Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Of course, in our education system today, we are confronted with the huge timeframes of millions of years, billions of years for the age of the universe, for the age of life on earth. And in the past, this has certainly worried a number of christians and different people have come up with different explanations to try and harmonise the so called claimed billions of years with the Bible account, of course, which clearly points to the earth only being thousands of years old, in fact, close to about 6,000 years old. And people, I guess, as I've explained before, when we look at these radiometric dating methods and this sort of thing, they're just based on chemical analysis of particular isotopes in rocks.
And from then on, it's based on unproven theories. And I worked as the chief chemist for many years of a NATA registered laboratory. So we were a laboratory that was.
Our results were accredited and certified by the National association of testing Authorities in Australia. And that meant that we had to use methods that had been validated and those methods were validated by using known samples, samples where the analysis was known and the methods were checked to get the right answer. And we need to understand that these long age dates haven't been validated.
The same with the ages of the universe and this sort of thing. We have a number of theories there that are based on different calculations, but they're all based on theories really, that, again, haven't been validated, haven't been proven. And there's a lot of questions, as I've raised in some of the earlier talks, and I encourage people to just scroll back down.
If you're on the Internet, remember, you can re listen to these programmes by going to just googling 3ABNaustralia.org.au, and click on the listen button, go to Faith and Science and then scroll down through the programmes. And I've addressed these issues in the past. One of the obvious ones is, for example, with the age of the earth, is that when people start to ascribe hundreds of Inc years and billions of years to these rock layers, we're faced with massive erosion problems there.
And I think people have failed to comprehend the extent that erosion changes the topology of the earth, the surface of the earth. And these changes can occur very rapid and they can be very severe. And if the earth was that old, we wouldn't, in my view, see the structures preserved the way they have been.
And again, I've talked about this in some of these earlier episodes of Faith and Science, but this is a very important factor. Erosion rates more or less totally contradict the possibility of the long ages. But nonetheless, christians have come up and people have attempted to harmonise with science and tried to harmonise the Bible with science.
We need to understand again as well, that how science works is that scientists make observations and they have this data there, but then it is interpreted and we know that our mind, our thoughts are non material and these can be certainly influenced by the worldview that we have. And that's why many secular people push back and unfortunately, many people fail, turn away from their faith in the Bible, thinking that science has disproved the Bible. But in actual factory mem, it's very important to understand that.
I know so many science, top scientists that believe in the Bible and understand it, and they've looked at the evidence, and when we look at the evidence, it falls down in terms of we have so much evidence for the supernatural, we have so much evidence for answers to prayer, we have so much answers for evidence for the benefit of Christianity in the world. That is true Christianity, based on love your neighbour and on forgiveness. The principles that Jesus taught, not necessarily what particular churches teach, but what the Bible teaches, is true Christianity.
And we see the benefits of this in society, that it really works. We see the evidence of providence in history, down through history, and how God has preserved the knowledge of his word. And this is very important, that the evidence for our faith is very strong.
We don't have to compromise with science. But one of the theories that people have come up with, unfortunately, to attempt to compromise, to reach a compromise, thinking that these long ages are real, is the gap theory. Now, the gap theory, or the ruin construction theory, aims to fit the alleged millions of years of the earth and the universe history into a so called gap between the first and second verses of Genesis.
One. If we read in verse one of Genesis, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
That's verse two. And then it goes on verse three. And God said, let there be light, and there was light and so forth.
So there's a postulates that there's a gap between, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, verse one and verse two, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Now, I read an excellent article on this by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, and I feel a certain bond with Jonathan because he's a chemist, as well, his phd in chemistry, but he is also a very strong creationist and has a far greater knowledge of Hebrew and these issues than I have.
He certainly has a very superior intellect. He's an amazing chess player with an amazing memory. And I found his article very interesting.
And so I'd like to share this with you. It was called the gap theory. Why it fails on all counts.
And he goes on to point out that this theory did not arise from contemplation from scripture, but was an attempt to harmonise the Genesis account with the belief in long ages. And it came only after secular thinkers started to promote the belief that the world was very old. And so the most common form of this theory was that God originally created a perfect world.
But then, in this supposed gap, Satan fell. God judged the world by a catastrophe, which formed most of the fossils. And so the gappists translate Genesis 1:2, as the earth became Genesis, chapter one, verse two, as earth became formless and void.
And then the six days of creation become a recreation of this fallen world. But Dr. Sarfati points out this fails on a number of grounds.
So the gap theory was totally motivated to fit in with uniformitarian geology, but really it doesn't. And uniform geologists reject the idea of any global flood, whether it's Noah's flood or the gappists Lucifer flood. And so this Lucifer's flood is an imaginary flood also postulates the fall of Satan in the existence of evil, death and suffering and disease in a world God afterwards declared “very good” in Genesis 1:31. And so Adam and Eve would have been standing on a graveyard of fossils showing death, bloodshed and cancer. Hardly “very good”.
So we can see that the theory just basically contradicts scripture. So it really makes no sense to have a theory that is supposedly harmonising science with scripture that contradicts scripture. The gap theory also contradicts the Sabbath command of Exodus, chapter 20, verses eight to eleven, which is based on the creation of the heavens and earth and the sea and everything in them in six ordinary days.
So if we look at the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, verses eight to eleven, it reads, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the 7th day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, or your man servant, or your maid servant, or your cattle or sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the 7th day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”
Now, this is quite important really, in that wherever the words heaven or heavens and earth are co joined, it is actually a figure of speech called merism, as Jonathan, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati explains, in which two opposites are combined into an all compassing single concept. And he points out that an english example would be is open day and night.
This doesn't simply mean during sunlight and darkness, but not at dusk. Rather, day and night means the whole 24 hours day night cycle. Other examples are far and near, hill and vale, high and low.
And so throughout the Bible and a number of texts, there are references to God being the creator of heaven and earth, like Genesis 14, verse 19, and also in chapter 14, verse 22, in 2 Kings, chapter 19, verse 15, in Psalms 121, verse two. And so here these verses point out that God is the creator of heaven and earth. This is the totality of creation, not just the earth in its atmosphere or our solar system alone.
It is used because Hebrew has no word for the universe and can at best say the all. So this is very important to understand that this usage is a Hebrew term for the universe. Now, Dr. Sarfati goes on to explain that the words tohu and bohu shall translate without form and void. In Genesis 1:2 are claimed by the gappists to indicate a judgmental destruction rather than something in progress of being built. But Dr. Sarfati points out that. But tohu occurs several times in the Bible, in which it is used in a morally neutral state, describing something unfinished and confused, but not necessarily evil. And also, Hebrew scholars in the church of for centuries taken the view that Genesis 1:2 is not a scene of judgement or evil state created by the fall of angels, but a description of the original undeveloped state of the universe.
And that makes a whole lot of sense. The plain and simple meaning of what Moses says is that on the first day there was a mass covered by water with no dry land, with no dry land involving features unformed and no inhabitants unfilled. Unfortunately, some people have misused the text in Jeremiah 4:23 to teach the gap theory, because it uses the phrase tohuva bohu to describe the results of a judgement.
And one of the leading gap theorists, Arthur Kustos, uses this fact to assert that without form and void must mean laid waste by judgement. But Dr. Sarfati points out, this is fallacious.
There's nothing in the Hebrew word tohuva bohu themselves to suggest that the only reason they refer to being laid waste is due to the context in which the words are found. If you read that section in Jeremiah, you get that context. They simply mean unformed and unfilled.
And this state can be due to either nothing else having been created or some created things being removed. Now, the context of Jeremiah four is a prophecy of the babylonian sacking of Jerusalem, not creation. And that's very, very plain.
In fact, Jeremiah 4:23 is known as a literary allusion to Genesis 1:2. The judgement would be so severe that it would leave the final state as empty as the world before God created anything. In other words, what he's talking about is that the destruction of Jerusalem would be so severe as a result of the Babylonian attack.
And Dr. Sarfati used an analogy. He says, when I open my word computer, my document screen is blank. But if I delete an entire document, the screen would likewise be blank. So blank means free from any text. In some contexts, the lack of text is because I haven't written anything. In others, it's due to a deletion of text. You would need to know the context to tell, which you couldn't tell from the word blank itself. However, the gappist type analysis of the word might conclude, since blank can refer to a screen with all the text deleted, the word blank itself signifies a text deletion event, even when none are stated.
So you can get the point there. Just because it can apply to something being deleted, it doesn't mean that it does. It's interesting that, for example, the flood took the world back to its condition on day two, before the land and water had separated.
And furthermore, the gappist argument actually violates the principle of God's progressive creation in scripture. And this is a very important point to understand. I know a little bit about this, but obviously Dr. Sarfati knows quite a bit more because he points out later texts presuppose the prior revelation of earlier texts, not vice versa. Therefore, Jeremiah 4:23 cannot be used to interpret Genesis 1:2 as a judgement that would be completely back to front, because an illusion works only one way. And that's a very, very important point.
Genesis was written way before Jeremiah. It was written by Moses way hundreds of years before Jeremiah. And so this is a very important point there, and an important failure of this attempt to reinterpret scripture.
Other things is we need to remember some very important texts that Jesus said, too. I'd like to read one of these texts. And this is a very important rebuttal of the gap theory comes from Jesus, because Jesus said that people were there from the beginning of creation, not after billions of years gap from the beginning.
And so if we have a look at Mark, reading from the book of Mark, chapter ten, verses four to six, Jesus said, and they said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce to put her away. But Jesus said, for your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.
And it goes on for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. And so quite clearly we see here, as Jesus said, from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. That's a very important point.
Another thing is to the English word replenish in the King James translation of Genesis 1:28, where it says, and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Again it does not support the gap theory as gappists claims. As the linguist Dr. Charles Taylor explains, when it was translated in 1611, replenish was merely a parallel to Phil and the preflex re didn't mean again, but completely so it meant completely fill. So the same Hebrew word male is used in Genesis 1:22 and is there translated fill the seas. So there was no need to translate it differently in verse 28.
So these are some important technical points again, that refute the gap know. Dr. Sarfati points out that top professors of Hebrew at world class universities are in agreement that Genesis is teaching straightforward historical narrative about the creation of everything in six earth rotation days with no gap thousands of years ago and a subsequent global flood.
Though they don't usually believe the history of Genesis, there is no doubt for them about what it says. In other words, when we look at the Bible, the Bible's very clear about what it says. So some people might not believe it, but what the Bible says can't be twisted really to support the gap theory.
So again, the majority of believers since the time of Christ understood the text to be saying that there was a literal six day creation only thousands of years ago. And this was the dominant view until philosophies about long ages became popular. But like virtually all the other attempts to harmonise long ages with Genesis, the gap theory puts death and suffering before the fall and the curse.
But again, it hasn't even the Citus basis in the Hebrew of Genesis. So again, we can't get that actually from the Hebrew. In fact, it seriously violates the tenets of historical grammatical exegesis or understanding of the text.
It was never actually thought of from the Bible. That whole gap theory actually arose due to the pressure from outside secular views and it actually fails to satisfy the proponents of those antigod views anyway. So it's really a very messy theory and it just reeks of compromise and really, in my view, undermines the gospel.
There are other similar theories, such as the day age theory, and that is that all the different days in Genesis were some really long period of time, perhaps millions of years. But again, the whole day age theory falls down to, on the basis of ecology, how you need the support systems and the structure of creation is actually brilliant and it fits the science. You have light, you have land, you have atmosphere being created, then you have the plants.
And of course, we know the plants convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the starches, but they need sunlight to do this. On day four, the sunlight is created and then of course, the animals and so forth are created on the next couple of days, all the little creepy crawly things that are important for pollination of the plants and the nitrogen cycle and all these sort of things. So the whole concept of ecology fits also the evidence for the flood.
I was taking my grandchildren for a walk around Swansea heads in Lake Macquarie to show them some of the fossilised tree trunks and trees that are buried there in the rockshelf. You can see these, and there's coal seams nearby as well. And you can see how the tree stumps are vertical and they've been buried.
And also in the cliff face. As you walk around the cliff, you can see quite severely bent layers, multiple layers of sediment that have been quite severely folded. And again, this has to have happened.
These structures have to have formed when that rock was soft and pliable, not as rock. So the evidence is just before our eyes for the global flood that fits the picture there. And when we look at.
We've just recently in our weather here, had massive storms. And I was walking another beach with friends over the weekend and we saw the massive amount of erosion that has taken place. There's headlines on the news just recently.
A number of waterfront oceanfront properties are under threat because of massive erosion of the beaches. And so again, this evidence is just in front of us that the earth isn't millions of years old. Life on Earth isn't millions of years old, it's relatively quite young.
And we have so much evidence that supports that now. The decline in the earth's magnetic field is declining so rapidly. We can measure that. We can measure that here now, today, if we extrapolate back, the earth's magnetic field would have been so strong, the heat generated would not have permitted life on earth. There's so many factors that point to a young earth that fit the measurements that we can make here and now, today. And this is the evidence.
We don't have to compromise scripture. Scripture is real and the reality is that we all die and we know that. And the picture is, though, that God doesn't want us to die eternally.
And God had a plan, that Jesus, God himself, came and died so that God may resurrect us, perfect, without evil tendencies, on the day that he returns, that we might live with him forever. And that's the promise, and that's the gospel that's offered to everyone. And that's why it's so important that this message get out.
That's the message of the Bible, that if we choose to turn from evil, if we choose to follow God's ways, follow the simple Ten Commandments there in Exodus chapter 20, if we want that lifestyle, God offers us eternal life. And that's a truly amazing offer. And the thing is that in that time, when we are recreated, we will have time with God, the creator of the universe, the creator of all these amazing flowers, plants, and saw a beautiful little tiny little floral frog, green frog the other day, just a centimetre long, hopping around on some sweet potato leaves.
So there's some amazing creation out there. So remember you've been listening to Faith and Science. If you want to relisten to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word au and click on the listen button.
And remember to share the links with your social media friends too.
I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
