Welcome to evolution. Impossible. A production of three ABN, Australia.
Television. Our host is Dr. Sven Ostring with special guest Dr.
John Ashton and our panel. You're joining us for Evolution Impossible, where we're exploring the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution. And we have to say that we're starting to get a deluge of reasons to see why evolution is impossible.
My name is Dr Sven Ostring. Back with me in the studio today is Ellie Turner. Thanks for joining us.
We've got Stephen Aveling- Rowe, good to have you here. And Jeandre Roux. Glad to have you back with us.
And of course, we've got our resident expert, Dr. John Ashton. Where would we be without you on this journey together with all of us, you know, talking about a deluge of evidence, one of the landmark events in the Bible is the flood, which the Book of Genesis tells us covered the whole Earth.
That would be a pretty incredible flood indeed. And yet some scholars maintain that the flood was only a local event which impacted a region in the Middle East. But what we want to know is where does the scientific evidence point? Does it point to a local flood or a global flood? So, John, help us out here.
Why are scholars and experts so concerned and really believe that the flood was a local event? Well, there are, I guess, some other histories in the area that talk about the flood. And also, I don't know really why they want to say that. Maybe they think it's impossible that it could be a global event and therefore it had to be a local event.
But really, if it was just a local event, why didn't God say to Noah, well, just pack up your family and go for a holiday, north or south, just walk over the mountains. And why did all the animals have to go in the ark, just migrate the animals? It just doesn't make sense. And of course, you've got the meteorite impact, which was supposedly destroyed, all of the dinosaurs, which was global, and yet why not have a global flood as well? So moving on to the scientific evidence, we want to explore with you and find out what is the scientific evidence that we have for a global flood event? Well, the global flood event is actually recorded in the scientific textbook.
So they admit that at the end of the Cretaceous period, the geology textbooks essentially say the whole world was covered by water. And there are a number of other extinction events, too. First one, the Order Vician, about 450,000,000 years ago according to conventional dating.
And then another series of extinction events. So the geologists recognized that there were extinction events that wiped out huge numbers of animals at those time, huge percentages of marine life in one event, and so forth. And so these are recognized.
These global extinction events are recognized. The big issue is that the Bible puts these events only thousands of years ago. Right.
So it's a matter of timing. Yes, only thousands of years ago. And of course, a lot of people feel that the story of Noah's Ark and this sort of thing is a little bit childish, but something we can discuss another time.
But the geological evidence for a massive catastrophic flood is certainly there. In fact, there's been books written now, the Earth's Catastrophic Past. One of the things that the author of that, for example, Dr.
Derek Ager points out, you know, I don't want creationists to grab onto know, I still believe in long ages, but we can see that long ages don't fit either. We can talk about that perhaps another time. But the evidence is there that there was a catastrophic destruction of life on Earth.
The geologists put them over a period of about 400 million years, apart from about 450,000,000 years ago to 65 million years ago, whereas the Bible puts this all together. But the Bible picture has some other advantages too, in that in the Bible, it talks about the fountains of the deep opening interesting and coming forth. And a lot of people just have this picture, oh, rain for 40 days and long period of time, sort of thing.
Yeah. But in actual fact, the Bible talks about massive and these fountains of the deep. That's what the Bible says.
And that's as far as we can know. But it probably involved massive amounts of water, groundwater that was under there that would have been much warmer. Of course, that would have heated the oceans up as well.
And so we had a lot of climatic conditions that occurred. How this actually provides a beautiful explanation for the ice ages, because we would have had this massive warming effect after the flood. And then, of course, with a lot of volcanic matter and ash and this sort of thing, we would have had cooling that occurred after that, which would produce risa and so produce these cycles afterwards.
So going into the evidence itself, do we find in the strata evidence for this global flood? What is the specific evidence we're looking at? Well, in particular, if we say, look at the Grand Canyon, we see all these layers on top of one another that have been laid down, that must have been laid down underwater. And this covers huge areas. Like over the continent of the United States, we have massive amounts of material deposited.
So if we have a layer that's covering, say, over a million square kilometers, that's a massive amount. And that's not a local flood. No.
And it might be 30 or 40 meters thick, this particular layer, that's a huge and this is a solid material. To carry that amount of material, you think 30 meters deep of solid material spread over a million square kilometers requires a huge amount of water to transport that huge volume of solid material. And the average density of rock is about 2.7,
so nearly three times the density of water has got to be moved, so a lot of force and to be carried by huge distances. So we're talking about material spread over huge areas of the continent and all the continents spread like this that buried these creatures at these time. One of the interesting things is there's no erosion in between the layers.
So, again, these layers are dated millions of years apart. And of course, some of the shots of the Grand Canyon might have 300 million years or 200 million years showing in that particular shot. And yet all those layers of pearl, there's no signs of erosion.
And yet in the Grand Canyon itself, we have massive erosion and I get erosion in my gravel driveway just when we get you got a Grand Canyon, your very home, mini one, mini one, very many. Another coastal example is folding. We often find that the strata are folded very sharply in this sort of thing.
Once, if those layers are millions of years apart, they're not in the hard rock, they're not going to fold up. And we can see that those folds represent very plastic forms of the rock. Everywhere we look, when we look at these structures, it all points that these layers can't be millions of years apart, that the evolutionists require for their theory.
It all has to have happened at a very recent time. Very interesting. Very interesting.
Stephen, it looks like you've got a question for John. Absolutely. So, talking about the stratification there and the lack of erosion between these layers, we look at things like the great coal deposits, which we have very close to us here in Australia, the great Newcastle deposits around here.
And I've seen with my own eyes, we see, for example, fossilized wood and things like that, trees that are spanning across many meters through these different layers. Well, in my experience, timber seems to decay after decades, not millions of years. I mean, in millions of years there wouldn't be much left.
So how is it that this timber has remained there, was able to fossilize and then some of it's turned into coal or has been preserved in other ways? How does that work? Well, again, these are major problems. I don't know how geologists attempt to explain this in terms of the timescales when I was doing geology. We simply learnt the layers, we learned how to do the mapping and so forth.
In stratigraphy, in paleontology, we learned the names of the fossils. But I do know, talking to people, that there are, and particularly the coal miners in this area have come across these vertical tree fossils preserved even in the coal seams, and they were even known to Lyle, Charles Lyle, as I mentioned in previous session, the ones in Nova Scotia. So these are major problems, these polystrade fossils, and they're found in many places around the world and of course, the mountain hell interruption that occurred in the 1980, I think it was, or thereabouts when those trees were blown out, and then they float in the lake and so forth.
We can see how that sort of scenario could explain these structures. But the important point is that these structures pass through many layers that if we use the Lyle type dating approach, would span tens of thousands, a hundred thousand, maybe even millions of years, whereas in actual fact, there but in actual fact they can't be. So everywhere we look, we've got this sort of evidence, right? So moving to this concept of the Ice Age, as you mentioned before, it's a time which fascinates kids the woolly mammoths and the saber tooth tigers and things like that.
So I guess it's a challenge. How does the Ice Age fit into the flood account in terms of and compared to the Lankovich cycles and all of that kind of things in terms of geological history? Yeah, sure. Okay, well, many of us have heard about the ice core data, and the ice cores go back hundreds of thousands of years and this sort of thing.
So let's have a look at this. There's powerful evidence for ice ages and in the relatively recent past. For example, the official age for the Grand Canyon Ice Age is only about 12,000 years, even though Lyle dated it about 35,000 years from his guess.
And his guess was way too old, and that was because of recent ice Age activity in the area. But there's no actual secular model that can explain the ice ages. So when we look at the Malkovich sort of theory, it's looking at perturbations, or slight perturbations in the till of the Earth bearing the amount of sunlight, but it's not enough change in energy to actually trigger this.
But they've got nothing else to sort of hang their hat on. But I've had a look at this ice age data because a lot of questions are raised on this when they say, people say to me, hey, John, so you believe the Earth's only six and a half thousand years old. What about these ice ages? They measure them, they go back 100,000 years.
Well, the data just isn't there for a number of reasons. When you apply increased pressure to ice, it melts. If you have a block of ice and you put a wire across it with a couple of weights, it just slowly moves down because under that little bit of wire, increased pressure, decreased melting point.
And so what happens is that as the layers get compressed and compress, the melting point change. So any particular layering there is going to blur. Plus, when you look at the literature, you have that up in Antarctica, for example, you've got maybe 30 different ice ages supposedly recorded.
Yet you go the Greenland ice core, and there's only one ice age recorded. So there's major discrepancies between this ice age data and also the interpretation becomes very very blurred and it's actually a very similar phenomena in terms of when they date these valves. And another area is they say we look at these lake valves and these are where you get these little multilayered layers that are supposed to represent sedimentation that's occurred with the melting snows through the years.
The whole thing is that and they say that they can date these back tens of thousands of years and so forth. The whole problem is that doesn't really work in real life. We have what is called bioturbulence and bioturbulence mixes these layers up though when you dig down in beach sands and this sort of thing today, you don't see these layers, you see them for a meter or so down and then it's all mixed up.
That's why we observed. So the fact that we observe these layers in the valves and these sort of things represents really very short time frame. Another fascinating thing with the ice courses and we can do this calculation is that we know that a group of bombers ran out of fuel and landed on one of the Greenland glaciers during World War II.
So we've got the data when that happened, they were able to land on the ice, they landed on the ice, the crews got off, the planes were lift there, they had no fuel and they got the rescued the people, they left the planes there. Now the planes since when I am 41, 42 whenever it was, have been buried, right? But a few years ago they drilled down and they got one. Matter of fact they got one out, right, but it was under something like 250ft of old did it still work? Amazing, wouldn't it? Well, I suppose it might have evolved pretty well, hadn't evolved.
But the interesting thing was if you just do the simple math and you look at how much snow fell over that plane in that particular time, this is something we can measure today, right? And if people want to apply the uniformitarian principle, let me apply that uniformitarian principle and the whole thickness of the Greenland ice sheet would have been deposited less than 2000 years ago. So since the time of Christ. So people say to me could be a lot younger than 100,000 years, can only be a couple of thousand years to deposit that amount of ice.
And people say to me oh John, there's a different snowfall rate there, it's much slower in these other areas. And I said well, how do you know that? It's not something you know, if I go out and measure this it explains everything. Again in short time frames, right? And this is an important point I think when we need to look at all this data.
What does the data that we can go out and measure today tell us? Right? And it really all points to the young ages and a physician like for example, one of the guys I met just recently was he specializes in studying fossils and he's done some work at the whale fossils that they've found on the mountains in Peru. Top of the mountains? Yes, on the top of a mountain. Not buried on the top in the desert.
They've been around. Now, whales, although they can breathe there, they're not noted for mountain climbing there's. A whole pot of these whales are found there and they're very well preserved.
The baleen still there, hasn't broken off so obviously very quickly. But why are they up there? Why are the whales up there? Now, this rays are very another. When we look at the Earth's surface, we find crinoid stems in the limestones and this sort of thing up on the top of Mount Everest, right? Now, these little creatures live down the bottom of the water sort of thing.
Why are they up there? So would it be geological kind of thrusting that they talk about? Would that have got the whales to the top? Well, that's right. So what we have is we talk about this picture of the flood, right, and this sort of thing. But the flood embraces a whole catastrophic event where God destroyed the surface of the Earth at that time and starred again, and it involves not only the deluge of water, but involves the movement of probably the continents and pushing up the mountain ranges.
So the picture that we get from geology, from what we observe today what we can go out and measure, drill down with our cores go out with our little pick and see and photograph today the picture that we have is that we have all these parallel layers that were laid down on top of one another. Must have been laid down very rapidly because there's no erosion in between or they're folded up and which must have happened while they were all soft. And so all the layers must have been soft.
They rapidly buried a whole lot of creatures, from tiny little things to really big things that are all mixed up. And then after that time, there was massive movement on the crust that pushed up the mountains in the different ranges, the Alps, the Himalayas, South American mountains and so forth. And that's why we find these fossils up there.
And then after that particular time, over hundreds of years, there were massive temperature cycles as the Earth cooled down, became very cold and then warmed up again. And that explains exactly what we know. Dr.
John, one of the things I was wondering is just backtracking a little bit to the strata, the widespread stratas. I heard some people refer to that and say this is evidence to say that the continents were previously connected and then moved apart over millions of years. What would you say to that? So the idea of gondwana, yeah.
So what they're saying is, well, that could explain the fact that we have similar layers of strata around the world that these things all sort of moved apart and so forth. Well, it most certainly could have been continental grift, and it could have been actually, in fact, quite rapid, particularly if it was lubricated hydraulically with water and so forth. I guess we're getting into space here where there's only certain things that we can know, and there are things that we can't know.
We can make measurements today and do our best, but if we haven't observed it yes, but there certainly could have been movement, how that happened, where the energy came from and this sort of thing. I understand creationists have done models of this to show that, yeah, they could have very rapid movement and this sort of thing. A lot of issues to look at in those particular models.
But I think one of the important points in my reading is that the creationist models that are being developed seem to explain things better than the long age models. And particularly, really, we have so much evidence that the long ages aren't there, so they really can't fall back there. Ali, you've been very patient to jump in with a question.
Did you have a comment or a thought for John? Yeah, look, going back to talking about the Grand Canyon earlier and the different layers, I'm just wondering how we know that they were deposited underwater. Is there any other ways that those layers could have been deposited, or are we sure that it was from some kind of watery catastrophe? Yes, we would expect that the volume of material there would have to be moved underwater. Of course, your sedimentary rocks does include rocks carried by any sort of fluid, and so that could include air.
But the structures and so forth are not as likely as the dune. So it very strongly points to massive movement of water. And I think geologists would accept that.
They wouldn't question that those layers were laid down underwater at that particular time. And to move such massive amounts of material, I mean, some of the areas cover one of the things I think it's the Chillini. I'm not saying that right deposit it's over about two and a half million square kilometers, and it's quite thick, many meters thick.
So that's a huge volume of eroded material that has to be moved. It's massive, catastrophic conditions, very different to anything we've observed, like in recent human history. I think it's evidence.
It's a one off type event that occurred as recorded in the Bible at that time. And in the book, you also talked about how there were some layers which actually were kind of thrust up and moved across the top of other layers and pointed out the evidence, how that pointed towards the flood. Could you just share with us what the idea was there? Yes, well, of course, sometimes they find slabs of rock layers that are in the wrong order.
And so in order to explain these we have overthrusting and this is an area where there's a bit of contention and debate because some of these areas cover the overthrusting, has been for a long way. So why didn't the rocks will break up? Because of the friction. Again, the only possible explanation for these big slabs of rock to move so far with overthrusting is that they had to be hydraulically lubricated, otherwise they're going to break up.
One of the other factors I guess I haven't mentioned is that there are areas where there's like 100 million years of fossils of layers missing and yet there's no signs of erosion in between. Where do they go? Well, they're just not there. And so I think one of the things is that in different layers they just weren't deposited in the first place.
Interesting. Yes. It's not that they were eroded away, they just weren't deposited.
So again, when we look at all these scenarios and these sort of irregularities, it points to the fact that it had to be a very short term event, not even over thousands of years. And then you've got the examples in the Mount St. Helens eruption where the canyons form very quickly when they had an eruption that carved out a canyon and the volcanic ash that was deposited that formed all these layers.
That if you looked at them, you might interpret them at tens of multiple tens of thousands of years and yet they formed in a few hours this sort of scenario. We've also got the island of Certese that exploded again off Iceland. The amazing structures that formed with that before the ISO, it showed that again, within a few years.
I think within one year they had the first plants on Certi after the surface cooled down and then within a few years they had permanent plants established. Now we know with the flood that the seeds and all this material would have been washed around and spread around. And so when we saw Certsi and how quickly that island, that barren volcanic island out in the middle of the sea got plants on it and the plants grew, it shows that the earth could, after the flood, reform very quickly.
Plus the flood was a miracle as well and God had a plan there to destroy the earth. But I think when we look at the science and the bottom line is this when we look at the science of what we can go out and measure today, it fits the biblical model to a T. Geologists can't explain these rapid folding strata.
They can't explain the fact that there are no erosionists occurring in between these layers. And yet these layers span millions of years, and yet they're all flat and parallel. Even massive coal beds are hard to explain.
Yes, the way that hasn't decayed over time, but that was compressed. And as recently I saw some research, it takes a very short amount of time to actually form the coal, relatively speaking, and the long ages might have caused its decline. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I'm not an expert on coal formation, but I think the flood model again explains that coal, where you have the heat from the volcanoes, all these fossils, massively cleared, they float, form together and turbulence then get buried and dumped on and get buried.
So the flood model certainly explains the coal and the fact that you have all this timber buried and then the heat to coalifiers and so forth. Another visually very stunning thing that we see around the world is chalk, the cliffs of Dover, like Cliffs of Dover. And, yeah, just how does that kind of fit into the flood model and also the geological so that's the Cretaceous and of course, that particular deposit there spreads from Ireland through to know it's a massive deposit full of fossils.
But these similar chalk deposits for the Cretaceous, great Australian bite, same period. So they're all all around the world. So, again, these deposits that have these same structures all around the world point to the flood being a global event, impossible to be a series of little local floods, because little local floods wouldn't produce these same patterns of strata that we see around the world today.
And so the little local flood model in all these different areas around the world just doesn't work. Everything points to the biblical model. And really, I think it's a wake up call then.
I think our science would progress far more rapidly if we accepted that the Bible in actual fact was inspired by God. So, John, as we start to wrap up and head towards the finish of our episode, could you just summarize what's the key evidence that leads you to believe in a global flood? The fact that when we look at the global picture of the surface of the Earth, there's this thin layer of sedimentary rock laid down by water. We've got all these massive sedimentary beds around here with parallel rock layers in them all laid out.
We've got all the buried fossils of all the buried animals. To me, it just all points to one big global catastrophe. It's amazing.
So there really is scientific evidence for a global flood, and that really builds my faith and confidence in the Bible. And you may be wondering if there's any other evidence that the flood was a catastrophe that impacted our whole entire planet. Well, you'll definitely want to join us next time as we explore the historical evidence for a global flood.
In the meantime, you can catch up on previous programs on our website, threeabenaustralia.org Au and the Other thing as well. If you want to dive into the evidence, go to your favorite online bookstore and get one of Dr.
John Ashton's book, Evolution Impossible. We look forward to you joining us next time. Thank you for joining us on Evolution Impossible, a production of Three ABN, Australia television.
If you have any comments or questions, send an email to
[email protected] Au or call us within Australia on 024-973-3456. We'd love to hear from you.
