Atlantis: Fact or Fable? by Alan Smith

Okay. All right. Well, I am Terri Camerizal, and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship CNT.

We're a group of friends who love to study God's word and believe that the Bible, when read properly, disproves

Darwinian evolution. We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020.

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

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

forward slash CFS archives. That's C like creation, F like fellowship,

S like CNT archives. Tonight, we are so happy to introduce to you our good friend, my friend,

Alan Smith. In 2014, I took a group of homeschool families on a field trip to the

Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, where Alan was our tour guide.

Shortly after that, he invited me to come to the Thursday night fellowship he was leading that met there in the museum.

As a homeschooling mom, I jumped on the opportunity for a free Bible class.

Alan continued to lead the in -person group that met on Thursday nights right up until the lockdown in 2020, which is when we took to meeting online instead.

Tonight, we get to have our leader with us to present for us. Alan still is teaching at the museum on the first weekend of each month.

They have a kids' creation club. Also, they recently started on Tuesday nights, the first Tuesday night of the month, an in -person fellowship similar to what they used to do.

That's called Genesis to Revelation. He will share a little bit more about that tonight.

At Christmas time, he presented for us a talk about his research into the city of Atlantis and how the

Bible may refer to it. We are happy to have him share that with all of you here in this forum tonight.

Alan, go ahead. Thank you, Terri, for that introduction. My name is Alan. I'm a

Christian, and I believe the Bible's true from cover to cover. I even believe the cover. Thank you all for coming to my very first Zoom class.

Can you guys see me okay? I can't hear anybody. We sure can.

What do you look like, Alan? Do I look all right? Am I doing okay? Let me just double check here.

Okay. I think I'm okay. Let's go to my slides. I hope you can see that.

Can you guys see my slides? My slide? Yes. Okay. There we go.

Last year, when Robin and her twin sister

Holly were planning the Christmas party, Robin had asked me if I wanted to teach a class and something different than I've ever taught.

I had something I'd been working on. I wasn't sure if I wanted to present this to my friends or not, but I said, why don't

I just do it? Last year, my son introduced me to a video series on YouTube that was very interesting.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself first. I was born or raised in San Diego, California. I still live here.

I love San Diego. You can go to the mountains. You can go to the beach. There's all kinds of great stuff to do here.

You can take your cats to the beach. I love my cats. Not far away, there's a dinosaur park up north a little bit, probably towards Terry's house.

I grew up going to Calvary Chapel in San Diego. Mike McIntosh was the pastor.

That was my biblical foundation. As I grew up, I became a guitar player in the 80s.

My dream was to be a rock star. I'm glad that did not happen. I also used to love a lot of weird shows like In Search Of and The Twilight Zone.

They used to talk about really interesting topics like the Merbuda Triangle, Atlantis, and other stuff.

I used to be really into UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster a long time ago. I'm not anymore.

I found this place in 1992 in Santee, California, which is just five minutes from where I live right now.

I walked through the museum. Now, I went to public school. I was taught evolution.

I wasn't really sure about it. Honestly, when I went to church, they didn't talk.

In the 70s, there wasn't the creation versus evolution stuff being talked about.

I went through the museum and it was very interesting. Like I said, I wasn't really sure about evolution at the time.

But the museum mentions the age of the Earth being about 6 ,000 years old. I had never heard that ever in my life.

Honestly, I walked out of that museum. I thought those people were crazy. I said that I will never step foot in that museum again.

This was back in September of 1992. Then a few years later, I read this article in National Geographic tracing all the different dog breeds back to just a few wolves just a few thousand years ago.

I thought, wow, that's kind of like what they said at that museum, although this is evolution, but actually it's speciation.

It got me curious. Then I ran across these videos by Kent Hovind on the age of the

Earth and dinosaurs and the Bible. The one called Lies in the Textbooks, that really got me.

I watched this video and it was intriguing.

I actually looked things up online and I found out it's true. Evolution is not true.

From that point on, I prayed and I asked God. I said, if it's your will,

God, this is what I want to do. I want to teach this topic. Here I am, what, 15 years later.

Let's talk about Atlantis. There's something really important that I like to point out.

There's all kinds of ideas on Atlantis, but they're very vaguely related to what

Plato wrote. We're going to look at what Plato actually wrote.

Plato wrote, in a single day and night of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea.

Now, what does this have to do with the Bible? Not a lot, but there is a very small connection and we're going to talk about that.

Okay. When I was first interested in this topic last year,

I started looking up Atlantis from a creationist point of view and I found articles.

I'm going to read to you portions of an article on the

Answers in Genesis website. So, this is from Answers in Genesis.

The island of Atlantis was first mentioned and recorded by Plato in his dialogues

Timaeus and Critias. Plato mentions that this rather large island was destroyed by a great earthquake.

The timeframe for this written account is said to be about 350 to 400 years before Christ.

According to Plato, Atlantis was named for Atlas, who was supposedly the oldest twin of Poseidon, the son of Cronus in Greek mythology.

Furthermore, Poseidon was the owner of the island and named it for his son. Other place names also reflect

Atlas, such as the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlas Mountains extending from Morocco to Algeria.

According to Plato's account of Socrates' account of Solon's account that he received from the

Egyptians, the Athenians, people of the city of Athens and perhaps others in Greece, went to war with those inhabiting the island of Atlantis.

The Atlanteans had conquered parts of modern -day Italy and North Africa and were threatening

Greece and Egypt. Now, there's a bust of Solon and a bust of Plato.

When it comes down to it, either Atlantis was a real place or it wasn't.

If it wasn't, then the discussion is more or less finished. And considering that this story was passed down several times before Plato recorded it, we can assume that it may have some inaccuracies.

Number one, either Atlantis was destroyed by the flood of Noah and we should not expect to find remnants of it, or two,

Atlantis was destroyed after the flood and its remnants may still exist.

So, could Atlantis have existed pre -flood? If so, there would be little evidence left due to such a worldwide cataclysm.

However, the Critias account by Plato reads, which had elapsed since the war, which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the pillars of Hercules and all who dwelt within them.

This war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war.

The combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia.

And when afterwards, sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

Also, in Plato's account of Atlantis, he refers to the Atlantic Ocean as well as the pillars of Hercules, which is the

Strait of Gibraltar between modern -day Spain and Morocco. Plato said Atlantis was as large as Libya and Asia.

Asia was originally seen as a part of modern -day Turkey, and keep in mind that this is not what we think of today as Libya and Asia, but the way the

Greeks viewed them about 500 BC. Take note that these are post -flood features and names.

That puts it in its proper context. So this is, these are the Straits of Gibraltar.

You've got on the right, you have the Mediterranean Sea, and on the left, you've got the Atlantic Ocean. And right there, where they kind of meet together, those are the

Straits of Gibraltar. There's another view from up above with Spain on the right and Morocco on the south.

There's the Rock of Gibraltar right there.

So in the past, people have proposed likely places for Atlantis, such as the Americas or parts of it, remnants of the island of Faroe in the

Mediterranean, which should be ruled out by Plato's statements, or the Azores in the Atlantic, but there has never been a consensus by researchers that any of these were indeed

Atlantis. So you've heard of the island of Santorini, which a lot of people, when

I was a kid, people thought that that may have been Atlantis, but that's in the Mediterranean. That doesn't fit the description of where it is or was by Plato.

Here's islands off the west coast of Africa that probably were not

Atlantis. And then, this was really popular in the old days, was that Atlantis was a continent that had sunk in the

Atlantic Ocean. But we can look at a map, or excuse me, this is a map, an old map of Atlantis that somebody made up.

Notice it's upside down because America is on the right and Africa and Europe are on the left.

Now, this is a map of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. There is no sunken continent.

So Atlantis is not on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, just not there.

Another popular idea was that the Bimini Islands down off of Florida, that that was

Atlantis. I remember as a kid seeing these big giant rocks that look like they may have, they call it the

Bimini Road, like it may have been man -made from a long time ago. Not really sure.

I don't think they're sure where that came from or what that was. But Plato also informs us that Atlantis was inhabited by Poseidon and his family, including

Atlas. Before people begin thinking, are you taking Greek mythology seriously? Take note that Poseidon was the son of Cronus, which is the variant of Kittim.

Cronus, Cronos, and I don't know how to say that other one. But biblically, Kittim was the son of Javon, the son of Japheth, the son of Noah.

With this in mind, Atlas was likely Noah's great, great, great grandson. So when

Plato speaks of Poseidon inheriting land from the dispersion of people around the earth, this makes sense.

Kittim, Poseidon's father, was mentioned in the Tower of Babel account. With the Tower of Babel dispersion happening just over 100 years after the flood, according to Usher, then the earliest

Atlantis could have been inhabited was soon after that time. So the Tower of Babel event, you know, happened a little more than 100 years after the flood.

The people groups, the families, left and went to different parts of the world. Okay, that's

Poseidon. According to Plato, Poseidon's control of Atlantis had already been given to Atlas, after whose death several kings had ruled by the time the disaster had struck the island.

If Poseidon was the great, great grandson of Noah, the same as Eber, who is the father of the

Hebrews, and in a different lineage, then it's reasonable to assume that his life expectancy would be near the same as Eber, and Atlas may have been near the same as Eber's son

Peleg. The ages of the post -flood patriarchs dropped off after Noah.

So Atlas was the legendary king of Mauretania, the land of the Maury in antiquity, roughly corresponding with modern

Magrab. So that's the country of Mauretania. So if we follow

Plato's description of where Atlantis was, it should be somewhere around Mauretania.

Now remember, something to think about was before Noah's flood, people could live to be eight or nine hundred years old, not a problem.

They probably were young for a long time. After the flood, the ages dropped.

So people were living to be at first about 500, then 400, then the ages were dropping.

So think about this. Let's say if you lived several hundred years after Noah's flood, and you know, now our generations are living to be, you know, 70 to 80 years old, but your great -great -great -great -grandpa's 400 years old, and he looks very young, he would have been very wise and very intelligent, you know, we would have turned those people into gods.

That's what we do with athletes and movie stars, people who seem greater than us, we turn them into gods.

I mean, not me myself, but our culture does that. It makes sense that they would turn in their ancestors as, turn them into gods.

You know, the Romans and the Greek, they said that we are descendants of the gods.

So Eber, who was born 66 years after the flood, would have died 530 years after the flood.

Had Poseidon lived about this long as well, then this would have been about 1818 BC, according to Usher, who put the flood at 2348

BC. This would have been about the time Abraham died as well. Peleg died sooner, and assuming that Atlas was his contemporary, he too should have died much sooner than Poseidon, as should the next few in line.

Using these assumptions, about 1818 BC would have been the earliest that Atlantis could have been destroyed.

To give you some context, Moses and the Exodus from Egypt would have occurred in 1491

BC, or about 850 years after the flood, using

Usher's numbers. So this is Plato pointing out to his books

Critias and Timaeus. Of course, Plato invented the spinning on the basketball on the end of your finger trick.

Solon was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic, and moral decline in archaic

Athens. Sonchis of Sice, I think that's how you pronounce it, was an

Egyptian priest who is mentioned in Greek writings as relating the account of Atlantis.

My point here is there were a lot of historians in ancient times who wrote about Atlantis.

The Egyptians, this is from Diodorus of Sicily, 50 BC, the Egyptians were strangers who in remote times settled on the banks of the

Nile, bringing with them the civilization of their mother country Atlantis, the art of writing in a polished language.

They had come from the direction of the setting sun, the far west, and were the most ancient of men.

This is called the Temple of Horus. This is in Egypt.

And if you go inside and look at this one wall, way up toward the top, there's some hieroglyphics.

And I don't know how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, but apparently this is the story of Atlantis and what happened to it and where the people came from.

So now we're going to look at what Plato said. Plato wrote, this tale about Atlantis, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages.

So, you know, after Noah's flood, Northern Africa was green.

There was no Sahara Desert. It was green. And even if you go on secular scientific websites and type in, you know,

Sahara Desert, they'll tell you that the Sahara Desert was green just a few thousand years ago.

So, you know, after the flood, everything, plants would have grown everywhere. Here it is from Live Science.

The Sahara Desert was once lush and populated. Now today, of course,

Northern Africa is a desert. Herodotus was the first historian to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent, and arrange them in a well -constructed and vivid narrative.

So Herodotus was called the father of history. He was a historian. This is a map that was drawn by Herodotus in 430

BC. Now, this is Northern Africa and Southern Europe and, you know, parts of Asia over there to the east.

So take a look. So he drew Italy on it and the

Arabian Gulf. Notice something on the left -hand side of the map. It says Atlantis.

There's a question mark that says Atlantis. Now, if you go to that part of Northern Africa and take a look there, and we'll get back to that in a minute, this is another ancient map.

We're going to turn this around similar. There's Northern Africa, Southern Europe, and parts of Asia.

If you look at the bottom left -hand corner, Atlantis is also written on the map.

So Plato wrote, the main city of Atlantis consists of centric circles of water and land.

There were alternate zones of sea and land, larger and smaller, encircling one another.

There were two of land and three of water, which were turned as if with a lathe, each having its circumference equidistant every way from the center.

So this is a drawing of, if you follow what Plato wrote, this is how

Atlantis would have been laid out. You have the island in the center, and then you have two ring islands, and then there's water in between them.

The area between the outer wall and merchant harbor was densely populated and busy all day and all night.

So it was a busy place. Now this is an artist's conception based on what

Plato wrote of what Atlantis would have looked like. It looks like science fiction,

I'll be honest with you, until I watch these videos that my son showed me.

This is called the Eye of the Sahara. It's in Mauritania. Okay, that's it right there.

Notice the island in the center and the two ring islands surrounding that island.

This is in the desert now, but it once had water in those. It was an island, there was water.

So look at the comparison of what the artist drew based on what Plato said and what's actually there in Mauritania out in the middle of the desert.

Plato wrote, the surrounding mountains of the city flowed with rivers. So to the north, there were mountain range, the big mountain range.

Those are called the Atlas Mountains, named after Atlas, the son of Poseidon.

And if you look closer, these are satellite photographs. If you look real close at these mountains, rivers once flowed through these mountains.

You can see how they flowed downward toward the south. There's the mountains to the north.

Pretty interesting. So another writing from Plato, a well near the central

Acropolis provided the city with fresh water. The Acropolis is sort of like, you know, downtown where the buildings were.

So there was an expedition that went there, I want to say about 15 years ago, and they were looking at this piece of land, and they decided to dig a well to wonder, is there fresh water?

And they found fresh water. They dug down, found fresh water. This is another satellite photograph, and I don't know if this has been enhanced, but there's a square, there's like a foundation for a building there.

It's kind of blurry, I know. Everything is always blurry on these mystery topics here.

But that is the eye of the Sahara, which seems to fit the description of Plato.

Now here's something interesting. Geologists admit that there was a massive flood in northern

Africa thousands of years ago. Most likely when the ice age ended and the oceans rose up hundreds of feet, this is when the

Mediterranean overflowed and washed over this area of northern

Africa. You can see the ripple marks out in the desert where a massive water flow washed this area out.

So when the ice age happened after Noah's flood, there was lots of snow and lots of cold summers, and the glaciers built up, and the water from the oceans froze into glaciers.

Now this is North America, and it looks like Russia and northern

Europe. Lots of ice and snow, which caused the oceans to be about 400 feet shallower.

Okay, this shows the whole world. Now this is the Mediterranean. You can see

Italy right there. So after, that's what it looks like now. So this is Los Angeles.

You can see that if you were to lower the ocean down about 400 feet, the continental shelf would take

Los Angeles out much, much further. So during the ice age, there was a lot more land exposed.

So this is Florida. If you lower the ocean about 400 feet,

Florida would double in size. And this is the

Mediterranean Sea. The white outline shows you during the ice age, that would have been the

Mediterranean. So when the glaciers melted, it filled up that area, and now the

Mediterranean is much larger. This is called, you might have heard of the Lake Missoula flood up in Washington State.

When the ice age ended and the glaciers melted, it washed through this whole area here, and it left ripples in the land.

And just like in Mauritania, same ripples near the eye of the

Sahara. So they saw only reeds on the surface of the water.

The sea in that area is impassable to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the sunken island.

So those are reeds. So imagine if Atlantis gets washed away by this flooding, it would have been covered in mud and reeds would start to grow, and now you can't go there anymore.

This part of the island looked toward the south and was sheltered from the north. So there's the eye of Sahara, sheltered to the north, looking south.

Atlantis, when sunk by the earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

So they say you used to be able to sail right up to, or take a ride up to Atlantis, but the mud washed westward when that flood happened.

So it became impassable. So people say, well, Atlantis was just a myth.

I don't know. I really don't know. But I'll tell you what, Troy, the city of Troy used to be a myth until they found it.

That's Troy right there in western Turkey. The city of, or the temple of Angkor Wat was a myth until they found it.

There it is right there. They discovered this about 150 years ago. They had only heard about it in history, and they thought, well, it must be a myth because we've never seen it, but it was buried in the jungle in Thailand.

So is this Atlantis? I don't know. I can't prove it, but it certainly fits the description by Plato.

Remember what Plato said, this tale about Atlantis, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages.

So Plato believed it was a real place. Plenty of historians believed it was a real place.

So the videos that I watched to research this were mainly these three.

There were some others also. There's a YouTube channel called Bright Insight, and the guy is not a

Christian or a creationist, but he's interested in weird things like I am.

And I love his videos. His name is Jimmy Corsetti. Very interesting guy. So thank you very much for coming tonight.

And if you guys are in San Diego, we do the G2R class the first Tuesday of every month, and next month our class is on dinosaurs.

And if you want to look me up on Facebook, there's my Facebook page. I don't post much on Facebook anymore.

Everyone likes to argue with me. But thank you very much for watching my presentation.

Great. Thank you, Alan. That was good. You're welcome. Thanks. Not particularly long, but it was good.

Well, nobody interrupted me this time. Let's not get Joyce started, okay?

So, Terri, I think there's some questions in the chat. Did you see any? Yeah, that was great.

I wasn't quite prepared for it to end so early, so sorry about that. But I was getting my earphones back on.

Turn off my slideshow here. Sure. We have a few questions. Let's see.

And maybe as we get started, people will think and ask you some more, and maybe you'll feel your seat underneath you warming up a little bit.

That's funny. Oh, yeah. Let's go ahead and keep our cameras and microphones off still during this live streaming time.

So, let's see. Jeff asked, although it seems like maybe he got somebody's answer, but we'll see if that's right.

Jeff asked, was Eber the same person as Poseidon? No. No. Did you want to explain more?

That was a pretty short answer. That's very simple. No, Eber was not

Poseidon. I don't know. They were contemporaries, though.

Didn't you say they were like cousins or something? Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think

Kittim was more closely related to Poseidon.

Interesting. Okay. And then Jeff also has a comment. He said just a week or two ago that he learned that there was pottery found in this area.

Also, records indicate gold, copper, and iron ores that are still found in the area.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I didn't go into that, but there's been a lot found there. Now, it's a very dangerous area.

It's not like we can just go there and go camping and dig around.

It's in a foreign country. They're not really friendly to Westerners. It's kind of like there's just certain parts of the world that are not easy for us to go camping.

I don't know that I would want to camp there. So, I have a question. And while we're still recording and everybody has their camera and microphones off, and you may not know this, but I'm not that versed in the actual legend of Atlantis.

I mean, I heard it offhand. What is supposed to be kind of fable -ish about it?

What is it famous for? Well, the legend is that it sunk under the ocean or there was a great earthquake and it sunk.

It was a great city and it sunk under the ocean.

Well, it sunk underwater. It was most likely, like you just saw, it was most likely not long after the flood was over.

As the ice age ended and the glaciers melted, it washed over it and it disappeared under mud.

But its big claim to fame was it was a port town. It was a good place to get a steak.

They had great tacos there. Yes. Oh, see, I would go there for that. Yeah. No, it was just one of these early great lands that the people made after the flood was over.

When God said to go out into the world and multiply, and they did. And that was one of the places that they went to.

And the people, according to the historical writings, the people that lived in Atlantis, a bunch of them went to Egypt and kind of colonized what's

Egypt. These are really early days of history. History, right.

So I had never heard before where you showed a picture of Egypt and they had the story of Atlantis in hieroglyphs.

And where is that at again? It's called the Temple of Horus. Okay. Yeah.

And I got that from the videos from Bright Insight. I'm going to have to look that up because that was very interesting.

Terry, now I'm done taking up the time. Are there more questions? Well, I have a question because, you know, as I was creating the promo, it was hard to find any kind of picture, especially even if I asked

AI for a picture that did not include it being an underground city.

I mean, you said that it sunk, but it's interesting to me about the fact that the legend built up that it was an underground city where people, maybe gods, lived and that there was something going on still when it was after it had sunk.

Well, like I mentioned this in the talk, you know, the people after the flood were living to be long ages and not long after that, they stopped living long ages.

And, you know, imagine if your great, great, great, great, great grandpa was 400 years old, but he was buff.

He looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and he was really smart and really wise.

I mean, you might think he's some sort of a god, you know, and they thought, well, these people are going to live forever because it was so different than modern people at the time.

To me, it makes sense that ancient people would, you know, we turn things into gods.

We're not supposed to, but as a culture, we do, you know, rock stars, sports stars, movie stars.

They're kind of like gods, not really, little g, false gods, but we tend to do that, you know, really look up to these people.

And like I said earlier, the Greeks and the Romans said that we are descendants from the gods.

We're descendants from these people that lived long ages, you know, and they said that they lived long ages.

I don't know. It makes sense to me. I'm not saying I worship, you know, Poseidon as a god or anything like that.

I'm just looking at it from a historical point of view and it makes sense to me.

Like I said, I don't know if this is Atlantis. I'm not saying it is, but it's very interesting where the when you look at Plato's writing at what he actually said and it looks like that may have been

Atlantis. It looks landlocked to me, but. It is now, yeah.

Okay, but before it was more open to the ocean, do you think? Well, that's according to Plato it was, according to historians it was.

Now, I don't know if it was like a river that flowed to it. I don't think it was like on the coast, but they definitely could get there by ship according to the writings.

That is just very interesting and the Bimini Road, I had seen you showed pictures of that too.

I think they thought that that was Atlantis. Like there was a road and then it would go into Atlantis.

Terry, were there any more questions? Because what we can do is we can close out for tonight and then let everybody get a chance to chat with you since we don't get to see you very often,

Alan, and I'm okay with an early night. Yeah, we don't have any more questions.

So, Alan, why don't you tell people about the two things that you still do at the museum so we can invite anybody who's local to come and join you?

Well, the first Saturday of every month I teach the kids class. It's called the Creation Club.

Then the first Tuesday of every night I do the G2R, Genesis to Revelation.

Sometimes I do a PowerPoint like I did tonight. Sometimes we do a DVD. It depends.

I have a lot of fun doing it. It's interesting and I get a lot of questions there too.

You know, for the kids, I would never present Atlantis to the kids.

That's too out there for the kids. It's more like dinosaurs and, you know, creation versus evolution.

You know, I wouldn't want to lead kids down the wrong path, but you guys are, you have a great foundation and you guys are going to be good.

This is not going to lead you to new teaching. I just thought this was an interesting topic.

It was. I really enjoyed it. Sorry, Terry, go ahead. Definitely, it was an interesting topic.

Once again, we are Creation Fellowship Santee and you can find links to most of our past presentations by typing in tinyurl .com

forward slash CFS archives, C like creation, F like fellowship, S like Santee.

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