Young Earth Evidence: Are Textbooks Wrong? - SC2542

SPEAKER 1 Welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. What are 12 reasons why evolution cannot explain the origin of life on Earth? Joining me to discuss three, part three of this topic, is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, Dr. John. SPEAKER 2 Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER 1 So Dr. John Ashton has written a book entitled Evolution Impossible, and today we will be summarizing the last four reasons covered in his book for why evolution is impossible. And of course, in the last two episodes, we talked first of all about mutations and DNA, the problems with that. And then we talked about abiogenesis. And then in the last episode, we also talked about the fossil record and difficulties found there. What else are, what other areas are there? that we can talk about? SPEAKER 2 Well, I think, Kaysie, the main reason why people want to jump to evolution and particularly reject the biblical creation account is their belief in long ages. So we've been thoroughly inculcated with the idea that life on Earth is very old. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 Thousands of millions of years old. And so essentially, you know, most textbooks say life initially formed somewhere 2 and a half to 3.8 billion years ago, somewhere in that period of time. So millions of years ago. And we even have that, you know, humans maybe date back to one or two million years that we've been here. But when we think about this, it really doesn't fit the evidence that we have. These massively long time scales don't fit the evidence we have for how old the surface of the Earth is. And there's a couple of ways we can look at that, which I look at in the book itself. and this is very important because evolution, according to the theory again of these gradual changes, requires these hundreds of millions of years. SPEAKER 1 Absolutely. SPEAKER 2 So-called. Even though, as we've pointed out, there's no known mechanism for it to occur, but they're still clinging, hang on, if you have enough time, it can happen. SPEAKER 1 Yes, they can. SPEAKER 2 But the thing is that there isn't enough time. And one of the ways that I look at this is to what are the ways that we can know now, what's the evidence we can look at now that can tell us that the earth can't be that old, that we don't have enough time. SPEAKER 1 Interesting. SPEAKER 2 And I think one of the first ones is erosion rates, the rate at which we see erosion occurring. So I live not that far away from beaches and we see massive changes occurring on the beaches, noticeable changes that have occurred, for example, you know, over my lifetime, we have the famous 12 apostles off the coast of Victoria, South Australia there that have a number of them have eroded to the point they've fallen down. SPEAKER 1 Pretty much. There's like seven apostles now, not 12 or something like that. SPEAKER 2 That's right. And so when we actually do the data and work it out, we can see that the continents which are supposedly billions of years old would erode away in less than 10 million years. Wow. So the continents would have eroded away in a less than 10 million years. SPEAKER 1 Just 10 million. SPEAKER 2 That's right. SPEAKER 1 Let alone 1 billion. SPEAKER 2 That's right. Just 10 million. Yes, that's right. When we look at the erosion rates, it's amazing because million years, a long time. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 A lot of erosion occurs in that particular time. And again, when we look at the depth thickness of ocean sediments, when we look at the volume of volcanic material that is spewed out and we measure the rate at which Volcanic material spews out on the surface of the earth. Again, from the amount of material, again, the earth can only be tens of the surface of the earth can only be tens of millions of years old maximum. Looking at the rate at which sedimentation builds up, looking at the volume of deposits that we've measured, and the amount of volcanic material. And we know that in the past volcanic activity has been much, much stronger than it is now. A lot of volcanic activity, you can see evidence in the area where we live now where we don't have any active volcanoes here now. And so again, these figures are saying, hang on, this surface of the Earth, the geomorphology that we observe, can't be, you know, thousands of years, can't be hundreds of millions of years old. It just doesn't fit. And these are based on just the. SPEAKER 1 Natural processes we observe every day, isn't it? That's right. That's right. We're making these calculations, which is how we'd expect evolution to fit in that model. SPEAKER 2 That's right. the sediment being carried by rivers, we can measure all these different erosion rates, the data's published in geography journals and so forth. And when we use this data and do the calculations, and I set out some of the calculations in the book, for example, it shows the surface of the Earth can't be that old. It just can't be that old. Now, of course, the main crux that people come back to is radiometric dating, and because we date these rocks at billions of years old, the problem is, and, and I think, again, then this is what I talk about, and many times I've talked about this. And the, the people, many people don't understand this, that the, when you have a method to determine something, you need to check that that method actually works, that the method is giving you the true value. Right. When you go to the hospital and you have your cholesterol level measured, you want it to be the correct answer. Right. And the way they do that is they validate their method using known standards, right, that have been independently checked or simulated, right? And this is the same with all sorts of chemistry. Now, radiometric dates are based on methods of analysis, and we have fairly accurate methods of analysis, but we don't know what the original concentrations were. We have no idea. We have to make all sorts of assumptions and their calculations along those lines. So that means that the only way that we can really validate the method is to go and say, right, this rock is a million years old. This rock's a hundred thousand years old. This rock's 20 years old and measured the ages. The only problem is we have no other independent way of having a standard reference rock that is a thousand years old, you know, a million years old, or, you know, a hundred thousand years old to actually calibrate our method. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 We don't. So we can't. Those methods have never been validated. When we actually try to validate the method, by dating rocks that we accurately do know the ages of, we get ridiculous answers. And so when we have dated rocks right, this lava flow was observed to have erupted 200 years ago, we will get ages of millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years. And so we can show that the radiometric dating ages are crazy. They're wrong. And they're not really telling us what we're learning from the radiometric dating is not correct. And a classic example is we can take a rock, volcanic rock that's encapsulated some wood. We can date the wood inside, we can date the lava, it should be the same, and we'll get vastly different ages. We'll typically get tens of millions of years for the rock, and we'll probably get tens of thousands of years for the wood inside using carbon-14 dating. and yet they should be the same. But we have the same problem with carbon-14 dating, but it's a little bit better in that we know that after, for example, 100,000 years, there'd be no detectable level of carbon-14. And so that's why in the past, people didn't carbon-14 date things like diamonds, which supposed to be billions of years old coal, which is, you know, anything up to 300 million years old. But when recently they decide, okay, maybe we should check this out, what happened? They found that there was carbon-14 in diamonds. They found that there were carbon-14 in coal. I had a fellow student when I was studying doing postgrad at the University of Tasmania, who was doing his geochemistry, had a prospectors shovel handle that was partly petrified and still partly wood from a mining, from an old gold mining area. from the 1880s, carbon-14 dated by the government research laboratories. And it came back as 6,000 years old. SPEAKER 1 And it's only 200 years. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, yeah, well, back from the 1880s sort of thing. So we, yeah, and this is one of the things earlier on that alerted me. We've got major problems with this dating again. And also people often don't realize as well that the rate at which carbon-14 formed was going to be affected by the strength of the Earth's magnetic field because the process involves cosmic rays hitting atoms in the upper atmosphere and so forth. But we know that the Earth's magnetic field has been changing dramatically. It's oscillated violently in the past or rapidly in the past. We know that it's degenerating quite rapidly now. So again, this all affects what the background concentration of carbon-14 would have been. So again, the only way we can calibrate carbon-14 methods is to again date something that we absolutely know the age. And there are historical artifacts that we can go back maybe to, you know, 500 or 600 BC and we can set up these charts. One of the fascinating things is if you look at the calibration curves for these dating methods such as those produced by Columbia University and so forth, which are the main ones that are used, you can have for the same level of carbon-14 several different ages will fit because we had oscillations in the level in the past it would seem. And so again, when we look at these dating ages and carbon-14 is certainly the most accurate we would have, it brings the dates back to the biblical timeline. If we attempt to correct carbon-14 dates, for the higher magnetic fields in the past, and therefore the lower levels of carbon-14 in the past. And correct for that, it brings these ages 30, 40,000 years back to sort of four or five thousand years, which again brings these dates for these fossils and things back into the biblical timeline. But again, this isn't talked about very much, but this is the data that is actually out there. We can go and measure and find carbon-14 in coal, where it shouldn't be there if we pick the evolutionary model. And then the other creature, of course, is the rate at which we are all accumulating mutations in our DNA. Our DNA and mitochondrial DNA, for example, is just steadily accumulating mutations. This applies to plants, all living things. So our DNA is gradually becoming more and more corrupted. So how far can we go before it's corrupted so much that life isn't viable? Now, if we were backwards from the current rates at which we measure the rate of genomic decay, we can calculate the absolute maximum age for Earth was around 100,000 years. Most realistic age for life on Earth is around 10,000 years. And this fits, and we, I mean, we have articles coming out in the media that found, you know, records of certain art that 60, thousand years old and all this sort of thing. But it actually doesn't fit the reliable data that we know from genomic decay. We've got very accurate handle on this genomic decay now, and it's a really serious issue that brings the whole timeline back to the biblical timeline that the Bible talks about. So when we look at the big picture, and this is what I tried to put out in the book, we look at erosion rates. We look at radiometric date. We look at the amount of sediments and lava flows that are existing. We look at genomic decay. It all points to very short timelines, nowhere near the tens of, you know, the hundreds of thousands of millions and thousands of years, millions of years, thousands of millions of years, billions of years, in other words, the ages that are ascribed to these things. And the convincing thing is this is data coming from all different, from a number of different areas pointing to the same focal point. And so it's very important to recognize that this is the evidence that we have that we can go out and measure now. It doesn't support the theory of evolution. It doesn't support the long ages. people aren't being taught this. They're not being taught that the evidence is pointing to the biblical account and life on earth and the flood being supernatural events by a supernatural creator that created and designed us and also wanted to have a relationship with us. And I think one of the things that is banning, that is, you know, moving people away is people don't want to consider the supernatural. But we have overwhelming evidence from this for the supernatural. in a number of different areas. And this is very important to recognize as well. And, you know, probably a different topic that we could talk about. But when we come back to the science, and the whole purpose of the book was to set out that we have scientific evidence from a whole range of fields that confirms the biblical account and proves absolutely that evolution is impossible and didn't occur. in the past. SPEAKER 1 Very, very compelling things to consider. And thank you so much for sharing and putting it out in this book so that people can look through, examine the evidence, think about it. And of course, it's not exhaustive. And there's still questions that we may have. But as you've said, the convergence of the evidence is much more pointing to that younger age that aligns with the biblical history and supernatural intervention. as you've mentioned, it makes more logical sense to align with that. And that's really a powerful thing and an important perspective to be considering. So thank you so much for sharing that. And if you've enjoyed Dr. John Ashton's research and comments that he has shared, you may be interested in looking at his other program series on our 3ABN Australia radio YouTube channel called Faith and Science. he goes through a lot of interesting scientific evidence there. So, wish you all the best. Thank you for joining us today. God bless.