DEL: You know, I grew
up in country like this. My dad and I would ride our horses up
to these amazing high mountain lakes. We’d ride back into some
pretty remote wilderness areas… …with incredible streams
and meadows and wildlife. I love it here. DEL: Look at this canyon. It reminds me of
the Grand Canyon. You’ve got this little stream… …you’ve got these
steep canyon walls. How long do you suppose it would
take for a stream this small to
remove this much material? And cut the canyon this deep? This rock has a history, just
like I do and just like you do. It came from somewhere. A lot of these rocks have been dated
to be 350,000 years old — up to 2 million. That’s pretty old. DEL: But it might
surprise you to know… …that all of the geological
formations that we see here — the
canyons, the layers, even the plants — …are younger than I am. When I was born, there was
nothing here but a vast forest… …hundreds of feet below
where we’re standing right now. In fact, before 1980… most people had never even
heard of Mount St. Helens. [explosion rumbling] It was in that year on May 18th that
molten rock created a steam blast… …with a force of 20
million tons of TNT. Avalanche debris and other
flows from the eruption laid down… …all of those layers
rapidly, up to 600 feet thick. A couple of years later there
was some more volcanic activity… …that created a mud flow
that cut out this entire canyon. It also cut through
deep bedrock. All in a couple days. Isn’t it amazing what a little bit of
information from the past can do… …to help change your view of the
present and the present world around you? There are a lot of assumptions
made by a lot of people… …about the history of
the earth around us. The question is, how do
those assumptions affect… …how we view that history? But more importantly, how do they play into how
we view science and the Bible? Did God create the world in a
few days or billions of years? Is mankind descended from apes… …or did God create us
instantly, in His image. Was there a global flood
that destroyed the earth… …or is that a myth? In other words… …is Genesis history? ♪♪ DEL: When we think about
the history of the earth… …there are a lot of things
we need to consider. But one of the most fascinating
is the account of the Flood. Was the whole earth
covered with water? Genesis says the waters
prevailed so mightily on the earth… …that all the high mountains under
the whole heaven were covered. So if the Flood
was truly global… …wouldn’t there be
a lot of evidence? I’d heard of a scientist who had spent
over 40 years studying this question. When I spoke to him… …he said he had a great place where
we could see evidence for the global flood. DEL: Steve, I’ve got to admit,
I’ve been here several times… …but every time I come
here it is breathtaking. STEVE: Besides being at home, Grand
Canyon is my favorite place on earth. DEL: So Steve, tell me,
what do you see here? STEVE: When we look
at Grand Canyon, we see… …the inside story to the
ground beneath our feet. And we kind of have a layer
cake here, don’t we, of strata… …that have been
eroded for our benefit… … to see the inside
structure of the earth. These same layers
are also in Colorado… …are also in Illinois,
and also in Pennsylvania. DEL: So when you say
‘sedimentary strata’… …you’re talking about
the layers that we see? STEVE: Yes. So the
lowest layers are formed first. Those are sediment grains
that were mixed, separated… …and flowed in here
from different directions… …and accumulated
one on top of another. And then, of course,
naturally they convert to rock. DEL: So you’re saying that the solid
ground we’re standing on right now… …if we went back in its
history, it would be liquid? STEVE: Yes. So the ocean is doing
some amazing things… …and water of incredible power is
depositing the layers we see in the canyon. DEL: And are there
fossils in all of those layers? STEVE: There are marine
fossils through all the layers. But the standard explanation is there
were 17 different advances and retreats… …of the ocean over the
North American continent. And it was extended over
hundreds of millions of years. DEL: And what is the evidence
that you see here that would say… …that doesn’t seem
to make sense? STEVE: The 4000 feet of flat
lying strata in the canyon are flat. And, relative to one another, we
look in between the strata layers… …and we don’t see the passage
of time in between layers. DEL: You mean
erosion? STEVE: Erosion. Especially and channeling
on any great scale is not visible. And then we look at
the strata themselves… …and they provide evidence of
rapid, very rapid sedimentation. Just minutes or hours is all
that’s needed to make layers. DEL: Well, tell me about
the story of these layers. I mean, how did they get here? STEVE: “In the 600th year of
Noah’s life, on the second month… …the seventeenth
day of the month… …the same day were all the
fountains of the great deep broken up… …and the windows of
heavens were opened.” My understanding is the
ocean floor upheaval occurred… …some type of magma or earthquake
propelled the oceans over the continent. DEL: So that’s why we get these
marine fossils in these layers? STEVE: Yes. And we have six months
the waters prevailed upon the earth. Another seven months or
so for the water to subside. The 4000 feet of strata
probably represents the early… …and middle part of the global
flood, right here in Grand Canyon. We have other strata locally
in this Grand Canyon region… …that’s called the
Grand Staircase. We have about 10,000 feet,
two miles thickness of strata… …on top of the Grand Canyon. DEL: Higher than where we are. STEVE: Higher than we are. And that represents the later stages of the
Flood and the retreat of the Flood water. This surface was beveled
by retreat of flood waters. And as the Flood retreated into
the newly formed ocean basins… …then the continents
probably uplifted. And the ark, of course, was landed
in the high country in the Middle East. DEL: Well, there’s some
people who say that… …that record is
about a local flood. STEVE: I believe it’s a global
flood and all the high hills …under the whole heaven were
covered, a universal statement, …but that mountains
have risen since then. And we shouldn’t measure
the depth of the Flood waters by the present
mountains of the earth, which are largely created during
the Flood and after the Flood. DEL: Well, the fact that we
have all of these layers would be unknown to us if we were
standing on them somewhere else but they’re known to us
because they’ve been cut out. How did that happen? STEVE: Well, it was the
story that we all learned in grammar school, okay? Colorado River over
tens of millions of years cut the Grand Canyon. Most geologists have
jettisoned that idea. It’s hard to sustain
a canyon like this for tens of millions of years. You can’t imagine a canyon
enduring that long with erosion. DEL: Is that because it
would eventually the sides would have collapsed
and broken down? STEVE: Yes. DEL: Then how in the world
do we get this all carved out? STEVE: Well, there are lots
of theories, and personally I like the idea of catastrophic
erosion by drainage of lakes. DEL: So after the Flood we
have these large bodies of water, these lakes that are trapped. STEVE: There’s
evidence of the big lake in the Painted Desert, a
place called Hope Buttes, about 500 cubic miles
of water in this huge lake. DEL: And so the dam breaks and all of that massive
amount of water then is now pouring
out and carving this. STEVE: Yes. And how long would it take
to erode Grand Canyon? Maybe weeks, but
not millions of years. Time is not a magic
wand that solves all the geologic
problems of the world. Jettison that way of thinking
about millions of years and then start thinking
about catastrophic processes like you see at Mount St. Helens and that will help you
understand Grand Canyon. DEL: Everywhere we looked,
Steve showed me evidence of the incredible
power of moving water. They quickly laid down
these enormous layers, then quickly eroded them away. Steve wanted to show me where the Flood waters
first hit the continent, so he took me
deeper into the canyon. DEL: Steve, when you
said you were going to bring me to the bottom, you
weren’t kidding, were you? We’re at the bottom, aren’t we? STEVE: We’re in this big side
canyon to the main Grand Canyon and we’re looking at the
granite basement rock, which is the core of
the continent if you will, and then we see the flat
lying strata on top of it. The boundary between
the granite rock below and the Tapeats
Sandstone above is this surface we call
the Great Unconformity. DEL: Why does it appear
to be such a stark line? I mean, it’s clear. STEVE: I think it’s an erosional
boundary of colossal scale. We’re looking at something
that shows the magnitude of flood flow over a surface. DEL: And is it just here? STEVE: The Great
Unconformity is continent wide. I’ve seen it, I believe,
in the Middle East. It’s over in Europe. It’s in Africa. And here it is under the
North American continent. DEL: So we’ve got this layer. How thick is this layer? What goes up from here? STEVE: Well, we have the
Sauk Megasequence here if you will, a thousand
feet of sandstone, shale, limestone that
goes continent wide. There are four other
big sequence packages of strata that sit above it. Those are also very
continuous like this. What we’re seeing here
is rather representative of the rest of the world. DEL: It makes one
really question the notion that this all happened
because of a small local flood. We’re talking about
something enormous. STEVE: The power of
moving water was beveling and pulverizing rock depositing
great thicknesses of layers and calling our minds to
think about a global flood. DEL: The conventional story
is entirely different though. It would say that
there is a lot of time between each of these layers. STEVE: Some people have
said that the Great Unconformity boundary here represents
half a billion years. DEL: You mean between
the granite we see and that first layer of
the sedimentary rock? STEVE: Yeah. They say that
may be half a billion years there, okay, and that’s
what their explanation of earth history would
ask them to consider, yet when you come
here and look at this it’s nearly a featureless plane. It’s not in exactly a plane,
but it’s a gently rolling surface. And would that be the
product of billions of years or would that be the
product of the power of water planing off a surface? Time is foreign to a
good explanation here, and so we want to
explain what we see. STEVE: Everywhere we
look we see the power of water. And it’s water on
a colossal scale and that’s the story
here in Grand Canyon. It’s not a little water
and a lot of time. It’s a lot of water
in a little time. DEL: Time really
is the central issue when talking about
the history of the earth. How much time did it take to
form what we see around us? It seemed clear to me that
a global flood would have transformed the earth quickly,
yet I know many people think that the world formed
slowly over billions of years. What was the real difference
between these two views of time? I needed to talk to
someone who could tell me more about science
and history and time. Since my background
is in computer science, we met a place where I had personally experienced
some of that history. As we looked at the exhibit, I was reminded how much smaller and more powerful
computers had become since I first
started using them. Paul said our changing
assumptions about computers were really a series
of paradigm shifts. PAUL: So when I was 19, I
read Thomas Kuhn’s classic, “The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions” where he describes
this notion of paradigms. A paradigm is a framework
within which you interpret evidence. So really science isn’t
just about the evidence; it’s about how you
interpret that evidence. So this room for example, we’ve got so-called
mini computers here, but really they’re
not really mini at all in terms of our
current paradigm. DEL: Today, right? PAUL: Yeah, this. So really to understand
this question of origins you really need to
begin by looking at the governing paradigms, the two major views
that we currently have about the history of life and
the history of the universe. DEL: What are those? PAUL: On the one hand, we
have the conventional paradigm. In the conventional
paradigm you’ve got deep time, 13.7 billion years along
which this gradual process beginning with primal simplicity
ending in what we see today. All the complexity in life
has to be built bottom up by strictly physical
processes where no mind, no creator, no
design is present. PAUL: The second
view we can call, let’s say, the historical Genesis paradigm. Everything starts with
a divine mind, a creator, an intelligence that
plans and superintends and brings into
existence reality. Events are happening on a
much more recent timescale. The universe, the solar
system, our planet, life itself, all of that begins fully formed
as a functioning system. DEL: It’s not hard to see
there’s a radical difference between those
two in terms of time. PAUL: When we look
at the history of life on this planet we’ve
got a body of data but depending on the
paradigm that one adopts, that data will be interpreted
in very different ways. DEL: It seems that
one paradigm is drawing on a history
that was given to us and another paradigm is
constructing that history. Is that how you see that? PAUL: We have a witness to
those events and that witness is telling us this is what happened and we have to take
that into consideration when we evaluate the data. DEL: Well, Paul, the reason
this becomes serious is that we’re not talking about
a history of just boiling water at a certain temperature. We’re talking about
a history that deals with the origin of the universe. It deals with the origin of
life; the origin of humanity; the origin of sin and why
there’s evil in the world; the origin of the
geological formations that we have around
us; the origin of language. I mean, this is history
that is not minor. This is dealing with major,
major elements of humanity and where we are today. PAUL: Yeah. You’re talking about the
origin of literally everything. And I think if we zoom
out from that and say well, what really is the difference
between these two paradigms, it isn’t a question of
science on the one hand versus religion on the other because both of them
are scientific in the sense of looking at a
common body of data. Really at the deepest
level the difference is two competing views of history… what is the true
history of our cosmos? DEL: That does seem
to be the real question. What is our true history? What actually happened? The conflict is not between
two views of science, but between two
competing views of history. Since Genesis was
written in Hebrew, I wanted to talk to
a Hebrew expert. What was actually
in the original text? ♪♪ STEVEN: The first word in
Genesis is (speaks Hebrew). Genesis 1:1 is (speaks Hebrew). This is the beginning
of the toledot of Noah. That word toledot is a
very interesting word. It’s translated
sometimes genealogies. Sometimes it’s
translated history. And what follows then is
the account of the Flood. DEL: Steve, it
seems that there is a lot of history in the Bible. Is that how you see it? STEVEN: Oh absolutely. In fact, the first thing is that it’s an accurate
historical account. The presentation is such in
the perspective of the writers that they believed they
were talking about real events. It’s very obvious because of
the way in which they insisted the next generation
learn their history. DEL: When you look at these
early chapters in Genesis, what do you see? Can you take us through this? STEVEN: It starts
with, “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.” There’s no word in
Hebrew for universe. That means He
created everything. And then the next thing
we find in Genesis 1:2, we find a water
ball that is in space. God in the subsequent days
is going to fill that universe. DEL: Well you’re
talking about days here. Do you see these
as literal days? Is that what the
text is telling us or, you know, what
other people think, that this is just a poetic
different kind of view? STEVEN: Well, first
of all, it’s not poetry. The world’s greatest
Hebraists all affirm that this is a narrative. And they say that’s one
of the unique features of the Genesis
accounts of Creation and the Flood is that
they are narratives, because in the ancient near
East they are done in epic poetry, which is very different. And here we have a narrative to indicate that
this is historical. STEVEN: What that means is that
you should understand the words the normal way in which those
Hebrew words were understood. The word “yom,” it means day. The foundation of its usage
is what we mean by a day. It’s a 24-hour day. The only way you’d want it to
mean a longer period of time is if you impose an alien
concept to the text and say, well, I think that
these are ages and therefore “yom”
has to mean ages. What you have to do
is start with the text. If we start with the
text, “yom” means day. DEL: So when we
come to the passage that talks about the
creation of Adam and Eve, you’re seeing that as
a clear historical event which would stand
in direct opposition to the conventional
paradigm that man evolved out of a long, long process. STEVEN: The Biblical
text is not compatible with the standard
conventional paradigm. The Bible teaches that
the Lord God formed man, artistically breathing
in him the breath of life, created him in His image. And then of course
woman is created. We have marriage. We have the Fall. Then in Noah’s genealogy we
have the entire Flood account and the Flood, is
it a global flood? Well, I don’t know
how many times, 35 times or so, the
word “kol” which is “all” occurs in the Flood narrative. If this is a judgment on
mankind then it has to be global. And as we continue through these
first eleven chapters of Genesis we come to chapter ten, which
is called the table of the nations, which are the sons of Noah. It mentions in that
chapter that the people are in their different nations
and their languages. So Moses goes back
in Genesis 11:1-9 and explains how the
languages develop. And so we come to
the toledot of Terah and the toledot of Terah is
not going to be about Terah. It’s going to be about
his famous son, Abraham. DEL: It just seems so
apparent that there is no disconnect
between all of that and everything that
we see in the beginning. It’s just one long
historical narrative. Is it not? STEVEN: It is.
As a matter of fact, the genealogies
form the structure, not just for Genesis,
but the narratives are embedded in the genealogies. The genealogies are picked
up and actually called the toledot in the book of Ruth to
establish that David is a descendent of Judah, which
is required by Jacob’s prophecy. And then, we move
into the New Testament. How is the pedigree
of Jesus established? With two genealogies, one
going back through Mary’s line all the way back to Adam. DEL: Steve, in light of all
of this that we have seen, how important is
the historical narrative that we find throughout Genesis, including all of the
generations that are laid out, how important is
that to Christianity? STEVEN: It shows
that Christianity has a historical basis. It’s what the scriptures say and the scriptures represent
actual historical data. So Christianity, it’s
not a leap in the dark. It is an understanding that has
a very strong historical basis, and that our Savior
is also our Creator. DEL: These genealogies
are incredibly important. If Jesus is descended from Adam, and Adam was created
on the sixth day of creation, then the earth
can’t be very old. So where do the millions
of years come from? I met a geologist at
a place where he said we could understand this better. ♪♪ ANDREW: You see the quietness, the expanse,
nothing to disturb you. Yet you’ve got the reminder
that it was explosive in the past. There was this volcano back
here, this cinder cone volcano and it belched
out this lava flow that spilled out
across this countryside. DEL: Just a huge
amount of basalt lava. ANDREW: Yeah, but it’s
actually small compared to the lava flows that
we see in many places. And there’s like a thousand
of these volcanoes around here and the little one
behind us here we call that a
cinder cone volcano. DEL: You call that a little one. ANDREW: Yeah, well it is. These volcanoes are small. Mount St. Helens, 1980
when it erupted, okay, the top 2.5 thousand feet
of the volcano blew off, but that was small compared
to historical eruptions. We can go back
a little bit further to the great
Yellowstone eruption and some of the volcanic
ash was down in Texas. It blew that far away. You think about
lava flows in India that you have an accumulation
of up to a thousand feet over an area a third of the
size of the subcontinent of India. What we see in the present
is really only minuscule by comparison of what
was seen in the past and that’s telling us something
about the historic past. We can’t use present day rates
of these processes to understand how quickly and how
majestically in terms of scale the geological
record accumulated. DEL: Well that is the point
that has brought me to you because how do we determine
the age of these rocks? ANDREW: Well, the important
first thing is to recognize that this lava flow is in a
sense an instant in time. It’s an event. And when it’s molten, you’ve
got all the different elements that come out of the
volcano are all mixed up and the rock
starts to crystalize. Any of those atoms
that are radioactive they now start to
accumulate what we call the daughter products,
the decay products. Now the point is that this
rate of decay is so slow where we measure
it in the present that it takes millions of years for parent atoms to
decay to daughter atoms. And so that’s ultimately where
the millions of years come from, the fact that the decay
rates in the present are slow. DEL: But we would
say the present is not really the key to the past because obviously the
past holds some massive, massive catastrophic events
that are not going on today. ANDREW: In fact,
the Bible would say that the past is the
key to the present. If you want to understand
why the way the world is today you’ve got to understand
what happened in the past. So we’ve got lots of hints
that geological processes haven’t been at constant
rates through time and we have other
hints that the decay rates may not have been constant. So we’ve taken rock samples
from a number of places — lots of samples in
the Grand Canyon of each of these rock layers. I’ve done it in New Zealand. We’ve done it in
other parts of the world. And what we’ve done is we’ve
submitted the same samples to more than one of
these dating methods. And so what we found
is on the same samples with more than one
method, we were getting ages that were different by
hundreds of millions of years and even a billion
years in some instances. We’re seeing huge differences
by using different methods. DEL: Well if there is
that kind of a difference between all of
these dating methods then that would seem to
confirm the fact that we have an open system
here, not a closed one. ANDREW: Correct. And if we have an open system
that means we can’t trust it to give us dependable
dates for these rocks. And that changes
the whole thinking about the history of the
earth because suddenly now these radioactive
clocks are not reliable. We’ve got evidence that
rates were faster in the past. Suddenly we may not be thinking
in terms of millions of years. We may be thinking in terms
of a history that is much shorter. DEL: You were saying
this kind of evidence is in the open literature now. ANDREW: Yes. Yes. DEL: Why is it not
making an impact? ANDREW: Well,
I’ve been asked that when I’ve spoken in
university geology departments and the answer is because
there is a commitment to the millions of years. And so once people
get locked into that focus anything outside their
field of view that conflicts with that focus is marginalized. ANDREW: And the reason why the millions of
years are important, if we go back in the
history of scientific thought, Charles Lyell in England
proposed millions of years and they multiplied
the ages for the rocks. And that was the foundation
on which Charles Darwin built. In fact he read Charles
Lyell’s book and was convinced of the millions of years
of geological evolution so he could say now
given enough time what we don’t see
happening in the present. We might only see small
changes in the present. Given millions of
years, small changes can add up to big changes. And so if you want to have
a way of looking at history that says that we
got here by chance, random processes
over millions of years then you’ve got to have rocks
that are millions of years old. Otherwise you’ve undermined
that whole foundation of that view of earth history. DEL: So time becomes
the critical element for the conventional paradigm and that time has
to be deep time. DEL: Andrew said when
you study the rock formations, they show evidence of a
young earth transformed by a global catastrophe. So he took me south to
Sedona to see it for myself. ANDREW: The important
thing to note is that this landscape is
actually very stable. There was lots of
erosion in the past to carve out this whole terrain but those cliffs and the
valley floor are very stable, which is why you’ve
got the vegetation. Today everything is
much, much quieter. Today’s processes
are extremely slow but they can’t explain
how we got this erosion, how we got these layers,
how we got these cliffs. DEL: Alright, so you
wanted to come here because you see evidence of a young earth
because of what’s here. What do you see? ANDREW: Yes. Well,
the first thing we notice is the extent of these layers. It’s like a stack of pancakes. For example, the red
unit that goes all the way across our field of view, that’s
the Schnebly Hill Formation. And above that you can
see the first white unit is the Coconino Sandstone. And above that you’ve
got the Toroweap and at the horizon you’ve
got the Kaibab Limestone, which is the rimrock
of the Grand Canyon. And here we are 70 more
miles from the Grand Canyon and these layers are still here. DEL: It’s almost hard to imagine the volume of material
that that represents. ANDREW: Yes. Take the Coconino Sandstone. We can trace it from here
right across New Mexico, Colorado right over
towards Kansas and Oklahoma or even into Texas. We’re talking at least
200,000 square miles for this one rock
unit that’s consistent for mile after mile after mile. That’s not the scale
that we see today with localized sedimentation. And to get it flat lying like
this over such a large area, it’s like you have to
make your pancake all at once very rapidly. And so these layers show
evidence of rapid sedimentation, the extent of these layers. DEL: Well Andrew, you were
talking about that red formation but that doesn’t
sound familiar to me. ANDREW: No, that’s the
Schnebly Hill Formation. It’s not in the Grand Canyon. In the Grand Canyon,
we go from the Coconino into the Hermit Formation. There’s that knife edge boundary and there’s no
evidence of erosion there, which means that the Hermit
Formation was rapidly deposited and then immediately
the Coconino was deposited on top of it. ANDREW: But here we’ve come
70 miles from the Grand Canyon and we’ve got this
Schnebly Hill Formation between the Coconino
and the Hermit. And this Schnebly
Hill Formation, 800-1000 feet thick over
an area of 1000 square miles had to have been
formed very rapidly. If that took millions of years, we ought to see millions
of years of evidence of millions of years of erosion
back in the Grand Canyon at that same boundary. We don’t. So that means that this
Schnebly Hill Formation in this area had to
form in a matter of hours. So it tells you that not only
is there a lack of erosion but there’s no time
between those boundaries. So the whole sequence of
layers was very rapidly deposited. DEL: So we have this
large extent of layers. We have the lack of
erosion between the layers. What other evidence do you see? ANDREW: Well if we
look closely, for example, at the Coconino Sandstone,
we see the bedding that there’s bands
within it that are sloping. We call those cross beds. What they indicate
is that you had underwater sand waves
were moving along. The comparison is in a desert. It’s important to recognize
that there’s a difference in the angle in a desert dune. It’s usually 30-34 degrees
of these sloping beds. Underwater, it’s usually
25 degrees or less. And Dr. John Whitmore
has combed the hills around here with his students hundreds and hundreds of
measurements of these cross beds and they all come into
the range of 15-25 degrees. So it was underwater deposition. And so these layers are
accumulating in hours, weeks and within months,
you’ve got this whole stack of pancake layers
over such wide areas. DEL: So it isn’t a difference in believing in those
layers that exist. ANDREW: Not at all. DEL: It’s the difference
of time, isn’t it? ANDREW: Correct. It’s not a question of
science versus the Bible. When we’re talking
about the Flood paradigm and the conventional paradigm,
we’re actually talking about two different views
of earth history. DEL: Those views
really are different. Of course, I grew up being
taught the conventional view with its long ages and
slow uniform changes. But what was the history of
the world according to Genesis? ♪♪ DEL: Kurt Wise took me from
one fascinating place to another showing me evidence
of fossil forests, explaining the rapid
formation of coal and talking about the complex
design of biological systems. Everywhere we turned, he
showed me something new about the earth and its history. We ended up at the entrance
to an old abandoned coal mine. KURT: This is leftover remains of the Dayton Coal
and Iron Company built about 100-110 years ago. DEL: What’s amazing is if
you didn’t know that history and if you looked at these rocks you would think they
were very ancient. In fact if we were in
Greece you might think they were thousands
of years old. KURT: It’s hard to tell just
looking at the structure itself. DEL: Well Kurt, then I
need for you to do something because I know that the
conventional paradigm looks back in earth history
and it’s a straight line. A lot of uniform
processes and so forth. But the Genesis
history is telling us that it’s not that uniform. KURT: Yeah, that’s a good point. In II Peter chapter 3, it talks
about people in the latter days saying, “Where is the
promise of His coming?” “For all things
continue as they were from the beginning
of the Creation.” That concept that what
you see in the present, what’s happening right now, what’s happening in
the creek down below, what is happening at
every place in the earth is the way it’s always been. It’s always been for
all of earth history. The passage goes on to say, “For this they are
willingly ignorant.” They’re not just
ignorant of these truths, they’re purposely
rejecting these truths, and it lists the
Creation and the Flood. These are apparently
events, according to the Bible, that aren’t like the present. And the neat thing is
that’s what we see here. That cliff isn’t
actually in place. That cliff belongs about
a thousand feet up. It slid down to its
current location. That’s a pretty big boulder. DEL: That’s huge. It’s massive. KURT: Now what kind
of process in the present slides blocks that big down? This thing continues for a mile. But inside those rocks are
yet further evidence of an event before that that’s even bigger,
even more unlike the present. And then inside those rocks
are also fossils of a time period that’s very different
than the present. So according to the
claims of scripture and according to
my own experience you can’t use the
present to judge the past, to understand the past. But if you go all the way
back to the beginning, you realize that
the Bible lays out what I would call
epochs of earth history. DEL: Major periods of time? KURT: Just different
things happening during each of these epochs. But if you lived in any one
of the other epochs you would never understand the previous
epoch because it’s so different. The first one is
the creation itself. In six days God created
the entire universe. He created the
planets and the stars and he stretched
out the universe with his outstretched arm. That’s obviously
not happening today. He’s not creating planets. In fact at the end
of that passage, he says he ended
his creation work. KURT: Then we move into
what I call the Edenian epoch, the period of time
when Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden. And it’s very different
than the present. We get the impression from
that passage, for example, that Adam and Eve,
had they not sinned, would have lived forever. It’s hard to even conceive of
human beings living forever. So it’s a different world. Wildly different. How long it lasts?
We don’t know. But it’s suddenly terminated with Adam and Eve
eating of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil and God cursing the creation. He changed the
rules in the universe. Now no longer is the sun
going to be able to burn forever. No longer are we going
to be able to live forever. DEL: So it’s hard for us to even
imagine what they would be like because we only see
the laws that are present. KURT: And we wouldn’t
have come to that conclusion if we didn’t have
the Word of God. DEL: That’s true. KURT: And that’s what I
think the Word of God has been given to us for. KURT: So we slide into
the third epoch of time, what I call the
Ante-Diluvian period, the period before the Flood
and after the Fall of man. It’s a world that’s
different than the present. It’s got the same
natural laws going on, but it’s a different
set of critters, a different set of plants. It’s a little bit warmer earth. The continents are
in different positions from what they are now. It looks significantly
different. DEL: And that’s what we see
in Peter where it talks about that world being destroyed. So the Flood was not
just soaking everything. This was radical,
radical change, wasn’t it? KURT: Yeah, if we’re right about
what we’ve understood so far, we’ve got continents moving, smashing together,
creating mountains. Mountains are rising to
tens of thousands of feet. You’ve got water washing
across entire continents. We’re ripping tens of
thousands of feet of sediment off of the old continents
and then depositing thousands of feet of
sediment on top of them again. It’s — we’re looking
at earthquakes of astonishing power. DEL: So this changed
then from what you call the Ante-Diluvian epoch
now into the Post-Flood. KURT: Basically
the earth has got to recover from a global flood. The atmosphere
has got to recover. The geology, the
rocks have to recover. Plants and animals have
to spread across the earth. You’ve got lots of water,
humongous earthquakes, humongous volcanoes. And more or less that period
of recovery is a slow decrease in intensity and
frequency of those things. DEL: So would it be in that
period that we would see the Ice Age, for example? KURT: Yes, that’s—
ironically, the Ice Age turns out to be in our modeling a consequence of the heating
of the water during the Flood. The water is evaporating
off the oceans. That cools the ocean. The water is then
moving over the continents and dropping enormous
volumes of water. Now in certain places the rain
is going to come down as snow but coming down so
rapidly and without break that it can’t melt
and accumulates into thick sequences of
ice until they’re miles thick. And then when the
oceans have cooled enough that that rain generation
system had stopped then those glaciers then
collapse under their own wake, melt back to the
current position and they’re continuing to melt. This thing global warming
it is — it’s recovering. The earth is still
recovering from the Flood. DEL: So that was really a
fairly tumultuous era right then but then you have
one final epoch. KURT: So the Modern Epoch is
you can study present processes and understand
things fairly readily back to within a couple
of centuries of the Flood. DEL: And so that would lead
one to think that these processes if you take them
all the way back… KURT: Precisely. You take the present processes
and extend them into the back and that’s what II Peter says. That’s the error people make. It’s reasonable. Take the present and
extend it into the past. Not unreasonable. So you need to go
to the Bible to find out the necessary
information to reconstruct it. And looking at it the other
way, if you start from the Bible, you only get the
beginning of the story. God has given us the
ability to read the rocks and fill in the
rest of the story, and we need to to fully
understand the Flood. We start with the Bible
but then we go to the rocks. Speak to the rocks
and they shall tell what has happened in the past. DEL: Kurt made a good point. The Bible records
historical events but it doesn’t explain how
those events happened. That’s what these
scientists were doing. They were trying to
interpret the evidence in light of Biblical history. But Kurt said there was
evidence inside the rocks. What was that evidence? ♪♪ MARCUS: I love coming
to natural history museums. For me as a paleontologist,
it’s like a chance to go to a zoo. It’s all the animals that
used to live before the Flood. It’s like a chance
to step back in time. DEL: It is like a zoo
except they’re not alive. They’re all dead. MARCUS: And they don’t
smell, so that’s pretty good. And the natural history museum isn’t just about telling
us what was there. It’s also trying to
give us a storyline and we’ve got two possibilities. We’ve got these two paradigms between a naturalistic
view and a Biblical view. MARCUS: And all the natural
history museums in the country, most of them around the world, all give you just
one of those views, only giving you a naturalist,
old earth view of the world. But these same data,
this dinosaur is able to be understood in
an alternate paradigm. So when I’m thinking about
these types of creatures I’m thinking about a world
that’s right before the Flood. DEL: I mean this is a real
picture of a violent world. MARCUS: Yeah. It’s why God said
behold, the end of all flesh. It wasn’t just mankind. Man and all of the animals
over which we rule are judged at the time of the Flood. DEL: Well Marcus, can you
kind of give us an overall picture of the fossils and how
all this stuff fits together. MARCUS: Yeah. Fossils tend to be
found in distinct layers where there are very,
very large numbers that have been
destroyed, untold billions. And so every time
we see a layer of rock that’s this thick,
we’re thinking about an event that probably
took minutes to make, not thousands of years. Minutes for just this
one package of rock, sometimes even seconds. MARCUS: Now where these
pulses of water from the Flood are moving over the continents,
grabbing ecosystems or dragging marine ones
up from deeper in the ocean and pulling them onto land,
and as one gets deposited and the waves come
back, they start pulling and piling additional
stuff on top of that. And it’s a graveyard
on top of a graveyard on top of a graveyard. It’s the sort of thing that
speaks to catastrophe, not the sort of thing
where the fossil record is gradually accumulating
bone by bone, shell by shell, little by little over
untold eons of time. DEL: So you’re
saying that we have these marine fossils all
over, even on mountains. MARCUS: Yeah. Further back over in the
museum, they’ve got sections with things like Mosasaurs,
these big swimming reptiles. Mosasaurs are
globally distributed and they’re distributed
on continents. So looking at these
things, you’re saying what is it that has the power, what is it that has the capacity
to take the marine world and throw it on top
of the continents in such a violent and
destructive manner. And the Flood makes
perfect sense for this. DEL: When we were
in the Grand Canyon, we saw that Great Unconformity and there were no fossils
to speak of, really, below that and then all of a sudden,
we start getting a lot. What does that say to
you as a paleontologist? MARCUS: Well the Great
Unconformity is telling me that there’s some
sort of massive erosion and sheering that’s
happening across the continent. And then once we start getting
to those nice sedimentary rocks that have all the
wonderful fossils in them the pattern starts to emerge. The ecosystem that
has the first animals in it shows up very suddenly. In conventional paleontology, they call this the
Cambrian Explosion. It’s the first appearance
of a wide diversity of different types
of marine animals. All of a sudden you have this
complex and whole ecosystem that shows up
basically out of nowhere. Now that makes perfect sense from a Creation and
Flood perspective because the Flood is about
destroying ecosystems, whereas in an evolutionary view,
these ecosystems are going to have to arise a little
bit more gradually as organisms
diversify and evolve and respond to one
another in their environment. But that’s not what you see. Instead you see an explosion
of life that is complex, whole, the ecosystem is
integrated with one another. You can see where all
the different organisms fit with respect to one another. And that’s just the first
time that that happens. Every time you move up
in the geological column, in this fossil record, you
start seeing snapshots of more and more ecosystems. You’ve got one
ecosystem that’s destroyed and then you’ve got another one. It’s got slightly
different creatures, there’s different
interactions going on. And as the Flood waters
move higher and higher they are getting closer
and closer to shore destroying more and more
organisms in the shoreline and eventually up onto land. DEL: So I think I see
what you’re saying here and that is that the
paradigm that we’re all taught, that conventional
paradigm is trying to tell us that the fossil record is an
evolutionary picture of life as it is developing as opposed
to the Genesis paradigm that’s saying
no, all of that life, all the complexity of
life already was there and now we’re
looking at the graveyard of all of that life. MARCUS: Exactly. DEL: Well what are
some of the other data that you’re seeing that
convinces you of this paradigm? MARCUS: Well one
very curious situation with the fossil record — so thinking vertically
about things — is not the hard parts of the
animal but the trackways. They’re the footprints. This is a pattern that we
see in several different groups where their footprints are first
and their body parts are later. For the trilobites,
for the amphibians, for the dinosaurs, the first time I find evidence
of them in the fossil record it’s from trackways,
not hard parts. From an old earth
perspective that’s really weird and hard to grapple with because you have
millions of years between the trackway production and ultimately the
animal that made it. But that obviously doesn’t
make a whole lot of sense because if there’s
trackways, there’s animals, and those animals have bones
and teeth and shells to them. Why aren’t they fossilized? Instead the pattern is
telling us something different. There’s no time between
when somebody leaves a track and when somebody gets buried. DEL: But the fact that those
trackways are still there, that should tell us something
as well, shouldn’t it? MARCUS: One, it tells
us that the deposition or the placement of the
next layer on top of them had to happen very, very quickly because again you
go out onto a beach and you walk in the
sand, your trackways are destroyed very, very quickly. But the fossil record is
showing us something very different from today. This is death in a moment. This is death in an instant. And we’re talking
about a world that was complex, whole, integrated and the Flood is destroying
that world sequentially and burying it in
a vertical fashion. And so I think looking
at the fossil record as a record of
life is partly correct but it’s not about
life’s development. It’s about life’s attempt
to survive an event that ultimately
consumed all of them. DEL: Well that would
make sense then because when God
was talking about destroying the
earth with the Flood, it wasn’t just the
destruction of human life, it was the
destruction of all life. And so now the world
we live in is, as you said, radically different than
what that was before. MARCUS: Yeah. When we look at the T-Rex,
when we look at the Mosasaurs, when we look at all these
animals as ferocious carnivores and they really are — I
mean, they’re terrifying — but that’s not what they
were initially created to be. And so these sharp teeth,
these devastating claws and the behaviors
that go along with them all seem to be part of the
Curse and part of that is genetic. Part of it might also be
just some modifications. But these organisms by
the time we see them — and this is important
for us to remember when we come to a
natural history museum is you’re not seeing the
world at creation week. You’re seeing the world
as it existed at the Flood, and that world was one
that was filled with violence and was a pretty
terrible place to be. DEL: I realized that
the billions of creatures buried in those layers
are a silent testimony to God’s global judgement. I decided I wanted to see one of those layers
of fossils for myself. If the dinosaurs had
died suddenly in the Flood, wouldn’t it be obvious? ♪♪ ART: What we’re
dealing with here, this is in the Lance Formation. This is a upper Cretaceous
sedimentary deposit and what we have here is
what’s called a bone bed. It’s an accumulation of bones
that’s about a meter thick, a little less than a meter, and in this meter we
find the bones present as a graded bed with
little bones at the top and bigger bones at the bottom. And you can see here
it looks like Erline is working on another
vertebrae here. This is a cervical vertebrae
of a duck-billed dinosaur. This is where the spinal
cord goes right there. When I look at these
bones in the quarry, I often think of them as
being inside the animal alive and just imagine
what it’s like to be seeing these bones
for the first time. ART: So this is just full
of bones and it’s not like we have to go looking
for where the bones are. We just have to sit
down and start digging. DEL: What is mainly
different about the sites that you’re digging here
as opposed to what we’d say a general dinosaur
dig somewhere? ART: Well there are dinosaurs
found all over the world, but this particular site is
unique in that it’s probably one of the largest collections
of bones in the world. And there are the remains of I’d say between
5,000 to 10,000 animals each 20 to 40 feet
long in this deposit. These are big animals
and there are a lot of them. DEL: Let’s step
back for just a second. Okay so we had a
duck-billed dinosaur roaming around the earth and
all of the sudden it dies. Would it become a fossil? ART: Fossilization requires
very special circumstances. Normally we know for example
if a coyote dies out in the desert, its body is soon gone. Yet these bones are
all perfectly preserved. They have never been
subjected to weather. They are just all there. Today it would be
very difficult to imagine how you could do that. DEL: To some extent
we would really say that to find a fossils is rare. Even though we have
many, many fossils in terms of things that die, it’s rare if they
become fossilized. ART: It is rare. It requires special
circumstances, not the least of
which is rapid burial. These animals had to die
and then their carcasses had to have time to rot. So we’re talking days
or weeks or months during which time
the bones and tissues were either eaten
away or rotted away and then the bones that remained
were deposited instantaneously in this environment because
they’re in a graded bed with big bones at the bottom
and little bones at the top. And you can see that here. The big bones are
all down at the bottom and when they
start digging up here, they start to find
smaller bones. So that condition
requires a sorting process that can only take place during
a catastrophic implacement. DEL: So when we look
at the dinosaur fossils, rather than looking at
them from the standpoint of we have early dinosaurs, then middle dinosaurs,
then later dinosaurs, you’re looking
from the perspective that all those dinosaurs
were in existence. They were all living and then
there was this huge catastrophe that brought them to an end. ART: The dinosaurs
are already dinosaurs when they first appear. They look just like anyone
would think a dinosaur looked. And this is an enigma for those who believe in evolution
of the dinosaurs. DEL: But we hear a lot
about transitional forms. What’s the real story there? ART: Scientists have been
able to lay out some forms they think are transitional
and some of them are very interesting and
some even challenging, but they are the
exceptions to the rule. The rule is there are
no transitional fossils. What we find in
the fossil record — and contrary to Darwin’s
hopes, this is the rule — is that a form exists
in the fossil record. It basically stays unchanged and it disappears
from the fossil record without having been changed. That’s got to mean
something besides evolution because we don’t ever
see changes from this form into this form in the
rocks themselves. ART: So it’s coming
from somewhere else. It’s a paradigm that’s
being imposed on the data rather than the data is
providing the paradigm. So I think it’s very easy
for me to be a creationist just based on my understanding
of the complexity of lifeforms. And when we look
at the fossil record, we can see the complexity
is all there from the beginning and this begs the question of where did all this
complexity come from. It’s one thing to have faith. I have faith that God
was the creator, but that’s substantiated by
what I see around me. To say I have faith that
evolution produced this when I can’t even see
how it could have happened, that’s blind faith. DEL: That’s a leap in the dark. ART: That’s a leap in the dark. DEL: It seemed that
everywhere I looked there was a growing
body of evidence that fit the historical
record of Genesis. It wasn’t just one thing; it was many things pointing
in the same direction. When I was with Art he told me
about some recent discoveries of material inside
dinosaur bones, so I traveled to a lab in
Arizona to talk to a scientist who is doing some of
that research himself. ♪♪ KEVIN: This is a fragment
of a triceratops horn. When we pulled it out of
the ground, it fragmented and then of course we’ve
had to continue to fragment it in order to do analysis of it. In 2012, the Creation Research
Society sponsored Mark Armitage and I go to the Hell Creek
Formation in Montana, which is a very popular place
for finding dinosaur bones, and we instead dug out an almost four-foot-long
triceratops brow horn. It’s just in crumbled pieces now so we can’t really put it
together and show you a horn, but yet you have to recognize
that pieces such as this, we have found tissue with cells. DEL: Oh that’s amazing. KEVIN: And potentially
proteins such as collagen. It’s so difficult to understand
how you could have this material still in a dinosaur fossil
that is supposed to be 65, 75, 80 million years of age because tissue, cells,
proteins break down. They’re not concrete. They don’t just
exist for eons of time. They break down and in fact, they tend to break
down fairly quickly depending upon the conditions, and certainly in Hell Creek
the conditions would be warm up, cool down,
warm up, cool down. And any biochemist
can tell you that is the fastest way
to destroy material. It’s difficult enough
to envision it surviving for 4 or 5 thousand years but 60 million years,
70 million years? That really becomes
very difficult to make any kind of biochemical basis
for how it could have survived. DEL: Ok, so once you
find a sample like this, what do you do next? KEVIN: So what we do is
we soak the fossil material in a solution called EDTA. And what you’ll have after
you dissolve the fossil is the tissue will be remaining because the EDTA
won’t dissolve the tissue. So then I’ll bring this over to what we call a
dissection microscope. This is in essence dissolved
triceratops horn magnified and so you can
see what it looks like. Just kind of little
pieces of rock. DEL: Well Kevin, what did
you find then when you were looking at the sample and
you actually found some tissue? KEVIN: Okay,
here’s what we found. This is actually
triceratops tissue. It’s stretchable. It’s pliable. It’s not an impression of
the soft parts of the dinosaur. This is truly
soft. It is squishy. It is stretchable. It is tissue. DEL: That blows your mind, huh? KEVIN: Absolutely. And if you look at them
then at a closer magnification what we see then, this is using
scanning electron microscopy, you see the extreme
detail of the cells in that picture and this picture and particularly like
look at this picture. We would not expect,
begin to expect to see such enormous
and elaborate detail. I mean these structures
are incredibly small. This is our 20 micron bar here and see how small these
structures are, still intact. It would take very
little to break those. So at best you would
expect that all that would have broken off
and been long gone. DEL: So that has
to have shaken up the scientific community. What’s been the
response of all of this? KEVIN: The initial response
when Dr. Schweitzer first published her work, which is what became
very popularized in 2005, it generated a lot of response. And so initially some of
the reaction was rejection. Oh it’s contamination. That’s not really dinosaur. It’s bacteria because
bacteria can look kind of strange sometimes. So you had a lot of
proposals of what it could be. And to her credit,
Dr. Schweitzer did more work. They began to find protein. You break open
some of these cells, you look at the matrix
these cells are attached to and they are protein. DEL: Ok, so once that is
understood, then what happens? Now this is shaking
it up, I guess. KEVIN: That becomes
part of the controversy because clearly
you’re now faced with how could you explain
the survival of this, the pristine survival of
this not only for so long but in very
un-pristine conditions. KEVIN: And so then
the controversy has been, ‘how do you explain it?’ And if you read
some of the literature, there’s almost like desperation
because they recognized what the implications
of this could be. Now some people would
claim well, it means nothing because we know how old they are and therefore it just
seems it survived somehow. Big deal. But how do you know
how old they are? You use methods,
supposed methods of dating. Well, this is a
method of dating. The tissue itself
can’t be discounted as a part of a method of dating. So why do you say that doesn’t
count but this does count? Well, it’s all the paradigm
drives your conclusions. The paradigm
is it has to be old, therefore methods
that give us an old fossil are what we choose. Something that doesn’t
give us an old fossil like tissue we have to reject
or explain away. DEL: At least to
me, and of course, I’m not a microbiologist, but I think most
people would say well, that just seems
reasonable to think that maybe these
are not that old. KEVIN: Clearly this is in
violation of the dating process. It challenges the
entire dating process. If the fossils of dinosaurs
have been dated incorrectly, which I would say this is
clear evidence they have, then it’s very likely the
fossils of any organism have been dated
incorrectly and therefore then the geologic ages
themselves are incorrect. DEL: What you’re saying is
that if you pull out the notion of a long period of time, you’re
pulling out a major foundation for the conventional paradigm. KEVIN: Absolutely. In fact time is the critical
component for evolution. If you’re going to say that
a simple cellular system because a multi-cellular
system that then became fish and the fish then
jumped up on land and grew legs and
started breathing air and then that
creature grew feathers and wings and started flying. So if you give us time,
we’ll claim to account for all of this massive
change of organisms, but we’ve got to have the time. DEL: Everything
seemed to come back to the question of time. I remembered Andrew
saying that Charles Darwin accepted millions
of years first, then fit his theory of
evolution to that assumption. But why is time such an
important element to evolution? ♪♪ DEL: Rob Carter
is a marine biologist so he took me scuba diving to get a glimpse of a
world most people don’t see. His specialty was coral and he knew a lot about
the incredible creatures that inhabit the reefs
around St. Thomas. DEL: Oh man, we’ve
got the sharks here. Just look how they move and it’s almost like
effortlessly glide along. I wish I could swim like that. ROB: Engineers wish we
could make boats like that. Submarines that could
move as efficiently as a shark, we can’t quite do it. DEL: So from your
perspective as a marine biologist and I know that you’ve studied the whole area
of genetics a lot, when people talk about
evolution, what is it? ROB: How do you
define evolution? The word means
‘change over time’ but I believe in
change over time, but I’m not a evolutionist. So how does one figure this out? Really evolution is a belief
that enough change over time, over enough time, can
lead to the common ancestry of all species on earth. So that’s the part I reject. Of course species change. I mean look at
these sharks here. We have several
different species of sharks. When God created, he
put into those organisms the ability to change, to adapt, to respond dynamically
to the environment. But they are still sharks. And when we look at the fossil
record, they are still sharks. People have heard the
phrase ‘the missing link’ and they usually think of
between a man and a monkey. No, there’s missing links between almost every
major group of animal and almost every other
major group of animal and plant and bacteria throughout
the entire fossil record, which indicates very
strongly that these are actually different creations. DEL: So we don’t get one
kind becoming another kind? ROB: No. Evolution theory
requires that small, random changes can explain
everything we see, but it can’t. DEL: And why can’t it? ROB: Because life is so complex that small changes
can’t explain it. Just like you can’t take a
computer operating system and look at it and say,
oh yeah, this is built up one digit at a time
over any length of time. No, it took an intelligent
person to sit down and put it together. DEL: Well I can guarantee
you as one who was in that world that if anyone in the
area of computer science were to say if we just
randomly change some things in this operating
system it will get better. I mean no one
would agree with that. ROB: No, we’re not going to
get the shark to evolve into a bird. The number of changes
and the types of changes are not something that you
can do one change at a time. ROB: This is a sea urchin. DEL: It looks spiny. ROB: It’s pointy.
You’ve got to be careful. DEL: Am I going to get
stuck when I touch it? ROB: No, he’s pointy but… DEL: Oh my goodness,
they’re moving. ROB: Yes, they’re moving. And in between the
spines are little tube feet, especially on the bottom. Look at that movement. So he walks with his spines
with these little tube feet in here and that’s what he
uses to grab onto things. But looking carefully there’s
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, there’s actually
ten radial parts to this animal. DEL: Huh. ROB: Actually the
starfish is his cousin. DEL: Are you serious?
You can’t be serious. ROB: Absolutely. The starfish here is
also an echinoderm but notice he has five-fold
symmetry instead of ten. This starfish does. On the bottom, look,
we see the spines. We see the tube feet. His mouth is in
the center there. DEL: So there is
some similarity here even though externally
it looks a lot different. ROB: A lot different. You want to see something
that looks a lot different? DEL: Sure. ROB: Which is a cousin to
the starfish and the sea urchin? DEL: Alright. It almost looks like a rock. ROB: Yes, yes,
I’ve got to be careful. He’s squirting on me. This is a sea cucumber. He has spines. He has tube feet. You would never know it
until you studied really hard that this also is an echinoderm. He’s not very happy
being out of the water so let me put him back in. DEL: So these are all
related even though they look very, very different. ROB: Related in their creation. Not in an evolutionary sense but our creator took this
phylum of life, the echinoderms, and created this and this
and this on a similar pattern. And that’s what we see
across the entire realm of life, similarities and differences. DEL: So what
makes them different? ROB: Well,
genetically they share most of their genes in common, but there are
developmental genes, they’re called hox genes, that set up these patterns
in the animal as it develops. They develop from a single cell. In one of them they set
up a five-fold symmetry. In another they set
up a ten-fold symmetry. Another one they make
this long skinny animal. They control the
development of the embryo in these amazing ways. DEL: So what you’re
saying when we look at this from a molecular or genetic
perspective, what we’re finding is really a fascinating
design in all of this. ROB: Absolutely. DEL: But what we’ve heard
in the conventional paradigm, the conventional story tells us
that it’s those random changes that has brought
about all of this. ROB: Sure. Back in the 1800s, when life
was simple, when they didn’t know what was happening
inside the cell, they didn’t how how
complex genetics was, you could imagine
all sorts of things. But now that we know
what actually happens behind the scenes, the story
gets a lot more complicated. You see, I’d like to say the
genome is four-dimensional. We have a one dimensional
string called DNA. And if you want
to draw that out, you’d have to write all
the letters of DNA out, all three billion of them, and then you’d have
to draw lines or arrows from one part to another part, because this part
turns this part off, this part interferes with
this, this part enhances this. It’s this huge two
dimensional interaction network and that’s how you have
a two dimensional genome. DEL: Let me stop you for
a second because this is really amazing
to think about this because I think in terms
of a computer program that it’s fairly static. The instructions are there. But you’re talking
about a program that is reprogramming itself. It’s modifying its
own instructions. ROB: Oh, wait until I get
to the fourth dimension, because there’s a
third dimension first. The information in that first
dimension, that linear string, has to be organized in
such a way that when it folds into the third
dimension, it still works. DEL: Oh that’s amazing. ROB: Genes that
are used together are next to each other in 3-D space. DEL: Are you saying that
once this thing gets folded up, it’s almost like we have
a new set of instructions? ROB: Yes, a new level of
information that whoever programmed that first
level needed to understand what was going to happen to
have it work in the third level. DEL: You said there’s
another dimension. ROB: Oh yeah, the
fourth dimension is time. DEL: And how does that work? ROB: The genome
changes shape over time. Maybe you eat something
that’s bad for you and your liver says, I
can get rid of that toxin. Now the chromosomes in
the liver will change shape, expose that new protein
gene, make copies of it, build a brand new
protein that can kill off that toxin and when
it’s not needed anymore, they’ll change shape
again and fold back. Dynamic programming,
all three levels change in the fourth level, time. DEL: Rob, that so far
beyond anything that we know even in our most
complex software systems that it’s almost
beyond imagination to think that someone
would look at that and say it all
happened by chance. ROB: Yes, and it only
brings glory to God. DEL: It does. ROB: You can’t build something
like that one thing at a time. You need it to function
in all its interlocking four-dimensional complexity. It’s not something you can do one letter at a time
with natural selection. DEL: It has all to be there. ROB: Yeah, in the same
way when we talked about the environment out
here on the coral reef, if you don’t have all these interlocking pieces
of that puzzle, you don’t have that ecology. The system will come
crashing down if you just remove a couple of very important
factors that are there. They have to be together
or it doesn’t happen. DEL: So not only did we
have this interdependency, this mutualism so to speak
down at the genetic level, now we even make it more
complex by saying there is that same mutualism at
the higher level as well. ROB: Yes. In fact the entire
world has a mutualism. DEL: It’s impossible to think that all of this could
have happened just by a series
of slow processes over billions of years. ROB: That’s exactly
what I’m saying. DEL: It’s clear that
the world we live in is incredibly interdependent, from
the smallest biological system to the largest ecosystem. There are complex, mutual
relationships everywhere. I realized that creation in six
days makes the most sense from an engineering perspective. You need everything working
together at the same time for everything to
function properly. And that’s exactly how
Genesis says God created it. Rob also said God created
animals with the ability to change and adapt
to their environments. Is it possible this ability
to change has been mistaken for evolution? DEL: As Todd Wood and
I walked through the zoo, we saw incredible beauty
and amazing design wherever we looked. I noticed the great diversity
between some animals as well as the remarkable
similarity of others. DEL: As a biologist,
what do you see when you see all
of these creatures? TODD: Yeah when I look at this, these lions specifically,
I’m seeing cats myself. And all the other cats
they have here at the zoo, they all have this
underlying catness to them that’s really apparent. It’s really apparent when
they start playing, right? You’re seeing them
playing with some sort of ball or something and they look… DEL: They’re just like a cat. TODD: They look like a cat. Scientists would put that
into a family called felidae. And I would understand
the felids to be representatives of a
single created kind. So the continuity,
the similarity there is so significant that I’d say
these guys have all descended from a single pair of
critters that was on the ark and that eventually generated all the different sorts of
cats that we have today. DEL: So rather than
just a random accident, it appears as if all of these
different species are coming from a really elaborate design. TODD: Oh absolutely. And it’s not just a
design like God designed and created the lion. It’s God created something
that could make a lion. So it’s more like a multi-tool
or a Swiss army knife where you’ve got all of these pieces
that you can just pop out whenever you need them,
but it’s all just one thing. DEL: Give me some other
examples of created kinds. TODD: Yeah, so
you’ve got the grizzlies and the polar bear. Those are all members
of the bear kind. You’ve got ducks,
swans and geese. The thing about the dog
kind is really interesting. So you take just
this wolf-like creature and we can breed in
only a few hundred years many different breeds. DEL: Well, Todd, that’s
kind of fascinating now to think about
what God was doing when he was bringing
two of every kind. What do you think
was going on there? TODD: Oh yeah. He doesn’t have to bring
every little variety onto the ark. So when you actually
do the calculations and ok, so we don’t
know exactly how many created kinds there
were on the ark but maybe a couple of
thousand and they’re small. Most animals are quite small. So you have room to
spare, literally room to spare and all of that diversity
that we have today is built into those
two of every kind. DEL: Well Todd, we’re
looking at the zebras and they’re all unique and
yet all of these creatures, there’s just so much
complexity and diversity. How does the standard story, the conventional
paradigm explain all of that? TODD: Well they would
use evolution, right? So millions of years,
random variations, all things that are alive
now, that cactus, that zebra, the grass here,
it’s all related. We all go back to a
common ancestor that lived billions of years ago and through the process of
mutation and genetic variation and natural selection,
that’s where we get the stuff that we have today. DEL: So natural
selection, what is it? Does it have the kind
of creative potential that we need for all of this? TODD: Natural selection
is basically all about killing off things that aren’t
fit for the environment. So if you’re a finch
in the Galapagos and you have a really tiny beak and the only food
available to you is really big, hard seeds,
you’re going to die. And that’s exactly
what we observe. And so we can watch
over the generations as the beak size of finches
change in the Galapagos. But they’re still finches. They’re still birds. The notion that natural
selection can generate all of the diversity we see,
that’s not been demonstrated. What we find most often
with natural selection is that natural selection
does a lot of fine tuning. So right over here
we’ve got these oryx, beautiful creatures and
very, very pale colors. The wild range of the oryx
is right on the southern end of the Sahara desert. And so you can see, yeah,
their coloration makes sense. If you get a really
dark colored one that’s going to be really
easy for predators to find, and so they end up being
these really beautiful light colors. And that’s an example
of where selection would take a variation and
turn it into an adaptation. DEL: And that brings
us back to the notion that a really exquisite
design in the beginning… TODD: Oh I think so. Absolutely. DEL: Has provided these
creatures with the ability to survive and to
change for their benefit. TODD: Absolutely. So the ability to be able
to change your coloration like that, to be able
to fit in an environment that’s got to be built into
the system before it starts. Now don’t get me wrong, natural selection and random
variation can do amazing things. It’s pretty astonishing
the kinds of changes that we can see. But we don’t see one
kind changing into another. All we see are variations that
happened within a created kind. So there’s a felid tree
which has all the cats on it. There’s the canid tree
which has all the dogs on it. There’s the ursid tree
which has all the bears on it. There’s the equid tree
with all the horses on it. Each individual created kind
then has its own individual tree so that you end
up with something like an orchard or a forest. DEL: As a scientist, it
seems what you’re saying is that the Genesis paradigm
answers all of this data better. TODD: Ultimately I think it
does because it embraces both similarity and difference. Now as we’ve already
said there’s lots of questions that are still out there but I’m pretty confident given
what our paradigm can explain, I’m very confident that those
answers are going to be found. DEL: After we left the zebras, we made our way to the gorillas. Todd wanted to talk about
the question of human evolution. DEL: Todd, we see it all the
time, a new discovery, new skulls, new skeletons that supposedly
solidify this whole link. What do you see there? TODD: Absolutely, well, I
got some right here in my bag. DEL: Ooh, a skull. TODD: So this guy
is a Neanderthal. Very, very low forehead and
we have really tall foreheads. The face, the mid face
has been pulled out but at the same time,
well, it looks very human. So that’s Neanderthal. You want to hold
that one for me? DEL: Yep. TODD: We have others
that are very different. Now this one is
Australopithecus africanus. So you can see really
no forehead at all. It just slopes right back. Very, very small brain
case, muzzle sticks way out so the face is sloped forward. What do you do with this stuff? I mean there’s many more that
we could show, many more pictures, many more skulls and you
can see looking at them together they’re really — there’s
a lot of difference there. Well, here’s the thing. So all that created kind stuff
that we already talked about, I can show again and again
and again with multiple studies that I can find a discontinuity
between humans and non-humans. So this thing lands
on the human side. This Neanderthal
here, it’s one of us. This thing is not. It is different. But this would be
just another one of those varieties
of living things that God made in the beginning and it survived the
Flood aboard the ark. DEL: So when we look
at Neanderthal man, we’re looking at a human but it’s a human that
just like we find in dogs we have a lot of
variety of dogs… TODD: We’ve got a
lot of variety of people. So even looking
back here at the gorilla, we can see the obvious
differences between us and him, not the least of which
is that he’s in there and we can go home
when we’re done. DEL: And so those differences
are really huge, aren’t they? TODD: Yeah, absolutely. The image of God
entails this idea of being God’s representative
here on this earth. Part of that then is having
dominion and having authority, a spiritual quality that we have that we don’t share
with animals like that. DEL: It’s obvious
we’re different from the rest of creation because we’re
made in God’s image. We’re the only
ones to create zoos so we can see the
beauty of God’s animals. And we’re unique
in tracking time and wanting to
know our own history. But where does our
concept of time come from? ♪♪ DEL: It was a beautiful night. Danny took me
far outside the city and kept me up very
late in order to show me something I will never forget. DEL: Oh my goodness,
now you’re going to make me buy a telescope. [laughter] DANNY: You know, we have
some purposes given for the stars. In Genesis 1:14-19, it’s
day four creation account, it mentions the stars and other
heavenly bodies to mark time, to rule over the night,
to be for signs, seasons, festivals and so forth. People have been using the
stars for marking passage of time. The patterns repeat every night. They repeat every year. They come back in their season. There’s a lot of
regularity going on here. DEL: What about the design
of the sun and the moon? DANNY: There are a couple
of things I can talk about. On rare occasions, the moon
passes between us and the sun. It doesn’t happen very
often, and when that happens the moon just barely
covers the sun up. If the moon were
a little smaller or a little farther away,
it wouldn’t do it at all. If it were larger
or closer to us, it would be grossly over total. And so these eclipses
are spectacular and rare, and this is the only
planet on which it matters, and it’s the only planet
on which it happens. And you’ve got to think either
that’s just the way the world is for no apparent reason or the world is that way
for a purpose and design. To me that speaks of creation. DANNY: Okay, high overhead here, we have the great
square of Pegasus. It’s this big rectangle. Now coming off of Pegasus
is a little fuzzy spot right there. Do you see that? That’s the Andromeda galaxy. That is the most distant object that you can see
with the naked eye. It’s a little, what we think a little over two
million lightyears away and it contains a couple
of hundred billion stars. DEL: Okay Danny, that
brings me to a big question and a big question on
a lot of people’s minds. If we have stars
that are that far away, millions of lightyears away, and if the earth is
young as we believe then how in the world
can the starlight be here? DANNY: Yeah. We call this the light
travel time problem and I’ll try to phrase it
for you a little differently. We believe that the creation
is only thousands of years old, say 6000 years, 7000
years, something like that. And I just pointed
something out to you that we think is 2 million
years away from us. I think those distances
are reasonably correct and we creationists need
to answer this question and we’ve offered several
different solutions to that. I’ll discuss with you
my solution on this. DANNY: Several things jump
out at me on the creation account. One, there was a lot
of process going on, very rapid process
but still process. If you look at the
day three account, it talks about plants
rising up out of the ground. It says let the earth
bring forth these plants and the earth brought forth. I think if you would
have been there, it would have looked
like a time lapse movie. Growth that might
take normally decades, taking place in a matter of
minutes or hours at the most. Normal growth abnormally fast. I believe you can
interpret one day of creation in terms of another day. So I turn to the
day four account. Not much information
is given there but I think God also
rapidly made the stars and other astronomical
bodies and then in order for them to fulfill their
function to be seen, he had to rapidly
bring forth that light. Just as he brought plants
and matured them quickly, he had to bring that light here. I’m suggesting we actually
look at these objects like the Andromeda galaxy
we saw a few minutes ago, we’re looking at light that
actually left that object. So I think there’s a
rapid maturing took place. DEL: Danny, are there
some other things that you see that would point to
a young universe? DANNY: I think so. For instance spiral galaxies,
the Andromeda galaxy we talked about
is a spiral galaxy. Our own is. And the inside of the
galaxies should spin faster than the outside of the galaxy. So after a few
rotations you wind up or smear out those
spiral patterns. They ought to disappear
after a few rotations. Now most astronomers
think that spiral galaxies are 10 billion years old, so why
do we still see spiral patterns? You shouldn’t see those and it’s been long
recognized as a problem. But if we look at the outer
planets of the solar system, the gas giants,
they all have rings. And we also know that
these things are changing. They’re wiping out. They’ve actually
documented changes that have taken place within
the ring system. You have all these
gravitational tugs from the other
satellites orbiting around. So these ring systems
are fairly young. It doesn’t prove that
the solar system is young but it proves that these
ring systems are young and that’s interesting. DEL: Well you’ve
mentioned a lot of theories about the spirals and so forth, it brings us to what
most people see as the big theory concerning
cosmology and the universe and that’s the Big Bang. How do you see that? Is it holding up over time? DANNY: I don’t think so. I think it’s getting some
problems so much so that more than a dozen years ago I think in the New Scientist
Magazine there was an open letter protesting
the Big Bang Theory and it’s had hundreds
of signatories since. And most people
signing it are atheists, they’re not even creationists. So this idea that
the Big Bang model is universally
accepted is not true. There are many people
out there, well known people, very famous physics
and astronomy people that have real problems
with the Big Bang. And I don’t see any way
that you can reconcile the Big Bang with the Bible, though a lot of people
seem to think that you can. I think the temptation
they have there is to try to interpret scripture in terms of the current
cosmological thinking. That’s nothing new. That’s happened
before as it’s turned out with disastrous results. So I think when you look
at the history of science, the way we’ve discarded
theories over time, we’ve had theories that were
supposedly beyond dispute and then later on discarded, when you see that
lesson from history and then you want
to wed Genesis, you want to interpret Genesis
in terms of a ruling paradigm, I think you need
to be very careful. DEL: I realized Danny was
reorienting our perspective. We need to
interpret the universe in terms of Genesis,
not the other way around. And Genesis tells us that God
created the sun, moon and stars to be a magnificent clock
to track the passage of time. Even the ancients built
towers to follow the stars. But what does Genesis
say about those people and the languages they spoke? ♪♪ DEL: Doug took me to one of
the best archeological museums in the world to show me
some of the unique artifacts that relate to Genesis. DOUG: Well the events
of the Bible are unfolded in the ancient Near East. So all of these lands
are extremely important to understanding how and what
took place in the Biblical text. DEL: So this picks up these
events we’ve been looking at in Genesis from
Creation and the Flood and now we’re to the
dispersion of mankind out of Noah and his family. DOUG: Exactly. And the dispersion
would have taken place somewhere in this mountain range
to the northwest of Mesopotamia and what we see in the
Biblical text in the narrative is that a number of people have migrated
down to southern Mesopotamia, the land of Shinar,
and moved toward the process of
urbanization, city living. DEL: And that’s the
famous Tower of Babel. DOUG: Absolutely. DEL: Do we know where that is? DOUG: There are about
seven or eight Babels, cities of Babel in the
ancient area of Mesopotamia. And so one at a time I’ve
studied all of those areas and found only one
that meets all the criteria of the famous sight
of the Tower of Babel and that is the site of Eridu, which is in southeastern
Mesopotamia. We have signs of the expansion
to the north, to the south, to the east, to the west
all the way as far as Egypt. DEL: And when you say
evidence, that is the artifacts that we find in these
archeological digs? DOUG: Exactly. There’s an enormous
amount and very specific kinds of material culture that attest
to this expansion of people that I’m connecting to
the post-Babel dispersion. Here are the beveled-rim
bowls, these two, that Riemchen brick
that we see up there and those two spouted jars. All of these diagnostic forms
of pottery and material culture, they’re found
throughout the near east. The Bible describes an event that’s not just the
confusion of language but it’s the dispersing of
people far from that city, because we see language or the written
expression of language just pop up out of nowhere
and then different languages being represented
through cuneiform script or through hieroglyphic
script or other means. So you do not have a
universal plan that’s followed among all of the languages. You see great diversity
in the forms of grammar from language to language
even in ancient languages. DEL: It seems then that the
event recorded in Genesis about the Tower of Babel, that’s a very, very critical
event for archeology. DOUG: It is. So all of this fits perfectly
with what we would see as the Biblical account of
how languages took place. It’s really the only
way of explaining this. So the integrity of Biblical
history ultimately is justified by the expression
of these languages. DEL: Now most of us think
today of a tower the kinds of things we see in big cities
with big straight walls. Is that what they were building? DOUG: Well essentially
it’s a variation of a pyramid, and there were four sides to it and several stairways
that would go up to the top. At Eridu we have a temple that
existed in 18 different phases and at every phase it grew
in its size and its complexity. And that final temple, that
final phase of the temple, it was abandoned
immediately right at the time of the late Uruk expansion. Catty-cornered to the temple was
an absolutely enormous platform. DEL: Do you think that
could be the foundation of the Tower of Babel? DOUG: Absolutely. And I would suggest to you
that this late Uruk expansion where this technology
began was something that spread with the people. We find forms of these
ziggurats all around the globe. We find them in China. We find them in India. We find them in various
parts of the Americas. We find them all over. DEL: Well obviously we have
evidence here of civilization and people beginning
to gather together in communities, even cities. Do we have any
other evidence of that? DOUG: Absolutely. We can move forward to the
time of Abraham because we know that Abraham lived
at the site of Ur, which was also in
southern Mesopotamia at the end of the
third millennium BC. DEL: That brings us to the
end of Genesis chapter 11. DOUG: Exactly. In fact you see some
pottery, some cuneiform tablets all dating to the period
of the third dynasty of Ur. DEL: It’s amazing just
as we’re sitting here thinking about that,
thinking about Abraham and that this
represents the culture and the civilization
that he lived in. It’s a great tie to that
record in Genesis. DOUG: It is fascinating
and it gives you a feeling of putting your hands
around the events that go on in the Biblical text. DEL: When I looked
back through history, I realized each of
these cultures had been impacted by the events
recorded in Genesis. But what is the importance
of Genesis to us today? ♪♪ DEL: George Grant
wanted to meet me at a garden near his home. He said it was a good reminder
of where our history began. DEL: So there’s
something significant about the Genesis text
in which Adam and Eve are then placed into
a garden to tend it. That’s more than just a story. GEORGE: It’s much
more than just a story. One of the things that you
see in Genesis chapter 1 is the structure for time. The universe was
created for a 24 hour day. And so everything from
the way our sleep cycles and the way our work
cycles work all come from that definitive
historical account there. When we get to
Genesis chapter 2, we start to see the
meaning and purpose of man. Of course in Genesis chapter 3 we see the disruption
of everything by the fall. And the implications
of an historical fall, an actual man and
an actual woman who actually yielded
to actual sin have then implications all
through the rest of the Bible. If you remove a
literal Adam and Eve, that changes the whole
shape of what history is and how history is remembered. DEL: Is that
because when we pull an Adam and Eve out
of a historical record, we can then pretty much make up what we think about man, and
marriage, and even sexuality? GEORGE: Absolutely. The apostle Paul
understood the events of the early chapters of
Genesis as formative not only for our understanding of history
but for relationships between men and women
and their children, the character and
nature of marriage, rightness and wrongness in
moral relations including sexuality. All of that is assumed from
those early chapters of Genesis, oftentimes quoting
the passages verbatim. DEL: It seems that even Peter
is taking that event of the Flood for example as
a historical event and laying it in
the context of what he’s pointing to a
judgment that will come. So even judgement is
a part of understanding that historical record. GEORGE: You cut
things off from history and you lose sight of
the meaning of all of it. DEL: I think most Christians
when we talk about, for example, the life of Christ, those are understood
to be historical accounts. Why is it that when we look
at the account in Genesis that we have a tendency
not to want to do that? GEORGE: We have a
tendency not to do it because we’re constantly exhorted
to not see it that way. DEL: From the culture around us? GEORGE: The culture
around us, from theologians, modern theologians
who are trying to somehow in their minds fit
the truths of scripture with the so called
discoveries of science, which if you know anything
about the history of science you know it’s an
incredibly unreliable path. So we’re constantly
bombarded with this message that we have to adjust our view. DEL: But I think there are
a lot of Christians who have a sense that the
historicity of Genesis is just not that important
to their Christianity. GEORGE: I think we’ve been
sold a bill of goods on that. When you somehow
make those chapters a different category
altogether and non-historical, what are you doing to
all the rest of the Bible — the Bible that
assumes that it’s true, the Bible that treats
it as historically true, the Bible that refers back to all of the characters
that are there? Does that then negate
the whole of the Bible? Well yes, and that’s
exactly what the strategy was of the higher critics in the
18th and 19th centuries. They knew if you
could somehow attack the first three or the first
eleven chapters of Genesis you’ve done away
with the whole thing. DEL: Well George, all
of this brings us back then to the notion that the history
that’s recorded in Genesis or any true history
at all is critical for us in terms of understanding
what’s going on around us. GEORGE: Yeah. In fact it reminds us of
how important history is in anchoring all of the
other human disciplines. It is history that helps to
inform science so that science can begin its journey
of discovery in the world. So what history does is
it tells us what happened. Then what science
attempts to do is it asks the question
well, how did it happen? And then it begins to explore
the how, the mechanics, the structures that were
present in those events. If you try and reverse that,
if you try and make science saying what actually
happened, then you wind up having a worldview
that is constantly shifting where nothing is certain and moral relativism is
that necessary outcome. DEL: And God has
given us that bedrock. He has given us that foundation
in that historical record. GEORGE: He’s given it to us
in that historical record going all the way back to Genesis
chapter one back to the garden. DEL: In the end, I suppose
we always return home. And for me, home is Colorado. I always think more clearly when I’m out in the
beauty of God’s creation. We’ve been a lot of places
and seen a lot of things, but considering
everything together, it’s clear that nothing in
the world makes sense except in the light of Genesis. DEL: I love being
in the mountains, especially ones like these. They help give us
a good perspective, help us realize that we’re
small and finite and vulnerable. They humble us. And we need to be humbled
because we have a tendency to base our ideas on our
own small set of experiences. That’s why the wisdom
of the ages has told us over and over again
to know history. Everything that we have
done up to this point has looked at the evidence that shows
us that the Word of God, the history that has been laid
down for us in Genesis is true. God created the
world in six days. There was a real
Adam, a real Eve. There was a real Fall. There was a real Flood
that destroyed the world and produced all of this. It is glorious but it represents
the judgment of God. Everything supports
what God has told us. Genesis is
history, true history. ♪♪ Closed Captions by
CaptionLink www.captionlink.com
