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. Jake Hebert, physicist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert. According to the Big Bang model of the universe's origin, our universe is supposedly 13.8 billion years old.
Yet, a straightforward reading of scripture, as well as the historical information in the Bible, and the testimony of the Lord Jesus Himself, all confirm that the Earth and universe are much younger than this, about 6,000 years old.
Now, of course, if the universe is just a few thousand years old, then the Big Bang model can't possibly be correct because it requires billions and billions of years to even appear plausible. And of course there are many other scientific problems with the Big Bang model, and this would be one more such problem.
So in this episode of Science, Scripture and Salvation, we want to examine how the scientific evidence is consistent with the recent creation. But first we have to clear up a common misconception that a lot of people have. Science cannot prove that the universe is either young or old.
Okay, let me repeat that. Science cannot prove that the universe is young or old.
Now, why is that? Because age is not something you measure in a laboratory. When scientists claim that a rock is so many millions of years old, that is not a measured age. It is a calculated age. And that calculated age is based on assumptions about the past.
And this is always true. There are no exceptions to this. And to illustrate this, consider your own age. You know how old you are because your parents have told you or because you have a birth certificate. You know your age based on reliable eye witness testimony of people who were there when you were born.
Now, think about how hard it would be to guess your true age if you did not have that eyewitness testimony. You know, some people age very gracefully, and you might overestimate their true age. Other people abuse drugs and alcohol, and they end up looking a lot older than they really are.
So, if estimating your own age is that difficult, you can see how finding the age of other things may not be as straightforward as you might think. And that's why eyewitness testimony is so important. And that's what we have in the Bible: it is eyewitness testimony from God Himself who never lies or makes a mistake. And He has given us this testimony so that we can know the truth about our origins and the universe in which we live, including its age.
Now, the reason that creation and secular scientists reach different conclusions about the age of the universe is that they make different assumptions about the past. Secular scientists hold to a philosophy called uniformitarianism. And uniformitarianism is summarized by the motto: the present is the key to the past. And so, for instance, they think that because erosion generally occurs slowly today, it's always occurred slowly. You know, if you look at the Grand Canyon, they assume that it was carved out slowly by the Colorado River over millions of years.
They just assume that these rates are the same. And by definition, they deny God's intervention in history.
So they deny creation, they deny the flood, and they deny that the Lord Jesus is coming again. Creation scientists, on the other hand, affirm these things.
So these different starting assumptions lead to different age estimates.
So how do you tell who's right? For instance, I can make one set of assumptions and get one answer. They can make another set of assumptions and get another answer. We don't really prove anything with our assumptions. But there is a way to discern who's right and who's wrong.
You see, if the underlying assumptions of an age estimate are correct, then the results should be logically consistent. In other words, the calculated age should not contradict The starting assumptions that were used to calculate that age.
So, if the calculated age does contradict the starting assumptions, then the starting assumptions can't possibly be correct. If the uniformitarian assumptions were used to calculate an age, but that calculated age ends up contradicting uniformitarianism, then that's a strong indication there's a problem with uniformitarianism. And this is what we call an internal critique, and we creation scientists often make use of it to point out problems in both evolutionary arguments and evolutionary age assignments.
So, what we find is that even when we make starting assumptions that are generous to the old earth position, even when we assume uniformitarianism, the calculated ages are not only contradictory many times, but they often contradict uniformitarianism. And so, we would like to share some of these inconsistencies with you, especially as they relate to the heavenly bodies. And so we'll talk about that in our next 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. In this episode of Science, Scripture, and Salvation, we're talking about the age of the universe. And we pointed out that you really can't prove that the universe is young or old, but you can critique old Earth arguments. And let's look at a few examples of this that we see out in the universe itself.
We'll look first at the solar system. Comets, for instance. We have comets that they're basically dirty snowballs, and every time they come near the sun, they lose some of their mass, and eventually they disintegrate.
Well, these comets can only last for thousands of years, yet the solar system is supposed to be around 5 billion years old.
So, why do comets still exist?
Well, an obvious answer would be that our solar system is actually quite young, that comets are young. They haven't been here that long. The Earth's magnetic field is another example. Believers in an old Earth believe that the Earth's magnetic field has been in existence for billions of years, but they don't know how that's possible. They've got a theory that they've been working on for 100 years, and they still haven't been able to get it to work.
Another example would involve Saturn and its rings. Simply put, Saturn's rings are too clean to be very old. If they were really as old as evolutionists claim, we would expect them to be dirty due to collisions with comets and asteroids over vast ages, but they're still quite clean, and that's much more consistent with a young solar system. Another example involves Saturn's moon Titan, and it has a methane atmosphere that should have been depleted in just a few million years, and yet it isn't. In fact, I remember that when I attended one of my first American Geophysical Union meetings, I think this was in 2010, I distinctly remember seeing a poster at one of the poster sessions on this very subject, and it said something to the effect of: We urgently need to find a solution to this problem.
So the evolutionists are aware of these problems and they've come up with rescuing devices to try to get out of these problems, but these explanations, if you will, are often themselves problematic and unconvincing. For instance, when it comes to comets, they claim that there are sources or reservoirs of these comet nuclei that can replenish the number of comets so that they would still be here after billions of years. And they have basically two different sources. One is this hypothetical cloud that's supposed to be way, way, way out there.
So far, we couldn't even see it, even if it did exist. That's called the Oort cloud. It's supposed to be a source for these long period comets, the comets that have these long orbital periods, but there's not a shred of evidence that this Oort cloud even exists. And then they have something called a hypothetical Kuiper belt that's supposed to be beyond Neptune that's composed of these bodies. And there are bodies out there beyond Neptune, what they call trans-Neptunian objects.
But the problem really there is that a lot of these objects that they see are way too big to be comet nuclei. And if there are some that are the right size, there doesn't appear to be enough of them.
Now, what about the larger universe itself? There's lots of arguments we could make for the youthfulness of the universe. One involves hot blue stars. The hottest stars should burn up their nuclear fuel in just a few million years, and yet they are still out there shining away. Likewise, spiral galaxies, they are rotating, and the material in the interior parts of that spiral rotate faster than the material in the outer parts of the spirals, and so it winds up.
And over time, the spiral galaxies lose their shapes. In fact, they ought to lose their shapes in just a few hundred million years, and yet these galaxies are supposed to be billions of years old.
Well, what's going on?
Well, again, this is a contradiction for uniformitarianism, but it's consistent with a young universe.
Now, of course, there are some arguments for an old Earth and universe that always come up. And it seems like the two that generally are mentioned are radioactive dating methods, which routinely give ages of millions of years or even billions of years for rocks. That's one of them. That's an equivocal argument. The dating methods often contradict one another, and creation scientists recently have made really some strong breakthroughs in this area where we have good reason to challenge the underlying assumptions of that method.
In fact, in some ways, some of these radioactive dating methods actually seem to be pointing to a young Earth. And the carbon-14 or the radiocarbon method is one of those in particular that does that. Another argument that always comes up is distant starlight. People say, well, how can you see distant starlight from galaxies that are billions of light years away if we live in a young universe?
Well, there are a number of creation scientists who've come up with different ideas about this. Jason Lyle, my colleague here at ICR, he has his own idea. Drs Humphreys and Hartnett, they've got some ideas of their own. And the creation community hasn't really come to a consensus on this. But you need to understand the evolutionists, particularly the Big Bang proponents, they've got their own version of this problem.
It's called the horizon problem. And it's one of the main reasons that they tacked on this idea of inflation theory to the original Big Bang model.
So these are equivocal arguments for an old Earth or universe. And the preponderance of the evidence is really consistent and strongly confirms what the Bible says about the age of the universe. 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.
