TO THE READER This book is an outgrowth of a curious reading adventure for more than 25 years. The author has read deeply into just about all sides of a very complex story - the respectable books, texts, and journals; the works of evolutionists and creationists; the uniformitarians and the catastrophists; mythologists, historians, geologists, archaeologists, and astronomers; the hollow earth theorists, the flying saucer fans, the gods-from-outer-space writers, and the proponents of Mu and Atlantis. This reading was not done out of gullibility, but rather to see just what various views and theories rested on. To a remarkable degree, it may now be said, any of the above may use the same facts to bolster any theory. In this book, however, the facts, the clues, the anomalies, are removed from the views and theories woven about them and are here examined in a new light. We want to explore how reported facts, and anomalies as well, fit into belief systems, especially belief in a young, created earth as contrasted with a belief in evolution.

ONCE UPON A TIME Much has been written about origins. This book focuses more on the problem of time as treated by scientists and others. Generally speaking, this is a book about prehistory, those areas of the past in history where written records either do not exist or where they do not furnish as yet clear answers to crucial questions about ancient times. To this definition of prehistory we add those aspects of ancient history where Biblical accounts and other accounts (or modern assumptions) are in serious conflict.

One can't read very much about the past without running headlong into problems of time. Do we live on an ancient earth or on a young earth with an appearance of age? When one sees a fossil tooth or an insect in amber, invariably the first question is, 'How old is it?' The Christian especially, who reads widely, soon comes to agree with Shakespeare: 'The time is out of joint!' I often explain in my lectures that I believe in a young created earth, but that the Bible does not give us enough information to pin down the precise age of the world. Then the hands are raised, and the first question is: 'Yes, but what is your date for the creation of the world?'