Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Recently, I was talking about the incredible structure in trees and the DNA codes that are responsible for developing a tree from such a tiny little seed, and the amazing codes, genetic codes that are in the seeds. And to me, it's just powerful evidence of a creator of design, the way trees function. And as I thought a little bit further about it too, all the different varieties of fruit, for example, and nuts that provide food for ourselves and animals.
And all this information is encoded in the DNA, that is in that little seed that's programmed to germinate under certain conditions, to take the energy from the sun and use that to capture materials from the air and the soil and build the tree and then produce the fruit. And it really frustrates me within our education system, that we continue to educate young people, that these amazing systems somehow arose by chance mutations, and yet their function is so perfect. And as I was thinking about this too, I was thinking that the Bible tells us that Jesus was the creator, that God came to earth, made himself as a human and lived amongst us, as a last resort, to explain to us how good God was and how much he loves us, and how much he wants us to turn to him and have a relationship with him through our minds, which he created.
Because there is going to be a time when the earth comes to an end, when God brings judgement on the earth and puts an end to all the wickedness and bad things that are happening on the earth. And that makes so much sense and reason too, because we see so much of the earth's resources running out, we see the extent of pollution and so forth. And it reminded me too, as I thought about this, that Jesus, who came, was actually put to death on a tree, on a cross made out of wood, the very wood that he designed.
And as I've talked about in one of the recent programmes, timber is so versatile, and yet it was the device on which God himself allowed to be killed in our place, that we might be forgiven for the wrongs that we've done and choose God, and choose to accept that forgiveness and change our lives, choose to bring our lives in harmony with God. As I read the Bible, and the Bible describes in so many ways God's love for us. And over time, over thousands of years, you can see that the knowledge of God has only just been preserved by a thread.
We can see that evil, evil forces, major pagan ideas and religions have attempted to stamp out and wipe out knowledge of the true God down through the ages. But it survived. And that's why, to me, it's so precious.
And the fact that we have the Bible today, as we look back through history, there's so much evidence that, again, the Bible, as we have it today, has survived biethread. It's been miraculously preserved from being destroyed and wiped out so that we don't have that knowledge. But there are other things, too.
As we look out in nature, there are other evidences for God. And as I was contemplating that, yes, one day God is going to bring an end to all the bad things happening on this earth and recreate the earth and recreate us, too, with bodies where our biochemistry doesn't run down and come to equilibrium in a situation where we can, we will live to it forever. And it will be a situation, a perfect situation, where life can go on and we can enjoy this relationship with God, our creator, and with each other as God designed, because as we look in nature, there's just so much evidence of an intelligence behind everything around us.
But at the same time, too, we have these reminders that in the past, people were not good. There was much wickedness in the past. And when we look at the cultures around the world, a huge number of cultures have a record of the destruction of the earth, mostly by water.
95% of these cultures have their destruction by water, as by the flood, which is preserved. The record of the flood is preserved in the Bible account in Genesis. There in those early chapters of Genesis and the count of Noah and the flood.
And again, when we look at the different cultures around the world, China, North America, South America, even the australian indigenous cultures had a record of the flood in Africa, the different in Europe, of course, many in Europe and India, these records are there of this flood. And essentially most of them, more than three quarters of them, as I recall, associate the reason for this destruction of the world by water was because people had become so wicked. Matter of fact, one of the north american accounts, indian accounts, is that they were no longer caring for their children and looking after their children.
And really, as scientists look at a secular geologist claim that during the cretaceous period, that's the period when the limestone was put down, a lot of the limestone chalk deposits, that it ended with one of the earth's mass extinction events, and that at one time during this period, most of the world was underwater. So here we have evidence from science for the global flood in the cretaceous period, and just look it up in the geology textbooks. And one of the powerful evidences for this that just stands out as the well known white cliffs of Dover.
Now, these iconic white cliffs are on the south coast of England, and, of course, they've been photographed many times and they're perhaps one of the recognisable landmarks of the British Isles. They're actually huge. The cliffs themselves, on the english side, stretch for about 16 kilometres on either side of the port city of Dover.
And they're about 110 metres high, 360ft high. And, of course, there's corresponding white cliffs across the English Channel near the port city of Calais in France. Now, these cliffs are white because of the chalk content that they have.
And this chalk deposit, massive chalk deposit, it extends further into the North Sea, and in some places it's over a thousand metres in thickness. It also can be seen further inland across England and northern Ireland, and also in northern Europe, and right across to Turkey. And, of course, similar massive chalk beds also can be found in North America, for example, in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Nebraska and Kansas.
Now, chalk itself is a relatively soft rock. It's nearly 100% calcium carbonate, and it actually comes from the skeletal remains of little single celled algae, marine or single celled marine algae type organism called plankton. And in the dover chalk, the predominant type of prankton is called cocolithophores.
And these have an external little skeleton of the calcium carbonate called the cococa sphere. And these little spheres are made up of tiny little plates of a crystalline form of calcium carbonate called calcite. And these plates, they're quite pretty, actually, if you see pictures of a scanning microscope image of plankton, and they're sort of made up of all these little plates are sort of like the shutters on an old fashioned camera that slide over one another and they form sort of like little upside down breakfast bowls made out of these shutters.
And they're quite interesting. As the little animals grow, these plates are shed during the life, but they also remain after the little pankton dies, forming a sediment on the ocean floor. Now, of course, the geologists and most of the textbooks that are supporting this old earth theory say that the chalk formed gradually over millions of years, and it was supposedly laid down in placid, shallow, warm oceans during the cretaceous period.
And so they say that as these little plankton, the calcite crystals, calcite material on this plankton settled over 60 or 70 million years, just solely deposited. But the thing is, if that had really happened and that was really the reason why these very thick chalk deposits are found, we would expect to find, mixed with these layers, all the erosion, sediments being washed off the earth, they should be all mixed in with this chalk. But it isn't.
Although the chalk can vary in different consistencies, but it doesn't vary in purity. These thick beds, and when you think of, as I said, 100 metres thick and more up to half, up to a kilometre thick, they're 98% pure calcium carbonate. And so we have just very obvious evidence that they can't have been deposited slowly over millions of years.
They wouldn't be that pure. It just wouldn't work. Instead, a creationist model can explain this very well.
Creationist geologists associate the deposit of these to a period during Noah's flood, probably when the floodwaters peaked and blotted out everything. And this model then fits the deposition. If this material is deposited very rapidly during the flood, that would fit quite well.
It's interesting that recently secular science have suggested that all the calcium carbonate fadovus white cliffs came from giant blooms of the algae. And when the water is warm, the algae can grow explosively. And at certain times, these algal blooms have occurred and they're even visible from space, because the sea appears blighter due to the sunlight of the reflecting little calcite plates.
And again, these blooms that can occur yearly, particularly in the Antarctic Ocean, seem to stem from large quantities of nitrate and other nutrients upwirling from the surface from waters that are being carried up. And so we have now a mechanism that would explain, if we have warmer water during the flood, that this could quickly cause a very rapid bloom of these sort of materials. So there's some factors now that suggest that the flood would be the ideal scenario to produce one of these massive blooms that would then have been floculated, perhaps by very small amounts of hydrothermal, very tiny hydrothermal particles.
Matter of fact, many of the chalk cochalymphs have a very fine covering of a mineral called smectite. Now, this is a type of clay mineral, and it's a hydrothermal product formed by the action of hot water, generally in a volcanic setting that's injected into the ocean from volcanic vents. And it's interesting that the spectite makes the cocholith settle out of suspension very quickly.
It's similar to the industrial wastewater treatments that we call floculation, using, for example, bentonite, which is a type of clay which primarily contains smectite. And so what we have, in actual fact, from observations today, and when we look at the fact that there's this very, very fine coating of this smectite in amongst the calcite that makes up the white cliffs, we have a model, a scientific model, that fits and explains how this very, very thick layer could form. The interesting thing is, too, that the position of most of the chalk in the geological record indicates that it is flood rock that it formed as floodwaters were rising towards their peak levels.
And creation scientists have actually developed models that can explain this and actually fit the scientific data. If you want to look at one of the models that has been proposed, that would explain this very well if you Google creation.com biblicalgeology so I'll just read that again.
So googlecreation.com biblical geologymodel and so we actually have models that fit the observational evidence that we make today that fit also the flood scenario. In other words, the flood scenario with hot water from volcanic eruptions, the fountains, the deep, much volcanic activity coming up, these minerals that are formed that then would floculate, there'd be a rapid bloom in the warm water.
And also all the rich minerals that are being released into the water from the volcanic sources really promote rapid growth of the algae. And then, of course, this mechanism of settling them out. And that's exactly what we find when we look at the minute composition of these things, like the white cliffs of Dover.
Now, one of the things too, I think that people can forget particular secular geologists when they don't want to accept the flood model, is that the flood model was a major catastrophic event. There were massive movements in the earth's crust at that time. And towards the end of the flood, or just after the flood, the mountains were pushed up.
There would have been massive movement of land masses that caused the mountains to be pushed up. The mountains were able to be pushed up and moved because these sediments that had been laid down were still relatively soft. They were fresh from the flood.
And again, as I've spoken many times before, when we look at the size of the formations, like the Coconino sandstone in the United States, Morrison Formation, these are massive amounts of material know, covering thousands of square miles that have been moved of sedimentary material spread over this massive know. This isn't some little local flood like we observe today due to rainfall, cyclone, typhoon, it was a massive catastrophic event. This provides really the perfect conditions for the formation of chalk.
The fast moving warm water. Fast quantities of suspended biological material would have triggered an explosive worldwide growth of algal blooms. And all the mechanisms for rapid colicus sinking would have been amplified to a huge extent during the flood.
And because the availability of algal food was increased, grazing plankton would massively proliferate and they would excrete their coccolence and form these little fast sinking crystals, or little plates of calcite. So again, the flood currents would have swelped this calcium based rich material into deeper areas of the ocean form, which geologists call basins, somewhat like the North Sea in northwest Europe, and then it would have accumulated there to these thicknesses and then, of course, been pushed up later. So again, the flood model fits, because, again, these deposits, if the evolutionists have it for the huge thickness that they have, if you have this slow, uniformitarian evolutionary model, it's going to take you millions of years and you're going to have contamination by massive amounts of erosion sediments at the same time, the flood model for the massive, rapid growth of algal blooms, the shedding of their calcite plates, the deposition of this material on massive scale very rapidly, and then the movement of this and pushing it all together into these basins, pushing them up afterwards, fits so well that the flood model, of course, the other thing that scientists forget that with the flood model and the warm water would have, after the flood, generated, in actual fact, a massive ice age with the increased evaporation of the water forming the clouds, and then you get the cooling effect from the loss of energy there.
And again, this exactly fits the evidence we have for an ice age post flood, which, again, led to the destruction of a lot of the and preservation of a lot of the giant fauna after the flood. Now, creationist scientists and meteorologists have calculated that this cold ice age event probably occurred about 500 years after the end of the flood. So it wasn't something that occurred straight away.
And so during that time, of course, the animals would have proliferated over that time. And we know that there were many large animals that lived in the past, and we know that they lived with humans as well, but then they were wiped out. And, of course, this ice age change accounts for the explanation of the animals like the giant ground sloth, the sabre toothed tiger, the giant irish elk, the depropitodon that you find in Australia, the glyptodon and the toxodon, these other giant animals that are no longer with us, that we find evidence of, that they seem to be wiped out during the ice age event.
It's interesting that when we look at the ice age model, if you have the global flood, then you've got warmer oceans, milder winters, you've got increased evaporation. But this then leads to more rain and snow and higher rainfall in areas that later become arid. And all this process leads to the buildup of ice sheets.
At the same time, after the flood, we would have had volcanic dust in the stratosphere, which again led to the cooler summers, minimal ice meltback and the lower sea levels that we have. That's during the flood. And then of course, several hundred years after the flood, as the oceans cool, we get reduced evaporation, we get less rain and snow and the ice cover retreats.
And the same time we'd have dust in, the atmosphere clears, we have hotter summers and the ice melts back in the summer and the sea level rises. And this corresponds to a time when we have mass extinctions of the larger animals, including your woolly mammoths and so forth. And whereas just after the flood, these animals, like the reindeer woolly mammoth and so forth, they would have, with the mould of rivers, winters, and that just after the flood would have increased in population.
So it's amazing when we look at the pictures of the evidence that we have today. The flood model explains just so much of what we observed, the massive evidence of animals being wiped out during the ice age and so forth. And I think as we look at this evidence, that the Bible record is a true record of history.
And when we look at what the Bible says about evil and so forth in the world, it fits. It fits the psychology, it fits human behaviour. And the beauty of it is, though, that it also portrays that God has a solution.
And that solution is through God recreating the world again, but this time without sin. And the important message is that. And the gospel message is that Jesus who died, was raised from the dead.
He became alive again because he was God. And that was the evidence that he really was God. And on that basis, as we choose Jesus to be our saviour, and that is that, because we've all done wrong, we have all done bad things.
And God wants to have a world, a system, where people don't do bad things, where they live perfectly. And that is going to happen. And it happens through people choosing to want God to change them through.
And that happens when people choose miraculously and people choose Jesus as their saviour. So read your Bible and begin going to a Bible believing church. And remember, you can hear these talks again by Googling 3abnaustralia.org.au
and click on the radio and then on the listen button 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.
