In the Beginning Program No SPEAKER: JOHN BRADSHAW

Transcription

1 In the Beginning Program No SPEAKER: JOHN BRADSHAW On February 12 in the year 1809, two men were born on either side of the Atlantic Ocean who would go on to profoundly affect the world. In Kentucky on that day was born the man who would go on to become the 16th President of the United States of America Abraham Lincoln the man who would sign the Emancipation Proclamation and lead the nation through the turmoil of the Civil War. And on that very same day, in Shewsbury, England, Charles Darwin entered the world. Now, although he was far from the first person to propose the idea of evolution, Darwin went on to become known as the father of evolution. He came to view what he saw in the natural world as being explainable by natural processes, and in 1859 he published the book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was a book that shook the world. Prior to Darwin, the western world was largely a creationist world. But today, things are very different. Gallup polls reveal that while nearly half of Americans believe in creationism, 32% believe in evolution guided by God, and 15% believe in atheistic evolution. TV scientist Bill Nye to quote CNN slammed creationism, saying that if people ignored evolutionary theory, their worldview became crazy. He urged adults not to teach the Biblical teaching of creation to their children. So, what can a person safely believe? The Bible begins with the words, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But a lot of people don t agree. I recently traveled to Petersburg in Northern Kentucky near Cincinnati, Ohio to visit the Creation Museum, and I spoke with scientist Dr. Terry Mortenson about creation and evolution. I began by asking Dr. Mortenson where the idea came from that the Earth is millions of years old.

2 TERRY MORTENSON: The idea of millions of years did not come from the rocks and the fossils. It came from certain assumptions that were used to interpret the rocks and the fossils, and those assumptions came out of antibiblical worldviews deism, atheism where people rejected the Biblical view of history. In contrast, for the first 1,800 years of church history and for 1,400 years before that among the Jews, they took the Bible as the revelation of the Creator the early chapters of Genesis as true history and so the date of 6,000 years roughly comes from the chronological information given in Genesis. JOHN BRADSHAW: You said that we didn t get from creationism to evolution because somebody made a startling scientific discovery. How did we get here? TM: Many people coming out of the Enlightenment rejected the Bible and they began to say, We need to explain everything by time, chance and the laws of nature. So they started looking at the rocks. They looked at the rock layers and made an assumption that there s no way that a global flood could produce what we are looking at. I mean, these rock layers are very thick. It must have taken millions of years to deposit those. Well, they were making an assumption: that they knew what a global flood could do. They were just assuming. They had not done scientific experiments to say you can t produce this particular kind of geological formation in a catastrophic flood. JB: So what s science, or good science or responsible science? TM: Well, the word science in English comes from the Latin word for science, and originally it just meant knowledge. And so before the modern scientific age, theology was a science. In fact, it was called the queen of science, the queen of knowledge. But in the wake of the Enlightenment, and with the development of modern science, science became associated with repeatable experiments and the development of technology, so we started to build steam engines, and railroads, and worked with electricity and those kinds of things. What happened in the 18 th and 19 th centuries was that what we now call the science of geology began to develop, and it was a different kind of science, because it wasn t reproducing things in the lab. It was looking at things out there in the world and trying to reconstruct the unobserved past. And so, just a concrete example, John Wesley Powell was the first geologist to go into the Grand Canyon back in the 1860s. He went into the canyon already an evolutionist and believing in millions of years. He believed that the rocks were the result of slow, gradual deposits over long, long periods of time.

3 So when he went into the Grand Canyon and saw these massive layers, and he saw the muddy Colorado River going through this huge canyon, he thought, Well, slow, gradual deposition laid down these layers, and the Colorado River has just been flowing for millions of years to carve this canyon. JB: So why should people believe creation from a scientific point of view? Is there evidence in the rocks that point to this global flood? TM: I think we both know that it s common for people today to view the world as being millions and millions of years old, and to look at the Grand Canyon as something that was produced over long ages of time. JB: How in view of the science can we go to the Grand Canyon and see an altogether different picture? TM: Well, I m going in with an eyewitness testimony. When an evolutionist goes into the Grand Canyon, it s not even a question on their radar: could a global flood be responsible for what I m looking at? Whereas when I go to that eyewitness testimony of the Creator given to us in the book of Genesis, and that s in my mind, is there evidence in the rocks that point to this global flood? JB: Give me a scientific explanation for the Grand Canyon. TM: Well, there are a number of things we show people when we go into the canyon. One is a feature that s called cross bedding. You have very strong evidence that that very thick layer was laid down under an enormous amount of water, moving at a good speed. There is another feature that we show them. They re called nautiloids. They are fossils that are like an ice cream cone, a pointed ice cream cone. And they re related to squid. They have a head sticking out of the cone, and there s about a seven-footthick layer in the red-wall limestone that s about 400-feet thick that is just filled with these, and they ve been spotted in different places, all the way through this layer, all the way up near Las Vegas. There s an estimated billion or so of these creatures buried in this one thin layer and Steve Austin, a Ph.D. geologist, did some research on them. He took a compass and a GPS and plotted where he found them all along this layer in the Grand Canyon. He noted their orientation. I think 15% of them are buried in an upright position with their point down. He noted that they are not all just higgledy-piggledy in all directions, but there s a general indication I can t remember if it indicates a flow from the Southwest to the Northeast or Southeast to the Northwest, but what he argues in a paper that he presented to the National Park Service and they were very interested, the geologists was that this was a massive catastrophic event, a mass burial of these creatures, and that helps to explain the orientation.

4 These cones are in an upright position, and you wouldn t expect the creature to just die a natural death and go down and sink into the ocean floor and just stand there perfectly upright for hundreds or thousands of years waiting to slowly get settled. Another feature that we show is the folding of rock. Now, you can bend solid rock under high temperatures and pressure, but when you do, you metamorphose or you change the structure of the rock. But in these examples, the rock stays exactly the same character all the way through the bend. JB: Many people have seen this on the sides of roads, that type of figure, where you get layers that fold, and this is what you re talking about, right? TM: Right. JB: OK. So what do you see when you look at these legs? Doesn t it show taking the evolutionist viewpoint doesn t it show, well, this one laid down over 150 million years, and then the next one came, because this is what modern science typically teaches, correct? TM: Yes. JB: That they laid down over millions of years. TM: But it wouldn t lay down the layers so that it all flowed the same way, and if the rock layer was being deposited slowly, and then you had an earthquake, which is what would cause the movement, it would break the rock. Or if there was enough stuff above, it would, with the heat and the pressure, allow it to bend. But it would transform the character of the rock in the bend, and what we see doesn t fit that at all. What it fits is the conclusion that those rock layers were bent when they were still relatively soft and moist, shortly after they were deposited, and then the northeast end of the Grand Canyon you have the Kaibab up there, where the whole pile of sediments which the evolutionists say represents 300 million years of time the whole pile is bent the same direction. This indicates strongly to creation geologists that the whole pile was still relatively wet and moist and soft. JB: See, you ve got me convinced. And as I listen to you, I say to myself: Why doesn t everybody believe this? TM: Well, I come back to the Bible, because that informs my understanding of the world, and the Bible says that all of us are sinners. We re in rebellion against our Creator, and Paul says in the book of Romans, chapters 1 and 2, that the whole of creation bears witness to the existence of God, and at least some of the attributes are characteristics of God. In chapter 2, he says that God has written His moral law in the heart of every person.

5 Our conscience tells us we either did something right wrong, and what Paul says in Romans 1 is that we all do this to a greater or lesser extent. We push down the truth. We suppress that truth because we don t want to deal with God. We don t want to deal with our sin. You know, there s a lot of discussion today about Intelligent Design, and people saying there s strong evidence for a designer. I agree with that, but it s fairly safe to entertain the idea of a designer as long as you don t say who the designer is. It could be aliens in outer space. I can live my life the way I want, but to consider a global flood and a young earth, you re now face to face with the reality of a God that the Bible describes who is not only loving and merciful and patient, but holy and just. So if a person is not prepared to really face that truth, they re going to suppress the truth. They re going to find any other explanation to evade that. JB: Which leads me to my next question. It s not just atheists who embrace evolution, even Christians, even Christian teachers and preachers. Even Christian academics. TM: Yep. JB: who claim to believe the Bible. The pope came out and said that evolution and at least how he interpreted the Word of God, were not mutually exclusive. How is that? TM: If we believe the Bible is the Word of God, then we need to carefully look at what it says. And I find that a lot of Christians, including academics, who say: You know, the age of the earth doesn t matter, or, you can accept that God evolved the body of Adam from an ape, and then he breathed into that, and that became Adam. What is really disturbing to me, John, is that as I read their writings, I don t see them carefully handling the actual Biblical text on the key verses. So it s easy to wave my hands and say, There s no conflict between this view and the Bible if I don t look carefully at the text. JB: Is it possible to bring together the teachings of creation and evolution? TM: Not if you re really paying attention to what the evolutionists say and what the Bible says. JB: There s another very common argument in favor of evolution and against Biblical creation that I want to ask you about. That s carbon dating. TM: Carbon dating there are various dating methods using radioactive isotopes. Carbon-14 is one, but carbon dating is never used to date rocks. It s used to date former living things that have carbon in them, so the maximum age you could date something with carbon-14 is about 80,000 years.

6 So, they use other methods. They look at well, how many uranium atoms are there and how many lead atoms are there in the rock? We have observed for 100 years that uranium decays into lead at this x-rate. They assume that it has always decayed at that rate, but the half-life for uranium to lead is 4.5 billion years. So, they didn t observe it all that time. They ve only observed it for 100 years, and they have extrapolated on the basis of the assumption of a constant rate. JB: Well, is that not a fair assumption? TM: It could be, except that we have creation scientists who have done a lot of research in this area. They start with the Eyewitness, the Creator, who says that creation is only a few thousand years old. There was a global flood, so they go out and they look at the rocks. They ve taken rock samples and they look for things. They ask questions about the rocks. They probe in certain areas because they are starting with that Eyewitness, and they ve found a lot of good evidence that the decay rates have not been constant in the past that there were faster orders of magnitude. If that were the case, that would shrink those millions of years to thousands. JB: Dramatically. TM: They used carbon-14 to date coal, which is dated anywhere from, I think, about 35 million to 245 million years old, and they dated them with carbon-14. The dates these scientists got back for each of the 10 samples at different levels and supposedly different ages was all about the same. I think it was about 58,000 years. Now, the creationists don t believe that s the real age of the coal because they were using still the same naturalistic assumptions that the evolutionists were using. They believe that the flood would have a huge impact on carbon dating. They also dated some diamonds. The rock layer that enclosed the diamonds was something like 2 billion years old. They dated the diamonds, and the dates for the diamonds with carbon-14 were only several tens of thousands of years. JB: So even though that s still older than a young earth, it s radically different from the assumptions. TM: And it s saying, How do you get a diamond completely enclosed in a rock that is 2 million years old, and the diamond is only 50,000 years old? There s something wrong here. They ve dated rock layers in the Grand Canyon. The lava that flowed over the top edge of the north rim and the south rim are dated by some methods to be older than lava deposits down at the bottom of the canyon that are supposedly at least 300 million years older than the lava flows at the top.

7 JB: So what do we deduce from this about carbon dating? TM: These dating methods are not telling us the true age of the rocks. They are giving us erroneous dates because of several key assumptions the evolutionists use to interpret what they see. So, they take their sample and they get uranium and lead atoms. That doesn t tell them the age. They have to plot this on a chart and then they have to interpret what they are looking at so the uranium and the lead don t tell you the age of the rock by themselves. It has to be interpreted, and the interpretation is very much influenced by the assumptions about the past. JB: The flood. TM: Yep. JB: The flood in Noah s day. The Bible talks about it. It s very clear. For a Creationist, the flood answers a lot of questions. The Grand Canyon, the layers, we look at those as being laid down by the flood quickly. Give me some reasons why we can believe that there was a flood. TM: Let me start with the Biblical reasons, because there are a lot of Christians who have accepted the millions of years who believe that Noah s flood was just an extensive but localized flood in the Middle East. But the Biblical text from Genesis 6-8 is clearly describing a global flood. If the flood had been just in the Middle East, there d be no need to build an ark because the animals and the birds outside the flood zone wouldn t care and they could repopulate the whole area if all the other creatures died. And God could have just told Noah to go on a vacation to Europe. No need to build this huge boat. So the purpose of the ark the fact that the Bible says all of the high mountains under the heavens were covered, and since water seeks its own level, the only way you are going to cover the high mountains is through a global flood. Now, the Bible doesn t say that the Himalayas were in existence before the flood. The Himalayas are actually the result of the flood and the mountain ranges the major mountain ranges are all geologically recent. They are made of sedimentary rocks that were once flat and were thrust up, so we don t have to assume that you had to have 29,000 feet of water added to the ocean. So, there are a number of factors. In Genesis it says that all creatures in whose nostrils is the breath of life, perished. Then there s the rainbow promise in Genesis 9 that never again would God flood the world with a global flood. JB: So Biblically speaking, there is no way around the flood. TM: No. It was global and it was catastrophic.

8 JB: And it s fundamental to the Bible. TM: Absolutely. Geologically, we see massive layers. For example, in India, there s a massive lava flow on a scale that we don t see today, and there are other places where huge flows of lava changed into solid rock. That fits with the Bible. The Bible says that the fountains of the great deep burst open, and with study we see that the words used in the Bible are clearly speaking of tectonic breaking of the crust of the earth. We see sedimentary layers that are continent-wide or nearly so that are just massively extensive. These are not the sediments of a river delta. They re just too extensive. We see evidence of sea creatures buried in these sediments. We see mass graveyards where there are millions of creatures buried together in high concentrations with all kinds of creatures buried together. In many, we see land animals and sea creatures buried together. They are not buried where they lived. They aren t even buried where they died. They are buried where they are buried, and as we mentioned earlier, we see cross bedding, which indicates a turbulent flow of water. The very fact that we find fossils speaks of a global flood, because if you have a creature die around here, we hunt deer all year round. I tell people most of the year that our people hunt with their car as they slam into a deer. If you leave the deer on the side of the road and the highway department doesn t come to pick it up, scavengers and decay microorganisms will erase the evidence. So to make a fossil, you have to bury that creature fast, and we see evidence of creatures being buried alive. There are even creatures with other creatures fossilized in their stomachs, so they didn t even get to finish digesting lunch! There are fossilized worms. There is fossilized animal manure. You know, a cow pie doesn t lay on the field for years in pristine condition. So there s folding in the rocks and this speaks of catastrophic processes on a global scale. JB: It s interesting. Christians people who believe in creation are often dismissed as non-thinkers. But it seems to me that if you really think about how we got here creation, a flood divine intervention is the only suitable, satisfactory explanation for the world we see around us. TM: The more I read and the more I study, the more persuaded I am of the truth of the Bible. JB: Dr. Mortenson, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. TM: Good to be with you, John. JB: Thank you.

9 Creation and evolution. The Word of God points us to a God who is the God of creation. Together, let s pray to that God right now. Would you pray with me? PRAYER: Our Father in Heaven, I thank you for the fact that the Bible states with great confidence that in the beginning, God created. And I m grateful that you are not only the Creator, but the Re-Creator. David prayed, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me, and I pray now that you would be our Creator and Re-Creator and create in me, in each of us, that right spirit that you want us to have. Bless and keep us, Lord, and be in our lives the God of creation and recreation. I thank you today in Jesus name, Amen. It Is Written Box O Thousand Oaks, CA USA Tel: (805) Fax: (805)