Introductory Scientific and Biblical Arguments for a Young Earth

INTRODUCTORY SCIENTIFIC AND BIBLICAL

ARGUMENTS FOR A YOUNG EARTH

Based on a Talk at the University of Georgia, Athens, 25 September 2000

I am a catastrophist. Throughout my life I have seen enough scientific evidence to convince me that the earth has experienced a series of global catastrophes of comparatively short duration. This topic is large, so I am going to give quick examples and keep moving. I will leave out the well- known story of the fight over dinosaur extinction by catastrophic means. Even so, in the end, your worldview permitting, you will see that there is massive evidence for a catastrophic interpretation of earth history.

The Columbia Plateau

Catastrophism is opposed to uniformitarianism, which is the belief that changes in the past, particularly geological ones can be explained best by observable processes existing today, usually happening slowly over long periods of time. This belief does not explain any of the geologic formations around where I grew up in Spokane, Washington, which sits on the Columbia Plateau. This plateau is an enormous lava field of 15,000 square miles and up to 10,000 feet deep. You can see the various layers of basalt in the canyon with pine tree vegetation pictured on the left. One layer, seventy-five feet thick, extends for hundreds of miles. One of the flows forming these layers encased an extinct rhinoceros, a Diceratherium, leaving the mold shown at the right. There are no processes today that are producing anything like the Columbia Plateau, or the even more massive lava fields in Siberia, India, Brazil, or on the moon.

Near the center of the State is Gingko petrified forest. Below on the left is a piece of Cyprus from it. There are a lot of petrified forests around, but no process today is producing them. The wood just rots away. Further, central Washington is very arid. There are no Gingko or Cyprus treesgrowing there now. What happened in the earth's past is not happening today - this is the opposite of the principle of uniformity.

The Great Spokane Flood

All over Eastern Washington are evidences of catastrophic flooding. As early as 1949-1950, I had seen some of them several times. In 1957-1958, at my high school science club, I heard about the ongoing controversy concerning the interpretation of these evidences. J Harlan Bretz, a PhD geologist from the University of Chicago, called the whole area the channeled scablands. In 1923 he proposed that a massive flood had scrubbed the land bare in places, left huge amounts of flood debris in other places, and formed channels like Grand Coulee.

Grand Coulee, which gives its name to Grand Coulee Dam, is 50 miles long and several miles wide. You can see in the picture on the right that it is flat on the bottom with steep sides. Bretz realized that only a gigantic flood could have carved it out of the solid basalt. But the uniformitarian geologists at the US Geological Survey and elsewhere, insisted that the Columbia River did the carving over along periods of time. If they were right, this channel would have been a V-shaped valley. If a glacier had done it, then it would have been U-shaped. It is obvious they were wrong, but they fought Bretz for forty years.

Besides Grand Coulee, no normal flood could have formed the above feature, Dry Falls, which are higher and wider than Niagara Falls. My mother took this picture around 1950 from its rim. Also, no normal flood could have left piles of debris shown at the right, especially with the the boulders in the middle. It does not take a trained geologist to see that! How could PhD scientists be so off base? It made no sense to me, even though at that time I was looking to science for all the answers to life. What I did not understand then, is the great subjectivity in scientific theorizing, especially in geology and biology. When the topic of evolution or uniformitarianism comes up, science goes out the window, and worldview comes in the door. (For more on the channeled scablands click here.)

The net effect of all this on me as a young man, was to make me very skeptical. I was skeptical about religion and was looking for rigorous proofs of God's existence. In college I was taught biology with the textbook Life, coauthored by one of the noted evolutionists of the day, George Gaylord Simpson. Among other things, the authors assert that without uniformitarianism, "there could be no really scientific study of any kind of history." Basically, they are saying that Bretz was not doing real science. But I knew from experience that this statement by Simpson and his coauthors was not true, and a misrepresentation of real science.

Further, the authors of my textbook assert that the principle of uniformitarianism "was one of the major triumphs in the history of human thought." They indulge in this propaganda because they are promoting Darwinism, which they point out also has close ties to uniformitarianism. Well, I did not buy into the idea that we descended from a common ancestor, even though I called myself an agnostic at the time. I thought evolutionary theory was not scientific and that there had to be a better explanation for our origins than this. (For how I eventually found a better explanation, click here.)

The book also contains a geological time chart. It shows our present era, the Cenozoic. It is preceded by the Mesozoic and Paleozoic Eras, comprised of various periods such as the Cretaceous, Jurassic, Permian, Pennsylvanian, Mississippian, Ordovician, and Cambrian. Is this chart correct, or is it part of the uniformitarian propaganda I had already encountered?

A scablands feature I did not see were ripple marks like the giant ones in Western Montana, shown at the right. They are also located in various places in Eastern Washington. These are thought to be from the Cenozoic Era. In Colorado, the ripple marks, shown below right, along with dinosaur tracks, are dated as being from the Cretaceous Period. But dinosaur tracks and ripple marks in Utah are from the Jurassic Period. There are ripple marks, from the Pennsylvanian Period, in Alabama. There are some, from the Ordovician, here in Georgia, and there are ripple marks, from the Cambrian Period, in New York. In my fossil collection are bird tracks from Wyoming. Now what preserves animal tracks and ripple marks? Why didn't they wash away in the next rain or tide? This is not a process observable today. Again, this is evidence against uniformitarian geology. It is also evidence for massive, worldwide water action, from at least one catastrophic flood.

Index Fossils

Some extinct animals are used as index fossils to indicate the supposed ages of various geological periods. Shown at the above right are belemnite index fossils. According to the belemnite fossil in the picture below, the rock is about 189 million years old, but the wood right on top of it carbon dates to about 23,000 years. We have a discrepancy of over 188 million years. This contradiction is one of many examples indicating there is something wrong with the index fossils involved in dating strata.

Geologists have dated the Mauv formation in the Grand Canyon as Cambrian because of the index fossils in it. The same holds true for the Red Wall Mississippian layer above it. The problem is that, according to the uniformitarian geological column, the two should be separated by the Ordovician, the Silurian, and the Devonian Periods, which amount to some 150 million years. So what happened to the 150 million years of geological time? The missing layers did not erode away. You can see from the picture on the right that the white-colored Mauv is interbedded with the Red Wall limestone at the boundary. That means there was no erosion between the two layers. This one of many examples that the geological column is fictional. There is no lost 150 million years of geological time, because it never existed.

Fossils

The drawing on the right was made before Lyell and Darwin published their ideas. It depicts a petrified tree found at the angle shown and penetrating around a dozen different strata. Uniformitarians would say that the different layers took thousands of years to accumulate. That cannot be so because the tree would have long since rotted away. This is one of many polystrate polystrateexamples indicating that deposition of sediment layers had to be rapid, and not slowly over a long period of time.

Other indications of rapid deposition are mass fossil graveyards like Fossil Lake in Wyoming. One layer, 14-20 inches, in one lake, contains millions of fishes.⁽¹⁾ There are other fossils of mass kills, such as pictured at the left. These are some of the evidences of millions of more fish rapidly buried all over the world. Another picture I do not have room for is my wife standing beside a mass kill display at the British Museum. These mass graveyards are best interpreted in terms of a worldwide catastrophic flood.

Coelacanths

The coelacanths first appeared in the fossil record at a date of 375 million years ago in the Devonian period. The last fossil was dated at 80 million years ago in the Cretaceous period.⁽²⁾

The discovery of living coelacanths in this century electrified the scientific world. A fish that had existed from Devonian times and then had thought to have died out with the dinosaurs was found alive! Let us ask why there are no fossils of this fish during the time since the dinosaurs? Again, it looks like we have lost 80 million years from the fossil record. However, a young age for the earth explains not only why there are no fossils for 80 million years, but also why this primative-looking fish never evolved.

Stromatolites

The same thing can be said for stromatolites, which are the oldest fossils that we know. Depending on the researcher, stromatolites are up to 3.7 billion years old. ⁽³⁾ ⁽⁴⁾ ⁽⁵⁾ That is really old, because the oldest rocks are thought to be 3.8 billion years old. The oldest stromatolites are nearly as old as the oldest rocks!

Single-celled, blue-green algae, also called cyanobacteria, make stromatolites, which are identifiable layers of minerals that the algae form. At one time scientists thought the algae that formed these stromatolites were extinct. Then unexpectedly, the algae were found alive and well in the late 1950's in Shark Bay, Western Australia.⁽⁶⁾ A modern stromatolite in Shark Bay is shown at the right. The algae still make minerals into the same identifiable patterns. The verifiable scientific facts are that it did not change. It did not evolve. Think about it, the oldest fossil never changed!

Not only did the algae not evolve, they did not even adapt to a changing environment. In the past they were more common: Stromatolites have been found all over: Canada, California, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Arkansas, New York, Turkey, the Bahamas, Australia, and so on. But today the algae are less common.⁽⁷⁾ So evolution, and even adaption, as far as we can tell, never happened even though the algae's environment changed for the worse. One explanation is that there was not enough time for the algae to evolve because the earth is young. That it did not even adapt to the changed environment implies catastrophic change.

Other Living Fossils

Stromatolites are just one example of many living fossils. Nautiloid are thought to have lived over half a billion years ago in the Cambrian period. Almost all the nautiloid died out at the same time as the ammonites. Only five or six species of the nautiloid live on today. They are found in deep water sections of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. So, like the blue-green algae, the nautiloid did not adapt, but certain species lived on, like the chambered nautilus, whose cutaway shell is pictured at the right, while the rest of the nautiloid died out. Not only did the chambered nautilus not evolve, but, like the blue-green algae, they did not even adapt, even though they are very capable of adaption according to the latest research.

The story of sea lilies is the same as for the nautiloid. Sea lilies have been dated to as long as 570 million years ago. Shown at the right is a fossil of one. Five thousand species are extinct, and only eighty species live today - again in deep water. These data suggest that there was a major catastrophe that destroyed all but deep-water nautiloid and sea lilies.

Careful researchers first found bacteria alive in the guts of insects trapped in amber dated at 125 million years old. Later they found living bacteria in salt thought to be 250 million years old. Some other scientists believe this is too long a time to stay alive, and I agree. The bacteria did not live for hundreds of millions of years - they only stayed alive for a few thousands of years.

Perhaps the reason that these and other living fossils did not evolve is because the age of the earth is very young. The reason that they did not even adapt is because at least one catastrophe created radically changing environments and there was not enough time to change.(More on Living Fossils)

A Young Earth?

If the earth were young then we would expect to find evidence that man has been on it from the start. I will present some of it. Shown at the right is a man-made hammer in rock that dates back to the time of the dinosaurs. This implies strongly that humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.

You may have seen an interesting article in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1993. A fossil hunter has found a treasure trove of fossilized tracks from the Permium Period. He keeps the exact location in the Robledo Mountains in New Mexico a secret so he can keep on carrying out these fossils. The puzzling thing is that some appear to be bird and bear tracks - but birds and mammals are not supposed to have existed in this period, which is before the dinosaurs. If you look closely at the picture of his of his studio, it seems like there are human footprints in his collection. That is what a Texan, Don Patten, thought. Patton went to New Mexico, found the Permian site, and found human footprints too. I phoned Patten and talked to him - he does not seem like the type that would create a hoax. But his find means humans have lived on the earth from early times, but how long is that? Is it a short period of time?

The past assumptions on mitrocondrial DNA mutation rates appear to be wrong. Recently there has been careful DNA studies of Czar Nicholas II of Russia and his family. Given the mutation data from Czar Nicholas and his living relatives, the mitrocondrial "Eve," the mother of all humans, would be 6,000 years old, not 100,000 to 200,000 years old as previously thought, according to a 1998 article in Science. Obviously this date is not acceptable to scientists, but it is the result of factual data. It is the best match I know of for the Biblical chronology.

The authors of a report in American Antiquities magazine investigated human bones in North America with the latest and most accurate mass spectrometer technique. Previous analyses using uranium series estimates and another mass spectrometer technique have given ages of human bones up to 70,000 years. The new technique dates the same bone at around 4,000 years old and no other bone older than 11,000 years before the present. It seems that past radiocarbon dating methods may be in great error.

The Age of the Earth

The many assumptions made in calculating the age of the Earth by radiometric means also add up to a questionable result. An important example is uranium with an atomic weight of 238 (²³⁸U), which decays into lead, with at atomic weight of 206 (²⁰⁶Pb). The decay from²³⁸U to²³⁴Th has a calculated half-life of about 4.5 billion years. This is where we get long ages for the Earth. We must ask "Where did very heavy elements like uranium, thorium, and lead come from, and how did they get into the Earth's crust?" The answer to this question relates directly to the formation and age of the Universe.

According to theory, shortly after the hypothetical "Big Bang," the Universe contained only the lightest elements: hydrogen and helium. No one has seen the formation of a star, but naturalistic presuppositions drive scientists to assume that lightweight elements somehow accreted together to form the stars. This coming together is no mean feat if the elements were also speeding apart from each other due to the supposed primal explosion, the Big Bang!

Theorists think supernovae generate the high pressures needed to forge the heavy elements. But no one has observed heavy elements like uranium being made in supernovae.

Although the explosions from supernovae scatter these heavy elements, and though they are rushing away from each other, in theory they somehow cluster together and form planets and new stars. The rings of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune do not seem to be clumping together and neither does the asteroid belt. This is observational evidence against the idea of accretion and there is none for it.

Astronomers have reported detecting heavy elements in the oldest stars, (which are at the edge of the universe).⁽⁸⁾ But the oldest stars should not have heavy elements in them if the standard model is correct . Similarly, the oldest galaxies also contain heavy elements.⁽⁹⁾ Again, according to theory, this should not have happened. It is evidence that God created all the elements at once. So how uranium got in our crust is miraculous, when you look at all the impossibilities.

What follows are the ²³⁸U decay chain and half-lives for alpha decay only. (The beta decay steps are not shown.)

Table 2 - ²³⁸U Alpha Decay Chain

²³⁸U decays to ²³⁴Th in approximately 4.5 billion years

²³⁴U decays to ²³⁰Th in 24 days

²³⁰Th decays to ²²⁶Ra in 80 thousand years

²²⁶Ra decays to ²²²Ra in 1,620 years

²²²Rn decays to ²¹⁸Po in 38 seconds

²¹⁸Po decays to ²¹⁴Po in 3 minutes

²¹⁴Po decays to ²¹⁰Po in 160 microseconds

²¹⁰Po decays to ²⁰⁶Pb in 138 days

²⁰⁶Pb is stable and the chain does not decay any more.

(U=Uranium/Th=Thorium/Ra=Radium/Rn=Radon/Po=Polonium/Pb=Lead)

What scientists measure in a sample is the lead or its ratio - that is a fact. However, the calculation of the age of the sample involves many unprovable assumptions. The most critical assumption, and yet the weakest one, is that all the ²⁰⁶Pb in the Earth's crust got there from²³⁸U. This is a critical assumption because, without it, no meaningful calculation of the age of the Earth can be made. If some ²⁰⁶Pb came from a supernova or from some other source, scientists measuring it would not know how much of it resulted from radioactive decay. They would not be able to arrive at a correct answer for the age of the Earth.

From a creationist standpoint, these scientists are saying that God never created any Pb, or any of the other daughter products shown here. This is the anti-supernatural worldview affecting science. Now who can say that God never created any lead 206 or any of these daughter products? I think that for the sake of completeness, He did. We already saw evidence for this assumption with heavy elements in the oldest stars and galaxies and there is more.

Another assumption is a constant decay rate. Howver, a very dramatic change occurs if all the electrons in a nucleus are stripped away. Scientists have demonstrated that stripping the electrons from rhenium-187 causes the half-life to change from forty-two billion years to thirty-three years! This could happen in a harsh environment like a star's interior.⁽¹⁰⁾ )

Rocks/Conclusions

Robert Gentry has done careful research on rocks containing the radioactive decay chain shown above. He published his work in refereed scientific journals, including Nature and Science. He has found evidence that polonium appeared suddenly in some Precambrian granites without any parent.⁽¹¹⁾

Since these poloniums all have short half-lives, the implications are staggering. Gentry's experimental results imply that these rocks did not form from hot magmas that slowly cooled over long ages - rather they formed nearly instantaneously. This is evidence that God created some uranium decay daughter products, and the implication is that God created completely. He made the others too, including lead. The poloniums did not come from stardust or uranium decay, and therefore the rocks containing them and the Earth itself are young. (For more on this, click here.)

Although Gentry's conclusions are unacceptable to many, there has been no scientific refutation of his work. There is a possibility that some of the samples Gentry tested were influenced by migration of the element, as is true of all dating methods. However, in this case, the half-lives of some the poloniums are so short that this migration problem is very limited.

THE BIBLE

Critics of the Bible operate on the same anti-supernatural worldview and uniformitarian presupposition that we have already encountered in science. Professor Eta Linnemann studied biblical criticism and published in the discipline. Then she realized it was an ideology and not a methodology. She wrote another book explaining why and asking her readers to throw her earlier publications in the trash, as she had done. I find it interesting that she makes a comparison to uniformitarian geology. (For more on this, click here.)

From a historical viewpoint, the Bible totally outclasses all written texts. Most written texts can be traced back to the Middle Ages, and then the trail stops. There are no more texts. On the other hand, we have complete copies of the Bible that go back to the fourth century, and fragments of it that go back even further. The Bible checks out better than any other old book.

Christians believe that God inspired and preserved the Bible, and that God walked on Earth as Jesus. (More on Jesus.) Jesus is the Second Person of the Triune Godhead. So when He speaks, what He says is infallible. In the Gospels, both Matthew and Mark record the answer Jesus gave to a question about divorce. Jesus' reply includes quotes from Genesis 1: "Have you read that at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female?" (Matt 19:4, NIV)and Genesis 2: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh." (Mark 10:7,8a.) One key approach to Biblical interpretation is to ask what was said mean to the listeners. Let us stop here and apply that method. Jesus is alluding to Adam and Eve. What did these listeners know about God's creating, and about Adam and Eve? Also Jesus had referred to reading. What had they read?

I have a little replica of the type of jar in which the Dead Sea scrolls were found. I bought it this summer at Chicago's Field Museum where the scrolls were on display. There is a replica scroll inside. When scholars analyzed all the scrolls, they found that the scrolls dated to before, during, and after Jesus' sojourn on Earth, and that there were passages from all of the Old Testament except the book of Esther. For our study, the scrolls start "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . .And God created humankind . . .." (Genesis 1:1 and 27a)

Also, the Hebrew in these early chapters is in the form of a waw consecutive indicating a straightforward narrative, and not any poetic or other style. Both the phrase "evening and morning," and the numerical adjective in front of the word for day, yom, indicate a 24 hour period.

Another early source was The Septuagint, a complete Old Testament written in Greek. Jesus' listeners could have compared it with the Dead Sea scrolls, and also read: "And God formed the man of dust of the earth, and breathed upon his face the breath of life . . ."(Genesis 2:7), and later read that God made Eve from a side part of Adam.

If they still had the Ten Commandments written on stone, the High Priest could have read them and affirmed that Jews should observe the seventh day, the Sabbath, as a day of rest, because God rested on the seventh day after creating all things in six days. Also Jesus' listeners could have read this passage in Exodus, which is not from the Ten Commandments: "The Israelites are to observe the Sabbath . . . for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he abstained from work and rested." (Exodus 31:16a and 17b).

At this point we should ask what is the biblical evidence for an old earth and even older universe. The answer is that there is none. Neither of the two verses that refer to a day with the Lord as a thousand years (Psalms 90:4 and II Peter 3:8) are in the context of the creation week. The order of biblical creation has the earth created before the sun, moon, and stars. So the earth is older than the rest of the universe.

We must conclude that Jesus' quotes from Genesis referred to the creation of Adam and Eve on the sixth day of a six-day, 24-hour creation. The text was revelation from God. That was what his listeners had read and believed. You can read these same passages today in any translation. The question is how much faith you have in Jesus and his words (Hebrews 12:3). The facts of science are on your side, it is interpretations of these facts that are against you.

HANDOUT for UGA Talk

Glossary of Selected Terms

Accident: An unplanned event. Macroevolution implies we are the result of a long line of accidents. As a consequence, our lives have no meaning or purpose.

Adaptation: See Microevolution.

Believe: To have a firm conviction in the reality of something.

Catastrophism: Explaining past change in terms of discontinuous, catastrophic processes.

Chance: An uncaused event. Current theories like the Big Bang imply that all happened by chance. However, chance is unobserved and not measurable - it simply does not exist except as a mental construct.

Chemical Evolution: The emergence of life from chemicals/non-living matter. This is testable. Pasteur demonstrated it does not occur.

Cosmic Evolution: The sun, moon, stars, solar systems, and galaxies developed naturally from matter and energy.

Creation: The world we see is a result of supernatural activity.

Darwinism: Macroevolution by natural selection, slowly over a long period of time.

Evolution: The world we see arose from a simple beginning by natural processes.

Facts: Refer to specific verifiable events or entities. An example is an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed. They do not refer to universal claims of any kind.

Falsification: If an idea/theory/hypothesis cannot be subject to a test that would prove it false, the idea/theory/hypothesis is not scientific, (ala Sir Karl Popper and Judge William Overton).

Living Fossil: A recent being whose external form has changed little since its inception. (From Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History.) ⁽¹⁾

Lineage comprises all individuals that are able to hyberdize or have hyberdized with the same third organism.⁽²⁾ It includes species, and sometimes genera and even families.

Macroevolution: Origin of lineages, (which include species), by descent from a common ancestor. This is not observed or testable, and hence the controversy over it.

Microevolution: Change within a lineage (sometimes called adaption). This is observed, and there is no debate over it.

Neo-Darwinism: Macroevolution by natural selection of accidental mutations, slowly over long periods of time. This is not observed and not testable, but does have a postulated method. What is observed is no change in form and structure in the fossil record.

Neo-Lamarckism: Descent from a common ancestor by inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Punctuated equilibrium: Macroevolution by rapid mutations with long periods of no change in between. This is not observed, not testable, and does not even have a postulated mechanism. Unchanging form and structure is observed in the fossil record.

[The] Scientific Revolution: Generally the period from 1543 to 1727.

Species: An interbreeding population that is/was capable producing fertile offspring.

Theistic evolution: God makes Macroevolution work.

Transcendent evolution: The idea that evolution is a unifying principle of science, transcending traditional disciplines.

Uniformitarianism: Explaining all past change in terms of current processes.

Worldview: An encompassing mental framework and pattern that provides a guide to life.

For further elaboration, check my Website:

http://www2.gasou.edu/facstaff/etmcmull/

These are files associated with the above address:

Did we descend from Animals? - /ANIMAL.htm