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 Dr. Tim Clary, geologist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Clary. Today, we're going to be talking about discovering the pre-flood world and discuss a little bit about what we can learn from the geology about what the pre-flood world might have looked like.
There's been a lot of speculation over the years about the pre-flood world, but very few of it has actually been based on the rocks.
So, we're going to talk today about what the rocks really show and what the pre-flood world might have looked like. A lot of people wonder about The flood in general, they hear a lot of things that was just a local flood. Was the flood real? Was it global? And the research that I'm doing at the Institute for Creation Research is actually showing that the flood was global, that the continents were seeing the same things happening on each continent as you go around the world at the same time.
God says in Psalm one hundred nineteen one hundred sixty Thy word is true from the beginning. And Jesus himself said in John 17:17, thy word is truth.
So today we're going to see that the flood was real, that God's word really is true. The Secular World calls these mega sequences by American Indian tribal names. The the Native American names, they use the words like Sauk and Tippecanoe, Kaskaskia, and those types of names for the mega sequences. But we all agree there were floods of the world. They were happening at the same time.
They just don't believe the whole world ever flooded. But yet, the evidence is there. The evidence is strong that the whole world did flood, just like the Bible says. If we look at the history of the flood itself, God tells us that the flood lasted a little bit over a year. And there are no real geologic ages at all.
We just use these names, like the Sauk and Tipic, New Kaskaskia, to represent. Yeah. Rock layers. And so the rock layers are deposited, you know, one on top of another over the course of this flood year. But we see they kind of came in packages almost like tsunami waves.
These mega-sequences are like huge pulses of sediment that came in and then backed off a little bit and then went in again and went in again. And it appears the first five kept getting higher and higher and higher. And then that last sequence, the sixth sequence, the Tejas it's called seems to be the receding water stage of the flood. But all that happened in a year. There's no evidence of time in between.
So my research is data-driven. We look at the Bible as truth and then observable data, looking at oil wells and columns and stratigraphic information from actual rocks in the field or wells drilled in the ground by oil companies. And I've looked at North America particularly. I've got over 700 columns now across the United States, across Canada and Mexico, and even in Greenland, around the edges of Greenland. looking at different rock layers and mapping out these mega sequences and seeing what the extent of these mega sequences.
And what we always see, and this is what the evolutionists will tell us, is we always see the earliest flood sediments seem to contain only shallow marine animals. brachiopods, trilobites, fish. Corals, all these different things. And the evolutionists say, well, that's why we evolved from marine things. But really, we will see later in subsequent talks.
I will explain more extensively that this is exactly what we expect to see in a flood. The flood's going to first flood the lowland areas first, and the lowland areas contained all these shallow marine animals. And then as you went up in the flood, We end up going with the Bible says in Genesis 7:17 and 19. It says, And the flood was forty days upon the earth. The waters increased and bare up the ark, and the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth.
The waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered.
So, God's telling us here in Genesis 7 that the waters got higher and higher. It wasn't just the first 40 days after that, it got higher and higher. And that's when I feel the data supports that you were starting to flood the land.
So, early on, you're just flooding, I think, shallow seas. That's why you're only getting marine organisms. But later, you start to flood the land. And then, God talks later how that's when the ark was actually floating after day 40.
So shifts in depositional patterns are what we really see. sequences, the first three sequences that only show marine animals, suddenly we see a complete shift across North America where we're now flooding what appears to be the land. We see the very first land animals in great numbers being deposited. And this has been studied by one of my colleagues here at ICR, shows that the paleontological database actually supports. That there's almost no land animals until you get to the fourth sequence in the Abserica sequence.
And that's when it appears to be after day forty in the flood, when you start to flood the land.
So we suddenly see now great huge sand wave deposits across the United States and across the world. Very first time we see these things, huge sand waves. And then we see the first appearance of thick coal beds. Thick coal beds that were tens of feet thick, and later in the flood, we see they were over 100 feet thick. But this is where we first start seeing big coal beds.
This is the Pennsylvanian period it's called in the cycular world. But this is about that level of the flood where you're starting to d flood the land in the in the swampy areas and depositing all these coals. And so the sock-typic unique Kaskaskia, those first three sequences, are really just marine things. That seems to be where you're only flooding the low-lying areas of the continents. And then as you get to the Abserica and the Zuni and the Tejaus, the last three sequences we're starting to see more and more land influence as you go up in elevation.
When we return, we'll hear some final words from Dr. Clary. Stay with us. 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. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research.
Here's Dr. Clary. In the first segment today, we were talking about mega-sequences and what they reveal about the pre-flood world. And so we're gonna get into some of those details. We talked about early in the flood, we're seeing mostly marine organisms being deposited.
That's what the fossils show. And as you get into later sequences, we see more and more land plants as coal and land animals mixed in. But you always get a mixture of land and marine. It's not just simply land animals versus marine animals. It's always mixing marine.
Just what you'd expect in a major global flood, where these waves, these tsunami-like waves, are coming in deeper and deeper and deeper from the oceans all the time, pushing these big water deposits up.
So we see things up in North America, like Tyrannosaurus Rex specimens buried right with shark teeth. And you see freshwater fish deposited with marine fish and all this mixing going on, exactly what you'd expect in a global flood. My research is actually. Finishing up three continents now.
So I've got North America, Africa, and South America done. And as you piece these things back together, Into the pre-flood world, which appears to be some version of Pangea, some sort of supercontinent in the pre-flood world, we can actually see things line up. The sediments across North America line up with the sediments across North Africa, and the sediments across Southern Africa line up with the sediments across sort of Central South America, just when you piece these back together.
So, if you look at your world map, you can kind of close up the Atlantic Ocean and push North America up against Africa, and South America up against Africa, and you can kind of see what I'm talking about in terms of this pre-flood Pangea. But the geology actually matches. If you go to these tip of Canoe and the Sauk and the Kaskaskia, we see mostly shallow marine areas being deposited. across North Africa and across the eastern United States and even across parts of South America. And so that leads back to the question: how did animals like mammals and dinosaurs, how did they survive the early flood?
Well, as I talked about in the first segment, I don't believe that the The world was flooding the land until about day 40 or after day 40 of the flood.
So their early flood sediments contain only shallow marine animals.
So when you look at North America, North America seems to be most of its early flood deposits are in the eastern U.S. from Michigan and Indiana east. And then in the west, it was pretty much high and dry. We see very little sediment whatsoever. And I've termed this the dinosaur peninsula that runs down between about Minnesota down towards New Mexico and that area.
And that's where we see many of our dinosaur fossils near that or maybe displaced off that slightly. But that's where they found dry land still for the early part of the flood. They didn't get buried until later in the flood, possibly. as you approach that day one fifty at the high point of the flood. And so the dinosaurs were around possibly through day eighty, day ninety, maybe even up to day one twenty before the floodwaters encompassed all the dinosaurs.
But they were buried in the order of where they were living on the land and washed off. But the dinosaur peninsula shows where many of them actually lived. And we can see the same thing in Africa. We can see similar processes in Africa. We see high ground where there's no dinosaurs.
And we see areas of shallow marine, which is mostly North Africa and the shelf areas. What we call and it appears that the fossil record can be explained then by the pre-flood world topography. We can go through and see the early flood was only deposited marine animals because it was only buried in areas that were possibly shallow marine.
so much of the Eastern US might have only been Under 100, 200 feet of water, a very shallow ocean across a lot of the continent. And as the waters went higher, they started flooding the swampy areas where the dinosaurs were at. And the plants that are unique to that environment, mostly a gymnosperms, non-flowering plants. And as the water got higher, yet, it went over the top. And what appears to be areas up in what is now Canada went over the top, and that's possibly where the humans and the mammals that we're more familiar with might have been living at the time.
And so it all kind of works out and it gives us a global record of fossils.
So the fossils really do have an order to them globally because we're seeing the same things happening on each continent as you go around the world at the same time. As you piece these things back together, you can actually see the Precambrian shield areas as they're called, like in the Canadian shield up in Canada, a lot of Brazil, and across into Southern Africa below the Sahara, we see areas that appear to be really big flood highs. And these areas probably were where the humans were living be in the pre-flood world. And the lowland areas around it is where we see our dinosaurs, and that's where we see our dinosaur fossils, that dinosaur peninsula. that runs down from Minnesota to New Mexico.
and all round easternmost Africa. But the center part of Africa below the Sahara appears to be a big upland. It's stripped right down now by erosion right down to the crust. And so there's very little soil there today in that part of Africa because the the crystalline rock of the crust is exposed at the surface.
So if we put it all back together to finally summarize things, we see that the Continents do seem to fit together into this pre-flood pangea, and the continents do reflect. The initial topography that God created on day three of Creation Week is the flood waters increased. They flood increasingly higher and higher areas of the land, but the dinosaurs themselves lived in these lowland areas adjacent to those high grounds. And so not only are the animals deposited in order of their burial, but we see that the land is starting to flesh out a little bit to where the highs and lows were in the pre-flood world. Maybe some year we'll be able to identify possible areas where the Garden of Eden might have been.
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.
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