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.
Today's episode features Dr. Jake Hebert, physicist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert. One of the arguments that is often made for an old earth is that you have all these different dating methods that seem to agree with one another and seem to give ages of millions and billions of years.
And that at first glance does look like a strong argument for an old earth. But what we're going to see here is that there are lots of contradictions in these dating methods. Before we get into that, however, we need to remind ourselves that science cannot tell us the age of the earth. And the reason for that is that whenever you make an age estimate, This estimate is actually a calculated number that's based on assumptions about the past. Age is not something that you can measure in the laboratory.
These are calculated ages, and those ages are only as good as the assumptions behind them.
Now, creation scientists and secular scientists have very different starting assumptions, and so naturally, they're going to reach different conclusions about the ages of things. Really, the best way to establish the age of something is by reliable eyewitness testimony, and of course, that is what the Bible claims to be: it's the eyewitness testimony of the Creator Himself. We can see this just in our own everyday experience when we think about our own age as an individual. How old are you? You know the answer to that question, but the reason you know is because you were told by your parents and because you have a birth certificate.
If you didn't have that, it could be very difficult to estimate your own age, let alone the age of something else, or something like the age of the earth.
So those are things that you have to keep in mind when we're talking about this issue about these clocks that are used to try to date the age of things and the age of the earth itself.
Now, within the secular reckoning, there is a general agreement between a lot of these dating methods, but that's because the dates are being made to agree. There's a lot of circular reasoning going on. And one example of this that I harp on a lot because it's something that I've been working on involves the way that the secular scientists assign ages to the deep seafloor sediments on the ice cores. They assume that these seafloor sediments were deposited slowly and gradually over millions of years. And they have this theory called the Milankovitch theory.
It's basically their ice age theory, where they claim that ice ages are triggered or paced by these changes in the way the sunlight falling on the earth is distributed with season and latitude. And so they have this theory and they use That theory to assign ages to the seafloor sediments by a technique that they call orbital tuning. And so you can make these chemical measurements within the seafloor sediments. And if you plot them on a graph, you see what look like all these wiggles as you go down a sediment core. But what they do is they can assign ages to those chemical wiggles, but the way they do it in effect is where they're stretching and compressing different parts of that signal to make it agree with this Milankovitch theory.
So they're assuming millions of years and they're assuming that this Milankovitch theory is true. And then they're using that to assign ages to the deep seafloor sediments. Then they use those ages for the sediments to help assign ages to the ice cores. And then they will take the ages for the ice cores and the ages for the seafloor sediments and use those to help assign ages to other cores, other sediment and ice cores.
So all these ages are tied together via sort of a complicated web. And they even use this Milankovitch theory to calibrate one of their radioactive dating techniques. On one hand, I guess you could argue maybe it's not that surprising that these dates often seem to agree with one another.
So we see that there's a lot of circular reasoning going on, and that gives them an advantage when they're trying to assign ages. But what we're going to see here in the next segment is that contradictions still exist, but you often have to delve into the literature to find them.
Now it's time for a short break. We'll hear more from Dr. Hebert in a moment. Dinosaurs are fascinating creatures. Seeing their fossils inspires a sense of awe and wonder that sparks the imagination.
We're learning more about them all the time, but many questions still remain: Are dinosaurs really millions of years old? Did they live at the same time as humans? How do they fit with the Bible? And why are they extinct today? The Institute for Creation Research addresses these questions and more in their full color and easy-to-read book, Guide to Dinosaurs.
Guide to Dinosaurs delves into the history of dinosaurs, fossil discoveries, dinosaur kinds, and what the Bible has to say about these mysterious creatures. It serves as a helpful resource for parents and kids alike. Order your copy of Guide to Dinosaurs from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. That's 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. Mm.
Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert. In our previous segment, we talked about how the secular scientists will often tie ages from one dating method to another. And that sort of explains how you get a lot of times these ages that seem to agree with one another.
But when you dig into the literature, what you find is that there are contradictions. For instance, I wrote a paper for the Answers Research Journal that was published in 2014 about this orbital tuning method that we talked about in the previous segment. And it was entitled Circular Reasoning and the Dating of Deep Seafloor Sediments and Ice Cores, the Orbital Tuning Method. And in there, I document from the secular literature contradictions between the methods.
Now, these are relatively subtle contradictions, but if you look at the error bars they have on their measurements, there are contradictions and they're there. And the secular sciences acknowledge them, but because they're in the technical literature, most people don't know about them. If all you read are the popular science articles in the popular science magazines, you're not going to find out about this. Very rarely are these contradictions discussed in the popular level articles.
Sometimes these contradictions are just ignored even when they're quite significant. Hmm. For those of you who have been keeping up with the research that we do at the Institute for Creation Research, many of you know that I spent a lot of time examining a really important paper to secular scientists called Variations in the Earth's Orbit: The Pacemaker of the Ice Ages. And this was a paper that was published in 1976 that seemed to confirm their Milankovitch Ice Age theory. But when you really dig into the literature and you carefully read the details, it turns out that those results, which seemed to confirm their Milankovitch theory, their astronomical theory for these ice ages, that proof, if you will, that confirmation depended on an assumed age of 700,000 years for the most recent flip or reversal of the Earth's magnetic field.
Well, it turns out the secular scientists themselves no longer accept that age as valid. They now claim that this reversal occurred 780,000 years ago. The obvious question is: what would happen if you were to go back and Redo the calculations.
Well, it messes up the results. It seems like the secular science community is just totally ignoring this. In fact, they recently just celebrated the 40th anniversary of this paper. You get the impression, reading what the secular scientists write, that many of them are not even aware. Of this problem in this paper.
So you often have lots of little contradictions, but you also have very big contradictions as well.
Now, let me remind you again: science cannot prove the age of the Earth. When you make an age estimate, you are basically using a calculated number based on assumptions about the past. And as I've noted before, creation scientists and secular scientists have different starting assumptions. We have different assumptions about the rates and the initial conditions, and so we come up with different answers.
So, how do you tell who's right? You know, I can make one set of assumptions and get one set of numbers. You can make another set of assumptions and get another set of numbers. How do you tell who's right?
Well, logically, the right way to do this is to do what you call an internal critique. Where you take your opponent's starting assumptions and show that they lead to a logical contradiction. And we do this a lot in the creation science literature. There's lots of indications of youthfulness, even when you make assumptions that are generous to secular science or to these uniformitarian assumptions that they make. For instance, uniformitarians, that is secular scientists who basically deny creation in the flood, they claim.
Based on their uniformitarian assumptions, that things like coal, oil, natural gas, dinosaur bones, diamond, those are all millions and billions of years old.
Well, if they really are millions or billions of years old, there shouldn't be any detectable what we call radiocarbon in them or carbon-14, which is a radioactive form of carbon. And well, guess what? We do find radiocarbon in these specimens, so there's a contradiction between what they're claiming. We've shown that their uniformitarian assumptions lead to a contradiction. Likewise, we find original biomolecules within dinosaur bones.
Even though these biomolecules, these proteins, blood vessels, red blood cells, things of that nature, these are fragile and they should not be able to survive for millions of years under reasonable conditions.
So, again, we have another contradiction with their uniformitarian assumptions. We even see this in astronomy. There's lots of indications of youthfulness in astronomy. For instance, spiral galaxies. These galaxies that kind of look like pinwheels, the material toward the center of the galaxy rotates faster than the material on the outer edges.
And so the galaxy, this spiral galaxy, winds up, and in a few hundred million years or so, it should no longer be recognizable as a spiral galaxy. Uniformitarian science claims that these galaxies are billions of years old, yet if they really are, we should not be able to observe their spiral structure.
So, again, there's another contradiction. You've got lots of examples of this. There are even indicators about how quickly mutations are accumulating in the human genome that also contradict this idea that the human race is millions of years old. And recently, Dr. Tim Clary made some arguments that there are features, geological features, about the Hawaiian islands that strongly indicate they cannot be millions of years old.
So, there are all these clues out there that indicate youthfulness. And we see that even if you assume uniformitarianism, there are lots of contradictions with these old Earth clocks. If you'd like to learn more about this, we invite you to check out the resources at our website at the Institute for Creation Research, www.icr.org. Thank you for joining. 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.
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