Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
On today's show, we'll get to hear from Brian Thomas, science writer with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Brian Thomas. This week, we've been talking about the importance of recent creation.
Now, again, the gospel doesn't demand that you believe in Genesis creation, it just demands that you believe in Jesus Christ. That's how you get born again. But the information. The gospel itself comes from a book, and the same book that teaches these spiritual lessons also teaches physical lessons, it teaches where we came from.
So, if you're gonna say, Hey, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, and here's what it is. How do you know that?
Well, you know it because of the Bible.
Well, how do you know the Bible's true? Because we can trust everything the Bible says, including recent creation. But a lot of people get hung up on this because they think, well, I just can't believe in recent creation you know, the world is only thousands of years old, that kind of thing, because scientists, scientists have demonstrated or proven that it's wrong. I wanted to touch today on some of the reasons why I think the scientists have the wrong ages in mind. The answer, I think, is in bias.
They have a bias, and this bias colors everything they think. We all have biases and they influence what we think and what we're willing to accept and even willing to ask. Jesus faced this issue. The Pharisees had a strong bias that he had to navigate, or at least try. He showed them, Jesus did, all the evidence and then some to prove that he was God.
And yet, did the Pharisees believe that Jesus was God? Not at all. They would have none of it. Jesus lived without sin. He taught the truth, he told the future, About his resurrection, and then he actually rose from the dead.
I mean, he performed miracle after miracle right in front of them, and they still absolutely refused to believe that he was God. Once after he had stilled the wind and waves just by the power of his spoken word, and he healed many who were sick, He even cast out demons from those who were demon-possessed. Matthew 934 says, The Pharisees said, He casts out demons by the ruler of the demons. This is just ridiculous. How could someone possessed by the ruler of the demons, or Satan, Live without sin, teach the truth, tell the future, perform miracle after miracle, help people left and right, and basically fulfill all that the prophets had spoken about him.
the prophets that the Pharisees were supposed to be expert in. They did not know the scriptures, and Jesus called them out on that time and time again.
Well, these Pharisees they were the professors of that age. And I think today the professors of our age are no less deceived in certain areas. Today, the area that they've chosen to ignore is the evidence for recent creation. And they use lots of bias when they assign ages, for example, to rocks and fossils. I've read a lot of technical papers, and these scientists tediously study all kinds of details of rock types.
Fossil types. They even get into the different types of pollen grains found inside these fossils, and they assign ages to the fossils and the rocks based on different correlations. All these correlations, though, always pin back to an evolutionary Timeline.
So, when I suggest that they get the ages wrong, these secular scientists, I'm not saying that they're bad scientists. They do good research in lots of detail analyses, but they filter all that through what they believe. An example of what I'm talking about comes from the process of thinking that they must go through whenever they find an out-of-place fossil. When I say that, I mean they expect a certain type of fossil. Certain type of animal to have lived and died in a certain evolutionary era or time zone.
But then, when they find a fossil that's outside of that, what do they do with it? They can admit that some of these creatures lived outside of their time range, but that sort of explodes the chart that's in the book that everyone has accepted. Or they can assign new ages to the rock. By the way, that's what they end up doing. The ages are very plastic, so they can reassign ages.
They did that recently to rock layers that I visited. in the summer of 2014. I remember going down to the Picketwire Canyon land in southern Colorado mid-August. It was H O T. I don't recommend going at that time, especially because in order to get to the dinosaur footprints you have to go six miles just to get there.
But I wanted to see the dinosaur footprints. And afterwards, I learned about them and the rock layers that hover over them, because it's down in this canyon, but you can see in the canyon walls, there's these. beautiful rock layers with sauropod tracks in them. They discovered, however, Triassic Now these are lower layers. It goes Triassic and then Jurassic, then Cretaceous.
So you've got. Jurassic Age Assignment to this one layer based on the fossil footprints. But then they have Triassic fossils found above the supposedly Jurassic dinosaur tracks.
Well, wait a minute, how do you get them in reverse order?
Well, here's how they solve the problem. Quote, because the wind-deposited rock layer, and I don't think it was wind-deposited, but anyway, I digress, in the Picketwire Canyon lands is overlain by deposits bearing in situ fossils of late Triassic age, it cannot be the Middle Jurassic and Trotus sandstone like we had identified it previously.
So the secular notion that each rock layer represents an age is what motivated these people to reassign the rocks. When we return, we'll hear some final words from Brian Thomas. Stay with us. What happened to the dinosaurs? Are monkeys and people the same?
Why do we live on Earth and not some other planet? Kids have some great questions about God's creation, but do you have the answers for them? At the Institute for Creation Research, our scientists and Bible scholars have produced The Guide to Creation Basics. This book contains full-colored images and fascinating commentary from experts in biology, geology, astronomy, and biblical study. Guide to Creation Basics can help teach your children how the animals could fit on Noah's Ark, how dinosaurs and humans could live at the same time, and how God's power and wisdom can be seen in something as small as a single cell.
Find basic answers to your child's biggest creation questions. Order your copy of Guide to Creation Basics from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting www.icr.org. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Brian Thomas. Welcome back and we are talking about Bias.
We're talking about how secular scientists have a real strong bias. It's like a bias against miracles. Like they've decided before they even examine or look at any evidence that miracles are not even possible. Basically, it's kind of an atheistic, like there is no God anywhere bias.
Well, what about the evidence for creation? Doesn't matter. We're biased against creation. What about miracles like a worldwide watery judgment? No, that couldn't have happened because it's a miracle.
You see? And then you ask them, what about the resurrection of Christ? No, no, people don't rise from the dead. That's not possible. And so it's a bias against miracles.
But if you look at the evidence for or against, if you evaluate the actual history, you'll find in each case, whether it's creation, the flood, or the resurrection, or any number of other biblical miracles, you'll find that the evidence is powerful.
So there's another example I wanted to point out of the bias and how it comes out. In 2012, scientists reported three-toed tracks in rocks from Washington State.
Well, other scientists had used different methods to assign an age of like Cenozoic.
So they assign an age of only a handful of millions of years to these rocks. But that means the three-toed tracks. have to come from animals that evolutionists believe were alive, In that Cenozoic timeframe, which to them post-dates the supposed age of reptiles millions of years prior to that, in their view. Since the authors of the 2012 study were confident that dinosaurs had all died out before these Washington state rocks formed, then they said, ah, these three toad tracks must be from a giant flightless bird. That's what made the tracks.
Now, this is a little bit odd, really odd, because only a handful of giant bird tracks have ever been discovered, but billions of dinosaur tracks occur worldwide. It's also interesting that these same scientists wrote and admitted that if they had found these same tracks in supposedly dinosaur rocks, that they would immediately have identified them as three-toed dinosaur tracks.
So in this case, the observations about the secular age assignments to the rocks, that's what motivated their identification of these tracks as being from a bird instead of from a dinosaur. You know, it should not be that way. Real science should proceed with them examining the anatomy of the tracks to see if it fits a bird or a dinosaur. But they didn't use anatomy. They used their beliefs about the age assignments instead.
So that's an example of how bias comes out in the literature. One geologist actually admitted it, he said, geologists themselves must take much of the responsibility for the dissemination of this concept. And he's talking about the sudden worldwide dinosaur extinction. Because they have often defined the end of the age of reptiles. as the exact time that dinosaurs became extinct.
Ergo, reasoning in a tight circle, dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Mesozoic time.
So, in other words, secular thinking does not necessarily derive millions of years. From the data. From the rocks or from the fossils. But secular thinking with this evolutionary bias and this bias against miracles. It imposes vast lengths of time on the rocks and fossils.
and they even resort to circular reasoning sometimes in order to do this. You know, the Lord Jesus faced strong bias. John 10:31 through 33 says this: Then the Jews took up stones to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works I have shown you from my Father. For which of these works do you stone me?
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy, and because you, being a man, make yourself God.
So the religious Jews reasoned that although Jesus claimed to be God, as a mere man, he could not possibly be God, therefore he should suffer the death penalty for blasphemy.
Well, their bias against the possibility of God coming to earth as a man Listen. Not the evidence for or against Christ as being God, steered them toward rejecting the truth of his divinity. And so we have this same feature of bias steering secular scientists to believe. Anything? That's not biblical.
It's like an anti-Bible bias.
So as Christians, we should not succumb to that type of thinking. We believe the scripture, science supports the scripture, the history that's in the scripture, as well as the gospel that's in the same scripture. Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org. For over 45 years, ICR has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible's accuracy and authority by showing how science supports the Genesis creation account.
Our scientists research the evidence for creation and communicate their findings through books, articles, DVD series, and conferences. Please visit our website at icr.org for more information about the latest scientific discoveries, to subscribe to our free magazine and devotional, and to locate our next creation conference at a venue near you. All of this and more at icr.org. If you've enjoyed this podcast, subscribe to Science, Scripture, and Salvation on iTunes. Also, do us a favor and rate and review the show so that more listeners can find us.
Thanks for listening and God bless.
