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 hear from Dr. Jake Hebert, physicist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert. In 2010, the BioLogos Foundation published an article written by geologists Greg Davidson and Ken Wilgomuth titled Christian Geologist on Noah's Flood.
Biblical and scientific shortcomings of flood geology. And so, in this article, they presented what they considered to be four very powerful arguments for an old earth.
Now, the first three arguments we don't think are all that persuasive, but the fourth one was a little bit challenging. Basically, in order to explain this, we have to give some background material. Secular scientists had drilled these cores into the bed of a Japanese lake. It's called Lake Sugetsu. Within that core, you see these bands or laminations, these banding patterns.
And the banding patterns consist of this gray clay, but you've also got these diatom layers, where diatoms are a kind of algae. And the diatoms tend to be whitish in color.
So you've got these white and gray banding patterns that show up.
Well, the typical assumption with these couplets is that you have one per year. If you assume that it's one per year, that's what you call a varv. And varves are a favorite argument for many old earthers to try to argue for an old earth because you often have many tens of thousands of varves in some locations.
Well, this Japanese lake had a lot of these banding patterns within them. And if you assume that they're all annual, you're looking at a lot of time, more than is allowed by the biblical time scale. In this article, this BioLogos article, they claimed that they had counted 100,000 varves or annual layers in this core, this sediment core from this Japanese lake.
Well, it turns out that's a bit of an exaggeration, as we'll see here a little bit later. But scientists from ICR and Answers in Genesis have responded, and creation scientists have posted some responses to this over the years. But there's one particular aspect of their argument that I don't think we had really responded to terribly forcefully up till now. But we've recently done, myself, Dr. Tim Clary here at ICR, and Dr.
Andrew Snelling in Answers in Genesis, we've recently wrote a paper titled, Do VARVs, Tree Rings, and Radiocarbon Measurements Prove an Old Earth? refuting a popular argument by old earth geologists Greg Davidson and Ken Woolgomuth.
Well, getting back to the Japanese lake, one of the cores that they extracted from this Japanese lake was 246 feet long. And as I said, they had these banding patterns, which were thought to represent annual layers. Woolgamuth and Davidson presented a twist to their argument. It's not just the usual argument for VARVs. Scientists found fossilized leaves, twigs, and Insects, and they took those fossils and they radiocarbon dated them.
And so you had quite a few of these. And what Davidson and Woolgameth did is they presented graphs that seemed to show very good agreement between the calendar ages assigned to the VARVs and the amount of radiocarbon that was measured in those fossils within the VARVs. And so it looks like there's very good agreement. Basically, they had calendar ages out to about 50,000 years on a horizontal axis, and they had what they called measured radiocarbon on a vertical axis. And the measured radiocarbon, in a way, was standing in for the radiocarbon ages.
And the graph makes it look like there's very good agreement between the counted ages for these VARVs and the radiocarbon ages. And so Davidson and Woolgamuth argued that this proved the Earth had to be at least 50,000 years old. The question is: can creation scientists plausibly answer that objection? And it's the second. Part of the argument that took a little bit of doing for us to forcefully respond to it.
And so we'll come back to that and we'll talk about this in our second segment. Let's take a short break. 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 Dr. Hebert.
Well, in our first segment, we discussed a popular old earth argument involving these banding patterns that you see within the lake bed of a Japanese lake. In fact, this is a very popular argument among old earthers. You see, it pops up all over the internet. It's one of their favorite arguments. And there's really two parts to the argument.
First, you have what seemed to be a very large number of supposedly annual layers in the sediments for this Japanese lake. And there's apparently very good agreement between the radiocarbon ages and the calendar ages that they assigned to these quote-unquote varves.
So how do we answer that?
Well, there's two aspects to this argument. First, what about the number of these banding patterns? Can we account for that? The key is the post-flood ice age. These diatoms use silica to construct their skeletons.
And there are factors that can cause you to have more than one period of diatom growth per year, where these diatoms can grow very rapidly. Anything that tends to increase the amount of silica in the lake water is going to tend to spur diatom growth. And there's a couple of factors that can do that. One is volcanic ash, and the other is windblown dust.
Well, guess what? You would have both of those things during the post-flood ice age. And our best guess for the length of that ice age is about 700 years. A big part of the flood ice age model is that you had a lot of residual volcanic activity after the flood. And so this volcanic activity is going to sporadically occur for hundreds of years after the flood.
You're going to have a lot of volcanic ash. And toward the end of the ice age, in particular, we think that things dried out and you had very windy conditions. And you had a lot of windblown dust. And there's actually evidence within the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica for much higher amounts of dust. The concentrations of dust in the ice cores, and what we call the ice age parts of those cores, is much higher than in the upper parts.
So we think we've got a plausible mechanism for accounting for a lot of these diatom blooming periods, if you will, that don't necessarily have to be annual. We weren't there when this happened, but we think this is a plausible explanation that can account for this. It turns out also that Davidson and Woolgamuth exaggerated the actual number of counted varbs quite a bit. In one part of their paper, they say they counted 100,000.
Well, that's not really true. It turns out that the secular scientists estimated 100,000 varves, but that was because they assumed a constant sedimentation rate in parts where they could not clearly distinguish these layering patterns. In fact, it turns out it wasn't even 50,000. If you read carefully the original paper that Davidson and Woolgamoth cited, the actual counted number was 29,100. And there are other papers that acknowledge that they often had to interpolate because they could not clearly distinguish the varves.
So the true number of actual counted banding patterns was probably somewhere between maybe 15 and 25 or maybe 15 and 30,000. That's still a lot, but it's nowhere near 100,000 or even 50,000. And we've got a plausible mechanism for accounting for that during the Ice Age. But what about the second part? Of the argument.
This is the part of the argument that really gave their article its force. And we've actually received reports that Dr. Woolgamuth would show up at creation conferences and confront the creation speaker, basically demanding that the speaker explain how you can have this fantastic agreement between the radiocarbon ages and the VARV ages if the Earth is actually just 6,000 years old.
Well, we're a little chagrined that it took us this long to really forcefully respond to this part of their argument, but we are happy to do so. It turns out we did some digging. We really went and looked at those papers that they used, and there's a lot of problems with the argument that Davidson and Wilgamuth make. First, their varv chronology for this Japanese lake is what is called a floating chronology. That means they did not actually know the age for the first clearly distinguishable varv.
That's because the sediments were disturbed at the top of the core, so they had to get that number by something other than simple counting. Their first number that they assigned was 8,830. It wasn't one like you would expect from simple counting.
Well, how do you obtain an age of 8,830 if you skipped the first 8,829 integers?
Well, it turns out what they did was they experimented with different chronologies. And they pick the one that would give the best agreement between a radiocarbon calibration curve, which is used to convert apparent radiocarbon ages into what are thought to be true calendar ages.
Now, by the way, the very fact that secular scientists have a calibration curve is an indication that radiocarbon dating is a little more complicated than most people think. And so it turns out the ages assigned to the VARVs were not obtained by simple counting. That's the first problem. In fact, even after they did this, if you look at the radiocarbon ages and the varv ages, they don't actually agree. If you plot them on a graph, you have these two lines, if you will, that are kind of parallel and they track pretty well with one another.
But if you look at the error bars, there's actually a formal disagreement between the radiocarbon ages and the varv ages. But because of the way that Davidson and Woolgamuth plotted this on their graph, that important fact was obscured. There's some other problems. For one thing, they seem to have mistaken a radiocarbon calibration curve for actual data. There's some other mistakes in there as well.
But the bottom line is when you look at the details of this argument, this paper is not nearly as formidable as it initially appears. And so we're glad to be able to answer this argument, which many old earthers have for a long time thought was. An unanswerable argument for an old earth. 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.
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