Participants:
Series Code: TCR
Program Code: TCR180006A
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00:32 Welcome to The Creator Revealed.
00:35 I'm Tim Standish. 00:36 I'm a scientist, but I'm also a Christian 00:39 and there really shouldn't be a but in there. 00:43 Of course, scientists, 00:45 it can and in fact should be Christians. 00:48 That means that I believe the biblical record of history. 00:53 Amen. Amen. 00:54 But we're just very excited that you're with us 00:57 and we are very excited that those of you at home 01:00 or in your car, 01:02 whether you're watching by TV or internet, 01:03 we thank you so much for joining us. 01:07 And this is to me, 01:10 I'm so excited 01:11 because creation science is something 01:13 that many people have, 01:16 their views have changed a little over the years. 01:19 And we see Christians 01:21 who are kind of amalgamating almost, 01:25 I don't know if that's the proper word, 01:26 but they're taking evolution 01:29 and they're taking the little from the Bible 01:31 and they're doing this and that 01:32 and coming up with all kinds of ideas. 01:35 So I'm excited about this series. 01:36 What are we gonna talk about today? 01:38 Well, we're gonna talk about evidence. 01:41 Remember that science is all about 01:44 empirical evidence. 01:45 And occasionally, I actually, quite commonly, 01:48 I hear what seems to me 01:50 to be a ridiculous statement which is, 01:53 there is no evidence for a recent creation. 01:59 We're gonna disprove that today. 02:01 Well, we're gonna look at some evidence, 02:02 that's for sure. 02:05 And obviously each person 02:06 has to draw their own conclusions. 02:08 But I will tell you that, again, 02:12 this is from my perspective as a scientist. 02:14 Actually there is abundant evidence 02:17 of the recent creation of life. 02:20 Now, I'm concentrating on life because I'm a biologist. 02:24 Life is what I study. Amen. 02:26 I'm not a geologist. 02:27 So I won't try to go too far down that way. 02:30 But I will compare what geologists 02:35 and what the biological evidence say. 02:38 Okay. All right. 02:40 So I want to start off with a Bible text. 02:43 And this is Isaiah, 02:45 which is one of my favorite books. 02:46 By the way, a book that is full of the creation 02:50 interestingly enough, 02:51 the creation and the new creation 02:52 that God's promised. 02:54 So Isaiah write this, he said, 02:55 "Lift up your eyes to the heavens, 02:58 look at the earth beneath, 03:00 the heavens will vanish like smoke, 03:03 the earth will wear out like a garment 03:07 and its inhabitants die like flies. 03:10 But my salvation will last forever, 03:15 my righteousness will never fail." 03:19 Amen. 03:20 God 03:23 makes this incredible promise here to us. 03:26 Yes, the earth is old. 03:30 Now, that doesn't mean that life is millions 03:33 or hundreds of millions of years old 03:35 or billions of years older, 03:37 even according to some people, 03:41 but thousands of years old is a long time 03:45 and none of us can go back. 03:47 Probably, none of us can genuinely figure out 03:50 the exact date on which God started the creation. 03:57 We get these dates 03:59 by via calculations that have some error in them. 04:03 But what is obvious both by looking 04:06 at genealogies in the Old Testament, 04:08 and also by looking at genealogy 04:11 in the New Testament 04:12 because we have the genealogy of Jesus Christ, 04:15 and we know how many people there were from Adam to Jesus. 04:19 By looking at those things 04:21 we can know with a reasonable degree of assurance 04:24 that life is thousands of years, 04:28 not millions of years old. 04:30 Amen. Now, that's data. 04:32 That's a real record of reality. 04:36 What do we see when we look at the creation? 04:38 So let's start off by talking about clocks. 04:41 Because we all know that there isn't a clock out there 04:45 on palm trees, 04:47 or on human beings, or on anything else. 04:51 There isn't an actual clock. 04:54 But there are things that act like clocks. 04:58 But sometimes those clocks give two different times. 05:03 I don't know if you've ever seen a clock tower like this 05:06 with the faces with different times on them? 05:09 No. 05:10 But that is sort of the situation 05:14 that we sometimes see with science. 05:16 Now remember, we're interpreting data 05:19 to come up with the times that are being estimated. 05:24 So let's start off here. 05:26 This is, well, actually one of my favorite places, 05:28 it's south of Sydney in Australia 05:30 place called Coalcliff. 05:31 And you can see why. Yes, beautiful. 05:33 Can you see that beautiful line of coal there? 05:37 This is why Australia is the Saudi Arabia of coal. 05:41 There's huge amounts of coal there 05:44 in this basin around Sydney. 05:47 And here's the thing. 05:51 Do you see what a straight line 05:52 that is between the coal and the sandstone 05:56 that's on top of it? 05:58 Yes. 05:59 When you do something called radiometric dating, 06:04 what you find out is that supposedly, 06:09 there was five million years 06:12 that coal was on top of the earth. 06:16 And then the sandstone came along 06:19 and pile up on top of it. 06:21 So I want you to just think about that a little bit. 06:23 What do you think would happen if that coal was sitting there 06:27 with just air above it for five million years? 06:33 I'm into far guessing. 06:35 Well, you would expect some kind of erosion maybe? 06:38 Or some kind of, 06:40 or maybe the coal would get lit on fire? 06:42 Maybe, it'd be struck by lightning? 06:43 Maybe, it was underwater so it didn't burn? 06:46 But if it was underwater, 06:47 then you'd expect erosion or something. 06:50 And then you've got to dump all of this, coal, sorry, 06:52 this sands on top of it to make a sandstone. 06:57 Really, five million years. 07:00 What the evidence is most reasonably 07:03 interpreted as there as many 07:05 is actually very little time at all. 07:08 Because there is no erosion. 07:09 Because there is no erosion and the coal is still there. 07:12 You cannot leave coal 07:13 sitting out on the earth surface 07:14 for five million years. 07:16 Make sense. Yes. 07:17 So there's a kind of logic here. 07:19 We're looking at two different clocks 07:22 and they're telling us different times 07:25 at this place called Coalcliff. 07:27 First of all, there is that radiometric clock 07:30 and that says five million years. 07:33 But the flat interface between the layers 07:36 says a short period of time. 07:38 So you got two clocks telling us 07:40 two different periods of time. 07:43 And these flat gaps in time that we see there. 07:49 They're actually quite common. 07:51 There are... 07:52 You can see them, for example, in the Grand Canyon. 07:54 You're in the United States, 07:56 where there are millions of years missing there 07:58 also between layers and yet it's absolutely flat. 08:02 No erosion, 08:03 no indication that there was actually any time there. 08:07 They're called paraconformities. 08:09 And as I said, they show up all over the place. 08:12 The paraconformity visible at Coalcliff 08:15 covers about 97,000 square miles. 08:21 That's an incredible area, absolutely flat. 08:25 They're simply not places on earth 08:28 that are like that today, 08:30 97,000 square miles of flatness of flat coal. 08:34 This is obviously something different 08:37 than we see today. 08:39 And well interpreted as a short period of time. 08:43 Now, I count this as a biological evidence 08:46 because coal came from plants. 08:51 So let's look at another thing. 08:52 Here's our coal again, 08:54 this is just looking at the same coal 08:55 from a different angle. 08:56 And when we look at that coal, 09:01 frequently you find carbon-14 in coal. 09:05 Now, you've all heard that carbon-14 means long ages. 09:08 But that's actually not really true. 09:11 Is this where they get the carbon dating? 09:12 Yeah. 09:14 This is what carbon dating comes from. 09:15 The most ancient carbon-14 dates 09:19 you can possibly get around 100,000 years. 09:23 There are some variables in there, 09:24 generally, less than that and a lot less. 09:27 So because the carbon-14 breaks down very fast, 09:32 you simply, it's a fast running clock 09:34 and the time runs out after a while. 09:38 So if carbon-14 is measured in a coal sample, 09:42 it either had the carbon-14 put into it 09:45 or it's less than 100,000 years old. 09:49 Now remember that coal that you're looking at, 09:51 they're supposed to be millions of years old. 09:54 There should be no carbon-14 there. 09:56 And this is something that has been done many times 10:02 in a number of different types of coal. 10:04 So here is another line of evidence. 10:07 There have been a lot of molecules 10:09 that have been found associated with fossils 10:12 that are supposed to be millions of years old. 10:15 And the question is, 10:17 you know, how long the proteins last? 10:20 Do they last hundreds of years? 10:21 If you put a, 10:23 you know, a piece of steak outside, 10:26 how long does it last? 10:28 Not very long. 10:29 Now, a lot of that's 10:31 because bacteria will come along 10:32 and speed things up 10:33 and some animal might come and eat it. 10:36 So we know that today, it disappears very rapidly. 10:40 But even if you don't have animals 10:42 or other organisms breaking down these molecules, 10:46 you have water that breaks up. 10:47 You have oxygen, 10:49 they just oxidize spontaneously, 10:51 and other chemical reactions degrade them 10:53 and they can be physically broken as well, 10:55 and radiation. 10:57 Radiation is something that you simply can't get away from. 11:00 And it breaks things down. 11:02 So this exact skeleton here. 11:05 From this exact skeleton, they have found proteins, 11:10 a whole blood vessels and things 11:12 that they got out of the bones 11:15 for this particular dinosaur here. 11:17 The idea that those would have lasted 11:20 for 60 something million years is very optimistic, 11:25 let's put it that way. 11:26 Very optimistic. 11:28 Reasonably, 11:29 these are explained as telling us 11:31 that these dinosaurs did not live that long ago. 11:34 And there have been scientific papers published about this. 11:38 It's not something that is fringe science. 11:41 One more thing, 11:42 let's go through it really quickly. 11:43 Sure. 11:45 It's not that technical, mutations. 11:46 These are random changes in DNA sequences. 11:49 Most of these changes have a very small impact. 11:53 Thankfully, you know, we'd all be dead 11:54 and you're going to see why in just a moment. 11:58 Let's imagine that we have a wife and a husband. 12:01 And they have a whole bunch of children. 12:04 In fact, they have 10 children. 12:06 And let's just imagine 12:07 that there is a very low mutation rate, 12:10 1.1, I'm sorry per... 12:13 0.1 mutations per individual, per generation. 12:16 That would mean that one of their children 12:20 had a mutation. 12:21 Now you think, "Okay, 12:23 natural selection can get rid of that child, 12:25 and the rest of them will be perfectly fine." 12:29 But what would happen 12:31 if you had a higher mutation rate, 12:33 let's say 0.5 mutations per generation? 12:37 Well, that would mean 5 out of the 10, 12:39 half of them would not survive, 12:42 if natural selection selected them out. 12:43 But you'd still have five, so you'd be fine. 12:46 But what if you had one mutation per individual, 12:49 per generation? 12:50 It wouldn't exactly be like this, 12:52 but we're just illustrating something here. 12:55 That would, 12:56 in this example, mean absolutely, 12:58 all of your children had mutations, 13:00 and natural selection would not be capable 13:02 of getting rid of them. 13:04 So what is the actual human mutation rate, is it... 13:09 More than one. 13:10 Is it one mutation per individual, 13:12 per generation or 0.1, what is it exactly? 13:17 There are lots of estimates about this. 13:19 But generally speaking, 13:20 they're well over 100 mutations per individual, 13:26 per generation. 13:29 The point is this, 13:30 human beings are incapable of even having enough babies 13:34 to get rid of all of these mutations. 13:36 So natural selection is not only improbable, 13:40 it sounds impossible. 13:41 Well, natural selection isn't gonna fix this problem. 13:43 Yeah. Yeah. 13:45 We're going to accumulate mutations. 13:46 Now, thankfully, our bodies are so robust 13:50 that we can survive a whole bunch of mutations. 13:53 But the question then becomes, 13:55 how many mutations can we survive? 13:58 At what point are we going to die 14:03 because we simply, 14:05 our genomes are worn out. 14:08 And truthfully, we don't know exactly. 14:13 But we could be pretty sure 14:14 that it isn't millions of years. 14:16 Yes. 14:17 In fact, it's pretty remarkable 14:19 that we're able to survive thousands of years, 14:21 which sounds pretty optimistic or pretty pessimistic 14:25 when you think about it. 14:27 We're all doomed except for one thing, 14:30 God's salvation. 14:32 We've read the back of the book. 14:33 Exactly, God's salvation is eternal. 14:36 Yeah. 14:37 And so what does this evidence, 14:39 all of this evidence that we've seen 14:41 about a recent creation tell us? 14:44 Well, there are a few things that I would pull out of it. 14:47 Number one, God's mercy. 14:50 The creator's mercy in not using this death driven 14:55 process of evolution 14:57 over eons of time is very clear. 15:01 The time isn't millions, 15:04 hundreds of millions of years of suffering, 15:06 struggle and death. 15:08 And secondly, 15:10 His mercy is clear in not allowing sin 15:14 and suffering to have continued 15:17 over hundreds of millions of years in the past. 15:22 So we can praise God. 15:24 The time is short. 15:27 Jesus is our Creator 15:31 and He created thousands of years ago, 15:35 not millions of years ago. 15:38 And He is our redeemer. 15:40 Amen. Amen. 15:42 And I believe that He is coming soon. 15:45 Amen. So... 15:47 Not millions of years from now. 15:48 So we see that there is sufficient evidence 15:52 to prove the recent creation of life 15:58 and we believe it isn't 16:00 more than 6,000 years ago, personally. 16:02 But please stay tuned, 16:03 we've got something special coming up. |
Revised 2019-03-21