Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Recently there was a headline, something in Australia here in the newspapers, the media, or a commentary, I should say, along the lines of, we need to get God out of the lodge, out of the prime minister's lodge. And it was a reference to the fact that in Australia at the moment, the Australian prime minister is an evangelical Christian. He's very open about his faith in God.
And of course, these were comments by, I presume, someone who wants a very secular government. And I thought, it's so interesting now that this whole concept of, well, there is no God, we don't have to be accountable to God, is increasing in the community. As I think back when I was a child, at least that I guess most people, I got the impression that most people believed in God and feared God and realised that if they did bad things one day they would be accountable before God.
And indeed, I think this is one of the main things that helps people to do good things, is this balance that, yeah, one day we are accountable for what we do. And as I look around the world now and read the news, we see the conflict between good and evil is continuing. I think of the medical research that is going on and the huge advances that we're making now in medicine to be able to save lives and repair people that have been damaged in accidents or by cruel diseases and finding treatments for disease.
And yet, at the same time, we read about people that are sort of thinking up all these new ways to scam money out of people and trick people into giving their. Getting paying for things that don't exist and all this sort of thing, as well as all the fighting and cruelty that is going on around the world. And this whole idea of a judgement, I guess, is unpleasant in many people's eyes.
And of course, God doesn't really want us to choose to be in his kingdom because we just want to escape their judgement. I think really God wants people in his kingdom that choose to be good people. They really want to be in a place where there's love and peace and joy and beauty and all these wonderful attributes that we see evidences of in the world at time.
But we see this conflict now. I guess people are saying, well, hang on, this is a programme supposed to be on Faith and Science. Where's the science coming into this? Well, it's interesting that the Bible records, of course, that several thousand years ago, people were really bad at that time too.
And it's interesting that most of the cultures around the world have accounts of the flood of the global flood that we call Noah's flood, and that people at that time were very wicked, and that this was the judgement of God on those people to eliminate wickedness. And that God started again with a family that believed in God, that trusted in God and started again. And it's interesting, as we read about this in the Bible, in Genesis, chapter seven, we read in the 600th year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the 17th day of the month, on that day, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of heaven were open and rain fell upon the earth for 40 days and 40 nights.
But one of the things that interests me is this phrase, the fountains of the great deep burst forth. We know there's a lot of underground water that is trapped underground. And also, though, of course, in my mind, I think of lava flows and volcanic eruptions.
And as I just walk around my local neighbourhood, there's areas, particularly on the coastline there, where we can see that lava has come out between the rocks in the form of dikes. And in other places there are sills and so forth, where the lava has flowed out horizontally. And of course, I've been to places where there's been volcanoes.
Matter of fact, I'm not real keen on volcanoes, but I did go and do a volcano tour on the big island of Hawaii, and I've been back since and seen where lava has flowed out, flowed and destroyed one town, flowed across the roads and so forth on the big island there. And just recently in the news, there's been a massive volcanic eruption. I think was in Iceland.
There's a volcano now with a lot of activity and a lot of lava flowing out. And one of the things that fascinates me is I remember, too, reading an account of, in a lava flow, there was a very well preserved mould of a rhinoceros that was preserved in extreme detail. So what had happened? Obviously, this lava must have been flowing very rapidly, trapped this rhinoceros, buried it very quickly, and left a mould of the rhinoceros in quite great detail.
And when I think about their volcanic eruptions in the past, we see, like the lava flows out of the different volcanoes that have erupted just recently in Europe and in Iceland and so forth, and volcanic explosion that killed a number of people on white island off the coast of New Zealand. But this is nothing compared to the volcanic eruptions that have occurred in the past. And I was reading a very interesting article by a Dr. Oskarsson, Birgir Oskarsson. And he earned his doctorate in volcanology from the University of Iceland. And his article was entitled The Colossal Nature of Past Volcanic Activity on Earth.
And essentially his article points to powerful evidence of a catastrophic past on the surface of the earth, unlike anything that we've ever seen. And so just reading from his article, which is one of the articles published in this book, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature. And of course, these are a number of articles, on the overwhelming evidence for the earth's catastrophic past and the evidence for Noah's flood, for the global flood.
And also these scientists are pointing out in this overwhelming evidence, not only for intelligent design, but if there was a catastrophic past, the now dating methods that have been largely based on uniformitarianism, in other words, slow, gradual processes over the earth for millions of years, are quite obviously wrong. And therefore the dating methods that supposedly corroborate these old ages are obviously wrong as well, as I've talked about in other talks previously. But, he writes, the evidence of volcanic activity is seen at various levels in the geologic column.
Now, one of the important aspects of this is that, again, the geologic column is spread over hundreds of millions of years, but this volcanic activity again suggests that all these processes occurred over a very short period of time. And I'll talk a little bit more about other evidence for that too, in a moment. But there are lava flows from explosive eruptions and huge volcanic activity that has emerged in the past.
And these lava flows in some places have been so huge that they just. Yeah, well, I guess we don't realise how big they have been and what they are called. They have a special name which are called large igneous provinces.
And these are massive areas of where we've got voluminous amounts of lava that have spread out over the surface of the earth. And so these large igneous provinces and of course, igneous rocks are volcanic rocks, rocks that have come out from molten earth's core or underground. And he points out these found throughout the entire geologic record.
They've been high in the pre Cambrian, in a number of areas, but there can be also found in the palozoic area, time frame, in the mesoic rock record, and even in the cenozoic rock record. So this stratigraphic distribution is right through. And one of the things is that this volcanism, these represent eruptions on a much, much larger scale than any modern activity.
And matter of fact, scientifically, this volcanism is conventionally termed flood basalt volcanism because it has the appearance of giant flooding events. Lava flows actually covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometres with volumes in the thousands of cubic kilometres. Now, I'm not talking about cubic metres, I'm talking about cubic kilometres.
So if you've got a lava flow with a volume of thousands of cubic kilometres, in terms of modern activity, we have lava flows in the order of tens of square kilometres, with volumes generally less than ten cubic kilometres. So we can see there's a huge difference there from a lava volume of thousands of cubic kilometres in the past to the ones we observe today in the order of ten. So that's hundreds of times larger.
Hundreds of times. And there's a basalt group in the northwestern the United States that includes lava fields of an estimated 40,000 square kilometres with volumes in excess of 2000 cubic kilometres. Now, one of the largest eruptions in modern time.
The lucky eruption in Iceland in 1783 to 1784 formed a lava field of just 600 square kilometres and a volume of 15 cubic kilometres. So we can see there, in the past, these lava flows were 2000 cubic kilometres, one of the largest ones in modern times, 15 cubic kilometres. And so these flows are just huge.
The other thing is too, the amount of lava that has occurred has occurred at massive rates of flow. For example, they've calculated that for some of these flood basalts, the flow rate has been in the order of 10,000 to 10 million cubic metres per second. Now, for comparison, the Amazon river has an average flow rate of about 200,000 cubic metres per second.
And so lava flows in the past have been in the order of 50 times the flow rate of the Amazon river. And this is just huge, these flows that occurred. And again, modern lava flows are in the order of ten to maybe 1000 metres cubic metres per second.
Ten cubic metres to 1000 cubic metres per second. So much, much smaller rates. And so here we can see that the colossal nature of volcanism in the past is very different to what we observe today.
And it fits in and it paints this model of this catastrophic past on the surface of the earth. Now, the other thing that fits in with this is the megabreccias. Now, breccia are sort of really, they're sedimentary deposits in which the rock itself is very angular.
So the rock itself is not rounded. It so much for resolved or tumbling. It's very angular. And also megabreccias. The rock pieces have to be bigger than one metre in diameter, so they're a minimum of about three tonnes in weight. And the interesting thing is that these megabreccias, these sedimentary deposits with these angular deposits of these really large pieces of rock, occur over the world.
And it's interesting that another Dr. Art Chadwick talks about this. And he points out that there are many geologic phenomena of the past that do not appear to be adequately accounted for in terms of the processes now occurring on the earth's surface.
In some cases, it's difficult to conceive of any mechanism capable of explaining them other than through the agency, such as a global deluge described in Genesis. And among these problems, problem areas in geology, the explanation of the origin, transportation and deposition of megabreccias deserve a prominent place. And so, again, this is another chapter in this book, Design and Catastrophe:
51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature, published by Andrews University Press. And Dr. Chadwick goes through and describes some of these massive megabreccias that occur.
So these are massive sedimentary deposits that occur again. So when we look at the geologic column, we've got all these layers, and in these layers you've got these massive volcanic deposits that occurred. These massive lava flows are absolutely huge and that represented massive flows.
And at the same time, we've got water flows that move these massive chunks of rock over huge distances. For example, in Peru, a rock formation covering an area of about 80,000 square kilometres, and we're not talking about square metres, we're talking 80,000 square kilometres, contains locally dried blocks of cretaceous limestone, up to one kilometre by several kilometres and up to half a kilometre thick. And it's in southern Iran.
There are slabs of an exotic rock over a kilometre in size, found in Myocene mudstones, apparently derived from a source many kilometres distance. In the Apennines in central Italy, bodies of transported sediment exceeding 400 metres in thickness and covering hundreds of square kilometres of area, extent unknown.
And so again, in the Jurassic, limestones in the Cretaceous, radiolarites in Arabia, some of the largest blocks cover an area of 1600 square kilometres and are up to a kilometre thick.
And so we've got these amazing movements of these angular rocks that are just very difficult to explain how these structures could have formed using some sort of slow, systematic process over a long period of time. It's interesting, as they're doing more studies, particularly in oceanography and subsurface imaging, there's evidence of, again, similar phenomena occurring on a smaller scale underwater in oceans at the present time. But as Dr.
Chadwick points out, very little is still known about specific transport mechanisms and triggering forces responsible for the origination and accumulation of these megabreccia deposits. And he goes on to say it is difficult to imagine forces operative under uniformitarian constraints that would have produced class of the size we find in megabreccia deposits. And he concludes the presence of various kinds of megabreccia in the geologic record, showing the rapid transport of extremely large class over gently dipping or flat surface substrates for many kilometres, indicates energy levels on a scale that stagger our imagination.
Their common occurrence indicates significant catastrophic activity in the past, not readily explained in terms of contemporary processes, but consistent with an extended catastrophic period such as the one described in Genesis. So here we have. I wasn't aware of these massive deposits.
I mean, I did geology at university for a year and I remember getting a distinction in stratigraphy. But when I read about these, now we see just again accumulating evidence for the biblical account. There's so much evidence there.
Another one that comes out that supports the flood are turbidity currents and the evidence of, again, very rapid movement of the lateral transport of fine sediments, mud and so forth, and the graded beds. And they can work out the speeds, of course, from the angles of some of the beds. Another scientist points out the widespread occurrence of persistent sedimentary layers right across the world.
The massive, widespread deposition of fossiliphorous cretaceous limestones. He gives the example of the limestones that spread across uniform across Europe, forming the spectacular cliff south of Marseille and the Dura Mountains, east of France and west of Switzerland, the carpathian mountains and the Balkan Mountains, the crimean peninsula and so forth, right down to the similar layers in southern Morocco, southern Tunisia and similar layers in Mexico. And so there's so much evidence.
Again, another scientist, Dr. Elaine Kennedy points out, has a chapter in this book, the widespread deposits evidence consistent with the biblical flood. I think one of the important areas too is an article.
Another chapter in this book, Design and Catastrophe, published by Andrews University, is by Dr. Ariel Roth. He's done a lot of studies in this area and his chapters entitled flat gaps in the Rock Layers, challenge the long geologic ages.
And he presents very, very strong arguments challenging these long ages. It's a very interesting book, but I think one of the things that stands out to me is when we read the Bible account and how it talks about the fountains of the great deep bursting forth and the volcanic activity and plus the rain and the water and all the amount of heat that would have been released. Then the rapid burial, the rapid destruction of life, extinction as a major rapid event at that particular time.
It just fit so well, the layers laid down in so many of these sedimentary layers, because they don't show any forms of erosion, insignificant forms of erosion had to be laid down straight on top of one another, virtually not over millions of years. It all fits the biblical picture, the biblical picture of a flood, which was a judgement on the earth at that time. And of course, the Bible talks about, well, this world is going to end and God is going to put an end to evil.
And that's why it's so important that we all come to know and understand that Jesus, the life of Jesus also fits the prophecies in the Bible, that Jesus was God and the miracles he performed that know witnessed by so many people and recorded miracles of healing and the resurrection. And plus the evidence for Jesus' resurrection as well as powerful evidence that Jesus really was God.
And this gives us hope and this is very important hope that we need to tell people about at this time.
The Bible can believe it fits the scientific evidence that we have in our world around us at the present time.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
And remember, if you want to re listen to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
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I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. Your been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
