrophe. The only explanation for that is a global flood."

After his talk, Fangrad joins Walker to take questions from the audience.

"What about those big limestone cliffs people say are made up of the shells of dead animals?" asks one. "Great question," says Walker. He answers by describing an increase in ocean temperatures during the flood that led to a vast increase in tiny marine organisms, which died, leaving mountains of limestone.

"What about meteorites?" "Is the Earth's magnetic field evidence for a young Earth?" All are answered with a similar tautological scientific explanation, technical enough to impress the audience, but always twisted to support the assumption that the Bible's version is literally true. After leaving the stage, Fangrad is eager to talk to the audience in more detail. When asked how CMI are faring in Canada, he responds "The CMI Canada chapter is very small. We only have 10 paid staff and a mailing list of around 10,000."

I mention the recent controversy in the United States over the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution in the classroom. "Intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism," explains Fangrad.

"The idea behind intelligent design is the notion that the world around us must have been designed, rather than a product of chance," he says. "It's a good first step, but it won't bring people to Christ."

Creation scientists like Walker cherry-pick certain facts that can be spun into support for the historical account of Genesis. Further, as they admit on their website, "the scientific aspects of creation are important, but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer and Judge."

Walker refuses to believe that his faith in the Bible as unerring truth is any different from a scientist's reliance on current scientific theory. The big difference is that scientific theories change over time.

Creationists often criticize the science of "humanist evolutionists" because theories are constantly being tweaked and sometimes thrown out altogether. Scientists are allowed to change their minds; creationists are not. That's what makes science so powerful.

According to Walker, the antidote to the uncertainty of science is in the Bible. In one of his papers, he writes, "God was there when He created the world. He knows everything, does not tell lies, and does not make mistakes."

Joseph Wilson is a Toronto science teacher with a degree in astronomy.

Credit: Special to the Star