Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 3, 2017 | Sunday Evening With Jim - The Grand Canyon: Evidence for a Young Earth?

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September 3, 2017 | Sunday Evening With Jim - The Grand Canyon: Evidence for a Young Earth? · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Good evening.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: How are you?
0:03
SPEAKER_01: What are you doing here?
0:05
SPEAKER_01: This is Labor Day weekend.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: There's a reason I picked this night.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: It's because I'm going where angels fear to tread, or at least where I've always feared to tread.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: And I thought if I'll set it, if I set this on September the third, Labor Day weekend, it'll just be me and ten other people, and that'll be great.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: So uh I'm gonna deal tonight with an issue which has been, which is, which is a hot issue, which is an issue that causes Christians to divide.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: It's the issue of how old the earth is.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: And this is a hot issue because the old earthers uh have accused the young earthers oftentimes of ruining evangelism because they're so stupid that uh, you know, nobody respects them and doesn't respect the Christian message, which is exactly the same accusation or similar, the young earthers accuse the old earthers of ruining the gospel and ruining evangelism and sending people to hell because they proved that they don't believe the Bible.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in an interesting home.
1:20
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in a home where uh we talked a lot about our forebears.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: My great-great-grandfather had founded Wheaton College, and his son was the second president, Charles Blanchard, who had been a close friend of D.L.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Moody and had written uh, it was a famous Christian fundamentalist about the turn of the 1900s when he was president of Wheaton, and he was obvious, he was clearly a young earther.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: But at that time, as you know, the origin of species was not only out, Charles Darwin wrote it in 1859, but by the 1870s, uh the doctrine of evolution had become an accepted doctrine across our country and began spreading into uh the first the Unitarian seminary and then the Presbyterian Seminary, and then moved to some extent into what we would call evangelical Christian circles.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: So that a Kansan named C.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: I Schofield, uh, who trusted Christ as his savior and stopped his drinking and so forth, became a very uh well-known uh evangelical Christian and fundamentalist and came out with something called the Schofield Reference Bible, the first one in 1909, I think, and the most famous one in 1917, in which he became the most famous to sort of say, you know what, I think, since most of the geologists agree that the earth is billions of years old, uh, rather than 5,000 years old or 6,000 years old, where do we where do we put all those years?
3:09
SPEAKER_01: And so he found a place to put those years.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: He put them between Genesis 1-1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and Genesis 1-2, which talks about a kind of dark, sort of a watery, perhaps a chaos, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: And he said, God wouldn't create that, therefore, Satan must have caused that, therefore, we can separate Genesis 1.1 and 2.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: We can say there's a huge gap there, and you had uh a perfect creation in Genesis 1.1, and then you can put all the billions of geologic years between Genesis 1.1 and Genesis 1.2, Shazam.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: We can still believe the Bible, and yet we can hold up our heads in the scientific world.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: And that was uh that swept uh across many parts of our country, seminaries and Bible schools included, and the school that uh as sort of the Congden family school, eight of my brothers and sisters and I went to Wheaton College.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh, by 50, 60 years ago, Wheaton College had excised any young earthers from its science departments.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: So it has been a very staunchly old earth school.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: The earth is billions of years old.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: It has changed how many billions of years old it is right now, I think that sits at 4.6 billion.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, my father, who went to Wheaton College and then to Dallas Seminary, became a theologian.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: This is all my biography, sorry, but uh he he decided he agreed with Schofield and raised us uh at our home that the earth was billions of years old and that you could put all the geologic ages, most of them, between Genesis 1-1 and Genesis 1-2.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: We ended up, by the way, I'll just cut 20, 30 years ahead.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: We ended up with a very interesting situation in my family in which my dad, the theologian in my family held to an old earth, but the scientists among my siblings held to a young earth, though they had gone to Wheaton College as well.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: I have a brother named John who taught chemistry and biology at the largest high school in Oregon.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: He graduated in biology from Wheaton College and he was young earth.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: My brother Rob, who's a doctor, majored in biochem at Wheaton, he was young earth as well.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: So this weird thing where the theologian actually was mad at the kids for believing in young earth.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: And I kid you not, the first thing my dad often said to me when, said or said to us when we would go home for Christmas was without even saying hello, do you still believe that somehow the earth is blah, blah, blah?
6:13
SPEAKER_01: So the problems that the gap theory has, well, the main problem, well, it problems are there's theological problems, and that is that if you put millions of years or billions of years between Genesis 1.1 and Genesis 1.2, then you have all kinds of death and disease and suffering and so forth, which seem to contradict the idea that these things came from sin, which only happened later.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: So just listing some of the gap theory problems, it presupposes death before sin.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: It makes the God statement that the creation was very good in Genesis 1.31 include death and destruction.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: It teaches a recreation, which is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: It contradicts the words of Jesus in Mark 10, 6, where Jesus said, at the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: For me, that that isn't why I rejected it.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: I went to Dala Seminar and I majored, unlike my dad, who majored in theology, I majored in Hebrew and I became addicted to Hebrew, and it just simply will not work to make Genesis 1-2 in Hebrew say, and the earth became without form and void.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: The Hebrew will not allow.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: It is, and the earth was at this time without form and void.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: So I I would go home and dad would get mad at me and say, Dad, you raised me.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: I, you know, it's your fault.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: I just uh and so my dad would say, Well, I not only believe the gap theory, he said, I take there's another way to fit the billions of years in, and it's called in Genesis 1.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: This is all introductory.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: This is the day-age theory.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: You just need to know this, this will be really quick.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: That is that the days, Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, these days, since the word day can mean a period of time longer than 24 years in the Bible.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: A thousand years is just a day to God anyway, right?
8:14
SPEAKER_01: A year, day is a thousand years.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: 2 Peter 3, 8, why can't you say these are gigantic periods of time?
8:22
SPEAKER_01: They were ages, perhaps billions of years.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: This progressive creation view, or the day-age theory, which my dad also held, making him rather unique.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: Usually you chose, um, it's unusual at best, exegetically.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't work because when you have numbers associated with days or evenings and mornings with a second day, there's no place in the Bible where it's anything other than 24 hours, and you still have the problem of death entering the world before the fall.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: And uh I won't, I'll just zip over this.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: Whenever you have the word a number associated with the word day in the Bible, hundreds and hundreds of times, it never means anything more than 24 hours.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: So so I'd say to Dad, Dad, I can't buy that either.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: I said, It's the way you raised me.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I ruined, I messed up, I majored in Hebrew, I'm just telling you, this won't work.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: So this caused me a problem.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: I love science.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: Our family loves science.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: We've read science magazine since we were little.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to find a way to go along with the majority of scientists and geologists.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: This is before my younger brothers went to school and turned out horrors to be young earth.
9:45
SPEAKER_01: And um I could not find a way to fit it in the Bible.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: I just couldn't find a place to squeeze those years in that would work in Hebrew.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
9:57
SPEAKER_01: So uh I'm really open.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you, I lean toward young earth.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm really open to being corrected by God when I go up, and if you're really strongly old earth, great.
10:10
SPEAKER_01: Hope you're right.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: But I will just tell you that when I got a phone call then 10 months ago from the vice president of an organization called Answers in Genesis, you may have heard of his uh his bosses, Ken Ham, and he said, and he wrote me an email, he said, Listen, you've you've you know, you're one of 25 Christian leaders across the country that uh I'm inviting to a pretty much totally paid trip to the Grand Canyon to do a rafting trip down the Colorado River, with, I have to confess to you, a couple of creation geologists, one from America, one from Australia.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna hear one side of it.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Now it doesn't matter.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: If you're old Earth, that's fine.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm just telling you, you're being invited on this trip, and you cost will be 400 bucks, and that's it.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: It's a thousands of dollars trip.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: So I'm thinking, did you say a rafting trip?
11:05
SPEAKER_01: I said, did you say something of are there rapids?
11:08
SPEAKER_01: Oh, he says, you won't believe there's 50 rapids.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: I said, I think I'm in.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: So um, because I'm so spiritual, I care uh wanted to know theology.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm going, I want to go down some rapid.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: I've loved rapids ever since I was a kid.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: So the Grand Canyon turns out, as I started reading some books and so forth, turns out to be an amazing place.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: It's our it sort of is the, you know, it's the, it, it's, it's our, it's, it's beloved by both old earthers and young earthers.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: I've listed here some things.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: It is the classic example of erosion, unequaled elsewhere on earth.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: It's carved by water.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: Everybody agrees, geologists of whatever stripe, young earth, old earth, it's carved by water through sedimentary layers of limestone, sandstone, and shale into the bedrock of schist and garnet or granite.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: And it stretches 277 miles through the Colorado Plateau.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: We went the first 180.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: It descends a mile into the earth.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: Now, how did it come about?
12:16
SPEAKER_01: Well, one view, the common view, is that it came about through rock layers were laid down over hundreds of millions of years, and then the canyon has been carved slowly over millions of years by the Colorado River.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: How?
12:35
SPEAKER_01: Well, this other view, this creationist view, is that the Grand Canyon was carved by a massive amount of water in a matter of days just after the global flood of Noah's Day 6,000 years ago.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: So the question is if you hold to the latter view, then the Grand Canyon, the former view doesn't include, usually doesn't include God.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: It's not a latter view, it's a testimony to God's glory, God's amazing, but also to his wrath.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: This is the greatest outpouring at one time of God's wrath on the earth, and this is a testament of how devastating God's wrath upon the earth can be.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: So uh all of that introduction to tonight, the Grand Canyon is an evidence of a young earth.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: The interesting statistic is that how many of you have been to the Grand Canyon?
13:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a lot of you.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: How many of you uh have just been up to the rim, the top?
13:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've just been up to the rim a couple of times.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: The average amount of time spent by people that drive to the Grand Canyon and stand at the rim and look at the Grand Canyon, 15 minutes.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: You drive all the way up from Flagstaff or down from and you stand there and you look at it, and then you scratch yourself, and then you look at it again, and you go, wow, isn't that cool?
14:06
SPEAKER_01: You walk a couple steps and fifteen minutes.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: And I'd done that a number of times.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I ever spent more than 10 minutes being more impatient than most people.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: But the nice thing about this was it was gonna be an opportunity to go down to the bottom of the canyon and to raft those Colorado River rapids.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm gonna very quickly tell a story of my nine days there, or really a week down at the bottom, and just about how the trip went.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: This has nothing to do with science.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: This is just lots of photos, and then I'll get into the pictures.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: We had these geologists along, all right?
14:53
SPEAKER_01: So uh as as we started driving up to, you know, uh out to the west, uh, you know, uh pretty soon we left the Grand Canyon and the beauty and the amazing, it's just this awesome, awesome, awesome place.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: And we got together, 25 of us Christian leaders.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: There's a seminary president from Minnesota, and most of them were professors from seminaries or Bible schools across the country, most from seminaries, and there were five or six of us pastors.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm there on the uh wow, can you guys see?
15:28
SPEAKER_01: Are the lights, should the lights be turned on?
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Are you okay?
15:32
SPEAKER_01: Huh?
15:33
SPEAKER_01: You good?
15:34
SPEAKER_01: Can you see it?
15:35
SPEAKER_01: No, you can't see it?
15:36
SPEAKER_01: Is there any way we can um anyway, Sam, we can get some of those lights off?
15:43
SPEAKER_01: Or are we stuck with those?
15:46
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, we'll we'll see.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I'm on the right, hey, hey, hey, magic.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: So I'm on the right-hand side there standing next to the Australian geologist.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: We went with a group, a very well-known group that if you if you've gone on those rapids, you may have gone with the Arizona River Runners.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: It's it's uh not a Christian company or anything, and they have these wonderful rafts, and we divided up about 12 people per raft, and and there was sort of a staff there.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh huh, it's been nice having you.
16:13
SPEAKER_01: I would have left long ago.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: So um, so so sorry.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm really lippy tonight.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: So we had these young guys, and so they ran the trip for us, and I mean, you know, they supplied everything for us.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: It was phenomenal, and they were just really gifted.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: And we got started uh at the very beginning of the canyon.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: I had just read Powell's book from the 1879, 1880, and he'd gone all the way down, and so it was nice to to have this you know fit.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: So we start, and and it's we're it's before you get into the Grand Canyon area, and so uh we got off on our boat and we start going down and and uh and we are looking at layers.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: There are ten major layers of the Grand Canyon.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: We had to memorize them, or else we couldn't go on the trip or something.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was just astounding.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: And so you see, the the layer down here is gonna be the very top layer, thousands upon thousands of feet up as as we continue to go down.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: So we go down, and and and from this viewpoint, the canyon is just beautiful, but but it's not all that exciting.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: And then as you get farther and farther, the walls start getting higher and higher, and then the water gets a little more rapid as the walls get higher and they get closer, and and I'm gonna sort of collapse like seven days into one day and just say, so so we would hit hit about 50 rapids, uh, about five of which were ten out of a ten.
17:46
SPEAKER_01: If you're in the west coast like me, our rapids out there are graded on a level up to five.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: These are graded on a level of ten.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: And uh some of these were were horrific.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: And most of the guys hadn't done much in rafting, and I love it, so I was generally in the front and you know, hanging on for dear life.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: And uh one guy who had never rafted me before from China asked me nicely at the end of one day if he could come on, if he could be next to me, if he could come up front.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: So I did, and I didn't realize the worst rapids of the whole trip was the one rapids left that night.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: And he wasn't holding on right, he wasn't ready, he flew off.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: I had to grab him as he was about to go off and hug him for the rest of the time.
18:32
SPEAKER_01: And I lost my lost my cool glasses with the red side, and and uh, but the seminary president lost his expensive camera and everybody lost stuff.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, um it was an adventure, it was phenomenal, just just amazing as we went down these rapids, and um so um um and and and we hit a rapids that ruined our motor and it was dangerous because then we were just drifting, and um fortunately we had a second raft that could come over and lash to us.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: So uh anyway, uh as we were going down these, I don't know what this picture is doing here, although it's really pretty, um, we would stop.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: Uh we would stop periodically because our leaders, the um uh the two geologists and um a couple of uh historians who knew the whole history of the evolutionary debate and of the flood and so forth.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: And the middle guy who who for 20 years was one of the top guides down the Grand Canyon, and then one of the women he had on one of his rafts, uh, he fell in love with and went to visit her.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: He visited her church, her Baptist church.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: They prayed for him, he became a Christian, and so now he's written a book about all this.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: He's he's my favorite guy.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: But some of these guys that were there, here's Dr.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: Terry uh Mortensen, he's a historian of geology, he's a theologian, he's the right-hand man to Ken Ham.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: And he would be the guy who uh Joe Hishma over at Fellowship Bible and I are talking about getting a trip together this fall to go to um the Creation Museum and the Ark, which is in like Cincinnati, but primarily to go on to the opening of the Bible Museum in Washington, D.C.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: So we're working on that.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: Well, Terry Mortensen is in charge of the Creation Museum.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: And um so uh so he was there.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: My one of my favorite guys was a professor of geology, Dr.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: John Whitmore from Cedarville University.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: He teaches geology there, has written a number of things.
20:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm tempted to have him here.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: You would love him from the pulpit.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: Short guy, lovable guy, and he explained a lot of things very simply to us.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: And uh then there was the best-known, probably the most experienced geologist from Sydney, Australia, who's uh a scholar and a speaker and so forth.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: And uh, and by the way, he had just he was he the first day we were on that trip, uh in Forbes magazine and the front page of his own Sydney newspaper was this headline, and it was about him.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: A young earth creationist sued the Grand Canyon over religious discrimination and won.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: He had been uh uh you have to get permission from the National Park Service to go do a scientific trip and to get take samples, and of course he wanted to, but um and he they've done it million times many times before, and and and the National Park Service, because you know um it's a prejudice, said no, we're not gonna allow you to do it.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: So um there was a lot.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: I could tell you a lot more about it.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: I know the attorney.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: He helped us at Jews for Jesus.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: It was a several-year-long legal battle, and he finally won it while we were on the trip.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: And it became, it was, it was in Forbes magazine, it was in a lot of places.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: So this is Dr.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: Andrew Snelling.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: And so they that we would stop and they would show us things and they would make us memorize stuff, like all of the names of all of these strata, all the way down the geologic column that's that's shown there in the Grand Canyon.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: They would explain things to us about uh how they look and why they're there, and and and and and so it was a very educational trip, all right?
22:41
SPEAKER_01: So um, but but then we get back on, and it was a beautiful trip.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: And later in the day, you would you'd see the sun starting to move behind the clouds, and it would highlight certain peaks, and it would get darker and darker.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: And so finally you would pull off onto the side, and then you would make we would make a line and we would unload our uh our rafts.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: We would our our the tents and the and and the cots and the sleeping bags.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: They provided all this stuff and the food and everything else.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: And then these young guys would prepare food, and they would prepare amazing food.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: By the way, the taller guy there became a good friend of mine.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: He's a professor in Israel at a Bible college, and the guy on his right became a very good friend of mine.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: He's from South Africa, first time in the States.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: He's a really sweet guy.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: And uh, so for instance, the first night we had salmon.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't that look pretty good?
23:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, really, yeah.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: So, and then the next night we had lasagna.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: As you can see, um I think that's probably seconds for me.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: But um the last night we actually had, yeah, that's actually steak on a canoe trip.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: And there's uh Dr.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: Mortensen and Andrew Snelling, who are, oh, this is actually lunch.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: We you just make your own sandwiches.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Now, at the end of the day, uh, we would sit around in a circle, the 25 of us, and and we would share, and and the scientists or whatever would would teach.
24:05
SPEAKER_01: So it was a couple of hours in the evening, and they would talk to us, and it was so it was definitely a learning experience.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: If you wanted to go off on your own, you just you know, you couldn't.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: But then after that, you would you would I just revealed something there, I'm sorry.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: So um, so you'd you'd find your cot, you know, and it's nice off the ground, no scorpions or or fire ants or whatever, and you wouldn't actually get inside that thing because it had been 115 degrees during the day, and it was still about 100 degrees at night.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: So at most you covered yourself with a sheet.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: But then you could look up, and of course the stars were astounding.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: The Milky Way was absolutely amazing uh at night.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: And then in the morning uh at dawn, you know, you'd get up and and and there's there's the moon still showing as the dawn started, and these guys would fix you breakfast.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't that look good?
25:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I want that right now.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And then you'd have more meetings, you'd sit around again, and you get more teaching for an hour or two hours, and then you'd get back on the Colorado River, which was, you know, really great, okay?
25:15
SPEAKER_01: And because I'm a pleasure lover, I was like, let's get on the Colorado River all the time.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: So we'd get on there and we would, and the, and, and the the strata would change constantly.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: It would be beautiful and they'd get taller, and then they would yell out when a new strata, when a, you know, there's the you know, the Temple Butte layer or whatever else, and and you'd learn to identify the layers by their by how they looked.
25:43
SPEAKER_01: So you so uh and at times you know you'd see a waterfall coming out of the rock, or you would see, you know, uh, you know, just some wonderful uh wildlife, you know, uh on the just on the side, and it's pretty not much greenery on the side of the Colorado River there, but there was always some sort of wildlife, you know, to look at.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: There's a gecko.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: And uh then at times we would get off in this incredible heat and we would hike up uh half a mile or a mile and we'd find a falls, frigid water, but of course, you know, we would find a way to jump off and swim in the absolute frigid water, and it would just be just be amazing.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in the Little Colorado River, which comes into it, we found a way to actually uh we found a way to actually sort of uh go down the Colorado River through these minor rapids, and yeah, it was it was kind of fun.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: So, um, but I don't know why that's there, but anyway, this is more important.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: Um no.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: I told you this is not edifying, but um so uh it's all kinds of stuff to explore, all kinds of learning to do.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: So I I I um you know I found that it was a combination of a number of trips at the same time.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure trip, you know, for me because of the rapids.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: And it was a sort of a uh, and because of the food, you know, that was being fixed for you.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: And there was an educational trip, you know, definitely.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: And then it was definitely sort of uh outdoor.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: I love the outdoors, an outdoors trip where you, you know, weren't in a hotel and you were sweating and you know, you didn't I mean you would bathe very quickly in the 55 degree water, very quickly, and or wash your hair.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: How you know, and and so it's just a number of trips at the same time, and then it was a scenic trip at the same time.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: So, so if you ever have a chance to do this, I know it costs a lot of money, three thousand dollars or something.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: And so uh at the end, we finally, having gone through most most of the best rapids and gone about two-thirds of the way all the way down the you know, we had helicoptered out and uh and then took a little plane uh to Las Vegas.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: And but it was just nice standing up about uh 1,500 feet and looking back down on the Colorado River, back where we had came and realizing what we had seen.
28:21
SPEAKER_01: So that was a real blessing to look down from a plane and see that wow, for the first time I didn't just see the Grand Canyon from the top, I saw it from the bottom.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Now, back to the young earth thing.
28:38
SPEAKER_01: Now, uh you're not gonna be able to read this, but I'll read it to you.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: This is a this is this sort of a short description of what young earth creationists believe as versus the uniformitarians, that is those who are older.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: Young earth creationists start with the Bible to decide the age of the earth.
28:58
SPEAKER_01: Approximately 4,000 years passed between creation and the coming of Christ.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: There are some extra years that you can find, you know, in the genealogies, Genesis 5 and 10.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: Those aren't exactly right.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: So that's added to the 2,000 years since the time of Christ.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: This gives an age to the earth and the and the universe of 6,000 years.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: Now, some young earthers would say 10,000, but compared to the billions, you know, not much different.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: They accept that God created in six days, that the once very good creation has been marred by sin in Genesis 3, and that a global flood inundated the earth about 4,300 years ago, God's judgment on the sin of mankind.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: And then they interpret the evidence, the geologic evidence, in light of these truths revealed in the eyewitness testimony of the Bible, the events of the creation week, Genesis 1, and the Genesis flood, Genesis 6 through 9, are the major shapers of the geologic record from this biblical perspective.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: From the other perspective, the old Earth perspective, the uniform, you know, that means things have been going on the way they are now, physical, chemical processes for millions of years.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: From this perspective, the planet has evolved gradually from a molten ball to a water covered planet where mountains are continuously eroded and uplifted, and rocks are recycled through the earth's crust and mantle over billions of years.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: Radiometric dating is used to establish absolute dates for the age of the earth.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: These geologists accept catastrophes on a local scale, but reject any idea of a global flood or global events.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: The Bible is generally rejected as authoritative.
31:11
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not sure that's fair.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: My friends who believe in an old earth at Wheaton College and so forth would say, I believe the Bible's authoritative.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: I just don't think you're correct in how you interpret Genesis 1.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: And because most of them now realize, as I do, that the gap theory and the day theory don't work, what they say about the story in Genesis 1 is that it's sort of figurative, sort of mythological.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: That's how they explain it now.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: But I they would not agree that they don't accept the Bible as authoritative.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: The earth is calculated to be 4.5, I think it's 4.6 billion years old.
31:54
SPEAKER_01: The major problem with this second view, this is answers in Genesis, puts it this way.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: The major problem from a scientific perspective is that it is an unverifiable assumption.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: They won't ever say that, of course, they'll say this is obviously the way it is.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: Anybody doesn't accept it as stupid.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: This is the same claim they level against creationists in the Bible, except creationists say we have a written eyewitness account.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: There's no absolute way to measure rates at which past events happened.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: Uniformitarianism is a presupposition applied to geology and the rock record, and also to biology, astronomy, physical chemistry, many other scientific fields.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: It's a controversial point there.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: So you need to hear that.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: That's sort of the battle we've got going.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: And now I want to tell you what, briefly, because I'm not very smart on this, uh the things I saw as I went down the Grand Canyon that seemed to me to support a young earth.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: So as we went down, you know, we learned these formations, the Tora weep, the kibab, the coconino, the hermit, the supai, the red wall, the bub, the bright angel shale, the tepees, and the great unconformity.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: So we learned these things, and both everybody agrees it is a fact that the earth has layers of sedimentary rock.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: Now, the creationist interpretation of that is that those layers are from the flood of Noah, right?
33:36
SPEAKER_01: But the evolutionist interpretation is that those layers form slowly over millions of years.
33:43
SPEAKER_01: So what?
33:44
SPEAKER_01: Are we in a tug of war?
33:46
SPEAKER_01: How do we decide this?
33:48
SPEAKER_01: I like this cartoon.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: From the perspective of an average person, from a non-scientific background, it would appear that the old Earth and younger sites could argue until they're blue in the face about whether Grand Canyon's layers were deposited in less than a year by Noah's flood, or over eons of time, some 280 million years.
34:12
SPEAKER_01: The evidence is if you go on a website, if you go on a creationist website, they will often, I've just picked one, they'll give you, and I'm going to tell you my three or four main ones.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: Uh, here are the five that you will hear, uh, and some of mine are the same as these.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: You'll hear them talk about how the layers in the Grand Canyon appear to have been deposited in rapid succession, not over millions of years.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: Second, they say the fossils, there are fossils of sea animals that have been discovered far above sea level.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: How in the world would they have gotten there?
34:53
SPEAKER_01: Third, they point that sand, some of the sand of the Grand Canyon, and they can identify exactly what sand that is, is found clear over in the Appalachians, clear across the continent.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: Now, how in the world would sand of exactly, you know, related to the sand of the Grand Canyon get that far away?
35:15
SPEAKER_01: It seems to imply some catastrophic major uh mega catastrophe.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: Fourth, there are layers over entire continents.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: In other words, those layers that I just listed for you, there's no place in the world where all of the layers are are there at the same time, perfectly, but you do find this consistency.
35:36
SPEAKER_01: It's, you know, and you find it, and these same layers in the same order even over in Europe, in Africa, both coasts.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: Now, that that's hard, I mean, that's an amazing miracle if that happened over a billion years at the bottom of the seabed or whatever else.
35:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh and fifth, no slow and gradual erosion.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: In other words, you find that these layers are right next to each other, like a knife edge or so, and there's supposed to be 50 million years between them, and no erosion.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'll share with you the three or four and with pictures that that touched me the most of these.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: The first thing I saw that actually really affected me was when I saw evidence of what geologists call folding.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Do you notice these rocks here where they look like they're sort of bent or folded?
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Folding is the geologic term for the bending of rock.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: This right here is in the tapete sandstone in Carbon Creek.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: That's where we stopped.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: Now the question is, did this happen gradually because of intense pressure?
36:47
SPEAKER_01: This is what the geologists would say, over millions of years without water, when the rock clearly was dry?
36:56
SPEAKER_01: If so, there's no place in the world where that happens without any cracks or any breaks.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: It looks like something that was soft and pliable.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: Clearly, the rock was still somehow pliable when this happened.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: It must have been deposited by a great upheaval, I say, and folded soon after while it was still wet, or there would be breaks in it.
37:21
SPEAKER_01: And we found this at a number of places.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Look at this photograph we took.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: Another geologists call it soft sediment deformation.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it had to be soft when it was laid down, before it turned into sand, this sandstone, it's sandstone now.
37:36
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, look at how that is.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't make sense that that would happen over 50 million years gradually.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: The geologists say, well, the pressure was so great that it got hot, so hot that then it made it pliable.
37:51
SPEAKER_01: But but but you can't reproduce that.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can you can go into the lab, and that never happens even in the lab.
37:57
SPEAKER_01: It always cracks or breaks.
37:59
SPEAKER_01: So that's a pretty big deal.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: And then for me, uh, just as great an evidence was uh the amazing, the the fact that there were no signs of erosion, slow, gradual erosion.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: Supposedly, I just pick one place right here is the Cocanino sandstone here, which is on the top, and the hermit shale, which is the next one, which is right underneath it.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: Look, I and supposedly 10 million years of erosion took place.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: But the contact is like knife edge, it's smooth, it's tight, without a apparent, and it's this way for miles in the Grand Canyon.
38:36
SPEAKER_01: Without any apparent physical or chemical erosion, you would expect some weathering, right?
38:42
SPEAKER_01: If if if you know, if if the hermit shale, you know, I mean, you just it doesn't make sense over millions of years.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: You'd expect some ruts, you know, when it rained, uh, then there would be water runoff.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: You find that in other places.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: So uh that that's a real problem.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: In fact, uh Tony Plebeak, you were telling me I want you to grab this mic and and come up and tell me, you know, you thanks for sending me this today about the Tuttle Creek Spillway.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: And as you come up, can I tell you, uh, my brother uh John, who taught chemistry and biology at Reynolds High School in um in Oregon, um used to take his kids up to Mount St.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Helens for a day trip.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: And then he he took us at a family reunion up to Mount St.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Helens, and he showed how in just a matter of hours, in just a matter of hours, on the day of the eruption of Mount St.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Helens, all of these levels had been laid down that normally and in fact would be dated over millions and millions of years, and he just he showed us these layers and yet it had been done very quickly.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: Tony, would you get in the light here and tell us what we're looking at?
40:00
SPEAKER_01: And would you prefer this picture or this picture?
40:08
SPEAKER_00: Right?
40:12
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, you were telling me about uh about Tuttle Creek.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, years ago, I was in Manhattan um at the base of uh Tuttle Creek Reservoir, and I noticed this area off to the side, which was fairly flat sandstone looking ground land.
40:40
SPEAKER_00: And then the years went by and we hit, I think it was 1993, is that correct, when we had all that water.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: And I heard that they had opened the Tuttle Creek spillways, didn't mean anything to me when I heard it.
40:58
SPEAKER_00: But uh within the next year or so, I was back in the same place uh at the base of the reservoir uh at Tuttle Creek.
41:09
SPEAKER_00: And when I looked, I was sure that the the area I was looking at was the same area I had seen years earlier before the runoff, and there was now a 20-foot uh gouge through all that um area where the uh ground and actually the stone had been worn away by the runoff.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: And so I looked it up this morning and I came up with some statistics for you.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh it said that um during the runoff uh when they opened the spillway, the flow rate was sixty thousand cubic feet per second going through that area.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: Um sixty thousand cubic feet is represented by a cube that is forty feet by forty feet by forty feet every second that was going out of Tuttle Creek.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: If you take just a few things um and apply math to them, you can see that uh one cubic foot is equal to about seven point five gallons.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: And one gallon of water weighs approximately 70 pounds.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: 60,000 cubic feet.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Or seven pounds, probably, or something like that.
42:46
SPEAKER_00: Seven what?
42:47
SPEAKER_00: Seven pounds, seven pounds.
42:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: I've got my thousands and millions mixed up here, as I think a lot of people that talk about this stuff do.
42:57
SPEAKER_01: Um sixty thousand that was that man thinks quickly on his feet.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: That was brilliant.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: Go ahead.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: 60,000 cubic feet equals 450,000 gallons.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: One gallon of water weighs about seven pounds.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: 450,000 gallons weighs three, one hundred and fifty thousand pounds of water per second coming out of Tuttle Creek.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: It's no surprise that that water ate through rock, dirt, whatever was there, but it was mostly rock, and yielded a twenty foot canyon in three weeks.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: They closed the gates after three weeks.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: And a 20-foot deep canyon have been carved in the earth of the Spillway Channel.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: This is the part that I like.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: That exposed rock is 290 million years old.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: So I am not smart enough to decide who's right, but I know that looking at that erosion in three weeks told a very simple man that it really didn't have to take billions of years to form the Grand Canyon.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: So that's just my interpretation of what I saw, and I think Jim and I agree.
44:47
SPEAKER_00: And so I really feel like I'm on good ground.
44:54
SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
44:59
SPEAKER_01: I make sure I always agree with Tony.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: By the way, there was uh one more thing that that surprised me, that made me think, um that led me to think as I went down the Grand Canyon that perhaps it had been carved quickly.
45:17
SPEAKER_01: And that was something that would be surprising if it took uh 270 million years, which is the Grand Canyon, 270 or 280.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: Why is it as you go down the Grand Canyon for a hundred miles, are those layers so uniformly thick for mile after mile?
45:41
SPEAKER_01: Because if they, unless they were laid down quickly, rapidly by water, you know how water is, so that would make more sense, but to be laid down over millions of years slowly because sediments that are laid down, let's say at the bottom of the ocean now or or anywhere else are they varied radically just five miles away from where they're laid down here over a span of a great, great amount of time.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: By the way, there's one more thing that really influenced uh a lot of the guys on our trip, and it is that at the bottom of those ten major layers, you have what everyone calls the Great Unconformity.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: This is a uh this is an area, it's called the Great Unconformity because it doesn't conform to anything that geologists would like it to conform to.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: It is weird.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: It is sort of the strip that divides all the fossils, which are up from it, more recent, with there are no fossils below it.
46:44
SPEAKER_01: And in the geologic uh column, in the figuring, that time period for this little strip is 500 million years.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: And yet there seems to be no trace.
47:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I went over there, put my hand on it.
47:04
SPEAKER_01: You can span 500 million years with your hand, and all of that time there wasn't erosion or all kinds of stuff laid down.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: That's the great unconformity, you can find it all over the earth.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: There's a place in Israel, you can find the great unconformity at the bottom of all the geologic columns.
47:26
SPEAKER_01: There's a place in Australia uh you can find it near Ayers Rock and so forth.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: My new Israeli friend so excited, he's gonna, he said, you know, when he goes down to Solomon's Pillars, it's down near I Lot.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: He's gonna always go down and do that.
47:41
SPEAKER_01: So that's the question.
47:43
SPEAKER_01: Is the Grand Canyon evidence for a global uh universal flood?
47:51
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm more open to that idea than I was before.
47:55
SPEAKER_01: I think beforehand I was going, oh, you know, I can't fit these billion to 4.6 billion years into the Bible.
48:04
SPEAKER_01: But I sure wish there was some good geology being done by young earthers.
48:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think there might be some being done now.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: So if you happen to be uh on the border of these views, especially if you're young, let me just caution you with a verse from Colossians.
48:25
SPEAKER_01: However you decide, just make sure that no one takes you captive when you go to college through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.
48:41
SPEAKER_01: That's how we memorized it in Colossians 2 8.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: I kind of get a kick out of a new version of the Bible that puts it this way don't let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world rather than from Christ's.