Noah’s flood : rocks and fossils
Just as naturalistic assumptions control biological evolution……
In this session we will look at geological evolution, calling it “Noah’s flood. Rocks and fossils.” You saw this morning that biological evolution is not scientific fact, it is simply philosophical naturalism imposed on the evidence. The glasses of the assumptions that nature is all there is, there is no God, it all happened by chance, those glasses are used by the evolutionist when they look at biological life and fossils to conclude that it all happened by chance. We see that when you look at the living creatures and the fossils with those glasses, it doesn’t make sense of the world. Why? Because there are no transitional forms; because mutation and natural selection are not changing one kind of creature into another, nor do mutation and natural selection increase positive information in the DNA molecule.
So also naturalistic assumptions control geological evolution
I hope you will see in this session, that the same thing is going on in geology. In fact the assumptions of philosophical naturalism took control of geology over 50 years before Darwin published his book. It was because the geologists were already in the 19th c. speaking of geological evolution of the earth (they didn’t use the word evolution at that time, but that’s what it was), that laid the ground work for Darwin’s theory. It’s because the geologists gave him supposedly all these millions of years that his theory was even plausible. So let’s look at the evidence and you will see that the main question is not “are you showing the evidence?”, but are you confessing your assumptions that you start with before you ever look at the evidence.
NOAH’S FLOOD
And to understand this issue of the age of the earth and geological evolution, we need to look at Noah’s flood, because Noah’s flood is absolutely critical to understanding this issue. And most Christians who believe in an old earth, in millions of years, that the age of the earth doesn’t matter, they don’t pay much attention to the flood. Most of the theologians and OT scholars who argue for an old earth or the day-age theory or the gap theory, look only at Genesis 1. They ignore Genesis 6-9. But the flood is critical. As you will see, this was the key to the development of old earth geology in the early 19th century.
Before the early 1800’s, the dominant view in the church and in Europe where science was born was that the flood of Noah was an historical global catastrophe. But in the early 1800’s as non-Christian geologists, (men who were not just unbiased neutral religious people, but who were anti-Biblical, either atheists, or deists), began to say that the rocks with fossils could not possibly have been caused by Noah’s flood. The rocks with their fossils came about in millions of years.
Three new theological views of the flood after the 1800’s
1) It was local: And so some Christians began to reinterpret Genesis 6-9, the account of the flood, and say “it was an historical flood, but it was a local catastrophe in the Tigris Euphrates Rivers in the Mesopotamian Valley, modern day Iran and Iraq. And it was just described in exaggerated language in Genesis.”
2) It was tranquil. And then others said, “No, it was an historical flood and it was global, but it was peaceful. It was tranquil. It was so peaceful, it left no geological evidence. So the geologists can talk about the millions of years and attribute that to the long processes, and the flood is global and we can believe that too, but we don’t have to try to relate them because the flood was so peaceful. After all, the dove went out and found an olive branch. And see, that proves that the flood didn’t destroy any of the plants.”
That argument fails to recognize that olive plants are very hardy and can survive in salt water for a long period of time and then replant themselves in soil and grow just fine.
3) It wasn’t. And then liberal theology. These ideas were developing in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, denying the miraculous, and stating that Gen. 1-9 is mythology. If you can believe in Santa Claus, you can believe in Noah’s flood.
Biblical arguments for a global catastrophic flood
I want to present to you a few of the Biblical arguments for why it was a global, catastrophic flood. It was not a local flood, as virtually all old-earthers today believe. There are a few old-earth theologians and OT scholars who believe in both millions of years and a global catastrophic flood, but they haven’t thought the issue through. You can’t believe in both. I hope to show you that these are contradictory ideas. But most of the people who are leading the church into believing in millions of years do not believe in a global flood. Hugh Ross does not believe in a global flood.
- I) The first reason for believing in a global flood: the purpose of the flood.
The Bible tells us why the flood occurred, and it is absolutely clear: to destroy not only man, but all living things on the earth. And when we say “global” , we mean a flood that covered the whole globe. Some people say they believe in a “universal” flood, but we must ask if they mean“global”. Because some people believe the flood was universal with respect to man, men living in the Mesopotamian Valley. So one must be careful with definitions. So you have to say to them, “The kind of flood I’m talking about (while you put a miniature globe in a tub of water) is this kind of flood”.
Hugh Ross – the flood was to destroy only sinful man
Hugh Ross, (a proponent of the old earth view, who has a strong influence on seminary and Bible-college professors through his group Reasons to Believe,) said this about the flood: “Is the flood universal, or is it local?” (He didn’t use the word global) “I will argue that it is both universal and local.” He means it was universal with respect to man, but local with respect to the geography of the earth. Ross says, “But there are physical reasons why the flood cannot be global, such as the limited extent of sin. Given that human beings had not civilized or inhabited Antarctica…” (Here Ross assumes that before the flood, the world was geographically exactly the way it is now, even though there are tropical fossils found in Antarctica, so maybe humans did live there.)… “There would be no need for God to flood Antarctica because there would have been no sin there. There would be no need for God to kill all the penguins, because those penguins had no contact with reprobate humanity. And in that case, I don’t think Noah took any penguins on board, because only the bird and mammal species according to the Levitical law can be impacted by sin.” (That is a bizarre interpretation of the Levitical law. He said that at a conservative Christian college. His assumption that penguins are only in Antarctica forgets that there are penguins in New Zealand today.) So Ross assumes that the purpose of the flood was to kill man.
But several verses in Gen. 6 tell that God intended to destroy animals with man.
But Genesis 6:7 says: “And the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.‘”
And Gen 6:13 says: Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold I am about to kill them with the earth.”
And Gen. 6: 17 “And behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth , to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish.”
These verses teach that the purpose of the flood was to destroy sinful man, all the land animals, all the birds, and the surface of the earth itself.
Since Gen. 6 says all the land animals, the flood had to be global
And only a global flood will accomplish that. Because many birds can migrate up to 2000 miles. Animals sense when a natural disaster is coming, when forest fires or volcanic eruptions are coming, and they flee the danger zone.
God could not have destroyed all the land animals and birds unless he used a global flood, because most of the land animals and birds would have been living outside the flood zone if the flood was only in the Mesopotamian Valley. They could have gone on living just as if nothing was happening in Mesopotamia. When I lived in Hungary, and the huge earthquake hit in Turkey, I was not worried about my house or life, because that was a local event. Only a global flood satisfies the purpose stated in Gen. 6:7, 13 and 17.
- II) The second reason for a global flood was the purpose of the
The purpose of the ark was not just to save a few animals for Noah to start a farm after the flood. Genesis 6:19 says the purpose was to save two of every kind. He doesn’t say “two of every species” but “two of every kind.” The word kind is the same here as in Gen. 1.
Two of every kind, but only of land animals and birds, not two of every kind of fish. Noah didn’t build aquariums in the ark.
And the purpose was (Gen.7:3) “to keep seed alive upon the earth.” That would be totally unnecessary if most of the world was already inhabited by birds and land animals. If the flood was only local, there would be no need to save seed of two of every kind. It was a ridiculous task. But it would be absolutely necessary to build the ark if there was a global flood. The purpose of the ark shows that it was a global flood.
III ) The third reason for a global flood was the volume of the ark.
The huge size of the ark
A lot of people say that the flood account cannot be true, because how could Noah have gotten all the dinosaurs in the ark. How could he even get one dinosaur in the ark? The problem with this objection is they have a faulty view of the size of the ark. They think the ark was a little floating zoo. Nothing could be farther from the truth. And the sad fact is that many children’s books for Christians picture the ark like this (a thirty foot long, two story boat with giraffes sticking their heads out the windows). And what these pictures do is teach the children that the account of Noah’s flood is not true. The Bible tells us how big the ark was: one and a half foot ball fields long, the equivalent of a four story building in height, and 2/3rds the width of a football field. No boat was built this big again until 1860. It was a huge boat. You could fit 560 railroad cars in it.
Noah was told to take “every kind”, not every species.
But surely Noah couldn’t have gotten all the species of animals into that ark. Let’s do the math and see. How many animals were on the ark? First, Noah was told to take two of each kind, the same Hebrew word used in chapter one, and seven of the clean animals. The genetic boundaries of the Genesis kind are uncertain, but we are pretty certain that the genetic boundaries for a kind are much bigger than the boundaries for what we call a species. Species is a sub-unit of the original kind. The dog kind is made up of jackals, and dingos and wolves, and coyotes and all the 350 domestic dogs, from Great Danes to little poodles. All that genetic information was in the dog kind. So Noah didn’t take two poodles and two Great Danes and two German Shepherds and two spaniels, because all of those were developed in the last two centuries by artificial breeding. So the dog kind shows that it was a bigger category. We can be absolutely certain that the Biblical kinds were not smaller than species.
Now we’ll make it as difficult as we can for Noah. We’ll say that he had to take two of every species. It had to be less than that, but we’re going to make it as tough as we can. So how many species did he have to take?
By including species, there would be 50,000 animals
According to the leading evolutionist taxonomists, he had to take 3,500 mammal species, 8,600 birds, 5.500 reptiles and 3,400 amphibians (although amphibians live in the water a lot of their lives so they are not really bothered by a flood, but we’ll make it as tough as we can for Noah.) Then all of these creatures who live in the ocean or aren’t bothered by water: they can lay their eggs in the water or can live on the surface of the water. So 21,000. That’s the high number, that’s species. Double that for two of every kind, and throw in an extra 7000 for the clean ones and we have a maximum of 50,000 animals.
Now the average size of an animal is about the size of a sheep. Some animals like giraffes or elephants or brontosaurus or tyrannosaurus rex are bigger than a sheep, but a great number are much smaller: squirrels , rabbits, racoons, skunks.
Now with the larger animals, we have to remember the purpose for taking them on the ark was to save seed, to repopulate the earth after the flood, so Noah would not take the oldest ones or grandma and grandpa who have no reproductive potential. So he takes the teenagers who have a whole life of reproduction after they get off the ark. The younger ones are the smaller ones, and particularly with reptiles. Almost all reptiles continue growing all their life, unlike other creatures that reach adult size early in life and then stay that size. And we humans start to shrink as we get older because our bones are wearing out. So you take the young tyrannosaurus rex, which is smaller than granddaddy T Rex.
The dimensions of the ark are given in the Bible in cubits. A cubit was the distance from the end of your elbow to the tip of your hand and that varied a little bit. And that many cubic feet which is equivalent to about 560 railroad stock cars. Each stock car can hold 240 sheep. So 50,000 animals divided by 240 per car is 208 stock cars which is only 36% of the volume of the ark, leaving 2/3rds of the volume of the ark for the vegetable foods that God also told to take on the ark. Gen 6:21 “..take for yourself some of all food which is edible, and gather it to yourself; and it shall be for food for you and for them.” There was plenty of room in the ark. And remember, this is using species, the worst case scenario. If he was taking two of every kind, it was probably a lot less than that.
There have been a lot of objections raised to the ark, and there is a book, Noah’s Ark, a Feasibility Study, out on the table that is based on 7 years of research from John Woodmorappe, who is one of these tireless researchers, an incredible student of literature. And he’s looked at everything from ventilation systems to waste removals systems, to feeding, to housing animals, all on the basis of what people who take care of animals today tell what they have learned in research. And he has answered just about every objection that any skeptic has ever raised about Noah’s flood and he’s probably answered a lot of them that they have never even thought of, but he thought of for them. A wonderful powerful book, showing that even without evoking any miracles, it’s very believable that Noah and his family could have cared for the animals in the ark and they could have survived.
- Then there is the character of the flood: was it tranquil or violent?
Many in the early 1800’s when the flood was initially rejected (and many today) will say there is no evidence in the Bible that the flood was a violent catastrophe. They just don’t read the text. The text tells clearly that it was violent:
In Gen. 7:11 it says “In the 600th year of Noah’s life, in the 2nd month, on the 17th day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the deep burst open and the flood gates of the sky were opened.” Two sources for the water of Noah’s flood: the waters coming down from above, the flood-gates of the sky, and waters coming up from the bottom, the fountains of the deep. The great deep in the Bible usually refers to the ocean, so this is either the springs that are bringing water into the ocean (there are springs in the ocean floor today that are bringing hot briny waters into the ocean); or subterranean waters under the land. Most of our drinking water comes from underground reservoirs. There’s lots of water under the earth and under the floor of the ocean.
And then the flood gates of the sky. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights non-stop, 24 hours a day, and this was not a gentle rain to water the garden. This was the wrath of God being poured out on a wicked world to destroy it. It was monsoons, hurricane-force rain, non-stop, global. This would cause some serious problems.
Furthermore we have the verb “burst open”, a verb in Hebrew used when Korah rebelled against Moses and his leadership and God judged Korah and his family, with his possessions, and Numbers 16:32 says the ground “opened” , the same verb, and all of their tents and their family and their possessions went into the earth and the ground closed. It’s the same word used in Zechariah 14 where it says that when the Messiah comes again, his foot will touch the Mt. of Olives, and the mountain will split in two and a huge valley will open up. This verb is telling us that when the fountains of the great deep burst open at the flood, there was world wide catastrophic tectonic activity. And when the earth breaks, (which is called an earthquake), it sets off volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and it is very violent.
Mt. St. Helens, of which we have a video on the table, was triggered by an earthquake underneath the mountain that caused that eruption. So the text is very clear that, at the very beginning of the flood, this was not just water slowly rising. It was violent. And those fountains of the great deep and the flood gates were not completely closed until the 150th day. (Gen 7:24)
Then we find in the middle of the flood, (after day 150), when God decides that the waters have risen enough and done their job, and he is going to cause the waters to recede, then Gen 8:3 says, “And the waters returned from the earth continually, and after 150 days the waters were abated. All the English translations translate this “returned continually”. But in the Hebrew this is two Hebrew verbs. The adverb “continually” is not in the Hebrew. The English conveys the idea, but misses a certain element. The two Hebrew verbs used here are very common Hebrew verbs in the OT: the verb “to go” and the verb “to return”, telling us that as the waters dissipated, they were going and returning. When you have water moving back and forth, water erodes, it carries sediments. And when it looses its energy, it drops its sediments. The receding of the waters of the flood, were not like what happens when I pull the plug in the bath-tub when my kids have taken a bath, where it goes down steadily. There was erosive activity going on as the waters receded.
Now if you take earthquake activity like the earthquake that hit Turkey a few years ago and put with that flood conditions with fast moving water, what are you going to get? A catastrophe. And what will happen if you multiply that not in just one location but globally, simultaneously, for 150 days? You’re going to see something that is exactly what you would expect from the wrath of God being poured out on this wicked world. So you would expect to see creatures being ripped up by tidal waves, carried out into the ocean, drowned, buried in sediments.
- Another evidence of the global flood is the depth of the flood.
The Bible is very clear that the flood rose and rose and rose till it covered all the high mountains. Gen 7:19,20 “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth and all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered, 15 cubits upward, the waters prevailed and the mountains were covered.” Concerning this verse, Hugh Ross said in a tape a few years ago, (I don’t know if he still holds this view), that “all the high” was not in the original Hebrew. Maybe he never took time to read a Hebrew-English interlinear, and he doesn’t know Hebrew himself, but “all the high” is in the Hebrew. The text is emphatic that the flood covered ALL mountains.
Suppose we are all mountains, with heads various heights above the floor. I start pouring water. Water seeks a level plain, so if I start pouring water into the room eventually I’ll cover the shortest person here, the person slouched in the chair. I could cover her completely but that wouldn’t cover this mountain over here. I’d have to keep pouring. And I’m standing here as the tallest mountain, so I’ve got to keep pouring because water seeks a level plain. The only way to cover all the mountains is a global flood.
- VI. Finally, the rainbow promise indicates a global flood.
At the end of the flood God promises that never again will he destroy the world with a flood. And the promise is made not just to man, but to the animals, the birds, and the earth itself. (Gen. 9:10)
When you read this promise in Gen. 9, God repeats himself. The promise is 7 verses. Why so much repetition?
When the Bible repeats something over and over, God is trying to make you get the point. It’s not that he is trying to be boring, He is wanting to be emphatic. Did you get the point? This is for the WHOLE EARTH. I’m making the promise to the animals, to the birds, to all of your descendants, to the earth itself: “Never again will I flood the earth.” If the flood was local, God lied. Because there have been many local floods that have killed some of the animals and some of the people and some of the earth. But the flood of Noah was a global flood that destroyed all of the animals which were not in the ark, all of the birds not in the ark, and the surface of the earth.
Now what would you expect from a global flood of unimaginable violence that lasted 371 days from start to finish? What would you expect as it is ripping up the continents, ripping up all the plants on the land, eroding the soil away, burying creatures, what would you expect to find? You’d expect to find billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth. And that is precisely what we find. In every continent. On top of our highest mountains. Billions of dead things buried in rock layers, laid down by water all over the earth. It’s exactly what we would expect to find from the flood of Noah.
But the evolutionists say “There’s no evidence of a global flood. The geological record is the evidence of the evolution of life over millions and millions of years. And the age of the dinosaurs was 205 to 65 million years ago. They all died out before man came on the scene.” But the Bible says, No, these billions of dead things are not the record of the development of life over millions of years. This is the record of the death of all life in one year.
LOOKING AT HOW ROCK LAYERS WERE FORMED.
Where did the idea of millions of years come from?
In the early 1800’s these old earth geological theories were developed, and it came from the fossil record. Radiometric dating methods were not invented till the early 20th c. The late 1700’s and the early 1800’s was when the old earth idea was born, and it was born because of the fossils. They said these fossils represent long ages of creation or of evolution. So the millions of years is from the fossils.
Three views of earth history in the early 1800’s
In the early 1800’s, the time period I studied in my PhD, there were three views of earth history” 1) The traditional Biblical view that had been the view of the church for 1800 years, that the flood of Noah was a global flood, that there had been a supernatural beginning with a supernatural 6 day creation week about 6000 years ago, and we are waiting for a supernatural ending to the world at the return of Christ. There were a group of men called the Scriptural geologists, who were the focus of my thesis whom you may learn about on the Answers in Genesis website.
2) The catastrophist view, put out by the French paleontologist Jean Cuvier and a British engineer William Smith. They said earth history was much longer than the Bible said, speaking of untold ages, and that during those ages there were at least 4 global catastrophes that were responsible for producing the sedimentary rock and fossils. Initially some of the catastrophists believed that the last catastrophe was Noah’s flood, but they believed most of the geological record came about long before that, long before man. Because they viewed these catastrophes as natural it was possible there could be another global or regional catastrophe in the future. Most of these were theists.
3) The uniformitarian view. It was developed by Werner and Hutton, but didn’t catch hold till Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology in 1830. He was a persuasive writer, trained in law, and then became interested in geology. He said there were NO regional or global catastrophes in earth history. We must explain everything in the rock record by present day processes of erosion and sedimentation operating at the same rate of intensity and frequency throughout earth history. So he started with an assumption about time and history. We can’t allow for catastrophes in our theories.
Uniformitarianism became the dogma of geology. By about 1840, that was the way geologists began to think. The Biblical view was rejected. The catastrophist view hung on until the 1840’s and passed off the scene. So for about 150 years it was the dogma of geology. Every geology student was trained to think this way: slow gradual processes formed the earth.
Derek Ager and his book The New Catastrophism 1993
But now listen to this from Derek Ager, a geologist who died just a few years ago, an evolutionist, as far as I can tell from his writings, an atheist. In the book I’ll quote from, he warned young earth geologists from using the information in his book to support this young earth view. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander; truth is truth. He’s dead now and knows that he is wrong about his atheism.
In an early chapter of his book he does a history lesson of geology. He says: “My excuse for this lengthy and amateur digression into history is that I’ve been trying to show how I think geology got into the hands of the theoreticians” (referring to the uniformitarians) “who were conditioned by the social and political history of their day more than by observations in the field. In other words we have allowed ourselves” (writing to his fellow old earth geologists) “to be brainwashed into avoiding any interpretation of the past that involves extreme or catastrophic processes.” In the rest of the book he goes on to argue for a neo-catastrophist view of earth history. He’s going back to the ideas of the early 19th c.
Notice though, he says “the theories were developed by social and political ideas, not by observations in the rocks.” What determined what a man saw in the rocks? It was his assumptions that determined what he saw in the rocks. And Derek Ager said that in all of my geological education,undergraduate, graduate, PhD, and then for most of my geological career, “I’ve been brainwashed.” We’ve all been brainwashed from seeing any evidence of catastrophe in the rock record. But in his book he says, “It’s glaring; there’s all kinds of evidence of catastrophe.”
So the uniformitarian view dominated. Now in the late 20th c., early 21st c. the neo-catastrophist view is gaining ground. In fact I doubt if there are any pure uniformitarians in geology anymore. The neo-catastrophists have had such an impact over the last 30 years, that even the uniformitarians are thinking of catastrophic things like a catastrophic reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
And an amazing thing has happened: the flood geology of the Scriptural geologists in the early 19th c. has been resurrected, and now we have flood geology in the 21st c. in the young earth creationist view.
An example of brainwashing
Let me explain what is going on here by showing a picture. It’s a picture of an old lady. She is here. She doesn’t have her dentures in; this is her big nose and here is a little imperfection on her cheek; here is her right eye, her left eye, and she’s looking that way. Well, I’ve just lied to you. I’ve just brainwashed you. It’s not an old lady, it’s a young lady. She’s looking that way. This is her cheekbone; this is a nice cloth choke chain around her neck; that’s her left eyelash, that’s the tip of her nose; you can’t see most of her face or her right eye; and that’s her left ear. She’s looking that way. It’s a young lady. This illustrates a very important principle. The facts in this picture are the black lines and the white spaces. We all agree where the black lines are, how thick they are, how long they are, what direction they are, how they bend. The interpretation of the facts is old lady or young lady, and it depends on what you’re looking for as to what you see; I brainwashed some of you to see the old lady.
Derek Ager said we’ve been brainwashed in our education in geology from seeing any evidence of catastrophe. But it’s there. We just couldn’t see it because we were brainwashed.
Another geologist, reviewing Derek Ager’s book, said in 1993: “We are rewriting geo-history. We live in an age of neo-catastrophism. Surely what we know as geo-history originates not within rocks, but within the minds of human observers. As a creation of the human intellect, our geo-histories may owe more than is commonly supposed to processes acting within our own cerebra”. It’s what your starting assumptions are. We all have the same facts: the uniformitarians, the neo-catastrophists, and the young earth creationists all have the same facts, they have the same fossils, the same geological formations. They go out to the Grand Canyon and see the same layers of rocks, the same Colorado River, the same canyon and the same fossils in those rocks. But it depends on what your starting assumptions are as to what your interpretation will be. If you start with uniformitarian assumptions and you completely rule out catastrophe as a possible explanation for what you are seeing, you won’t see any evidence of catastrophe and you’ll come up with a uniformitarian interpretation of the Grand Canyon. You’ll say a little bit of water over a long period of time cut the Grand Canyon.
But if you start with catastrophic assumptions like the neo-catastrophists and you say I’m not going to rule out catastrophe before I go and look at the rocks, you’ll go there and see all kinds of evidence for catastrophic interpretation of the Grand Canyon. And then you’ll say a lot of water and a little bit of time cut the Grand Canyon.
And there are evolutionary old earth geologists today who are saying that. They are getting close to the proper interpretation.
Neo-catastrophists still have one problem- they believe in millions of years.
The neo-catastrophists are old earth. They believe in millions of years. But they believe that as we look at the rocks without uniformitarian brainwashing, we’ll see evidence (if we look at this rock layer carefully) for rapid deposition, catastrophic deposition of these sediments. And if we go up also to this layer we’ll see evidence of rapid catastrophic deposition, and the same in the next layer. They still believe in millions of years. Where do they put the time? It’s not in the layers. Time is between the layers.
The young earth creationists say, you neo-catastrophists are on the right track. We agree with you that there is evidence of rapid catastrophic deposition of these layers, but there’s no evidence that there are millions of years between layers. In fact, if you look carefully at the boundary here, you’ll see that there’s actually evidence of rapid deposition of one layer after the other without long passages of time. I’ll give you an example, and there’s books out there that will show much more.
The Grand Canyon layers don’t allow millions of years between catastrophes.
Let’s suppose with the neo-catastrophists that you have a catastrophic event and it lays down several layers of sediments, shale, limestone, sandstone in a very short period of time. And then that surface lays exposed for millions of years either on the bottom of the ocean or on a land surface, where we would expect after millions of years that there would be erosion, with rivers and valleys, earthquakes here and there, volcanic eruptions, so that that nice smooth surface would become eroded. Then let’s suppose that in the neo-catastrophist view that there’s another catastrophic event after millions of year and it deposits more sediments and fills in the irregularity and keeps piling up and develops a new surface, and in the process repeats itself. If that is true, we would expect to see a complex geological record, showing all kinds of erosion going on. But instead, this is what we generally find in this power point picture. Here’s a cross cutting of the Grand Canyon, which is 4 to 18 miles wide 270 miles long and a mile deep. Look at the extensiveness of the layers that you see at the edge of the Grand Canyon. And they are just as flat as a pancake. There is no evidence that there was erosion from millions and millions of years at one of those layers, that the old earthers claim was once the surface of the ocean or the surface of land for millions of years before the next layer was laid down.
FOSSILS AND THE AGE OF THE EARTH
Let’s turn to the fossils and the age of the earth. In The Museum of Western Colorado (Grand Junction) in the Dinosaur Valley you’ll find this definition of a fossil “Any evidence of life more than 7000 years old.” That’s a strange definition of a fossil; and it’s wrong. A fossil is a former living thing that is turned to stone. It’s not something that is over 7000 years. That’s evolutionary bias. How do they know how old the fossils are? Do fossils come with labels saying I’m 654 million years old? No, so how do they know? How did they know in the early 1800’s? They didn’t know. They assumed, because of an evolutionary view of earth history even before Darwin developed his theory of biological evolution. They were already assuming things about the order in which life came. They had no evidence; they just assumed.
But how long does it take to make a fossil? A thousand years? A million years? A 100 million years? Not long at all. There’s a miners cap found in a mine in Australia, probably less than 50 years old and its completely fossilized. Here’s a water wheel turned to stone in just a short period of time. The wood molecules have been changed to stone. If you get Creation Magazine you could have read the article about that. There are also fossils that indicate that fossilization and the burial process happened very rapidly. Like this mother ichtheosaur that was buried and then fossilized as she was giving birth to her young. She was swimming along giving birth and a wave of sediment-chocked waters came upon her and buried her so quickly that no micro-decay organism and moving water could tear that skeleton apart. Here we see fish that are fossilized in the position of eating their lunch. We’re talking about rapid burial and rapid fossilization because fish decay very quickly. If you see a dead fish on the side of the lake, it will decompose in hours or at most days. But there are many, many fish that are highly preserved in the fossil record. You can see their scales, very thin fins.
RADIOMETRIC DATING METHODS
What about those radiometric dating methods? Surely they prove that the earth is millions of years old.
The first thing we need to know is that the dates are always selected dates. Here’s an evolutionary geologist at a university who says, “In general dates in the correct ball park are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in discrepancy, in disagreement with other data are seldom published, nor are the discrepancies fully explained.” So every time you read an article in the newspaper and they tell you that these bones were x-million years old, you now know that that was the selected date. It’s not the actual date. That’s the one the evolutionist chose to fit their theory.
And there are lots of examples in the literature where the radiometric date is not consistent with what we know the date to be from other reasons!!!!!!!!
For example, in 1968 there was an article about dating of volcanic rocks in Hawaii. The abstract in the article in a technical journal said “The radiogenic argon and helium contents of the three basalts” (rocks produced by lava flow) “which erupted into the deep ocean from an active volcano have been measured. Ages calculated from these measurements increase with sample depth up to 22 million years for lavas deduced from our knowledge of when the volcano erupted to be recent, probably less than 150 years”, says the article. These rocks were produced by a volcano that erupted in Hawaii in the early 1880’s and there is documentation of the eruption. Yet the radiometric dating method that gave ages for those eruptions go up to 22 million years. Something is wrong.
Most rocks cannot be dated directly by radiometric dating methods. Most rocks in the geologic column of fossils are sedimentary rocks. Sedimentary rocks from sand and mud do not contain radioactive materials. It is volcanic rock made from ash or volcanic lava that can be dated by these methods generally. And in the Grand Canyon most of the rock layers cannot be dated by radiometric dating. (See the link on radioactive dating and sedimentary rocks:
But in the Grand Canyon are two sources of volcanic rocks. 1)Down here at the bottom of Grand Canyon, below the mile of sedimentary rocks, and 2) then volcanic lava which flowed over the top of the rim of the Grand Canyon. Steve Austin is a creation researcher at the Institute for Creation Research. He took samples of these two volcanic rocks, one from the top, one from the bottom of the canyon. Steve was trained at Penn State U. , trained under leading evolutionists on how to do this correctly, and so he took very careful samples. He prepared the samples, sent them off to highly professional labs in the USA to do this analysis. He did not tell them where the samples came from, because he wanted an analysis with no bias. The results came back and gave interesting results. Look at this physically. These rocks on the bottom have to be older than these rocks on the rim a mile higher. All these sedimentary rocks were laid on top of the bottom volcanic rock. Then the canyon had to be cut, and then the volcano had to erupt near the top and pour its lava over the edge of the canyon. If the canyon had been cut after the top surface volcanic eruptions, there wouldn’t be any lava over the side of the canyon. So the physical evidence is clear that these rocks on the bottom are older than the rocks going over the edge. The radiometric dates came out and the top rocks are older than the bottom rocks by 300 million years. There’s something wrong with the dating methods!!!!!
Another example. In Australia 1994 they found partly petrified wood entombed in basalt lava from a volcano. Now the basalt has to be younger than the wood because the basalt is on top of the wood and is surrounding it and some of the wood goes down into the lower layer. You don’t get trees that will come after the lava, trees which somehow bury themselves into lava that is already solidified. They took the Carbon 14 dates of the wood, and a different substance for the radiometric dating of the basalt. (You don’t date rocks with carbon 14 because rocks are not made of carbon.) The lab reports came back for the basalt: the basalt was 45 million years old, and the wood was 45,000 years old. That’s impossible. So which date is the correct date? Neither. Both dating methods are based on evolutionary assumptions about how these radioactive substances decay.
Consider this statement reported by a cave specialist: “From 1924 to 1988, there was a visitor’s sign above the entrance of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico that said that Carlsbad was at least 260 million years old. In 1988, the sign was changed to read 7 to 10 million years old. Then for a little while the sign read that it was 2 million years old. Now the sign is gone.” Why is that? The age of the cavern is not decreasing over the last 70 years, it’s increasing. What’s happening? The dating methods are faulty and so they have to keep rearranging them.
You can learn more about how the sedimentary rocks were laid down rapidly, but also a simple explanation of the radiometric dating methods and how they work and why they are not trustworthy.
So we have the fossil record of all this death and carnage. It’s not the record of millions of years It is primarily the record of Noah’s flood.
Evolutionists are now talking about Noah’s flood.
The evolutionists are talking about the Flood these days: “A flood of Biblical proportions, enough to fill the Mediterranean Sea, gushed down from the highlands of Mars a billion or so years ago, the latest pictures from the Pathfinder confirmed today.”
Another scientist writing says “The total release of gases from the Tharsis Magnum may have produced the equivalent of a global layer of water nearly 400 feet deep. At the very end of the Noachian epoch, volcanic activity dissipated.” The Noachian epoch??? On Mars?? They’ve got the flood on the wrong planet! Now we have something really bizarre going on here. There is no liquid water as far as we know on the planet Mars, and yet the evolutionists say there was once a global flood of 400 feet deep on Mars. Yet they scoffingly say to creationists: it’s ridiculous to believe in a global flood on this planet. Yet our planet is 70% covered with water, liquid water. And they say there is no evidence of a global flood on this planet. That’s because they are brainwashed.
Why don’t evolutionists see the evidence rightly?
What does Paul say? “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” The reason that the geologists cannot see the evidence for the flood on this planet is because sin has darkened their mind, and they don’t want to see. Why?
There are many scientists today who are evolutionists who will acknowledge that maybe there is some kind of Creator God, a vaguely defined God, and intelligent designer, but they don’t want to accept a global flood. Because what does the global flood say about God? He is the holy judge of all the earth. And if He did that, four and a half thousand years ago, because of sin, then woe is me. And these kind of people will not, I believe, will never accept the flood, although they may accept some kind of designer God, because they do not want to accept that there is a God to whom they are morally accountable. That’s what Paul said.
Why do they believe on a global Noachian flood on Mars but not on the earth? Here is what Derek Ager said: “We’ve allowed ourselves to be brainwashed.” It is the assumptions, the brainwashing in the mind that entered into the minds of young geology students before they ever went and looked at their first rock, that kept them from seeing the evidence.
So evolution is not science, it is a philosophy. It is a religion. It is the religion of atheism, imposed on the scientific evidence.
And the church compromised 200 years ago. Most of the church compromised. Most of our greatest most godly OT scholars and systematic theologians have compromised for 200 years and said “The age of the earth doesn’t matter.” It matters.
I’d like to give you an example. Gleason Archer, a great OT scholar, and evangelical, who has taught me much, whose writings I appreciate: “From a superficial reading of Genesis 1, the impression would seem to be that the entire creative process took place in six 24 hour days.” He doesn’t believe that though. He believes in the day-age theory and he doesn’t believe in a global flood. “If this was the true intent of the Hebrew author, it seems to run counter to modern scientific research which indicates that the planet earth was created several billion years ago.” See what has happened?
If Derek Ager as a geologist was brainwashed, then what about the rest of us, including most of our theologians, who don’t ever look at the rocks themselves. We’ve all been brainwashed. What theologians are doing is reinterpreting the Bible on the basis of what the scientific establishment which is controlled by evolutionists has said. The text does not support a local flood. Gleason Archer only believes that because he believes he has to make the Bible fit millions of years.
The issue is not science. The issue is which authority are we going to believe? Are we going to believe the authority of the Word of God who was there at the time of the flood, who was there at the creation, who always tells the truth, who knows everything, who inspired the Word of God to be written without error, or are we going to believe the fallible opinions of sinful men who are in rebellion against God, who are trying to think of theories to explain away God, and explain away the truth of the Bible, explain away the witness of the rocks to Noah’s flood, so that they don’t have to , in their own minds, be accountable to God. Which are we going to believe? It’s a question of authority. It’s a question of whether we are going to use the non-Christian world view to interpret the Bible or whether we are going to use the Bible to critique the non-Christian world view.
A seven part lens or a three part lens?
The non-Christian world view is: as they are looking at the world, they are looking through lenses, the lens of death, blood-shed , disease for millions of years as the process that produced man. That’s how they look at the world, and they get a distorted view.
I’ve just graduated from single lens glasses to bifocals, and it’s been a difficult experience. My head goes up and down trying to see things. If I look at you through the bottom half, you’re out of focus. So also these lenses of the evolutionists are distorting what they are looking at. They can’t even see the evidence for catastrophe and God’s judgment.
So we need to look at the world through Biblical glasses. And it has seven lenses, the seven “C’s”. And when we look at the Bible through these seven lenses of Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion (at the tower of Babel), Christ, the Cross, and the Consummation, we will see the world clearly and we will make sense of everything, from the rocks and the fossils to 9-11 and the fall of the twin towers, and everything in between, race and everything else. It will make sense. See Luke 13: 1-5 for Jesus’ explanation of sudden deaths by violent kings, or other causes.
But the sad thing is that the church over the last 200 years has been looking at the world through a faulty Christian worldview that has thrown away the first four lenses, and so they don’t have a clear view of the world and what’s going on in the world, and don’t have a consistent answer to the world.
We’re teaching Bible stories in church and in Sunday School, but a lot of times we’re not teaching them as if it’s true history. So the young people learn the Bible stories and then go out into school and listen to their evolutionary biology teacher, astronomy teacher, anthropology teacher, and evolutionary every-other-kind-of teacher, because every discipline in the University has been brainwashed with evolution. It effects everything. I was talking to a man recently who said “psychology is evolutionized.” And the young people say: I’m learning the true science in school, and I’m learning Bible “stories” in church.
No, the Bible is the true history of the world.
Many godly theologians, I had some of them in seminary when I went to seminary, would say that the key is to believe the theology and the morality of the Bible. The history doesn’t matter that much, so it shouldn’t bother if some of its historical things are wrong. We must say a resounding no to this view. The Bible bases is morality and its theology on its history. The Bible is a book about God’s acts in time-space history. And if the history is not true, the theology and the morality is not reliable.
When Paul said, “For as through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men”, was Paul teaching us theology or history? Both. And the theology of sin is not true unless Paul’s history is true.
When Paul said, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and He rose from the dead on the third day”, was he telling us history, or theology? Both. And if Jesus did not rise in time space history, then the theology of the resurrection is destroyed. And that’s what Paul goes on to argue in I Corinthians 15. If Jesus is not really risen from the dead, then our faith is in vain and we are of all men to be most pitied.
The Bible’s history is the foundation to its theology and its morality.
But the early chapters of Genesis are history that relate to biology, geology, and astronomy. So we can really say the biology, geology, and astronomy of the Bible is foundational to the theology and the morality. If the Bible is not true when it says that God made separate kinds of biological life to reproduce after its kind, and Darwin is really right, then how can I trust anything else in Genesis? If the Bible is not true that there was a global catastrophic flood as it clearly and irrefutably teaches, then how can I trust what it says about salvation?
Jesus understood the importance of this. It’s a very interesting Gospels study to look at all of the passages of the OT that Jesus referred to. Do you know which stories in the OT Jesus refers to? It’s the ones that our modern skeptical age can’t believe in. Jesus believed there was a Sodom and Gomorrah, that there was a Cain and Abel, and that Cain killed Abel, that there was a global flood. Concerning the flood he said: “For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah, for as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage till the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand till the flood came and took them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” If I said to you, “Just as Santa Claus came last year and brought presents to all of your homes for your family, so Jesus is coming again.” How strong would your faith be in the second coming of Jesus? (I’m assuming you don’t believe that a real Santa Claus came.) So if I based the promise of his coming on a mythology, it has just destroyed the promise. But Jesus spoke of Noah’s flood to make us tremble at the fact that He is coming again. And you know why you should believe that He is coming again in judgment? Because God judged the world once before, and it was a global flood and a global judgment, and the next time when Jesus comes it will also be a global judgment.
There was only one door into the ark, only one way into the way of salvation, and there is only one way to be saved from the coming judgment, the cross of Christ.
And Peter saw the same thing when he talked about scoffers that would come saying “Where is the promise of His coming?” And why did they scoff? Because they thought “Ever since the father’s died everything has gone on as it has since the beginning of creation.” There you have, 1800 years before uniformitarian geology developed, a perfect summary statement of uniformitarian thinking: “All continues just as it has from the beginning.” Peter goes on to say: When they say this, “they deliberately forget that long ago, by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed by water and out of water and the world of that time by water also was deluged and destroyed.” Peter is saying that “the scoffers deliberately forget.” It is a “willful ignorance” as the King James says. And what do they reject? The supernatural beginning and the global catastrophic flood of Noah. They reject that both creation and the flood came about “by God’s Word.” “He spake and it came to be.” Creation and the flood happened as supernaturally as Jesus saying to Lazarus by his Word: “Lazarus come forth.” That eliminates the long processes of evolution. What could be clearer?
There is only one way of salvation. It is the cross of Christ. And if you were here today listening and you’re not a Christian, I want to say to you that the rocks and the fossils are screaming out Noah’s flood. God did judge this world because of wickedness, and there is a coming judgment. It is not a fictitious myth. It is a sober reality. And you need to be ready to meet your Maker. And maybe you won’t live till Jesus comes. Maybe you will die, maybe unexpectedly as in 9-11, or maybe prematurely just as Stephen J. Gould the atheist old earth geologist who died last May of cancer in his early 60’s. The Bible says “Today, if you hear God’s voice, do not harden your heart.” We need to repent, turn from our sin, and get in the ark of Christ.
So the flood is critically important, for understanding the rocks and the fossils, and for understanding the promises of Jesus and of Peter about the second coming.
The above lecture by Terry Mortenson was typed out by Gary Vander Hart from a CD lecture given by him in 2005. In my opinion Terry Mortenson will some day be viewed as the John Calvin of the Biblical creation apologetic, because he is not only a well versed theologian who knows the Bible in its original languages and not only has a doctorate in the history of geology, but he also knows how to systematize all this material in a winsome logical way just as John Calvin did in his Institutes and in his commentaries.
P.S. by Gary Vander Hart: Whitcomb and Morris in their important book The Genesis Flood, 1961 present many more Biblically based arguments for a universal flood on pages 1-33 that totally convinced me after I read it in 1963. One of dozens of arguments is found on page 26, 27 and posits that during the 1,600 years of Gen 5 between Adam and Noah, the world population was more than a billion. If that were true, there goes the local flood theory, because a billion people wouldn’t have limited themselves to the Mesopotamian Valley. This figure was arrived at by positing that each family had 6 children and assumes 18 generations during those 1,600 years. It is an extremely, extremely conservative figure to say 6 children per family when you consider that the Hebrew tradition says that Adam and Eve had 33 sons and 23 daughters, and when you consider that Noah became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth at the age of 500, showing that the powers of procreation lasted hundreds of years, not just 40 years as today. If each family had as many as Adam, there might have been 10 billion people on earth, and that means they would have covered the globe. Good bye local flood theory!