Age of the Earth-IAC Training Video

Genesis Apologetics

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Now in this video I'm going to show you how you can use the artifacts in the collection dealing with the age of the earth and history of civilization.

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Now you can use these artifacts however you want in your presentations, but the way I'm going to show you how to use them in this video is

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I'm going to show you how you can use them to answer the question, how far back in time can history reliably take us?

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This is an important question because the age of the earth is really a history question, not a science question.

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So the best way to display these artifacts is to line them up with the jumbo timeline signs that we also have as part of the

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IAC collection, and as I'll show you these artifacts in this particular collection, I'll show you where they place along the timeline.

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So to start out our journey back in time, let's go back to 0 AD, to the birth of Christ.

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This display right here features several coins that were used around the time of the birth of Christ, including one from Caesar Augustus and another from Herod the

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Great, which are both mentioned in the Nativity accounts found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

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And this just illustrates the fact that many of the events described in the Bible have direct archaeological corroboration, which is a really exciting thing as a

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Christian. Now we have historical records from this time period, but not everything is super clear.

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There is a fuzz factor about history that happened at this time, just as there is in all periods of time, but the historical records overall are pretty good.

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Around this time we have documents that were written in papyri. Papyri is an ancient form of writing material.

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It's made out of the papyrus plant, and it was used for thousands of years for historical documents.

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In fact, some of our earliest copies of the Gospels are written in what's known as papyrus.

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As you can see here, it even has a little clay seal, which was stamped in with the image probably of some ruler and nobleman.

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So this can be used when talking about the historical records from around the time of Christ and even before then.

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So let's go back to around 1000 BC, and you can mark this time on your timeline using this little sling here, which is a replica of the type of sling that David would have used back when he slew

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Goliath. And back in 1000 BC, we have pretty good historical records in some cases, but not nearly as good as the records that we have for the time of Christ.

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So this is an interesting little artifact. You can put that along your timeline when talking about the time of David.

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As we walk further back to around 2000 BC, we have even less certainty. We do have archaeological artifacts from that time period, like this one right here.

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This is an actual Bronze Age dagger, which is an actual real knife that you can use when marking the

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Bronze Age. This particular knife was probably made around 1000 BC, but since it's a

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Bronze Age knife, you can use it to mark the entire period. Now around that time in China, we had what was known as the

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Shang Dynasty, and during this Shang Dynasty, the Chinese peoples made these artifacts called oracle bones, and they have certain characters written on them.

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Actually, it's interesting. Most of our records of the Shang Dynasty actually come from long after the actual time of the

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Shang Dynasty. So again, our records of history around that time are more fragmentary.

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So it's an interesting artifact. You can place along your timeline at around 1000 to 2000

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BC as an example of a Bronze Age artifact. Now the earliest forms of writing we have are from the

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Near East, specifically Sumerian Cuneiform script and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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First, let's look at the hieroglyphics. The earliest recorded sentence in hieroglyphics dates according to the archaeological secular timeline back to around 2800 to 2600

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BC. You can see a couple replicas of hieroglyphic script right here.

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Sumerian Cuneiform script is believed to have emerged as a form of writing for keeping accounts around the end of the 4th millennium

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BC, which is around 3000 BC, according to the secular evolutionary timescale.

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Now according to the scriptural chronology, we know that the flood happened around 2300 BC, which means that these documents can't possibly be as old as the evolutionists date them.

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So for your timeline, it would probably be best to have the hieroglyphics and the Cuneiform script kind of somewhere in between 2000

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BC and 3000 BC. Now this particular Cuneiform script is called a medical tablet.

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It actually records the ingredients for making an ancient form of medicine and this document here is a cattle sale document.

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Now as we've seen here, history from an evolutionary perspective can only take us back to about 5 ,000 years ago.

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And because of that, anything that comes before 5 ,000 years ago, as creationists, we would probably say more like 4 ,300 years ago, is all a matter of faith.

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We all have to choose which story of the history of the world we believe in. We either believe in what the

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Bible tells us about Earth history, or we believe in what the secular scientists tell us about Earth history, which is that the planet's been here for millions and billions of years and that life has evolved from simple to complex.

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Those are our two options. And as Christians, we recognize that our one and only option is to follow what

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God has spoken. God has written in His Word, His inspired, inerrant, infallible Word, that He created the universe in six days, only about 6 ,000 years ago.

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And so when presenting these artifacts, you can use them as a powerful testimony to the fact the age of the earth and the history of the universe is ultimately a matter of who we choose to believe.

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You can use this to really challenge Christians and ask them, who are you really trusting on matters of Earth history?

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That brings us to the next set of teaching objects which deal with radiometric dating. The first two we're going to look at are ammonite fossils.

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Here you can see one of these ammonite fossils. You can see what looks like a rounded part of the rock, but that's actually the inside mold of the fossil ammonite.

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You can see a little bit of the white shell. On this other one over here, you can see the white shell a little more clearly.

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They were discovered in a system of Cretaceous rocks in Redding, California, which is in Northern California.

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I was actually on the team that uncovered these and these are both ammonites. They were shelled creatures.

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They floated around in the oceans. They had tentacles. They looked a lot like the modern -day chamber nautilus. Now, Dr.

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Andrew Snelling from Ancestry Genesis has actually had ammonite fossils and wood fossils from the same layer dated using carbon dating.

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These fossils returned ages of between 30 and 50 ,000 years.

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This is significant because these particular fossils have been dated using radiometric dating.

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They're supposed to be around 112 million years old. So what we have here is a conundrum.

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We have fossils that can only be thousands of years old and rocks that are supposed to be tens of millions of years old.

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So which is it? Which date is accurate? Well, either one of them is accurate or both of them are inaccurate.

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They can't both be right and because radiocarbon gives us a maximum shelf life for whatever it is that we're dating, we know that these fossils can only be thousands of years old.

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Radiocarbon can only last around a maximum of a hundred thousand years. Because of this, if these fossils were really over a hundred million years old, as the evolutionists would say, they should not have any radiocarbon in them at all.

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But they do and that's a real big problem. This really puts a severe monkey wrench into the idea of millions and billions of years of Earth history.

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It indicates that these fossils and thus other creatures that are dated to be that old, including the dinosaurs, can only be thousands of years old, which fits very well with the biblical time scale of thousands of years of Earth history.

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Now, the next teaching object we have here is a copy of the book Radioisotopes in the Age of the

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Earth. This is the first volume in a two -book series. This study, the Radioisotopes in the

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Age of the Earth study, that was put on by the Institute for Creational Research and the Creation Research Society, uncovered several lines of evidence that indicate that radiometric dating really doesn't work the way the evolutionists say it does.

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In fact, they actually found evidence that the rate at which radioactive materials decayed was accelerated in the past, probably during Creation Week and also again during the

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Flood. And the primary way you can use this particular teaching object is to show your audience the real scientific research has been done that confirms the young age for the

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Earth. Now that we've looked at the Age of the Earth from a historical perspective and also from a more scientific perspective, the next teaching objects we're going to look at deal with the theological issues related to the

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Age of the Earth. Now, if you're like me, you've probably run into the claim by some Christian leaders and pastors that the

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Age of the Earth really doesn't matter. They really, ultimately, it's a side issue and that it's too controversial to really talk about in churches.

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It's not really that important. But in fact, it actually is very important. It's very important for a couple of reasons.

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The first one is, as I said before, it's a faith decision. We either choose to believe what God has spoken or we choose to believe what man has imagined.

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Those are really the only two options. But there's also another problem with the idea of an old

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Earth and that's the idea of death before sin. Here in the collection, we have a replica of the crown of thorns that Jesus wore during his trial by Pilate and the crucifixion.

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Now, the Gospels don't really spell this out for us. So this is really an inference. It's not a direct teaching of Scripture.

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But it is interesting to note that in Genesis chapter 3, when God cursed the ground, he said that thorns and thistles would now be a part of the creation.

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And when Jesus was crucified, when he took on the curse of sin for us and died in our place as our substitutionary atoning sacrifice, he wore a crown of thorns.

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You see, Jesus on the cross was taking on himself the penalty that was deserved for our sins and was instituting the beginning of a new covenant in his blood which would usher in the eternal kingdom, the restoration of all things that was prophesied in the

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Old Testament. Jesus was undoing, in a sense, what had been done in Eden, where a perfect man fell into sin and brought sin and death into the world.

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In the new heavens and new earth, there will be no more curse because the curse will be removed.

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And so when we see the crown of thorns, we can think of it as a symbol of Christ taking on himself the curse for sin and death, which he will one day remove.

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So what does this have to do with the age of the earth? Well, let's take a look at our second teaching object.

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This here is a fossilized thorn. It was discovered in Hawes Quarry in Colorado.

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It's a part of the Green River Formation, a so -called Eocene layer, and it's dated by the evolutionists to be about 48 million years old.

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So why is this important? Well, it's important because in order to make the Bible fit with the secular story, what most

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Christians end up doing is they end up taking the geologic time that we read about in secular evolutionary science books, and they try to squeeze it either in between the first two verses of Genesis 1, or they try to stretch out the days of creation to being millions and billions of years to try to fit the secular story in it.

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Now, there's other ways that some people try to fit the millions of years in the Bible, but all of them require a belief that most of the fossil record was created before Adam and Eve were created in the

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Garden of Eden. But that's a really big problem for a number of reasons, and one of those reasons is that we know from Scripture that thorns were a part of the curse.

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Thorns were brought in as a result of Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden. They were not part of the original creation, which

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God called very good. But here we have a fossil that's supposed to be about 48 million years older than the creation of Adam and Eve, which would mean that there were thorns in the world for millions and millions of years before God had ever created

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Adam and Eve. So thorns would have not really been part of the curse, they would have been part of God's very good creation.

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Now, you see the problem? Now, this doesn't just apply to fossil thorns, it applies to the entire fossil record.

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Because think about it, what is the fossil record? The fossil record is ultimately dead things buried in rock layers in the earth.

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And we know from Scripture that death was a consequence of Adam and Eve's sin. Also in the fossil record, we find evidence of cancer, of carnivory, of supposed mass extinctions where thousands of species were all wiped out in a single event.

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All of these things are believed to have happened millions of years before Adam and Eve were created and before they sinned, which really doesn't fit with the

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Bible's picture of history. You see, ultimately, history is God's story. It's the story of God creating a perfect world, the man falling into sin, but then

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God bringing redemption through Christ Jesus. All three of those are part of the same story, and if we remove any one of those, we are ultimately going to be destroying

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God's story. That's why this issue is so important. A view of a young earth is consistent with what we find in Scripture.

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It's consistent with God's revelation from start to end, but the old earth story is not. And we need to lovingly encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to realize that this is an important issue and to take a stand on this, because it really is, in a theological sense, a gospel issue.

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So now that we've taken a look at all of the artifacts in the collection dealing with the age of the earth, I just want to encourage you and say, go get them.

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This is a really exciting ministry. We're calling people back to the authority of Scripture. So use these artifacts for His glory, and may