Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
You know, I was reading a report that two minutes after midnight on the 14 November 2016, the upper South Island of New Zealand experienced a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. This was the second strongest earthquake in New Zealand since Europeans arrived.
It caused a number of faults that were ruptured and that is abrupt sort of changes in the strata. And the northeastern tip of the South Island actually moved closer to the North Island by about two metres, six and a half feet. There was one fault that moved about 32ft sideways.
And so it's the Kaikōura earthquake, after a town named after the town near one of the faults. The fault is where there's a rapture and a real sharp movement in the rock layers. But it's estimated by, according to the geonet.org New Zealand website, that about somewhere between 80 to 100,000 land slips occurred. And so there were some of the land slips, blocked rivers and so forth. And of course, since that time, some of those slips have been eroded by the rivers flowing over and through them.
And they've actually created quite new landforms. And some of the things is there's some new canyons have been formed that can be used for kayaking, that people kayak down. And one observer who wrote in one of the New Zealand websites about the event said that in the space of just four months after the earthquake, a gorge formed that looked like it had been there for thousands of years, and that was either gouged through limestone on the Clarence river.
And the person noted that the rivers were always changing. But the speed of the transformation after the earthquake was amazing. And he was one of the people working in the rafting industry.
Another rafting operator has quoted as saying, this gorge looks like it could have been here for 1000 years, but was created in four months. The earthquake brought an entire slab of limestone up out of the ground and the river cut through it just like a saw. And this is one of the things that has impressed me when we look at these ages and often we go out and we see signs about things millions of years old and so forth.
What's happened is our education system for decades now has been conditioning us that the surface of the earth is hundreds of millions of years old. And so people tend to look at things and we look at this in our framework, in our mind, that these things took thousands different rock formations, must have taken thousands of years to form and all this sort of thing. Whereas in actual fact, examples like this show that hang on, no, these different canyons and that formed in just a very short period of time, in the case of these ones in New Zealand, just in a few months. And it's very interesting that we see that these changes in the landform can occur very quickly and produce massive changes, very different changes. And again, this just so typifies, again, the sort of mechanisms, but on a much larger scale, that would have occurred during the global flood.
The global flood as described in Genesis, the book of Genesis, because the huge amount of water involved would have produced unimaginable hydraulic and tectonic forces and upheavals. And we know that there was a lot of volcanic activity at that time. Now, I remember seeing a very high profile song singer and actor person who just thought, oh, this whole concept of the global flood and Noah's ark, it's a silly children's story, but there's overwhelming evidence for the global flood.
And one of the important things that fits the Noah's ark scenario is the reality that really secular geologists have no explanation that really fits the data to explain all these massive sedimentary layers over the world and several of the structures that we form, such as these water gaps. That is where a river has cut through a mountain range. Unless we've got this catastrophic event, we can't explain that.
We know, as we look at the geology of the earth, that the surface of the earth is covered with these multiple sedimentary layers all over the earth, a thin layer of sedimentary layers over the top of the earth's crust that have obviously been laid down under very large water movement conditions. And some of these slabs of strata, rivers of strata like the Morrison formation in the US, run from Mexico up to Canada. They're huge areas, so they involved huge water flows that were occurring.
And so the flood was a major codoscosmic event. Now, the other aspect that comes up is a lot of critics of the Bible have said, well, look, the Bible is just a bit of a copy from the Gilmish epic, which was written about 2000 BC or so, and about the time of Abraham and this sort of thing, and that the story or the account that Moses has recorded in Genesis is just a version of that. But when we look at this Gilmash epic, which certainly predates Moses' writing, of Genesis, we see that it's just not scientifically viable, it's mythical for a number of reasons.
Well, it only rained for about six days. There's only rain involved in the description. There's no underground water being released.
And the Bible emphasises, the fountains of the deep were opened up, so it's believed that much more water came from under the earth and was released into the ecosphere than from rain. And of course, the volcanic activity as well. And so the Gilmer Sheffield, you've only got six days of just rain, no fountains of the deep opening up.
And the vessel in which they were saved was a mean, you know, it's highly unstable sort of boat in that sense. And so a number of these aspects just don't fit the scientific description. Whereas we know the description of the ark, its size could account for a lot the species of the air breathing, land dwelling type animals.
There's so many things that fit the explanation of the global flood. The historical accounts in all the different cultures that go back pre Christianity that talk about how the world was wicked, that God destroyed the world because it was wicked, was destroyed by a flood. Only a small group of people were saved in a vessel and it was a supernatural event.
We know the Bible describes how God brought the animals to the ark and it was a supernatural event. And of course, a lot of people don't accept the supernatural, but we need to remind ourselves all the time that life is supernatural. There's no natural explanation for a living organism for life.
There's no explanation for consciousness. And I read an article just recently, an interview with Paul Davies, the renowned astrophysicist who wrote the book the mind of God. And he was asked about does he think there's an afterlife? And commented, well, he doesn't really know.
But he then pointed out that science has no explanation for consciousness. So we have no explanation for the amazing biochemical machinery that we find in cells. These molecular machines, they're unstable in the natural environment.
They need to be in a protected living system to form. And they're so complex, they're not going to form by random chemical reactions. Everything is against it.
All the known science is against life. Living organisms forming by chance. So again, that's another miracle.
And there are many aspects of science that we don't understand. Why is the corona around the sun much hotter than the surface of the sun? So this outer layer of gases is way hotter. The surface of the sun is measured at about 6000 degrees.
The corona average temperature is one to 2 million degrees, with some areas reaching up to 20 million degrees. And scientists have no explanation as to how it can be that hot. And of course, that's just a physical thing that's happening now.
And I'm sure there will somehow, someday we will actually work it out. But there are a lot of examples like that that we know of that point to particularly consciousness, the origin of life, point to clear evidence for supernatural intervention in our world. And that's what the flood was.
But of course, people still don't want to accept it. But again, there are so many structures on the earth where there's major problems now, often mentioned that people talk about, oh, well, what about all the radiometric dating and this sort of thing? Well, hang on, let's look at something we can measure with radiometric dating. We've got no reference rocks, right? We have no rocks that we know for sure were 100,000 years old or a million years old or 100 million years old to calibrate our method.
So we don't know. But what we do know is we can measure erosion rates today, for example, and show that, hang on, the continents would erode away in less than 10 million years. We can measure the decline in the earth's magnetic field and we'd say, well, hang on, if it was much stronger in the past, the heap would have been so strong that life on earth wouldn't exist anyway.
So there's all these factors that are pointing to a very, very young age for life on earth. But another one that is very, very clear evidence is the Grand Canyon. Now, I've been fortunate to visit the Grand Canyon a couple of times, once from out of a tour from out of Las Vegas and once being taken privately from Phoenix in Arizona.
And so it's certainly an amazing structure. And in fact, the valley of the Colorado river is about 450 kilometres long, or actually 466 kilometres long if the nearly 100 kilometres of the marble canyon are included. And the depth of the Grand Canyon varies from about 900 metres to 1800 metres.
And the average depth is 1600 metres, 1.6 kilometres. And the canyon's width, rim to rim, is between six and a half and 29 kilometres.
And so the amount of erosion that has occurred there is nearly 1000 cubic miles or nearly 4000 cubic kilometres of material has been eroded from that. That's 4000 cubic kilometres of material. Caribbean river no, it doesn't work.
And it's interesting that even the secular geologists really don't have a satisfactory explanation for it because again, it's based on this uniformitarian scenario that things have all continued as they are for millions of years, all this gradual erosion and this sort of thing. And they have to assume that the Colorado river or some earlier river cut the canyon. But the canyon's path does not follow the geological structures that logically it should follow.
In fact, it cuts through high plateaus. It hasn't actually been diverted by faults and it does not follow the topographical slopes of the surrounding plateaus. So the Grand Canyon itself is a classic example, defying the principle of uniformitarianism, on which all secular geological interpretations are based.
So here we've got this massive piece of evidence that we can go out and study today. We can walk around the perimeters, we can fly over it, we can do aerial studies of the surrounding topology and so forth. And there's no explanation in terms of uniformitarianism of how that amazing canyon could form.
Now, the creationists, of course, we look at it from the biblical perspective. That was a global flood. And of course, flood geology provides a tremendous opportunity to explain the origin of the canyon.
But some of the theories, again, that have been put up have been refined. One of the early theories that was put up was that during the floods, a couple of massive lakes formed, and there was some sort of natural dam of sediment that had formed, and then suddenly that broke and the massive amounts of water escaped. And there are two areas there nearby that could provide such lakes that could have perhaps formed by the flood.
And if they breached, they would certainly cut through the high plateaus and form the grand canyons. But one of the reasons against these models is that there actually aren't evidence of shorelines that we would have expected to form from the lakes and ice age lakes commonly had them. And we know that the ice ages form after the flood.
In fact, the flood is the best explanation for ice ages and, well, one massive ice age occurring after the flood. And the reason for this is, of course, that you had all this warm water formed after the flood, there would have been volcanic ash. And so this intense evaporation and decline in sunlight, the cycles would have cooled the earth.
And creationist meteorologists have said this, done calculations and estimates, and it seems that the peak ice age would have occurred roughly about 500 years after the flood. And that actually explains perhaps some of the famines that occurred at Abraham's time and this sort of thing. So it'll take us to around Abraham's time and why migrations occurred at that time and so forth.
But again, as getting back to this lake theory, there aren't evidence for the shorelines, although we see that for the other ice age lakes. And secondly, lakes usually have their sediments in the deepest parts. And in these depressions, that would have been the sources of the water if there had been a dam burst.
We don't find the evidence of those sediments of the bottom of the lake. And secondly, a dam breach would not carve out long side canyons. And the Grand Canyon has two 1.6 kilometre deep, 50 kilometre long narrow side canyons that end at the Colorado river, one from the north and the other from the south. And so water from any dam breach would have been narrowly focused down the main canyon from the east and not down the side canyons from the north and south. And to have water flowing down side canyons, the water flow from the breach would have had to have been over 100 kilometres wide.
So generally, creationists now don't support the Dambridge hypothesis. A lot of them don't. And instead they feature a second or a different hypothesis that from late flood erosion, after receding, floodwaters formed a sheet flow, or changed from the sheet flow over the surfaces into channelized flow and it carved the Grand Canyon from the top down.
And this late flood channelized erosion. So it's talking about as the flood was receding, the erosion occurred, then this channelized erosion. And actually it explains a lot of the puzzles that confound scientists in terms of the formation of the Grand Canyon.
And so some of the creationists estimate that about 100 days or so after the floods peak, massive sheet like flows of water into the land, flowed off the land into the deepening ocean basins. And these would have really vast areas. And we can see that.
I think it fits a lot of the topology that we see in Australia because these erosions would have planed a lot of areas flat. When you drive out through central Australia, vast areas of central Australia. And I've done a lot of four wheel driving trips through the centre on the major four wheel driving tracks.
And it's so typical of topologies to see these plateaus rising up with just tabletop tops, just extensive, huge, flat, dead flat plateaus over huge areas. And so this is exactly the scenario that the creationist geologists are saying would fit the Grand Canyon as well, because the flow, well, even secular geologists accept that before the Grand Canyon was carved out, there was about three kilometre thickness of sediments that had been laid down by this massive turbulence and movement of floodwater. Then a huge amount of material about.
Yes, I said about three kilometre thickness of sediments was actually eroded away from the Grand Canyon area. And this is referred to as the great denudation. And so what is the creation of saying, as the water level dropped, this sheet flow would start to divide into individual channels across the underlying surface, intensifying the erosion beneath each channel and cutting it rapidly and deepening grooves in the land surface.
And of course, we've seen how, for example, in the New Zealand example we mentioned earlier, and also how this sort of channelling can occur with Mount St Helens eruption as well. And so this receding water quickly carved the Grand Canyon and the other canyons like the Zion Canyon. And the eroded sedimentary load was then emptied into deep basins in the southeast California and the ocean.
And we see the sediment there. But one of the fascinating things is that canyon, which passes perpendicularly from one side of a mountain range or a ridge to the other, and which contains a river, as I mentioned earlier, is called a water gap. And of course, there's thousands of water gaps around the world.
There's some pretty spectacular ones in Tasmania called the Gordon splits. And the Grand Canyon is the world's longest water gap. And these water gaps pose a serious puzzle for uniformitarian geologists, who generally assumed that the river carved the gap.
But rivers should logically flow around mountains, not cut through them, but channelized flood erosion as water little drops solves that mystery. And particularly in the Grand Canyon, if you look at the path of the Colorado river, it passes straight through several high plateaus instead of going round them. And it does not cut through the Kaibab plateau at its lowest point. It cuts through it at a higher, much higher point. As a matter of fact, one of the papers that was published by the Grand Canyon association, by W Ranney, called Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mystery. He writes, oddly enough, the Grand Canyon is located in a place where it seemingly shouldn't be.
So this is what secular uniformitarianism geologists are saying. Some 20 miles east of Grand Canyon village, the Colorado river turned sharply 90 degrees from a southern course to a western course into the heart of the uplifted Colorado Plateau. It appears to cut right through this uplifted wall of rock, which lies 3000ft above the adjacent marble platform to the east.
And so that's a massive problem both for secular and creation geologists to explain how the Kaibab Plateau was cut through at its pleasant day altitude of about two and a half thousand metres and not at its lowest point of only 1700 metres. But again, the two channelized currents approaching from the northeast and the southeast, each cutting their own valley until they joined forces on the Kaibab Plateau at the location of the eastern Grand Canyon, would explain it really well. It's a brilliant explanation.
So the flood geology explains the Grand Canyon very well, really. We can see the Grand Canyon really is factual evidence for the flood on a global scale. Some people try to say, well, the Genesis flood was just local, but we have powerful evidence that the flood is worldwide as we look at the structures all over the world.
And of course, the Bible reminds us that just as the world was once destroyed by water because of wickedness, that it's going to be destroyed again by fire, this time at the second coming of Jesus, that God is going to return. See what we have done to this planet. And those that have chosen the path of righteousness, chose the Lord Jesus, their saviour, and want to do what is right.
They will be taken from this earth, the dead in Christ will be resurrected, and then the earth will be destroyed by fire. So it's a very important choice to make, while we can, to choose God on the base of this evidence. You've been listening to Faith and Science.
And remember, if you want to relisten to these programmes, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word au and click on the radio button and on the listen and you can relisten to this and many of the earlier programmes. And remember, if you enjoyed this programme or found it interesting, please put links up on your social media pages and tell others about the importance evidence we have that supports the Bible.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
