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 Brian Thomas, science writer with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Brian Thomas. This week we're thinking about and talking about the science behind recent creation. Very few people that I talk to even know that there is science that supports recent creation, that supports a world that's thousands, not millions of years old. And a lot of people a lot of Christians deny that this is even important.
They deny that it's relevant. But I think it is relevant. Especially when we consider how many other scriptures reference Genesis So if we inject millions of years into the creation account, which doesn't plainly have it. than we actually opened the door to unraveling our confidence, in the many other scriptures that reference Genesis creation either directly or indirectly. I think, for example, about Psalm 33 verse 9.
It's an amazing verse. It says, For he spoke, and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast. The verb tense there stood. means immediate so the spoken command of God.
accomplished immediately What he commanded, what he intended. for it to accomplish.
So the Psalms rely on and and reflect Recent creation, so do the prophets. The Psalms, the prophets, Isaiah 42:5, thus says God, the Lord who created the heavens. And even Hebrews, the New Testament, of course, quotes Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and cites Adam as a real person and Corinthians cites Noah as a real person. Jesus himself cited Noah.
So, our beginnings in Genesis matter to the rest of the Bible. Therefore, they should matter to us as Christians. It's easy to believe the more we study the scientific evidence that supports this recent creation that Genesis teaches and that the prophets and the New Testament apostles also taught and believed.
Well, we've got this amazing evidence, and it's going on right inside each of our bodies. It's a clock that's still ticking, and it should have ran out of all of its ticks. Like an egg timer. You twist the dial on an egg timer, and most egg timers I know they go to sixty, and then it can tick for sixty minutes, and then the last tick Tick and then ding, and that's what should have happened with the entire human race. If It's a million years old.
Based on what? What's doing the ticking? Our mutations are ticking. Our DNA inside each of our cells is accumulating mutations. These are copying errors.
So every generation accumulates a few more copying errors, and these add up over the generations. and there's no process known to man. that can erase or correct these. The only way to correct it would be to genetically engineer the right DNA base pairs and put them into the correct positions. According to evolutionary model, mankind evolved from an unidentified ape-like ancestor at least 2.4 million years ago.
So they're saying that we're that old.
Well, can we have experienced the number of generations that 2.4 million years would have encompassed, and yet kept the modern known measured mutation rate? Humans may have experienced 120,000 generations in 2.4 million years. In contrast, however, Scripture teaches that there were about a hundred generations from Adam all the way to Jesus Christ. That's a lot of difference. A hundred twenty thousand versus only a hundred generations.
Then you consider another hundred generations since the Lord Jesus.
So it's about two hundred generations since Adam to now. What about this mutation clock? Geneticists have been studying Multiple generations of families. Recently, geneticists tallied each new mutation in 219 people that included 78 parent-offspring trios.
So Grandparent, parent.
Sons and daughters. Three generations. Of families in Iceland, and they found an average of 63.2 new mutations. per trio. meaning that about 60 new mutations are added every new generation, and that's just with the genes that they analyzed.
They didn't analyze all the DNA. They would have found more. Mutation expert Alexey Kondrashov reviewed this nature study, and agreed with its authors that these accumulating mutations very likely contribute to increased diseases. even mental diseases like schizophrenia and autism. Human DNA sequence, the quality is relentlessly worsening.
This expert geneticist Kondrashov, he said Because deleterious mutations are more common than beneficial ones, Evolution will inevitably lead to a decline in fitness of the population. This process sets a reasonable maximum limit to the total number of possible human generations. Evolution's 120,000 generations. of human history supposedly. would produce seven million two hundred thousand mutations.
This greatly exceeds the human mutation tolerance. Without invoking a miracle and an extremely long suspension of mutational build up, The human mutation rate alone precludes evolutionary history. When we return, we'll hear some final words from Brian Thomas. 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 Brian Thomas.
We have stunning confirmation. Of recent creation, what we call biblical creation. And it's scientific. We have scientific processes that we can measure and just extrapolate into the past using reasonable assumptions. And they show that the world may be just thousands, not millions, not billions of years old.
One of those is within our own bodies. We just talked about mutation rate to our genomes, but there's a special little annex of DNA in each of our cells is called the mitochondrial DNA. This one has its own little clock going on.
Now I'm about to use the phrase secular scientists, and some of our listeners may not know exactly what that means.
So let me just quickly define secular scientists as those who have a bias against God. Against creation. Against the Bible, we probably say they fall in the category of 2 Peter 3, of being willfully ignorant. They do not want to know the evidence for recent creation. It would force them to re-evaluate their very lives, to reevaluate the truthfulness of God's Word.
which is exactly what we stand for here. But consider this amazing mitochondrial DNA mutation rate and what it means and what scientists have recently discovered. I'm going to let you in on a recent discovery by a creation scientist, doctor Nathaniel Jeenson. He says that secular scientists have measured the mitochondrial DNA mutation rate. For four species.
That's humans, fruit flies, Drosophila, the technical name. Round worms. and these little tiny creatures called water fleas. They reproduce quickly in the lab, so they can do these multiple generation studies, and then they can extract the DNA from them and measure how many DNA changes occur in between every generation.
Well, the Bible puts the origin of each of these species at about six thousand years ago.
So we can round it up to 10,000 years just to make it the numbers easy.
However, the published evolutionary literature puts the origin of modern humans about 180,000 years ago, depending on which paleontologist you talk to. Fruit flies they put at twenty million years ago. Then round worms about 18 million years ago. And finally, their idea of water flea origins includes a history of seven point six million years. These are all published age ranges, and they fit the evolutionary model and concept.
but do they fit the science of mitochondrial DNA decay?
So you could plug these numbers into a decay rate equation. They reveal a sharp contrast between creation and evolution predictions. The measured mitochondrial DNA mutation rate for humans is zero point zero zero zero four eight mutations per year. That's a slow mutation rate. Every generation has only a fraction of one, so it may take multiple generations for a human to.
To experience a mutation in our mitochondrial DNA. But these are the measured rates the scientists have very recently discovered.
So if you multiply 0.00048, which is the number of mutations, To mitochondrial DNA in humans per year. Multiply that by two, and by 10,000 years. gets a prediction of about 10 mutations after 10,000 years of existence.
Well, how many mutations have we actually experienced?
Now this is remarkable. This is stunning. The actual difference between any two humans today in our mitochondrial DNA. Averages Ten. The minimum is zero, the maximum is thirty two.
The predicted difference was about 10. Dr. Jeanson's study puts it at between 7 and 16 DNA differences.
However, after 180,000 years, according to evolutionary ideas, the human mitochondrial DNA should have 124 To 290 DNA differences. We just don't have it. We do not have the evidence in our DNA of the number of mutations that should have been occurring, that should have occurred if we've been on the planet that long. The same is true for fruit flies, for roundworms, for water fleas. The known mutation rate in fruit flies.
Plug that into the creation prediction of about 10,000 years, and you get something like fewer than 1,000 DNA differences. What do we have today? 1168, right in the target range. If evolutionary history, Is plugged into the formula that we would expect to find after 20 million years from 100,000 to 2 million DNA differences. We don't find nearly that many in fruit flies.
It's just 1,168 DNA differences between any two fruit flies in their mitochondrial DNA. Same is true with roundworms, same is true with water fleas. Remarkable, stunning genetic confirmation in the mitochondrial DNA mutation rate compared with mitochondrial DNA actual differences in actual species. And that gives us exactly what we'd expect to find if these creatures are only thousands of years old, not millions. Hey, this means the Bible got it right.
We can trust what the Word of God says about history, therefore, we can trust what it says about everything else. 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.
