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. Heber. In December 2016, the journal Science and Nature Published articles commemorating the 40th anniversary of a paper that is very important to secular scientists.
And this paper is titled Variations in the Earth's Orbit: The Pacemaker of the Ice Ages. And this was published in the journal Science. in December of nineteen seventy six. There is very strong geological evidence for an ice age. Creation scientists would argue there was just one ice age and that it was the result of the Genesis flood.
Now, of course, uniformitarian scientists reject the flood out of hand, as the Apostle Peter said they would in the third chapter of his second epistle. And of course, they reject the testimony of Scripture, and they try to explain the water-deposited rocks and the fossils within them. As being something other than the result of the flood, they claim this is evidence of millions of years.
Well, if they reject the flood as an explanation for the ice age, they have to come up with some other explanation. And they've got dozens of theories, but the one that is dominant right now is called the Milankovitch or astronomical theory. And the basic idea is that the Earth's orbital and rotational motions slowly change over time. And you have the change in the tilt of the Earth's axis, the Earth's axis is wobbling, the shape of the Earth's orbit is slowly changing. And these changes result in variations in the way that the sunlight is distributed on the Earth with season and latitude.
And supposedly, when you have more of this summer sunlight falling on the high northern ice sheets, they melt, you get a warm period. And then when there's less of that summer sunlight, the ice sheets melt and you have a warmer period. And so, in a nutshell, this is what this Milankovitch theory posits. And you expect there are going to be these orbital cycles of about 100,000, 41,000, and 23,000 years, or approximately those length cycles.
Now, even though this is a very popular theory, there's lots of things about it that don't make sense. For one thing, these are very small changes in sunlight. It's hard to see how that could really affect the climate. There's also a change in the length of the climate cycles from 41,000 years to 100,000 years, about 900,000 years ago, and there's no real apparent cause for that, even in secular thinking.
So there's a lot of things about this theory that don't make sense. But the one thing that it has going for it is that they've done these analyses of seafloor sediments and specifically chemical wiggles within the seafloor sediments. They can make measurements of a number that they call the oxygen isotope ratio. And we're not going to get bogged down in the technical details here, but basically, they think it's a climate indicator.
So, when you have high values of this oxygen isotope ratio within the seafloor sediments, that's thought to indicate an ice age. And when you have lower values, that's supposed to indicate warmer periods.
So, they did this analysis of this oxygen isotope ratio within these two. Sediment cores from the Indian Ocean, and they analyzed these with something called spectral analysis. And when they did that, they found evidence of climate cycles of about 100,000, 42,000, and 23,000 years, which agrees pretty well with those orbital cycles that you get from this Milankovitch theory.
So, this was seen as being very strong evidence for the Milankovitch theory.
Now, before they could do this, however, They had to assign tentative time scales to the seafloor sediment cores. Remember, they've extracted these two cores from the ocean floor in the southern Indian Ocean, and then they make these measurements.
Now, it's not easy for them to do these time scales because, as a general rule, you can't use radioactive dating to date the seafloor sediments.
So, they had to use a backdoor approach to get this to work.
So what they did do is was they used radioisotope dating to measure the age of volcanic rocks that recorded the most recent flip or reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. Creation scientists agree that the Earth's magnetic field has flipped in the past, but we believe those reversals where the Earth's magnetic poles flipped or traded places that those are associated with the Genesis flood and the aftermath of the flood. But nevertheless, they claim that these occurred many, many hundreds of thousands of years ago and even millions of years ago.
Well, they assigned an age of 700,000 years to this most recent flip. Of the magnetic field, which they call the Brunhes-Maduyama magnetic reversal.
Well, it turns out that you have magnetic minerals in seafloor sediments, and they had a long core from the western Pacific Ocean. It showed that same reversal at a depth of 12 meters below the surface.
So they transferred that age of 700,000 years to that depth of 12 meters, and then they used that age to help assign ages to the two Indian Ocean cores that were used in the pacemaker analysis. That is the background to this pacemaker paper. And in the second segment, we'll discuss some very serious problems with this paper and the implications for that.
Now it's time for a short break. We'll hear more from Dr. Hebert in a moment. From sharks to butterflies, bats to orangutans, we can't help but marvel at the stunning and amusing creatures God has made. If you and your kids enjoy learning about animals, then you'll love our book, Guide to Animals, with its beautiful full-color images and fascinating facts.
Published by the Institute for Creation Research, Guide to Animals provides answers to many popular questions about the animal kingdom. How do chameleons change colors? How do jellyfish live without a brain? And what happened to the dinosaurs and other extinct animals? Guide to Animals shows how everything that can slither, crawl, soar, or swim displays the handiwork of God.
Order your copy of Guide to Animals from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. That's 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert.
In the first segment, we discussed the background of a very important paper that has been celebrated by secular scientists. It recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. This paper was called The Pacemaker of the Ice Ages. And this paper seemed to confirm this particular ice age theory called the Milankovitch or Astronomical Ice Age theory. But as we hinted at at the end of that last segment, there's some very serious problems with this paper.
First, the data seemed to have changed over the years. It's hard to find the original unaltered data that they used in this paper, but you do have data from these two sediment cores from the Indian Ocean, and there's subtle differences between the data. If you look in the pacemaker paper, there's differences in the data that were shown in that paper and then later versions of the data. Most of the changes are trivial, but there are a few that are not. The second big problem is that they excluded nearly a third of all the data from the second seafloor sediment core.
And other secular scientists have since politely challenged that. That really wasn't entirely fair because if you're doing a test of the Milankovitch theory, you should use all the available data.
However, the biggest problem with this paper Is that 25 years ago they changed the age of this Brunhas-Maduyama magnetic reversal? And they revised it to 780,000 years.
Now, remember, the age they used for the pacemaker paper was just 700,000 years.
So that means that for 25 years, this paper has been invalid by their own reckoning.
So the only question is, it's going to change the results. The only question is, will it change the results enough to really mess up and invalidate the results of the paper? It's obviously going to change it a little bit, but is it going to change it enough to call into question the results of the paper?
So what I did was I redid the calculations. And the first thing I had to do was I had to reconstruct the data because the original unaltered data. I could not find them anywhere. I've done many searches on data archives trying to find the data and could not find them.
So what I had to do was I had to reconstruct the data from two figures in the pacemaker paper. And that means I had to basically obtain over 600 data points. By reading them very carefully off these graphs. Then I went ahead and replicated the original results. And when I did that, I found that I was able to reproduce their results very well.
And then I went back and redid the calculations after taking into account that revision to the age of the magnetic reversal. And when you do that, the net effect is that the time scales that get assigned to those cores get stretched by about 11 to 13%. And what that means is that the climate cycles also get stretched by 11 to 13 percent.
So that means that originally results that before were in good agreement with Milankovitch expectations are no longer in agreement. They've been knocked out of alignment with the expectations of the theory. This has really sort of knocked these results out of alignment with Milankovitch expectations. You know, I tried to be charitable. I tried different age models.
I did some fishing expeditions to see if I could get results that would be more favorable to the Milankovitch theory if I played around with the numbers. And as a general result, those results were not favorable to the Milankovitch theory either.
Now, what's interesting is I have never been able to find a single solitary acknowledgement of this problem in the secular literature. I've done all kinds of searches and I just can't find them. And it's possible that many of these secular scientists are not aware of the problem, although I suspect that some of them probably do know that, although I think the rank and file probably don't.
Now, what's interesting is they made this revision because they were trying to get chemical wiggles in other cores to agree with the Milankovitch theory.
So it's kind of ironic. They ended up invalidating their own results because they were trying to get other results in agreement with the Milankovitch theory. Mm-hmm.
Now for Christians, this is a big deal because they use the Milankovitch theory to assign ages to seafloor sediments and ice cores, and they even use it to calibrate one of their radioisotope dating methods, what they call argon-argon dating.
So if the foundation for this Milankovitch theory is shaky, then that really is problematic for their dating methods.
Furthermore, the Milankovitch theory is making a subtle contribution to climate change alarmism.
So the fact that this paper is no longer valid is one more reason to question some of these hyped concerns about the climate change issue. 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.
