Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
This time of year, in the area where I live, we have whales migrating up the east coast of Australia. And I know it's a real treat to be able to go to a nearby beach or headland and look out and see the whales if they're breaching, or even if you can just see them blowing off as they breathe, it's quite spectacular as they clear invent the water out the top. And of course, they're quite large animals.
I guess there's something special about seeing them. And of course, we associate whales with. They live in the oceans, of course. And of course, when they die or sometimes they're killed, of course they tend to be eaten by sharks or other animals. Occasionally they wash up on beach, or sometimes they beach themselves. And again, once that happens, the local animals get a feast.
But it's quite fascinating that there was a very large deposit of whales. Fossilised whales was found in the Sahara Desert, about 150 kilometres southwest of Cairo, on the edge of the desert there. And there was quite a really good article on this deposit published in National Geographic back in August 2010.
The author was T Mueller, and as I said, the article was titled Valley of the Whales. And it is quite fascinating, this report of the fossilised whales that have been uncovered there, particularly as the sand has been blown away from the wind and these fossils have been revealed buried there. And it's not just one or two, it's estimated that over a thousand whale fossils have been found in this particular valley.
And they're fossils of young whales, old whales, and they're not alone either. The other fossils that have been found in the area include sharks and rays, crocodiles, dugongs and, of course, and catfish, in fact, giant catfish, lots of shellfish, sea urchins and, of know, shells of marine organisms are know right across the Sahara, including the Giza pato, where the great pyramids are located. Now, it's also quite fascinating, as I look at some of the pictures that have been published of these whale fossils, where they're located, you can see the horizontal strata laid down in the background and you can see that the strata is quite level.
And also the local mountains, many of them, have been planed off pretty well level. It's very similar topography to what I've noticed in outback, Australia, actually, in some places in terms of the flat top mountains. Although the strata, when you look at the pictures, the photographs of the Valley of the Whales, you can see a lot of horizontal strata there.
And when you think about it, to bury these animals so that they are largely intact means rapid burial while they were whole. So if they were buried sort of very gradually and the skeletons would sort of break up, and if they were buried and died naturally, say, in the sea, sank to the bottom and then were broken up, we'd expect the bones to be scattered and moved around by just ocean currents and predators and so forth. But most of these ones are the fossils are of the animals joined together.
And so the explanation of this, in terms of the uniformitarian theory which underpins secular geology, is that, of course, this was once a sea. The animals died, they were solely buried and so forth. But quite clearly, to find whales there in the Sahara and all these strata and the layers of the strata are quite thick, represents totally different climatic and topography in the past.
And it has to have been a, a cataclysmic event to bury these whales and these other large animals, like sharks and crocodiles in particular, and dugongs, and to bury these animals so in such a way they haven't been eaten and preyed upon dugong by other animals for food or other marine creatures. And so it's powerful evidence of a catastrophe. But the thing is that we find these sort of scenarios around the world.
I've spoken in the past, for example, of how up in the deserts, in the mountains of Peru, we find fossil whales as well. There's one particular site where about a dozen or maybe even more whales have been found in fossils, particularly the skeleton parts, in very good condition, again showing that they had to have been buried rapidly. And whales are big animals now, for example, the species of whale that are buried in the Sahara are pronounced Basilosaurus and Dorudon.
And the Basilosaurus whales grew to about 20 metres, 66ft. That's a very, very big animal to be buried there. And, as I said, testimony that over 1000 whale fossils have been found there with all these other marine creatures.
So the evidence is enormous that we have these massive, catastrophic events in the past, such as not only buried, for example, in Peru, the Wales, but pushed those mountains up and therefore to base our geology and so forth on this and calculate ages and so forth of millions of years based on the uniformitarian model, is really clearly quite wrong. And one of the things I also find quite fascinating, and I think I've mentioned this before a few times, is when we date, the soft tissue that is, for example, found in dinosaurs that are tens of millions of years old. And this whale deposit here is estimated to be in the order of 40 to 35 to 40 million years.
And they postulate that there was this sea there at that particular time when we date the soft tissue of the dinosaurs. And I've seen the results of these. I don't know if they've found soft tissue in these whale things in particular at this stage or look for it, but we get dates in the order of 2025, 30,000 years.
And what I find most interesting is that these are the same carbon 14 calculated ages that we get that are now claimed for different, for example, indigenous campsites and art and so forth. For example, here in Australia, and I think in other parts of the world, too, in China, they've been pushing some of the carbon 14 dates back. But when you think about it, we're getting then into the same dates as the dinosaurs when we date them.
So, again, I think we're faced with a lot of clues, reproducible clues, that there's a major problem with our dating system, and there's also a major problem with our explanation for a lot, secular education explanation for these land forms forming as seas and being gradually buried and so forth. Instead, Noah's flood provides just the ideal scenario to explain these sort of fossil deposits. And, of course, in the United States, we know in the Morrison formation that stretches from New Mexico up to Canada, a massive area of the United States covered with this particular sediment that has buried dinosaurs.
Again, large animals, many of them large. Of course, a lot of them are small animals, but these large animals are buried there. And one of the interesting things that I know has come out of some research recently when they have a much more accurate satellite location capability now.
So they can measure not only the horizontal location of these fossils, but the vertical ones, they find that many of the bones that are from, for example, dinosaurs in the Morrison formation, where the skeletons no longer articulated, that is, joined together. In other words, we find a bit of bone here and a bit of bone there and so forth, that the bones are sorted with the heavier, bigger bones down low and the lighter bones higher up. And so, again, this is characteristic of typical rapid flow water sorting of these sort of materials.
Of course, the other thing is, too, that when we look at these valleys and the valley of the whales, where they're found, again, it's another. And they call these waddies over there. Again, when you look at the water flow, the best explanation, as I explained recently, is that if you have the floodwaters receding and the earth being pushed up, as the water is flowing off these plateaus, it levels out the deposits there, and it cuts through and forms these valleys and its most logical explanation.
Another example in Australia would be the Canarvon Gorge, perhaps not on the same scale as the Grand Canyon, but last year I had the opportunity to walk the 30 kilometres or so length of the Canarvon Gorge. I think that was the distance up and back was around 30 kilometres. So it's a reasonably large gorge, quite narrow, with steep sides.
And when you look at the geology here that we can look now, it's not the logical flow of the river. And secondly, where have all the material that would have been washed out? Where is that located? It's not nearby, and so obviously it's been washed quite away. And again, these represents cataclysmic sort of events in the past.
The other thing that when I go past a lot of these walk in these different gorges, the amount of erosion since the gorgeous formed is relatively little. And so because you see all these sharp edges and so forth, and I've often thought of that too. A classic example of this would be looking at the Alps and the Himalayas, Himalaya mountains with Mount Everest and this sort of thing.
And walking in New Zealand, there didn't seem to be a lot of material from erosion that you'd expect if these things formed millions of years ago. Where is the erosion? And you have erosion from sort of fresh landslides and this sort of thing. And you can see where the deposits have built up.
And to me, the indications are, when I look at these structures, they're not real old. One of the classic examples of this, of course, is in Egypt, where the wind erosion is very significant, eroding away the relatively soft sandstone and so forth. Again, when we look at erosion rates and from erosion, again, the sites can't be 35 million years old.
And these sort of ages, when we see the erosion rates are much faster than that. And the fact that in the Sahara there as well, we find these buried whales and this sort of thing, we also find, buried along old water courses, we find the remains of old villages and canoes and these sort of things have been dug up in these areas there. So I think that when we look overall at the topography of the surface of the earth, we know that on the very top of the earth, on the very surface of the earth, is this very thin layer of sedimentary rocks that covers most of the land areas of the surface of the earth.
And it just exactly fits the flood scenario. I know a lot of people mock the global flood scenario, but it makes so much sense. And especially when we see these classic examples of fossil whales in the Sahara and in the mountains of Peru, it really, in my view, should make us think.
And again, last year I was able to travel through north Queensland and I remember one of the things that stuck out to me in terms of the recent discovery of quite a lot of dinosaur, very large dinosaurs, very large marine creatures that they're finding out. And we went to sites where they're currently excavating these. And when I saw some of the filming and the farmer showing that walking through the paddock, the grass had eaten down a little bit, he saw this rock sticking out, unusual looking rock.
And what it was a thigh bone, the end of a thigh bone of a giant dinosaur. And again, the fact that they're there like that and that state preservation and so close to the surface there again suggests to me that we're looking at something that's recent. There's so much evidence for that.
And of course, there's even the Australian stories in the indigenous culture of yowies and so forth, as giant creatures that lived in the waterways and swamps. And it's hard to think it was a coincidence, but back in the early 18, hundreds in one of the Australian newspapers in Victoria published a picture of a giant animal that an indigenous man said lived in a swamp. And essentially what he described was drawn by an artist back in the 1840s, or it's about that sort of date from memory, just going from memory now, but essentially it was very close to a duck build dinosaur.
And when we look at the flood accounts around the world that are preserved in pretty well all the different cultures around the world, I think we have powerful evidence for a global flood producing the topography that we see today. Now, of course, people raise questions, they say, well, hang on, look, how did all the animals get into the ark? Well, of course, the Bible tells us quite clearly that God brought the animals to the ark. It was a miracle, it was a supernatural event.
I think one of the issues today that is certainly polarising people is, is there really a supernatural or not? Does a supernatural world exist? And of course, the Bible is very clear that it does, that there are evil angels called demons. As I talk to missionaries that have worked in countries where demon worship is still perhaps even found today, but certainly has been currently practised in the past hundred years, in less than 100 years. The accounts of demonic type events and really unusual phenomena is very real.
And according to these missionaries, they've observed these sort of phenomena occurring. And I was also interested, and it came to mind recently that the evidence for the supernatural, in terms of angels, in terms of the good angels, as we read the biblical accounts, the angels that appeared to Abraham and to Sarah and so forth, so many of the different Bible characters down through the ages, and to mary at the tomb of Jesus and so forth. I think the evidence reported there is very clear for the supernatural.
One of the contributors to my book in six days and also to my book, the God Factor, was Werner Git. And Werner Git was a world authority on information technology, a professor at one of the leading universities in Germany there. And, as I said, a world authority on information technology.
And he tells the account that during the Second World War, his family lived in the eastern part of Germany, and his father had gone and was serving in the german army. And in the latter part of the war, when the russian army came into that part of Germany, the local german people wanted to get away from the russian advance. And Werner was put into a cart and horse drawn cart that was able to leave.
But his mother and sisters, other members of his family, were in a different cart. And he understood that they were actually stopped by the Russians and captured and taken away, and they never heard of them again. But he got into the safety of family relatives and was passed to an uncle, I think, and cared for during the rest of the war by this uncle.
Meanwhile, Werner's father had been captured and was in a prisoner of war camp. And as the war was ending, the soldiers were encouraged to write to their families, and they obviously had to go and find their families again. And of course, he had no idea where his family was.
And the Werner tells how his father reported one night he had a dream, and he dreamt of an address, and he dreamt of this relative talking to him, saying, when are you going to come and see us? And in his dream, the father said, I don't know your address. What is your address? And in his dream, the man spoke a particular address, and Werner's father woke up and immediately wrote down the address. And so when he was released, he went to that address, which was in a northern part of Germany somewhere, I think, or may even been in adjacent country, Denmark. I'm not sure from memory. I'm just running from memory now. But that was where young Werner was taken, the last surviving member of his family.
And so when we think about where did that information come from in that dream? I put out a book once, some time ago, called the 7th millennium. The evidence we can know the future. And in that book, I looked at the secular accounts recorded in the secular history of people having premonitions, of bad things happening, of danger, some classic examples of course, are Julius Caesar's wife, warning him not to go to the forum. Pontius Pilate's wife. But there are many others as well, right up to modern times. And there are also dreams that accurately predicted the future.
People were revealed a number of things in dreams. It was quite fascinating. And these were accounts recorded in the secular history, a number of them verified with a number of witnesses at the time as well.
And so the argument of that book is that essentially there is overwhelming evidence for the supernatural. Of course, one of the Classic Bible Accounts is in the book of Daniel, chapter two, where we see that Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that was troubling him, and he called the wise man at the time. And, of course, Babylon was the world empire in that area at the time.
It was the dominant civilization. And Nebuchadnezzar, of course, was the person who built the hanging gardens of Babylon there. And he had this dream, and he knew it was a special dream, and so he wanted the wise men to interpret it.
And he called them, and they, of course, said, well, look, tell us what the dream is and we'll tell you the interpretation. He said, no, you tell me what I dreamt, and then I'll know you can tell me the interpretation. And of course, they couldn't, and they were going to be put to death.
And of course, Daniel, who was a young Hebrew who was being trained in the schools there, was included in the group. And so he went and saw Nebuchadnezzar and said, there's a God who can reveal the dream to me. I will, and give me some time.
And Daniel prayed, and God revealed the dream to Daniel, and he was able to tell it to Nebuchadnezzar. And, of course, that's an amazing dream that outlined the world history, essentially up until the second coming of Jesus right into our time. And it's been fulfilled precisely.
And we know the book of Daniel was written well before the time of Christ, because older manuscripts of it and parts of it have been found, for example, in the Dead Sea Scrolls and so forth. So we have this amazing evidence of the supernatural, and that's what the flood was. The flood was a supernatural event.
The animals came there supernaturally. God supernaturally destroyed the surface of the earth. He used water.
But we need to bear in mind it was a supernatural event, but it was a global cataclysmic event that destroyed the surface of the earth. And just Noah and his family survived. But that, too, should be a warning for us, as Peter points out, that once again, as our world gets to the end once again, everyone will have to give an account of themselves to God.
And God is going to destroy this world. And that's why it's so important that we get the message out that each of us need to make it right with God. And we can do that through Jesus Christ, our saviour, who died in our place for all the wicked, bad and wrong things that we've done, that we might have eternal life.
It's an amazing message and it makes so much sense, the biblical account of salvation. So I encourage everyone to make sure that you are reading your Bible and praying and taking this opportunity while we have life to be right with the creator God who made us.
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I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
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