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 be joined by Brian Thomas, science writer with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Brian Thomas. This week we are considering The science behind recent creation. But before we do, we want to make sure That our readers and listeners understand why this even matters. Why does this matter?
A lot of Christians say, oh, it doesn't matter. God could have made it millions of years ago, or just. yesterday, it doesn't really matter. But it does matter because that's what the Bible teaches. And it's actually what Jesus taught.
So if we say, Millions of years not thousands, then we actually contradict what Jesus taught and believed. Consider what He said in Mark ten, six. He that made them from the beginning made them male and female. Jesus did not say he that made them billions of years after the Big Bang beginning Made them male and female. He's actually quoting from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as though they're actual history.
So let's get it right. Let's follow the Lord Jesus in what He believed and thought and taught. And it's actually easy considering all the great scientific evidence that supports Recent creation. For example, original tissue fossils. We've got this.
phenomenon now of more and more reports. Of original tissues like blood vessels and proteins inside. fossils like dinosaur bones, and its original to the dinosaur. For a long time soft tissue fossils We're silently advocating for recent Biblical creation. It's been going on a long time.
This Genesis perspective, alive but marginalized even back in Darwin's day, held that rocks and fossils should be interpreted in light of the flood of Noah.
So recent widespread flooding, not deep time, explains why many fossils, such as the ones England's famous geologist Mary Anning found in eroding cliffs near her hometown of Lyme Regis, Mary Anning was famous. For her fossil discovery, she found ammonites fish, she found the first ichthyosaurs, extinct marine reptile, the first pterosaur in England. as well as cuttlefish. Referring to Mary's fossils, Charles Dickens wrote in a magazine in the eighteen hundreds, Some of them are so perfect that the ink bag has been found and utilized. That is, utilized as ink.
Now how can ink last millions of years? On our website, icr.org, researchers reported in 2009 that they found another fossil squid ink sac. in Trowbridge in the UK, and they wetted its dried ink and then they drew a picture using that ink of what the creature looked like when it was alive. Then chemical analysis later confirmed the fossil and cuttlefish ink pigments were identical. But the age assignment for this ink is one hundred fifty million years.
How can ink sit in the ground and not react with other chemicals? The longer it's there, the more opportunities it has to react. Because pigments are organic compounds. Bacteria could eat them. They're a rich carbon source.
Oxygen could react with them, but One answer to this question is that Hey, if it's only been in there for hundreds or maybe thousands of years It just hasn't had enough time to do this reacting. Bacteria haven't had enough time to get to it and eat it.
So that's one way to answer it, but that way conforms with what the Bible's been teaching. All along. Marianning also found some eyeball lenses of an ichthyosaur. Dickens wrote back in the eighteen hundreds This was brought to light in the first ichthyosaurs a monster some thirty feet long, with jaws nearly a fathom in length, and huge saucer eyes.
some of which have been found so perfect that the petrified lenses, have been split off and used as magnifiers.
So he's talking about eyeballs that still They're not rock. They're eyeballs. Light can pass through them. and back then people would use them as magnifying lenses. This is amazing.
It's basically naturally mummified. Dried down animals in these rocks. And that's what we're talking about, with their original tissues intact. Consider this. In nineteen oh eight, famous American fossil hunter Charles Sternberg and his sons uncovered in Wyoming.
The first of two of the world's best preserved dinosaur remains. These are dinosaur mummies, mummified hadrosaurs. The placard Beside a replica of one of these mummies in the Black Hills Museum of Natural History, it quotes Sternberg. and he described it as this the skin preserved with its complex arrangement of minute scales and clinging to the bones.
Now he didn't use today's sophisticated techniques to identify specific proteins, but his word choice does match what more recent investigators have discovered and confirmed through a dozen different techniques. Original proteins, collagen, for example, elastin, the exact proteins we know today exist in hold-together vertebrate tissues, hold together you and me, and they held together dinosaurs, and they're still there in the rocks, even though they take less than a million years to decay. It's time for a short break. Stay with us. 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 Brian Thomas.
As we consider the science behind recent creation, What an exciting time to think about. How scientists secular, skeptical, evolutionary scientists Keep uncovering original proteins from fossils like dinosaur bones. Original tissue is what we call them sometimes, original tissue fossil discoveries, have been continuing throughout the twentieth century, right up to today. Famed fossil discoverer Roy Chapman Andrews may have uncovered original dinosaur tissue when he was working in China's Gobi Desert. during his wild adventures in nineteen twenty two.
He wrote of them and his discoveries, saying The dinosaur lay exactly as it died. seventy million years ago. Every bone was in place, even to the end of the tail.
Now get this Tendons along the back showed plainly. Andrews knew the preservation happened fast. if those tendons still had their original proteins, Then the preservation happened quite recently. Investigating more specimens from a nearby area puts it. Polish scientists reported in 1966 in the scientific journal Nature on electron micrographs.
They used an electron microscope to take photos of these sectioned and polished dinosaur bones. And do you know what they found? Cells, bone cells called osteocytes, showed up in the image. This is 1966, so this is not just one. recent find.
A long history of original tissues. And molecular preservation of dinosaur and other supposedly ancient fossils. And what do they find? Collagen fibrils.
Now collagen is interesting. It's in bones, it's in all bones. It's also in skin and connective tissue. But scientists today, archaeologists actually, have been measuring the decay rate of collagen in bone. And they take chunks of bone, they place it in these little chambers, they elevate the temperature, they heat up these chambers so that they could watch what happens to the collagen.
Now, heat it up to about 90 degrees Celsius, which is just below boiling. They take little bits of it out throughout certain time stamps, and then they measure how much of the collagen has decayed. Then they plot this decay rate on a graph. And then using the Arrhenius equation, which should be familiar to chemists, they can actually change the temperature from the 90 degrees that they ran the experiment to an earth surface temperature, something that a fossil might actually have experienced during its stay in the earth. say 10 degrees Celsius if you're in England.
And guess what? At 10 degrees, the expected lifetime based on these repeated measurements of collagen protein. is fewer than one million years.
Now it can last for hundreds of thousands of years at the temperature of, say, England, or seven degrees if you're in Montana. But it can't last a million. which means if we find collagen in a protein, collagen protein in a bone. it must be younger than a million years. But there's not been much crosstalk between the paleontologists who have been finding Proteins in dinosaur bones, and archaeologists who have been doing the protein decay research.
They should talk to one another and find out, Hey, there's a mystery here, and we need to solve it. One way to solve it is to doubt the evolutionary age assignments. If it's only thousands of years old, if these are Noah's flood deposits, then we would expect them to last for thousands of years based on the collagen decay experiments. But we would expect them not to last more than a million years, not to last sixty five million years, or a hundred million years. Or I've read one recently where scientists found in southern China a little dinosaur egg.
And they opened the egg, this fossil, and they found a little dinosaur baby inside. It's a sauropod dinosaur named Lufangosaurus. They took out the little baby dinosaur leg bone and they analyzed it using several different techniques and they found protein signature.
Well, 90 plus percent of the proteins that are in bone, including little dinosaur leg bones, is protein. It is collagen. And so, what we can say about this 180-million-year-old age assignment is that I'm sorry, it's got collagen in it. It has to be fewer than a million years old.
Now, this is science that confirms. Recent creation. And there's all kinds of these discoveries. Researchers recently found that blood protein can last longer than expected. Released iron atoms help preserve tissues, but they have not provided the extraordinary long hemoglobin decay rates that deep time requires.
Instead, experiments continue to confirm that proteins can perhaps last hundreds of thousands of years, but not millions. In other words, we found hemoglobin proteins in an array of different dinosaur bones and other fossil creatures, and it's decayed hemoglobin, but it's not decayed to the point where it's totally gone away. It's still colored red. We still find hemoglobin. We still find all kinds of amazing original tissues.
Biomolecules preserved in rock as though these rocks and their fossils are only thousands of years old.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.
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