Episode 173 – 10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know 1 Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” Evening came, and morning followed—the first day. Genesis, chapter 1, verses 3 through 5, New American Bible Revised Edition ******** VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re excited to be with you today as we begin a new series on Anchored by Truth. So, to announce the series and tell us why we are doing it, we have RD Fierro in the studio. RD is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. RD, you’ve entitled this series “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know.” This ought to be fascinating. I’m not sure how many facts there are that pertain to the Christian faith but way more than 10. How in the world are you going to pick 10 from the hundreds or thousands of facts that are relevant to those who put their trust in Christ? RD: Well, I’d first like to start by expressing my gratitude for everyone who is joining us here today whether on the radio broadcast or the podcast. And you are absolutely right that there are hundreds, thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of facts that shape and fill the Christian faith. And that is the one of the points that we want to make by doing this series. The Christian faith is a faith of facts. VK: Well, that’s an interesting phrase – “a faith of facts.” That phrase alone starts to raise questions. I think most people would see or draw a distinction between faith and facts. RD: And I think you’re right about that. Many people in our world think that if we’re talking about faith and facts we’re talking about two different categories of ideas. But that is a modern fiction. The great theologians through the ages have always recognized that authentic, saving faith has three dimensions. Authentic, saving faith consists of content, assent to the content, and trust in that content. Well, the content of authentic, saving faith must consist of facts or it’s not faith at all. It might be gullibility, credulity, or imaginative fantasy but it is not faith. If someone says I believe moon fairies visit me at night and sprinkle glow berries at the foot of my bed, that’s not faith. And if someone chooses to label that kind of belief as “faith” it’s certainly not what the Bible means, or classic Christian theology means, when we use the term. VK: And while critics might assert that we are playing word games there is a very concrete distinction between Biblical faith and the “glow berry” kind. Christian faith always begins with and ends with the truth. Truth is that which corresponds to reality. We make this point regularly on Anchored by Truth. It is a critical distinction. Belief in moon fairies and glow berries might give a small child a distraction but it won’t help an adult struggling with addiction, or financial troubles, or a sick loved one, or comfort with a desperate illness. Authentic, saving faith will help with all of those situations and a great many more. RD: So, when we say that Christianity is a faith with facts we are saying that it is a faith grounded in the real world – in time and place – but it is nevertheless a faith that recognizes that there is a real realm that is outside of the created order that is perceived through the senses. We know the reality of that other realm from the Bible which is why we must become so familiar with the Bible that we can use its truth to guide us through our lives in the created order until Jesus brings us safely into that unseen realm at his side. VK: So, during this series you want to give people a group of facts that will help them reinforce their confidence in their faith and in the Bible. You don’t see this series so much as evangelistic tool – though it could help with that – as much as you do helping believers fend off the world’s attacks on their faith. RD: Yes. Classically the believer’s enemies are the world, the flesh, and the devil. Well, in the modern “world” the world’s enmity with Christ has been steadily escalating. The contemporary reliance on instantaneous and mass media has allowed false messages to move instantly and continuously. And one of the messages with which Christians are bombarded today is the whole notion of what is sometimes termed “deep time.” VK: Deep time is essentially the idea that the universe and the earth are billions of years old. The secular world must have deep time in order to maintain the illusion that the General Theory of Evolution is plausible. Evolution needs billions of years of time to change bacteria into biologists. The only supposed creative force evolution has is beneficial mutation - in other words the random interaction of unthinking matter. To make the whole evolutionary hypothesis plausible the scheme needs lots of time. Lots of time is necessary so that lots of those random, chaotic, interactive events can take place. They need untold trillions of those interactions in the hope that a few of them will produce a living being so complex that the code that describe its construction can contain 3 billion data elements. RD: The task to turn an amoeba into an anthropologist is even more formidable than just having the 3 billion base pairs that comprise human DNA properly organized and functioning. When DNA was first discovered it was thought to be similar to other chemical components of living beings. The initial idea was that somehow the chemistry controlled the biology. VK: But we now know with absolute certainty that the chemistry of DNA is not sufficient to explain its operation within the human body or any other living creature for that matter. Just as the chemistry of ink and paper does not control the message printed on the paper, the chemistry of DNA does not control the messages it provides. DNA is far more akin to a language that conveys information to other chemical structures and its complexity goes well beyond its numerical attributes. RD: Yes. And we’re going to get more into that in a future show. But for today I just want to stick with the issue of time and specifically that there is abundant scientific evidence that deep time does not exist. The best science tells us, in fact, that the Biblical time frame is far more reasonable that the secular alternatives. So, the first fact that every Christian needs to know is that science confirms that the universe and earth are thousands of years old, not millions or billions. VK: Ok. That’s a very bold proclamation given that probably 95% of the people who call themselves scientists would probably disagree with it. RD: I recognize that. And it would be a lot easier for us at Anchored by Truth to simply go along with conventional thinking. But as we started out saying Christianity is a faith of facts and the facts of science are not helpful to a billions of years old earth. VK: I think we better get into some specific examples of what you’re thinking about. RD: I agree. So, today we’re going to talk about 3 specific lines of evidence that demonstrate that the earth is far more likely thousands of years old than billions of years old. And the 3 lines we’re going to talk about are all mentioned in an article on the Creation Ministries International website entitled “age of the earth.” VK: And we are going to put a link to that article on the podcast notes that accompany the podcast version of this show. So, if your podcast app supports written notes you can just go to them and find a link. If not, the Creation Ministries International website is creation.com and you can just search for “age of the earth.” RD: Right. So, the article we’re linking to contains references to these 3 lines of evidence but the article itself actually contains 101 forms of evidence that earth is far younger than normally thought. VK: We don’t have time on one of our shows to go through 101 lines of evidence, do we? RD: Nope. So, I just wanted to pick a few of the many, many lines of evidence just to give our audience a sample of why they don’t need to accept the proclamation of the world that directly challenges a straightforward reading of the book of Genesis. VK: So, what is the first line of evidence you want to discuss? RD: The first thing that demonstrates that the conventional understanding of the age of the earth is in error is that biologists and paleontologists have recovered blood cells, blood vessels, and proteins from dinosaur remains that were supposedly millions of years old. But even the scientist, who made the discovery, Mary Schweitzer, has admitted that contemporary science has no explanation for how such tissue could have survived intact for 65 million years which was the supposed age of the bone. VK: And since that first discovery of dinosaur soft tissue in the mid-1990’s many other similar discoveries have followed. The first discovery of dinosaur soft tissue was in a T. Rex bone but since then they have found intact soft tissue in other species as well. RD: Right. The Tyrannosaurus Rex bone that contained the first soft tissue discovered was supposedly 65 million years old. But then they discovered the protein collagen in the bone of a hadrosaur which was purportedly 80 million years old. That has been followed by the discovery of the protein osteocalcin in an Iguanodon bone that is thought to be 120 million years old – twice as old as the T. Rex. VK: The dilemma for the scientists is how could such soft tissue have survived for those enormous amounts of time? In his book, The Greatest Hoax on Earth, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati says, “Yet analysis of collagen stability shows that it would last only 2.7 [million years] at freezing point under the most favorable preservation conditions. At 10 [degrees centigrade] the limit was 180,000 years and 15,000 years at 20 [degrees centigrade]; [it is normally thought] dinosaurs were supposed to live in a warm climate.” RD: So, the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones, and not just in one but in many, poses a huge challenge for conventional time periods. But it poses no challenge for Biblical time frames. While Biblical scholars are not uniform on their dating schedules it’s fair to say that most scholars believe the earth is about 6,500 years old. But let’ just say that they were off 1 or 2 thousand years. That still does not pose a problem for the preservation of the soft tissue. The analyses of the preservation possibilities even under the warmer conditions allows easily for the tissue to be preserved for the Biblical time frame. And it is reasonable to say that the availability of the dinosaur soft tissue is far more consistent with the time frames laid out in the Bible than with any of the secular speculations. VK: At this point we should remind the listeners that whether the dinosaur soft tissue was thousands of years old or millions no one alive on the earth today was there to see it. So, all that any scientist, or anyone else for that matter, can do is to look at current evidence and see how that evidence fits in with a particular hypothesis or theory. And all scientists, whether they are Christians or not, look at evidence through a lens comprised of a set of starting axioms. The evidence might be consistent with the expectations that arise from those starting axioms or it might not be. What we are pointing out here is that, contrary to popular belief, the preservation of soft tissue from dinosaurs creates many additional questions for the conventional time frames but none at all for Biblical ones. So, what’s next? RD: Well, another conundrum for the conventional idea that the earth and universe are billions of years old is what is often termed “the faint young sun paradox.” VK: A “young sun paradox” – this should be interesting. RD: It is. Let’s start out by noting that one commonly accepted idea for how the sun generates energy is by nuclear fusion – the combination of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms deep within the core of the sun. According to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, as the thermonuclear fusion occurs massive amounts of energy are released. But the combination of multiple hydrogen atoms into few helium atoms takes up less space. So, over billions of years the sun would shrink in size but it would increase in brightness. As the sun increased in brightness its energy output would increase meaning the energy that would hit the earth would increase. VK: So, the “faint young sun” means that if the sun-earth system were really 4.5 billion years old as conventional dating asserts the sun would have been far less bright billions of years ago. It would have been “fainter” in the earth’s sky 4 billion years ago than it is today. A fainter, weaker sun would mean a lot cooler earth. So, the question is how much cooler would the earth have been? RD: Reasonable estimates say the earth would have received anywhere from 20% – 30% less sunlight than it does today. VK: And how much cooler would the earth have been with that much less sunlight? RD: The current average temperature of the earth is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. With 25% less sunlight the average temperature of the earth would have been below freezing – about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. In other words with a sun that is 20% to 30% less bright the entire globe would have been glaciated – essentially a solid ball of ice. That certainly would not have been a condition in which any kind of life would have developed much less spread widely and begun to create the kind of biodiversity we see on the earth today. VK: In fact, most scientists believe that the primordial world was much warmer than it is today. Whenever we see movies with dinosaur scenes in them we are always regaled with lush, tropical vegetation surrounding them. But, of course, there is a “faint young sun” paradox only if the earth is billions of years old. If the earth is only several thousands of years old the way the Bible tells us the paradox never arises. There is simply not sufficient time for the sun to have been any different than it is today. Well, I’m sure secular scientists are aware of this difficulty so how do they respond? RD: The most common response is that the level of greenhouse gases in the primordial earth’s atmosphere was much, much higher than today. This higher level of greenhouse gas provided a much thicker “blanket” than our current atmosphere does. But the problem is that the level of greenhouse gases needed to compensate for the lower luminosity is hundreds of times the present atmospheric levels of such gases. Not only is that an inconceivable proposition but according to analyses information from so-called “ancient soils” does not give any indication of dramatically greater levels of carbon dioxide which is the most abundant greenhouse gas. Recently, newer solutions have been proposed involving only slightly higher levels of greenhouse gases but with a lower level of planetary albedo. Albedo is the reflective level of the atmosphere. With lower albedo more sunlight would penetrate the atmosphere and keep things warmer. VK: Does this solve the problem? RD: Not really. The models that have been proposed use a one-dimensional form of climate modeling but all responsible climate models use a three-dimensional model. In our podcast notes we’ll link to a couple of articles on creation.com but this a comment from one of the articles entitled The Faint Young Sun Paradox and the Age of the Solar System. “…any climate model, other than a three-dimensional general circulation model with a realistic ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere (the snow/ice component), is inaccurate. For example, such a one-dimensional model ignores important feedbacks, such as the powerful ice albedo feedback. As snow and ice increase, the albedo increases to cause further cooling.” VK: Ok. Well, just to remind everyone today we’re discussing the first fact in our new series “10 facts every Christian needs to know.” And the first fact that you believe all Christians need to firmly grasp is that there is abundant scientific evidence that confirms that the universe and earth are thousands of years old, not millions or billions of year old. And the reason this fact is so important is because the General Theory of Evolution needs billions of years to perform its magic of turning colliding molecules into computer scientists. Without these billions of years – deep time as it is sometimes called – even the evolutionists admit their paradigm wouldn’t work. So, the evidence we’re providing today demonstrates that that deep time just isn’t reflected in what we see in the created order that surrounds us. So, we have time to do one more line of evidence. Where do you want to go now? RD: Let’s talk about what is termed “lunar recession.” After the first missions to the moon we were able to place mirrors on the moon that allow us to bounce laser pulses off them. We can then measure very precisely the length of time it takes the returning photons to reach the earth and thereby determine with a high degree of precision the distance between the earth and the moon. So, we’ve done that and we now know that the moon is moving away from the earth about 1.5 inches per year. VK: Now if the earth-moon system is only several thousand years old as the Bible tells us one and a half inches a year is no big deal. But, if the earth-moon system is billions of years old all that changes. And the conventional understanding is that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Right? RD: Right. In fact, lunar recession means that in a system billions of years old the moon would have been a lot closer to the earth than it is today. The calculations about the movement of the moon place a maximum age on the earth-moon system at about 1.4 billion years old. At that point the moon would have been below the Roche limit. The Roche limit is the distance from a central body, such as a planet, inside of which orbiting debris cannot coalesce. In other words, the moon would have been torn apart if had been below the Roche limit. As a result of this various theories have been proposed to explain how the earth and moon have arrived in their current configuration in such precise balance. But none of these theories such as the “capture” theory or adjusting the earth’s tidal parameters resolve the problem. VK: We have to remember that the moon is the principle cause of tidal action on the earth and it is well understood that tidal action is important to the earth’s eco-system. If the moon had been a lot closer to the earth in the past there would have been enormous tides – tides so large they would have swept over huge portions of the land. That would have been devastating for the formation of any land dwelling creatures. But we also know that tides are important for keeping the boundary between the earth and land healthy and beneficial for life as it exists. The harmony between the earth and moon is an essential part of making life on this earth possible. RD: Again, lunar recession in an earth-moon system thousands of years old is not a problem. The relative position change of the two bodies is negligible. But try to take that back millions or billions of years and now there are lots of difficulties that arise that must be explained away. This is a problem for science because the mantra of contemporary science is uniformitarianism. The present is the key to the past. VK: But the present is not the key to the past for an earth-moon system where the current recession rate of the moon puts a limit on the age of the system that rules out evolutionary time scales. RD: Yes. So, these are just three of the lines of evidence that show that good science supports an age for the earth that is consistent with the Bible but a challenge for the most widely held conventional beliefs. Now, notice I’m being careful about how I say this. Present empirical observations cannot “prove” the age of the earth. Only an eyewitness to events could do that. All empirical observations are made by observers in the present who must integrate the information they get from current observations into what we might receive from recorded events and then interpret that information. But notice that the three lines of evidence that we have mentioned today pose no problems for a Biblical timeframe but do so for evolutionary schedules. And these are just 3 of the lines of evidence out of the 101 lines that are contained in the article we first mentioned. And that article, even with the 101 points of evidence it covers, is illustrative and not exhaustive. The big point – the fact every Christian needs to know is that there is abundant scientific evidence that the earth is only thousands of years old, not billions of years old. And this fact alone destroys any possibility of evolution as it is normally envisioned. Evolution needs deep time. But empirical observations, even when aligned with a typical uniformitarian perspective, do not provide deep time. Empirical observations just pose one problem after another and each solution that is proposed to resolve them tends to raise more problems that must be resolved. None of that is necessary for those who simply trust the Bible’s historicity. VK: Well, as you said the only way to know when the earth was created would be from an eyewitness and that’s what the Bible provides. God was there at the beginning and the Bible is His testimony to the world of what He did. It’s up to us to decide whether we will accept His testimony to us or continue to shove Him aside in favor of our manufactured idols such as evolution or deep time. There is really no need to do that scientifically despite what our culture continually insists. As we always do we want to close with prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer of adoration for the Holy Spirit who is the One who hovered over the water and testifies to us that it was God who is the one and only Creator of everything. ---- PRAYER OF ADORATION FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT VK: Before we close we’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes in this series or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.” If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!” (Opening Bible Quotes from the New American Bible Revised Edition) Genesis, chapter 1, verses 3 through 5, New American Bible Revised Edition Age of the earth - creation.com Young sun paradox - creation.com The young faint Sun paradox and the age of the solar system - creation.com The moon's recession and age - creation.com Paleozoic Corals and Lunar Recession - creation.com C14 dinos - creation.com