Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm doctor John Ashton. A few days ago, a friend was chatting to me and said that their child came home from school, actually a christian school, and told them that they'd learned today that meteorite had struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
And of course, this was taught in the science class as a scientific fact. And I think this is an example of how a lot of unproven information is being taught to our children as scientific facts. And of course, they then grow up and become teachers and teach their children.
So let's have a look at this claim in more detail, because we have a lot of evidence that, in actual fact, that statement is not correct. So, according to the theory, a meteorite hit the Mexico, the yucatan peninsula, in fact, about 65 million years ago, according to secular time, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. It's called the chic sulab impact idea, and of course it's very popular, but being popular doesn't mean that it's necessarily true or correct, and this is an important point.
So the idea was that there was either a stony astronoid or comet that was somewhere between ten to 80 kilometres in diameter. So quite a large object. The theory says that whatever this impactor was, it threw out about 60 times its mass in pulverised rock into the atmosphere.
The resulting dust blocked out the sun. Causal and global cooling effect that wiped out 50% of all life, including the dinosaurs. Now, this theory was actually proposed back in around 1980 by a geologist, Walter Alvarez.
And his dad was actually had won the Nobel Prize in physics and helped really publicise the theory, because he was such a well established scientist. So what the geologist Walter Elvis had found was that a discovery of what he proposed was a worldwide layer of clay with a high iridium compound. Now, iridium is an element that seems to be associated with meteorite impacts.
And so this was the idea that this iridium layer that is found in the clay, this element that's analysed and found in this clay layer, was the indicator that that impact had actually occurred. And it fitted this supposedly crater there, or the shape that you see in the yucatan peninsula there. So this thin layer is thought to be found in the rock layer that's characteristic of what they call the KTG, or formerly the KT Cretaceous tertiary boundary.
And this seems, in terms of the geological fossil record, to coincide with the extinction of the dinosaurs. In other words, we find the dinosaur remains in fossils below this layer, but not above. But there's major problems with this statement.
It was an interesting theory at the time. And, of course, when we think of the 65 million year scenario, we've got to remember that this is in terms of the secular timescale. They ignore the fact that, for example, from our geographical research and measurements of erosion rates, the continents would erode away in less than 10 million years.
The fact that we've discovered dinosaur soft tissue remains, including DNA, which is a very fragile molecule, though we found this. So all these things point to hang on. The dinosaur remains can't be 65 million years old, nowhere near that.
But nonetheless, this is because they're sort of in separate baskets, they seem to be just not connected. But the other thing is, too, that this iridium layer is nothing actually really well defined. In fact, there are over currently about 100 known different iridium anomalies that have been discovered.
And so we've got a bit of circular reasoning going on here, because how is the particular boundary for the dinosaur extinction defined? Well, it's defined as any rock layer with dinosaur remains or tracks in it must be below the boundary. So, as you can see, it's just based on definitions. So one of the ironies of this claim is that at the actual impact site itself and in some of the ejecta that's been analysed, that they believe from this impact, there's hardly any iridium.
So there's not much iridium around the actual side of the impact, and we'd expect to find a little bit. So there are quite a lot of problems with this theory, and these problems are actually recognised by secular science. As a matter of fact, there was a secular book, so it's not a christian book published, called the great Dinosaur Extinction controversy.
It was by Charles Officer and Jake Page. It was published by Addison Wersley in New York in 1996, and it was actually reviewed in the top science journal Science just after it came out. And they actually exposed the way the media explanation for the dinosaur extinction actually became a new dogma that outstripped the evidence.
So, as we're pointing out, secular scientists say, well, hang on, let's have a look at this. We've got major problems with this theory, and yet what we find is now this theory's being taught in science classes, in our. As if it's a fact.
And this is representative. A lot of science facts, particularly with regard to the history of our planet, the origin of life and so forth, that are being taught to our children as fact being actual fact. They're not backed by strong evidence.
So one of the reasons that they proposed was that when you look at the geological record, it spread over quite a period of time. And this is a long time in terms of the secular record. But if we take the biblical model, the Noah's flood model, then it quite well, because these sedimentary deposits were obviously formed by Noah's flood.
And I think this points again to a very important point today we have so many different ideas being proposed. You know, one person thinks one thing, another person thinks another. There's massive amounts of disagreement in terms of, you know, politics, sociology, moral values, all these sort of things.
We need an anchor, we need a guide. The Bible, which was inspired by the creator himself, who created us, who created this amazing universe material system, actually gave us instructions, it gives us directions. And if we apply the principles of the Bible, the knowledge that is preserved in the Bible, it gives us a compass, it gives us direction, it gives us a basis on which we can find our decisions and found our decisions.
And we're finding more and more as we're delving into the evidence where there's all these controversies in time, dates and ages and this sort of thing, time and time again, the Bible's being vindicated. When we look at these secular theories that are trying to disprove the Bible or discredit the Bible all the time, after a while they themselves become disproved. And so that's just one of the reasons.
The other thing is a very interesting thing. Light sensitive species survive. What about all the plants and everything that depend on light? If there was this massive darkness period that wiped out the dinosaurs, this light sensitivity, the fact that light sensitive animals survived, is a massive problem.
Also, the extinctions don't correspond with the crater dates as well. And also modern volcanic eruptions don't cause global extinction patterns, even if they cause a temperature drop there. So again, when we look at the break down, this proposed theory, it actually doesn't fit.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, this iridium enrichments supposedly is the key proof of this meteorite impact. As I mentioned, it's not clearly defined. A scientist, Michael Ord, did quite a lot of research looking at this particular evidence.
And wise says, yeah, we've got a lot of evidence that the largest iridium anomalies are caused by meteorite striking. This would have occurred also during the flood. And this makes a lot of sense because the iridium deposits are in a k layer deposited by water.
And so again, we find this powerful evidence that fits the flood model. And there would have been volcanic eruptions at that time, there would have been meteor impacts at that time that would have produced these iridium. It's interesting, some data has come out as well.
Drill calls on the Chicago crater on the yucatan peninsula, yucatan peninsula in southeast Mexico, that actually don't support the idea that it's actually even an impact crater. So, as we can see, as more and more research is being done, this is secular research out there. All the secular theories for the extinction of the dinosaurs face numerous problems.
For example, if an asteroid hit the earth, leading to a nuclear winter, how did the photosynthesis dependent plants survive? Why did delicate bees and moths, or even sensitive amphibians such as frogs and salamanders survive? And if volcanic activity and toxic gases fueled the earth after the extinction event, such as with the volcanic or carbon dioxide theories for dinosaur extinction, then why did birds survive? Because birds have a unique, very efficient lung design that makes them very more vulnerable to toxic gases. Hence canaries in coal mines. Also, let's go back.
The detection of soft tissue and DNA in fragile dinosaur fossils fits the young ages, not the millions of years. And it's interesting that one of the other things that fascinates me is we look at the chinese calendar sort of thing that we, a few years ago, we had the chinese year of the dragon. It's intriguing that the fact that the eleven of the twelve animals in the Chinese New Year list are the ones that are alive and well today, the only one that seems to be missing is the dragon.
So the animals are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pigeous. So here we say they're all real animals. So again, we have the biblical account of animals that were obviously like dinosaurs.
We've got the chinese records of giant dragon type creatures. We've got the stories of, you know, St. George and the dragon and these sort of things.
And so the flood model, with a few surviving that were later wiped out, just like we don't have, you know, lions and bears running around Palestine today, and the megafauna in Australia and so forth, have been wiped out over time. This is an explanation for the dinosaurs as well, not 65 million years ago by a meteorite impact. And so we need to remember that a lot of the science that's being taught to our children, particularly the conflicts in the Bible, isn't based on actual sound scientific evidence.
There are theories that have been put up by people, but they're not back. The evidence that is strongly supported continues to support the biblical account of how we came to be here. So I would like to encourage everyone, keep reading your Bible, because it is the source of wisdom, not only for life on earth here today, but also tells us about our loving creator God that wants us to have an eternal relationship with him and that he will be coming again, putting an end to evil, and that we will be made alive with him at that time when he recreates a new earth.
And there's so much evidence for that too. Remember, if you've been enjoying this programme, that if you google three ABN australia.org dot au and click on the radio button, you can look up these program's past episodes and other interesting programmes in the television as well.
And remember to mention these sites and these programmes on your social media pages as well. I'm Doctor John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
