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 8th conversation with Dr. Ashton based upon his book, Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the origin of life on Earth.
Last time we noted the geological evidences for a catastrophic global flood. Today we're examining the historical evidence for a worldwide 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. Hi Barry.
Good to be here again. Do you know we're over halfway in the series? The time's passed, so we're on the downhill run. Now.
John, in our last conversation we discussed significant geological evidence for a catastrophic global flood. Yes, that makes the flood story in the Book of Genesis of legitimate scientific interest. But there's also some intriguing evidence that an event of this nature is embedded in the historical memories of cultures widely distributed across the world.
What's the significance of this evidence for science and religion? Right, well, there is actually an amazing amount of historical records for the Flood. And the other thing that has always fascinated me is that when we look at the historical records and particularly chronologies, they run back to about 2000 BC, and then they all end. I haven't been able to find any chronologies, credible chronologies that run back much before about 2000 BC, apart from the Bible account.
Now, the Bible account does go back to the Flood in terms of a chronology and then even a pre flood chronology back to creation. But when we look at other secular records, they all seem to run back to about 2000 BC. So that's consistent with the biblical record then.
Very close to it, yes. And this is something that really pointed something out to me. Hang on.
We learn about all these really long ages and sort of particular cultures going back 40,000 years here. And it seems that each culture, whether it be in China or Australia, they want to push their cultures back as far as they can. But a lot of these very, very supposedly 40,000 years dates are based on, again, carbon 14 dating, which we'll look at, I think, a little bit down the track and see, well, hang on, that really needs to be correct and brought forth by almost an order of magnitude.
And the other thing is too, that it's based on sort of looking at shards of pottery and these sort of things that, again, have all been based on estimates that really haven't been proven back for those times. So this is why I've been very interested in trying to track down actual historical records and particularly accounts by ancient historians. Now, when I was putting this chapter of the book together, I made contact with a chappie at Princeton who was in one of the archaeology sections there.
And his interest was actually studying the writings of ancient scientists and philosophers, or particularly those writers that had made observations about nature. So that was his area of research. He was actually the director of the institute there at Princeton, and we got on really well and he provided me with quite a lot of references to ancient documents, well, and copies of the ancient documents themselves, so that I could actually go through and look for what data was actually there.
And this led to some exciting findings and actually correlations between reported chronologies. So writing this was very exciting chapter. Of course, it's not an area that I normally work in and research.
My main area is in the biomedical science area. But I've always had a very, very strong interest in history. And of course, as reading from a doctor in Epistemology, looking at what is the evidence, how can we know? And so, again, looking and analyzing the historical evidence has been something that has been of quite a bit of interest to me.
Now, John, there's different types of Flood narratives. I think one is legendary and the other is historical. How do you tell the difference between the two? Right, well, some of the legend ones that I believe aren't true.
They have just descriptors that, you know, just don't fit reality. Like there might be a story where a giant fish towed the boat to a mountain. The boat was in the shape of a cube.
We know a cube would be very unstable in water, or the boat that saved the people at this time was a giant basket. We know that they're legendary accounts. And I guess perhaps at this stage we should go back and perhaps look at what the Bible account says just very quickly, because really the Bible account of the flood was taken quite seriously up to the mid 18 hundreds.
Indeed, in terms of geology, as taught by, say, leading universities like Oxford, they taught geology in the context of this flood geology, and people were looking at that time. Now, of course, we know the influence of Hutton and Lyle, and particularly Lyle's book on the principles of geology, where he's looking at Strada in these long ages. That changed a lot of that thinking at the time.
Was much of this information known in those times? Much of this historical legendary material, was that available? No, a lot of those well, some of those documents were available about accounts of the flood. I guess some of them have been there was a lot of archaeological discoveries in the Middle East in the 18 hundreds. So some of this is sort of running parallel.
I think the point is that the two weren't put together so as these archaeological findings were reported, and some of them are in fairly obscure sort of journals, so geologists might not read an article from, say, a review. Of books that might be in sort of a library sort of journal looking at history of libraries so they wouldn't connect those sort of things. But I think when we look at the biblical account, it talks about that man had become extremely wicked and that God was extremely disappointed with this.
Now, the type of wickedness is described as being really horrendous, much violence, huge amount of violence. And so God had decided to put an end to this. Well, this is a biblical account.
And one of the things that fascinated me was that as I was reading some of the accounts that have been recorded by secular historians such as Professor David Lemming at the University of California, who studied a lot of these flood myths and the interesting thing about the flood myths was that there was a consistency around the world. Now, a lot of people okay, you know, I'm sure we admit there were some flood myths in the Mesopotamian area. There was probably some local flooding there know, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, I forget which one sort of flooded down there in that area.
But when you look at it, there's a similar story in the Americas, north and South America. The indigenous Australian people have a story. The African people have stories along these lines.
And one of the things that stood out for me, for example, in, say, the North American account, was that, again, people have become extremely wicked. They were not caring for children. So all these stories that have been preserved in these cultures have an account of the wickedness of man.
They've become extremely wicked, and he was destroyed by a flood. There was a flood that came. And many of the stories have the people saved in a boat.
Some of them list the same number of people as in the Bible, eight. So there's a huge number of these accounts, and some biblical scholars have actually gone through the evidence and tabulated out of the hundreds of flood accounts that have been recorded from all around the world. I think there's over 200 substantiated accounts.
When they look at the comparisons, a high percentage involve people being wicked, salvation of a few in a boat at that particular time. Some mention characteristics like a rainbow. So it's a whole lot of support from the biblical account, from this extra biblical material.
You do get differences, don't you? You do get some differences. I guess that could be explained by the similarities could be explained by a common origin for the story. Yes.
And I think that's the important point. And the differences could be explained just simply by time and distance away from the well that's right. And characteristics of their culture.
Tell us a bit more about the biblical account. Well, of course, the biblical account, the size of the boat, it's a very realistic description. Again, I forget the ratios, but the ratios are approximately the same ratios that you'd have in a sea kayak or a type of vessel that would be really good for withstanding very, very rough weather.
I know that a geologist has done a creationist geologist has done quite an extensive review of the size of the ark and indeed a number of Bible commentaries talk about this and how really it had a very large capacity. It certainly could have carried a lot of kinds. And I think this is one of the understandings too, when we think in terms of animals like the cats, you've got lions, tigers and leopards that can interbreed.
So there are probably only a couple of types of cats that were carrying a lot of genetic code and the same with bears and dogs. And of course, it was only the land breathing animals that were taken on to the ark and a lot of them maybe have been as juveniles, these sort of things. We don't necessarily know everything that went on, but it's a very feasible account in terms of the time.
It says that the waters rose for 150 days, that it rained. There was action, a huge amount of deluge over a period of 40 days. But one of the important factors is it talks about the fountains of the deep opening up and sort of we have this picture of massive disruption of the earth's surface by underground waters coming out.
And I think the picture that many people have in their mind is, okay, we had all this rain falling, but that's only a very small part of the fixture. Sure it rained, but what we believe is, and understand that a massive amount of water was subterranean water under pressure that was released violently and massively smashed up the surface of the earth at that time. It was a horrendous massive disruption of the earth's surface.
And this is what we see from the geological record as well, that the structures were broken up, they were pounded. We have the rocks that are converted to sandstone. I mean, the sand had to come from somewhere, it's ground up rock and all these conglomerates.
And so this is the picture that we have not of just some terrain and you had heavy rain like we might have in a massive flood situation. It's very different. It's a catastrophic flood situation described in the Bible.
So we have basically evidence that seems to indicate that the biblical account is actually historical rather than legendary. Yes, and I guess what I'm interested in, perhaps we can just review because non area in that I work in all the time. Just to refresh my memory, I might read some sections just from the chapter that I wrote in the book when I was researching this area.
I'll just read a couple of sections here and I've written firstly the traditions of many ancient peoples from all over the world preserve in one form or another the account of a worldwide flood from which only a few people were saved. Archaeologist Professor Andre Parott, who served as Director in Chief of the National Museums of France, explains that there are both legendary type narratives about a massive flood, such as the Epic of Gilamash and Gilgamesh rather, as well as brief references to the flood as a historic fact, such as in the King list of the world Blundel prism. Now, it's very interesting if we look up about that world Blundel prism, which is in the Ashmerlin Museum of Archaeology at Oxford, they say, well, this really is a mixture of fact and fantasy, but really it's a list of the king lists.
And as it goes through the list of the king lists, it describes this flood. And this is really a historic list. Now, one of the things when I looked at a lot of these archaeological accounts, the modern commentators say, well, hang on, really we've got these ancient documents, but really they're fantasy.
And so there's this consistent attempt to educate the modern public that, hang on, there isn't evidence that supports the biblical account, whereas in actual fact, here we have all this evidence that's been recorded that collaborates the biblical account of the flood. So here we have this king list that collaborates the history of the flood. Now, admittedly, the ages that the kings live as recorded seem to be somewhat exaggerated, but we know that they were historical kings that are listed there.
For example, in the Sumerian narrative of the flood, a fragment which was found in Nipper in Babylonia and dated back to the 19th century BC. The gods decide to send a flood to destroy the human race. But King Z Sudra is saved in a giant ship that he has built in accordance with instructions given to him by a god who has taken pity in him.
In another account, in the Assyrian version, found on the cuneiform tablets discovered in Nineveh in the library of Asherba NIPAL, who lived in the 7th century BC, a hero by the name of Gilgamesh goes in search of Atnapistim, who survived the flood, and Utnapistim and I'm not very good pronouncing. This tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood and how God Iya advised him to build a vessel to a specified plan to bring his family, craftsmen and animals in it. A flood and a storm is then unleashed and the whole world is submerged and mankind is destroyed.
The boat later comes to rest on a mountain and several birds are sent out and one of the birds, a raven, does not return. Survivors leave the ark. So again, very similar to the biblical account, but just doesn't have that ring of historical accuracy.
The ancient Greek literature also describes this flood, which is explicitly mentioned by Pinda, who lived in the fifth century BC with a full version found in the compendium of Biblico Ether. Anyway, I can't pronounce that as a reference in my book. And in the Greek account, the god Zeus decides to destroy the human race, but king Dukelong is advised by his father Prometheus to build an ark in which he and his wife can survive.
The rains come and flood the land. And after floating for nine days, the ark comes to rest on a mountain. So this is very interesting when we look at these accounts and people say, oh, there could have been local floating, tsunamis, all these sort of things.
But hang on, these accounts are talking about rain. So we have to look at the analysis of this, a Roman version recorded by Ovid. Here again, the gods to destroy humanity, which has become corrupt by sending a great flood.
A flood is also mentioned in a Sanskrit document of the 6th century. This story from ancient India tells of manhu who was advised by a fish that a flood was coming that would destroy the whole of mankind. He was told to build a boat, and during the flood, the fish towed the boat to a resting place on a mountaintop.
The Mandy people of Mali in central West Africa have a creation myth about an ark that landed on a mountain. The ark contained the original eight Andes of humans and all the first animals and plants. So that's quite interesting.
Now, these are recorded by secular historians who have studied like language experts, like Professor Lemming at the University of California there at Santa Barbara. So here we have these accounts, and again, very close to the biblical account. The aridan Aborigines of northern Australia have a dreamtime story of creation that has gone wrong and was cleansed by a flood.
The Arikara Indians of the American plains have a story that tells of giants that had no respect for their creator and were destroyed by a great flood with only a few good giants preserved. So there are many examples. Professor Liming talks about their examples in Eskimo culture.
The peoples of Greenland. The Cheyenne Indians of the American Plains and AVAJO Indians of the American Southwest the Yuma and Paima Indians of Arizona, the Pomo and Selena Indians of California. The Impura people of Brazil.
The ancient Mescas of Peru, the Mayan people of Guatemala. And so from around the world we've got these accounts of people being wicked and god destroying those people by a flood and a few people being saved that became the ancestors of the current population. One of the fascinating things, and I know when I've talked to people, it just blows their mind.
We talk about Egypt. Egypt's regularly in the news. We have the pyramids and so forth.
Egypt is named after Noah's grandson. Tell us about that. Well, we know that Noah is record to have three sons hem, Shem and Japheth.
And Egypt is often referred to as the land of Ham, or the land of Mizram. Now, Mizram was one of Ham's sons, and the Greek translation of Mizram is Egypt. Now, I've got an old Encyclopedia Britannica atlas at home, and it doesn't have the name Egypt in there.
It has the name Mizra for, you know, this is in English. You're really making historical connections here. Oh, yes, very much so.
I mean, you think about it. You had the land rhodesia was named after Cecil Rhodes. You got Disneyland named after Walt Disney.
It's not Mickey Mouse land. These places were named after real people. If someone goes to a particular area and they found a town, they name the town after the people who lived there or who founded the town or something like that.
And it's interesting that Bill Cooper, he's a British historian. He did a study, he published a book, it's called after the Flood. And he showed that when you go back through the European histories of their kings, so the genealogies of their kings, so many of the European kings from different parts of Europe trace their genealogies back to Japheth that we know, again, one of the other sons of Noah.
But I think the account of Egypt is and the fact that we have this country, Egypt, named after that through many accounts in late ancient history, egypt was referred to as the land of Ham, or as I said, the land of Mizram. And there was an Egyptian historian by the name of Manento. Historians use a lot of his data, try and construct the history of Egypt.
He was a priest in the temple of Heliopius during the Greek era, about 270 BC. So it's well before the Christian era, and that was one of the centers of learning in the ancient world. Now, Manitho, I think, in writing his history of Egypt, also mentions Noah as an historical figure.
Now, a lot of Egyptian history is based upon Manitho's account. Yes. So if they're not accepting Noah as an historical figure, then that would call into question the other history that he has written.
Well, that's right. Exactly. It's like with the geological record, they want to have all the slow deposition of all the layers and hence a long period of time.
But hang on, there's all this evidence of catastrophic movement, of vast amounts of sediment, which must have happened in a short period of time, the rapid burial of dinosaurs and all these sort of things. So it's the same sort of thing. So Menentho recorded the history of Egypt at that time and wrote that after the flood, Ham, the son of Noah, begat Egyptus, or Mestrum, who was the first to establish himself in the area now known as Egypt at the time when the tribes began to disperse.
Now he's talking there about the dispersion that occurred after the Tower of Lang, when the people on the earth had one language and the language God confused their languages because, again, they were becoming too proud, too self sufficient. And that was what God was really concerned about. Another tyranny, wasn't he? Yes, I think.
And again so Menanto, obviously, he was the Egyptian historian that time the prominent Egyptian historian pre the Christian era, and that's what he records. But there's a lot more. There's much more we can talk about.
For example, in Manento also talks about the dispersion taking place five years after the birth of Peleg. Now, Peleg was a great, great great grandson of Noah, born just over a hundred years after the flood. And so essentially what Menento is saying is that the dispersion occurred or the peoples began moving away from the flood area, which we believe was around the southern area, or where the NAAC came to rest, we believe was roughly around the southern part of Turkey, maybe was a little bit further down in the Middle East, but somewhere in there.
And that from there the different families dispersed. And so the traditional view is that Japheth went north up and became the European nations, that Ham went to Egypt and then became the nations that moved down into Africa, and that shem moved across and became the Asians and into the Americans and also the Semitic peoples of the Middle East. That's right, yes.
We can see that this then happened about 100 years after the flood, and there were about four generations of people. And of course, we know at that time they were having a lot of children. So in actual fact, there were a lot of people at that time.
Now, there's some other very interesting chronologies that I came across. And so J. Lamprayer's classical dictionary containing copious accounts of all the proper names mentioned in ancient authors.
So this is a secular work published in 1812. And he states, according to the calculations of Constantine Manassas, the kingdom of Egypt lasted 1663 years, from its beginning under Mizram, the son of Ham, in 2188 BC, to the conquest by Cambisis in 525 BC. And so here again, we can see that this, again, from this older historical record, this historian, essentially the founding of Egypt is 2188 BC.
This is consistent with the flood account, isn't it? Really? Well, it's consistent with Manento's date that the tribes began moving away about 2195 BC. So essentially, what this account is from Manassas, as recorded by Lem Priya, is that Egypt was founded about seven years after the tribes dispersed. So it's quite consistent, yeah, the time it would take to move across there, I mean, easily to travel that away on a camel, you travel just in a few months, you could travel down there.
But essentially, obviously, they'd found a place and they'd settled, and that's where they'd set up their community and their little kingdom. So this is a really strong correlation there. So it's in very, very close agreement with that date that we would calculate for the flood.
Now, it's interesting, calculating the date of the flood itself is problematic. We have quite good chronology recorded in the Bible, but it's all based on the date for the construction of Solomon's Temple. And we're not sure exactly what that date was.
There's a range of about a 40 year period that are used by different historians, and that to pin that date down roughly between 960 BC and about 1002 BC. Somewhere in that 40 or 50 year period. So we know we're pretty close to the date.
So that's another one. Now, another count that I found. Thomas Morris was the assistant librarian at the London Museum in the early 18 hundreds, and he published a very interesting report after visiting the ruins of Babylon.
So again, this was published back in 1817 in the London Review and Library Journal. Now, we mentioned earlier that geologists probably may not have read that in terms of doing their research. So this is where this was published.
But what he wrote was this when Alexander conquered Babylon, the Chaldean priests informed Calisthenes that they had recorded on bricks baked in the furnace astronomical observations that extended back 1903 years before that period, which was 330 years BC. When the conquest was achieved. So that's when Alexander conquered Babylon.
Now, that gives us a date of 2233 BC for the founding of Babylon, which is consistent with the dates for the tribes being dispersed from around Babylon about 40 years later. So here again, we have astronomical records preserved in baked bricks that go back for 1903, records back to when these records started. Now, we know that the civilizations were very advanced in that time.
We have these pictures of apes evolving into humans and cavemen and this sort of thing. But when we look back at these particular times, these people had amazing knowledge of mathematics that just suddenly appears. They make astronomical calculations.
They build structures. And I know they build these beams, and when they making these structures, they allow for special curvatures so that when you look along them, they still appear straight and not curved. I forget what the architectural name for that is, but we know the pyramids, for example, in Egypt, that go back to that time.
And it's interesting, if we were to look at the account of the pyramids, we find that the Bible talks about Abraham going from this area here in Mesopotamia and across to Egypt, and that there's a time in Egypt when they were building pyramids just after mestram was there. And these pyramids are very shoddy. And then suddenly these pyramids become it's about ten generations after Mesram.
The pyramids suddenly become extremely accurately, astronomically aligned, and also geometrically extremely accurate in terms of squareness and so forth. And you've got structures hundreds of feet, and yet they're squared within a few centimeters, and they've got features on them that are aligned to astronomical features. And of course, that corresponds to Abraham is about ten generations from Noah.
And it's interesting that Josephus records that Abraham took a knowledge of astronomy and mathematics with him to Egypt. So we have all these amazing correlations, but here or corroboration of the biblical account, but here again, we have this date for the founding of Babylon that very closely aligns with this period just after the well, just before the Tower of Babel event. Now, there's more.
The fourth century historian Yusubus of Caesarea recorded that Igliaus, the Greek king, began his reign in 2089 BC. That is 1313 years before the First Olympiad in 776 BC. Now, this appears to be the oldest chronological date assigned to a Greek kingdom, and it corresponds to just over 100 years after the dispersion.
So when you think that where Greece is, further up and around, it's just a little bit later. As a matter of fact, I plotted this and I showed that when you compare all these chronologies that we have that actually list the date in terms of years, they are roughly proportional to their distance away from where we believe the ark landed. And yet they're from all different cultures, from all different historians, from all different you know, we're putting together a picture here that is very consistent.
And the other interesting thing is, again, we find that the Grecians were referred to as the sons of Javon, who was another grandson of Noah. So here we have the ancient name for Greece was named after one of Noah's grandsons, just like Egypt. So these are the historical names that were used by people back in ancient times for those particular cultures.
And this is giving particular credibility to the biblical account and to those early generations that are there before all this sophisticated higher criticism came in. This is what the people back in those times recorded. And it's just like us talking about I was alive during the Maitland Flood in 1955.
I can describe it. I was there. I can remember seeing snow landing on Mount Sugarloaf back in the late 1950s or early 60s, whenever it was.
And I know the rough period of time. I was an eyewitness to that. I was there as part of the culture.
I was at a big conference yesterday talking about food safety. And I think back, I can remember when the milk was delivered to our back door, fresh from being milked in a cow and was poured into a pail that we left out and the milkman collected his shilling. These are things dating yourself now.
And I think this is what we have to respect. We can have higher criticism now, looking back, but these are historians that are writing back using the data that they had. And we know that a lot of that data was destroyed, like in the libraries of Alexandria and down through different times when different historical records were destroyed during battles and the raising of cities and these sort of things.
The other thing is, of course, that Javen is also the Hebrew name for Greece, and it was used to refer to the descendants of Javen and their lands in Macedonia, Greece and Syria. Now, it's interesting that Dr. Young, who compiled one.
Of the first biblical concordances back in the late 18 hundreds. He notes that Japeth is probably the original of Japitus or Ayeptus, whom the Greeks consider to be the ancestor of the human race. So again, according to Greek culture at that time, that's the origin of their culture, their race.
The Roman historian Josephus also lists many of the tribes of Europe, including Greece, as being of descendants from the son of Japheth and his grandsons. And another scholar, Professor Giles Douset of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, points out that the ancient Armenian writers call the Armenian descendants of Toggamath and Ashkalanaz, the sons of Goma, who was also a son of Japheth. So here we have again these ancient cultures all tracing their descendants back to the sons of Noah.
Jabeth had another son called Magog, and Josephus notes that the Magogites were called Scythians by the Greeks, which were the people occupying an area of southern Russia and Ukraine. Another one of Japheth's sons and a grandson of Noah was Madai, who, according to Josephus, was the father of the Medeans, who were called the Medes by the Greeks, who lived in the region south of the Caspian Sea. Now, we know Josephus lived about the time of Christ.
He was a Roman historian at the time, Jewish by background. But here he is, he's recording the history and what these different cultures are talking about. So it's amazing historical corroboration of the biblical account.
I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you're listening to science conversations. My guest today 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 history and legends of a global catastrophic flood. When we come back, John will focus on other types of evidence pointing to a worldwide flood.
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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 history and legends of a global catastrophic flood. John will now focus on other types of evidence pointing to a worldwide flood.
John. Tell me about China. Yes, well, we have a general perception that Chinese history goes back a long way, and it certainly does.
But unfortunately, around the time across in China, there was an emperor who had a massive burning of books and records. So a lot of their historical records were destroyed at that time. Some chronologies have survived, however, and one of the oldest of these is known as the Bamboo Annals.
It has a more complex Chinese name, of course, and I'm not very good at pronouncing many of these words, but Professor Goodrich, who is professor of Chinese at Columbia University, notes that this is actually the oldest preserved Chinese chronology known. And it goes back to the first dynasty of China, and it dates the first dynasty of China at being 1994 BC. And that's consistent with the dispersion model too, isn't it? Yes, it certainly is.
There is another revised traditional date that is associated with another chronology for that founding of China at 2183 BC. And Goodrich also notes this as well. But both these dates are well after the dispersion of the tribes from Babylon and certainly harmonize with the biblical account.
So even from China, and as I said when I pondered it with China, the date is a little bit later, but it fits because China's a little bit further away. And of course, traditionally, too, that's where Noah went after the flood. Noah is said to have gone to China and founded China.
So this is very interesting. I hadn't heard that one before. It's recorded by Young in young's Concordance.
As Young expands the history that's the traditional account that Noah was FuXi is it was the founder of China. Now we have the Ebla Archive, which has thrown quite a bit of light on biblical history. Tell us about that.
Oh, yes. Well, again, thousands of tablets were discovered in this mound at Elba in northern Syria there. And one of the fascinating things about that is that when they translated the tablets, they found that they referred to the cities of the plain that are mentioned in the Bible, particularly Sodom and Gomorrah.
Now, most modern commentators don't want to believe that those were historical cities. And so when that information was published, the actual epiephic that translated those tablets, who was a professor of Assyriology at the University of Rome, he was sacked. It was quite amazing because people didn't want to know that.
Hang on, we've got this record in stone of all these towns that are recorded in biblical history from these totally independent historical accounts preserved in stone. Maybe that's a story we can talk about in a later yes, later conversation. What about genomic decay, this concept that the genome is deteriorating so rapidly and that if we look at the trajectory, it's not possible for humans to be tens of thousands or millions of years old? Well, yes, there's two sides to that.
And again, we know that DNA is accumulating errors. And so if we look at mitochondrial DNA, for example, absolute maximum that could be is 100,000 years, and it's really more realistically going to be less than 10,000 years old. Now, the other interesting aspect of this is and people say to me, look, you believe in the Bible.
That's a totally non credible account. The Bible records the ages of people before the flood and it records the ages of people after the flood. Now, before the flood, it says that people, the, the patriarchs at least, they live roughly around about 900 years.
And we know that, we predict that by about 2050 people here in Australia will be living at least 100 years. So that's through medical technology and better diet and so forth. But then after the flood, it has their ages dropping off rapidly.
And so you've got Abraham, I think, around 180 years, noah, Moses, 120 years, this sort of thing. Now, it's interesting. On the Will Blundel prism, at lists exactly the same scenario, at least different ages, but has the kings before the flood living very, very long ages and then the ages being shorter after the flood.
So there's a consistent there is there a possible explanation for this? Well, yes, there is, and it's amazing. We know that DNA is accumulating errors and when you plot the ages with time after the flood, it fits actually decay curve. As a matter of fact, it closely fits with high correlation the decay curve that you would fit from genomic decay.
Now this is amazing because those ages are recorded by different authors in the Bible, are recorded thousand years ago, and they span over a period of about 1000 years. And we find it fits a scientific decay curve which is highly unlikely that those ages were made up. And people say, well, but how could people live so long back then? Well, see, this again.
If we take the Bible as a fact and we begin looking for evidence, we find amazing evidence. Now, one of the cancer treatments that's currently being developed in Europe at the present time is to give people low deuterium water. Now, deuterium is a heavy isotope of hydrogen and when you make water from that, you get heavy water.
So that's what the dam buster account was all about. In the Second World War, the Germans were producing heavy water because heavy water with the extra neutrons could be used to moderate high energy neutrons from nuclear reactions and hence help them accelerate their nuclear program. And so they generated the heavy water through electrolysis, big hydro and using a lot of electricity.
And so the idea was to break the dam so they couldn't generate the electricity to make the heavy water. But the one of the characteristics of heavy water is that it actually increases the rate of cell mutation. Now, if you remove deuterium from water and currently in the Earth's oceans, there's about 150 parts per million deuterium in water if you remove the deuterium from water and it's about the same level in the water that we drink.
If you remove deuterium of water, cells grow much more slowly and the mutation rate is much lower. And so already this has been approved in veterinary use the use of low deuterium water. So what would happen is we know in the biblical account that the fountains of the deep opened up, and we know that groundwaters are much higher in deuterium.
We also know that some of the ancient waters were much lower in deuterium that have been preserved. So this fits a very interesting picture that if the original water on the Earth was very low in deuterium, that would explain the long ages, because they would grow more slowly. And also that fits the begat age, because we know that sexual maturity now has reached somewhere between maybe 1220 years back.
Then it talks about the Men begatting children generally when they were in their 60s, they first became fathers. So, again, this fits this low deuterium model picture of slow development, the larger growth of animals and all this sort of thing. And then if the fountains of the deep opened up and released this extra deuterium, this heavy water back into the ecosystem, then that would explain the increased decay rate and the rapid decline in ages.
So when we look for it, again, the Bible fits, we have a scenario, and it certainly fits in a low deuterium environment. We could expect very, very long ages. That's really interesting stuff, isn't it? Yeah, fascinating stuff.
John, tell me about the significance of George Dodwell's work on the wobble of the Earth's axis of rotation and its significance for flood history. Yes, well, this is again fascinating material. George Dodson was the george Dodwell rather, was the government astronomer from the early 19 hundreds the Australian South Australian government astronomer the early 19 hundreds through to the late 1930s, I think.
A matter of fact, in 922, Dobble led a very important expedition to the northern part of South Australia, Cadello Downs for Memory, where they observed an eclipse of the sun that verified that light was deflected by gravitational know. He was quite a famous mathematician, and that sort of verified some of Einstein's predictions there. So he's quite a famous astronomer, Dodwell, in his day.
Now, he hadn't become aware of some reports by a British admiral, Sir Algaroon Horsey, that had discussed an astronomical theory relating to the tilt of the Earth's axis. And this theory had been put forward by a major general, Professor Alfred W. Drayson, who had served as an astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
Now, Professor Drayson reported that there appeared to be an extra wobble in the wobble of the Earth's axis over and above that predicted by Newcombe's formula. So that's not Newton's formula. This is newcomb.
Newcomb was an American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, who worked out and calculated the wobble in the tilt of the Earth that occurs as the Earth moves around the sun. At times it becomes closer to Jupiter and Saturn, these large pants, and it's influenced by their gravity, and it sets up a bit of a wobble. So those calculations were done in the late 1860s.
So these other British astronomers had noticed in the early 19 hundreds that from earlier records, there appeared to be an extra wobble superimposed over and above that calculated by Newcomb's formula. So Doddwell decided to investigate this. And what he did was he looked at very old records of the measurement of the angle of the Earth's tilt.
Now, the angle of the Earth's tilt can be calculated from the angle of the shadow at noon on the shortest day of the year and the angle of the shadow at noon on the longest day of the year. And so many ancient monuments marked those particular shadow points. And so he went back to old Chinese records, medieval European records, Greek records, and also measurements on Egyptian temples, the oldest ones being at the temples of Karnak in the Valley of the Kings.
And when he plotted this data, he found that it fitted a declining sine curve. So it's a bit hard to describe on radio, but if you can imagine a pendulum or a bob swinger, lead weight swinging on a string, and it's swinging vertical, right? It's hanging vertical. If you pull it to the side and let it go, it'll swing across and then back and back, and slowly it gets less and less and less and less.
So if you plotted the distance away from that mean position, that middle position, with time, you would get an up and down curve, like a wave, but the height of the wave would gradually decrease and the depth of the wave decrease over time. So I'm trying to paint a word picture there, and that's what he observed was happening when he separated out the other calculation. Now, if you plot what we call a log sign curve, you can actually calculate the sort of point of maximum displacement or estimate when that maximum deflection occurred.
And when he plotted his data, the curve went tangential about 2350 BC, which is very close to the date for the flood. So we know that at that time there was some massive event that shook the Earth so violently that WAP wobble continued right through to roughly the 19 hundreds, where it's essentially disappeared. Now, so that's, again, a massive account had to be some major event to shake the Earth like that.
And my view is that in actual fact, it corresponds to the time just after the flood, when the mountain ranges were pushed up, that there was this shaking of the Earth. Whatever caused it, we don't know, but that caused a rapid movement of the plates. And as those plates moved, they pushed the sediments, the strata, up and formed your Andes, your Himalayas, your Alps and so forth at that time.
And that also fits the fact that we have these events where we've got the fossils found high up on the mountains and this sort of thing. So, again, we now have a mechanism based on astronomical evidence that can explain the pushing up of these mountains in recent times, just after the flood, which is again consistent with the scientific observations that we can go out and make now. So we can go and check these monuments now.
We can go and check the day, matter of fact, if listeners want to look at it, if they simply Google George Doddwall manuscript, because Doddwall is writing this up as a book. Unfortunately, he died before he finished it. But his family has put the entire manuscript up on the Internet.
So you can go there now, look at his observations, check his data, check his calculations. And so that's the whole purpose of the book, when I put it together, was to actually provide data for people with the references. We've got so much data now, historical data, scientific data that supports the historical accuracy of the Genesis account of a global flood.
That's pretty intriguing evidence that you've introduced today. John, we've got just a couple of minutes for you to sum up the evidences that we've reviewed today. Well, I was absolutely amazed when I read through the historical accounts of the chronologies, how those ancient chronologies, we've got them coming from Persia, from Greece, from Egypt, from China.
We've got the biblical account and they all line up, they all give the same date of the founding of those nations and so forth, as occurring from about 100 years onwards after the flood or the Tower of Babel event. And so this consistency to me is very, very powerful evidence. And then when we look at the deuterium, we go to low deuterium water.
A matter of fact, there was a conference on that held just in Europe just a month or so ago because they're very interested in the low deuterium water concept as treatments for cancer now and the health benefits of that, how they can slow cancers right down. And this fits the whole scenario of suddenly these long ages suddenly dropping away. That, to me is amazing evidence.
And of course, to cap it off, Doddwell's findings, we've got an explanation now for the formation of mountain ranges at that time in recent history. It must have been an absolutely catastrophic, amazing event to rock the Earth so much at that time. John, where are we going next week? There is more evidence with regard to dating.
I think dating is an important issue for most people. And one of the important clues to dating is not just radiometric dating, but erosion rates. And that's one of the important areas we'll look at.
That's what we're looking at next week. 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 erosion rates, sedimentation rates and other evidence in conflict with radiometric dating ages.
Don't miss it. It's fascinating. Bye for now and god bless.
