Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Science Conversations, a series examining the intersection of science and faith. I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and my guest today is Dr.
John Ashton. This is my 7th conversation with Dr. Ashton based upon his book, Evolution in Possible Twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the origin of life on Earth.
Last time, we noticed the absence of uncontested intermediates in the fossil record. Today, we're examining the geological evidence for a catastrophic global flood. Dr.
Ashton is a chemist with a PhD in epistemology, a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth. Welcome, John. It's great to see you again.
Yeah. Hello, Barry. Good to be here, and I'm looking forward to this conversation, particularly today.
Oh, thank you, John. Much of the surface of the planet is covered with rock strata that formed underwater. That is uncontested.
Our explanatory choices for the rock strata are repeated local flood events, rising and falling sea levels and volcanic and earthquake disturbances of lakes and seas over a vast period of time, or a massive worldwide flood event and its aftermath and continuing local flood events. What do we actually see when we look at the Earth's crust and why is it evidence for a catastrophic global flood? Yeah, so that's an important question. Geologists recognize that the surface of the Earth is essentially covered with a very thin layer of sedimentary rock.
Now, to get this in perspective, if about 75% of the surface of the Earth is covered with sedimentary rocks that have been down, in the vast majority of cases, underwater. So this is powerful evidence that the Earth was covered with water at least many times in the past. Actually, when we look in more detail at these layers, now, when we think that 75% plus is covered with this sedimentary layers, and of the remaining amount, part of that are sedimentary rocks that have been metamorphosed, that is under the influence of heat.
The remainder rocks are volcanic rocks. So when we look at this composition and realize that it's only 5% of the Earth's crust is made up by this layer, we can see it's a very thin layer over the surface of the Earth. So with that picture, when we drill down into these structures, we find the same sort of layers all around the world.
And so this is powerful evidence that the whole world was covered by water. Now, this is a major problem for people and those scientists that are trying to put together models that these layers were laid down by local small floods and lakes and so forth, because these layers are around the world, and they're essentially the same pattern, and they cover vast distances, too, don't they? Oh, yes. Some of the well, when we look in detail at the stratigraphy, we find that the different rock types are laid down in layers.
So these sedimentary rocks are laid down in layers. And I'm sure we've all seen these bands of rocks. If we've driven through cuttings on freeways or highways or railway cuttings cliffs by the seaside, this sort of thing, you see the layers there, and some might be the white or light gray colored limestone type rocks.
Others will be the conglomerates where we have big pebbles cemented in sandstone. Others will be sort of like what we call the shales. That will be a fine grained layers.
Then there's the typical sandstone layers that we see. And we see these layers, they're laying down as these bands around the world. And when we think all these types of rocks represent formations that have formed underwater, now, through them, of course, we might find volcanic rocks that we see come through them.
Like on the beaches around here where we live, there are the dikes where volcanic intrusions have come up and cut through these things. And in some places, of course, they spill out over the top of the sedimentary rocks and cover them. So these layers show that these deposits were laid down and in particular, and as you were referring to, some of them are absolutely massive, like many of us have heard of the White Cliffs of Dover.
Well, that's a massive Cretaceous limestone deposit laid down the Cretaceous Period, say 100 million years ago, according to conventional dating. Now, that stretches from Ireland, cross Europe right down to Turkey. And it's really the same time period and the same layers that we find here in Australia on the great Australian pite, those massive limestone cliffs there from the Cretaceous.
Now, the geology textbooks say that during the Cretaceous Period, the world was essentially entirely covered by water. So the textbooks and the geologists recognize this, that the Earth was covered with water. Now, you mentioned that the sedimentary rocks only covered a very small percentage of the Earth's crust.
But when you look at the depth of some of these, like you're talking about two kilometer layers of water deposited limestone that surround the Grand Canyon with these massive fossils in it, you realize that we're not just talking about a local flood, are we? It's impossible for it to have been a local flood. Now, when we say a small percentage of the Earth's crust, it's small percentage of the Earth's crust in terms of volume. Volume, yes.
But in terms of areas, it covers, it's more than 75%. Now, when we look at, say, those deposits and let's perhaps just consider, for example, the Morrison Formation in the United States, because this is where a lot of the dinosaurs are buried. So here we have a layer of this particular sandstone type of material that stretches from north of Texas up to Canada.
So it's a massive area that is covered from memory. It's about 100 meters deep, 300ft deep. Now, this massive amount of material buried dinosaurs, land dwelling dinosaurs.
So here we have animals that big animals and small ones, of course, but we're famous for the famous for the big ones, like Tyrannosaurus Rex that we find there. So here we have these large animals, land dwelling animals, that have been buried by this sediment that's, as I said, 100 meters thick, 300ft thick. And it's over this huge area that stretches from, like, as I said, New Mexico up to Canada.
So you can't have that sort of structure form. You can't bury those great big animals with some sort of little local flooding. A few years ago, we had the big Queensland floods.
Now, from memory, I can remember an area the size of the state of New South Wales was covered in Queensland, but we didn't see massive amount of fossilization of kangaroos and lizards and wombats and birds and things like this. But yet this is what we observe in the United States there. Now, we also see that you get the same particular combinations of layers of sedimentary strata around the world.
So this indicates that it's most likely to have resulted from a worldwide flood, rather than just local a series of local floods. Yes, well, there's a number of points that come out there from your comment. Most of the geology textbooks recognize that there were about five major extinction events on the Earth involving water.
So essentially they're saying that, sure, all these fossiliphorous slayers, that is, there were massive catastrophic flood type events that occurred where the animals were buried. Birds, fish and so forth were buried and fossilized then in these formations. But these events are separate and they occurred tens to hundreds of millions of years apart, which is sort of crazy, really.
Well, the problem is that you don't see signs of intermittent erosion between. This is exactly right. There's a classic example of where you've got rocks from the Cambrian which are, say, 500 million years old, according to conventional dating.
And in between, you've got the layers running up, all conformably, laying on top of one another, no sides signs of erosion. And we've got fossils in the Cambrian and then we come up, and then you've got the Cretaceous on top, say 100 million years. So you've got 400 million years of layers on top of one another laying with no signs of erosion in between.
It's just sort of, how can that be? How can those rocks be there for so long? All parallel on top of one another with no signs of erosion? And yet these sorts of formations are found all around the world in this particular layer. And of course, as you were saying, with the similar layers all over the world, there's a characteristic quartzite layer that underlies the Philipporus Cambrian. So the Cambrian layer is quite low down, as I said, stated, round about 500 million years, 550,000,000 years.
Very rich in fossils. That's where your characteristic trilobites and so forth are found, nautiluses and so forth. Many, many types of animals and fossils are found in that layer.
And underneath that layer is a unique quartzite layer. So that's a type of sandstone, very rich in quartz that is laid down under that layer there. Now that's found all around across the globe, this characteristic layer of this very thin quartzite layer.
And then on top of the quartzite layer is the other Cambrian layers, fossiliferous Cambrian layers. And that's a very interesting pattern that lies over the world. And then from then on you step up through all the other layers.
In the geological column you mentioned four areas that actually have the sedimentary strata in the sequence. Britain, Greenland, the Canadian Rockies and Australia all have this similar sequence. It would be all the continents, it'd be in China and Africa.
It's around the world. And that's how the geological column was built up. The fact that these layers are essentially found in the same order around the world.
Now in some places they're missing, there might be a big gap and yet the layers are conformably laying between. So you've got these beds laid down on top of one another, no signs of erosion. But in some places, say in the Grand Canyon, there's about 100 million years of layers missing.
Between another two set Australia strata, there's about 14 million years of layers missing, but there's no signs of erosion. So the main uniformitarian model that all these processes took millions of years and these sedimentary layers were formed very slowly, a tiny little layer each year and then corresponding to millions of years just doesn't fit the evidence that we have. It just doesn't work.
You can't bury huge animals like that. The other fascinating thing is that some of these deposits, and I can't remember which one it is from memory, but in the United States there's a massive area where they've found all these fossils and it covers thousands of square kilometers or square miles of area. And when they've analyzed the type of crystals and minerals there, and this is over in the western side of the United States, they realized that the material came from Canada and the eastern part of the United States.
So there was a massive movement of about 2000 or so across the United States of material, of huge amounts of material that covered hundreds of thousands of square miles. So how can you move these massive amounts of material across? It's got to be an unbelievable, catastrophic event on the surface of the Earth, not some slow deposition was a lake filling up with water and depositing sediments, or an earthquake sort of changing sea levels, or some sort of tsunami event. These are massive events way beyond any tsunamis we've ever in human history record, apart from the flood.
I'd like to take a look at some specific examples in a moment. But perhaps this is an appropriate time to talk about the whole concept of catastrophism because for decades it was out of favor with geologists and it seems to be coming back into favor. So we've got to the point where they're recognizing major events, major flood events, but there's still this lack of desire to recognize a global flood event.
Well, very much so. Professor Derek Ager, who's professor of Geology at the University of Swansea in Cardiff. In Wales, he has published a book the Earth's Catastrophic Past.
Now, he wants to immediately remove any notion that he is supporting the flood. He says, you know, I don't support the flood, but really so many things that he points out point to a global, catastrophic flood as described in the Bible. And of course, one of the evidences for these that he points to, and also Lyle, who was responsible for the geologic column, was aware, is that you've got examples, for example, of tree trunks that pass vertically up through 15, 20ft of these layers that were supposedly laid down over thousands of years.
But we know here we've got this tree going up through them, so it must have been deposited very quickly. And I know in the area here, I've seen some in the cliffs down in the quarries just south of Swansea there, where you've got the fossil of a a collified tree going up through the sandstone. And I know one of the geologists that studied at Sydney University and he had been into some of the mines here.
And I also have other friends that have been underground in the mines here, where they find the large trees that run up through several layers of the strata of coal and the intermediate strata, of course. Of course, as you know, we're in a very large coal mining area here. Where we are here is undermined.
So how can you have these vertical tree trunks going through all these days? It shows they must have been very, very quickly. And we had that scenario with the Mount St. Helens volcano, where in the lake there, all these trees were floating vertically in the water.
And of course, subsequently they could be buried in, say, a flood situation. And again, as we talked about last week, we've been able to show that these were from the St. Helens eruption.
We saw these structures like little mini Grand Canyon form just in a day, with all these layers in between, which, if we came across them using a conventional geologic interpretation, we'd say, oh, well, this took thousands of years to form, but yet we know it formed in a day. That's a serious anomaly. Then these polystrate fossils.
Yes. So they're going through different strata, and the ones in Nova Scotia have been studied again quite recently. So these were ones, lyle saw them, he wrote them up in his notes.
This is where you have these trees? Yes, in the cliffs going up through all the different strata. And when they've examined them quite closely, they've actually found the fossilized remains of animals in these trees. They're obviously fleeing the rising floodwaters.
And I can't remember how many different types of species that have been recorded there offhand. But it's more than a couple of dozen different types of species. Matter of fact, I think it might even be close to 100 different types of species have been found in these trees who are obviously trying to escape the flat waters.
Let's look now at some specific examples. Talk to us about the Shinner Rump conglomerate in Utah where you have this fossil wood. You've got the layer.
I think the fossil wood in the layer is about 30 meters thick, but it covers 250,000 km². Yes, well, that's right. This is the other point.
These layers like the Shinrump layer and the Chaneli Formation, they spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers and they contain fossils of land dwelling animals and fossils of wood and this sort of thing. So again, it's all a catastrophic the size of these deposits, the amount of material that has to remove requires huge flows of water to be moving. Now I think it's the Chaneli Formation where there's quite a bit of work has been done.
I think that's the one actually, now that you've mentioned it, or now that I've thought about where they've actually traced the material, must have come a couple of thousand kilometers from the other side of the United States. And of course, the other one is the Coconino Sandstone, which is exposed in the Grand Canyon. And that has preserved and the fossil remains of footprints of thousands of animals.
And when they've studied these footprints, they're running uphill, but they also believe that they were formed underwater. So we all know if you're walking up a sandbank in the sea, you'll leave little tracks. But for these then to be buried and fossilized, it's a very rapid movement of something happening on a huge scale.
And all this material is reported in the conventional geology literature. Matter of fact, I think it was a study published by one of the Smithsonian journals about the evidence for these reptiles and so forth running uphill. And you also suggest that means the tracks were made underwater too.
Yes. So this is a sandstone formation that covers 520,000. Lower half has hundreds of fossilized footprints of amphibians or reptiles and it's 150 meters thick.
The sandstone formation. We don't see that today, do we? Don't see that forming today. It's just so hard for us to comprehend the size of that.
As you've said there you've got 150 meters thick, over 450ft thick, and 520,000 don't know what that would be in square miles, but I'm sure it'll be over 100,000 sq mi. That's a huge amount of area. So if you think it's sort of 100,000 sq mi, it's 100 miles by 1000 miles, isn't it? It's huge.
Well, the Chinleaf formation that we talked about before is 2.3 million km². That's a massive flood.
Even if it's a low, if it's a local one. Well, it's not a local flood. The point is this these deposits were laid down by absolutely massive catastrophic conditions.
And yet, when we're working out the ages, what do we do? We count up the layers and we say this represents hundreds of millions of years. You can't have them both, they're incompatible hypotheses. Either there was a massive flood event that caused this and deposited this huge 100 meters thick layer.
It's totally inconsistent to say that those layers, 150 meters thick, were laid down over thousands of years, let alone millions of years. So there's a major problem with the interpretation of the stratigraphy of the surface of the Earth when we take this long age uniformitarian model. Now, you mentioned the Morrison formation in your book.
You say that's 1.5 million, it's 100 meters thick from Texas to Canada with land animal fossils. Yes.
And that's obviously consistent with a catastrophic rather than a slow, gradual deposition. Yeah. So that's the one I mentioned earlier, where we find it's quite rich in dinosaur remains.
And these are quite many of them are quite large animals to bury. So the whole picture clearly fits the biblical picture that the entire Earth, the surface of the Earth, was disrupted. The Bible talks about the fountains of the deep opened up.
We understand from that that there was massive volcanic action and there was the rain, the water falling as well. But also we understand there was groundwater coming up. There was probably massive movement of the Earth plates at that time.
There was a massive disruption of the surface of the Earth underwater. Now, the other thing that comes out with a lot of these things, such as in the Coconino Sandstone there that's exposed in the Grand Canyon, is that we can see what we call a cross bedding. So that's sort of like you can see these slopy lines within the sandstone itself.
Now, from the angle of these lines, it's possible to estimate the current flow of the water that was moving, that was depositing these underwater dunes of sand, so to speak. And we can see that those water flows correspond to the sort of water flows that you'd see in a tsunami. But that's some tsunami, isn't it? When you think you're depositing 250,000 material 150 meters thick, 450ft thick, that's a massive tsunami.
Yes. In the Coconino Sandstone, there doesn't seem to be any local source for this. So this had to be transported a massive distance to bring that sandstone in to that area.
Yes. And that's the other fascinating thing about many of these deposits. Where did the material come from and the few that they have been able to track down? As I mentioned earlier, the one specific example I remember, I know the estimate was that the sand was moved 2000 km.
You mentioned also that there was no local source of sand for the Supai group of sandstones, which were several strata below the Coconino that had to be transported vast distances too. Well, that's right. And actually, I think that's the Navajo sandstone, wasn't it, in southern Utah.
That's the one where they've tracked down the Zircon, and that had to come from the Appalachian Mountains or United States. Yes, yes, that's right. When they identified the particular inclusions in the Zircon and uranium and that's right from the mineral analysis.
So that massive movement of water, we've not observed, have we, in historical no, not in historical times apart from the flood. So we have the flood record, of course, and we can talk about that another time is recorded in so many cultures around the world. And so what we see on the surface of the Earth in these continents, in Australia, in America, in Europe, is this evidence.
And in China, a lot of research studies coming out of China now, they've found similar situation in China of finding the dinosaur tracks and so forth, again with the same characteristics that they seem to be running, and they're all running in the same direction, so they're running away from something and then they're buried. So it just fits a massive tsunami flood type scenario. But the important thing to remember is, okay, we have these descriptors and obviously then you have to have these huge amounts of material deposited very quickly.
But then what happens is the conventional science moves on to the other foot and they look at all these layers and they say, well, these layers represent yearly deposits or something like this in a lake. And they say it happens over millions of years. So this is a massive inconsistency with the interpretation of the geological record.
You can't have it. The overwhelming evidence is that there was a catastrophic global water event on the Earth. The Bible calls it the flood.
Noah's flood. Now, some students of the Bible have attempted to say, well, it was just a little local flood in the area of Palestine there, but we can see it doesn't fit that there's a problem with flood evidence all over the world. There's a problem with consistency there too, because God said he wouldn't send another flood if it was a local one, then his word hasn't been held, has it? No, that's right.
And so the attempt to bend the biblical reading to fit some sort of conventional science interpretation involving uniformitarianism long ages and small local flood events just doesn't work either. And in my view, it's a shame that people have attempted to support the Bible in that way. We don't have to be afraid of supporting the Bible and make up some or not make up, but sort of try to adapt scientific evidence to fit the Bible.
What the Bible says is very clear. When we go out and we look at the structure of the surface of the Earth, it's very clear there was a massive catastrophic global flood event. It was a catastrophic event involving water moving vast amounts of material and depositing them and with it burying huge amounts of plants and animals that make up our coal deposits, our brown coal deposits, and the fossils that we find all around the world.
And these events yes, the rock evidence is there. It's in stone. Let's look at some more anomalies in the slow and gradual model before we go to our break.
We find a lack of canyons, gorges and valleys preserved in the strata. If it were slow and gradual, we should find evidence of erosion and irregular surfaces. We see it on the surface of the Grand Canyon.
You get the erosion on the surface, but you don't see it in the layers. Exactly. That's a serious anomaly, isn't it? Well, it's very serious, and it's the same all around the world.
The Grand Canyon is just a particularly spectacular and obvious example of this, because you've got, say, on the eastern wall of the Grand Canyon, I think from memory, you've got a huge exposure of these layers that run hundreds of millions of years. I think it would run down to the Cambria at the bottom and up to at least the Cretaceous, if not more recent, at the top. I can't remember exactly.
And when you look across, you can see these layers. They're on top of one another and they're essentially parallel and they're essentially almost horizontal. And there's no massive erosion occurring.
And yet we look at the topography over there today, there's massive erosion. And we know that erosion takes place quite quickly. We know that in the past, these areas were much wetter.
The whole picture is just inconsistent that that could possibly represent 400 million years. You can't have 400 million years and no erosion. It's just common sense.
And the erosion rates are going to be a lot higher. I mean, we've got data on the basis of the recent geographical studies of erosion rates show that the continents would erode away in 10 million years or so. So this is data we measure today, and it's highly possible, if there was higher rainfall in the past, that the erosion rates would have been much higher.
So, again, it's inconceivable to have all these layers on top of one another representing hundreds of millions of years, and no erosion in between or insignificant erosion. They're virtually parallel, flat layers. So the evidence is really suggesting that all the layers were laid down quickly, and then we see the erosion on the top, whereas we don't see it between the layers.
So that seems to indicate that it wasn't laid down slow and gradually, as you suggested. Now, we also have some missing geological layers, some of these covering vast periods of geological time according to the slow and gradual model. What's the significance of these missing geological layers? Well, I mean, that's an interesting puzzle for the uniformitarian model, because if they're missing, the only way they can be missing, according to that theory, is they'd have to be eroded away.
But there's no evidence for erosion. So it's a major problem. If, however, everything was laid down at the one time, then it just means that those particular types of sediment didn't reach that particular area at that time and that's why they weren't laid down.
There's massive evidence that all these structures were laid down very, very quickly at the same time. This solves the problem. If we have a short term massive catastrophic event where all these things are buried on top of one another, that fits what we see very, very nicely.
The flood picture described in the Bible fits very nicely. You also mentioned the European Alps and Australian coal deposits and the problems that they pose for the uniformitarian model. Well, it's the same thing.
We've got the parallel layers, very little signs of erosion in between. It's essentially the same scenario. You also have the problem of layers of the geologic column being out of sequence with older layers overlaying younger layers.
What's an example. How is it conventionally explained and what's the problem with the explanation? Yes, well, this is very interesting. So what you can have here is you can have, say, rocks that are 400 million years old, according to conventional dating, lying on top of rocks that might be only 100 million years old.
Now this is observed. So in other words, the order is the wrong way. Now, the conventional explanation is that the older rocks were originally lower down, as they would conventionally be interpreted, and there was some earthquake discontinuity and they were pushed up and then pushed over the top of the younger rocks with some massive upheaval on the earth.
Now that's reasonable. The only thing is that some of these ones, the rock movement has been over very vast areas. So you've got this huge slab of rocks, supposedly 400 million years old, being pushed 20 or 30 km over the top of other rocks.
Now often these layers are laid down where again, there's no rupturing of the rock underneath, there's no piling up or forming like these overlapping tile like structures. You can imagine when you go to try and push carpet along and push something along the surface of carpet, the carpet ripples up sort of thing. So we would expect that with the underlying rocks, you've got these massive layers of these older rocks being pushed over the top, but we don't see that they lie conformably over the top of the younger rocks.
So the only way that that could happen is again, there must have been massive hydraulic forces and lubrication that enabled that to happen or else the rocks were laid down in the opposite order at the time of the flood, for whatever reason. But again, the only way you can have it is you've got to have some massive water event with hydraulic forces and some sort of lubrication allowing that to occur. So that's again, consistent with the catastrophic with the flood, there's a massive one in North America, the Lewis.
Overthrust, which is about it's on the near the Rocky Mountains there, near the Glacier National Park there, north of Montana, for memory. It's about 500 miles long. I think it's about 50 or 60 miles wide.
And this whole area has been slid over the top of Younger Rocks. Well, that's what we find. We find the structure is reversed there.
And so how that could happen again without the rupturing with all this sort of thing? It must have occurred with some sort of lubrication and there must have been massive hydraulic type forces to enable that. So it might have happened if the sediments were soft, wet, it might have been able to happen more effectively. Well, it's interesting that you've raised that with the soft, wet sediments, because here you've got a massive water situation, but you've got, say, the very soft.
You've got a case in some cases of these Cretaceous sort of rocks on the top, and then you've got rocks that are supposedly 400 million years old underneath. Why hadn't they eroded away in the meantime? Why are they still there to then be pushed up over the other rocks? There's just major problems with the interpretation, whatever way you look at it. How can these other rocks be sitting there nice and flat, nice and smooth for whatever it is, or maybe 100 million years? And then there they are, nice and neat, ready to be pushed up over the top of the other rocks.
It doesn't work. Erosion is occurring all the time. Pretty well.
Most seriously get wind erosion out in the desert areas. We get rain erosion in the high rainfall areas. So no matter what way we look at it, there are major problems.
There's another example, I just can't remember what the name is. I think it might be a formation down in Texas. Yes, I'm pretty sure it is in Texas.
Now, what's happened in this Texas outcrop is quite fascinating. So if you can imagine the up and down shape of gears, you know how like a gear from a gearbox. It's round, of course, but it has the little spikes, right? There are grooves in between.
So there's a formation there where you've got the Younger rocks have eroded away. The so called Younger Rocks have eroded, leaving these grooves, erosion grooves. Now, these erosion grooves are actually then filled with rocks that are much older.
So your conventional overthrusting model can't work. How can an overcrusting slab of rock fill gears? Fill the grooves in the gears without chopping off the top of the gears, for example? Yes. Was that? The Franklin mountains in Texas.
I think it is, yes. I think that's where it is from memory. Now, I'm positive it's in Texas.
So again, it just defies the fact that these rocks are hundreds of million years apart. It just can't work. You can't push these older rocks over the top of grooves and then fill them in the grooves and have them there with their layers, it's got to have occurred at the same time.
So again, that evidence powerfully suggests that all these rocks were laid down, all these sedimentary deposits were laid down at the same time, not millions of years apart. It just doesn't fit. So I think the main point is when we look at the polystrate fossils, when we look at the overthrusting type scenarios, when we look at the lack of erosion between these conformably overlaying layers that are supposedly millions of years apart, the whole picture fits.
That it must have happened quickly, it must have all happened around the same time. You can't bury dinosaurs with little local floods and build up sediments. And so although, as I said, there's an inconsistency there, the geologists are now recognising.
There was a catastrophic past, but they're still sticking to the uniformitarian method of calculating the ages. You can't have one and the other they don't work. I'm Dr.
Barry Harker, and you're listening to science conversations. My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
John has been examining the evidence for a global catastrophic flood. When we come back, John will focus on the evidence for rapid sedimentation that we can actually observe today. If you have any questions or comments in relation to today's program, you can call three ABM, Australia radio within Australia on 024-97-3456 or from outside of Australia on country code 612-497-3456.
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If you've just joined us. I'm Dr. Barry Harker and you're listening to science conversations.
My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. John has been examining the evidence for a global catastrophic flood.
In our remaining time today, John will focus on the evidence for rapid sedimentation that we can actually observe today, the evidence for single post global flood ice Age and the evidence from landforms. I also want to ask John about valves or annual layers of sediment or ice. John, what's the significance of the Mount St.
Helens explosion for rapid sedimentation? The Mount St. Helens aftermath has given us a very, very clear picture of a catastrophic type scenario because you had the volcanic eruption, but then there were also the flood type events as water was released from the lake on the side of the mountain and formed the gorges, sort of mimicking the Grand Canyon type scenario. So we have the ash fallout that form the different layers and then we have the erosion type scenario.
Now when we look at these layers they form just little layers, so they might be say, 8 mm or about a third of an inch thick, these different layers. Now, conventionally, if you just came in with a conventional, long age uniformitarian picture and looked at these little layers and you'd count them up and so in areas you might have these layers, say over 25ft of sediment or of deposit and you counted them up then you're going to get thousand years or so forth as the amount of time that it took for these layers to form. Well, you know that they formed in a day.
So it illustrates that there's a mechanism. So the observational evidence is really telling us that our model, the global flood model, is quite consistent with what we're seeing. Well, it's quite consistent in a modern experiment.
So people often challenge us and say, well, look, the Flood. How can you sort of test that as a scientific theory? Well, the volcano provided a test scenario which we have gone and observed, and we find, whoa, we find a physical outcome that could be interpreted under the uniformitarian model as taking a very long period of time. But in actual fact, it was observed and it only took a very short period of time, and that factor is out by 1000 or so.
So it's very, very clear that the uniformitarian model doesn't fit the same with the erosion, the erosion of the canyon. This canyon, I forget the depth of it. It's 40, 50ft deep from memory, but it formed in a few hours.
So again, we find the same sort of scenario that again fits the catastrophic model and that you can't say, well, this represents millions of years of some sort of event happening out there in the world. So this is very important from the point of view of interpreting the evidence around the world that we see. The evidence that we see all around the world, when we look in our railway cuttings, our highway cuttings, when geologists drill, when they're drilling for oil and so forth, and we look at all the layers, it fits the model of rapid deposition, very little erosion in between, animals buried very quickly, footprints even preserved.
That's how rapidly the material is laid down and large animals buried. We have huge amounts of material, unimaginably huge in our mind, I think it's just hard to imagine. How can a layer of sandy sort of material 450ft thick or 150 meters thick, be spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers? How can that happen? We don't see anything like that happening today.
Now, there's evidence that the world was much wetter in the past, especially in some now desert regions. What is some of this evidence and what is its significance for a single ice age in a global flood? Okay, now, one of the fascinating things I found in doing my research was that they've made a lot of studies now under the Sahara Desert, and they've found the fossilized remains of crocodiles and hippopotamuses. They've identified cultures that live there.
They've found fishing equipment, fish hooks and spears, this sort of thing. And fascinatingly, they've found numerous water courses. Some water courses have been as large as the Nile.
So we know that the Sahara, which is massive desert now, was once a very, very lush, rich region and very, very wet. And it's the same in many water areas. I mean, I've flown over Nevada, I think it is, and you look down and you just see the network of what was once rivers.
That's how I interpret it anyway, flying across it in the plane. And yet it's a massive desert area now. So we know that there's evidence in Australia, here, in many areas that these areas were much, much wetter in the past.
Also, the poles were much warmer. Like, we find corals at the South Pole. We find evidence of many animals that would have eaten vegetarian up in the Arctic region too, that that was much warmer in the past.
So obviously there were, as you talked about, ice ages, a massive ice age after flood. And this is actually what we would expect in some ways too, because the Bible talks about the fountains of the deep opening up, so water coming out. And we know the water from deep down is warm, very hot.
We go to thermal springs, don't we, sometimes on our holidays. So this would have heated up the oceans to a degree that would have increased evaporation. And we know evaporation then produces cooling.
The old canvas bag that used to hang on the front of your vehicle when you're traveling outback or through hot areas, the cooling and the older type refrigerators, this evaporation led to the cooling of the water. The actual biblical flood model is the best model to explain the ice ages. Conventional science has a lot of problems trying to generate mechanisms to create these ice ages, because they need a number of ice ages according to their dating, because their time periods are so spread out, they've got to spread ice ages out for hundreds of thousands of years after the flood.
However, it seems it's likely that there was perhaps one or two massive ice ages as the world had this evaporative cooling, froze and then these melted, warmed up, and then maybe there was a cycle. We don't know for sure. But this would certainly explain how sometime after, and I think the best creationist models have estimated that was about 500 years after the flood, probably around the time of Abraham, when the massive ice age struck.
And maybe that is why these different groups moved down to Egypt, moved down to the warmer climbs. And possibly that was the time when we had the woolly mammoths and these other more recent animals frozen. Now, I wanted to ask you about ice valves, which are basically just layers of ice or sediment.
So you can get them in lakes or you can get them in areas of ice. Aren't they an anomaly for a global flood? Just slow and gradual. So you'd be able to go down through these thousands.
This is often claimed that they've drilled down, say through the Greenland ice core, which is about 10,000ft thick, whatever that is, in meters, I think it's just under 3000 meters thick or around 3000 meters thick. And they look at these particular layers in the ice crystallization down through these very deep ice cores and they come back to hundreds of thousands of years and they say look here, we have clear evidence for that. The Earth is much older than what the Bible would say.
But again, when we look at this, we don't know if there was a catastrophic condition in the past. How can again, we assume a uniformitarian model to calculate these ages? And when you do simple calculations like for example, those famous World War II bombers that landed on the ice after the German submarine jammed their radio communication and they were lost and they landed on the ice. Now that was during the Second World War and I think they were discovered again in the late 1980s sometime.
And so when they found those planes 40 OD years later, 40 or 50 years later, they were from memory, more than 250ft down. So if you got 50 into 250, you got 5ft a year of snow there. Now it's only 10,000ft thick of ice there.
If you're going to have the uniformitarian model there, and this is on data we measure now the erosion rates that we measure now maximum 2000 years old. So what we actually see so what we see in the President, what we see in the present rather actually tells us that we need to be careful about assuming that these are annual layers in the ice. Well, very much so.
And I mean, even if we apply that sort of theory, we're going to come up with a much younger date anyway. You can't have it both ways. There are major problems with any model for them to produce the ice ages.
There have been models that have been proposed based on slight movements or variation in sort of starlight reaching the earth and so forth, causing variations in slight variations in temperature. But none of these variations have been big enough to promote an ice age or the variations in the sun's temperature have been large enough to promote an ice age. The cycles don't fit the claimed cycles that are in the ice age or the icevab records.
There's just huge inconsistencies that they haven't got a model that fits the data really well. Now I guess some will make assertions that they have, but from my reading of the literature, there are major contentions about the proposed models by other scientists that they're just not fitting. Whereas the flood model fits beautifully, the data that we see, it fits really well.
It provides a model that works. That's the important thing. These long age models, they run into problems here, there, and so forth.
But the flood model, if you have hot water, high evaporation, then cooling, it just fits a massive ice age after the flood. Sean, we're running out of time, but I would like you to just explain an example of a landform that can only be explained by an enormous global flood. Do we have an example? Well, the ones that we've just talked about, these massive geological deposits, like the so called White Cliffs of Dover, the Cretaceous that spread across there, right across Europe, there the Morrison Formation.
These sandstones formations that we've seen can only form under these massive flood type examples. I think I was thinking of Tasmania, where you have a mountain range, and then you have a river going straight through the mountain range. Oh, yes, well, that's another very good example.
You're really on the ball there, Barry. Yes. So the Gordon splits, for example, in Tasmania.
Here we have this very narrow chasm, about 20 foot wide, hundreds feet deep, passing just straight through the mountain range. And there are many examples of this where we have a river cutting right through a mountain range. But I think that leads us into another very interesting scenario and that we don't often talk about.
And that is we find these fossil layers up on the tops of mountains. And so there is evidence, and we can talk about this another time, that these mountain ranges were pushed up after the flood. So you have essentially, the Earth's surface fairly uniform, and then you have a massive movement of the plates after the flood that pushed up these mountains, the Alps, the mountains in America and so forth.
And that explains how, if this happened after the flood, where you've got this water still pouring off and so forth, why they cut through those layers. Again, it fits the biblical flood model very well. And I think this is another thing people say, well, how were the mountains covered during the flood? Well, the secret is the mountains were pushed up after the flood, and we have, again, separate, independent and even astronomical evidence that supports that.
Okay, John, we've only got a couple of minutes left. Would you like to just sum up the evidence in perhaps about a minute and then tell us what our topic for conversation is next week? Well, to me, as I've looked at the stratigraphy of the surface of the Earth and the geological reports about this, we see evidence of massive deposits of material that must have been moved underwater. We've got big animals that were developed, obviously under catastrophic conditions.
We've got trees growing up through these layers. So you can't have these layers multimillions of years old. That's the important thing.
Their time scale has got to be out. It's got to be recent. It's got to be catastrophic.
It fits a flood model, and that leads us to the fact that there's actually a lot of historical evidence for the flood model and I think that would be really good to talk about next week. So we're going to talk about the historical evidence. So this is going to be from different cultures that are spread across the world? Yes, we'll talk about that from different cultures but there's also astronomical evidence as well that we can talk about.
Sounds fascinating. I look forward to that one. I'm Dr.
Barry Harker and you've been listening to science conversations. My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
Next week, our conversation will be on the historical evidence for a worldwide flood. Don't miss this important topic until then. Bye for now, and God bless.
