My name is Kurt wise. I'm addressing the question
of the matter of age. What does it matter? Or does it matter
how old the earth is? Is it nothing more than perhaps
something similar to how many angels can stand
on the head of a pin? Surely the age of the earth
is not significant. In fact, there's a very
famous quote from a theologian. The “...antiquity
of man has of itself no theological significance. It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference
how long man has existed on the earth. ” This is by B. B. Warfield. If you know anything
about church history and that sort of thing,
he was a very important, powerful proponent
for biblical inerrancy and a conservative
Christian position in a time when It was being
attacked most vigorously. But in his opinion, it don't matter theologically
how old things are or how old humans are. And I would suggest that this particular
statement is not accurate. Although it is often repeated and it is very
commonly believed, I believe it is
very definitely untrue. Distinctly untrue. This is a question of why I
believe the creation is young, and why I think it even matters
what age things are. You know, one day I
was trying to figure out why other people don't find this as
significant or as obvious as I. But I realized,
when I looked at my argument, that my argument
was almost entirely a paleontological argument. And I'm a paleontologist. So you could say
that the lecture is why, as a paleontologist, I cannot believe
the earth is old. I cannot believe that the earth is old
if I'm a paleontologist. So here I have to introduce the
concept of the fossil record. There is on this earth
a pile of rocks on all of the continents of the earth. From way back, that pile of rocks
has been recognized to have a particular order to it. In the rocks there were fossils, and so the fossils themselves
have a particular order. And eventually what happened by the early part
of the 19th century is that people looked
at the pile of rocks in various places
around the world, realized that there
was a similar order in different places, and began to conceptualize
a hypothetical column that took all the bits and pieces from all
of the piles of rock around the world
into one column, calling it the
fossil record here. They realized that
although individual columns in different places with real rocks and real fossils
didn't have all the fossils. Any one column never had
all the fossils. Nonetheless, the order
of the fossils in all of these columns was the same. So the major column,
the hypothetical column, might have had
all 80 steps or stages. Individual columns
might only have 30, but the 30 are in the same order
as the hypothetical column. In the early 19th century, they began labeling these things
as Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary. Again, in the fossil record, paleontologists typically
think of time going from the bottom up, rather than from
the right to the left, which is what most people think of a timeline going
in that kind of direction. Paleontologists and geologists
think of time going up because in a pile of rocks, the bottom rock is generally understood
to be the oldest rock. It’s kind of hard once the rock has already
been in place to stick another rock underneath it. So typically rocks form
on top of one another, from the oldest to the youngest, the oldest at the bottom,
the youngest at the top. So as I display this column, I hope that you all can
kind of follow along and conceptualize time going
from the base upward. That way, as we
move through time, we have the Primary, which means the first fossils, the second fossils,
the third set of fossils, and the fourth set of fossils. In time, the Primary came
to be renamed the Paleozoic, or “old life. ” The Secondary came
to be renamed the Mesozoic, or the “middle life. ” The Tertiary and Quaternary
still exist today as labels. And the two of them together
are often called Cenozoic, or “new life. ” I'm going to keep
the old names, Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, partly
because they’re easier, I think, for anyone to follow first, second, third, fourth
than it is Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The other reason is
that I don't happen to think that the Paleozoic is any older
than the Mesozoic, so I have a problem
with the names. As you go from the base
of this column of rocks upward, you're going to find that at the very base
you find no fossils at all. As you move upward, you're going to discover fossils
of different types. And as you go upward
the first time that you see animals
is also the first time that you see sea animals, and they appear
at the base of the Primary. And in fact, that defines the base
of the Primary. Not too long after you get
the first sea animals, which are invertebrates, you find marine
vertebrates as well, just a little bit higher. Not a whole lot
higher than that, you find the first land animals, animals that lived
breathing air soon. After that almost
in the same rocks, you find the
first insect fossils. You don't find any flying vertebrates, Pteranodons
and that sort of thing, until you get into the middle
of the Secondary. The first land plants
are sitting down here just a little bit
before the first land animals. The first grasses...and
I'm choosing these groups because they have
biblical significance. So things mentioned
in the bible. So the first grasses don't show
up in the fossil record until the Tertiary. First fruit trees after that,
in the late Tertiary. And again, I want
to emphasize the fact that this sequence is worldwide. Wherever you find fossils, this is the sequence,
the order that you find them in, no matter what
continent you’re on. Now, if we then
look at that pile of rocks and fossils, we can begin to think,
“What does it tell us? What is it a record of? ” Well, first of all, somewhat obviously,
it's a record of death. Now as a paleontologist, that's not the first
thing I see. When I see a fossil, I tend to see it reconstructed
for what it was when it was alive. And I love seeing that. I have to stop
and think about it a bit before I actually accept
the fact that this is, you know a carcass. It's the evidence of something
that was once alive, but in fact now dead. But obviously, that's
what fossils are. They’re evidence of death,
that a death event occurred. And of course, it's billions of organisms
that are evidence because there are
billions of fossils. There really are
a lot of fossils. The fossil record
also evidences extinction. Not only do we have
the individual bodies that indicate death, but we encounter in the fossil
record species of organisms that don't exist in the present. This suggests there were
species in the past that lived in the past
that don't live now, which means those
species went extinct. So we have evidence of
extinction in the fossil record, and in particular we have about
250 thousand species of fossils that we have identified as species that don't live
in the present. So at least, something in the order
of a quarter billion species we have extinction evidence for. Direct extinction evidence for. We also have evidence of thorns in the plants that we
find in the fossil record. We have a fossil
record of thorns. We have a fossil
record of carnivory, animals eating other animals. Take, for example,
this particular specimen. Now there's more than
one way to interpret this particular specimen. One could assume
that in a school of fish, one of the pupils in the school did not learn
to stop at the stop sign and just plowed right on
into the mouth of another fish. That could be what happened, but we know from
a variety of specimens that there are
in fact fish specimens where we find the remains
of other fish in their stomachs that they have digested, not just taken into their mouth and choked
to death or something. Maybe that's what happened
in this particular instance, but the fossil record preserves
evidence of carnivory. Animals eating other animals. We also have evidence
of disease in the fossil record. Here, for example,
are two columnals from crinoids. Now the normal crinoid columnal
should look just like this all the way up, and then in this particular
species the normal crinoid columnal should look
like that all the way down. But here are some tumors on this sea creature (in the modern
world we call it a sea lily) that is preserved
in these fossils. So we have evidence of disease
in the fossil record, by inference then, just like we infer death,
we can infer that we have suffering going on. Perhaps we don't infer
that from the plants, but at least from the animals
we know from analogy with the present organisms
that the disease and damage they encounter, the failed attempts
at carnivory, ripping an arm off of some organism
is likely to hurt them and cause them suffering. We have direct evidence in
the fossil record of suffering. Now this whole thing, technically speaking, is called
the biostratigraphic column. “ Bio” meaning life, “strata”
referring to layers. It's layers of rock
with living things, biological living
things, in them. We formally call this
the biostratigraphic column. This is something
we actually observe. Actually observe actual
fossils, actual rocks, and that sort of thing. But what is typically
done is we will add to this an interpretation
of the ages of these things. And we typically, in geology, will use
radiometric dating. We impose radiometric dating on the column to determine
the dates for the various parts of the column. So radiometric dating of some
of the oldest rocks in the earth that could actually
preserve fossils and do or do not gives us an age
of 3.8 billion years for those. The age of rocks in which we
find the first sea animals is about 500-530
million radiometric years. Between the Primary
and the Secondary, about 250 million years is
the radiometric date there. 65 for the juncture
between Secondary and Tertiary, and about 2 million between
the Tertiary and Quaternary. So again, the point here being that these are actual rocks
with actual fossils. We use radiometric dating
of things that we can't see, of very, very low
concentration minerals in rocks. We interpret that
information to date, and then we stick the dates onto
our biostratigraphic column. The result of combining
the biostratigraphic column with the chronologic column is something we call
the geologic column. From this column,
now think of the fossils, plus the rocks, plus the imposed
chronological column, and we can infer
some other things. From this we have to conclude that the earth must be at
least 3.8 billion years old because the oldest rocks
we have are that age. So it must be that the earth is at least
3.8 billion years old. We also now look at this new way
of looking at the same things. We're still looking
at the fossils, still looking at the rocks. But now with the dating
information, we now have a record of something
a little bit different. We have death but now it's not a record
of death of billions. It's a record
of billions of billions. You say, “ But we haven’t increased
the number of fossils. How in the world can that be so? ” Well if, in fact, this is representing three and
a half billion years of time, we know from the rate
of formation of rocks in the present, and we know from even studying
shorter segments of this that if the rocks
are really that old, we're missing a lot
of time in there. In that amount of time, we should have produced
a geologic column, a pile of rocks, if nothing got destroyed, that's many,
many times deeper. In fact, it should be
about a million times deeper than what we see. So you have to assume
that for every layer that you find
in the present world, there must have been 100, 200, 300 other layers
that have eroded away and we don't have in the column. So you've got to multiply what you'll actually see by
a very large number to determine what is actually true. There's another way
to do it specifically for the number of organisms, but we're talking at
least a billion times as many organisms as we actually see in the fossil record
must have died in the course of earth history. And we have
evidence of extinction, but in addition
to the 250,000 species we've seen actually seen
in the fossil record, there must be a bunch of others
that weren't preserved because there's a bunch
of stuff not there. And we estimate there's
something in excess of five billion. In fact, a better estimate is actually about
50 billion species that existed in the past
that don't exist in the present. In addition, we've got
that fossil record of thorns, but now it's spread back
over millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. Carnivory, again, over hundreds of
millions of years. Disease over hundreds
of millions of years. It’s a little bit different
than just to say, “Oh, there's evidence of disease. ” Now we're thinking of it
over long periods of time. There's suffering, then,
over extended periods of time. Hundreds of millions of years. Now, let's put other things into this that might be
more familiar to us. Where do humans come in? Humans don't appear
in this record until well into the Quaternary. There's some that may
actually get close to the very top of the Tertiary, but this is where
humans first appear. And thus, all of these things
that we've just referred to are proceeding
the presence of humans. We've got thorns that are going back
into the Primary, hundreds of millions of years before humans ever come
on the scene at all. We've got the suffering of animals for hundreds
of millions of years; long before humans ever
come on the scene. We've got billions
and billions of organisms dying. And literally billions
of species coming into being and disappearing before humans
ever come on the scene. So now, let's look
at some more details. First human fossils, again, up there
in the Quaternary. When we first find them, those human fossils are
of people that are short-lived. We have no good
reason to believe that they lived even as
long as we live today. In fact, many of them have
evidence of dying young. We estimate, probably
on the average, they’re probably dying
at about 30 years. The old timers
in these oldest fossils look like they might be getting up
into the 70s and 80s. But that's only one person among
literally scores of specimens. We rarely find an old person,
“old” being over 30. So these are short-lived humans
when we first find them. They're omnivorous. By studying the microscratches
on the teeth, we can determine what they ate. We can determine
whether they plants, whether they ate animals, whether they need a combination
of those things. We can infer the diet. And we know that these humans, like present humans,
are omnivorous. Too carnivorous in some cases,
but usually omnivorous. We have both male and female
when we find them, and sometimes they're
in association. The ratios are
somewhat close to 50/50. So there appears to be
populations of male-female, very similar to the present. Very soon after we
find the first ones, arguably it could even be argued
for the very first ones, we have them worldwide. At least over the Old World. At more or less
the radiometric pixel, hard to tell
the difference between them, we have the oldest
fossil humans in Spain, South Africa, and China, which is about as far away from each other in
the three Old World continents as you could possibly get. We don't have them
in the New World until later, but certainly across
the Old World we have a global distribution of humans
when we first find them. It's not until... It's later, and again,
it's not too much after. We're finding new
fossils every day, and this line
is coming down here. We're now finding
really old fossils, some of the
oldest human fossils, that show distinctions in... I'm going to say “races, ” but it's not modern races. Modern racial distinctions
do not show up on the bones. Unlike what they teach
you in CSI and all of those lying horrible shows, you cannot determine
race from the bones. You cannot do it. The racial differences are
literally only skin deep. It's really only the melanin
concentration in the skin. It's the subcutaneous
fat distribution, plus the melanin, that produces the shapes
of the nose, the eyes, the color of the skin,
and all of that. And the racial differences in the modern world do not show
up in the fossil record. You can't distinguish them. But what we can see in the fossil record are
true skeletal differences between people living in different places
at different times. So we're talking about
huge differences in humans. They are human, but there are populations of humans with very
big differences compared to the present going
all the way back, nearly to the oldest humans
that we find in the record. And it isn't too long after we find the oldest humans
that we find stone tools. We don't find, you know, the tool
in the fossilized hand of the human. So people argue about who it is
that made that tool. But the tools seem to be found
in the same sediments as the human bones are, so it looks
like we've got evidence of humans making tools
from the very beginning. And we don't find tools
before, older than, the oldest human fossils. It's not until significantly
later at what would be radiometrically dated at about
10,000 years before present that we find agriculture. Before that, humans
are hunting and gathering. They’re hunting animals, gathering fruits and
that sort of thing. They are not planting crops
and raising crops. But 10,000 years before present, we have the sudden appearance
of agriculture across all of the Old World. Simultaneously with that, you
can’t discern the difference, the first cities, the oldest cities we
have in the present with piles of material
going all the way back, go back to the same time to 10,000 years before present
in conventional dating. Now that's the
paleontological data. That’s the data
from the fossil record. Let’s turn back to the Bible. We have two
genealogies in scripture, Genesis 5 and 11, that collectively tell
us a sequence, a lineage, from Adam all the way
up to the Flood. We've got roughly
ten generations in each of these lineages, and the question is how much time
between the creation of Adam, the beginning, and the Flood in Genesis, and the end
of Genesis chapter 11. The possibility exists,
as some have suggested, there's gaps between
these individual lineages. Adam really isn't the father
of Seth, or whatever. There's a period of time
in between the two. But it has to be
that Adam is the father of Seth because in the passage it
says Adam names his son. So there can't be a gap there. Seth also names
his son, Enos, and names a city after him. We know that Lamech name's Noah. We know from the book of Jude that Enoch is
the seventh from Adam, which means at least as far as
the New Testament is concerned, the Holy Spirit indicates
that the truth is that Enoch is the seventh name. It's the seventh person there appears to be
no gap in there as well. We know that Shem was
on the Ark with Noah. Can't be a gap in there. They're both on the boat
at the same time. We know that Shem fathered
Arphaxad two years after the Flood, so there doesn't appear
to be a gap in there. We know that there's
a short discussion about Eber and his sons there that also suggests that there's
a direct connection there. Of course, Abram lived
with Terah and moved out of her with his father Terah to Haran. So there can't be
a gap in there. We're left with very few places where you could actually stick
a gap that would actually make any sense
in the biblical account. And if you assume that there's no gaps
and walk through this, you will calculate the time
from Abraham back to... And most everyone agrees
Abraham lived about 2,000 BC. So it's 4,000 years ago. If you assume no gaps
at all in this passage, you deduce that the earth is
6,000 years old. If we add to that 6,000 years
the gap length here, we could put gaps in here. We've got two
possible gaps here. Let's say we put
five generations in there. The average generation time
in Genesis 5 is 155.6 years. Multiply that by five,
do that for two gaps, take the average
generation time here, and multiply it
by one, two, three, four, five, six. Five times the average
generation time, times six, you're still left with less than 9,000 years
for the age of the Earth. Now you have five generations when there's no generations
missing in these places, and you're going to put five
in the other places? That’s a little unreasonable. That sort of
compromises the text. Even with all that compromise, you're only going to get
nine thousand years. You're not even going
to get these guys to go back to the oldest cities. You're not going to get
these guys to go back to the oldest
evidence of agriculture. This is still
arguing for a very, very, young account, which places Adam
above all of this! It places Adam as younger
than the first cities, the first agriculture. Tools preceded Adam by thousands, actually a
hundred thousand years minimum, actually 400,000, almost two million years
before Adam comes on the scene. There are “races” on the planet for nearly
two million years before Adam comes on the scene. Humans are distributed worldwide
across the Old World long before Adam ever comes
on the scene at all. And humans are showing
evidence way back when, long before Adam, of being short-lived
omnivorous populations of males and females. Noah is going to be
supposedly after that, of course, so Noah
is also above that. And Babel would be above that because it's later
in the account. So, all of this stuff
is occurring at least hundreds of thousands
of years before any of the stories of Genesis. Before anything we
read about Adam. Noah, Babel, all these things
proceed the Genesis account. So if you take the actual
evidence of rocks, plus fossils, and archaeological data, plus radiometric dating, you conclude that there are
humans before Adam, and that the Genesis account
is not telling us about the beginning of humanity. It's not telling us
about creation at all. It suggests something's
not quite right there. So how do we reconcile that? I would suggest the issue is
not the actual fossils. The actual artifacts. The issue is
the radiometric dating that's imposed upon that pile
of rocks and fossils. So what if we ignored
the radiometric dating for a moment and just took the biblical data at face value and dated
this with the Bible? Set the radiometric dating aside
and date it for the Bible. We might conclude that this area down
here is pre-Flood. It's before we have
the first animals. And the reason I'd say that is because the biblical account
seems to indicate that the death of animals
only follows the Fall of Adam. The first time you
can have fossils... you can't have it
before Adam falls. It’s got to be after that. Then we see the nice
preservation of living things. What's a time after the Fall
when you might preserve animals? It could be in the Flood. This material here
could be pre-Flood because there are no animals. Could be before
the Fall of Adam. I'm going to put the Primary
and Secondary in the Flood because what I observe is that these particular events are
found across entire continents. They're actually
global sediments. That's not true
of the Tertiary and Quaternary. Tertiary sediments are found
in smaller regions. I can trace them
sometimes across states, but not across continents. Most of the time
it's across counties. You can follow it as
far as a county goes, and then you've got
a different set of rocks. But these rocks,
the Secondary and the Primary, I can trace across the entire
North American continent. Or the entire
European continent, or across the Asian continent. This suggests that there's
a global phenomenon that's actually dropping
those sediments in place. So there's reason to believe
that these things actually date from the Flood. And I would suggest
that Babel could be placed in between the Tertiary
and the Quaternary. It was the first time
after the Flood where we find humans
on a worldwide basis. If you assume the traditional
interpretation of Babel, then Babel was a universal event
where people dispersed and was the origin of all
of the languages of the world. People left the Ark.
They settled in Babel. They did not want to disperse
across the planet. They disobeyed God,
Who told them to disperse. They stayed there until God
confused their language and forced them out
across the world. So again, according to
the traditional interpretation of that account, the humans do not get dispersed
globally until after Babel. And yet, when you find
the first human fossils, we find them globally
distributed at the base of the Quaternary. So it suggests that Babel is just before that
global distribution of humans. You might say, “ Well, why in the world do we
not have any humans between the Flood and Babel? ” Well, if you look
at the biblical account and take it straightforwardly, you have Noah living
for 350 years after the Flood. It’s hard to tell
when Babel actually occurred, though it seems to be
in the days of Peleg. If that’s the case, then it’s between a hundred
and four hundred years after the Flood. So if we say it's
a few hundred years after the Flood, that means Noah was probably
alive at the time of Babel. His son lived for 500 years
after the Flood. He lived all the way
through Babel and beyond. His son lived through
Babel and beyond. His son lived through
Babel and beyond. Unless somebody died
prematurely, it's very possible that no one had died yet. Everyone born after
the Flood is still alive at the time of Babel. You can’t have fossils
until someone dies. You can't have fossils of humans until someone dies
to leave a fossil. So it's very possible that there are no humans found
as fossils in this period because no humans were yet dead. No humans had yet died. And in this particular
interpretation then, we now have a new
chronologic column. We could suggest that the Earth
itself is 6,000 years as the Bible seems to claim. That would put the Flood at
about four and a half thousand years ago, roughly, and that would be the date of
the Primary and Secondary rocks. The Tertiary rocks
would be 500 or so years, maybe something like that,
between the Flood and Babel. And the Quaternary is
the last 4,000 years of time. With that scenario, now we've got two scenarios
to now compare. We've got an old age scenario
of the rock record. So I'm going to call
that the old interpretation of the rock record. We also have
a young interpretation of the rock record
that I'll do over here. So let's consider the claim that Genesis 1 is
creation in six days. That's what it seems to say. Creation in six days. But if you believe that the earth is
actually as old as radiometric dating suggests, then we have an origin not only
billions of years ago, but the various objects
listed there, the stars, the sun, the moon,
and the earth itself, and various things on the earth
is actually over a period of something in excess
of 14 billion years. So it isn't six days. It's 14 billion years if you believe
the radiometric dates of things. Also, the order
in Genesis 1 is such that the earth is created
before the sun. Earth on Day 1,
the sun on Day 4. Flying creatures are
created on Day 5. The land creatures
are created on Day 6. The plants are created on Day 3. The animals begin on Day 5. But if you believe in the ages, the sun is before or at
the same time as the earth. Arguably, it's actually before
the creation of the earth. The land creatures evolve before
or appear in the fossil record before the flying creatures by
millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. Animals come before plants. Sea creatures come long
before the plants come. We learn from
the biblical account that humans are
initially herbivorous. They are not carnivorous and omnivorous until
after the Flood. But as I've already said, the oldest humans
in the fossil record all the way up are showing omnivory. According to the
biblical account, all animals are herbivores. But in the old
age interpretation, we have carnivorous animals for
hundreds of millions of years before humans ever
come on the scene. So it would suggest
if the earth is old, Genesis 1 is wrong
on at least four points. However, if I take
the young interpretation, I can actually believe all these things just
exactly the way it says. I can assume all these things to be true and I'm
not contradicting the scripture. So Genesis 1 can be true. Genesis 2: we have a claim
of a Garden of Eden. We have a place where a river
is exiting the garden, splitting into four rivers, and watering four
different regions. There ain't no place
on this planet where a river divides into four rivers and waters
four different places. There's no place
anywhere like that. There's no reason to believe that there's any place
on the surface that’s ever been like that
on the present earth. So that has led many people, and if they're consistent
they'd have to, who believe the earth is old
that Eden never existed. Or the description
is just wrong. We're told in Genesis 2 that Eve was created
from the side of Adam. Adam was first,
and Eve was created from Adam. But if things are old, we have male and female
before we have Adam! So you don't have
the origin of females, or marriage arguably,
in Adam himself. The one river into four. We have maybe the possibility of
putting three rivers into one, or four rivers into one,
but you don't have the opposite. We're told in the biblical
account that God breathed into man’s nostrils
the breath of life. Man became alive. “Nefesh chayim,” a living soul. It isn't that a living
soul became man. A living soul, that phrase “Nefesh chayim”
is used to describe animals in chapter 1. God said let the waters teem
with nefesh chayim. Let the land be abundant
with nefesh chayim. In the second chapter, we're told that man became
a nefesh chayim. The Bible very explicitly
says humans do not, did not, never did,
come from animals. It's a very explicit claim. But you have soul life
existing long before humans. Animals long before humans. And again, if you take those old
age interpretations, there's animals that look more and more like humans leading
right up to true humans, and it's only natural
to sort of interpret perhaps that man is derived
from living creatures, from animals. Scripture says that Adam named
all the land animals and birds. If the earth is old, he's sitting on a graveyard
of at least 250,000 species that never coexisted. He didn't name all
the land animals if, in fact, the earth is old. If, in fact,
the earth is old, that would suggest
that Genesis 2 is wrong. So not only do we
have Genesis 1 wrong, but Genesis 2 wrong
if the earth is old. Whereas, if the earth is young, you can actually accept all
of these things exactly as scripture indicates. Genesis 3 suggests that humans would
have lived forever if they had not been kicked
out of the garden. “ Lest he take of the Tree
of Life and live forever, I’m going to kick him
out of the Garden. ” And then, in the following chapters,
we see that they live for 900 years for a time
before the Flood. Whereas in the old
age interpretation, we have no evidence of humans living even probably
to a hundred years old, let alone 900 years old. We have thorns and thistles
and weeds that come in after man sinned that is a consequence
of man's sin. But if, in fact,
the earth is old, we've got weeds and thorns and
thistles proceeding humans by hundreds of millions of years. Scripture indicates that Eve is the mother
of all living. All living humans. But, if in fact, the earth is old Eve is
after almost two million years of humans and she
is by no means the ancestor of all human beings. So again, if the earth is old Genesis
3 must be ripped out of your Bibles. And it's not wrong
on one count, it's wrong on multiple accounts. Whereas in the
young age scenario. We can actually accept
all of these claims. Genesis 4 and 5. We learn about Cain
and Abel and the fact that they're engaging in two types
of agriculture at this time. In the old age scenario, we have agriculture
long preceding them. You get the impression
from the biblical account that Cain and Abel
are introducing agriculture. They’re the first ones
that are engaging in that. We have the idea of Cain
and Abel involved in religion, creating altars and
this sort of thing. But again, the fossil record
would suggest that there's religion long before Adam, and that altars
weren't introduced by Adam. They pre-existed Adam
by a long ways. According to the
biblical account, Cain built the very first city. But according to
the old age scenario, there are cities
that are older than Adam. The oldest cities
on the earth, including Jericho, are actually older
than Adam in this scenario. The first tools are claimed in Genesis 4 as being created
by the offspring of Cain. But if the earth is old, tools have been around
for almost two million years before Adam ever
came on the scene. Again, the claim is that humans are living
for 900 years. We have evidence
that humans do not live that long by the time
we find their fossils. So it appears that you've got to throw
out Genesis 4 and 5 as well. But again, in the
young age scenario, you don't have to. Genesis 6 through 9
tells us about a Flood. We've got all the land
animals on an Ark, as an example. But if the earth
is old we’ve got, in fact, evidence that there were millions
of species that were extinct that couldn't have
been on the Ark. Unless you took their fossils
on board, I guess. But why would you do that? We've got a claim
of a global Flood at the time of Genesis 6 through 9. But if, in fact, all this stuff is dated as it seems to be dated
and you go to a point when Noah would have lived
up there in the Quaternary, there’s no evidence of a Flood. There’s no evidence of a global Flood
radiometrically dating at 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 years ago. So that's why many people who believe in an old earth
simply reject a global flood. They can't accept it. Somehow the earth
was impacted by a global flood with no evidence? Are you kidding? We've got evidence of local
floods all over the place, and the only global Flood in earth history
didn't get recorded? No. That's why a number
of people I know of that started out as
young age creationists and went into old
age creationism rejected a global Flood
at a significant point in their trajectory. Man is, according
to this passage, first eating meat
after the Flood. They don't eat meat
before the Flood. But again, in
an old-age scenario, humans are omnivorous
for nearly 2 million years before Adam even
comes on the scene, let alone the Flood. Noah, according to the passage, is the father
of all living humans. But again, he's living so long after the oldest humans
in the old age scenario. Noah might be the father
of some living humans, but he ain't the father
of all living humans because there were people
living all around the world, including the New World,
long before Noah was around. And so those people would have
survived the “local flood” that impacted Noah, and not all people
are descended from Noah. We've also got the implication, because all humans
come from Noah, that all races in the present
must come from Noah. But again, it would be that there are races
long before Noah. They're already separated
on different continents before Noah. They did not come in with Noah. So you'd have to throw
out Genesis 6, 7, 8 and 9 with the description
of the Flood as well. Whereas in young
age creationism, we can accept all
of these things. Genesis 10 through 11:
the implication of the passage, the traditional interpretation
of the passage, is that all human beings were
at Babel and dispersed from Babel across the planet. But if the earth is old, there were people all around
the world long before that. They didn't get to Babel
and then separated from Babel. They were already spread
across the world. So some humans
might be from Babel, but not all. Again, the implications
of the passage is that all the languages
come from Babel. But again, it would have to be
that in the old age scenario, some languages are
not from Babel. Only some languages
come from Babel. People aren't living
for 900 years anymore, but they're living
for 400, 300, 200, and that sort of thing. And again, if the earth is old,
we have no evidence that people lived that long. So, once again, we've got to toss out
Genesis 10 and Genesis 11 if the earth is old. You can accept these things
if, in fact, the earth is young. If the earth is old, Genesis 1 through 11 just
needs to be tossed out in its entirety. That's 20% of the
chapters of Genesis. There's only 50
chapters of Genesis, so 20% of them have
to be ripped out all together. But then there's the rest
of the scripture that refers to those first
11 chapters of Genesis. Parts of the 23
of the Psalms, more than 15% of the Psalms, would have to be taken
out at the same time. Parts of 18 other Old Testament
books have to be taken out, which is 45% of the other
Old Testament books. And parts of seven New Testament
books have to be taken out. About 25% of
New Testament books. And then if we switch over
from just one doctrine, the doctrine of
the scriptures itself, to expand outward, we've got to claim first of all
that the scripture is true. But if the scripture is true
and the earth is old, we got a problem. If the earth is old, then scripture is not true
because of Genesis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, 10, 11. And so, you conclude
that scripture is not true if the earth is old. You can't hold to the doctrine
that scripture is true. There's a claim
that scripture is unhanging. You either have to change the scripture to make
it fit the truth, or make the claim that scripture changed from
what was right to what is wrong. Either way, you're having to argue that scripture is
certainly not unchanging, or it better not be unchanging. Otherwise you're in trouble. So if you in fact
believe the earth is old, the traditional Christian
doctrine of the scriptures must be rejected. You can't hold on to them. Whereas if the
creation is young, if the rocks are young, then you can accept
the claims about scripture. The doctrine of eschatology: we're told that the heaven
to come is going to be perfect, a place of shalom, as was the place
as was the beginning. But if, in fact,
the earth is old, there never was a time
in earth history where it was shalom. Long before humans came
on the scene there was death, disease, pain and agony. Across the planet, there was no shalom
in earth history. You're going to have to say
that the first heaven and earth were not perfect, so by analogy, the second heaven ain't going
to be too perfect, or you just can't
can't accept that. It's told to us that God rested
in the creation. It says that heaven
will be a rest. But if that's so, then God's rest is full
of sin and natural evil. He's comfortable with that. He rests in natural
evil and sin. Christ's return will be global, according to Matthew, just
as the Flood was global (that’s what Jesus says: “even as it was
in the days of Noah. ”). Okay? The breadth of the Flood
was supposed to be global. The return of Christ is global
because the Flood was global. Well, if the Flood isn't global, and you have to
conclude it’s local if the earth is old, then perhaps Christ's
return is not global either. So traditional Christian
doctrine of eschatology has to be rejected as well. But again, if the earth is young you
can accept these things. Doctrine of man: you're not supposed
to swear against man because he’s created
in the Image of God. He IS the Image of God,
actually, in James. It isn't that he's created in
or with; he IS the Image of God. But if the earth is old, humans existed long
before Adam was created with the Image of God. And humans look
like their image is of apes, or very similar to apes. That would be
the interpretation thereof. What is this Image of God thing? And what does it mean, then? What does that mean about
how we respond to other humans? Capital punishment was
introduced after the Flood because humans are created
in the Image of God. That's the justification. But again, we have this problem. If we compromise the image
of whatever a human is, there's no foundation
for capital punishment. Also, man's sin according
to the straightforward reading of the account seems
to lead to death, disease and suffering. But if the earth is old, those things preceded humans by
hundreds of millions of years. So if the earth is old, you must set aside
the traditional doctrine of man. If you're a
young-age creationist, you can accept the traditional
understanding of that. In the traditional Christian
doctrine of marriage, the husband is
the head of the wife because the man was created
first and then the woman. If the earth is old,
there's already humans. They’ve been there
for two million years. Who's coming first? There's no justification
for the headship in marriage. We're told that
marriage is unbreakable because God unified them. Because Eve was created from the side of Adam
and given to Adam, God created marriage. And what God
has joined together, let not man divide asunder. But if Eve and Adam come
two million years afterward, humans have already been having babies and all of them, there's
no foundation for marriage. You've lost the foundation
for the permanence of marriage. And so the traditional
Christian doctrine of marriage must be rejected
if the earth is old. In the young-age
creation scenario, we can accept
that traditional doctrine. What about the
Doctrine of Salvation? Man was created, according to the
traditional understanding of the doctrine of salvation,
in the state of perfection. He had a perfect relationship
and fellowship with God. And then man fell
from that state of perfection. Because he fell from perfection
he can be restored to it. Also, he needs salvation. He didn't start out fallen. If he started fallen, if he's created fallen,
he's there by no fault of his own. But according to the Doctrine
of Salvation, we have sinned and we deserve punishment, and we need salvation
as a consequence. And as a consequence, Christ is the only
possible solution. It's only by a perfect God becoming perfect in our place
and taking our sins that salvation actually works. In the old age scenario, man was never in
a state of perfection. If he is prone to sin, it's because he
was created that way. If he was created that way, he doesn't deserve
to get punished for that which he didn't earn. He didn't fall from anything. There's nothing to save. There's no restoration. There's no redemption. Those words
wouldn't mean anything. How do you redeem something that was never lost
in the first place? And so it would suggest that man never actually
really fell from perfection. He thus has no he's
not in need of salvation. I mean, he might need
to be rescued from his sin, but he's not responsible
for his sin because, in fact, the sin is coming
from his very nature. And so if humans
are to be rescued from their very nature, there's no need
for the perfect, sinless God to come down
and take human sin upon himself. He wouldn't have to go to such
extreme measures to save him. Whereas in the young-age
creation position, you can accept the traditional
Doctrine of Salvation. So in the Christian
Doctrine of God, according to scripture,
God is fearful in judgement. It says in Psalm 33 that you should be afraid
of the God of judgment because He spoke
and the earth stood fast. There was a sudden,
instantaneous creation. A God like that you
need to be as scared of. And in the old age scenario, it took God billions
of years to create the earth. So you might be able
to wait a few billion years before God actually comes
through with his judgment. Sort of changes the meaning
of that particular passage. Scripture tells us
that God is a God of truth. His Holy Spirit
inspired the Bible. The reason the Bible is true is
because God is true. But if, in fact,
the Bible is wrong, which would be indicated
if the earth is old, then that in turn suggests
that God is not a God of truth. And God is a God
of mercy in scripture. But the old age scenario would suggest God used
the process of death, disease, suffering, and pain for hundreds of
millions of years long before humans came on the scene. In fact, if you wanted to say, “Why was there death and
suffering for 100 million years, 200 million, 400 million years? ” You can't blame humans
because they're not there yet. You can't blame angels because, according to the
biblical account, Satan himself was unfallen in the Garden of Eden which
was created after Adam was. So that would suggest
the angels hadn't fallen before the creation of humans. You can't blame the angels. So who do you have to blame
for 400 million years of death disease
and suffering but God himself? He's responsible for the natural
evil of the universe. The claim is in Scripture
that God is good. But again, how can
that be consistent with a God that used or actually
tolerated death, disease, and suffering for hundreds
of millions of years. In the young age scenario,
you can accept these claims. You can accept the traditional
Christian Doctrine of God, but you have to reject it
if the Earth is old. So in general, we know from God's nature
that that determines the nature of the original creation. If God had been different, there'd been a
different creation. It's just kind of
as simple as that. It's also God's
nature to determine the nature of scripture. If He was different
in His nature, scripture would have been
different in His nature. So the nature of these things, the nature of scripture,
the nature of creation, teaches us about God's nature. So if, in fact, we have a truthful, perfect,
good scripture without error, that teaches us
that God is truthful, perfect, good and without error. And if you believe
that the creation is truthful, or at least started out
truthful and perfect and good without error, it teaches us that the One Who created
it is also the same way. But if the earth old, the original creation was full
of death, disease, and suffering, the original scripture, not just
the one we have received, but the ORIGINAL scripture
was full of errors. I mean, grossly erroneous! 11 chapters of Genesis
are just full of errors. Blatantly wrong! And that teaches us that God
himself is not truthful. He's not loving. He is not a provider. He's not merciful. If the earth is old,
God is not the Christian God. He cannot be the Christian God
if the earth is old. The original scripture
could have been truthful. The original creation
could have lacked natural evil. That would teach us that the God who created
these things can be truth, can be loving, can be providing,
can be merciful. The God of the creation and scripture is
the Christian God. We can accept that. The claims of Genesis
1-11 are the foundation of every single Christian
doctrine we hold dear. Putting it another way, every Christian doctrine
is based on the historicity of Genesis 1-11. Just as the resurrection of Christ is a historical
foundation for the church, so also the historicity
of the creation through Flood and Babel accounts is the foundation for the theology
of all of scripture. All Christian doctrine is based
upon those things. To reject ANY claim in Genesis 1-11 ultimately undermines
everything in Christianity. So which authority do we take? Do we take
the authority of man, who is the author of science? Or do we take
the authority of God, who is the author of scripture? Do we trust
the finiteness of man? Or the unbounded infinite nature of God who gave us
His revelation in His Word? Do we take the changing
nature of man, the changing word of man,
over the unchanging Word of God? Do we take the word
of a fallen man, as opposed to a perfect God? Do we take the word
of a deceitful human being, the heart is deceitful
above all things and desperately wicked, as opposed to the truthful,
unerring God of Truth. Do we take the words of humans who are willingly ignorant of
the truth that's given to them, or do we take
the all-knowing God? I've heard a comment several
times in the last few days: “ The Bible is not a
textbook of science. ” And the claim
following that is: “ Yes, it is not. It's a textbook of history. ” I'm going to change that. The Bible is not a
textbook of science. It's not a textbook of history. It's something far greater. It is a text book of Truth. It is not authored by people
who are finite and fallen. It is not a textbook
of changing facts. It is not a textbook. It's not a textbook at all! Textbooks are made by humans! And they fail! The Bible is a supernatural revelation from
an infinitely good, powerful, all-knowing, truthful God. It's got qualities immeasurably
greater than any textbook. The Bible is greater
than a textbook of science. I'm glad that the Bible is
not a textbook of science. It is something a billion times
greater than that. I'm a young-age creationist. Although I think that the fossil record is compatible with
young-age creationism and that it could give reasons
for why I hold it position, that's not why I'm
a young age creationist. I'm a young-age creationist because of Who I
believe God to be, and there I must stand. Thank you.
