Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. Dr. John Ashton. Was reading an article just recently that was a report on an old, a news item that came out in May 2021. It was a report that Darwin's arch, which is a large rock formation off the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador, had collapsed. So the arch had collapsed due to erosion activities.
[00:00:48] And I thought, this really reminded me that there is so much geological evidence for a young earth when we look at the geological structures that we see.
[00:01:06] Yet there's this convention that still tries to interpret these ages in terms of millions and hundreds of millions of years. Thousands of millions of years, of course, for the age of the continent. But when we look at things like erosion rates, we can see that these processes are very rapid.
[00:01:31] The continents can't be that old. And so, looking at some of the data, again, there's this overwhelming evidence that is pointing to a very young age.
[00:01:47] One of the scientists that I got to meet when I was visiting the United States is Dr. Ariel Roth, and he had been the editor of the journal origins, and he's a very active scientist and published quite a bit in the area of evidence supporting a young earth and creation. And one of the things that he wrote in one of his articles, actually, he contributed to a book I edited called in six days why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation.
[00:02:31] And the book actually is available free on the Internet. If you go to the website creation.com and did a search on in six days preface, then the preface will come up and down the side, you'll see a list of scientist names. And if you click on the names, you will get the actual articles written by those scientists. And as well, there's the biographical data for those scientists where they earned their doctorate, their areas of research, specialization, and so forth. And then the article goes on as to why they choose to believe in a literal creation in six days only thousands of years ago. And of course, Dr. Roth contributed to one of those articles. And if you want to read the full article, of course, just click on his name there. But he points out that one of the most significant differences between creation and evolution is this question of the length of time life has been on earth. And obviously, evolution proposes that life has been evolving for thousands of millions of years, whereas creation suggests that God created the various forms of life in six days a few thousand years ago. And the creation model for the great flood described in the Bible also provides an explanation, for example, for the fossil layers, while evolution suggests that these fossil layers were formed over eons of time.
[00:04:21] But you know, when we actually look at the data. And Dr. Off points out that it's of interest that the recent trends in geological thinking are favoring very rapid changes, which is called catastrophism, to provide interpretations that in actual fact fit well with the biblical flood. It's just that the geologists tried to spread them out again over hundreds of millions of years. So we have this evidence of a global water based catastrophe.
[00:04:56] But the geologists want to explain this by several major global catastrophes that occurred spaced millions and hundreds of millions of years, in some cases apart, but with major problems, again with the geology there, when we look at erosion rates, as illustrated by the collapse of Darwin's arch in recent time, and of course, we see this erosion and shorelines being erased quite rapidly. I've seen massive erosion in my lifetime in our local area near the east coast of Australia.
[00:05:43] Now, unfortunately, geology isn't moving towards a biblical interpretation, but in our schools and universities. But the only reason they're not doing this is that they have to continue to deny the evidence for a relatively recent global flood.
[00:06:07] They just have to deny the evidence in their face and continue to look for alternative long age explanations. But the problem is that the evidence is continuing to accumulate that these long age explanations just don't fit the data. They don't work. What works are long age things. For example, visitors to the Grand Canyon, usually, and I've been to the Grand Canyon a couple of times in the United States, hear the usual geological interpretation involving millions of years, and you see this on the signs and so forth and in the booklets that are sold in the shops. And we're told that the horizontal formation at the bottom, which is to Pete Sandstone, was deposited about 550,000,000 years ago. And the Kylab limestone, which forms on the rim, is about 250,000,000 years old. So there's hundreds of millions of years involved here. Now, the Grand Canyon strata extend over about 400 into the eastern part of Arizona, and these layers are about 1 mile or 1600 meters lower in elevation. And so it's supposed that the uplift of the Grand Canyon area occurred about 70 million years ago. So that is hundreds of millions of years after the sediments were deposited. So one would have expected that over hundreds of millions of years, there would have been plenty of time for the sediments to cement into hard rock. And yet the evidence indicates that the sediments were soft and unconsolidated when they bent. Because instead of fracturing like the basement rocks that are under those sedimentary layers did, the sedimentary layers that were obviously laid down underwater over these hundreds of millions of years, supposedly the entire layer is bent and it actually thinned as a bent. So I'm saying is that those layers between the topite standstone and the kibab limestone, which spans a time supposedly of about 300 million years, to explain this structure, they were uplifted. And in the uplifting process, they were bent. They had to be bent from the layers that are still down low, up to up high. And they're bent at quite an angle in parts getting up close to 40 degrees, just roughly. Looking at the stratigraphy of the area, the diagrams that you see, and so to bend all these layers at that time without any fracturing is powerful evidence that those layers were soft when that happened.
[00:09:14] And so you can't have this 300 million period, the whole lot, just bent like that without fracturing.
[00:09:26] Because again, when we look at, you see, when we carry out an investigation, when we look scientifically at this and we, for example, look at the sand grains, they don't show any evidence of the material was brittle or rock hard because none of the grains are elongated.
[00:09:44] Neither has the minerals cementing the grains together been broken and recrystallized. So evidence, just when we look at the structure that we can look under the microscope, the whole evidence points that that whole 1200 meters, 4000 foot thickness of strata must have still been plastic when it was uplifted. In other words, it couldn't have been millions of years old. Those millions of years old of geologic time are just imaginary, but the geologists have to imagine it to fit in with their evolutionary timescales. But this plastic deformation of the grand Canyon strata dramatically demonstrates the reality of catastrophic global flood occurring over a short period of time, that those layers were laid down.
[00:10:40] Now, the other thing that we often observe, again when we look at these layers is that supposedly laid down over hundreds of meters of years are the fossils. Now, there are many layers in which we find fossil animals. Now, most animals require plants for food in order to survive. And of course, some of the animals are eaten by other animals. But basically, there's got to be plant eating animals there to start the chain. And yet, in several of our important geological formations where we find good evidence for animals, we find little or no evidence for plants necessary to support the animals.
[00:11:34] The fossil assemblages that we find are incomplete ecosystems. And so we have to ask the questions, how did animals survive? For the me interviews postulated for the deposition of these formations without adequate food.
[00:11:51] And instead, what we find in the fossil layers represents what we would expect from massive catastrophic event and the different materials being sorted under these flood rapid transport conditions.
[00:12:10] And a number of these sort of inconsistencies with the long age model have been reported in the literature.
[00:12:19] For example, in the Gobi desert of Mongolia, there are protoceratops, dinosaur bearing layers where there's hardly any plants, in the Coconino sandstone, again, that runs through the Grand Canyon in the southwestern US United States. It has many hundreds of good animal trackways, but no plants, no plant fossils.
[00:12:51] Another one is the Morrison Formation, again, where they find a lot of the dinosaurs. And again, the Morrison Formation runs through the Grand Canyon as well. It's a massive formation that runs from about New Mexico to Canada.
[00:13:06] And so as well as not having any sort of slow, uniform explanation for this, I mean, this huge formation had to be formed under a massive catastrophic global condition, which is exactly what is described in the Bible. That was a global flood. And this important dinosaur bearing formation, identifiable plant fossils are practically nonexistent. So we find lots of dinosaur fossils, but very, very few plant fossils. And so what did these giant animals eat as they evolved over millions of years? Because it's estimated that the large plant eating dinosaur would eat three and a half tons of vegetarian of vegetation in one day.
[00:13:57] And so again, a far more plausible scenario for these deposits is that they represent layers laid down rapidly during the biblical flood, with the waters sorting the organisms into various deposits and plants forming some of our huge coal deposits.
[00:14:18] So when we look at coal, coal is again powerful evidence for not only young earth and short scales, but also of course for the global flood. Now we find coal deposits all around the world, and some of them are huge in their thickness, hundreds of meters thick in some places. And these layers are around now in the area where I live on the east coast of Australia. Here, not far away, is the port of Newcastle. I think I was reading somewhere just in one of the newspapers recently that it's the largest coal exporting port in the world. Well anyway, we certainly export a lot of coal from here, from the nearby Hunter valley. And there's lots of number of very large coal deposits, particularly down the east coast of Australia. One of those is found in the La Trobe valley in Victoria.
[00:15:24] And the coal seams there occur within thick layers of clay, sandstone and basaltic lava.
[00:15:35] And together these form about a 700 meters, or just over 2000 foot sequence of rocks known as the Latrobe Valley coal measures.
[00:15:46] And these of course lie in a deep depression called a basin. It's roughly about 300 km long and the same wide, much of the basin actually lies under the ocean off the southern coast of Australia there. And the offshore coal measures I've read in one report are supposed to be almost 5 km thick.
[00:16:19] This is huge. And so these coal consists of a massive, very fine plant debris.
[00:16:29] Quite a bit of it is partly decomposed plant remains.
[00:16:34] And so this enables scientists to identify what the plant material was. But what's the explanation for the accumulation of these huge deposits? So the standard theory that we learn, of course, is the swamp theory, and that is that the plants grew in a swamp, they fell over, rotted, and there were layers just deposited, and they grew up, fell over in a swamp, rotted down, fell over, rotted down, and so forth. And I can remember learning that when I did geology at university.
[00:17:17] But there's powerful evidence that these brown coal deposits did not accumulate in a peat bog or a swamp. So, first of all, there's no sign of soil under the coal, as you'd expect if the vegetation grew and accumulated in a swamp. Instead, these coal deposits rest on a thick layer of clay, and there's a knife edge contact between the clay and the coal. And this Kalin clay is so pure that it could be used for high class pottery. But also there's no roots penetrating the clay. So you've got this clear layer where the plants start. There's no roots down in there. So again, it doesn't fit this long age uniformitarian model. It fits a flood model.
[00:18:12] The other interesting thing is there's a number of distinct ash layers that run horizontally through the coal. And we would expect if the vegetation had grown in a swamp.
[00:18:24] And a geologist I know, Taz Walker, wrote a report of this. And in the report he talks about that if the vegetation had grown in a swamp, these distinct ash layers would not be there. After each volcanic eruption. The volcanic texture of the ash would have been obliterated when the swamp plants recolonized the ash and turned it into soil. But not only is there no soil, but the vegetation found in coal is actually not the kind that grows in swamps today.
[00:18:59] So, again, when we drill down and we look at the evidence for these models and scenarios that we're being taught in school and university, and we look at the data we can actually measure now, today, it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit the theory.
[00:19:19] For example, in the La Trobe valley, the vegetation found in the coal is very similar that found in mountain rainforests.
[00:19:32] And one researcher suggested that the best match for the mix of vegetation in the coal occurs in the mountains, on the western half of Papua New guinea, at a height of between 1000 202,200 meters, or between 4700ft against sea level. And similar vegetation is also found in the mountains of Australia, Malaysia, New Caledonia and New Zealand. So they're not the kind of plants that grow in a swamp or floodplain.
[00:20:10] In fact, most of the types of plants that have been found in the Latrobe coal measures still grow today.
[00:20:18] These plants, most of them actually came from conifers, a group including pines, Bruce's and cedars. It's interesting that most of these plants too, are actually not swamp tolerant.
[00:20:38] The Norfolk pine is one of the plants of the arakugaria type of species, and it tends to grow in sandy soils and tolerate sea spray.
[00:20:59] But it does not like waterlogged conditions.
[00:21:03] Another one of Agatha's, which they're carry pine, as an example. These are big trees, and again, carry pines don't grow in swaps. They prefer well drained, deep moist soils.
[00:21:21] Another one is the hewan pine, and again, it needs good grainage. Another one is the celery top pine, another tasmanian type tree that prefers cool, moist, well composted soil, but it does not grow in waterlog conditions.
[00:21:41] Another pine is the brown pine that prefers well drained soils, not swamp conditions.
[00:21:49] Out of some of the nonconified plants that have been identified, casseronas are one that's commonly found. But there's only two of the 30 species of casseronas that tolerate poor drainage, and so most prefer light, well drain soils.
[00:22:10] Of course, the she oak will grow in swampy conditions, but it's only, as I said, one of the 30 or so species. Banksia. Again, only two of the 47 species of Banksia tolerate swampy conditions, and most prefer well drained conditions.
[00:22:31] The native New Zealand red beach northophagus fusca.
[00:22:40] Again, it is a cool, temperate rainforest tree found at high altitudes. They don't grow in swamps, so it's clear that, overall, the plants identified in this massive brown coal deposit are not the sort that grow in the wet, swampy conditions. Most are drought tolerant and grow at high altitudes. But the fact that they're all found dumped in this massive deposit is very consistent with a huge water based catastrophe that swept vegetation from these non swampy areas into a basin that had formed. So when we look at it, overall, coal deposits are very strong evidence for a catastrophic global flood.
[00:23:34] It's also interesting that experiments have been done with conditions mimicking natural forces that can produce coal in actually very short periods of time. In some of these experiments, brown coal has been formed in weeks and black coal in months.
[00:24:01] And similarly, experiments have been done to show that oil can form quickly, too. Opals can form quickly.
[00:24:13] Again, there's also evidence for rapid petrification of wood and these sort of things in experiments that have been done. So when we look at these things in other areas, again, we point to these evidence of these deposition, of these layers occurring rapidly.
[00:24:37] We find, for example, in some layers, there can be evidence of raindrop marks, ripple marks, and animal tracks at the boundaries of layers, and yet there's no erosion in between the layers. And so again, this all points to rapid deposition of these layers. There's examples in some places of layers that are completely missing in terms of geologic time.
[00:25:08] There's also examples of wormholes, root growth, and these sort of things across these paraconformities that, again, point to the fact that they couldn't have been laid down. The boundaries don't represent layers laid down over long periods of time. There are very short periods of time. In fact, the almost complete lack of clearly recognizable soil layers anywhere in the geological column is a major problem.
[00:25:41] And, of course, when you look at the literature, geologists do claim to have found lots of fossil soils, or they call palosols, but often these, in most cases, actually, these are very different to the soils today, lacking the features that characterize soil horizons and the features that are used to classify different soils. In fact, everyone that's been investigated thoroughly proves to lack their characteristics of proper soil. And yet we would think if deep time, these long millions of years ages were correct, with hundreds of millions of years of abundant life on earth, there should have been ample opportunities many times over for soil formation.
[00:26:29] Of course, there's many other examples of rapid formations of geological structures, such as canyon, such as Providence Canyon in southwest Georgia, the Birmingham canyon near Walla Walla, Washington, the lower Lutewit Canyon near Mount St. Helens. And so these are canyons where we've actually observed them forming very rapidly, not over millions of years. And, of course, another classic example of rapid formation is the island certsi, which formed as a volcanic eruption. And we saw the gradual development of plants and animals or insects and so forth on the island was observed since it was erupted last century. So we have, everywhere we look, clear geological evidence for a young earth. The old earth age model really doesn't fit the evidence when we grill down and scrutinize the evidence. So we have powerful evidence for the historical record in the Bible as the account of our origins, how we came to be here. You've been listening to faith and science. Remember, if you want to relisten to these programs, just Google three abnastralia.org au and click on the listen button. And remember to tell your friends about these programs and the many other great programs that are available on three ABN radio I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:19] You, you've been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio.
