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.
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