Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
This morning, my wife read to me an interesting article about the western underground orchid and thought, an underground orchid. And so, for those of you who are into plants and botany and want to look it up, it's rhizanthella gardneri, so it's spelt rhizanthella, and then G-A-R-D-N-E-R-I. And this orchid is possibly the only plant in the world that flowers underground and is pollinated by termites and ants.
It was discovered in 1928, and it is on the critically endangered species of Australian plants. And I thought this was really fascinating, a plant that flowers underground, and you think of the evolutionary pathway for something like that. To me, again, it's just a simple example that is best explained by creation.
But then I thought, well, it's just here as far as it's only found just in Western Australia. And I know my wife and I lived in Tasmania for a while. And of course, down there they have a number of tree species.
One of the most famous ones would be the Huon pine, that only grow just in this particular region. And then, of course, we find in Australia, we have certain marsupials, some of which are only found in Australia. And it's always been something that I've been interested in and questioning that, why certain species are only found in certain areas.
And to me, of course, creation is the best explanation, because how could the evolutionary pathways you've got to have, as we know, massive amounts of genetic code, would have to rise totally independently in all these different parts of the world? To me, it's just very clear and obvious that evolution cannot explain this sort of distribution. But it's interesting also, I was reading an article that one of the arguments that non believers attempt to use to discredit creationists is to challenge them. Well, look, how did all these different species, after Noah's flood, after the ark landed on Mount Ararat, there in the Middle east, near western Turkey somewhere, how did the animals get all over the world from that particular place? Would kangaroos have hopped all the way from Mount Ararat across to Australia? And if so, why aren't there fossils found of kangaroos in the Middle east or India or Africa or somewhere like that? And of course, these are all legitimate questions.
We don't obviously find fossils of these sort of animals. But one of the other interesting things to bear in mind is also, too, we know that there are lots of lines roamed around in the Middle East in David's time, for example, and there are symbols on the walls of Babylon. Well, you don't find fossil lines so much in the Middle East either.
So we'll have to have a look at some of these things. So one of the advantages is that when you think of the Bible, the Bible is a book that has been written by persons who were under the influence of the Holy Spirit. They were under the influence of God to write and record the things that they have recorded.
And the believers in God recognised that these particular men were inspired by God and their writings were preserved. And many of them recorded prophecies that God gave them that were fulfilled. And that, of course, was one of the indications that these people were inspired by God.
The prophecies came true, of course, in the Bible we have a record of creation, and really, creation fits the origin of life just so well. The explanation of the genetic code, the code reader, the ribosomes and so forth. But what about the flood? And people often attack and say, well, Noah's flood is ridiculous.
Matter of fact, I read an article where quieter, a very famous and very popular young movie actress, who'd obviously been brought up as a Christian when she was a young girl, but scoffed at the idea of Noah's Ark and all the animals being in the ark, and she, you know, it's just a children's story sort of thing. But really, that makes a lot of sense, too, in terms of the geology that we see around the world. I mean, the world, the surface of the earth, I've mentioned several times, is covered by sedimentary rocks, rocks that are laid down underwater.
Large proportion, nearly 75%, something like that. From memory, a very large percentage of the land surface of the earth is covered by rocks that are laid down underwater. And there's so much that fits that.
But what about the animals? If all the animals that were to survive all the marsupials and so forth, and reptiles and this sort of thing were on the ark, how did they get to all the different places? So this article actually looked at this, and the author of the article was Paul F. Taylor, and I'm pretty sure he contributed to the book in six days as well. So remember, you can look that book up.
That's where 50 scientists explained why they chose to believe in creation. So just Google creation.com and in the search engine search for in six days, or just do a search on Paul F.
Taylor and his article will come up. Now, not the article on how the animals spread, but you'll read one of his articles there. I'm pretty sure he's in that book.
But we see that if we look at the Genesis account of the flood, then supernaturally, God took the animals into the ark. They came, two of each kind, a male and a female, except for certain animals that were deemed clean and could be used for food. There were seven of those animals came in to the ark, and it's very important that the animals came to Noah. Noah didn't have to go out and catch them. So it was a supernatural event. And then the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat.
And it's interesting, it talks about that. So, obviously, it landed in the region of Ararat, and therefore, it's unlikely that the ark actually rested at a point on the top of a mountain, as it's often illustrated in children's picture books. But it obviously came to rest among an area where, obviously, mountains had begun to be pushed up in that particular area.
And it came to rest there in an area is believed to be in western Turkey area, according to one of the articles I was reading. So when we need to look at the recolonization of the world and this sort of thing, the author used an example of dogs, and he said, well, consider the fact. Say you have two dogs come off the ark now within a relatively short time, he points out, there would be a lot of dogs.
For example, if each time the dogs mated, they produced six puppies, and then those six puppies matured. So you had, say, three pairs, three males and three females, and they mated, and each of those pairs of puppies produced six more puppies. Then, very quickly, after a third generation, you've now got 18 dogs.
And so once you go and they all mate and produce, then you have lots and lots of dogs. And, of course, what they're saying is that these dogs, of course, were carrying a lot of genetic information. And so as the different dogs mated with the different genes, you began to have dogs.
Some of the dogs were tall, some were small, some had long hair, some had short hair, just like in a family where you have children. Some children can have a dark complexion, some a light complexion. Some can be tall, some can be short, all from the same parents.
And so we can see that very quickly, animals could have bred and separated out and then moved, migrated to various parts of the earth. And again, people argue all, then why don't we find these fossils? Now, remember that the fossils were formed when animals were destroyed that were largely living before the flood. The flood buried those animals.
Now, obviously, there would have been some catastrophic events since the flood, but when you think about, there are vast amounts of bison roaming in North America and this sort of thing, we don't find a whole lot of bison fossils around. So the fossils were formed generally under very catastrophic conditions, some major catastrophe. And so that required very rapid burial.
And, of course, that was the event that occurred during the flood. So after the flood, we wouldn't expect fossilisation as these different animals then migrated. And we know that quite rapidly, species can recolonize an area.
And classic examples are the island of Certsi, which was formed by a volcanic eruption off the coast of Iceland in 1963. And, of course, also the eruption of a volcano on the island of Krakatoa in the Pacific in 1883. And so both these cases, you ended up with a big molten blob above sea level.
But within a few years, there were hundreds of species on these islands. And, of course, not all species became permanently established, but after a while, there were many species on these islands. So we can see the animals can spread very quickly, particularly animals that could fly a lot of seeds, and that there would have been massive, vast floating logs and clumps of debris that would have carried seed from plants.
We don't know what the oceans were like. There was still, obviously, a lot of upheaval and turmoil during the flood, and a lot of material was spread in different places. Some would have been destroyed and buried, and others flourished where it went.
It's interesting, for example, here in Australia, there an article that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States back in August 2. Four. That's volume 101, pages 12,387 onward, where it looked at some of these issues.
Well, actually, that particular article was on the origin of the Australian dingo, and it was looking at studying the mitochondrial DNA and so forth. And they suggested that all Australian dingoes are descended from a single female domesticated dog from southeast Asia. So that's as people are trying to put the examples up.
So we see that the whole idea of the animals spreading out all over the world makes a lot of sense. In fact, evolutionists have exactly the same problem. They have the same problem as if they claim that species evolve.
Well, then, how did they move all over the world? And, of course, one of the things they talk about is that there was a migration from Asia to America over a land bridge at the Bering Straits. And, of course, for these sort of land bridges to have existed, they need to assume that sea levels were much lower in the post flood period. And so the biblical ice age model also explains that very well.
And we can talk about age, ice ages, perhaps talk about that a little bit more detail. But I guess one of the important things is that when we look at the explanation of how animals moved over the world, if God brought the animals together, God could obviously promote the migration of the animals as well. And we can see that if the flood completely obliterated the surface of the earth, and then God starting afresh, then we need to remember that the flood was a supernatural event.
And we also need to remember that the evolutionists have the same problem of trying to explain animals moving all over the world. But the flood model, and indeed the population of animals and species after the flood, if the flood was only about four and a half thousand years ago, the earth's population models, all these fit that particular timeline. They don't fit millions of years timelines.
And so I think the flood model fits very well. But I think one of the most convincing evidences for the flood model is the flood model really is the best explanation for ice ages. Now, when we look at ice ages, and we all know about glaciers, which are large masses of ice that accumulate from snow over the year, but also moraine.
So these are the boulders and debris that have been carried either pushed in front of a glacier, one of these big slabs of ice that are moving slowly, moving down, say, a mountainside, or else, as the ice moves along, melts, sometimes it can drop boulders. And these can also be carried along on the edge of the ice and scrape the rock. So we have a lot of evidence for glaciers moving in the past.
And one of the best examples of the flood, really, is that the flood explains ice ages, because this is a major problem for secular geologists to explain. Why would the earth have cooled down? And the classic example, of course, is the Melankovich mechanism. And this is an astronomical model that postulates that the regular repeating ice ages are caused by the changing orbital geometry of the earth.
And so secular glaciologists believe that over the past, say, 800,000 years, there were allegedly about eight ice ages lasting about 100,000 years each. But when we look at this, there's quite a bit of work that has been done looking at the changes in the radiation from outer space that would be necessary to produce that snowball effect on earth, produce an ice age. And when we look at the changes in radiation that actually occur with the changes in the geometry of the earth's orbit, the changes aren't big enough to produce the massive changes in temperature.
You see, the secular science have great difficulty in explaining any recent ice ages based on the rates we observe today. And one of the reasons is what would trigger or sustain the northern summer in the United States to cool by around 30 degrees centigrade or 50 degrees fahrenheit, and the hence produce a huge increase in snow. And then what would persist? Dramatic climate change that then would persist for thousands of years.
And it's interesting that secular science themselves, really, at this stage, still don't have any explanation. And one of the reasons is that once you had produced this large amount of frozen material, why would it melt? Because the reflection of sunlight on a white surface would reflect the heat so effectively that glaciated earth would actually never melt. And so they're stuck with this problem that if they want to produce an ice age, what would then cause it to melt? And so they have to postulate that somehow temperatures got heaps warmer than they do today.
So you got a freeze fry sort of hypothesis scenario. But, you know, the flood model actually is a brilliant explanation to explain the ice age. And we know that during the flood, there were major changes in the surface of the earth's crust.
There would have been a lot of volcanic eruptions. And matter of fact, we have the evidence for that. We have the evidence pretty well all around the world, and particularly here in Australia, of extinct volcanoes that were very active in the past, but they're not active now, and they haven't been active for a long period of time.
And this is all around the world. We see the remnants of volcanic plugs and dikes and sills where lava flowed out in different directions in the past. We know the Bible talks about the fountains of the deep opening up and so forth.
And we have this picture of this massive, catastrophic event. And so this volcanic, all this hot lava, heating water, would have produced a lot of steam, a lot of evaporation. There would have been also the volcanic dust.
We know, for example, from the Krakatoa explosion and from other explosions in Greenland and so forth, that you've got this massive amount of dust, and so all these activities with the hot water would evaporate, and then you have the cooling effect, which actually provides just the ideal conditions to produce with the higher evaporation and everything to produce that moisture, and yet, at the same time, then produce cool ocean surfaces. And it's interesting that most of the evaporation would have occurred at mid and high latitudes, close to the developing ice sheets, dropping moisture on the cold continent. And a meteorologist, Michael Ord, wrote that this is a recipe for powerful and continuous snowstorms that can be estimated using basic meteorology.
And therefore, and he points out that to cause an ice age, rare conditions are required. Warm oceans for high precipitation, cool summers for the lack of melting snow, and then it can accumulate in an ice seat. So here we have the volcanic heating of the water and then, of course, we have the dust clouds in the air.
And it provides this scenario to actually produce this massive amount of ice at that particular time. It's interesting that Michael Ord writes, he's written a book called the Frozen Record. Actually, he's written a number of articles, actually, if you google MJ Ord and his books, he's a meteorologist and he said that he writes that numerical stimulations of precipitation in the polar regions, using conventional climate models with the warm sea surface temperatures, have demonstrated that ice sheets thousands of feet thick could have accumulated in less than 500 years.
And that's in an article that's found in the Institute for Creation Research, published in 2001 by Larry Vardaman. Vardiman and its climates before and after genesis, flood and numerical model and their implications, of course, as the volcanic material then subside after this massive amounts of ice had been formed, of course, and the gradual warming, then we see the ice age they estimate would have lasted about 500 years after the flood. It would have reached the global maximum of thickness, and they estimate that it would have reached an average ice depth of about 700 metres, or 2300ft in the northern hemisphere, and about 4000ft, or just over 1200 metres in the Antarctica area.
So when we look at the whole ice age thing and the fact, two, we have the woolly mammoths that have been found, and it's one of the things, too, that fits the dust theory associated at that particular time. Volcanic dust theory is that some of these animals, like the woolly mammoths in Alaska and Siberia, have been found resting above the flood deposit. So they weren't wiped out by the flood.
And some of them have been in areas where there was severe dust storms that produced dust stripped, and they've found carcasses that show evidence of suffocation in a standing position and some have been entombed in that position. So we find this fascinating evidence. But it all, again points to the flood model, because the flood model provides the heat energy for the evaporation, for the volcanic activity, provides the dust for the cooling, it provides just the ideal conditions for massive precipitation of snow to produce these very thick ice sheets and creates the scenarios that we see and observe.
And the bottom line, again, is that the secular glaciologists have no explanation for a cause for ice ages, let alone multiple ice ages. Because as I pointed out earlier, when we look at the attempt to explain it in terms of radiation from outer space, Milankovich mechanism, it just doesn't fit the physics. The energy involved just don't match the energy required to produce those changes necessary.
So to me this is just powerful evidence that fits. We have the ice age, we have the different levels in different sea levels, that fits the land bridges, that fits the migration of the animals. To me, the flood model just fits what we actually observe today so well.
And I think if we have the flood, we need to remember that, yes, one time God did wipe out the world and God is coming again. He knows the world. As the world gets, wickedness is increasing in the world and God will once again rescue his people from this world and it will be destroyed by fire the next time.
So this is a message we need to get out to everyone and it's there in the Bible. The facts are in the Bible and the Bible account fits the science that we observe today. You've been listening to Faith and Science.
And remember, if you want to relisten to these programmes, just google 3abnAustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You have been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
