Alrighty, so I'm gonna try to tackle a challenging subject this evening,
and that's of the age of the earth.
I touch on this in many other programs that I do, and particularly on those in
the fossil record and things, but I never put one together that specifically looked
at this, and I thought it was time to do so.
So... but this is a lot of material I'm gonna try to cover this evening,
and so hopefully we get to the end without having to skip a little bit here or there.
But this is what I'm gonna look at.
We're gonna first look at the age issue, just kind of a little outline.
The age issue and why we should care about the age of the earth at all.
We want to examine what the biblical age of the earth, or what does the Bible say
about the age of the earth, if anything.
And then, because this church and both of the senior pastors hold to a young earth
position, what I'm gonna do is look at some evidence that supports a young earth,
rather than the age of the earth as is claimed by the scientific community.
Today's scientists argue that the earth itself is close to 4.6 billion years old,
with the universe itself being 13.8, 13.9 billion years old.
So I want to kind of try to examine some age indicators that argue that the earth,
and the solar system as well, are much younger than scientific community claims,
and as a way of upholding what I believe is the more accurate reading of the Bible,
the biblical and the biblical age of the earth.
So why this is important?
It's important because atheism has begun to dominate academia, has begun to
dominate our public schools.
The science that's being taught in our public schools is a science that's based
on atheism.
And today many Christians have begun to accept evolution, which is ultimately a
theory that's designed to explain how everything came about through purely
natural processes.
It's important to keep this in mind, that what the scientific community has
adopted is a position of naturalism.
That only natural processes have been involved with the origin of everything we
see, and that all physical phenomena must be explained as well as through purely
natural processes.
This is the position that the scientific community has adopted.
And by accepting this, the effect of this has been that it can lead to a loss of
faith.
It can lead to a loss of faith, and particularly amongst young people,
and it can be an impediment that can keep others from coming to the faith.
It's just not... one of the reasons why we do these kind of programs is to help
people understand how scientific findings can be interpreted from within the
biblical worldview, because today, to be an effective witness, you have to
answer some of the challenges, some of the scientific claims that are
conflicting with the Bible.
It's important that we be able to answer some of these.
It's just not enough to say that you believe in Jesus, the Son, Yeshua,
because the belief in Him is ultimately tied up with the belief in the Bible,
God's Word.
And the Old Testament and the New Testament are inseparable.
They're part of the same book.
And so, it's important that we be able to defend not just our belief in the New
Testament, but the Old Testament as well.
And it is important.
It can lead to a loss of faith.
And this has been shown, and I want to give a little support for this.
In 2009, the American Research Group conducted a survey in which they
interviewed 1,000 20-year-olds who used to attend church regularly, but no longer do.
And they asked these 20-year-olds who used to attend church regularly a series of 78
questions that attempts to characterize the factors that led to their loss of
faith, or led to them at least walking away from regular church attendance.
These participants, of the participants who no longer believed the biblical
accounts, specifically, were asked, when did you first have doubts?
And it wasn't in college.
Me, I've kind of viewed my role in teaching at a Christian school to be
preparing students for eventually getting off into college where they would find
their faith challenged and might cause them to start slipping away from the
faith.
But this survey pointed out that it was much earlier.
It was in middle school and high school.
83% of this group said that it was during middle school and high school that they
first began to have doubts about the biblical accounts, about the stories,
if you will, that are in the Bible.
When this same group were asked, which of these things make you question
the Bible most, the biblical young age of the earth was the number one answer.
It was the young age of the earth, that our earth that's 10,000 years or
younger, was the number one thing that caused them to question the Bible in
general.
Number two were the combined creation or supernatural acts, the creation itself and
miracles combined were kind of the number two answer, with the number three being
there were too many rules.
Too many rules, so we doubt the Bible because it's got too many rules.
But these teachings can lead to a loss of faith.
In John, Jesus said, If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote
about me.
But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I
say?
Moses, of course, wrote the Pentateuch, which includes the creation account,
the account of the flood.
And if you don't believe these parts of the Bible, the historical accounts that
are in the Bible, how are you going to believe the spiritual claims of the Bible
regarding salvation?
He reiterates something similar, again, the words of Jesus, I've spoken of
earthly things, he says, and you do not believe.
How then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?
Again, if we can't believe what the Bible says on earthly matters, on historical
matters like the creation and the flood and some of the other events that took
place in the Old Testament, how can we believe what it says in the New Testament
about salvation through Jesus Christ?
And there's some important facts to note about this age issue.
Number one, the ancient earth is a theoretical necessity for the theory of
evolution.
Evolution through random mutations and natural selection requires long time
periods.
It's a theoretical necessity.
Mutation at a faster rate simply is, it cannot happen.
It would destroy the DNA.
It has to occur slowly and gradually over long periods of time.
An old age of the earth is a theoretical necessity for evolution.
Second, there are two main pieces of evidence to support evolution.
The fossil record stands as the main support.
Homology is another support that they use.
The fact that there are similarities found amongst the various organisms on earth.
You look at the mammals, you see five fingers and five toes.
They argue that this is evidence of common ancestry.
Or if you look at the cells of the various organisms on earth, you see similar
cellular architectures, similar organic macromolecules are found in all these.
The same DNA and proteins and RNA.
There are similarities and these similarities are argued to be due to
common ancestry.
But the fossil record stands as the main evidence for evolution.
They interpret the fossil record as a history of life on earth over hundreds of
millions of years and they say it illustrates how organisms have changed
through time.
However, when the fossil record is interpreted from within the biblical
worldview, it is clear proof of the flood of Noah.
And merely represents the destruction of successive life zones during this terrible
event and is a reminder to us of God's devastating judgment.
A judgment that happened in the past and a judgment that is coming again.
We should never forget that that terrible event took place.
And why?
Because of the sinfulness of the human race.
It happened in the past and a terrible judgment is coming again.
And this is an important reminder of that.
And this event was clearly global in scope.
The Bible says all the high mountains of the whole heavens were covered and
everything on dry land and whose nostrils the breath of life died.
This was a global scale event.
But all of your Christians that have accepted evolution, that accept an ancient
earth, have rejected this event as being a global scale event.
Either they believe it was just a local event or they deny it outright as ever
taking place.
A fairly high percentage of your theology professors in our Christian universities
deny the flood even occurred.
Of course, it has been rejected by modern geologists.
But if this event has occurred as described in the Bible, then one thing is
clear, the geology of that event has been misinterpreted.
It has been misinterpreted, that is clear.
And it's important to remember that science is based on naturalism and this
event in particular is one that could never be correctly interpreted within the
boundaries of philosophical naturalism.
This event cannot be correctly interpreted because the only reason life exists today
is because they were saved from this event through an act of supernatural
intervention.
This supernatural intervention during this event prevents a geologist from correctly
interpreting the geology of this event within the bounds of naturalism.
Because they're not just trying to interpret the layers of rocks that they
see, but they're trying to interpret the world and on top of those vast layers of
rocks, life exists.
To a naturalist, they must believe the life that's alive today survived the
formation of these vast layers of rocks on their own through purely natural
processes.
That means they form slowly and gradually over long periods of time in a rate and
manner that these animals could have survived it on their own without
supernatural intervention.
It's important to keep in mind this event can never be correctly interpreted within
the boundaries of naturalism.
It's simply not possible.
And again, Jesus himself described this event as a real historical event and with
a warning that we are advised to heed.
He says,
Jesus himself regards the flood as a real and historical event.
Who are we to deny that such an event took place?
So what is the biblical age of the earth?
Does the Bible describe how old the earth is?
And if it does, where do we get these numbers?
The biblical age of the earth is derived primarily from what is called a
genealogical record.
The Bible in Genesis and in Chronicles lists the ages of the patriarchs at the
time they had their firstborn son.
So Adam, when he had Seth, Cain killed Abel.
So in the patriarchal line, Seth is regarded as the son.
How old Seth was when he had his firstborn son.
The Bible is very specific about these dates and timelines.
And by simple addition of these dates, you can add them together and determine
the date of the global flood.
As occurring in the year 1656 after the creation.
The flood occurred in the year 1656 after the creation.
Or by subtraction, it would have been around 2350-2348 B.C.
Based on the genealogical record.
And by subtraction, you can calculate the date of the creation as being very near
4004 B.C.
By some calculations.
Plus 2018 would render a date of the earth of about 6022 years.
That is if the days of creation were literal days.
But there are many Christians that want to reconcile the scientific age of the earth,
this 4.6 billion years, with the biblical account.
And they do this in one of several ways.
Two primary ways.
One is known as the gap theory.
They just assert that there is a huge gap of time between Genesis 1-1 and Genesis
1-2.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
They would insert an entire 4.6 billion year period right there.
And they would argue that Genesis 1-2 should be rendered.
The earth became without form and void instead of the earth was without form and
void.
They argue that the fossil record is a record of this pre-earth.
And then after this gap between Genesis 1-1 and 1-2 then God recreated the earth
with the six days of creation on top of this fossil record of this previous 4.6
billion years that's missing between Genesis 1-1 and 1-2.
That's a very popular view held by many churches today.
The other is to assert that the days of creation were actually vast spans of time.
Known as day-age creationism.
That each day was a billion years each.
And it looks superficially like this might work until you examine what was happening
on those days a little more carefully and compare that with the scientific
community's timeline and you see some glaring problems.
Most notable is the fact that the sun and the moon and stars weren't created until
day 4.
Which would cause a lot of problems for the plants that were created on day 3 to
survive without a sun for potentially a billion years if those were vast ages.
And it conflicts with Big Bang cosmology as well.
Big Bang cosmology argues that the first things that formed after this main
inflation event were stars.
The first thing that formed would have been stars.
Dust particles sizable enough to form things like grains and that eventually
would have crept into ever larger bodies, eventually planetesimals and planets would
have formed after eons of star births and star deaths.
Day-age creationism conflicts with both Big Bang cosmology and the sequence of
biological evolution as well.
But these day-age creationists argue that the word day should be interpreted as a
vast age of time.
But it is interesting that the word day is really only contested in Genesis.
Nowhere else in the Bible, other than in Genesis 1, is the meaning of the word day,
the Hebrew word yom, contested.
It's just in Genesis 1.
But the reason why it's contested, again, is a desire to reconcile the
scientific age of the earth with the biblical age of the earth and the fact
that the word day can mean many things.
It can mean many things.
We tend to refer to a broad span of time.
Back in the days of the Old West or during the days of the Romans, you refer to a
broad span of time as a day.
The daylight portion of a day can be referred to as the day or a 24-hour period
of time.
The word day can mean many things.
So the question is, how do you know what an author means?
How do we know what the author of Genesis 1 means by the word day?
Well, there's several ways that you can determine what an author means by a word,
and one of them is context.
And for many uses of the word day in Scripture, we can clearly determine what
the author means by the word day just from context.
Like we know Jonah wasn't in the belly of a whale for 3 billion years.
That was probably closer to an ordinary day because he probably wouldn't have
survived much longer in the belly of a whale if it wasn't an ordinary day.
So context helps us in many of the uses of the word day in the Bible, but in a
Genesis account, it's not much help there.
One of the other ways that an author can help the reader understand what he means
by a word day is if the author defines the word.
And in Genesis 1, this is clearly the case.
There's a repetition of these phrases, evening or morning, that are used in the
Genesis 1 creation account that are there for no other reason but to define what
that word means.
The author is going out of his way to make sure everyone understands that the word
day in this account is a solar day.
The type of day we equate with an evening and morning cycle.
There's no other reason to put those phrases in there other than to make it
very clear to the reader what is meant by the word day.
And it was understood that the word day would be contested maybe in our day,
and the author wanted to be very clear that what was meant.
They're in the Genesis account.
Another method of determining what an author means by a word is what's referred
to as an exegetical approach to textual interpretation.
What's called exegesis.
Exegesis is also referred to as the historical grammatical interpretation of a
text.
Where you carefully examine a text to determine the author's meaning.
And one of the exegetical methods involves looking to see how an author uses that
same word elsewhere in the text to inform you what it means in this specific case.
In the case of Genesis 1, we would look to see how the author uses the author of the
Bible uses the word day elsewhere to inform us what the author meant by that
word in Genesis 1.
And if we do this, we overwhelmingly, and theologians throughout history have
always regarded Genesis 1 as the author meaning to convey that the day in Genesis
1 was an ordinary day because elsewhere in Scripture when that word is used in that
way, it always means an ordinary day.
If we use an exegetical approach.
For example, uses of the day outside of Genesis 1, when the day is used with a
number 410 times, when day is used with a number, it means an ordinary day.
When evening and morning are used together without the word day, 38 times that
happens outside of Genesis 1, it means an ordinary day.
When evening or morning are used together with the word day, it means an ordinary
day in all of those cases.
And when night is used with the word day, 52 times it means an ordinary day.
If we use the exegetical approach to help us understand what the word day means in
Genesis 1, it leads to that conclusion.
And everyone understands this to be the case.
Most that hold to an old earth even will acknowledge that the exegetical approach
makes the young earth creation position the most appropriate.
Bill Dimsky is a professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary and is a senior
fellow at the Discovery Institute in downtown Seattle.
He admits that the young earth view is the most universally accepted by theologians
up through history and is consistent with the exegetical approach.
He says in his book, The End of Christianity, he says, the young earth
solution to reconcile in the order of creation with natural history makes good
exegetical and theological sense.
Indeed, he says, the overwhelming consensus of theologians up through the
Reformation held to this view.
I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such
strong evidence against it.
I'm hardly alone in my reluctance to accept young earth creationism.
In our current mental environment, informed as it is by modern astrophysics
and geology, the scientific community as a whole regards young earth creationism as
scientifically untenable.
It makes the most exegetical sense, and theologians up through the Reformation
have held to that view, but informed as we are by modern naturalism, a naturalistic
view of geology and astronomy, that argues that these things must be
interpreted as being very ancient.
It now is not very theologically satisfying to academics like Bill Dembski.
A brilliant guy.
I've read several of his books.
Gets a little math, a little too heavy on the math for me on a couple, so I skip
over those parts, but a brilliant guy.
James Barr, a former Hebrew scholar and oral professor of interpretation of the
Holy Scripture at Oxford University says, As far as I know, there is no professor of
Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the
writer of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to the readers the idea that A.
Creation took place in a series of six days, which were the same as the days of
24 hours we now experience.
B.
The figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a
chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story.
And then C.
That Noah's flood was understood to be a worldwide and distinguished all human and
animal life except for those in the ark.
These are well-known historical contents of the Bible that most theologians
throughout history have regarded as true.
So, I wanted to look at, just try to examine a few evidences for the biblical
young earth.
By no mean an exhausted list, there's many, many examples, but I just want to
kind of paint, try to paint an argument for you here in support of what the Bible
seems to declare as a young earth in contrast to what the scientific community
holds to.
Now, when secular scientists talk about the age of the earth, the primary evidence
for this mostly comes from what is referred to as radiometric dating.
A dating technique that involves the use of radioactive elements and the decay
rates of those elements.
However, this specific technique uses a lot of assumptions and there's a lot of
problems with the technique.
Assumptions such as how much parent material or daughter material was there in
the beginning or whether the decay rates have been constant through time.
We don't know these things.
And also, this dating technique only dates lava rocks or volcanic rocks.
This dating technique only dates volcanic rocks.
You cannot date fossils or the sedimentary rocks that fossils are found in directly
with this dating technique.
You can only date volcanic rocks.
And by association, you can determine maybe the minimum age of the fossils if
they're above those volcanic rocks.
But it's important to understand what this technique involves.
But we can also find a number of problems, many examples of problems with this
technique If you look at the dates there that I show, these are from two different
volcanic rock formations there at the Grand Canyon.
And they're dated with several different techniques each.
You can see that the rocks on the top of the plateau have generated several dates
using several different techniques.
The volcanic rocks that are on the very bottom there in what is called
pre-Cambrian rocks also generated many different dates.
And the Rubidium strontium dating technique, which at the time this was
done, was regarded as the most accurate of these dating techniques, found a
significant difference.
Look here, the volcanic rocks that are on the very bottom that were regarded as
pre-Cambrian were dated several hundred million years younger than the flow that
had cascaded off the top and into the Grand Canyon.
And there's many, many examples of this technique producing flawed results,
very inconsistent results.
And so it's important to remember, although they tend to teach these dates as
absolute facts, their dates for these come almost exclusively from radiometric
dating, which they seem to accept only if the dates match their expectations.
They'll measure it using several different techniques, and the technique that matches
their desired dates for those rocks seems to be the one that they tend to accept.
But there are many, many dating techniques other than radiometric dating that can be
used to date things, hundreds of physical processes that can be used to set an upper
limit on the age of the earth, and more than 90% of these other dating
techniques render an age that is less than a billion years.
So let me summarize a few of kind of the top evidences.
I think I have 10 or 11 of these to show you with time permitting.
I've got a few evidences for you.
Start with this one, number one.
There is very little sediment on the seafloor.
Very little sediment on the seafloor.
Every year water and wind erode about 20 billion tons of dirt and rock debris from
the continents and deposits them on the seafloor.
Most of the material accumulates as loose sediments, little particulates that are
transported by the actions of fluids or what we refer to as sediments.
These accumulate near the continents or what we call the continental shelf.
Yet the average thickness of these sediments globally over the whole seafloor
is not even 1,300 feet or about 400 meters.
Now some sediments appear to be removed as tectonic plates, as the actions of these
plates that make up the earth slide one under another.
Some sediments are removed from this technique.
But an estimated 1 billion tons of sediment are removed this way each year.
So the net gain of this is 13 billion tons per year.
20 billion tons are added.
1 billion tons per year is removed through tectonic activity, rendering 19 billion
tons per year should be added by the sedimentary flows down into the ocean.
At this rate, 1,300 feet of sediments would accumulate in less than 12 million
years, not billions of years.
And this evidence makes a good sense in the context of the global flood cataclysm,
not the idea of slow and gradual geologic evolution.
It is believed that in the latter stages of the year-long global flood,
water swiftly drained off the continents and dumped sediments into offshore.
Thus, most seafloor sediments probably accumulated rapidly about 4,300 years ago
during the global flood.
We also find bent rock layers around the globe.
Bent rock layers can be seen in mountainous areas.
Rock layers thousands of feet thick have been bent and folded without fracturing.
These strata folds are exposed in this photo at the Zagros Mountains along the
southwest coast of Iran by the Persian Gulf.
You have to ask, how can that happen if they were laid down separately over
hundreds of millions of years and already hardened?
Or take a look at these folds.
These are near the Solomon River in British Columbia, Canada.
The hardened rock layers like these become very brittle after they harden.
Just try thinking about a slab of concrete and try bending it to see what happens.
But if concrete is still soft and wet, it can be bent and shaped and molded
before the concrete sets.
The same principle applies to sedimentary rock layers, in particular those referred
to as limestone, that are cemented together with the same materials we use to
make concrete.
They can be bent and folded soon after the sediment is deposited, before the natural
cementation process has taken effect and binds the particles together to form hard,
brittle rocks.
The Grand Canyon, you can see here on the far right of the diagram, cuts through
many rock layers.
Previously, all of these layers were raised to their current position,
a raised flat region known as the Kaibab Plateau, which is part of the much larger
Colorado Plateau.
You can see here, somehow this whole sequence was bent and folded without
fracturing.
But that's impossible at the first layer, the one shown there, the Tapeat Sandstone,
was deposited over North America 450 million years ago, as is claimed,
before being folded.
But all the layers would still be relatively impliable if this all happened
during a recent global flood.
Just consider this, the time between the first deposit of the Grand Canyon is
believed to have occurred 520 million years ago, and the conventionally accepted
date for this uplift event was 60 million years ago.
So 460 million years are thought to separate the deposition of this material
from it being folded.
460 million years, those layers were there 460 million years before that was uplifted
and folded in that way.
And this phenomena was not just a local event.
The Tapeat Sandstone that you see there spans the continent, and other layers span
much of the globe, as you would expect during a global scale flood.
We also find soft tissue in fossils, soft tissue in fossils.
In 2005, a Tyrannosaurus rex was discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in
Montana by North Carolina State University paleontologist Dr. Mary Schweitzer.
But due to its weight, weighing about 3,000 pounds when protected by plaster,
they coat these things in plaster to preserve them when moving it.
Because of its weight, they could not transport it by helicopter, and so they
broke the thing in half so they could transport it.
Upon unpacking the boxes back at the lab, she realized that there was material
inside the bone which prompted further microscopic analysis.
From the marrow cavity, Schweitzer found soft, flexible tissue that upon treatment
could be stretched and would return back to its original shape.
Since the T.
rex that was believed to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, soft tissue was
completely unexpected.
In her amazement, she found also what appeared to be blood vessels, shown in
this picture from Mary Schweitzer, along with structures that she believed
were blood cells with nuclei, which are the typical of reptile and bird red blood
cells, but not in mammals.
Mammal red blood cells don't have a nucleus.
The vessels were even revealed to be lined with specialized bone epithelial cells.
Initially, some skeptics suggested that bacterial biofilms had formed what only
appeared to be blood vessels and bone cells.
However, recently, Schweitzer and her co-workers found biochemical evidence that
intact fragments of protein collagen existed in these samples, which is a
component of connective tissue.
This is important because collagen is a highly distinctive protein that is not
found or not made by bacteria.
So this is clearly not of bacterial origin.
Over the last few decades, many soft tissue discoveries have been made that
have given dates more than double that of the T.
rex.
More than double that of the T.
rex.
Numerous soft tissue discoveries, the preservation of skin, blood vessels,
have been found that date far back into hundreds of millions of years at this
point.
Unfossilized dinosaur bones have also been discovered.
This display at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks contains a hadrosaur toe bone
that allows visitors to touch real dinosaur bone.
The caption that you can see there circled in red reads, This is real dinosaur bone
from the hind foot of a genus of hadrosaur.
Although it is 69 million years old, it is still original bone and not rock.
In May 2017, the Alberta Museum unveiled a nodosaur for exhibition.
Nodosaurs were plant eating dinosaurs that were packing some serious armor.
Dated at about 110 million years old, it is described as the best preserved
fossil of its kind ever found.
So well preserved that it seems to be staring back at you.
There's the head of the nodosaur.
I'll give you a zoom in so you can get a little better look at its eye.
And if you look right behind the eye, you can see a little bit of preserved
skin.
A little more skin preserved here with some exquisite detail.
Look at some of those protective spikes, would you?
Ribs were preserved.
Even the stomach contents of the nodosaur were preserved.
There are also a number of indicators that argue that the solar system itself cannot
be 4.6 billion years old.
The entire solar system is believed to be of the same age as the earth.
One of these evidences is referred to as the faint sun paradox that I'll try to
describe to you.
Evidence now supports that the sun power comes from thermal nuclear fusion
reactions.
Specifically, the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium are believed to be responsible
for the sun's emissions.
But as the hydrogen fuses in this way through thermal nuclear fusion,
the sun's composition should change through time.
So if this is true, it means that the earth was colder in the past.
If the sun is 4.6 billion years old, it should have brightened nearly 40% over
this period of time.
This is a paradox referred to as the faint sun paradox.
In fact, the earth would have been below freezing temperature 3.8 billion years
ago, if this theory holds true, when life supposedly first evolved on the
planet, which is thought to have occurred about 3.8 billion years ago.
The rate of thermal nuclear fusion depends on the temperature.
As the sun's core temperature increases, the sun's energy output should also
increase, causing the sun to become brighter over time.
And calculations show that the sun would have brightened by 25% after 3.8 billion
years.
This means that an early earth would have been 31 degrees Fahrenheit fainter than it
is today, warming the earth much less than it does, and that's below freezing
temperature.
There's also a problem with earth's decaying magnetic field that argues that
it can't be billions of years old.
The rapidly decaying magnetic field is a serious problem.
The earth is surrounded in a magnetic field, you can see in this diagram,
that is called the magnetosphere.
And the purpose of the magnetosphere is to protect living things from solar
radiation.
Without the magnetic field in this magnetosphere, life on earth would simply
not be possible.
But scientists were surprised to discover that the field is quickly wearing down.
At the current rate, the field, and thus the earth, could not be older
than 20,000 years old at its present rate of decay.
Several measurements have confirmed this.
Since measurements began in 1845, the total energy stored in the earth's
magnetic field has been decaying at a rate of about 5% per century.
Archaeological measurements show that the field was 40% stronger in 1000 AD.
Recent records from the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, the most
accurate ever taken, show a net energy loss of 1.4% in just three decades between
1970 and 2000.
This means that the field's energy has halved every 1,465 years or so.
A Croatian physicist by the name of Thomas Barnes, who was a professor of physics at
the University of Texas for 43 years, proposed that the earth's magnetic field
is caused by a freely decaying electric current in the earth's core.
This means that the electric current naturally loses energy or decays as it
flows through the metallic core.
Though this differs from the most conventionally accepted conventional
model, it is consistent with our knowledge of what makes up the earth's core.
But since the earth is believed to be 4.6 billion years old, a rescue device has
been proposed by secular scientists known as the dynamo theory, which they assert to
provide a self-sustaining mechanism for the magnetic field.
However, this complex process is purely theoretical, contradicts some basic laws
of physics, and furthermore, their model fails to explain some important things
like the measured electric current in the seafloor, nor can it explain the past
field reversals we see on the seafloor.
In a book published in 1993 by the U.S.
Geodynamic Committee of the National Research Council, titled the National
Geomagnetic Initiative, it is stated that the mechanism for generating the
geomagnetic field remains one of the central unsolved problems in geoscience.
Taylor states in Design and Destiny, Our Solar System and Its Place in the
Cosmos, that the magnetism is almost as much a puzzle now as it was when William
Gilbert wrote his classic text concerning geomagnetism, magnetic bodies,
and the great magnetic earth in the 1600s.
At this point, reliable published geological field data has emphatically
confirmed the young earth model of a freely decaying electric current in the
outer core is generating the magnetic field.
In addition, according to the creationist dynamic decay model, the earth's magnetic
field lost more energy during the flood, which when the outer core was stirred
during this event, and the field reversed direction several times, it is believed,
during the flood, the data all points to an earth in a magnetic field that is only
6,000 years old.
We also find helium in radioactive rocks.
Helium as discovered in radioactive rocks.
And this is again another indicator of a young earth.
Radioactivity, or radiation as it is called, is a spontaneous emission from
unstable atoms.
Basically, they are the atoms that we refer to as radioactive atoms that are
disintegrating.
Pieces are just flying off of them.
And some of these can be very dangerous.
If they strike you, they strike your DNA, can cause harm to your genetic code.
There are several different types of decay.
There's alpha decay, there's beta decay.
Gamma, there's one called gamma, for any sci-fi fans.
The gamma rays were what created the Incredible Hulk.
Anyone?
Incredible Hulk?
Yeah, it was gamma rays that turned into the Incredible Hulk.
But these radioactive elements will continue to decay.
And most of the really big elements are radioactive.
In the periodic table, the really big atoms in the periodic table are all
radioactive.
And they continue to disintegrate, losing particles, until they get smaller
and smaller and smaller and reach a stable element like lead.
Here's an animation of a uranium atom, a radioactive uranium atom, emitting what
is called an alpha particle.
One of the types of decay called alpha decay.
The alpha particle is a particle the size of a helium nucleus.
It is a helium nucleus.
It contains two protons and two neutrons.
And this particle comes flying off of these radioactive elements.
And during the decay, for example, of uranium and thorium found in rocks,
lots of helium is lost or produced by this process.
For example, during the decay of uranium-238 down to lead, eight helium
atoms are lost in this process.
These radioactive elements can be found in crystals.
But because helium is a tiny, tiny element, the second lightest element in
the periodic table, and a noble gas, which means it doesn't combine with other
elements, as it's produced by nuclear decay, it readily diffuses or leaks out of
crystals and eventually escapes into the atmosphere.
You probably have seen this happen, helium escaping in helium balloons.
When you have a helium balloon, they don't last forever.
After a couple of days, they usually lose their ability to float the way they did
originally because helium is able to escape through the rubber of the balloon
in the same way.
It's a really small element and it can just leak right out of these things.
Well, a creation science research team called the RATE group decided that helium
measurements might be an alternative method to determine the date of rocks.
Using a prediction from a young earth model, they assumed that helium might
still be in these rocks.
But it wouldn't be if they were in fact billions of years old.
So the RATE group shown here, just so you know, was formed by scientists from the
Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society.
And they collaborated on an extensive three-year project specifically to study
radiometric dating.
The acronym RATE stands for Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth.
So they were studying radiometric dating to try to understand what was actually
happening there.
And they were made up of specialists in geology, geophysics, astrophysics,
and physics.
What they decided to do was obtain samples of granite to see if they could find
helium still present in some of these very ancient rocks.
Samples of granite were obtained and analyzed by the RATE group researchers
from deep pre-Cambrian, meaning pre-flood granite rocks in New Mexico.
From these rocks they extracted zircon crystals from different depths.
Just so you know, the melting temperature of zirconium silicate, which makes up
zircon crystals, is so high that these zircon crystals can actually go through a
volcano and come out the volcano undamaged.
Now you might recognize zircons as being crystals used to make less expensive
gemstones for things like rings.
Here's a look at some tiny zircon crystals that the RATE group isolated, shown under
a standard optical microscope.
Another view of one at a higher magnification using a scanning electron
microscope.
So what the RATE group did was analyze the helium content of zircon crystals taken
from granite obtained through core samples drilled by the Los Alamos National
Laboratory at a geothermal site in New Mexico.
The drilling was done by the Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of an
experiment where they were trying to tap hot rocks and steam to produce power for
generators using geothermal heat.
The RATE researchers obtained these samples and were actually surprised to
find far more helium in them than they expected.
Again, if these rocks are very old, though, they shouldn't have helium because
helium leaks out very rapidly.
They, assuming that the earth was very young, expected to find helium in the
rocks, but were surprised to find much more helium in them than they expected
from the young earth position.
In rocks dated at 1.5 billion years old by radiometric dating, up to 58% of the
helium that the uranium could ever have generated in 1.5 billion years was still
present in the crystals.
This is completely surprising.
When these diffusion rates at various temperatures were plotted out,
shown here, the diffusivity of the helium provided excellent confirmation of the
predictions made by the young earth model.
The diffusion rates were consistent with the young earth predictions, but varied
considerably from those based on the old earth uniformitarian assumptions you see
plotted on the lower portion of that graph.
In addition, the helium leakage rates from zircons has been determined by several
experiments that are all in agreement.
Helium diffuses so rapidly that all the helium in the zircon crystals should have
leaked out in less than 100,000 years.
The fact that so much helium is still there means that rocks cannot be 1.5
billion years old, as the uranium-led radiometric dating of those rocks
suggested.
In fact, using the measured rate of helium diffusion, these pre-flood rocks have an
average diffusion age of only about 6,000 years, plus or minus 2,000.
Very consistent with the biblical age of the earth.
These results were interpreted by the rate group as indicating that accelerated
nuclear decay had taken place.
They produced this animation to illustrate the process they believed to have taken
place probably during the global flood.
The hourglass on the left illustrates the uranium on the top decaying into lead on
the bottom of that hourglass.
The hourglass on the right shows the helium that was being produced into the
upper chamber and then is diffusing into the lower chamber.
The results that they obtained suggested that at some point God accelerated the
nuclear decay process, causing uranium to decay into lead at a much faster rate,
producing helium in the process.
But because the diffusion of helium out of the zircon crystals is a mechanical
process, not a nuclear process, the rate was not affected.
The decay of uranium occurred at a much faster rate, while the diffusion of helium
occurred at the normal rate.
And at some point the accelerated rate of nuclear decay returned to what we have
today.
That is their interpretation of these results.
But then again, we don't really know how much helium there was there in the
beginning either.
It's hard to say, but it is interesting findings to be sure.
There was another thing that was kind of argued here.
Another piece of evidence suggested by this that supported young earth is the low
amount of helium in the atmosphere.
The leakage rate of helium gas into the atmosphere has been measured.
Even though some helium escapes into outer space, the amount still present is not
nearly enough if the earth is 4.6 billion years old.
In fact, if we assume no helium was in the original atmosphere, all the helium would
have accumulated that is there in only 1.8 million years, even from an evolutionary
standpoint.
But when the catastrophic flood upheaval is factored in, which rapidly released
huge amounts of helium into the atmosphere, it could have accumulated in
only 6,000 years.
We've also found carbon-14 where it should not be, particularly in fossils,
coal, and diamonds.
Now, carbon-14 is a radioactive form of carbon.
So it's a form of carbon that is subject to the same kinds of decay, not exactly
the same, but it's a radioactive form, an unstable radioactive form of carbon.
That scientists use to date organic materials, such as very recent fossils,
bones, trees, coals, and even human artifacts are dated using what they call
carbon-14 dating.
But first, let me explain a little bit about carbon-14 dating, what this is
about, and how it works.
Now, so carbon is an element, a type of atom, right, that usually has a mass of 12
atomic mass units.
It has an atomic mass of 12.
However, if atmospheric nitrogen, shown in this animation, is struck by
particles of solar radiation, these nitrogen atoms can be converted into an
unstable form of carbon that has a mass also of 14.
But, again, this is an unstable form of carbon that will decay.
Because of this process, both forms of carbon exist in the atmosphere.
Both carbon-12 and carbon-14 are going to exist in the atmosphere where they were
combined with carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is taken up by plants during photosynthesis and ultimately used
to make glucose.
In photosynthesis, glucose molecules are then used for energy.
Carbon compounds are going to find their way into all the other macromolecules,
into oils, into DNA.
So, in general, the plants and animals alive at any one time will have the exact
same amount of carbon-14 in their tissues that are in the atmosphere.
So, the exact same amount of carbon-14 should be found in plants and the animals
that ate those, all the way down to the food chain.
All organisms on earth should have the same amount of carbon-14 that's in the
atmosphere at any one point in time.
But, because carbon-14 is an unstable radioactive form of carbon, it decays back
into nitrogen over time.
So, after the death of an organism, the amount of carbon-14 in the bones or
fossils can be used as a measure of how long it's been dead based on the decay
rate of carbon-14.
But, these measurements of the amount of carbon-14 in the sample are determined
using a device shown here called an atomic mass spectrometer.
And the rate group had a number of samples of coal measured for C-14 content using
this device.
But, unlike the other isotopes used in radiometric dating, carbon-14 decays very,
very quickly.
Having a half-life of only 5,730 years, which means that half of the carbon-14
will have decayed in that period of time.
So, none is expected to remain in fossils after even 100,000 years.
The oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process are closer to
50,000 years.
Yet, carbon-14 has been detected in ancient fossils supposedly up to hundreds
of millions of years old ever since the earliest days of carbon-14 dating.
In fact, between 1984 and 1998 alone, the secular scientific literature reported
carbon-14 in 70 different samples that came from fossils, coal, oil, natural gas,
and even marble representing the fossil-bearing portion of the geological
record, supposedly spanning more than 500 million years.
Further analysis of fossilized wood and coal samples, supposedly spanning 32 to
350 million years in age, yielded dates between 20,000 and 50,000 years using
carbon-14 dating.
But, the problem with this is that carbon-14 in organic samples like coal is
completely expected.
Well, we expect it from a Young Earth model, but the plants, especially because
the plants that were alive at the time of the global flood, are believed to have
formed vast coal deposits we find in the strata and are not millions of years old,
but rather less than 5,000 years old.
So, the original carbon-14 content, representing what was present in the
atmosphere before the flood, then began to decay back into nitrogen after the flood.
So, we expect to find carbon-14 in all these samples from the Young Earth,
the global flood model.
However, again, one of the problems with measuring samples like coal is
contamination.
Organic samples are prone to contamination, and you could get carbon-14
in coal samples from the surrounding materials.
So, what the rate group decided to do was to see if they could find carbon-14 in
diamonds, which are not subject to such contamination.
They can be washed aggressively to remove any contaminations before carbon-14
contents are analyzed using a mass spectrometer.
And sure enough, as they expected from a Young Earth model, they found that
diamonds, supposedly 1 to 3 billion years old, yielded carbon-14 ages of only 55,000
years.
This date is excessively old according to the Bible, but the high carbon-14
quantities make sense if we remember that the magnetic field has decayed and was
stronger in the past, protecting the atmosphere from solar radiation and
reducing the radiocarbon production before the flood.
I've got another example that argues for a fairly recent or young solar system,
and that is the existence of short-lived comets that are still found in the solar
system, indicating that they could not be billions of years old.
Now, a comet is basically a dirty snowball that are swirling around in the solar
system.
It spends most of its time far from the sun in the deep freeze of space,
but once every orbit, the comet comes very close to the sun, allowing the sun's heat
to evaporate much of the comet's ice and dislodge dust particles to form what we
know of as the comet's trail.
Now, comets have little mass, so each close pass to the sun greatly reduces a
comet's size, and eventually comets fade away.
They can't survive billions of years in the solar system, making repeated rounds
around the sun.
If the solar system is 4.6 billion years old, comets should have burned up long
ago.
But the frequency at which a comet passes by the sun determines how long it will
survive, and thus comets are classified in two different ways.
There are short- and long-period comets.
A short-period comet circles the sun about every 200 years.
Halley's comet, for those old enough to remember the last time Halley's comet came
around, is a short-period comet.
Halley's comet comes by about every 75 to 76 years.
The comet that was in this graphic is the Hale-Bopp comet, which came around in
1997.
Long-period comets, by contrast, circle around the sun every 200 years or
more.
So 200 years or less, you refer to it as a short-period comet.
200 years or more, you refer to it as a long-period comet.
But there are mechanisms that destroy comets, so they shouldn't persist for long
periods of time.
They can be ejected from the solar system and collide with planets.
Ejections happen as comets pass too close to large planets, particularly things like
Jupiter.
And the planet's gravity kicks them out of the solar system.
Ejections have been observed many times, but the first collision of a comet with a
planet was observed in 1994, shown in this picture.
When the comet Shoemaker, Levy 9, slammed into Jupiter.
But given the loss rates, it's easy to compute a maximum age of comets.
That maximum age is only a few million years.
Obviously, their prevalence makes sense if the entire solar system is just a few
thousand years old.
But it does not make sense if you assume a solar system that ranges in 4.6 billion
years.
Evolutionary astronauts have answered this problem by claiming that comets must come
from one of two sources.
They propose that there's a Kuiper Belt, what's referred to as a Kuiper Belt,
out in the distant regions of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.
And another that's referred to as the Oort Cloud.
They believe that Kuiper Belt could produce comets that are under 200 years
old.
And potentially, the Oort Cloud could produce comets that are over 200 years
old, or the long-period comets.
Let me show you where these are believed to exist.
The yellow orbits that you see there are the rocky planets.
The green orbits that you're seeing there are the big gas giants.
And all of the dots you see there around the green orbits are what we refer to as
trans-Neptunian objects.
Every object outside the orbit of Neptune are referred to as trans-Neptunian
objects.
And or what we refer to as Kuiper Belt objects.
And even Pluto has been argued to be a Kuiper Belt object.
Not a real planet, but that debate has kind of gone back and forth.
The red object you see there is the orbit of Sedna, which is well a trans-Neptunian
object.
The most distant object we've detected in the solar system so far.
Drop back a little further, because some believe that there is even more stuff out
there.
And that these long-period comets may come from what they refer to as the Oort Cloud.
That is even further away from the solar system.
Okay, referred to as the Oort Cloud.
Yet there is, at this point, no evidence for the supposed Oort Cloud.
And there likely never will be.
In the past 20 years, astronomers have found thousands of asteroids orbiting
beyond Neptune.
And they are assumed to be coming from the Kuiper Belt.
However, the large size of these asteroids and the difference in composition between
these asteroids and comets argues against the conclusion that the Kuiper Belt is the
source of any comets.
And one of the most famous astronomers of our day said this...
Many scientific papers are written each year about the Oort Cloud.
Its properties, its origin, its evolution.
Yet there is not yet a shred of direct observational evidence for its existence.
And this is coming from Carl Sagan.
In the Journal of Creation article titled, More Problems for the Oort Cloud,
the astronomer Danny Faulkner says, Since it cannot be detected, the Oort
Cloud is not a scientific concept.
This is not bad science, but non-science, masquerading as science.
The existence of comets is good evidence that the solar system is only a few
thousand years old.
I have another indicator of a young Earth, and that's the minimal amount of salt that
we find in the oceans.
Every year, rivers, glaciers, underground seepages, and atmospheric and volcanic
dust dump large amounts of salt into the ocean.
Some 458 million tons of sodium mixes into ocean water each year, but only 122
million tons, that's 27%, is removed by natural processes.
So if seawater originally contained no sodium at all, and sodium accumulated at
today's rates, then today's ocean's saltiness would be reached in only 42
million years.
That's 170th the 3 billion years evolution has proposed.
But those assumptions fail to take into account the likelihood that God created a
saltwater ocean in the beginning for all sea creatures.
He made it on day five.
Also, the year-long global flood would have dumped an unprecedented amount of
salt into the ocean at that time through erosion, sedimentation, volcanism.
So today's ocean saltiness makes much better sense when we consider the biblical
account of just a few thousand years in the global flood.
Another evidence for a young solar system comes from the recession of the moon.
The moon is constantly receding from us.
This indicates that the solar system could not be 4.6 billion years of age.
Now one of the main goals of the Apollo missions was to solve the mystery of the
moon's origin.
The Apollo astronauts brought back hundreds of pounds of rocks to try to
solve this dilemma of where the moon came from.
842 pounds of rocks and soil total were brought back between 1969 and 1972.
Harrison Schmidt, a trained geologist, is taking some rock samples in that
picture.
But the Apollo missions also installed reflectors that were part of a laser
ranging system.
The first reflector was placed on the moon in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
Several additional reflectors were placed by other later Apollo missions.
The A-11 you see on this was placed by the Apollo 11 crew in the Sea of Tranquility.
The A-14 and A-15 were additional Apollo placements.
Those designated with the L letter are from the Russia-France Luna robotic probe
that also placed some reflectors.
But the purpose of these was to detect movements of the moon.
And they would do this by shining a beam of laser pulses on these reflectors from
the earth, such as from here, from the Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical
Observatory.
And by doing this, scientists were able to determine the distance between the earth
and the moon to an accuracy of just 3 centimeters.
But what they discovered by doing this was that the moon is moving away from the
earth at a rate of about 4 centimeters per year.
However, and I need to explain this in a little detail, otherwise you won't
understand why the rate of the moon has changed through time, why the rate of
recession would have been faster back in time.
So let me explain this a little further.
Looking back in time, the recession would be faster, but this is because the lunar
recession is caused by tidal forces.
The moon is pulling the oceans, creating tides, high tides, right?
But the tidal bulge is actually pulling back on the moon, which causes it to
accelerate.
And because the moon's gravitational force is stronger, the closer you are to it,
the moon would have caused larger tidal bulges in the distant past, creating
greater pulling forces, increasing the angular momentum.
Thus, the moon would have receded at a much greater rate in the distant past,
shown by the red arrows you see there.
Here are the calculated distances looking back in time.
The moon is currently about 240,000 miles away from the Earth, but would have been
28.4 miles closer a million years ago.
And although the solar system is believed, again, to be 4.6 billion years old,
based on the current rate of recession, it would have been in contact with the
Earth 1.4 billion years ago, based on these calculations.
Or, if you prefer a graphic illustration...
There you go.
There's your graphic.
Alright, I'm going to give you one other good example here for a young Earth,
and that's that recently DNA has been found in ancient bacteria.
In 2000, scientists claimed to have resurrected bacteria they named Lazarus
bacteria that were discovered in salt crystals conventionally dated to 250
million years old.
They found bacteria with DNA that dated 250 million years old.
They were shocked that the bacteria's DNA were also very similar to modern bacterial
DNA.
If the modern bacteria were the result of 250 million years of evolution,
its DNA should have been very different from this Lazarus bacteria found in these
salt crystals, based on the known mutation rates of bacteria.
In addition, scientists were surprised to find that the DNA was still intact after a
supposed 250 million year time span.
DNA normally breaks down fairly quickly, even in ideal conditions.
Even evolutionists agree that DNA in bacterial spores, which is a dormant state
for bacteria, should last no more than a million years.
However, the discovery of the Lazarus bacteria is not shocking or surprising at
all if we are within the expectations of the biblical accounts of a recent creation
and a global flood.
Now, I include a lot of evidence for a young earth and a young solar system,
and I intentionally don't go into the age of the universe, because I believe there's
questions about this.
There are a lot of creationist astrophysicists that have done a lot of
work, and there are age-dating indicators arguing that the universe itself,
there are certain factors that indicate that it must be very young.
The absence of supernova remnants in some of these have been used, but I tend to be
kind of cautious about this, considering especially that much of what God created
was created fully mature.
Now, the age of the universe, the vast distance of some of these astronomical
bodies, the vast distance to some of these other galaxies, is to some people a great
stumbling point.
There are a lot of people that assume because these galaxies are reportedly 50
million light years away, or 100 million light years away, that the earth must also
be that old.
Now, I believe that the earth and the universe itself, these other astronomical
bodies, was created during the creation week, and that these creations occurred
just 6,000 years ago, as described in the Bible.
But we have to remember that much of what God created was created fully mature.
And there are a lot of really intelligent, much more intelligent people than me,
astrophysicists who are young earth creationists, that have done a lot of work
in this area to try to understand how God created an ancient universe, but most of
this work works within the known laws of physics.
But God does not create within the laws of physics.
God created the laws of physics to uphold His creation, the power of His Word.
But God Himself and His acts of creation are not bound by the laws of physics that
He uses to sustain the creation.
A really good example of this is when Jesus turned the water into wine.
I mean, you can't turn water into wine within the known laws of physics.
And that very act not only defied the laws of physics, but defies time as well.
And the events that needed to take place for that wine to be there.
Because none of the events, none of the time that is required for that wine to be
there ever existed.
No one planted the grape vines to make those grapes.
No one cultivated the grapes or harvested them and mashed it into wine.
None of the time for the fermentation process ever took place.
None of the events, none of the time ever happened for that wine to be there.
And the elements, and more importantly, the elements that are needed, that are in
wine are not present in water.
You are talking about thermonuclear fusion processes to convert hydrogen and oxygen,
the elements that are in water, into the vast number of carbon and
nitrogen and other elements that are there in wine.
Thermonuclear fusion reactions would have been involved there, defying the laws of
physics, the heat and energy that are generated by such processes.
Jesus was not bound by the laws of physics, turning water into wine.
I don't believe we should be assuming that God was bound by the laws of physics when
He created the universe.
He spoke the universe into existence.
And I think we are kind of foolish to assume we could figure out how He did
something like that.
I don't care how smart an astrophysicist is, smart as these guys are, I don't think
they will ever be able to wrap their minds around how God spoke the universe into
existence any more than a creationist, organic chemist or winemaker will figure
out how Jesus turned water into wine.
It is not possible.
They will never know how Jesus turned water into wine.
I don't think we will ever know how God spoke the universe into existence either.
And it appears that He made it very old, very ancient.
But remember, much of what God created was created fully mature.
He created Adam fully mature.
He created the plants and animals of the Garden of Eden all fully mature.
And you have to ask yourself, how old was Adam the day He created Adam?
Was he a 30 year old man the day He created him or was he one day old?
The argument is He was both.
Adam, He created him on the first day He created him.
He is a one day old man but He created him to be 30 years old.
And if He tried to calculate how old He was, chances are some of those age dating
indicators would show that He was 30 years old.
Others might show that He was one year old.
And so I think with regard to the cosmos itself, that there may very well be age
dating indicators arguing that just based on the speed of light alone, 186,000 miles
per second, if the distances to these things are even close to correct,
then that indicator indicates it is very, very old.
But also 17 times in the Bible it says that God stretched out the heavens.
We'll never really know how He spoke something into existence so vast as it is
and apparently ancient as it is.
But I don't think we should get all hung up on that either.
On the age of the universe itself, much of what God created was created fully
mature.
Plants and animals in the Garden of Eden.
And He didn't do that to fool anyone.
That's one of the criticisms that you often hear by people that hold to an
ancient earth.
That God would not lie.
That the universe must be that old because God would not lie.
And He wouldn't deceive us.
But I would argue, was Jesus trying to lie to anyone by turning water into wine?
Was He trying to deceive anyone by turning that water into wine?
Was He lying in any way?
I don't think God was trying to lie to us or deceive us in creating the cosmos.
A cosmos that may very well be 13.7 billion years old.
But created 6,000 years ago, the same time He created everything else.
I don't think He was lying or trying to deceive us by making the universe the way
He did.
You ask, why did He do it?
Why did God make the universe that appears to be that vast and that large and that
light would take that long to reach us and why did He do it?
If He wasn't trying to fool us or deceive us, I would ask the same question about
why Jesus turned the water into wine.
Why did He do that?
Was He trying to fool or deceive people at the wedding?
Why did He do it?
Why did Jesus turn water into wine?
I think the answer is to demonstrate His creative power.
Demonstrate Himself as the Creator.
And you could argue the same thing.
That's why God created the cosmos.
Not because He was trying to fool us or deceive us or make us think that it's
older than it really is.
But to declare His creative power.
The universe itself, the heavens are the only aspect of God's creation that is said
to declare His glory and His righteousness.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
The skies proclaim the work of His hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech.
Night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no words.
They have no speech.
They use no words.
No sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth.
Their words to the end of the world.
There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each.
And as the psalmist says, He knows them all by name.
Why did He create it?
To declare His glory and His righteousness.
To show us just how awesome and mighty He is.
Don't get all hung up on the age of the universe itself.
But with regard to the age of the earth, I think it is important.
And I think it's important because of what the fossil record means.
What it represents.
And what it was always meant to represent.
And that's a reminder to us about just how much God hates sin.
It was to be an everlasting memorial to the end of time.
When we saw those vast layers of rocks, when we saw those fossils, it was to be a
reminder to us about just how much God hates sin.
We've kind of lost the fear of God.
We've forgotten how much He hates sin.
The modern church has kind of changed the nature of God.
They avoid all the verses that talk about His hatred of sin and His hatred of
sinners.
And we focus on the ones that talk about His love.
But it should be a terrifying thing to find yourself in the hands of the Almighty
God.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of righteousness.
It's a healthy thing to remember that God's judgment came in the past,
and it was a terrible, terrible judgment.
It destroyed the entire world by flood.
That's how deep His hatred of sin is, and His hatred of sinners is.
His judgment came in the past, and there's even a more terrible judgment
coming in the future.
We should never forget that.
And by reinterpreting the fossil record, by arguing that it forms slowly and
gradually over long periods of time, it's not just proof of evolution,
that life came about without His creative hand, but it takes away that important
reminder of His judgment and a reminder of just how much He hates sin, something we
should never forget.
Remember, the prophet said himself, As it was in the days of Noah,
so it will be in the days of the Son of Man.
They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage until the day
when Noah entered the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all.
A judgment happened in the past, it's happening again, but there's only one
way out.
Just like God provided a way out for Noah and his family to survive that judgment,
there's a way out for us to survive the judgment that comes too.
And that's by repenting of those sins.
Ask for forgiveness by the blood of Jesus.
He paid that sacrifice for us.
But repentance is still a requirement.
He's very forgiving and will forgive us of those sins.
And what a terrible thing to know that sacrifice that Jesus made for us and then
continue to sin.
God's hatred of sin, I would think His hatred of sin is probably greater now.
Knowing that He sent His Son to die for us, and that we continue to sin knowing
that, I would think His hatred of sin is even greater today than it was back then.
We should never forget how much God hates sin.
Let me close out in a word of prayer.
Father, thank You so much.
We consider the wonderful world that You have made for us, the outstretched cosmos,
100 billion galaxies and 100 billion stars each.
Father, what a great and mighty God we serve.
We bow before You, humbled before You, knowing that we don't know.
Father, so much information is out there, and we are trying to know the truth,
Father.
And we rely upon Your Word for the great insight it can provide us.
Father, give us wisdom, Father, and help us to be discerning of the truth.
Help us to be able to read Your Word for the truth that it contains and to inform
us about the world that we live in and about how we should live, Father.
Give us wisdom, Father.
We need it today more than any other time, perhaps, because of all the teachings that
are out there, Father.
Help us to find the kernels of truth that are there and wade through all that
misinformation, Father.
We need the wisdom.
We need Your wisdom, Father.
Help us.
Father, we bow ourselves before You in humility, knowing that all wisdom comes
from You, all knowledge comes from You, Father.
And we are so sorry, Father, for our sins.
Yeshua, we acknowledge that terrible sacrifice and we ask for You to examine
us.
Send Your Holy Spirit to us and convict us of the sins that are in our life.
Convict us with the conviction that will lead to tearful repentance.
You told, Father, Your power is made perfect in our weakness, Father.
And we acknowledge our weakness and we ask for Your power to be made perfect in our
lives, in our weakness.
May Your power be made perfect.
We praise You, Lord.
We honor and glorify You, Father.
With our praise and with our lives, Father, we dedicate to live a life that
glorifies and honors You.
Praise the name of the Lord God.
Praise the Son of the Lord God, Yeshua.
We ask all things in Your mighty name.
Amen.