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. We're continuing our Evolution Impossible journey, exploring whether the theory of evolution is even possible.
I'm Dr. Sven Ostring. We have Dr John Ashton with us, who actually wrote a book called Evolution Impossible.
It's based on almost 50 years of research that he's done in this area. Thanks for being with us again, John. Joining us today is Justin Torossian.
Good to have you back. Harley Southwell for the first time. I hope you enjoy it.
And, of course, Melvin Sandelin. Good to have you back as well. Last time, we explored the geological evidence for a catastrophic global flood, but of course, there are still animals and people living on Earth today, so all life could not have been destroyed in that event.
If there were people who survived, then there may be other historical evidence for a global catastrophe like that. So, John, you've been doing the research for a while now, and we just want to know, where would you go to find other historical evidence for the flood? Well, this was one of the most interesting areas of my research. When I began looking for the historical evidence for the flood, and particularly chronological evidence, I was very interested in trying to find ancient chronologies.
By chronologies, you mean dates for this event? Well, no. Yes, historical accounts that listed dates and chronologies of when events actually happened that could be related to our modern calendar system. And so we could work out the times.
And surprisingly, there weren't too many that went beyond the Assyrian period that we would have. So once you go further than about seven or 800 BC, everything seems to get a little bit vague. Right.
And particularly Egyptian history is quite problematic, as many people have noted, with perhaps centuries of discrepancies there. Okay, so you've got Egyptian, you've got Assyrian. Where else would we go for this evidence for the flood? Well, worldwide.
There are, of course, flood accounts worldwide in virtually all the cultures and people that study anthropology and history have made notes on these that the cultures in South America, Central America, North America, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe all have some sort of account where in the past people were really bad and God decided to destroy the work, the world. And in most of the cases, probably more than 90% of the cases, the world was destroyed by a flood. There were only a few survivors, and those survivors were in some sort of watercraft.
And so this is quite fascinating when you look at the different accounts, the description in the Bible is one that really sort of fits the scientific, an accurate historical perspective, in that the descriptions actually fit sort of science in many ways, too. The account there. So we've got the flood account in Genesis, the Hebrew history.
Yes. As recorded by moses. And what would be another really good flood account, one of the best? Well, that would be definitely the best.
What are you getting at there in terms of an account which kind of matches what we read about in the Bible? What's the closest match? Well, if you're referring to the Gilmish Epic, is that what you're thinking of? Okay, well, that one there is really a more sort of a mythical account, and it's not really written so much as a historical account. But associated with that, we do have the Assyrian king lists that are recorded, say, on the world Blandel prison. Now, that is a more sort of historical type of account that has been recorded and that records the flood as a historical event.
Okay, so that is definitely a more powerful scenario. Certainly that's because in chapter eight of your book, you give some of these examples, like the ones you give now, and also that in China in one of the languages, the ancient languages, that they have a symbol for the flood. So it's really everywhere around the world that they have some record of a flood.
But you also say that some of them are more mythical based. Is it because there are so many of those stories that might seem like myths that science therefore also ignores kind of the Genesis account of it, that it kind of thinks that everything is therefore kind of myth? Well, we can't really necessarily say that, but the other accounts are certainly not very scientific, such as some of the accounts have the vessel as a cube, which we know would not be very stable in water. Other accounts have that the couple were rescued in a basket carried by a giant fish.
And this sort of thing, the biblical account, when we look at the dimensions of the ark and so forth, it was interesting. I was reading an article only a few days ago that in the 1850s, they began designing ships to roughly the specifications of the ark, and that went on as part of naval architecture for quite a long time. So the modern ship design is essentially based on the rough dimensions of the ark.
It was a very, very seaworthy design. And so that's some of the interesting facts. But some of these other stories, yes, they're very crazy.
They're associated with some of the people that we associate with Greek mythology, like Zeus and so forth, these people. And so they're definitely mythological, whereas the account in the Bible lists a particular day and a particular month. It lists the generations.
It actually names the people. And I think one of the really fascinating things that comes out of this that has blown the minds of some of my detractors in this area is that Noah's grandsons, there are cities named after Noah's grandsons and great grandsons. Like, for example, Egypt, the country.
Egypt is named after Noah's grandson, Mizram. So Egypt is just the greek translation of Mizram. That is one of the sons of Ham, one of the sons of Noah.
So that blows people's minds away that here we have a country that today one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, and it is named after Noah's grandson. A matter of fact, I have an Encyclopedia Britannica, a very old one, at home. And the atlas, when you open it up to Egypt, it's not called Egypt.
It's called Mizra, even though it's in English. It's in English inside of Peter botanical. How do historians and archaeologists and sociologists or anthropologists rather, if it's not for a common experience like a global flood that led to all of these flood myths all over the world, the hundreds of them that you mentioned.
A few of how do they explain all of these nations and people groups detached from each other, having similar, at least somewhat similar accounts? Yes, I'm not sure generally, many of them actually say that it reinforces the evidence for the Bible. And I think the Bible as a historical account. And we need to understand, too, that in secular education today, there's a lot of emphasis to try and discredit any historical evidence that supports the Bible.
But continuously we're being surprised with particularly more archaeological discoveries that are confirming the accuracy of the Bible. And of course, when we go back to Genesis and pre flood, what happened before the flood, then Genesis is really the only reliable account that we have. And one of the reasons I think we can believe it is because the history after the flood, as recorded by Genesis is backed up by other secular history events.
And this is very powerful evidence in regard to that, though, you would think that so soon after the flood, with only eight people surviving, but then all these civilizations like Egypt and Babylonia and all these countries forming, how would such a population grow so quickly after such a catastrophic event? Yeah, so in actual fact, we have a genetic bottleneck there because we have the and for people that aren't familiar with the account, we have the account that Noah and his wife and his three sons and their wives went into the ark. So they were the only humans, eight people. And it's very interesting that many of these flood myths talk about only eight people being saved.
And I think you mentioned earlier the Chinese one. It refers to just eight people being saved. And it's quite interesting that traditionally Noah was believed to have gone to China and founded China.
That's one of the traditions there. It's very interesting, but genetically speaking, we have this genetic bottleneck. Now, this raised a number of interesting questions, but I think it points to the fact that very early on, when God created the genomes in living organisms, he created them with massive diversity.
So there was sufficient genetic diversity in those generations that were only ten or so or in some cases, more than that. But there were ten patriarchs prior to the flood, so to speak. So we're looking at only ten generations there.
So there's still massive genetic diversity there. And just to digress a little bit, when we talk about mitochondrial DNA, my understanding is that we inherit our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, not from our fathers. So when the two gamut cells come together, the male mitochondrial DNA is actually destroyed.
So I inherit our DNA from our mothers. And I understand that there are actually three main classes of mitochondrial DNA MN and R for memory. And of course there were three reproducing females after the flood, which is very, very interesting.
Three sort of groups there. So it's sort of a medical so all these little things, all these little factors are pointing into the detailed accuracy of the Bible. Now, some people say the Bible isn't a scientific textbook, but it's accurate, it's factual.
It's not trying to be a scientific textbook or explain things away in scientific terms. It's just recording what actually happens. And this is why it is so believable and so important that people read the Bible for themselves and learn this is our history, this is where we came from.
Now to go back to how the generations arose so quickly after that time, I can't remember which one it is, whether it's Javasim or Ham, but they record the descendants and there were about 15 or 16 sons that they had. So if we say they had roughly the same number of doors, you can say they roughly had 30 children. So you've got the three families each having 30 children.
And so people have done the calculations that after about 100 years I forget the exact figure, but you've got something like 1000 people or more. And so it's only about 100 years later that some of these chronologies record that. That's when Mizram, for example, went down to Egypt and started Egypt.
And so it actually is very feasible. When you do the math, it actually works out. Yeah, it's quite fascinating.
So John, you talk about Noah as if he was a historical person and you've mentioned how countries and maybe cities are named after his descendants. But do you have any other historical evidence that he really did exist, that Noah existed, that Noah existed as a historical? Well, there's so many towns that are named after his progeny and indeed much of the history of Europe traces itself. You know, we've got Canaan, we've got Sidon.
So many of those towns in that area were named after his grandsons or even the races like Javon, that was one of the grandsons. And of course, if you look at Greek mythology, they trace their history back to Japepthus, which is another word for Javen. So it's the same.
So many of those tribes of Europe, when we look at their own histories, they actually trace themselves back to the descendants of Noah. Interesting, their names are there. It's quite fascinating.
And not only that, in the Genesis accounts, you've got not only Noah's descendants, but also his ancestors as well. And it talks about them living for 800 900 years and descendants living for a certain period of time as well. So how would you explain the concept that there could have been humans living for almost 1000 years? Yes, I mean, that's something that is sometimes raised.
Now, it's very interesting when we look at, say, the accounts of the Sumerian King lists that they live 1030 thousand years all over the place. When we look at the biblical account, the ages of the patriarchs are roughly about 900 years or thereabouts before they died. Right.
And then after the flood, of course, they drop away quite quickly. Yes. Now, why does that happen now? It's very interesting.
I came across a paper that was published probably four or five years ago, but I only came across it recently where a mathematician did an analysis of those ages that are recorded in the Bible after the flood, because, very interestingly, those ages decay and they fitted what we would expect from a genomic decay curve. So we know from our present day research that DNA is accumulating mutations. And so we expect, for various reasons, the life expectancy to decline.
And it's quite interesting, the data of the ages. When you plot the data of the ages of the people that lived after the flood for the next thousand years or so, they're decaying as per we would expect. And this is quite amazing.
So what would be the reason for that? Well, before we get to that, one of the things is, are these ages made up? Are they mythical? Yes. Now, what's happened is there are mathematical systems that you can use that will actually statistically tell you whether a number is likely to have been made up or not, or whether it's a natural number. And when they apply these tools to those numbers, they come out that they are likely, most likely to be genuine numbers and not made up.
And so this is again where we're applying science to the Bible. We find the Bible is getting true now, but this speaks kind of against the model of evolution where over time everything should improve. Right? Yes.
Where things should get better and better. But we're seeing that everything gets worse and worse. That's right.
We're accumulating mutations, not accumulating mutations that are beneficial, that help us to metabolize and deal with mutations even better and hence live longer. We're actually succumbing to them. Yes.
That's fascinating. Why the ages declined after the flood again is open to we really don't know. But if we look at the data that we have today, there seems to be a cut off around about 120 years, somewhere between 120 and 130 years now.
Yes. People can't seem to live past that cut off point. And I think it is related to genomic decay.
Now, why that happened and why that happened after the flood, we know from the Bible account that after the flood, people were told to change from a plant. Well, not told. They were told rather than just have a plant based diet, which was the main diet prior to the flood, was a plant based diet after the flood.
They could eat animals. They could eat flesh foods. And we know now scientifically that flesh foods are associated with reduced lifespan.
There's a lot of data out now in the literature at University, Sydney University, the Charles Perkins Center been doing research on this, where high protein foods, and particularly animal protein foods, reduce lifespan. And so this is data. There's also an Ashtonian hypothesis, if I may be bold to put that forward.
Sounds good. Looking forward to hearing it. Well, one of the things that fascinating, we've got to look, we had the Bible account there, and we had this decline in ages.
And I was at a conference a few years ago where they were looking at cancer research and the role of deuterium depleted water in extending the life of people suffering with cancer and slowing down the rate of growth of cancer. And this research that's coming out of the Hungarian Institute of Physics and the Samais Medical University over there in Hungary, and essentially at the present time, our background levels of heavy water are about 150 parts per million. But if we reduce that level of heavy water in water back down to, say, 40 parts per million to a much lower level, plants grow more slowly.
There are a lower rate of mutation to DNA. And this is very significant, and hence the application, possibly. So my theory was that when these fountains of the deep opened up, that maybe the underground water would have been richer in deuterium, and it spewed all this heavy water into the ecosphere, which then just reduced the longevity of everything.
That's something that's been tested in the lab and verified that it actually does have an effect on DNA. So it's actual science. Yes, it is actual science.
But there's more. We know that when we find ancient waters that have been trapped, they are lower in deuterium. And when we look at the groundwaters, though, they're much higher in deuterium.
And the reason why we know this is that during the development of the atomic bomb, there was a lot of work done to try and find the richest sources of deuterium that could be used to slow down the neutrons during the nuclear experiment. So there's a lot of mapping was done at the hydrology. So just little things like this.
I mean, this may not be the explanation, but what I'm saying is when we look at some of these things, there are scientific explanations that fit the biblical account of the global flood. And it being recent, this is really exciting stuff. I think, in my view, I know.
Justin, you've got an interest in this area? The ages of the patriarchs. Definitely. Do you have any questions for John? Yeah, you know, the Bible says in Genesis one that when God created the Earth that he separated the waters under the Earth from or on the Earth and under the Earth from the waters above the Earth.
And I've heard it suggested that if there was a layer of water in Earth's atmosphere or below Earth's atmosphere, that it could have filtered out certain UV rays as well as created a different atmospheric pressure on planet Earth that would have extended the life of human beings and individuals. And I know you said that ultimately we don't know conclusively, but do you know of any studies that may have looked into the effect of different atmospheric pressures on aging or UV rays being filtered out as being helpful? Yes. Look, these are scenarios that are commonly circulated by Christians trying to fit the Genesis account in.
I don't know whether water, I don't think, does absorb that much in the UV. I think UV will still come through water pretty well. But my understanding is not that I don't believe that there was a water layer above the Earth, because my belief is that's where the fermentant was created, that's where the stars are.
That water layer has got to be somewhere out. The scientific evidence doesn't fit a water layer up there. And that was not where the water from the flood came from.
I don't think the main water from the flood came from the fountains of the deep. So you read about the oxygen pressure was different and these sort of things. Well, we know that there was much greater vegetation in the past and of course the green matter produces oxygen and the algae and the plants and this sort of thing.
So there would have been perhaps slightly higher levels of oxygen. But this needs to be very tightly controlled. If it's too much higher, then we're going to have different rates of reaction.
Spontaneous type combustion reactions are going to be more vulnerable. Really, the design of the planet is just right. It's the Goldilocks Planet.
But I think this concept we can't know. But we know that the Earth was formed under the water and there was water above. What that water is, God talks about the stars were created in that.
So in my mind, that puts it further out. But really we need to talk about things that we can know and measure and we don't really know that much about. But I think if we stay away from that, we're creeping out of science that we don't know.
And John, one of the biggest questions that really fascinates me is the chronology, the dating. So you've mentioned in previous episodes that there have been extinction events which have been recognized to be floods. But of course, the Bible places the global flood fairly recently.
So is there any historical evidence which supports this idea that the flood happened only about 4000 years ago? Yes, it's over 4000 years. Four and a half thousand years ago. Yes.
There's fascinating chronologies that relate, for example, and I think one of the best ones is that of Manentho. Now, Manentho was an Egyptian historian that lived about or wrote about 270 BC. So during the Greek era of Egypt.
And so he wasn't a Christian or Hebrew, and he was long before high criticism and all this sort of thing. And he wrote that Egypt was founded by Mestram, the son of Han, and that the dispersion occurred about five years after the birth of Peleg, about 100 years after Ham. So that really fits.
And so there's a number of chronologies. Alexander. We know there are records that Alexander the Great was given about 1900 years of astronomical records that dated back to the founding of Babylon.
And so when we calculate those records were given to Alexander about 330 BC, go back 1900. Then again, you get to a date about 130 years after the Flood or thereabouts we know that Greek history, their traditional history, goes back that the first king of Greece was about, I don't know, 15 or 1600 years before the first Olympiad, 770 BC. And again, when we add these dates up, there's the Bamboo Annals in China, which is the oldest surviving chronology in China because a lot of their history was destroyed by one of their emperors that lived about the first century Ad.
Or first century BC. Roughly that time had all their books and records destroyed. So only a few survived.
It's a real shame. And they placed the founding of China at about 1900 BC with Fu Xi, who traditionally was Noah. So when you look at these things and I've plotted them out, you have that the ones closest to Babylon were founded first, and then you have Egypt, then you have Greece, and then you have China.
And they're all within the biblical timeline. And these are secular historical records outside the Bible that confirm the Bible timeline. And just as we head towards the close, all of us have been really curious about this wobble in the Earth's axis that you wrote about.
Dr. Dobble mentioned george, just talk about what happened with this wobble. Okay.
Now, George Dobble was the South Australian government astronomer, and he had noted that some of the earlier British astronomers had reported a variation in the Earth's wobble, as predicted by Newcombe's formula. Not Newcomb. Newcombe was an American astronomer that first worked it out.
And he said, from that data, there appeared to be evidence of a massive disruption of the Earth that caused a wobble in the Earth about roughly about 4000 BC. Wow, that's amazing. But how accurate that data is, I wouldn't be real strong on that data.
But again, it's something worth looking at. Yeah, all these things point to the historical accuracy of the Bible. It's amazing.
This has been an amazing journey into history. Did you know that there's so much historical evidence for a global flood? And if there was a catastrophic global flood that destroyed most of the life on Earth fairly recently, where does that leave evolution? If you're intrigued by this concept, I'd really encourage you to grab the Bible off your bookshelf or download a Bible app on your phone and start reading through the first chapters in Genesis. You'll be inspired and amazed.
Also, go to your favorite online bookstore and get Dr. John Ashton's book Evolution Impossible. You've got all of the historical stories and accounts right there laid out for you.
It's really, really fascinating. Next time we're going to be looking at something also very interesting sedimentary layers and how fast they are. Eroding.
Could it be that our planet is much younger than what scientists usually tell us? Join us as we continue this Evolution Impossible journey together. 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
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