Andrew this just is not
what you normally see in people's backyards. This is just amazing! No, no. We've got a 900-foot high
cinder cone volcano. I mean, we're blown
away by the scale here, but imagine going back
to Mount St. Helens, 1980: the top two and a
half thousand feet of the mountain was blown away and hundreds of square miles
were affected by that eruption. Step back further in history — you go
to the Yellowstone eruption — some of the volcanic ash from that eruption was blown
all the way down to Texas. So we go back through
the geologic record — back in time — the scale
gets larger and larger. In fact, we can say that the volcanic eruptions we
experienced today are a leftover from greater activity
in the past. When we look at the geologic
record — we see some of the lava flows that are out there — this lava flow might have been
about 12 feet thick at maximum, and it's only one lava flow. You go to India, for example, and you have a stack of lava flows 10 or 20
feet thick that stack up for a thousand feet and cover a third
of the Indian subcontinent — which was one vast outpouring. On a small scale,
people might be familiar with the Pacific
northwest of the U.S: the Columbia River basalts. There was a similar sort of
eruption with thick lava flows — but over a much smaller area — but it's still several orders
of magnitude larger in scale to what we see here
in this location. So it tells us that things were happening at
a vaster scale and, therefore, at a greater catastrophic
rate in the past, with this volcanism for example. But there are other
geological processes as well. I'm assuming you're pointing
us to the Flood. And what happened? Walk us through those events. Well, the Bible starts
by saying, you know, Noah went into the ark,
God shut the door, and then we… we're told pass… at a specific point
in time the fountains of the great deep broke open. What is that? Well, it's a poetic description. The Hebrew scholars will tell
us it's a poetic description of a physical reality. And we wouldn't have known
about this a hundred years ago, because we didn't understand
the deep ocean floor. It's an interesting story about
what happened in the history of geological thought. And in the 1850s a guy called Antonio Snider Pellegrini… he
actually was one of the first that looked at the jigsaw
puzzle fit of North and South America
with Europe and Africa, and he put it back
together and said, well what happened if the fountains
of the great deep were molten material coming up
in big volcanic eruptions that broke up
the pre-Flood supercontinent and pushed them apart? So he was looking at this
from a Genesis paradigm? Absolutely. He was thinking, you know, the Bible
describing all the waters to gather together in one place
at the time of creation, so the land was in one place, and the fountains
of the great deep represented a pre-Flood a supercontinent that was split apart by
volcanism — by volcanic activity coming up through rifts
and splitting it apart — and he was thinking
of continental sprint: the pre-Flood supercontinent
breaking apart and the fragments sprinting across the surface of the earth
to open up the Atlantic Ocean and produce the
configuration of continents that we had today. Now his ideas weren't taken onboard immediately — even
the idea of continental drift, slow and gradual — well, it wasn't proposed by…
in a conventional scientific community until
the early nineteen hundreds. And for over 50 years, those who proposed the idea of continental drift —
and now we're thinking in terms of slow and gradual
over millions of years, because that was their paradigm
of thinking — they were opposed and they were ostracized. And this is a good illustration
of what happened… can happen with a paradigm change. After the Second World War, governments released maps
of the ocean floor that they had developed as part
of their submarine warfare. And, suddenly,
the geologists discovered that there were these mountain
chains in the middle of the ocean basins. And they started to explore it, and within ten years there
was a total paradigm shift. Before, you were scorned if you believed
in continental drift. Now it's the reigning paradigm;
it's called plate tectonics. The reason it's called
plate tectonics is because it's not just
the continents that fractured, it was also the ocean floor. And today we have
a mosaic of plates that make up the outer skin
of the earth — the crust. Some of those… like the Pacific
Ocean floor is one plate, and it's pushing it against
the North American plate, and where it slides
past one another — it's along the San Andreas
fault in California, which produces earthquakes. Where it's colliding today with
the South American continent, the ocean floors being pushed
down underneath and, of course, it starts to melt. And so you get the volcanic
eruptions in the Andes. You can actually trace
the plates' boundaries with the earthquakes and the volcanoes — we talk
about the Pacific Ring of Fire. And so the reason why
this idea took off — of plate tectonics — was because it was a very
powerful way of explaining the features that we have
on the earth's surface today: where you have volcanoes, where you have earthquakes,
those sorts of issues. And why you have that ridge
at the bottom of the ocean. Correct. Now there's some things that the conventional plate
tectonics model can't explain. And this takes us
back to the Flood, because as soon as you start to add in what Pellegrini
was talking about — looking at the Biblical view
of earth history — suddenly the model
becomes more powerful in explaining more information. Now let me… let
me step you through it. So we're saying that at the beginning
of the Flood, we're going to break
open the ocean floor — the fountains of the great deep. So it's like the seam
of a baseball, you know how you've got all
the stitching on a baseball…. Yes. …or cracks? You've got to have 70,000 miles
of volcano suddenly exploding and molten material coming up that's going to raise
the ocean floor. You're going to have
the steam jets come out because of the release
of fluids from inside the earth. Those steam jets are going
to take some of the ocean water and take it up
into the atmosphere where it's going to drop. And the Bible talks about the windows
of heaven opening and it was torrential rainfall
for 40 days and 40 nights. So the picture does
explain that imagery that's described in the Bible. But it does more than that, because one of the things
that the conventional model doesn't come to grips with is that the fossils — many of the fossils
of marine creatures — and they're found buried up
on the continents. And so you're going
to have a mechanism from taking creatures
from the ocean floor and burying them up
on the continents in rock lairs. And the catastrophic
plate tectonics model helps us to understand this because you bring up
this molten material, okay? Warm material is
actually less dense because it expands. So if you have
it happen rapidly, what's going to happen? You're going to produce all this
new ocean floor very rapidly. It's going to be hot and warm and it's going
to take a while to cool, but it's going to expand. So if it expands,
what's it gonna do? It's going to push
up the sea level. So the water is actually going to start to flood
onto the continents. Add to that the earthquakes generated
by the earth movements, and you're going to have
tsunamis of a scale that makes the — you know, the Japanese or the Sumatran
tsunamis that we've seen in recent decades —
look very small. So you could have surges
of water moving from the ocean towards the continents very
rapidly hundreds of feet high. As it gets to shallower water, it's going to pick up
the marine creatures, and it's going to scour
the ocean bottom and it's going to carry that material up
onto the continents. So immediately we have
a mechanism for the rainfall, for surges of sedimentation where the sea level rises
— it's going to go right across the continents and blanket the continents with
these sedimentary rock layers. But then the fragments are going
to start to move around as they're pushed aside
by this new ocean floor. The old ocean floor
is cold and dense, so it's going to start to sink
into the mantle and it's going to generate volcanic activity
on the continents. But then you're going
to get fragments that collide with one another. And so, for example, Africa and Europe collided
with North America during the Flood. And what did we get? We get buckled layers
of fossil- bearing sedimentary rocks that we find
in the Appalachian Mountains. And then the
process changes again, and it opens up
the Atlantic Ocean. Now we've got the Pacific
Ocean floor going under North America
as it goes westward, and we get volcanism out west, and big granites form in
Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas, and the Rocky Mountains
get pushed up as a result of these collisions. Now one of the things that has puzzled conventional…
the conventional scientific community is not only
do we have the mountain belts in particular areas, but they can't explain why
the mountains have risen so recently to the elevations
that we find them in. And on a slow and gradual
process of millions of years — they would expect
to take a long time — and it would be
a longer- scale process. But when we look
at catastrophic plate tectonics what's happening as they … all the ocean floor goes down, it's going to go
down so rapidly — we're talking about meters
per second movement. We're talking about
walking pace movement, rather than today
we've got the, you know, the growth of the finger nail — that's the scale at which
movements are occurring today. Per year. We're talking
about walking pace. These plates moving…
what's going to happen, it's going to actually
push down the margins that it's trying to seek. It's going to push down
the margins of the continents. So what happens — this is
where the mountains are forming, or where you've
got collision zones, and so what's going to happen — when the process
slows right down, it's going to start to have
an opportunity to rise and it's going
to rise very rapidly. And that's only
in the recent past. There's a whole list
of problem areas that the conventional slow and gradual model for
plate tectonics can't explain, that catastrophic plate
tectonics can explain. And, of course,
the other thing is that okay, once you get rid of the old ocean floor
you've got all this new, warm, ocean floor. It's going to start to cool — initially it expanded
and raised sea level — it's going to start to cool. And when it starts to cool
to form the new ocean basins, it's going to sink. So the water is going to slosh
back off the continents, back into the ocean basins. As it does,
what's it going to do? It's gonna erode. We can see vast areas
around the Grand Canyon that are being eroded off. Steve Austin talked
about the Grand Staircase — it's a remnant of
what was left of the rocks that weren't scoured away. So once the water comes off
in the sheet erosion, as the flow decreases
it's going to move down towards more channelized flow. It's going to pick weaker points
where it's going to erode in, and it's going to start
to make the river valleys. So, many of the canyons that we see on the earth's
surface and river valleys were carved out as a result
of the receding waters phase of the Flood where the water was drying off. The sediments, of course, were washed out around the edges
of the continent. That's why we have all
the sediments today on the continental shelves, or we get oil and natural gas
as a result in those sediments. And it's the same in the Grand
Canyon as anywhere else. You look down
at the Colorado River. It's a fraction
of the scale of the canyon. Many river valleys, you've only got a tiny trickle — if you're looking
at the big scale and you see this vast
valley — and the idea that slow and gradual
erosion over millions of years carved out
these valleys is just nonsense. As I say to people, why are there rapids
in the Grand Canyon? Simply because the Colorado
River is not eroding out the Grand Canyon. The rapids are formed by flash
floods from the side canyons that dump the material. Even in flood phase
before the dams, there were rapids. The Colorado River
wasn't carving out the canyon. So it means that it had
to be a greater volume of water in the past. The conventional paradigm of millions of years has
no mechanism for that, whereas the Flood mechanism, the Biblical paradigm
of the Flood when the whole earth was covered
in water — the Bible says all the high hills
under the whole heaven, the mountains were covered — and then the waters retreat. They're going to carve out
the present land surface. And so that integrates
a lot of information, but it all fits
with this picture that stems from
what we're seeing here when we have talked
about this being a small scale compared to what we see
in the geologic record. It leads us to answer
these bigger picture questions of what was going on
at the time of the Flood. And, once again, it seems that the evidence
that we find around us — all around the world, even at the bottom of the oceans
— seems to support now the historical record we have in Genesis better than what the
conventional paradigm tells us. Right, and it leads again
to the question of the age. I mean we talked about
radioisotope dating and the fact that we can't depend
on the radioisotope dating. Let me just show
you something here. We're here right
at these rocks, and this is the lava flow. Remember we said one
of the problems with the dating methods is that they're going to get
daughter atoms trapped in there that weren't from
radioactive decay or get things that leak out. If you have a closer look at this you can see
the gas bubbles in the basalt. When it cooled
and those gas bubbles pop, this is leaving this rough
surface in the basalt. So this was filled
with that gas…. It was filled with gas, including argon, which wasn't
from radioactive decay. Remember that this basalt comes
from deep inside the earth. One aspect I didn't
mention earlier is that basalt is of a different
composition to many of the rocks on the earth's…
on the land surface. The continents have
a different composition to the ocean floor. The ocean floor
is made up of basalt, and the continental rocks
differ from basalt. They're more like
a composition of a granite. So it means that this basalt will have come
from deep in the earth, down in the top
of the Earth's mantle, that comes up through fractures, and comes out
through the volcanoes. And it brings up
the gases with it. But the very fact that we can see
these gas bubbles indicates, again, the problems with
the radioactive dating methods. A rock like this has been dated
with potassium argon — we know that this is a recent lava flow — and yet it will give you ages
of tens of thousands of years because of the presence of the extra argon
in these rocks. And that is common, this is not just
a feature here. We find that in lava flows
around the world. Recent islands, volcanic
islands in the ocean basins, the basalts give ages
of hundreds of millions of years for potassium argon, uranium lead, ages of one to
two billion years for rocks that we know
the historical ages. We've actually
observed them occur. So this is the problem
we see illustrated here, in front of us, with a rock like this, with these
radioactive dating methods. That brings us back
to that hour glass that's open on both ends, and even the rate
in between is variable. That's right. We've got the evidence
that we can have inheritance. So the top is open and we're getting extra material
in at the beginning. The bottom is open because we've added
extra material at the beginning. We can get contamination. I can talk about granites
in the Himalayas that are supposed to be
20 million years old — they have crystals inside them that are
over a billion years old, and crystals inside them that are minus 100
million years old. They haven't even formed yet,
that we've studied. And so these are the problems
with contamination. And then we've talked
about the rate of decay — the evidence that just as we saw catastrophic plate
tectonics during the Flood, catastrophic eruptions,
catastrophic sedimentation. We've had catastrophic
decay rates, radioactive decay rates
that have aged these rocks more than the conventional paradigm
would have us to believe. And, again, we're back to the
problem associated with saying that the present is
a key to the past, because we don't have those kind
of catastrophes today. No. We can talk about the laws of physics being
the same in the past. I mean water still flowed
downhill during the Flood, but we're talking
about the rates of processes. There's a difference. We're not talking
about the suspension of physical laws
during the Flood. Some people would say, oh, but you're imposing a miracle
for a catastrophic plate tectonics or for
catastrophic decay rates. No, we're talking
about the normal physical laws, but they are operating
at catastrophic rates. And that's the difference. Yes, the present does give
us clues about the past, but we have to be careful that we're not locked in
to saying only today's rates can be used to explain how rapid processes
were in the past. When we see several lines
of evidence on the scale — and we'll see this
when we look at Sedona, when we look at the scale of the sedimentary
layers — the scale of the layers indicates
much greater scale of catastrophic action
in the past. I sometimes think, Andrew, that we've done a disservice
in how we teach our children about the Flood. You know, we somehow convey to them that this was
a fairly passive event. Part of that came from
theologians and Bible scholars who are trying to keep in
lockstep with the geologists. And the geologists said they couldn't see
the evidence of a Flood. And so the Biblical
scholars said well, the Flood must have been
tranquil, you know? That the waters rose, they covered the mountains and
hills and then they sank again. And so we have
this nice fairy story or a bathtub ark
with a giraffe sticking out. And, you know, it's all nice and airy fairy
and it's a myth. The geological details
in the case that was a cataclysm of just enormous…
The earth was convulsed. And that fits with
what the Bible says that God said he was gonna
destroy the earth with man. I mean God's anger was
against man for his wickedness. Every thought and imagination of the man's heart
was evil continually. I mean that just blows the mind. And that required, you know, that sort of upheaval
to totally renovate and change the surface
of the earth and start again. And so… the idea
of a tranquil Flood is not borne out by
the geologic evidence at all. In fact, in Peter
we read… he says that that world
that was was destroyed. Boy, that's not just a soaking. That is a massive,
massive destruction. It was a cataclysm. It was. That's the Greek word
that's used there. And so the world then
was being overflowed with water was… perished, but the heavens and the earth which are now —
he makes a distinction that the earth today is
totally different to the world that was before the Flood, and it suffered
from this upheaval that totally changed
the surface of the earth. So let's put out of our mind
any idea of a tranquil Flood. This was of such proportions that it's hard
for us to imagine it unless we're able to visually see the products
that it left behind. And that's what we
can do in geology. That's what makes
it so exciting… what makes me passionate about these issues is
that we can show people, we can broaden their horizons, so we can show you
the big picture of what was happening
during the Flood — that brings it to life as
a real catastrophic event just as the Bible describes. And better matches the evidence. Absolutely.
