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.
Joining us on today's show is Dr. Tim Clary, geologist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Clarity. Today we're going to talk about the true age of the Hawaiian Islands.
If you study the secular textbooks, they'll talk about the Hawaiian islands, you know, vary between 5 million years old to about modern, 1 million years old, 2 million years old, all these different things. Are they really that old? Let's look at what the rocks really show. And what the geology actually does imply is that the Hawaiian Islands were much, much younger than they're portrayed to be. Hawaiian islands themselves form because there seem to be some sort of a hotspot.
And that's what the secular world has described as a mantle plume that comes up from deep in the Earth's mantle that kind of spews out a lot of anomalously high amounts of basaltic lava, very thin, watery type lava that pours out across the land. And this is often called Pahoya Hoya lava in Hawaii. That's where the term came from. But it's also found in Iceland. It's found in places across the continents, wherever you have this basaltic black lava that pours out.
It's generally not very explosive, it just kind of pours out in almost rivers of lava. But these rivers of lava built up very, very quickly. I feel in the course of the flood. And so I don't really believe the age dates that they come up with for Hawaii saying they're five million years old, three million years old, because the geology doesn't support those dates. And those dates are always based on assumptions that we can't verify.
They assume that they can project dates, things they measure now, back for millions of years in the past. And there's no way to go back in time and see these things, but God has revealed to us through His Word. He's revealed to us that there was a flood, there was a global flood, and that much of the geology we see, including the geology of the Hawaiian Islands, all formed during the flood.
So we have one witness. And unfortunately, the secular world ignores that and tosses God's word out and doesn't believe the historical accuracy of His Word. But if you believe His Word, you see a lot about Hawaii showing it's very, very young. The plates of the earth are kind of Bust it up. into 20 or so plates.
There's about seven major plates of the earth. This includes the crust and the uppermost part of the mantle. And they seem to move around and jostled around. Most of these seem to have broken and formed during the flood period itself when the fountains of the deep broke open. And so you have these plates that started to move very rapidly during the flood.
And as the Pacific plate was forming, which is today one of the largest plates, as the Pacific Plate was forming, Somewhere along late in the time of the movement of the plate you started these Hawaiian islands forming. and they started popping up, making this big trail of volcanoes across the ocean. And so geologists can map out this trail almost like a trail of breadcrumbs that are older working their way to the youngest. But The secular world says these are millions of years old, but again, we will examine what the geology really shows and You'll see there's a different answer to this.
So the plates today are moving a few centimeters per year, but during the flood period we believe this the rocks and the earth supports the plates were moving much more rapidly at meters per second.
So you're looking at yards per second of movement, a vast difference in velocity during the flood and then now what we see today is really just residual movement. The Hawaiian islands seem to have formed in what's again what's called the Hawaiian hot spot, where this mantle plume, this melt material, high plume of high heat, almost like a candle, burned up through the crust. And as the plate moved over that mantle, it burned a hole increasingly moving along as that plate moved.
So the older volcanoes are moved further and further away from the current hotspot.
So today the current hotspot sits over the big island. That's where all the activity is. But in the past, it was underneath the other islands, but the plates have moved off that and moved these volcanoes away.
So if you look at a map today, you can see the Hawaiian Islands and then they trail off into the Hawaiian Ridge, which are mostly seamounts below the surface of the ocean and all the way up to the Emperor Ridge. It runs all the way up almost to the Aleutians.
So there's a long history here during the flood of when these Hawaiian islands formed, and today we just see the end result.
So Hawaii is in the kind of in the middle of the ring of fire. You hear about the ring of fire around the Pacific. There's trenches and subduction zones all the way around in every direction. And so Hawaii is susceptible to tsunamis from any of those areas, but it's also susceptible to earthquakes in itself because the Mebuna magma underneath that hotspot sometimes creates sizable earthquakes on the ranges of fives and sixes on the Richter scale. But keep in mind Hawaii is not a subduction zone volcano.
It's totally different chemistry So it's not explosive like Mount St. Helens, that doesn't explode and and kill thousands of people potentially. Hawaiian islands are the only islands where you can actually go to the island when it's erupting and watch it erupt. whereas most volcanoes like Pompeii or Mount Vesuvius and the destroyed Pompeii or Mount St. Helens, those you run away from.
You want to be miles and miles away. The Hawaiian Islands generally are not very explosive and because the difference in chemistry and the difference in the plate setting of where where is a hotspot versus a subduction zone volcano. We're going to take a short break. Dr. Clary will have more on this important topic in a moment.
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Here's Dr. Clary. We've been talking about the Hawaiian Islands, how the secular world says that they're millions of years old, but yet the geology we're going to talk about here shortly shows that they're only thousands of years old and fit exactly with what the Bible says. But when they come up with these age dates, you know, who can argue with them?
Well, let's take a look. There's two worldviews we have to worry about. One is if we believe that God's word is truth, we believe that the earth was made in six days. And there was a global flood. Whereas the secular world believes something called uniformitarianism, where they think everything continues as it always has.
Just like they see today.
So they project these really slow plate movement rates into the past for millions and millions of years.
So they believe the Hawaiian islands are millions of years old, partly for that reason and partly because of their age dates, which, as we talked about in our first segment, Are based on a lot of assumptions that can't be verified.
So we're gonna assume that God's Word is truth and look at the Hawaiian Islands. What do we really see? We're going to embrace the historical record. creation scientists like myself, we believe that God's word is true. And the evolutionary scientists, they reject that historical record and they have to substitute in speculation and assumptions instead.
So let's look at three clues to the age of the Hawaiian Islands that we can observe. If you go there, if you get a chance to go there and go to the Hawaiian Islands, you can look around and look for these three things. One is waterfalls. There's lots and lots of waterfalls on all the islands across Hawaii.
Well, how do waterfalls fit in? We'll talk about that in just a minute. The second thing, we're going to talk about the extensive lava layers. Layers on top of layers, on top of layers, top of layers. And that also has implications for the age of these lavas.
And finally, we look at erosion rates. To me, this is the most compelling information that's been tabulated since around 1900. The erosion rates on Hawaii tell us a lot about the age of the Hawaiian islands and how they cannot be millions of years old.
So let's look at waterfalls a little bit. But again, we're gonna assume the Bible is true. And that the rocks are real. We can actually go touch the rocks.
So, we're going to look at these rocks and see what the rocks really show. And again, the first thing is the waterfalls. If you looked at waterfalls on Hawaii, you go to any of the islands you want, you'll see waterfalls where the water drops off these cliffs, these sharp, steep areas across Hawaii. And if the Hawaiian Islands are really millions of years old, They should actually be smoothed out. There shouldn't be any of these big steps, like going down a series of steps.
They should all be smooth. more like a ramp. And as geologists, the psychogeologists have studied landforms for many, many years. The older, more mature landforms always seem to be smoothed by erosion. whereas all the Hawaiian islands still show extensive amounts of cliffs and waterfalls, implying that they're actually youthful and not as old as they're made out to be.
You can observe waterfalls across the islands of Kauai. You can see in the backdrop of Jurassic Park, they show some of the Hawaiian islands. You can see these waterfalls going down. You can go to the Big Island, you can look at lots of different volcanoes there. Akaka Falls is one of the biggest falls there.
And it just drops off. and goes down hundreds of feet from a cliff all the way straight down. Also all these cliffs shouldn't really be there. The next thing is the extensive layers of lava. We see layer upon layer upon layer of lava, with no evidence of erosion in between.
We see no evidence of V-shaped valleys and gouges and gorges carved in between each layer upon layer. If these layers are really deposited thousands of years apart or millions of years apart, as the secular world implies, there should be extensive erosion in between. If we go to Waimea Canyon, for example, in Kauai, you can look out across this vast area and see lava layer upon lava layer upon lava layer as if they were deposited just like bricks in a building, one right on top of each other with very little time in between. Where are all the gorges? Where are all the rivers?
Where are all the cuts? You can go to Makaha Valley and the Big Island. See the same thing. Drive all around Hawaii, you'll see layers of lava. This is similar to what we see in the Grand Canyon.
We see layer upon layer upon layer of sediment with no evidence of erosion in between, flat planar deposits that go across vast areas of the island, and just like we see flat planar deposits across vast areas of the Grand Canyon. implying these things were deposited very, very rapidly. The sect of the world tries to say in the Grand Canyon there's twelve million years between layers, but yet they see perfectly flat layers in between, no evidence of erosion.
So the same thing is true in Hawaii. We Can actually see modern erosion taking place on modern eruptions, eruptions that happened in the 1990s, for example, that went across the roads in the Big Island. We see immediately those lavas are breaking up, plants are growing, erosions occurring within just a few decades. Where's all that erosion when you look at the lava layers? It's not there.
So it implies that there was very, very rapid layer upon layer upon layer of lava that poured out very quickly, just like the Bible says: the islands form quickly during the flood. Our third and final thing are the erosion rates. The erosion rates have been studied since 1900. And over seventy percent of the beaches across Kauai, Oahu and Maui are eroding at up to six feet per year, averaging 0.4 feet per year.
So if you have 0.4 feet per year, it doesn't seem like a lot, but if you multiply that by a million years, you get 76 miles. Seventy-six miles would wipe out almost all the islands of Hawaii.
So the islands are claimed to be millions of years old based on age dates. But the geology doesn't support that. The geology with the waterfalls and the cliffs that are still there, the extensive lava layers with no erosion in between, and the erosion rates we're seeing today imply the Hawaiian Islands are very, very young. If they're only 4,500 years old, like the Bible tells us, The islands should only have about a third of a mile of erosion, so they should still be there.
So fortunately, the Bible is true. Fortunately, the Hawaiian Islands are still there. Still a place we can go visit. And the erosion rates tell us that the Hawaiian Islands are, in fact, very, very young. Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research.
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