The Ark and the Darkness with Dr. Dan Biddle

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Okay. We are now recording as well. So hello, I am Terri Kammerzell and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

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We're a group of friends who come together to study the Word of God.

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We believe that when read properly, it supports a six day, six literal day creation.

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And we are, I'm a little bit behind tonight.

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And also when properly, when read properly, it disproves Darwinian evolution. We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020.

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And since meeting online, we've been blessed with almost 90 individual speakers covering creation science, other theology topics, and even current events.

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Our goal is to equip believers to be ready to share their faith. You can find most of our past presentations by visiting tinyurl .com

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forward slash CFS archives. Tonight, we have a very special presentation where we're happy to welcome back our friend

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Dan Biddle of Genesis Apologetics. He's also a Logos Research Associate, and his professional background includes undergraduate and graduate work in theology and apologetics, training as a behavioral scientist and extensive work as an expert witness regarding the scientific method.

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He has also given hundreds of presentations to thousands of people on the topics of Genesis creation and the flood.

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Dan is also joined tonight by our mutual friend, Stephen Policastro of the International Association for Creation.

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We're looking forward to hearing from both of them this evening, especially about the new film that's coming out to theaters on March 20th and 21st only.

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It's produced by Fathom Events, so you can find tickets at fathomevents .com,

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but tonight we're happy to have Dan Biddle. He is one of the filmmakers, and he's going to share a little bit more about it with us.

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Go ahead, Dan. Great. Well, thanks for having me. Let's see. I tried to do the share my screen thing.

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Is that able to show up on your screen here? Let's give that a shot. We see it. Okay. So you guys have a very faint picture of the ark in the background?

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That's correct. Okay. Great. Let's make sure it's working here. Now, you can see it says, did this really happen, right?

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Is that what you're seeing on your screen? Yes, it sure is. And I think that we have a little bit of a hiccup with our

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Facebook, but I'm going to work on that. If you want to hold off for just one second while I make sure that we're live, because I know that we have people who are following with us.

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Yeah, we do. We're good. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. Sounds good. Okay. So when it comes to Noah's flood, we all want to have answers to the questions like this.

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Did it really happen? And why did it happen? When did it happen? And what evidence is there that it really did happen?

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And these were the questions that took me on a faith journey about 12 years ago, when I had to discover for myself that Genesis chapter six to nine was real history.

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I was saved when I was 11 years old. I fell away from the faith as a rebellious teenager until I was about 17 years old.

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But then I locked in after coming back to Christ, and I would like to say I've been trying to follow Him ever since.

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And I've always loved apologetics since that time. I went to seminary, and they taught me in seminary that, look, if you want to believe in the

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Hebrew scholars who wrote this Bible, the six days are real ordinary earth rotation days.

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And the genealogies in Genesis chapters five and 10 and Luke chapter three lead back to a young earth.

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But if you guys want to believe in science, earth has to be millions of years old, so you guys go figure it out.

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That was the introduction to earth history that I really received in the beginnings of my

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Christian faith. But then about 12 years ago, I went to a talk about dinosaurs living with man, and I was just astounded that they would let someone in church, they would talk about that topic.

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I just couldn't believe that someone would actually believe that dinosaurs lived recently with man. But then

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I went to this talk, it was done by the guy who's currently our vice president of our ministry, Dave Bisbee.

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And I was astounded by the evidence that this guy was dropping during this presentation.

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Things like dinosaur soft tissue and the extent of the fossil record. And how is it that all the different people groups around the world have similar myths and legends and cave drawings and military accounts about these dragon like creatures that they referred to as dragons, but looked an awful lot like dinosaurs.

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And so it's so spun me that I took about 90 days off of my normal work shift and plunged into that topic, geology, dinosaurs, and it was flood.

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I flew up to Montana, did research up there. I flew to Canada, looked at the bone beds, and I was able to see and discover things that I'll never be able to unsee in my entire life.

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For example, standing up over the dinosaur provincial park, where as far as your eyes can see for a 14 mile stretch, all you can see is these big hoodoos, these big, huge mounds that are 50, 100, 200 feet tall, and that are sandwiched with not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of dead dinosaurs.

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And they're buried with mammals and fish and clams and oysters and marine life. And I had to ask myself the question, well, if I'm seeing this and as far as my eyes can see a 14 mile spread of these dead dinosaurs buried with marine life, how much higher did the water have to be to bring in these creatures to bury them all together and they're all in this tumbled mess.

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And then you look at the secular explanation, they're like, well, it was just a little local flood that came tearing through here, just a little river.

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And it was during that time after investigating this and looking into the research,

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I also took a really deep plunge into paleo biochemistry and looked at the issues surrounding dinosaur soft tissue.

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And I had to come face to face with that as well, realizing that those bones could not be millions of years old.

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So it was about halfway through this journey that I completely converted. I became not somewhat convinced, but overwhelmingly convinced that the

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Genesis account in chapter six to nine is real history. And then all

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I had to do there is turn left in the Bible a few more chapters and you're at the creation week. And I decided to take that hook line and sinker too.

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So what happened to me after I had that epiphany wake up experience was for me, it was like being born again, again, my head and my heart were able to make a better connection, a stronger connection than what

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I had done before in the past, because what happened to me in seminary where they said, well, the Genesis text in the

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Hebrew has to point to a young earth, but science says that earth has to be old. So what that did is it started a great degree of tension or what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.

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And I lived in that place, that obscure place of doubt, trying to reconcile the modern secular view of science with scripture.

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And it really set me for a tailspin. But what I discovered, the evidence that I'm about to share with you guys tonight in this brief presentation, it overwhelmingly changed my faith in my walk with Christ.

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It changed the way I raised my kids, it changed the way I viewed scripture, the way I viewed

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Christ and God the whole bit. But what I'm going to do with you guys tonight is take you through a quick tour of those evidences that I personally found most compelling.

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The first is this, just consider that why is it that around the world, we have hundreds and hundreds, about 300 actually, ancient myths and legends about a worldwide flood and some of these stories and accounts have uncanny parallels to scripture.

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But why do they all generate these major flood myths and legends happen to emanate right from the same location that the

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Bible would put the Tower of Babel and where the flood, where the Ark landed. So the

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Bible says that the Ark landed on the mountains of Ararat, not necessarily on Mount Ararat, but the mountains of Ararat.

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And here we have the six leading flood myths and legends, not even including the

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Bible, which would make seven, different leading flood myths, they all emanate from that same region.

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Here's what they look like. There are many of these flood legends are carved on cuneiform, but these myths and legends that are thousands of years old, have a very strong overlap with scripture.

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When you start breaking down their stories, they all have common overlapping themes.

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Like there is a God who punished man and there was a chosen man to rescue the human family with starting first with his family and he saved some animals.

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And there was a vessel that God ordered to be built with certain specifications. Then there survived the flood, a bird was used to find dry land, and there was a sacrifice to God or gods afterwards.

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And so why is it that all of these legion, the oldest flood myths in the world, all happen to go back to where the

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Bible says the Ark landed? I thought that was just uncanny evidence.

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And when you look at books like what Nick has prepared here called the Echoes of Ararat, he's now just taken two continents,

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North and South America, and he's summed over 300 flood myths and legends from just those two places.

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So there's at least 300 myths around the world that have all of these myths and legends about an ancient flood that flooded the world.

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So if you start at where the Tower of Babel was, Barat Eridu in the Middle East, every one of these circles that you're seeing is where an established flood myth has been documented.

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These are all tribes and indigenous peoples. Look at how many we spin the globe over here to America, just hundreds of these myths and legends.

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So I would expect if the flood was true, it would have echoes and accounts that would rain on for thousands of years afterwards.

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And that's exactly what we find. And repeatedly in culture after culture after culture, history after history, we have

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Noah's Flood as just a continuing account all around the world, not just in the Middle East, but all around the world.

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The other thing that I found astounding is that there's not just a dozen or a few dozen, but there are thousands of findings of dinosaur bones where they're unmineralized.

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So for example, even the founder of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the largest dinosaur museum in the world, said that most dinosaur bones that they have in their museum that are discovered, especially in the

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Cretaceous, I would add, are still organic bones. They're not permineralized like rocks, they're not fully fossilized, they're still organic bones.

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And in some cases, we even have extreme preservation as in the case with this Leonardo fossil, which is a fossilized mummy dinosaur.

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They've even found what this dinosaur was still eating in its gullet when it died, like magnolia and ferns and berries are still inside of this animal's esophagus and stomach.

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So how in the world could that be millions and millions of years old? And it's not just these occasional dinosaur mummies that we find.

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Consider that these fossils are found all over the world. So each one of these little green dots is not just one fossil find, but usually a massive fossil graveyard.

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And they're all over the world representing billions upon billions of fossils. And sometimes they're found in patterns of places like in the middle of America here, we see there's a huge swath of dead things, marine life and terrestrial life, all smashed up and buried together.

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What on earth can do that? It would be a worldwide flood. So when did the flood happen?

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Well, there's some controversy about that. If you go to the classical creation ministries like Answers in Genesis or ICR, most of those ministries, including ours, will have as a starting place based upon the

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Masoretic text, which is what our modern Bibles are based on, that will park

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Noah's flood around 2350 B .C. So about 4 ,400 years ago is the most conventional classic way of understanding when

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Noah's flood happened. Now, there are some things that you can do with Abraham's birth year that might shift it a little bit later to 2518.

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And then there's a subdugent set of texts, which many scholars hold to and they don't hold to the

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Masoretic, that has some differences in the recorded genealogies, not in the people, but in the timespans, the lifespans in which they live, that could stretch the flood back as far as around 3200

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B .C. But right within the brackets that you see here on my screen, that's the

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Orthodox Christian position on when the flood happened, right bracketed in between those realms.

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You can't go back much further and you can't go earlier without getting outside of the clear teaching of Scripture.

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But we have no problem with saying it's about 2350 B .C. So how big was the ark?

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Well, it depends on the size of a cubit, because God gave Noah very specific cubits or lengths and dimensions by which he was supposed to build the ark.

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The one that's done over at Answers in Genesis chose to take a longer cubit. So their ark is about 510 feet long.

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And some people would say it could be as short as 450 feet. But you can see it was the largest ship, the largest wooden structure ever built in history.

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And it's just incredible, certainly enough for having all the animals that we needed on the ark. So what about how long did it last?

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We talk about when it happened, but how long did the flood itself last? Well, here's in one slide, we've crammed a timeline down for you there.

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The Bible is very clear that the flooding happened strong and heavy for about the first 40 days.

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Most people believe that the ark became buoyant at about 40 days. And then the zenith was at day 150.

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So that was the peak of the flood. But we have earth being catastrophically resurfaced and destroyed during those first 150 days.

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Then the water began to flow off of the earth, start receding first in sheets, and then in channelized flow, creating the cuts in places that we see in places like Arches National Park and others.

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So there we have the scriptures there. But all in told, it was about a 371 -day process, just an amazing one -year -long process.

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So in summary here, we've got three chapters that talk about Noah's flood. It's the longest recorded event in Scripture.

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Even if you look at the resurrection, that might cover one chapter or so. But this is the longest description of any single event in the

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Bible. Lasted about a year. Eight people were saved. All the pairs of land -dwelling, air -breathing creatures were saved.

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It preceded the Ice Age, so it came right before the Ice Age happened. It's mentioned by several other

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Bible writers. And it was really a reset of life on the earth. So I would say this, that if Noah's flood didn't happen, it didn't happen the way that the

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Bible said, now we have all of Christianity in jeopardy with respect to its credibility.

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Because there are five different Bible authors that talk about Noah's flood. We're talking about Moses, and David, and Peter, and Paul, and Jesus.

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These are fundamental issuers of Scripture who all spoke about the flood and regarded it as a real historical event.

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So I would say it's pretty important to our history and foundation. So why is this important?

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We believe it's because Genesis should be a very root fundamental issue. What's happening right now in high schools and colleges around the nation, particularly with kids that are being indoctrinated by a lot of the public schools, is that they start believing in the

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Bible. Their roots start going down a little bit deep. But then they run into things like, oh, what about science versus the

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Bible? Or what about ape to human evolution? Or deep time? Or Charles Darwin? Or what about how did all these species evolve?

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What about natural selection? Is that really the engine for evolution? And what it does is it stunts the growth of Christians today.

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And we're actually having a national problem with this, with our youth nowadays, not growing up with strong, solid faith.

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Because if you look at a tree, if you want to have lots of fruit, you have to have strong roots.

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It's the roots that are responsible for the fruit. And if the kids can't have their faith, their belief system, penetrate down to the very first pages of Scripture, I would argue that they're not going to have very strong root systems.

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So that's why this topic is very, very important. I'm going to skip through that slide and look at this one here.

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So this is very interesting because Peter only wrote a very, very small section of Scripture.

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And look what he says here in 2 Peter 3. He says, knowing this first of all.

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So in other places, he says, he's really heightening his conversation. He says, look, I said a lot of things, but know this first.

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Remember this, that in the last days, mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lessons, saying, where is this promise that Jesus is coming?

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For since the fathers died off or fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.

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But then Peter says, for when they maintain this, when they try to keep this uniformitarian perspective, that everything has just gone on since it ever has since the creation, he says they're denying two things, creation out of nothing and that the world was catastrophically destroyed by water.

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Andrew Snelling from Answers in Genesis brought up a very interesting part about this in our movie that hopefully you guys will see this coming

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March. He says, you know what? This prophecy is not necessarily being fulfilled today.

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It's already fulfilled. He said this happened about 150 years ago. When you look through history, when did this happen?

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Well, there was a shift in our culture in the 1850s with Charles Lyell and some other people where they tried to free geology from Moses and they successfully disentangled earth history from the flood account.

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And they brought up this idea of uniformitarianism, which means basically the present is the key to the past.

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Well, the Bible says it the other way around. The past is the key to understanding the present. So this prophecy that people are going to come and say, oh, look, everything's always just gone on from the beginning.

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There hasn't been any change. Jesus is never coming back. Peter says they're forgetting two things, that God created the world out of nothing through water and that he's going to destroy the water by earth.

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So very interesting prophecy about Noah's flood that is very relevant to our day.

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So what did that earth look like? When Peter's talking about the world that then was perished because it was overflowed by water, what kind of world are we talking about?

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Well, one where these kind of creatures lived. There's even books by this guy named Peter Ward, a secular paleontologist that talks about this ancient earth atmosphere in which these dinosaurs thrived.

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We have huge behemoth creatures as God describes in Job chapter 40 about these massive sauropod dinosaurs that weighed over 100 ,000 pounds, but have nasal passages that are only a little bit bigger than a modern horse.

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How in the world could that creature breathe in today's earth atmosphere? Or giant dragonflies with two and a half foot wingspans, how could they fly around in today's earth atmosphere?

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What about these pterosaurs that have a 50 foot wingspan? They'd have a hard time flying around.

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So there was a world that then was. There was a world that was different than the world that we live in today.

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A world where these gigantic mushrooms that were 20 feet tall would thrive and flourish.

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And here's an artist's rendition of what these things would look like. It was lush and it was green and it was tropical and it was friendly and it was amazing to live in.

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It was a world that God designed for us to live in forever, but we botched it because of the fall.

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You have things like giant centipedes and these huge shore pod dinosaurs.

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Definitely a place that's different than the world that we have today with these little tiny nostrils trying to suck in enough air to feed a 100 ,000 pound animal.

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Just not going to work in today's earth atmosphere. Even secular biologists admit this.

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They say, yep, there were some serious problems trying to get enough air into that animal. So maybe the pressure was different.

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Maybe the oxygen is different. But some things were different about that pre -flood world. And then how in the world can we get this monstrous pterosaur airborne when it's got a 53 foot wingspan and weighed 600 pounds?

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Some people have run the flight physics on this creature and said, look, you'd have to hit it with 16 mile an hour winds just to get its toes lifted off the ground.

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So definitely a different place, different time. And this world is gone. It's nothing like the world that we have today.

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Well, next, let's cover the question about how in the world can you get all these animals to fit on the ark?

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In fact, I was at a debate once and the person against me said, well, Dr. Biddle, and this guy was even purported to be a

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Christian, says, well, there's no way that we know that Noah's Flood is a real event because there's 1 .8

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million species would have to be on the ark. And I'm like, you just really haven't studied what our position is.

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Our position is not all the species had to be on the ark. If you just take these four categories of animals, as an example, you have

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Canis lupus, which is the dog kind, and there are 339 breeds of dogs.

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You only need to bring a pair of those on the ark. There's 336 breeds of horses.

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You don't need to bring the big ones, the little ones, and the medium ones. Well, did you know that a Clydesdale horse today can even breed with a smaller horse?

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They're all interfertile, still the same kind. And bears are even more interesting because even at the family level, when you have eight species of bears, did you know that five of the eight species of bears are still interfertile?

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You can take a brown bear and a polar bear, and they're still interfertile.

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Same thing with chickens, 68 breeds of chickens, and they're all interfertile. So you can see quickly how we've just taken a few families of animals, hundreds of different breeds, and said, look, all you need is a pair of each of them, eight animals total to represent hundreds of different current kinds.

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So it's very clear that the Bible says God will bring to Noah the different kinds of animals to bring on the ark.

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So next, I want to get into some of the mechanics about the flood. The flood started on the 600th year of Noah's life, and I want to explain a little bit about the lifespans.

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I hope we'll have enough time for that. And so he lived for 600 years, and on his 600th year is when the flood came, and he lived for 350 years after that.

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But when that happened, and you look how this reads like a history book, in the 600th year of his life, in the second month, in the 17th day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up.

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That one clause is the most definitive mechanical explanation of what happened during Noah's flood.

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All the fountains of the great deep were open up. The Hebrew word for breaking open is the bakah word, and it's very much like cleaving something open.

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So something happened on that day that brought about the flood. And I want to show you next an animation.

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I'm not sure if the sound is going to work for this, but I'm just going to let it run. And if you don't hear the sound, either way it's going to be fine.

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It's about a 20 second explanation or video demonstration of what it would have looked like when the fountains of the great deep broke open.

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So here we can see a subduction happening underneath the land continents, and the formation of the

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Rocky Mountains as it's pushing up the mountains that happened by the subduction of the new sea floor.

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And here we can see when the flood stopped, the fountains of the great deep cool, and then pulled the water back off of the continents.

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So you just saw a 20 second demonstration of a summary of what happened over a year in the flood.

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And we'll talk more about each of these stages. This is stage one when the fountains of the great deep broke open.

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This is prepared by Dr. John Baumgardner. He's a PhD from UCLA in geophysics, and he has based his software model called

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Terra on this and has proven it scientifically over and over again that that's how the continents broke apart.

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We can even see the Mid -Atlantic Ridge today. It's quite pronounced. It's quite obvious how the continents broke apart like that during Noah's Flood.

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With the Mid -Atlantic Ridge, which is a 10 ,000 mile oceanic rift that pushed these continents apart.

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This happened by the magma coming up, spreading to the left and the right as the magma came up, it hits the land continents and then it starts subducting.

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So when this newly formed seafloor gets pushed up against the land masses, it binds, builds up tension, and then releases.

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And when that happens, it sends a bidirectional tsunami, one going out to sea and one washing up onto the land.

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And that's how we see the dinosaurs are buried and stratified layer after layer after layer using the exact process that we just saw.

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We even see this is how earthquakes happen today. This is a little one that happened in Japan. Just a 60 -foot slip happened when the ocean, the seafloor was diving underneath the land continent, had been bound there for weeks or months, who knows how long it was building the tension, then finally slipped.

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And when it slipped, it was a 60 -foot slip. And that little 60 -foot slip sent tsunamis all the way over to other continents.

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And isn't it interesting how when you look at the Genesis account, it says in Genesis 8, verse 3, that the waters receded from the earth, going forth and returning.

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And at the end of the 150 days, the water decreased. Well, I know a number of scientists and theologians that look at that verse and say, you know what?

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That's talking about tsunamis that are coming up upon the earth and then sheeting off, coming up, sheeting off, going forth, return, going forth, return.

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So here we have, in the Bible, a scientific explanation of what happened during the flood.

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This is quite obvious that this happened. Let's just take one location in North Dakota. We'll take here, this is called the

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Tannus location. In this one location here, I'm going to show you a zoom. We're going to see a little figure of a man out there.

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And he is in the Tannus location where we find all kinds of fossils.

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So you can see this man way, way, way down there. And in this layer, there are at least two tsunami, evidence of two different tsunamis that have happened there.

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And look what it left behind. Excuse me. Thessalosaurus mummy, where its muscles look like beef jerky.

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With great tissue preservation. And fossilized fish, where their fins were even preserved.

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Look at these close -up zooms here of these incredible fish that were really, really well preserved.

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And we see here two distinct deposition events. The water comes up, brings in mud and sediment, and sheet flows back off.

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The water comes back up and sheet flows back off. Here we have even the directions of the tsunami.

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Scientists can determine how the water came up and fell back off, came up and fell back off.

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So here's just one example in the middle of the Dakotas where we see these tsunamis happening.

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So now let's talk about taphonomy. This is what I found to be one of the most convincing parts of Noah's Flood.

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It's just the taphonomy and the extent of the fossil record. So if we just see here in the middle of America, why in the world do we have an area where we have three partial countries, a million square miles, 14 states, representing all the different dinosaur species that we know pretty much are found in this area.

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And they're mixed with marine life. How in the world do you bury 14 states, a million square miles, three countries with millions upon millions of dinosaurs and not have a worldwide flood?

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They're buried in mud. Look at this, 1 ,800 miles long, 1 ,000 miles wide.

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It's the most obvious thing in the world. There was a worldwide flood. Here's a T -Rex that had to be helicoptered out and it's buried under 100 feet of mud.

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Now evolutionists would say it's an asteroid that fell there when the graphic showed. That destroyed all these animals.

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But if we drop the rock here, the Chicxulub crater, look at what it would have done.

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This is a secular animation of how that Chicxulub asteroid, which is what secularists believed led to the dinosaur extinction, would have landed there, created some flooding and everything.

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But look at the dinosaur extinction zone I just showed you. It completely missed that area.

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So it does not explain at all how the dinosaurs died. No, I think we would have need sheet flow water and tsunamis coming up that were caused from the subduction coming up over in America, going from the west to the east, west to the east, sheeting on and off the continents like that, coming in from the oceans, not coming in from the

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Chicxulub asteroid. So certainly a much better explanation would be Noah's Flood.

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Now, one of the best, most convincing things that I found is simply this. In fact, if I were to take five minutes and go to coffee with someone, they would say, hey,

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Dr. Biddle, I've heard a lot about this flood stuff. What's your best shot? I would say that's easy.

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Just give me two minutes and I'll convince you of the flood. I would simply ask this one question.

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How in the world do you bury a million square miles of dinosaurs in the middle of America in a matrix with three products, mud, sand and ash?

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Because that's what they're buried in. They're buried in a matrix of those three substances. And catastrophic plate tectonics is really the only explanation that can explain how you bury a million miles worth of dinosaurs in mud, sand and ash.

32:54

Where did all that ash come from? Here's an animation that's going to walk us through that. These rapidly subducting plates resulted...

33:36

So in the 1980s, Mount St. Helens blew its top. I was a teenager when that happened.

33:42

And it turned the clouds dark for three states. Washington, Oregon and California were dark for a few days when that little tiny volcano blew its top.

33:54

When it did, it released one quarter of one cubic mile of ash.

34:00

So 0 .25 of one cubic mile of ash. Enough to darken three states for a few days.

34:07

When the Independence Dike Swarm blew off, and secularists are admitting, yep, it went off, they estimate it released 4 ,000 cubic miles of ash.

34:18

And it was a subduction -related event. The Farallon Plate was diving so quickly underneath North America that created huge subduction -related volcanoes that tore a 375 -mile rift in the

34:32

Los Angeles region, pushing up so much ash, it filled the skies and buried those dinosaurs, a million square miles of them, much of them with ash, mud and sand.

34:45

What could do that? Bury these dinosaurs in mud, sand and ash. So if you look at the study of taphonomy, which is how the conditions in which these dinosaurs are buried, well, here we have it, the three products.

34:57

You've got mud coming in from the ocean, from these radical tsunamis along with sand, and they're being buried by ash because of the subduction -related volcanoes that are coming up.

35:09

So those three products are exactly what we find the dinosaurs buried in today. Mud, sand and ash.

35:15

And the idea, the flood -based idea of catastrophic plate tectonics is a perfect explanation of why we see what we see today.

35:25

Now let's just drill into one particular area in the middle of America called the

35:30

Morrison Formation. It's a Jurassic formation, so it's right underneath the topmost flood layers, which would be the

35:37

Cretaceous layers. But the Morrison Formation is a 600 ,000 -mile area that's right in the heart center of that bigger swath of land that I showed you before.

35:49

So it's 13 states, this formation, 600 ,000 square miles.

35:54

So here's what it looks like. We're going to zoom in to one little city called the

35:59

Morrison, the city of Morrison, Colorado. And we're going to go take a look at this big mud formation called the

36:06

Morrison Formation. Well, did you know that this 13 -state region that spans 600 ,000 square miles is made of a 300 -foot -thick pancake of mud?

36:20

So let's just stop and think about this. What on earth could make a 300 -foot -thick mud pancake that spans 13 states and 600 ,000 square miles?

36:31

How could you do that without a worldwide flood? If we look at this 300 -foot -thick area, well, we can fly a 747 down and a nosedive into it.

36:42

That's how big a plane looks, 230 feet. What about the Empire State Building? We can kind of size that up.

36:48

But remember, this 300 -foot -thick mud pancake spans 13 states.

36:54

And inside of it, we find 50 species of dead dinosaurs, 32 genre, all kinds of fossil occurrences, all kinds of fossilized plants that are all in this kill zone locked up together.

37:10

All these species together, one mud pancake, 300 feet, 13 states.

37:16

How could you do that without a worldwide flood? And some experts would say we've discovered less than half of the number of creatures that are buried in this

37:26

Morrison Formation. So just really quick, I want a couple more things, then we'll wrap up at 720 and see if we can take some questions.

37:35

The last thing I want to look at gets a little bit more scientific, but let's look at fossil and oil correlation.

37:42

So here's all the fossil beds that are found around the world, all these little green dots here.

37:48

And here's a phenomenon that we all know to be true. Secularists and creationists would both agree to this. It's where we find the same type of fossil species buried on multiple continents that are now currently spread apart by thousands of miles.

38:03

So we believe that these fossils are correlated or living on these different continents because they all used to live there before Earth was catastrophically ripped apart.

38:13

So if we just take these two continents, look at South America here in Africa, and you can look at the notch in the middle of your screen, we're going to put them together now.

38:24

So that's what they look like before the flood as the fountains of the great deep broke open, splitting this region in half.

38:31

Well, look at this. You see all these fossils here? Well, they're correlated. This was a habitat. This was a habitat down here.

38:38

And now these creatures are buried in the mud that was responsible for killing them.

38:44

So think about this. I'm not saying they're buried in the mud that they were killed around.

38:51

I'm saying they're buried by the mud in the mud that killed them. The mud was the cause for their death and that's why they're found buried, suffocated under 50, 100, 150 feet of mud.

39:03

And when you correlate these creatures, it's the same types of fossils and plants and creatures and animals that were once living together that are now spread over 2000 miles apart.

39:14

But you can find brothers and sisters and cousins straddling these two continents.

39:20

They were there living when they were broken apart. We also know this through oil chemistry.

39:26

So people who investigate different types of coal and oil and the things that are buried underneath the ground like this, we can learn that different types of oils actually have signatures to them.

39:39

So when we look down at how these ancient oil beds were formed and everything, well, plant and animal life turns into these substances that breaks down, eventually turns into oil that we go down and seek out and pump it out.

39:53

But we all know what's dead animal and plant matter. But did you know that if you go and look at the fossils or the oil that's on each side of these straddled continents that they correlate together, look at this.

40:09

Here's the two continents we were just looking at. Notice that the same different types of chemically -signatured oil is on either side of the matching sides of the continents, proving that whatever habitat looked like when these continents were pushed together before the fountains of the great deep pushed them apart, it was the same type of plants, same type of animals that were living there that were rapidly and quickly pushed apart during the floods.

40:39

Even the oil is chemically correlated. We'll go ahead and close with this dinosaur soft tissues.

40:46

Here is a fossilized triceratops form that's actually not so fossilized.

40:51

You demineralize it. You can pull it and stretch it. It's still flexible. It has 100 % rebound to it.

41:00

Mark Armitage is using some forceps and tweezers here. He demineralized the bone and he's able to pull it and stretch it.

41:07

How was he able to do that? Well, it's not a petrified rock. It's still organic bone that has soft, squishy tissue on the inside.

41:17

What really got me with respect to this is it's not just a couple of findings. It's 120 peer -reviewed science journal articles, not creationist publications, not religious publications, but peer -reviewed science journals that have substantiated not one, not two, not six, but 16 different types of bio -organic materials that are found in these dinosaur bones.

41:41

The last two that were just found are cartilage. Yes, that is a shot, an image of dinosaur cartilage and intact nerve cells.

41:51

How in the world could these materials be millions of years old? In fact, Dr. Brian Thomas, who has his

41:57

PhD in paleo -biochemistry, has established this. Here we have 122 peer -reviewed journal articles saying, yep, these are raw organic tissues that belong to dinosaurs.

42:11

Does this ancient tissue that's soft and flexible, does it fit our paradigm better of a global flood 4 ,500 years ago or ancient ideas of secular science saying, these dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago?

42:29

So I think it certainly fits our ideas much, much better. So with that,

42:34

I think I'll go ahead and end here. It is 7 .20 and then we'll see if we can take some questions if that sounds good.

42:41

How does that sound? That sounds like a great idea. So that was a really good overview and explanation about the flood.

42:50

That was a nice presentation. Great. I think that we might have some questions more focused on the movie.

42:58

So if people are watching on the live stream, please feel free on Facebook to add some questions if you have any questions.

43:06

And of course, in Zoom, if you guys have questions, please feel free to put them into the chat.

43:12

To start with, I'd like to know if you bought your tickets yet for the movie.

43:19

Oh, you're asking me. Yeah, I sure did. In fact, my daughter bought 20.

43:24

She's gonna take her whole ministry over there. And I bought seven for each night for family members.

43:32

So we're gonna be attending a theater over here in Folsom. And then I just learned today that we got comped 50 tickets from Fathom.

43:40

So I have yet to find out what to do with those tickets. But there are some of the theaters around our

43:45

Sacramento area that are getting bought up a little bit, which is nice. Some of the theaters only have half the seats left.

43:51

So I'm encouraged to see that. But yeah, I definitely did buy my tickets. If it does well enough in those two days, is there a possibility that they could extend, like add more dates?

44:07

Yeah, that's what we're told. That Fathom says that if they do sell out, that the theaters will have the automatic option to add more days.

44:15

So that's gonna be great. Yeah, that's very exciting. What's your favorite movie snack?

44:22

Oh my gosh, it would have to be whenever my wife lets me have her leftover movie snacks, which is popcorn and M &M's.

44:31

She actually, she mixes them together and they have to be plain. If I buy the peanut one, she'll send me right back to go get the regular ones.

44:41

So, and she has them together, like mixing them, which is probably an unorthodox thing to do, but she likes doing that.

44:52

Does she put them in her popcorn? I've heard that people put junior mints in their popcorn.

44:58

That could be a good idea, but no, I think she has them separately. And I like having the bottom of the barrel when you have all the kernels in there, the crunchy stuff, that's always fun.

45:09

You get to fish them out of your teeth for hours afterwards. So, I'm making

45:15

Steven blush, so. Will the movie eventually come to DVD and do you know like the timeline of that?

45:24

I do. Fathom has a blackout period for 30 days after the movie comes out in the theaters.

45:31

And then right at day 30, it'll be available on over 30 cable carriers and on DVD.

45:39

Okay. Do you, so you're the, you're a producer.

45:47

Is that your title? Is that, was that your role in this film? Yeah, so Ralph Strand is the president of Seven Fold Films and I'm the president of Genesis Apologetics and we split the movie ownership 50 -50.

46:00

And my role as the executive producer and our ministries are also a producer and then

46:06

Ralph is a producer director. So, but we both own the movie half and half.

46:12

I'm going to go ahead and turn off your sharing. So, so that. Yeah, sure. Or unless you'd like to do that, it might be easier for you to find the button.

46:21

See if I can find that button here. Screen sharing.

46:26

Here we go. Let's see.

46:32

It's not, not bringing that up. Okay, here we go. Close that. So, I'll do the stop share thing.

46:40

Okay, there we go. Good. Now I can see you better. So, so you guys split the ownership is what you said.

46:48

And, and so what like, what was your active role in the making of the film?

46:55

So, I guess you could say it was threefold. One was that I was the technical overseer of the content of the movie.

47:06

I delegated all of the artistic elements to Ralph. That's clearly his expertise.

47:13

Ralph is also a content expert. But the way that we arranged our partnership is that I was a technical overseer of the creation science that would be included in the movie.

47:22

But Ralph was a very equal contributor in that regard. The second thing was that I was the orchestrator and arranger putting together the, the travel arrangements, the film shoot, the location, the people that were involved, things of that role.

47:40

And then the third thing would be the promotion and the distribution. So, our ministry was the one to work with 15 different marketing platforms to promote the movie.

47:50

Like Faith IT and Logos and Blue Letter Bible and Salem and Crosswalk and radio stations and email lists and things like that.

47:59

So, we arranged the marketing plan and we're trying to promote the film as widely as possible.

48:05

So, those are really my roles. What was your favorite role? You know, my favorite role is the part when the movie got done.

48:15

No, you know, it was, it was a heavy lift and I think the favorite role

48:22

I have is seeing some of the marketing go out and actually be effective. But it's a little bit nerve wracking too because I could literally spend 24 hours a day if I had the strength to promote the movie because every social media post that we go out has dozens of people that post questions and follow up things or where is it playing and how do

48:45

I get a copy of it and all that stuff. And it's just a little bit overwhelming to know that I could be on those channels all day long and still not get to everything.

48:54

And we have other people that are helping too, but it's a favorite part and also a very burdensome part.

49:00

But Jesus says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. So, I try to work from rest and realize that he's gonna just help, he's gonna help us get it out there.

49:11

Yeah, can you elaborate on the title of the film? Yes, my bias was to do something dry and informative.

49:23

Like Noah's Flood, the true story, something like that was gonna be my title preference. But Ralph wanted to do something that was gonna be more artistic with mystery and intrigue.

49:34

And ultimately he won in that dialogue that we had. And I think he should have because the movie title, which is

49:43

The Ark in the Darkness, Unearthing the Mysteries of Noah's Flood. I was adamant that I needed the words

49:49

Noah's Flood to be in the movie title, even though it's in the subtitle just because I want people searching for it and then finding it.

49:56

But The Ark in the Darkness has been a little bit controversial because I agree with Ralph, the director, that it is full of mystery and intrigue.

50:04

But people also ask me, what's the darkness about? My response to that is, look, it was a judgment and it was a time where it was gloomy and judgmental and it was a hard thing that happened on earth.

50:20

So that's kind of a little background about the title. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

50:27

Will you be releasing the movie in different languages, including

50:33

Spanish? I saw that question pop up. And yes, during the

50:38

Fathom blackout period for 30 days, we have a team of people that are gonna translate it in over 20 different languages.

50:46

And so Spanish will be included. We've got people queued up for Russian, Polish, all kinds of stuff.

50:51

So it's our goal. In fact, our end game for this movie is YouTube. Free release around the world because we want it to be a ministry tool.

51:00

So that won't happen until after the cable. The cable wants a 90 day exclusive but we wanna go out on cable just because I think it's gonna get to more people that way.

51:10

But our end game is to get out on YouTube free in multiple languages. Yeah, that's great.

51:19

So when producing the movie, did you guys... Well, first let's talk about, you have a lot of expert scientists and anapologists who speak in the movie.

51:28

Who is involved in that? Who will we see when we see the movie? Yeah, so we invited...

51:36

In fact, we had 12 invitations. We had one of our experts in factually pass away,

51:43

Kevin Anderson with a group that's right out by you guys. I forget the name of it.

51:49

I can't believe the name escapes me. But he was invited, unfortunately passed away. He was gonna come out just like a week before he was gonna come out, he passed away.

51:57

So he was on our list. But the 11 people that are in the movie, let's see, I think there's four of them from Answers in Genesis.

52:06

Dr. Snelling, Chaffey, Mortensen, and Gabrielle Haynes. And then we had some

52:13

Liberty University people, Dr. Mark Horstmeyer, Dr. Randall Price, several of the people from Liberty University.

52:21

We had Dr. Charles involved, Dr. John Baumgartner involved.

52:26

He's big in geophysics and everything. So these are very classical experts who also are aligned with our ministry on the idea that catastrophic plate tectonics is the leading and most supportable theory of how the flood happened.

52:42

That makes sense. And then did you draw information from other sources besides Genesis, like the

52:50

Dead Sea Scrolls or any other resources like that? Let's see, yes.

52:58

In the movie, the last five or 10 minutes does have a,

53:04

I would say, a moderate but very mainstream push on end times and end time judgment.

53:12

We don't take a hard position on pre -trib, post -trib, anything like that. But we talk about, what we do is we align what

53:20

Jesus said about the flood in Matthew chapter 24, when he says, just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the coming of the

53:27

Son of Man. People won't be expecting a judgment. And so we take that theme and build on it and its applicability of the flood conceptually to today and the interesting times that we're living through today.

53:40

We also draw from 2 Peter 3 and talk about that. But we didn't draw from any extra biblical sources like the

53:49

Dead Sea Scrolls or the Book of Jasher or Book of Enoch or any of that other stuff.

53:56

We stuck very, very mainstream biblical in this production. Can you tell us a little bit more, just briefly, about the difference of the world before the flood and after the flood?

54:14

And as a follow -up question, would you have rather made a movie in the atmosphere before the flood?

54:20

Oh, that's a great question. Let me put my response in two categories.

54:25

I would say first, we know for sure, because of Scripture, some things that are true about the pre -flood world that we can stand on.

54:34

And then we can move out of that category and go into one that's clearly speculation and opinion.

54:41

So I'll cover both real quickly. What we know from the Bible is that it was temperate and habitable and spreadable for people.

54:49

So what do I mean by that? The landscape probably wasn't with impassable mountain ranges because God says, be fruitful and multiply, spread around, you know?

54:59

So God was like, all right, there's places to get around this earth. It was temperate because God was walking around in the garden and they were wearing no clothes to start with.

55:09

So that's a pretty reasonable inferences about that. And it was very lush and rich.

55:16

We can infer that from the coal and oil deposits that we have. There's a lot of plant material.

55:22

There's been a lot of studies on the amount of plant material it would take to make the coal seams that we have today.

55:28

So those are some things that are pretty conservatively held amongst scientists and creationists about this pre -flood world.

55:36

Also, we would add that it was designed for people to live forever before the fall.

55:43

So I would say it was perfectly conditioned and tuned with respect to carbon and CO2 and oxygen and pressures and all that other stuff.

55:53

And then there's some inferences that we can draw too, like how in the world does a person's knees last for 600 years to the point where you're going to go out and build an arc?

56:04

Well, maybe gravity was a little bit different. Maybe that's a speculation. I would also speculate that I personally think that oxygen levels and or types were more favorable than what they are today.

56:19

I don't think the sun and its UVs were as harsh and as harmful as they are today.

56:25

Maybe sunburns weren't even a thing in the pre -flood world, but we don't know for sure. That would be an inference.

56:31

And I also think there's something going on when you read the early chapters of Genesis about how God caused the water to come up from the ground, kind of like a sprinkler system before the rain would go around that would water the earth.

56:43

That's quite interesting to me. And then why did rainbows just start after the flood? Was there an atmospheric change that went on in our climate that led to rainbows being able to be produced now and they weren't back then?

56:58

I don't know. These are some speculations, but things that I find very interesting. Yeah. I heard...

57:11

Very well known, Dr. Morris. I heard him talking one time about some of the pre -flood conditions that we can presume, but we will never know for certain, of course.

57:24

But he said there's a good chance that there was a lot of technology. A lot of times we take for granted how developed that they might have been.

57:38

We think, oh, they were cavemen. But they probably had a lot of technology.

57:44

And to build a ship the way that Noah did, they had to have at least fine tools.

57:52

It's very interesting. Again, as a presuppositionalist, I want to make sure

57:57

I draw from scripture. But I have to ask myself this question. I've worked experimentally before with pitch from trees.

58:07

And God told Noah to cover this entire 500 -foot long vessel, both inside and outside with pitch.

58:15

And you cannot apply it unless it's heated to a boiling point. And when you take it out of a vat with a big paintbrush or whatever it is, and you point it on ship lapping or on whatever those beams were made of, it dries within seconds.

58:31

Like it's a hyper -fast drying type of fiberglass.

58:38

I don't know how you could make pitch applicable to a ship unless you could have it in a giant metal vat.

58:46

So yeah, there were some good technologies going on before the flood. Yeah. OK. So we just have a few more minutes before we're going to turn off the live feed.

59:00

So then we'll spend a little more time back in the Zoom Fellowship Room for people who might want to ask questions directly.

59:06

But while we're still public, let's do a couple of things. We want to make sure that you remind people how they can find you, how they can go watch the movie, all of those details.

59:15

Do you also want to introduce your friend who's sitting there with you? Yes. Come on over, Steven. Let's do that one.

59:22

We'll talk about the movie too. So Steven is my friend. He is the president of the International Association for Recreation.

59:29

And we love working with the IAC because he's able to go out and talk with homeschool groups.

59:35

He's currently working on getting a Christian tour set up in the seven leading natural history museums around the nation.

59:43

And we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homeschool kids that are going through public sector museums now with a

59:51

Christian worldview, thanks to the efforts that Steven is making. So with that little introduction, take it away.

59:59

Yeah. So I love museums. Yeah. I love museums and I love

01:00:06

Jesus. So why not put them together? But at the end of the day, there are many public museums, zoos, and aquariums that are full of things that God created.

01:00:18

And God owns everything he created. And being children of God, we get to have access to those things.

01:00:28

So our philosophy is, why not walk into those doors and teach people about God and what he created, whether it's a public museum or not?

01:00:37

Great point. Yes. And we love supporting them. We use material from ICR, AIG, wherever we can get it.

01:00:45

And then we arm Steven and the hundreds of followers that work with the IAC to go out.

01:00:52

And we're very intentional about framing together these Christian worldview tours in public museums.

01:00:58

Not everyone's going to be able to get out to the terrific Answers in Genesis Museum or ICR's Museum or David Reeves Museum.

01:01:05

They're going to only be able to go 20 miles down the road to their Natural History Museum. Why can't they see those great displays through a

01:01:12

Christian lens? So that's the work that Steven and his team do. They've got dozens of the whisper sets in the field right now that are deployed out to tour guides to give these tours.

01:01:23

Sometimes they're paid. Sometimes they're free. But he's doing a great job in that regard. Yeah, it's really exciting.

01:01:29

It's great to see Christians be professionals in the secular world and using that world to bring

01:01:37

God glory. It's really exciting to be able to walk into a museum and see an ape and a human standing side by side together in an exhibit that's called

01:01:50

Human Evolution. And be able to look at that and say, I know what that's actually saying.

01:01:56

And what they're saying about it is not true. But what the Bible says about it is. And being able to tell our children and our friends about what does the

01:02:04

Bible say about these world -class exhibits at some of the world's best museums. There you go.

01:02:10

That's great. Amen. Well, I actually, Dan, I don't know if you know this.

01:02:16

But Steven was one of our very first speakers here on CFS virtually there back in 2020.

01:02:23

He actually took us through a virtual tour of the Smithsonian. But we were not allowed to live stream or record it.

01:02:30

So nobody can find it. We do have it listed in our archives. But just no videos attached to it.

01:02:36

So that's great. Yeah. And I work with Steven. I've been working with him for a few years with IEC.

01:02:43

So it's a blessing to me to get to see what he does and to support him that way too. So we love it.

01:02:49

Yeah. Let's do this in order. Steven first, then Dan, and then I'll finish.

01:02:55

Remind everybody listening how they can follow and support your ministries. Steven? Yeah. So you can go to associationforcreation .org

01:03:05

and learn more about our ministry. Great. And for Genesis Apologetics, you can go to our website at just genesisapologetics .com.

01:03:15

And we have lots of free downloadable stuff that's there. And to learn about the movie, just go to noahsflood .com.

01:03:22

It's just the apostrophe, no apostrophe s, but plural noahsflood .com.

01:03:27

So just noahsflood .com. You can find theater, showtimes, tickets, the whole works there, and a bunch of really helpful

01:03:33

FAQs on the flood. Perfect. And we are Creation Fellowship Santee.

01:03:39

You can find a list of our upcoming speakers by typing in tinyurl .com

01:03:44

forward slash CFS. Actually, that's CFSantee. So C like creation,

01:03:51

F like fellowship. And then the word Santee is spelled S -A -N -T -E -E. And you can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com

01:04:00

to get on our email list so that you don't miss any of our upcoming speakers. So with that, we're gonna go ahead and sign off for the public side of things.