Evidence for the Flood Part 1 - SC2519

SPEAKER 1 Welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Is there any geological evidence of a catastrophic global flood? Joining me to discuss part one of this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, Dr. John. Hello Kaysie. Dr. John has written a book entitled Evolution Impossible: 12 Reasons why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. And we'll be referring to his book as part of this program. So we are looking at this fascinating topic of evidence for a global flood in geology. And I'm wondering, you know, if we assume that it was a catastrophic global flood in the past, we would expect to see evidence of the presence of water in the rock that covers the surface of the Earth. Is this what we find? SPEAKER 2 Yes, exactly. So there's no contention among geologists that we observe essentially Most of the surface of the Earth is covered by layers of rock that we call sedimentary rocks. These are rocks that are laid down mostly under water and they're spread by water. So they're laid down as a result of massive movements of water. Some can be as a result of air movements, of course, such as in a desert. But most of the rocks that we see, the evidence is that these rocks were laid down underwater. So the issue, and it's interesting, these sedimentary rocks are only about 5% of the rocks in the Earth's crust, but they're spread as this very thin layer over the surface of the Earth. Interesting. And of course, there's parts of the Earth where there's, you know, there's volcanic rock on the surface and this sort of thing that makes up the rest. But largely we can see that there's this thin layer that's spread over. So the issue becomes, was this thin layer spread over a very, very long period of time by gradual deposition processes such as espoused by the uniformitarian theory and, you know, the sort of earthquakes breaking lakes and spewing out some content, all this sort of thing. Or was it for or were these layers formed as the result of one massive catastrophic flood. Now, what has happened is, as I said, scientists of rheology have recognized that we've got this global layer of sedimentary rock, and this global layer of sedimentary rock in many cases contains buried animals. In other words, the layers were laid down in such a way that they buried a whole lot of animals. And I think I've talked previously, we've seen massive flooding, for example, here in Australia a few years ago. A huge area of Australia, the size of the state of New South Wales, was flooded, but it didn't produce a whole lot of fossils. Yes. Goannas and koala bears and so forth. But what we see is these layers did produce and bury, and in many cases, huge quantities of animals and marine creatures as well. land animals, plants, wood, and marine animals are buried in these layers, right? And so scientists and some of the leading scientists now have recognized, okay, there must have been catastrophic conditions in the past to do this. So they cling to the uniformitarian theory by saying, well, okay, we had these, you know, overall it's mainly this uniformitarian, but every now and again there was this major catastrophe that buried all these animals. And so the issue now sort of refines itself a little bit further. Were these catastrophic events separated by millions and in some cases hundreds of millions of years? Or were they, did they happen in one overall event? and I think this is where again, where we look at the evidence in detail and we drill down into the evidence, we find that the evidence is now overwhelming for one single massive flood event. Now this poses a significant problem for the radiometric dating methods and for the other uniformitarian dating methods of counting the different layers. But as I just said, the evidence we now have is that this catastrophic event must have occurred all at once. You can't have a whole number separated by... SPEAKER 1 So given if that is what happened, like if we assumed that we had a global scale catastrophic event that produced these rock formations, is there evidence that there is some consistency with the formations around the whole world? Or does it seem like the rocks in one place, they're very different to the rocks in another, which would suggest maybe more localised catastrophic conditions? SPEAKER 2 That's right. And so, yes, when we look at this evidence, again, just that you've said, okay, you can have catastrophic conditions, were these catastrophic conditions global? Yes. Or were they local catastrophic conditions? Yeah, so it's a very good question. And so the evidence again shows that we have these uniform type layers right around the world. So if we look at structure, for example, there's a classic set of rock layers. Well, let's backtrack a little bit. When we look at the rock layers that are laid in sequence, what geologists have found is that these sequences are very similar. And that's led to the geologic column being and it essentially applies around the world. Now, if we look a little bit closely at the layers in this geologic column, we find, for example, say that there's a in the lower Lower Cambrian rocks, we find a lot of fossils, and these are laid conformably over another type of sedimentary rock called quartzite. And this quartzite layer and this very prolific lower Cambrian layers are found, the Cambrian on top of the quartzite, and this combination is essentially found around the world. So we look North America, Greenland, Europe, Australia, we find this same sequence of layers. Now the fascinating thing is that the quartzite layer has no fossils in it. It's devoid of fossils. And then suddenly we get all these fossils in the Cambrian. And the other fascinating thing is that these two layers lay on top of one another what we call conformably. In other words, there's no signs of erosion in between the two. Now this again suggests the same catastrophic event that laid down these layers. And one of the problems that we have is that the conventional theory has about five global floods occurring. So in other words we have these marine layers spreading huge amounts of sediments and It's hard for the mind to really grasp, but you can have sediments say that 10,000 square, well, even larger than that, maybe a quarter of a million square kilometres in size spread as a thin layer. And this is a very large series. Yes, yes, right across. And so for example, you've got the Morrison formation, I think, spreads from Texas or New Mexico up to Canada. you know, huge amount of material. It's about 100 meters thick and contains all the dinosaur fossils and so forth, lots of other things. So how could that be spread over that large area? Now, that's, you know, just one particular layer now. So they have a series of global events that are separated by, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years, and others by tens of millions of years. But what we find is for example, when we look at these layers such as in the Grand Canyon, these layers are sitting on top of one another conformably. So if we've got massive extinction events, if we've got these massive catastrophic events, why don't we see the evidence of massive erosion in between? They're not in between. There's no evidence of the erosion in between. These layers representing all these so-called catastrophic events that spread these massive sediments over the surface of the earth, layers are sitting conformably on top of one another. This is really a major problem for geologists to try and explain, but powerful and very powerful evidence for a single catastrophic flood. Yeah, it's very impressive. Yeah. SPEAKER 1 Now you're explaining about how some of these layers are just such vast areas and it's all the same kind of like the layer is made up of the same kind of elements. I guess the question begs to be asked, if these layers are just full of all this sediment, because it's sedimentary rock, where does it come from? Like how do you get thousands and millions, even hundreds of millions of square kilometers of sandstone material? from somewhere and spread out. Where does it come from? Where's the quarry for this? You know what I mean? What explanation is there for this? SPEAKER 2 Yes. So this is again another very exciting area to look at. So when we look at the Bible account, there's a number of things that talks about the fountains of the deep opened up and this possibly produced as the liquid that we also have hot water, but we also have volcanic material coming out and possibly very finely disseminate. A lot of the material could have been dissolved up and then sort of crystallize us out. Some of the material, obviously, is a result of erosion that perhaps occurred before the flood. So, for example, I know with, and it might be the, the Morrison formation, one of, one of the formations anyway, they've, they've tracked that looking at the isotopes, for example, of some of the minerals and the uranium content in the minerals, that that material for that particular, particular outcrop must have come about a couple thousand kilometers. It's been moved 2,000 kilometers to get there and then spread as this huge layer. So understanding what happened in the flood is, or interpreting this area of geology is very difficult. And I think the bottom line is that there's no naturalistic explanation that we can have in terms of gradual process or even a combination of catastrophic processes. The evidence is there for a supernatural catastrophic process because things are very mixed up there. We have evidence of huge currents and all this sort of thing spreading the material. Material has been transported over huge distances, spread over huge areas in very thin layers and nothing anything like we observed today, you know, in the past 3,000 years, you know, when we've been keeping records, we haven't observed anything on this sort of scale before occurring that spread this material over these thin layers and yet buried all these mixed up fossils in these layers as well. So it's an event that's very difficult to explain in terms of any known processes, but a supernatural flood model that God had set up to deliberately change the surface of the Earth, destroy mankind and start again fits the picture very well. Fits the evidence that we observe. That, I think, is the important bottom line. When we look at the evidence, the fact that we have all these different layers, these different layers fit conformably over the top of one another with no signs of erosion in between. If we go to conventional dating, we've got hundreds of millions of years or tens of means years in between layers and so forth. There's major problems explaining, well, how come there's no erosion, all these sort of things. But if all these layers were laid down at the same time during one catastrophic global flood, not five worldwide floods, but one worldwide catastrophic flood that exactly fits the biblical model. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, and I guess it means that even though we don't We don't observe any catastrophic conditions of that scale today. At least that kind of model can somehow encapsulate what we see, even if we don't understand all the processes that were at play within that model. SPEAKER 2 Exactly. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, it's conceivable. Yeah, that would make sense for this to occur in those conditions potentially. So very interesting. We're going to continue this discussion. There's so much more we can unpack here. Stay tuned. Next time we'll continue looking at the question, is there any geological evidence of a catastrophic global flood? Be sure to join us.