Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:16] Just recently I was at a wedding reception and happened to be sitting next to a pastor, a church pastor and we were talking on a number of topics and one of the things that came up was the discussion of the time that australian indigenous people, which are sort of referred to as First Nation people have been in Australia. And of course, just recently there have been a number of articles on the local newses or on the australian news that the indigenous people been here for 65,000 years. And that's been, if you look on the different sort of museum websites and so forth, there seems to be a growing acceptance of this age.
[00:01:20] The pastor said to me, he said, well, as a scientist and as a christian, how old do you think the earth is? And I said, oh, well, I think the Bible is pretty clear that it's about 6000 years old.
[00:01:36] And so he said, well, what are the reasons? Why do you think that it is that young? And of course, this is very different to the age that is given for the indigenous people being in Australia for 65,000 years. So it's more than ten times the biblical age. And then of course, if we look at geological ages for the earth, we're looking at billions of years, four and a half billion years, something like this. So as a scientist, how old is the earth?
[00:02:19] Is my date or belief that the earth is only about 6000 years old credible from a scientific point of view. So one of the things that we need to look at when we look at the question how old is the earth? Is that we actually don't know. There's actually no proven scientific evidence for how old the earth is. Now, perhaps a number of scientists listening to this program might think, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that's not true. But when we actually look at how we measure and date things, we need to understand that these methods really haven't been proved and there's massive inconsistencies. For example, just recently I was reading a paper that I had seen before but I saw that it came up on one of the searches that I was doing. So I had a look at it again and this was where some volcanic rock was discovered up in Queensland that had wood trapped in it inside. So when they'd cut the pieces of lava open, they actually found some fossilized wood inside. So their fossilized wood was dated and of course the lava was dated. So the carbon 14 dating of the wood that was trapped in the lava that dated at 37,000 years. According to carbon 14 dating, the conventional carbon 14 dating, when the rock, the basaltic rock was dated using potassium argon dating. It came out at 47 million years. So here we have the timber inside dates at 37,000 years, the rock that encased it, and they should really be the same age, dated at 47 million years.
[00:04:24] Now, we have this massive inconsistency here, and this is typical across the radiometric and the different types of dating methods that we use, whether we're looking at the ice core data, whether we're looking at the tree ring data, all these sort of things. If we take the same rock and we do isochron radiometric dating on that rock, and the isochron method is at the moment the most accurate method that we've got. But we use, say, different isotope systems, maybe up to four different types we might be able to use on some particular rocks.
[00:05:13] We always get vastly different ages depending on the method that we're using to determine the age of those rocks.
[00:05:26] When I say always, I guess on the ones, the results that I've seen, they've always been different.
[00:05:32] So we really don't have a reference material that we can use. And when we look at how are the ages determined for, for example, the time that indigenous cultures have been in Australia. And this is quite a hot potato at the moment because this has political implications around the claims for land rights and these sort of things. So there's a lot of political implications here in terms of the science. But when we look at it, some of these ages have been, they've dated, for example, the shells in middens, and they might get an age of, say, 50,000 years dating the carbon in the shells that are in the middens that they can see. But we need to remember that when we date the soft tissues in dinosaurs, we typically get younger ages than that. We typically get ages in the range, the values that I've seen, 2020, 5000 years to 35,000 years in these sort of range. And so then again, this puts the age of the dinosaurs back more recent, and it would imply humans at the same time as dinosaurs. Now, of course, we believe that from the Bible point of view, as being in the pre flag condition, but we need to understand this at the same time. If we date the coal, and a number of studies have been done dating coal, then again, we tend to get this same range of values in the order of about 25 to 40,000 years. When we do carbon 14 dating and come 14 dating is really quite accurate in many ways because we can precisely measure the half life.
[00:07:39] It's 5728 years. I think pretty well, just going from memory, but it's a relatively short half life. So the fact that we're finding carbon 14 in these specimens means, again, that in terms of absolute terms, got to be less than 100,000 years old, because after that time period, we wouldn't have any detectable carbon 14. But, of course, as I've mentioned before in many of the talks, that carbon 14 levels depend on the cosmic ray flux, because carbon 14 is formed by the interaction of high energy particles produced by cosmic rays striking the earth there when they hit nitrogen nuclei and so forth.
[00:08:27] And we know, again, that the cosmic ray flux will vary. It'll vary with solar activity, but also varies with the strength of the earth's magnetic field. And there's a lot of evidence that the earth magnetic field in the past has been quite different, and it would appear much stronger at times in the past as well. And again, this would greatly reduce the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere, which, again, would artificially inflate the ages, give us much longer ages. So we're living in. Well, when we try to date these things, we're working in areas that are highly variable. Now, the ages for 65,000 years are generally done through optically stimulated luminescence dating of sand and this sort of thing. And so when they uncover some of these ancient footprints and this sort of thing, they date the sand, or they date the sand, where they've found, for example, some sort of primitive implement, and they use this optically simulated pumilescence dating. But again, this is based on a whole lot of assumptions. So how this technique works is that elements like sand, when they can detect the last time or the time in the past when that sand was last exposed to strong sunlight, which affects electron structure and so forth, or certain emissions. And so essentially what they're saying is that they can estimate the age at which that particular sand was last exposed to bright sunlight on the surface. So this is how they date the different layers. But again, when you look at the method, how these are calibrated and so forth, there's a huge amount of assumptions that are, again, involved there. And I think one of the issues that we have with all these different dating methods is that there's a huge number of inconsistencies between the methods themselves and the different methods. And they're all underpinned with assumptions that are very difficult to validate. And we can't easily validate them or cross validate them for these very long ages because we don't have standard reference material that we know directly the age, all these things.
[00:11:13] Age is estimated by some sort of implication or estimation based again on unproved assumptions, unverified rates over time and this sort of thing, and often assuming that there haven't been any changes in the past compared to the present or uniformitarianism. But of course, we know there's been cataclysmic events in the past.
[00:11:42] And I noticed an article that just recently, evidence for a young world by physicist Russell Humphries. And I knew that he'd done quite a bit of work calculating the estimated magnetic fields in the different planets and on Earth, looking at a model for generating the magnetic fields, because it's very difficult to explain the existence of the magnetic fields in certain planets. And his theories based on a young earth or a young universe creation model have actually, it seems, proved to be actually quite accurate. So I was quite interested in an article that he put together a few years ago looking at the evidence for a young world. And so just going through these, he has some evidence for a young universe as well. And he points out that he believes in a biblical age around about 6000 years. And he thinks that there's powerful evidence that the really long ages that evolutionary models and the attempted models to explain the universe require just don't stack up.
[00:13:19] It's interesting, just before doing this broadcast, I had a phone call where a lady rang me and started chatting about evidence for the big Bang theory. And of course, what a lot of people don't realize is, again, that the model of the Big Bang theory that physicists are taught or we're teaching in schools and universities at the present time, again, the evidence doesn't stack up for the big Bang theory. And there was, I think I've mentioned it before, it's a very interesting article. It was published, I think it was in one of the, in Scientific American back in 2016, where top astrophysicists from Harvard and Princeton pointed out that there's just major inconsistencies in the theory. We adjust the mass. So one part of the theory works and all predict what we observe, but then all the other parts don't work and we still don't have the evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy and this sort of thing. And yet they're fundamental requirements for the big Bang theory. And again, when they published that paper was published, there were a whole lot of top scientists subjected to it. But as the authors pointed out later on, that you can raise all these objections and oh no, you can't say that, that the big Bang theory is unscientific and that there's no evidence for it. But when these scientists that claim that don't put up the evidence to support the big Bang theory, it still isn't there. And they point out a very important fact that you don't arrive at truth by the vote. But this is what is tending to happen, particularly in terms of dating the ages of things today. If there's a political implication, we're arriving at these ages not on the basis so much of proven scientific evidence. Sure, we can do optically stimulated luminescence on the sand and we can get a reading, but that reading may not be a true reading. We haven't actually validated the method and established that for those particular ages, it's a true method, it's a true answer. And this is the important point to try and understand with these issues. And rather, we have a whole lot of data pointing to a very young earth. And so looking at some of these things that Russell Humphries points out, he points out, galaxies wind themselves up too fast. And so he says, the stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disk of stars instead of its present spiral shape. And yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. So that's a major problem. And if people are interested in this, you know, one of the references for this is the book Physics of the galaxy and interstellar matter by Scheffler and Elassa. Pages 401 to 413 and pages 352 to 353.
[00:17:20] And so he says that the astrophysicists call this the winding up dilemma. And they've known about this for about 50 years. They've devised many theories to try to explain it, but each one has failed.
[00:17:37] And the same winding up dilemma also applies to other galaxies. So we got major problems with the ages of the galaxies.
[00:17:49] And of course, one of the attempts to resolve the dilemma has been complex theory called density waves.
[00:17:56] But the theory, again, this latest theory has run into problems, and it's been actually called into question now by the Hubble Space telescope discovery of a very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the Whirlpool galaxy, M 51.
[00:18:17] And if anybody's interested in reading up on that, the reference for that is an article published in Nature in July 1993 by Zarisky and Al, and also an article in the December issue of sky and Telescope, 1993, page ten.
[00:18:44] The other thing, too, is another reason for the young universe, for example, is that comets disintegrate too quickly. And so, according to the stellar evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, that is, about 5 billion years, four and a half billion years. And yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. And so many comets have typical ages of really only 10,000 years. So this is another major problem. Of course, one of the ways they try to get around this is that assuming that comets come from some unobserved spherical ought cloud well beyond the orbit of Pluto.
[00:19:39] But improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system as another explanation. Another improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets enough to account for hundreds of comets observed. But so far, none of these assumptions have been substantiated by either observations or realistic calculations. So, again, there's a major problem with the age of comet.
[00:20:12] There's not enough mud. When we come to the earth, he points out, there's not enough mud on the seafloor. Each year, water and winds erode around about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it into the ocean. So when we look at the mud on the hard lava rock of the ocean, four, the average depth of the mud over the whole ocean, including the continental shelf, is less than 400 meters.
[00:20:45] However, the sea force slides slowly a few centimeters a year beneath the continents, taking some of the sediments with it. So, according to secular scientific literature, that process only removes about 1 billion tons per year.
[00:21:02] So the other 24 billion tons should be accumulating. And so at that rate, erosion, the present amount of sediment would deposit in less than 12 million years. But yet we say that the continents are about 3 billion years old. So, again, there's this major inconsistency. So these are things we can measure now, the rates of which things are happening now, the rates at which we see the comets, the rates at which sediment is accumulating on the ocean floor, and this sort of thing, it all points to vastly different ages than we calculate by the radiometric dating.
[00:21:44] Again, when we're looking at the sodium in the sea, again, this points to a much younger age for the oceans than again we would estimate from radiometric dating.
[00:22:02] One of the points that he makes, of course, is the earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast. So he says the total energy stored in the earth's magnetic field has steadily decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1000 years, according to published data.
[00:22:23] And the reference for that is the earth's magnetic field was a text published in 1983 by R. T. Merrill and MW Mahini, pages 101 to 106.
[00:22:42] He points out that evolutionary theories explain this rapid decrease, as well as how the earth could have maintained its magnetic field over billions of years, are very inadequate.
[00:22:59] And so he actually proposed a theory. As he said, there's a much better creationist theory that's based on physics and the rapid reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the genesis flood, which was a massive occur, massive upheaval of the surface of the earth occurred at that time. And the theory, he says, that has been put forward matches paleomagnetic data, historic and present data. And that was an article that was published.
[00:23:45] New evidence for extraordinary rapid change in geomagnetic field during a reversal that was published in the science journal Nature in 1995.
[00:23:56] Issue 374, pages 687 to 692 on the 20 April 995 by RS Co.
[00:24:07] Another point that I think is very, very powerful evidence for rapid deposition of the strata, and I've mentioned this before, too, is that many strata are too tightly bent.
[00:24:22] In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin type shapes. And the conventional Geologic timescale says that these formations were deeply buried and solidified over hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolitified when the bending occurred. And so this implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after the deposition.
[00:25:02] So a lot of work has been done in that, and that can be seen all around the world. He points out another example. Strong geologic evidence exists that the cambrian Saswatch sandstone, formed an alleged 500 million years ago of the ute passfault of west Colorado Springs, was still unsolitified when it was extruded up to the surface during the uplift of the Rocky Mountains, which allegedly occurred 70 million years ago.
[00:25:32] And so what he says is it's very unlikely that sandstone hadn't solidified during the supposed 430,000,000 years that it was underground. And so, he said, instead, it's likely that the event that was 500 million years and 70 million years in actual fact, occurred at the same time or less than a few hundred years apart.
[00:25:59] And again, he points out, the fossil radioactivity shortens geological ages and he talks about the radiohalos that have been found, that is around certain radioactive materials that again, points to very young ages for these crystals.
[00:26:28] Also, and one of the interesting ones that I thought they point out was that there's not enough stone age skeletons.
[00:26:36] Evolutionary anthropologists say that the stone age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Nathandril and Co. Magnum men was roughly constant between one and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artifacts and by this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies. And if the evolutionary timescales collect buried bones should be able to last for longer than 100,000 years. So many of the supposed 4 billion Stone age skeletons should still be around, and they're artifacts, but only a few thousand have been found. And again, the same agriculture is just too recent. Why wasn't agriculture developed much earlier on? So we can see there are a lot of arguments that the timescales that are used to promote these long ages, the methods of measuring these ages are just terribly inconsistent and don't fit with the observed data that we measure today. Instead, I think when we look at the historical data that we have and the histories, recorded histories, they all fit a post flood young earth biblical model.
[00:27:53] You've been listening to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton. If you want to re listen to these programs and check the references, remember you can google threeab in australia.org au and click on the radio and listen button.
[00:28:15] Have a great day.
[00:28:19] You.
[00:28:34] You've been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio.
