What's All the Fuss About?

I'm going to continue really with the first talk I gave last night and carry through with one of the implications of it in response to the topic of what's the big fuss about the age of things. And so I want to address that briefly. I'll try to go through this briefly. Again, this is a little less, probably only about two hours of material, which I have to do in ten minutes. So, I've got fifteen minutes. Okay, no problem. We begin with the Word of God, which is the eyewitness account of the... Remember, it is the eyewitness account of the only one who was there. And there are statements the Bible makes about the physical world. which is perhaps a shocking realization for people because beginning with Galileo, Galileo I consider one of the most evil people in the history of science. He destroyed the Bible in the process. He made the argument that the Bible says nothing about the physical world. And it became a popular argument that by the establishment of the Royal Society of London, In 1670, one of their rules was, in science, we do not consult the Bible for information about the physical world because the Bible contains no information about the physical world. That has become the standard of science, that there is no information about the physical world in the Bible, and that continues to be the belief to this day. But the Bible says things about the physical world. It really does. The earth was created before the sun, the moon, the stars in Genesis chapter 1. Sea creatures created before plants. Flying animals created before land animals. There's a whole bunch of, and there's another list. The list continues here. Just the things that are pertaining to the first 11 chapters of Genesis, there's some pretty important, poignant claims about the physical world. And so we need to consider those as we look at the physical world itself. My favorite part of the physical world are the fossils. And the fossil record is an important piece of evidence or set of evidences to look at in comparison with the biblical account. When people first looked at the pile of rocks on the earth, they realized fairly early on that certain rocks were always older, certain fossils were always older than other fossils, and they began putting them into an order they called the oldest fossils the primary fossils, then the secondary fossils, then the tertiary fossils, and then the quaternary fossils. These first two came to be renamed the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic. I'm going to hold those old names, primary and secondary, emphasizing the fact that these are the first rocks, second rocks, third rocks, fourth rocks. And there's a sequence of, since it's kind of hard to, once you've got a rock already there, to slip a new rock underneath it, it seems reasonable to assume the rocks underneath are older than the rocks above. So this is time as it goes up. These rocks are older, younger, younger, younger. And in that set of rocks, there's a particular sequence of fossils. You have down here at the beginning of the primary, in fact the definition of the beginning of the primary, we have our first animal fossils. And animal fossils are found all the way up through the sequence. We have the first vertebrates after that because the first animals are actually invertebrate animals. And all of those are marine animals until we get the first land animals. You get the first insects after that, first flying vertebrates after that. The plants, the first plants come in here, first grasses here, trees here. And the reason I mention these is because they're important in the creation of the count. So we'll be looking at these particular items with respect to the creation of the count. We don't find humans until the Quaternary. And the humans, when we find them, are short-lived. We suspect only a few decades old before they die. They're omnivorous. They eat both plants and animals. We know by the wear on the teeth. And their populations are both males and females. Soon after that, not too long after that, we find them worldwide, at least everywhere on the old world continents. We have distinct races, and I don't mean the modern races, because the modern races do not show up on bone. The differences among races in the present are ridiculous. They're literally skin deep. They have no significance in the fossil record, unlike they tell you on CSI on bones. You cannot tell the difference between the races from the bones. There's literally only skin-deep differences. But in the fossil record, there are real racial differences. Huge differences in humans in different parts of the world that show up at a certain point in the Quaternary. We have tools and agriculture, first cities, and so on. There's a sequence of these things. Now, this sequence is, among other things, a record of death, because we can't find a fossil until it is dead. These are dead animals and dead plants. Paleontologists like to think of them as alive, so I have to reinterpret it in my mind, but yes, I admit that they're dead things. And it's not just that, it's a record of extinction. Most of these animals down here are species that don't exist in the present, so they're species that have come and gone from the past. There's evidence of thorns from early on in this record all the way up. There's evidence of carnivory. Now, there's more than one way to interpret this particular fossil. It could be that in the fish school, the little guy didn't learn to stop at the stop sign, and just ran right into the mouth of the other guy, and maybe the big guy isn't really eating the little guy. But we have other fossils that show decomposed, partially digested bodies of fish inside the stomach of the larger fish. So we do know that carnivory is a real phenomenon in the fossil record. It's even preserved. The preservation is sometimes so fast, is to preserve organisms eating, in the process of eating. Some modes of preservation are so fast, there's a fish deposit in Brazil where it appears that the animals died because of the fossilization process. that phosphatization was occurring in the water so rapidly that it phosphatized their gills and killed them in the water column and they fell down to the bottom as fossils. That's how fast it occurred in some of these cases. It's really quite extraordinary. But we have plenty of evidence of carnivory. We have evidence of disease. Tumors on, you wouldn't care about crinoids, but I do. These are tumors on sea creatures known as sea lilies. But there's disease from the very beginning all the way forward. what we understand about the nervous system of the organisms that live in the present, projecting that onto the organisms in the past. They are capable of suffering, and there is thus animal suffering from this point in the fossil record all the way forward. So there's a quick summary of the fossil record as it applies to biblical claims. In my particular version of the fossil record, then I would say, okay, I know that animals did not, according to the Bible now, according to the Bible, animals didn't die until after the fall of man. That means that we've got to put the fall back before the deposition of these first fossils. And so, I would say that the fall's got to come somewhere in here. I know that in the primary and the secondary, I find those rocks that I was talking about across entire continents. I mean, I can't understand that in any other way than a global flood. Well, those rocks that are found distributed across continents are restricted to the primary and the secondary. There are no such rocks in the tertiary or the quaternary, so I suggest that the primary and secondary rocks are flood rocks because of that. Now that's good because it puts the fall is going to be before that, sometime before that. So it puts the death of animals in the appropriate location. Those things before the primary must be pre-flood. It's kind of hard from this to tell exactly where, but at least this much. And then we find humans, this would then be after the flood. We don't find humans until this point. We don't find them immediately after the flood. So that suggests that there's a period of time between the flood and human fossils. But human fossils are dead humans. Humans aren't going to die right away after the flood. In fact, Noah lives for 350 years after the flood. His son, Shem, lives for 500 years after the flood. Arphaxad, born two years after the flood, lives for 400 years. And so, for hundreds of years, for centuries, there ain't going to be any people dying. Okay, so it makes sense that you wouldn't be able to find fossils right away, and further we're told that humans didn't obey God by spreading across the planet, they stayed in Babel. So I wouldn't expect dead humans to be found outside of Babel until after Babel. So when we have worldwide humans, It's got to be after Babel. So I'm going to just throw in here, somewhere around here is probably the time of Babel. And that's how I would interpret the fossil record. This allows me to accept all of the things the Bible says about the beginning of things. It really does. It allows me to accept every single one of those. The description of Eden, the cursing of the creation, the flood account, all this sort of thing. However, If I was to entertain the possibility, just entertain the possibility that the earth is actually old, not thousands of years old, but millions of years old, first of all, why would I know that? Well the only way I know that is because I've got old stuff here that I'm dating and getting an old age. So it's actually the fossil record that tells us that things are old and the dating of that fossil record by radiometric dating. So we put radiometric dates on the rocks in the record. We got the oldest rocks on the planet are dating at 3.8 billion years old. Those at the beginning of the primary at 500, about a half a billion years in age. Those at the primary secondary boundary at about a quarter billion years in age. 65 million years for the end of the secondary. 2 million years for the beginning of the quaternary. And it's because of that that we then infer that life has been here a long time and so on. But that also means then if this is true, and notice all I did here was I added the radiometric dates. Before I have an interpretation which allows me to accept scripture, but if we throw in the radiometric dates and assume they're correct, now we have to reinterpret this. This is now a record of death of 530 million years of death. This is a record of extinction for hundreds of millions of years, a record of thorns that have been there for hundreds of millions of years, carnivory disease, suffering that has been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years before humans come into the record at all. And that becomes important because if you accept all of those dates, then the earth was not created before the sun, the moon, and the stars. The earth is younger than the sun, the moon, and the stars. You can't accept that. Sea creatures are created before plants according to scripture, but in the fossil record, the sea creatures are coming before the plants, so you have to kill that one. Flying animals are created before the land animals in the creation account. You've got to throw that one out. There's a separate origin of major groups of organisms according to the Bible, but the fossil record suggests otherwise. Humans are not created from animals. As I said yesterday, it's a very clear teaching of Scripture. But the evidence from the fossil record would suggest otherwise, if you assume they're old. The claim in the Bible is Adam is the first human. But if Adam lives 5,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, there are humans that are 2 million years old. So there must be humans before Adam. And there must be eves before Adam. There's got to be marriage before Adam. So it can't be true that Adam is the first human. It cannot be true that there is anything Anything like Eden on this planet, because Eden is described as a place with a river that divides into four, there ain't no place on this planet and hasn't been since the flood that could explain, could be a place for Eden. So the description of Eden must be wrong. The claim is that Eve was made from Adam's rib, but again, Females must have pre-dated Adam, so they couldn't have come about by that means. Marriage was created at the beginning of time according to Christ. That wouldn't be the case. There had to have been something equivalent to marriage long before Adam for all those humans to exist, so that's not true. Animals didn't eat meat before the fall is the claim of Scripture, and humans didn't eat meat before the flood, but the oldest humans we have in the record, which are long before Adam and anything like that are eating meat, so that must be wrong. The claim of Genesis chapter 1 is that there's a very good creation, which lacks any moral or natural evil, but according to the record, if you believe that things are very old, there's 500 million years of death, disease, suffering, and pain long before humans come into being, so the creation was not good at the beginning. God created in six human days as an example to man according to Exodus 20 verse 11. In six days the Lord God formed the earth, so you're supposed to work in six days and rest the seventh day. That's got to be a lie. God rested at the end of the creation. Event, meaning that whatever was used as a process of bringing things into being doesn't exist, doesn't happen today. But if those ages are correct, then there has been no change in physical processes of the universe, and so that can't be true. God is not resting. The claim is that God cursed the entire creation, but if those ages are correct, there is no change, there is no curse, there is no impact of man's sin on the creation. According to the scripture, natural evil enters the creation in response to Adam's sin, but according to an old age dating, it would precede man by hundreds of millions of years. Humans first die following the curse, a very clear statement of scripture, but humans would have been dying for millions of years before Adam, if in fact that dating is correct. Thorns and thistles first appear after the sin of man, but if things are dated old, they're existing for hundreds of millions of years before man. Abel was martyred, according to the words of Christ, at the very foundation of the world. The very foundation of the earth. That makes no sense if in fact he is murdered at 6,000 years ago, but the earth is 4.5 billion years old. He is nowhere near the foundation of the world. Before the flood, humans lived for 900 years according to the scripture. If you accept the age dating, there was never a time when humans lived for 900 years. The claim in the Bible is that Noah's Flood was global. If the dating is accepted, there was never a time, 5,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 10, wherever you want to put the flood, where there was a global flood. There's no evidence for it, so that must be wrong. The claim is made that all the land animals repopulate the earth from Ararat following the flood, and there is no way you can explain the biogeography of organisms if you assume the dating is correct and start from Ararat only a few thousand years ago, with the age dating as it is. All humans descended from 8 on Noah's Ark. Again, there's humans that preceded Adam. There's many humans that preceded Noah. You can't accept that account as well. Human longevity fell from 900 years to modern values following the Flood, but for a long period, they're living for hundreds of years. And that can't be true if the age dating is correct. Most of the diversity of modern languages comes from Babel. Babel confused the languages. If you date things in the conventional manner, you cannot accept that, that in fact almost none of the languages would come from Babel. So if you actually believe the earth is old, just that simple thing of believing the earth is old, you have to reject not just one statement of God, you have to reject many statements of God. So, here's the problem. It's just this, doggone it. If you don't have this, you can interpret this in such a way as to embrace every claim of God in the Scripture. So, something must be wrong with this age dating. And here we just have other evidence, physical evidence, that something's not quite right with these things. If you, in fact, take a single rock and date it with more than one dating method, you're going to get different values, it turns out. Here's one example. By uranium-238 dating, you get an age of 1.966 billion years. But by uranium-235 dating, you get 2.2 billion. And by lead-lead dating, you get 2.5 billion. These don't overlap. It's one rock. It should have one age. So how is it, why is it, that you have different methods giving different results? I would suggest you're interpreting it wrong. There's something wrong with your interpretation. As long as these ages remain different, I would say we're not interpreting radiometric dates correctly. Now, I know we're not because the Bible would suggest we're not, but we have actually physical evidence that suggests, uh-uh, something's wrong here. Until we can interpret these dates to get the same values, we don't know what age they are by radiometric dating. And I put in here the ranges. The ranges do not overlap. There is no way these things are the same age. Another example, same sort of thing, another rock. And it goes on for every rock that you look at. It's the same result. So I would suggest that radiometric dates are not interpreted correctly. We know that from the Bible, we know that from the physical evidence, so we must disregard them and go with the biblical data. When we do, we can accept all of the things, so we get rid of that stuff, and we replace it with the interpretation I gave, and all those things that I talked about before, I can accept all those things. I can accept the order of creation. I can accept the separate origin of major groups of animals. I can accept every one of these things if I merely reject the radiometric dates, assume they're interpreted incorrectly, and assign a very different kind of interpretation, a young age creationist interpretation. So, what it comes down to is, I'm a young age creationist. I believe things are, the earth is only 6,000 years old, as the Bible would indicate. There was a global flood that destroyed it, and that sort of thing, because I believe God's eyewitness account. And there I must stand. And there I would encourage you to stand. That's all I want to say.