Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Recently, I was reading a chapter in a book and the author had written, there's no event in Bible that has caused as much controversy and endured as much attack as God's judgement on sinful mankind by way of Noah's flood. And went on. This treatment of Noah's flood is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather aims to demonstrate the plausibility of the episode and the evidence for its historicity.
And so the chapter went on to provide scientific evidence and archaeological evidence for the flood. Those interests in more details, just quoting from Dr. Gary Baxter's book, Defence of the Bible, the newly revised third edition.
But it is true, really, that even some christians sort of try to sort of rationalise the flood, that it was just some sort of little local event. But one of the things that made me think about this topic for today was the current news released about the discovery in 2021 of a very large itchiothor, which is a type of marine creature. I believe it's related to the dolphin type family.
But this was a very large marine predator. And it was very interesting that what happened was a contractor was cleaning a water reservoir in Rutland, England. And if you think of Rutland is a county in England, if you look at a map of England, and on the eastern side, on the right hand side, you've got this large round section that sticks out into the English Channel area there.
Well, Rutland is roughly in that area, but about a third of the way across, back inland across England, and so it's fairway inland. And so this contractor was cleaning out this water reservoir there and noticed these fossil vertebra, huge vertebra, protruding in the mud at the bottom. And Lurty thought, wow, I found something here, because what happened was the reservoir, during the cleaning process, was drained out.
And so in the mud at the bottom, they found this creature in the clay there and it was huge. It was 33 foot long, or ten metres long, and a very well preserved specimen. And it made me think that what a marine creature that I understand lived in saltwater doing way over there in England.
And I've also talked about, for example, the discovery of a pod of whale remains on the mountains in Peru. And all these things, to me, clearly point that the earth as we know it was very different in the past. And I've also talked about, for example, similar marine plesios, or creatures, very large ones, of those who found just recently in Queensland.
And I've been to some of those sites. And what impresses me is, for example, when they're finding some of these remains and some of the other giant creatures that they're finding now in Queensland, the bones and the fossilised versions of the bones are quite on the surface, protruding out of the ground. And when you think about how these creatures have to be buried and buried rapidly, otherwise they're eaten by scavengers and broken down.
So to get a very large, complete skeleton like this one that they've just found at Rutland, intact, there obviously points to rapid burial. And I think that this is one of the examples we've talked about before, as I've talked about the issues for the flood. But when you think about it, what would we really expect to see today as a result of a worldwide flood? What would we expect to see? Well, we'd expect that most of the world would be covered by sedimentary layers.
That's like rock that's laid down underwater and that's exactly what we find. And if you look up scientific articles on this and geology textbooks and even Wikipedia, they point out that the surface of the earth is covered by this thin layer of sedimentary rock, and it is, it's just this thin layer compared to the, the other rest of the thickness of the crust. The other thing is that the Noah's flood describes this very catastrophic event that occurred on the earth.
We would expect then, as all these rocks ground up and moved and turned to sand and so forth, and then distributed, we'd expect that as things settled after the flood and this massive turbulence that buried forests and so forth, we'd expect stratificational layering of the rocks, we would expect that if forests and everything are going to be buried, because would have been a lush, very lush vegetation. And we know that when they're compressed under heat and press the carbon, the carbohydrate material, cellulose and everything is just converted back down to carbon, or essentially coal. And that's again what we find, massive coal seams around the world.
And also, along with this catastrophe, just to bury the fossils, we would expect rapid and jumbled up burying of animals and vegetation as a consequence, and many preserved fossils, and that's exactly what we find. And often we had floods, and I mentioned this before too, a few years ago in Queensland. Massive floods that covered the area of Queensland, I think the size of the state of New South Wales.
But it didn't lead to the massive fossilisation of kangaroos and wombats and goannas and possums and these sort of things, or even crocodiles, because it was a slow event. Now, of course, when they've dated. When the geologists in the past have dated these rocks, they've assumed very slow processes of just a few millimetres of sediment a year.
And then over millions of years, when they've come to layers of sedimentary layers that a kilometre deep and this sort of thing have done the calculation, they said, well, they must be millions of years old. That's how it was originally dated. But it doesn't add up.
You can't bury these giant animals by sedimentation processes that are a few millimetres a year. It's got to be massive, catastrophic event to bury a giant animal the size, for example, of this ichiosaur that they've discovered. And the other thing, of course, is they found this one in the dam, but they also find lots of other ones buried in the cliffs and limestone strata and so forth that are found around England and in other places in the.
You know, it just fits this picture again of this event that was a massive flood, but it's not that long ago. It's not that long ago. When we look at the erosion rates and everything, England would have eroded away.
If it was truly 180,000,000 years old, as it says the fossil was, it would have eroded away many, many times. And one of the fascinating things is, of course, when we see this strata now, I mentioned this before, that some sharper contain very sharp, almost hairpin bends. And there are lots of photographs of these in geology books.
I've seen them myself when I've been in the Kimberley areas, for example, in Australia, and even areas not far away from where I live in New South Wales, Australia, I've seen examples of these really tightly bend and sharply bed strata. And evolutionary geologists are really hard pushed to explain this phenomena because, again, they assume that the formations took place over thousands, perhaps even millions of years, when the strata will add down one level at a time. And they try to argue that high temperatures and pressures must have been involved.
However, it's interesting that many of the strata contain fossils and chills which would negate the high temperature profile. And secondly, once these rocks are laid down and set and hard, you can't then just go and bend them. They're going to crack.
The only way these layers, that my understanding is the only way these layers, on the basis of the knowledge that we have to date, could have occurred is when those layers were still wet and soft and supple, because to bend them like a hairpin, bend without cracking. And there's, as I said, lots of examples like this and the forces required to do this, if they were set rock hard would be huge, but they're even going to be large when they're soft and wet. But it fits the example of the flood situation and the massive events that were occurring during the flood and perhaps just after the flood, while the rocks were still soft, before they had actually set really hard under pressure and so forth.
This was a time when the mountains were pushed up. And of course, it explains why we find the fossils up on the mountains. And again, when you look at the descriptions in the Bible where it talks about all the fountains of the great deep broke up and the windows of heaven were open.
Genesis, chapter seven, verse eleven. And in Genesis eight, two, the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped also, and the rain from heaven was restrained. Talking about the end of the flood, we see that scripture is describing an event that occurred, that there's no other human record of a similar event occurring.
And the examples that we have there fit this very rapid process. I think one of the points, examples that again raises question over this dating that occurs is the example of in the Grand Canyon, the Coconino Sandstone sits on top of the hermit shale, but yet there's meant to be a time gap of 6 million years between the two layers. But when you look at the two layers, and I've seen photographs of this, and it's been pointed out, the bottom layer, the hermit shale, is virtually dead flat.
It's smooth. And then sitting on top of that is the Coconino sandstone, which was supposed to come 6 million years later. Yet there's no evidence of erosion that would have occurred over the 6 million years.
And it's a perfect as if the two layers will lay down one after the other on top of one another. And of course, when you look through the textbooks, you can see the photographs of trees, the remains of fossils of trees that have been buried vertically, and they go through many, many layers. For example, Dr. Derek Ager, who was emeritus professor of geology at the University of College of Swansea, put out a book and did quite a bit of work and argues for a catastrophic past, although he's not a creationist, a young earth person, but he gave the estimate that the age of the strata that these trees pass through is 100,000 years. And he concludes that this is ridiculous. And so again, we need to understand that there are major, major problems with the dating systems that geologists apply to dating these rocks and putting these massive ages.
And we have the evidence before our eyes, as Professor Ager points out, that you can't have trees, fossils of trees passing through strata that are then dated 100,000 years, that strata must have all been laid down at the time that those trees were buried. And they happened to be floating in the water, floating as they'd become saturated, different amounts vertically. And of course, they saw that happened after the eruption at mounts and helens, at violent eruption, when lower trees were damaged, washed into the lake there, and they were floating vertically in the lake.
And it's interesting, often the tree stems have been ripped out and separated from their root systems and the foliage bits of the stems of the trees. So we have all this powerful evidence for the description of the flood that is there. And of course, we know, too, as I just mentioned, that rapid burial is the key to finding or to the preservation of the fossils that are preserved.
And one of the interesting arguments that has been come to light reasonably recently, there was a new scientist article in November 26, 2011, page 20, page twelve, actually. And what happened was that a scientist, Alicia Cutler, and her colleagues at Brigham Young University in Utah, did some experiments to see what would happen to dinosaurs if they drowned. Because one of the things is that a lot of the dinosaur remains that have been found, that dinosaurs where they've got a complete skeleton, and a lot of the skeleton materials are broken up.
So when the animals died and the subsequent action, they were broken up and mixed up with other animals and creatures. But we're the ones that are intact. They have a particular pose.
And that pose is the head is thrown back, as if the head is thrown right back, and the hind limbs are bent up, and the the. And the tail is extended. And this dead dino posture is actually called opistotonus, op isthotonus.
And it's been found that it's a result of muscle spasms caused by suffocation. And it's interesting that what they did was these scientists, they placed pluck chickens on a bed of sand for three months to see if desiccation would lead to muscle contractions that pulled the neck upwards. But the chickens just decayed without contorting.
But when chickens were placed into cool, fresh water, their necks arched and their heads were thrown back within seconds. And that was reported to the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology at a conference in Las Vegas back in 2011. So here, this provided some quite strong evidence today that these dinosaurs had drowned.
And again, this fits the position in the flood. And so to drown something like a dinosaur, you have to have a massive event. And the other thing is, one of the very important things to point out is that the evidence for the flood is worldwide, very much worldwide.
We find the coal beds. One site that are found in the United States are found in Russia, across on the other side of the world, and in Australia. It's amazing.
And the same with the limestone deposits, all these sort of things, they're worldwide. The phenomena, the types of layers are worldwide. And that's why the geologic column applies worldwide.
If it was a lot of little local floods, we would expect different sequences in different areas at different times. But this is worldwide. The geological column applies worldwide.
It's amazing too, the fossil graveyards that are huge, as I've just mentioned earlier, when an animal dies, decay, they don't become fossils. We live on a road where there's a lot of kangaroos in our area and occasionally get hit by a car and they're knocked onto the side of the road. It's not long before they've decayed away and even the bones are removed by other scavenging animals and so forth.
And so there's very quickly very few remains, and this occurs in a week or two. It's very rapid, the decay, once the animal dies. But it's interesting, for example, in Agate Springs, Nebraska, in the United States, there's a fossil graveyard that contains an estimated 9000 animals buried in alluvial deposits. And they've got remains of camels, three toed horses, rhinoceros, giant wild boars, birds, plants, trees, seashell and fish are all mixed up together. And of course, Nebraska is quite a long way inland.
And know I find it fascinating finding the fossils of rhinoceroses and so forth that we normally associate with Africa. So this gives us an idea of the extent of these animals. Another one is in the Gobi desert.
I remember learning about the Gobi desert in primary school, I think it was, or early high school. And of course, this is an area in central Asia. It's one of the driest places on earth, and yet they find a lot of fossils there, apparently from this, Gary Baxter reports in his chapter on this that there's been 25 theropod dinosaurs and 200 skulls of mammals, along with other dinosaurs, lizards and small mammals have been unearthed in very good states of preservation.
In another area in South Carolina, back in the United States, there's the Ashley beds. There's about 100 square kilometres. The fossils there were first reported back in 1881 by Major Edgard Willis.
And this area again contains fossils of both land and sea animals. Dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, whales, sharks, rhinoceroses, sheep, horses, macedodons, mammoths, porpoises, elephants, deer, pigs and dogs. Again, there's an article on that on genesispark.org. It's amazing. Another one is the Monticella lairs mines. This mine is in Artun in France.
And the fossils are well preserved, very well preserved, and a mixture of creatures. Some are salt waters, some are freshwater, some are land based. There's hundreds of thousands of marine creatures were buried with amphibians, reptiles and insects.
Spiders, scorpions, millipedes were found as well. And it's interesting, if you're interested in looking this article, it was reported in Scientific American back in September 1988, and pages 70 to 76. And it's interesting that the palaeontologists involved were bewildered by the mixture and variety of animal fossils present.
And so such large deposits of mixed animals and aquatic fossils spread throughout the world, in my view, provide a clear demonstration that there was a massive, large scale, violent, rapid burial. And that's exactly what we would be expected as a result of the worldwide flood. And of course, we find the fossils up on Mount Everest and this sort of thing.
And azeva marine fossils found Mount Everest in the Makatana area in Nepal, which is 4000 metres above sea level. They find, for example, big ammonite fossils, and so there's big curls, seashell sort of creatures. And so the evidence is there so much.
But again, it reminds us too that that was a time of judgement. And of course, the Bible reminds us that there is going to be another time of judgement when God returns to earth to see what us humans have done with that. And of course, we read about that in different prophecies in the Bible and particularly in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
There's so much evidence really for the Bible from science. And remember too, as you're listening to these faith and science programmes, that there are a lot of programmes there that have been pre recorded. You can find them on the Internet if you google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word, remember the AU on the end and click on the radio button, then click on the listen and you'll see the Faith and Science programme. Click on it. And as you scroll down, you can keep scrolling down.
And there are lots and lots of presentations there that I've given over several years now that cover a whole range of topics.
And I'd like to encourage you, if you're seeing, to go there and if you have interest in any areas and more evidence that science, the evidence that we can gain from scientific observations today, support the Bible. There are so many topics and the different headings explain what the topic is on there's a massive amount of evidence out there and I'd like to encourage you to search out the programme there.
And when you find something interesting, send a link to friends. Send a link to young people that may be dealing with these issues at school. Help your friends to become aware that there's massive evidence out there to support the historicity and the scientific accuracy of the Bible.
You've been listening to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
