#68 Science, the Flood & Cavemen: the Bible’s Historical Evidence + Dr. Jeff Miller

The Bible, Science, and the Question of Noah to Abraham

What happened between Noah and Abraham? Or how do we even explain the cavemen, caves, giants, from a biblical perspective?

God is actually the one that instituted science.

So in your mind, science and scripture can work together.

Science really is God's domain. So science and scripture are going to harmonize.

Things like cavemen, the ice age, caves, how do we understand that in a biblical framework?

These are all just humans. They're all post-flood creatures.

Number 13, it's saying that there are giants in the land of Canaan.

How do we explain that?

Yes, okay, so what I think is going on is this is just

Why Science and Scripture Should Harmonize

Hello, hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

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You might be thinking a couple of questions when it comes to caves, the flood, cavemen, and evolution, maybe like what happened between Noah and Abraham, or how do we even explain the cavemen, caves, giants from a Biblical perspective?

And if the flood really happened, where's the evidence? We've discussed this many a time in the past on the podcast, but today we have a brand new guest who is an expert in all things caves. I'm so glad and grateful to welcome Dr. Jeff Miller.

You're a researcher, you're a speaker, and you have a PhD with Apologetics Press where you've served since 2011. You're the associate editor of Reasons in Revelation and the author of Science and Evolution and the field-based research for Flooded.

You also lead guided creation tours in Arizona, teaching on-site, and telling some of the most compelling flood-related geological formations in North America. I'm so excited to talk to you about timelines, cavemen, giants, and the evolutionary and geological evidence for the flood today.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Miller.

Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. This has been a long time coming when we first started talking about this a few weeks ago.

Truly, truly. And I always get the most excited for these types of conversations because it's this opportunity where, for so long when I was going to church, it was, okay, so I have to ignore everything I was taught in science class in order for me to be a quote, good Christian.

But I feel like today you're gonna open this door between what we see on earth versus what we're told in the Bible. We don't have to cancel out one or the other.

Yes, exactly. You know, I was the same way when I was a kid people treated science and religion as though it's trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or the opposite. From a biblical perspective, God is actually the one that instituted science.

When you think about like Genesis 128, God tells mankind to subdue and have dominion over the earth. I mean, that's basically a mandate to do science. And Psalm 111 too, God tells us the works of the Lord are great, studied by all who have pleasure in them.

Romans 120 tells us we can look at the things that are made, right, the physical world. And from that, learn about God, who he is. And that, you know, so science really is God's domain. So science and scripture are going to harmonize that where the problem comes is the lenses you have on when you're viewing the same evidence that the creationist and the evolutionists are both looking at evidence, but they have different lenses on.

And so they're going to interpret it differently depending upon their foundational assumptions. And I would argue, in fact, I've got a whole book on this topic that the evolutionary perspective starts with already a self-contradictory, the assumption of naturalism.

And therefore it cannot be right because it's already self-contradictory from the get-go. You've got to have the right lenses on or you're not going to be able to make sense of the physical evidence.

But when you have the right lenses on, science and religion, they go hand in hand and science further verifies the truth of the Bible and God.

Okay, I feel like that's really refreshing to hear because a lot of people feel like, okay, science doesn't really prove God, but we have God. And so they kind of look for the things of earth to prove God versus God showing us the creation.

Like this is the by-product of his creation. So in your mind, I mean, just getting really into it, but super broad, science and scripture can work together. Because it seems like in the Bible, the Bible is not a science book.

Yes, yeah, if anything, you would say the Bible is a history book, it's closer to that than a science book. But if it really came from God, then it's going to be accurate in anything it says that touches on scientific matters.

And in every case that we've been able to study that, it's totally verified exactly what the Bible says. And one important principle that Christians need to have clarity in their mind about in order to really understand the importance of science in this whole scope of things, God has really given us two forms of revelation.

He's given us what we call special revelation, that's the Bible. And he's given us what we call general revelation, which is revelation in the physical world around us. It's the things we can learn about God, Romans 1 .20, by studying the things that are made.

And he expects us to do that. He doesn't expect us to have this whole blind faith idea where we just accept things without evidence or even against the evidence. There's so many passages that teach against that idea.

Like 1 Thessalonians 5 .21 says to test all things, hold fast what is good. Don't just accept everything, you need to test it, make sure it's right. 1 John 4 .1, John says, "'Beloved, do not believe every spirit, "'but test the spirits, whether they are of God, "'for many false prophets have gone out into the world.'".

Acts 17 .11, you have these noble-minded Bereans who are called noble-minded because they didn't just accept everything they were told without evidence, they searched the scriptures daily to find out if what they were being told was true.

Jesus even said in John 10 .37, "'Not to believe him, "'if he didn't provide sufficient evidence "'to prove the things he was saying.'". So this idea of blind faith is not a biblical idea. And in fact, it kind of hurts our cause because rational people will say, oh, you know, I believe in what the evidence says over here.

You guys don't have evidence for what you believe in. And so you're not being rational. Well, that's true because to be rational, one is supposed to draw conclusions warranted by the evidence. Well, when you look at the actual evidence, you find there's an enormous, an infinite amount of evidence in support of the biblical creation model.

And as I alluded to before, the naturalistic model already starts as a self-contradictory concept because there is no such thing as a naturalist. And I'll unpack that again briefly, what I mean by that.

Everybody must believe that things have happened that do not happen in nature. So for example, you have to get matter and energy in existence from nothing, okay? We don't see that happening. In fact, we have a law of science that says that can't happen.

So if you believe matter and energy can come from nothing, you are believing something that runs counter to natural law. So you're not really a naturalist. If you believe that life can come from non-life, which you have to believe if you are a naturalist.

By naturalist, we mean people that don't believe that anything supernatural can happen. They don't believe in God.

Got it, okay.

That's what I was waiting for, is that definition. Okay, so naturalism is, there's no superpower interference whatsoever.

Right.

And so in order for life to begin, it just has to happen by chance, by coincidence.

That's right. And according to all of the observable and even experimental evidence, life does not come from non-life in nature. In fact, again, we have a law, the law of biogenesis. It says that can't happen.

And yet the naturalist must believe that that happened at least once in the past. So he's not really a naturalist. He's a supernaturalist, just like me and you. The question is which supernatural model fits the evidence?

And the answer to that is unequivocally the biblical creation models, what the Bible teaches. It's not, you know, Islamic faith. It's not the Hindu way of thinking and so forth. It comes down to biblical creation across the board.

Okay, I mean, this was a great starter for it, but what do you think Christians are misunderstanding about science? Like maybe we're taking the wrong approach when we're trying to hold fast to our faith.

And it's like, no, no, no, like Christians should believe in science in this way. What would that way look like?

So what would the way look like? You mean to hold to what the Bible teaches on this subject? Is that what you mean?

Yeah, like what's the way that we can hold both in both of our hands as far as like what do Christians misunderstand about science? Are there things that we maybe write off as far as, well, that's not, that's not of God.

But it's like, no, no, that's like of earth though. And God created the earth or whatever it might be.

You know, the biggest problem, the biggest way that I would say Christians go wrong that causes so much confusion on this topic of science, it comes down to these underlying assumptions. There are these hidden assumptions that are underlying, for example, what students learn in the classroom today.

Because you're not, by rule, you know, what the Supreme Court said, you can't teach creation in the school system. And so the textbooks intentionally don't allow any kind of a theory that would allow for that.

And so there's an underlying assumption of evolution, for example, that would require there to not be a God involved. And if Christians don't understand that, then that will cause us to, when we are in these classes and we're learning about evolution, we feel like, oh, this must be true.

I mean, this is the big belief that everybody believes in. And so, well, that's because you're not hearing the other side of the story on this. If you just go ahead and accept what is being shoved down your throat in the school system on this topic, for example, then you're gonna have a total misunderstanding of everything you're learning.

You're gonna interpret all the same evidence in the wrong way. And so Christians need to first, we need to know, does the evidence support the idea that God exists? Well, it ends up being there's multiple classical arguments based on logic and reason from the evidence that demand there has to be a God.

And we've got different names for them, the cosmological argument and the teleological argument, the moral argument, we could go into that. After you establish that, I mean, already, if you establish that, you now would interpret all the same evidence differently than what all of the textbooks being used in public schools are assuming to be true.

You've already shown, you gotta throw those textbooks out. They're viewing the evidence incorrectly. Now, there's a caveat to that. I would say you could go to most natural history museums, natural history, right?

So they're already a natural history museum is again, starting with the assumption of only nature. There's no super nature involved. You can still actually go to a natural history museum as long as you know how to interpret the evidence they're portraying from our perspective.

Okay, so they'll have evidence, and they'll have a skull out there. They might have a skull of Homo erectus. Okay, that's all they find. They find this skull and it's in the ground. And now how you interpret that is very much tied to the lenses you have on, the worldview that you're using to view that.

And if you try to understand that from a purely naturalistic way, you're not going to arrive at the right conclusion. Because as I've said, naturalism is already self-contradictory. If you view the same evidence with the allowing for there to be supernatural activity involved, you would interpret that totally differently.

If you understand that the flood actually happened, for example, you're gonna interpret that same skull that was found in the ground totally differently. But we've got these arguments that God exists.

The next question people ask, well, how do you know which God exists? I mean, I can prove that there's a God pretty easily, but how do you know that it's specifically the Christian God as opposed to Allah or Buddha?

How do you, in fact, I was asked this at a seminar by a biology, an evolutionary biology professor years ago. How do you know that it's not the flying spaghetti monster? I mean, how do you know that it's the God of the Bible?

Where do you get that idea? Well, and the next answer to that question is you would expect the creator to try to communicate with us at some point in the past. And the reason I would expect that is when I look at the natural realm, one of the endemic traits of the natural realm is a parent-child relationship, a passing on of information from the parent to the child.

Every living creature on the planet that's endemic to it. There's a passing of information that says something about the creator. The creator values this parent-child relationship and a passing of information.

So I would expect that the creator tried to communicate with us. So if you look at the materials that claim to be from the creator, there's actually only a handful. There's not that many. You can look at each one of those materials to see if they have characteristics that are supernatural that humans could not have produced.

What are some of the materials?

Well, here's one example. In Leviticus chapter 12 and verse three, okay? And this is starting before that in Genesis 17, 12, you have this command where circumcision is put into effect.

Right.

Okay, so Abraham is told, okay, eight days old, this male has to be circumcised. And then Moses comes in Leviticus 12, three, works it into the law of Moses as well. On the eighth day, the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.

And you think, well, why did he pick the eighth day? Where did he come up with the eighth day? Is there, you know, to the Semitic mind, numbers are a big deal, okay? So like they make a big deal out of numbers like seven and 12 and six, right?

This is a big deal to the Asiatic mind that we don't really have so much. And probably the closest we have is the number 13, you know, stay away from the number 13, Friday the 13th or, you know, but in the Asiatic mind, numbers are a big deal.

So you're thinking, is there something special about the number eight? Well, you do a deep dive on this subject and you find, no, there's really not any significance to this number. If I am going to just make up a day in the life of a boy where we're gonna do circumcision, and this is a process, a procedure that is going to symbolize to the world that the Israelites are set apart.

They're cutting off the filth of the flesh, so to speak, and they're being made holy, they're being separated. And this circumcision is a symbolic of that. What number would I pick if I'm a Jew? Seven, maybe, 12.

Why in the world is the number eight picked? Well, we find out in the last basically century what's probably going on here. So Henrik Dam, for example, was a Danish scientist. Back in 1935, he proposed a name for the substance in foods that was helping chicks, baby chicks, to not hemorrhage.

Whenever they'd get cut, they wouldn't bleed out, so they were able to blood clot. And he figured out, you know what, there's something in food that's allowing for this. And he gets a Nobel Prize for it in 1943.

It's called vitamin K. And so now we realize blood clotting depends on the liver producing what's called prothrombin. And so vitamin K in food stimulates the liver to produce prothrombin, which then allows our blood to clot.

So if you're deficient in vitamin K, you're more likely to hemorrhage if you get cut. All right, now, so if a surgery is going to be done on a child, this is important information to have. There's a book on pediatrics where this guy writes in his book.

He says, there is a peculiar susceptibility to bleeding between the second and the fifth days of life. All right, now, there's going to be a more likely chance that a child is going to bleed out on the second through the fifth day of life.

You think that's important to know if you're going to start cutting on a child? Well, yeah, that's kind of important. And now we find out, well, vitamin K production and absorption starts increasing on the fifth through the eighth day of life.

And it is only on the eighth day that vitamin K actually causes the percent of prothrombin in the blood to climb above 100%. And then after the eighth day, it actually goes back down and levels off at what is the 100 mark.

The only day in the entire life of that boy that the blood clotting element prothrombin is above 100 is the eighth day. It is literally the best day to perform circumcision. All right, so the question is, how did Moses know to stipulate that?

Now, you think it was just trial and error? He just butchered boys until he figured this out? No, and the text doesn't even tell you why. All he does is tell you, okay, here's what God wants you to do.

On the eighth day of the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. It's not until thousands of years later that our scientific knowledge has reached a point where we can be like, wait a minute, that was the best day to do that.

How did they know that? That is supernatural knowledge. We call that scientific foreknowledge. Like there are things in the Old Testament that there's no way they could have known. Like in Job 38, 16, you have God talking to Job and he's humbling Job with knowledge.

He's basically saying, Job, you're complaining about what's happening to you. You're asking for your day in court. You think that I've treated you unfairly. Let me just show you some things about nature to give you some perspective about the fact that you're not in a position to be calling me out on this.

And he goes through this line of amazing things.

I love that chapter so much.

Yes, yeah, and then finally he gets to, one of the things he just throws out there in passing in verse 16, which by the way, he mentions the laws of physics in there, Job 38, 33. So all kinds of really cool things in there.

But in chapter 38, verse 16, he says, have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Well, we've discovered again in the last 100, 150 years, number one, there's freshwater springs in the sea, which of course he hadn't entered.

How could he have known about them? And number two, I think even more impressive, the recesses of the deep, like we've only discovered those in the last 150 years and we didn't have the technology to get down there to them until we could do deep sea investigating with some of the technology that we've developed.

And so now we're seeing these recesses that we understand to be the deep sea trenches that are formed from subduction. This is a major part of the flood. And God's point is, hey, do you know about these?

And Job's answer had to basically be, no, sir. Okay, I don't even know what you're talking about. Well, again, this is scientific foreknowledge. This is the Bible giving us information that there's no way that the writers could have known about at their time.

So there's tons of these. So the bottom line is we know the Bible's inspired. Okay, so if we don't have the proper lenses on, if we don't understand the evidence demands God exists, the evidence demands the Bible's inspired, then when we look at the same physical evidence as the evolutionists, the Christian's not going to draw the proper conclusions if he doesn't understand the truth of what the Bible teaches.

He's going to totally view everything wrong. So you asked a question that turned into maybe something a little bit bigger than you anticipated.

Caves, the Ice Age, and Post-Flood Evidence

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For an exclusive discount at checkout. Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now back to the show. No, you clearly know a lot about this. I never even thought, nor did I know about that.

So thank you for shedding light on that. I want to get into your zone of genius though, which is caves and things like cavemen, the ice age, caves. How do we understand that in a biblical framework? Because all we know is like the ice age, like the movie, and we know that it happened.

It's hard to imagine it because it's not directly mentioned in the Bible. You know, it's not referencing like, oh, you know, Abraham had a cousin who was kind of slower in speech. So we can like infer that that was a caveman or like, oh, when Moses trekked across the great ice wall, like these things aren't included in the Bible.

So when we leave church and we learn about this in school, it seems like a separate lore entirely. So how do you marry that into a biblical framework?

Yeah, good question. And I remember, yeah, you don't learn about the ice age in church. You know, so this is purely a scientific thing. Now I would say there are what seems to be allusions to it. Like for example, in Job, the book of Job, you actually have some allusions to this.

Like ice is mentioned several times, like in Job 6 .16, Job 37 .10, Job 38 .29 -30. Ice would have been a very rare thing to be able to see where we think Job lived at the time, unless he's living on the tail end of the ice age.

So stepping back a little bit, the whole ice age thing, how do we know that an ice age even happened? Well, we can look at what happens today when glaciers expand and contract. We can look at the physical evidence that is left when that happens.

Like for example, when glaciers expand and contract today, we'll see these scratches in bedrock that'll be parallel. They're called parallel striations, and they'll go for miles and miles over plains, just all going in the same direction, these parallel stripes.

And they're made because in glaciers, as they're expanding, there'll be rocks and dirt and fossils even that are in this glacier that are scratching the ground as they move. And then as it's moving, picture a bulldozer trying to move it along and scooping up dirt.

It creates piles around the blades of this thing, and it's pushing material in the front of it as it goes. So then when the glacier starts contracting, it leaves these piles of material that are called till and moraine.

So these kinds of things will show geologists, oh, the glaciers used to be way bigger than they are now. Today, the glaciers cover about 10 of the land mass of the planet. And there was a time when they covered like 30%.

All right, so that is what they call the Ice Age. And now secular scientists, again, they've got different lenses on, so they're viewing everything from an old Earth perspective. And there's a lot that we could talk about that, but they think, well, there may be as many as 50 Ice Ages.

Whereas creationists would say there was just one. And one of the reasons Yes, yes.

When?

Yeah, just over millions of years. You gotta keep in mind, they're thinking millions

Oh, old Earth creationists got it, yeah.

Yes. Whereas creationists are thinking, look, the Earth is 68 ,000 years. When we look at, from us back to Christ is 2 ,000 years. From Christ back to Abraham is about 2 ,000 years. Then the genealogies of Genesis 5 and Genesis 10 and 11 give you another two to, I would say, probably 3 ,000 years to work with.

So the Earth is relatively young. So we would, again, interpret a lot of evidence totally differently than what the secular world is how they're interpreting. Like, for example, the dating methods that they're using to get these millions of years have major flaws, and I could talk about that too.

But we would say there's one Ice Age. And one of the problems, there's several problems with the secular interpretation of the evidence. So for example, it doesn't make sense. Why, if there's been like 50 Ice Ages, why do we have a bunch of extinctions only associated with the supposed last Ice Age?

Why do you have, in this one Ice Age, disharmonious associations? This is where you have warm area creatures interacting with cold area creatures. They're living together. They're not separated. How could they do that and not die out?

Why do you have areas that are today deserts that were once clearly wet? The biggest problem that the secular model for Ice Ages has is that they don't have a trigger to even start one of these Ice Ages, much less 50.

And so how do you even get one started? Well, this is a place where once again, people don't even hear about it, but the biblical creation model provides the powerful argument for what is going on with these Ice Ages.

Essentially, the fact that an Ice Age happened is evidence that the flood happened.

Right, I was just about to say how, if you were looking at this from a secular perspective, what else would have caused the Ice Age if not a massive flood? I wanna take a minute and say thank you to the recording service that has made this podcast possible, Riverside.

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Right.

Well, and they've got ways to try to deal with this, but none of them are able to hold up to scrutiny. So creation scientists have dug into this, and we've got a lot of literature on it in the creation science community.

But really what you need to start an ice age are three things. You need to have a lot more precipitation. Okay, so you gotta have a lot more liquid coming down from the sky. You've got to have your summers be cooler.

Okay, and the reason is because during the winter, glaciers expand. During the summer, they contract. Okay, so you need the contraction period to be less than the expansion period if the glacier is gonna keep getting bigger.

So in order for the contraction period to be, in other words, it'll be less melting, you need your summers to be cooler. So you need more precipitation. Your summers to be cool. You can't just have, well, the whole earth has to be cold because with cold comes more dryness, and yet you need more precipitation.

You actually need more liquid in the air, not less. And yet when it's cold, you have less cool. When it's cold, you have less liquid in the air. But you need more liquid, and at the same time, you need your summers to be cooler, and that has to persist for long enough for these glaciers to expand, for it to be an ice age.

Creationists really prefer the term

What in the Bible would you say that the ice age took place? Like which characters are we reading about? Yeah, that we think that the ice age was taking place.

Well, I would say the book of Job is talking about a guy that clearly lived on, probably at the tail end of the ice age. And there's several lines of evidence that indicate Job is a post-flood guy, pre-Moses.

He's like this patriarchal guy. But you also, a lot of the individuals that are mentioned in the genealogies of Genesis 10 and 11 are individuals that were living during this time period, during the Babel dispersion, essentially.

Yeah, so

Cavemen as Post-Flood Humans and the Babel Dispersion

Okay, you mentioned caves and more of the flooding. So let's get into a little bit of that. What did the earth look like after the flood? Like how do we even fit cavemen into the Bible? Because we have these remains that we found of cavemen from the past, archeologically.

How do you look at that from a biblical standpoint, saying, oh, there's like different species of human that maybe Moses was interacting with?

There's so much to unpack here. So first of all, one thing that we have to understand as a foundational principle, creationists do not equate the idea of... Okay, let me step back a little further. In Genesis 1, 24, God says that he creates the kinds of life on the planet and tells the earth to reproduce according to its kind.

Right.

When you get to Genesis 6 through 9 in the flood, representatives of the land kinds, creeping kinds, bird kinds are brought onto the ark. Now in the past, creationists have assumed that the word kind is equivalent to species.