Jim Mason, a Lakefield, Ont. area retired nuclear physicist, who lectures on the evangelical church circuit as a young earth creationist with Creation Ministries International (CMI)-Canada, will be in Thompson again the weekend of May 2-3.
Mason, who has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from McMaster University, will speak at several church venues, including at a brunch at Pastor Ted Goossen’s Christian Centre Fellowship at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 2, asking the question, “Does the Bible Conflict with Science?” Mason spoke on the same topic when he was there last April 14, 2012.
Mason grew up in a mainline Protestant church but left Christianity behind after taking Geology 101 in the first year of his bachelor of science engineering physics undergraduate program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. He resumed his faith journey in mainstream Protestantism in his late 30s mainly because he and his wife, Rosemary, thought it would be good for their two young girls.
He was almost 40 when he attended an evangelical church in response to the invitation of a friend and neighbour and subsequently became a born-again Christian.
Interestingly, even as an an evangelical at first, Mason continued to believe in the theory of evolution,including the evolutionary account of origins and the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution, which posits that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity, the theory’s proponents argue, with modern measurements placing this moment at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which they thus consider the age of the universe.
It wasn’t until he attended a weekend seminar conducted by young earth creation scientists that Mason came to believe that science and scripture were completely coherent and soon became concerned about how evolution is used as a means to avoid confronting the claims of Jesus, he said.
Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection. Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence.
Mason’s field of expertise, according to a July 2011 interview he did for Creation Ministries International with Jonathan Sarfati, an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist, who is a fellow CMI scientist and co-editor of the quarterly Creation magazine, which can be found online at http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist, includes radiometric dating techniques, which measure the ratio of the radioactive parent element to the stable daughter element in, say, a sample of rock today, inferring the age through calculations that typically give wildly erroneous ages, Mason argues, saying carbon dating, properly understood, supports young earth creationism.
After completing his PhD studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., Mason spent a year teaching in the faculty of the physics department at the University of Windsor in southwestern Ontario.
He then spent the next 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems. The first 20 years he spent developing passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.
Mason argues for a literal interpretation of the 50-chapter Book of Genesis, saying the first 11 chapters are “foundational.” According to Mason, the so-called “long ages” and Big Bang theory, which explains the origin and evolution of the universe using the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological concordance model, estimating the age of the universe as being 12 to 14 billion years old, cannot be reconciled with the Bible as “Adam and Eve disappear, original sin disappears, death through sin disappears, the need for a Saviour disappears and indeed, in the end, salvation and eternal life disappear.”
While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975. If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.
In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.
William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.
Creation Ministries International (CMI) is a non-profit young earth creationist organization of autonomous Christian apologetics ministries that promote a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament in the Bible. It got its start in 1977 when the Creation Science Association (CSA) was organized in Adelaide, Australia by Dr. Carl Wieland, a medical doctor.
Wieland, an atheist in university, graduated from Adelaide University in South Australia with qualifications in medicine and surgery, but stopped practicing medicine in 1986 after he was involved in a serious traffic accident, which resulted in him spending 5½ months in hospital. He has been managing director of Creation Ministries International (Australia) since 1987, when it was called Creation Science Foundation and then Answers in Genesis. He was the founding editor of Creation magazine in 1978.
The autonomous ministries are now located in Australia, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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