May 24, 2017 Show with Gregg Davidson on “The Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth”: Part One of a Two-day Discussion of the Age of the Earth (Old Earth)

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

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Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 24th day of 2017.

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I am very excited about something that we're doing which is quite unique. I mean we've done things like this in the past in the program but it's been a while.

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We are having a two -day discussion on an area that divides brothers in Christ where we are having both sides examined and the specific issue is the age of the earth.

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And on day one of this two -part series today we have Dr. Greg Davidson of Solid Rock Lectures and tomorrow,

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Thursday May 25th, God willing, we are going to feature Dr. Taz Walker of Creation Ministries International, also known as CMI.

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But today, as I mentioned, I am honored to have for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Dr.

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Greg Davidson of Solid Rock Lectures. He's a professor of geology and geological engineering at the

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University of Mississippi since 1996, currently serving as chair of the department.

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He's a frequent speaker and writer on subjects related to science and Christian faith. He's the author of When Faith and Science Collide and faith science articles in journals such as Modern Reformation and the

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Christian Research Journal. Today we are going to be discussing a book that he contributed to called

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The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth. And welcome for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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Greg Davidson. Thank you, pleasure to be with you. In studio with me is my co -host the

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Reverend Buzz Taylor. Well hello once again, it's good to be on with you Greg. Likewise. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

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Greg Davidson regarding the age of the earth, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And as I said, today we are going to be having an explanation or defense of the old earth position within creation science.

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And tomorrow is the young earth position that will be defended or explained. And before I get into specific questions about the age of the earth and about your book, tell us something about Solid Rock Lectures.

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So briefly, Solid Rock Lectures is a small nonprofit ministry comprised of Christian scientists who are committed both to the authority and inspiration of the

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Bible, but also share a concern that those whose faith has been shaken because of misperceptions, that being a

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Christian means rejecting modern science. So it's a mission of trying to remove stumbling blocks.

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And unfortunately in this day and age when we use the phrase Christian scientists, we have to give a little bit of an explanation.

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It's probably should be better said, scientists who are

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Christians, because of the cult known as the Church of Christ scientists and so on.

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I'd like to identify myself as a Christian first. Yes. Who happens to be a scientist.

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Yeah, that's a better way of saying it, you're right. And also before we get into the subject at hand, please let our listeners know something about the religion of your youth, your upbringing, if any, religion, and how our

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Sovereign Lord providentially drew you to himself and saved you. Sure, and I recognize the importance of that, especially for listeners who, when hearing that a guest is a scientist working at a secular university, what does that exactly mean about his beliefs and what he's going to be saying?

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So I am what would be typically thought of as a conservative evangelical

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Christian. I feel incredibly blessed to have been raised in a

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Bible believing, Bible teaching home. Both my grandfathers were actually preachers in conservative

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Bible believing churches. I never had a particular moment when

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I could say that that's the day that I accepted Christ, unless you count that year when

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I was eight, like the 14 times that I asked Jesus into my heart just in case I hadn't meant it the last time. But it really started to be the transition from being the faith of my parents to my own, probably starting late high school and then developing on through college and then in grad school.

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Grad school's when I got to a point where I was realizing that, you know, a lot of people around the world, they firmly believe that the religion that they were raised to believe is true.

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And I don't want to believe it was true just because that's the way I was raised. So I'm a little odd.

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I went on a reading binge and read the Koran, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the teachings of Buddha, the

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Hebrew rabbinical translations of the Old Testament, and I came away from that with a powerful sense, not just in the intellectual superiority of the

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Bible, but an overwhelming sense that God Himself was speaking through His word to draw me to an understanding that intellect alone could never attain.

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And that still grips me to this day. Well, how is your theology best succinctly defined today?

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So I already mentioned that it would be best characterized as consistent with conservative evangelical

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Christianity, where, you know, I gladly affirm all of the central tenets of the Christian faith, which would include things like the authority and inspiration of the

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Bible, the reality of miracles, just because I'm a scientist doesn't mean that I disbelieve that the miracles of the

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Bible, the divinity of Jesus, His death and resurrection, and the necessity of the atoning blood of Christ for salvation.

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And how about the inerrancy of the scriptures? Inerrancy of scripture as well, in all that it intends to teach, which is what

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I believe that the Chicago statement of inerrancy said states.

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And when I was asking the question after you'd already described yourself as a conservative evangelical,

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I was more trying to get more specific, like for instance, would you consider yourself a theologically reformed

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Christian, a dispensationalist, Calvinist, Arminian, or you just don't like labels, or is there any of those areas where you would fall into place?

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So the answer that I start with on questions like that is,

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I'm a Christian. So, you know, when I read in scripture, like Paul's kind of rebuking his, you know, particular church for saying,

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I'm of Paul and I'm of Apollos, I'm of Jesus, you know, it's Christ divided. So I like to emphasize that I'm a

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Christian. But yes, of course, my particular doctrinal beliefs and positions are going to align better with some subsets than others.

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So something more akin to Reformed theology is probably the closest peg.

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And how and when did your fascination with geology begin? Well, I mentioned my grandfather's were preachers, but my father was a biology professor at community college, and he always had such cool stuff at home.

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We raised animals, he had all kinds of little biology experiments going on.

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So I grew up with a fascination for God's natural creation, and actually going into my senior year of high school, my thinking at the time was

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I was going to get a biology degree and then go to seminary. But on into college, starting college,

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I felt called more to geology, and then felt called to stay in that, not realizing that decades down the road

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I was going to be cycling into theology and Christian apologetics.

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And if you could, summarize the category of creation science that best identifies your position, and a bit of the journey that led you to arrive there.

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So to answer that, I'm going to start by separating the book from my personal position, just for a moment.

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I'll come back. The approach that we took in the book could be considered consistent with either a progressive creation position, or an evolutionary creation position.

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Because the book goes into depth on how life has varied over a long Earth history, but without diving into whether that life is a result of a series of miraculous creations, or through evolutionary processes.

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My own view, though, is that God created the world to work so well, and with such artistry, that it works without requiring miraculous intervention to tweak.

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So that would place me more in that evolutionary creation camp. And if you could, let us know how this book, the

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Grand Canyon Monument to an Ancient Earth, came to be, and let us know about the primary contributors other than yourself.

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Sure. So with 11 authors, each had his or her own reasons, but we had eight

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Christian authors. Three of them were simply just experts in the field, without particular areas of the

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Grand Canyon, which is why they were brought in. But for all of the Christian authors, including myself, the motivation for the book was having a front -row seat to a lot of the confusions that's been created in the

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Church over the subject of the ancient history. In our Christian culture, belief in Christ is often linked with acceptance of a young Earth, but so much of what is communicated about the

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Earth is just not true. So when our youth and seekers see that, they far too often assume that Christ must not be true.

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And we have so many times students will come to us that are just, their faith is about to be shipwrecked.

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They don't know what to do because they've been raised to think they had to believe a certain way about their understanding of Scripture and about rejecting a lot of good science, but then they're in college and they're learning what that science actually is, and it's so convincing.

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They think it must be their faith that's wrong. And we're like, no, it's not.

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So that was the motivation for the book. We felt like, in this case, that young Earth advocates have focused a lot of attention on the

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Grand Canyon, saying that it offers convincing evidence of the young Earth shaped by a catastrophic flood, and a lot of their explanations seem very convincing to non -scientists.

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But being in the field ourselves, we see that a lot of critical information gets left out, and we felt that there was a need for people to understand what geologists actually see in the canyon that convinces them that the planet's quite old.

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And for me, how amazing it is that God's given us really cool tools to be able to figure out events that happened before any eyes were, human eyes were around to see it.

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And some of the other primary contributors, I know that Ken Wolgamuth, who I met actually personally, had lunch with him, who was formerly on the faculty at Dickinson College, which is about a five -minute walk from where I'm sitting.

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And if you could tell us a little bit about him and some of the other folks that are contributing to this.

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Yeah, so I have to tell you just one little tidbit or tangential thing about Ken.

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So Ken's the founder of Solid Rock Lectures, and he and I actually attended a class together at Messiah College many, many years ago.

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We figured that out much, much later, because the way it turns out, he was actually enrolled in the class, as my mother was, who was pregnant with me at the time.

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Wow. So that's why you were in the same place at the same time.

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Yes. So Carol Hill is the senior editor. This was her dream for many, many years, having a real burden for people who were really struggling with their understanding of science and biblical faith.

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Tim Hebel is a retired hydrologist with the

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NOAA. He did a lot of the illustration and got all the permissions together for us, which was a tremendous help.

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And then Wayne Rainey has been a guide in the canyon for many, many years, and has taken hundreds of trips down into the canyon, and probably knows the canyon better than any person alive.

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So those were the four editors. And then we had the other authors, like Stephen Mosier, Ralph Sterling, Brian Tapp, Roger Weems, David Elliott, Joel Duff.

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All of those had particular expertise in different aspects of what we were addressing in the canyon, and they all had a heart for desiring to promote truth and good science to this particular audience.

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So one biologist, a couple paleontologists, and the rest geologists.

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Well, it is quite a beautiful book. I mean, it is the type of book that many might categorize as a coffee table book, but it's an academic coffee table book.

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It's not just a coffee table book filled with photographs, but it is quite a gorgeous book, hardcover book, the kind of book that could last centuries, and perhaps survive through fire and flood, no pun intended, but it is a really a nice job, and I would hope that the young earth creationists would come out with a book of this quality, as far as the actual binding and printing

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I'm speaking of right now. And a very, very, very beautiful book indeed.

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And let me just read an endorsement that Wayne Grudem, somebody that I would imagine most of my listeners are aware of who

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Wayne Grudem is, from Phoenix Seminary, this important book must be carefully considered by everyone involved in the debate about the age of the earth.

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And Paul Copan, he is with Palm Beach Atlantic University, says, irenic in spirit, scientifically informed, and biblically sound.

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Well, since this is at the core of what we are discussing, if you could define flood theology.

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All right, so flood geology is the term... Oh I'm sorry, I said theology, I meant geology.

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That was probably worth correcting. Is the term that is applied to young earth creationists who ascribe the vast majority of the earth's sedimentary deposits and fossils to the work of Noah's flood.

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In today, this day and age, it's almost synonymous with just young earth creationism.

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I don't personally know, I'm not sure I know anyone that would identify themselves as a young earth creationist and not agree with flood geology.

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It derives mostly from the belief that there was no death, there was no animal death prior to Adam and Eve's sin, and yet there are miles of thickness of sediments that contain the remains of dead organisms.

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So you're left with the only option of there being some catastrophe that happened between Adam and Eve's sin in the present, and the only one that's presented to us is

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Noah's flood in the Bible. And so it's kind of a series of steps that get from a particular understanding of scripture to this particular young earth position.

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Well, I'm going to take a listener question. Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama says, greetings from across the state line in Alabama.

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Tomorrow your debate counterpart will argue that the Grand Canyon was formed in approximately one year's time.

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Since you will not be on the program to refute this claim, I wonder if you could take the time on today's show to briefly explain in layperson's terms, if possible, why you think that time frame is completely insufficient.

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That's Ted from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Okay, so that's the subject of a 260 -page book.

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I'm going to answer that in a couple minutes, right? It is, it's a combination of things, and actually what may be surprising to many listeners coming from a scientist, again working at a secular university, is that my starting point is actually scripture, not science.

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That when I read scripture and I read Genesis 1, I'm actually impressed that the most straightforward reading of Genesis 1 is not six consecutive days, but it's actually one of the most beautiful poems ever written that parallels three days of forming realms and three days of filling those realms, that actually eliminates some internal inconsistencies that are created by a literal reading.

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So I start there when I realize that scripture is, in my understanding, the best reading of Genesis 1 is not talking about days, but talking about God's authorship and that nature's not the result of warring gods from the surrounding pagan nations, what the surrounding pagan nations believe.

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It was a very intentional creation of God. Nothing in creation was to be worshipped, and it was all good, understandable, comprehensible.

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When I couple that with Romans 120 that says that God's character is manifest in his creation, one of the things that tells me is that when

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I go and study his creation, as God is trustworthy, I should be able to study his creation and expect it to tell a trustworthy story, that it's not going to show me something or reveal something to me that's misleading.

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So when we then go to the canyon and begin to study it and allow it to communicate its own story as the creation of God, there's a host of things that just start jumping out, like the flood model says that the mile of sediments above what's called the

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Great Unconformity must be deposited by Noah's flood within the first 150 days, and yet there's almost, there's actually two miles of sediment that's under the

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Great Unconformity that looks just like the sediments above it, except that there's not all those fossils in it, but you've got the same kind of sequence of layers with mud cracks and ripple marks and all the kinds, it basically looks the same as what's above.

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How did that get there without a global flood? Or the fact that the flood model says that you've got catastrophic tsunamis sweeping over continents, which should sweep all sorts of marine and terrestrial organisms and mix them into a huge jumbled mess, just like we saw, actually worse than what we saw with the

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Japanese tsunami, where we see houses and boats in the same layer. Now that should have just mixed all sorts of creatures together in all sorts of different layers, and yet when you look in the

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Grand Canyon, you have two miles below the Great Unconformity that has nothing in it but single -celled organisms, and then you get above that Unconformity, still in the

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Grand Canyon now, and in a mile of sediments, you don't have a single dinosaur, bird, mammal, or even flowering plant.

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In fact, you don't even have a flowering plant pollen. I mean, pollen, that gets in the air and goes everywhere.

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So for there to not even be any flowering pollen in the entire three miles of sediment, that doesn't make any sense from a flood model.

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But if those plants weren't around yet, if those organisms weren't around yet, and they came along the scene at various times later in Earth's history, then of course it makes perfect sense that they wouldn't be there.

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And if you have a process at work where the Earth's crust, you have different sections of the crust that are kind of moving and jostling around, and that's not just hypothesized.

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We actually have GPS systems and satellites that measure the plates moving around, that it makes perfect sense that as one plate moves into another, you have different time periods of the land rising and the land falling.

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You have different periods of Earth's history at a particular place where it's under ocean water for a while, and it's above ocean water for a while.

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And when we look at those fossil layers, they are almost always just terrestrial or just marine.

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They're hardly ever mixed. So that's my five -minute answer of a 260 -page book.

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Well guess what, Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, you have just won a free copy of The Grand Canyon, Monument to an

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Ancient Earth, Can Noah's Flood Explain the Grand Canyon? by our guest and other contributors.

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And so please make sure we have your full mailing address so we can ship that out to you. And I have a feeling that our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who ship out all of our listeners who win

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Bibles and books and DVDs and so on, I'm sure that they may be a little bit upset today because this book weighs about 40 pounds.

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I'm just exaggerating there, but the shipping... It's only about a half an inch. But it's it's quite a heavy book there.

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But thanks for contributing to today's show with your question, and keep listening to Orange Rippin' Zion and spreading the word about the program in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and beyond.

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And we thank our friends at Kriegel Publications for providing these books, and also our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service for shipping out these books.

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And that website is CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for Bible Book Service dot com.

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CV BBS dot com. And I'm going to read a question to you, and then

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I'll have you answer it when we return from the break. So this way you'll have time to mull it over during the commercial break.

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In fact, I'll even email you the listener question so you can have it right in front of you.

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And this way you could even mull it over easier during the break.

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But Sterling from Greensboro, North Carolina, and it's kind of interesting, providentially.

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He is with the American Gems Society and the Gemological Institute of America, or at least he was licensed through those organizations.

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So it does have some kind of a tie -in, I think, with geology. But Sterling says, how do you deal with the issue of day in Genesis chapter 1?

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By what warrant is this day to be considered a longer span than 24 hours? And finally, how long was

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God's day of rest, the Sabbath, if it is not a literal 24 -hour day?

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And we'll have you look that over, as I said, when we're on our station break. If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is

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ChrisArnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Greg Davidson.

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33:02

This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in. Today is day one of a two -day discussion on the age of the earth, and our first day of this discussion features our guest,

33:13

Dr. Greg Davidson of Solid Rock Lectures. And we're talking about a book he contributed to,

33:19

The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth. Tomorrow, Thursday, May 25th, we will feature

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Dr. Taz Walker of Creation Ministries International, CMI, who is a young earth creationist.

33:33

But if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guest, Greg Davidson, representing the

33:38

Old Earth position, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

33:45

And before the break, Dr. Davidson, as you know, I emailed you a question from Sterling in Greensboro, North Carolina, and also

33:55

I read the question on the air, but I'll quickly read it again. How do you deal with the issue of day in Genesis chapter 1?

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By what warrant is this day to be considered a longer time span than 24 hours? And finally, how long was

34:09

God's day of rest, the Sabbath, if it is not a literal 24 -hour day? So that's an excellent question, and fortunately

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I have thought about this before, so that two minutes was enough to actually be able to pull those thoughts together.

34:24

And by the way, I will say that I think some subliminal advertising was going on with solid rock remodelers.

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I'm not sure whose side that would have been benefiting, but... Yeah, I was thinking, wait, I'm about to put an edition on my house,

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I think I might need solid rock remodelers. Yes, so, the question.

34:47

It's an excellent question, and an important one. And it may,

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I've said this a couple times, that it may surprise readers where I fall on this, that I think the word day means a day, a 24 -hour day.

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But now what I do with that is maybe a little bit different than what people are used to. And I like to use

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Scripture to understand Scripture. So if I go to another Scripture, say a place that says, where Jesus says, if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.

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Well, I can fixate on, well, did he mean foot? What does he mean by, is that really foot?

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Like, well, yes, I think he really meant foot. But do I think he meant that I should really cut my foot off?

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No, I don't. So the point isn't the foot, it's this deeper message of, you need to take drastic measures to deal with your sin.

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So when I go to Genesis 1, and I'm reading about these days, and it says evening and morning, one day, that communicates to me that it's saying a day.

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However, when I'm digging deeper into the meaning of that, how is this being used, and what it's trying to communicate, and I see things in Genesis 1, like light being separated from dark in day 1, but then again in day 4.

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It's like, did it not work in day 1? Or even the notion of light being separated from dark, that has tremendous spiritual meaning.

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But it has no physical meaning whatsoever. Dark is not an entity that can be separated, it's just the absence of light.

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It'd be akin to me pushing a pile of beans in front of you and saying, I want you to separate beans from the absence of beans.

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So, and there's other things in Genesis as well, that says, wait, I need to look deeper into this.

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And it's at that point when I realized that the way it's set up is so cool, that you've got these rhyming

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Hebrew words of tohu and bohu, meaning formless and empty, and then you have two sets of three days that parallel each other, one giving form, where you've got realms of light and dark, the realm of sea and sky, the realm of land, and then a filling of those realms, where I'm filling the realm of light and dark with sun, moon, and stars.

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I'm filling sea and sky with fish and birds. I'm filling the land realm with animals and man.

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All set in the context of a human work week that ends with a day of rest that God doesn't need. So the point isn't about calendar days.

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The point is that this is not just a God who made stuff. He makes the very realms in which that stuff exists.

37:46

It's so much deeper and so much richer than a sequence of six days.

37:52

It's not intended to be communicating to us instruction on nature.

37:58

It's instructing us on the kingdom of God and the nature of the Creator that made not just stuff, but even the very realms in which the stuff exists.

38:10

Well, thank you, Sterling. And guess what? You have also won a copy of The Grand Canyon, Monument to an

38:18

Ancient Earth Can Noah's Flood Explain the Grand Canyon? by our guest and other contributors.

38:24

So please make sure we have your full mailing address and we'll have that shipped out to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

38:31

And we thank Kriegel Publications again for these books. And before I go back to my own question,

38:40

I will return to one more listener question for now. Charles in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania says,

38:48

The volume of the Grand Canyon is about 2 ,600 cubic miles or about 14 .2

38:56

trillion cubic yards. A lot of the material that was eroded should have been carried downstream.

39:02

Why don't we find a huge delta on the Colorado River? Where did that eroded material go?

39:11

That's a good question. And there's actually a common misconception that geologists don't know where that sediment went.

39:22

I'll say two things about that. One is, they actually do know where it went. You've got large deposits of sediment that can logically be traced back to the

39:36

Grand Canyon, southwest of the canyon on into California and off into the

39:41

Gulf of Mexico. The other thing that I'll say about that is that that challenge is often made by the young earth side without recognition that if that was really a problem, they'd have the same problem.

39:58

Because they're also eroding all of that material and it has to go someplace. So if it's a question, it's a question for both sides.

40:09

Well, thank you, Charles. And you're also winning or you have also won, I should say, a copy of the

40:15

Grand Canyon Monument to an Ancient Earth. So please give us your full mailing address and we'll have that shipped out to you.

40:21

How do we use the present to understand the past? Okay, so that's at risk of repeating myself is another good question and an important one.

40:34

In part because there's a lot of misunderstanding about what that even means.

40:40

It's very common to hear that secular geologists or geologists that aren't supporting a literalistic interpretation for a young earth, that they think that if it's not happening today, it could not have happened in the past.

41:00

Or another way of saying that is that geologists think that all processes that are happening today happened in the past at the same rate.

41:12

Neither of those is true. Really what the idea of using the present to understand the past is, is observing things that are happening now where we can go out and look at an area that gets flooded periodically and dries out.

41:32

And we walk out and we see that, gee, these clays as they dry out form these mud cracks.

41:37

And they have a characteristic shape. So now if I go back and I'm looking at the geologic record and I find layers that are made up of very fine -grained particles and look, they've got all these preserved polygon cracks in them.

41:54

Well, what I've seen, these processes at work today, inform me about what that was probably going on in the past there.

42:02

That looks like an environment where this region got periodically flooded and dried out.

42:08

So it's using what we see in the present to understand the past. So it's really just saying that the same physics and chemistry that are going on today were going on in the past.

42:22

The way God's creation works is consistent, it's understandable. But now as far as processes or rates go, that's a different issue.

42:32

The idea that the geologists think that everything in the past happened at the same rate today doesn't make any sense if you just think about things like this idea that a huge meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs.

42:47

Has anybody seen a big meteorite wipe out organisms lately? That was obviously a process that happened at a much faster rate in the past than anything we've seen today.

42:59

There's evidence of volcanic eruptions in Earth history that were much larger than anything that we've seen in modern times.

43:08

So geologists are quite open to rates having been slower or faster in the past, but they're looking for evidence of that in the record, like the size of the volcanic ash deposits, for example.

43:21

Or they find an enormous crater down off the coast of Yucatan and find iridium deposits in a layer all over the

43:32

Earth that dates to about the same time period that's consistent with a large meteorite impact.

43:38

So we're looking at these kinds of processes today to help inform us.

43:46

So when we see things in the geologic record, we recognize them from what we're also seeing today. And I'll add one more thing to that.

43:53

There's some irony from the young Earth community claiming that that's not appropriate because they actually use the same methodology.

44:04

When they're going into looking at the geologic record and trying to make their case for why this is evidence of a global flood, they're also relying on things that are observed today in order to try to defend that argument.

44:20

So in some sense it doesn't make sense that they're making that argument.

44:28

Well, please give us some examples of puzzles you face and how you attempt to solve those puzzles.

44:35

So by puzzles do you mean geologic puzzles or how to deal with a faith and science issue puzzle?

44:44

You could answer it either way or both. So one of the puzzles that is, of course, the whole effort of doing science today is solving puzzles.

45:07

There's things that are observed and you try to figure out a way of testing the hypotheses that you'll make in order to try to figure out something that isn't currently known.

45:20

But also a big part of science is communication. So this kind of touches on both the practice of science and communicating to people in the science and faith, on the subject of science and faith.

45:34

That takes something like radiometric dating. Initially when radiometric dating was being done, there were a lot of assumptions, like of constant radioactive decay rates, and that the samples that they were using were free of contamination, or that the radionuclides that were present weren't coming and going from the sample over time.

46:02

So over time, scientists have developed ways of actually testing those hypotheses to the point where they're not hypotheses anymore.

46:12

They're able to reasonably prove that the decay rates have not changed over time and that the samples that they're looking at have, if they haven't been free of contaminants, they're able to actually quantify how much is there to get trustworthy dates.

46:33

But communicating that to the public can be really challenging. So in my area, being in this ministry of trying to communicate some of these things to people, that's been both fun and sometimes maddening, to be able to come up with examples that people who are not steeped in the sciences can understand.

46:54

So would you like me to share one with you? Yeah, sure. Okay, so the idea of being able to put our hypotheses to a test and be able to give us confidence that radiometric dating works.

47:12

If I just take my GPS on my phone, the same technology that tells me how fast

47:22

I'm driving by bouncing a signal off a satellite from where I was a minute ago and now bouncing that same signal off a satellite from where I am now, that gives me a distance and a time that converts into miles per hour.

47:37

Well, that same technology is used today to actually track the movement of continents and plates.

47:46

So in real time, we can watch North America drifting away from Europe and Africa at roughly an inch per year.

47:57

I'm still waiting for the airline industry to figure that out and start tacking on a tectonic surcharge, getting an inch farther away every year.

48:05

But the test now, we can take ages of ocean crust that are based on radiometric dating methods and we can measure that distance from North America to Europe and we can take the radiometrically determined age for the oldest edge of the ocean and we can work our way back and what age was it at different points between here and the mid -ocean ridge and we can calculate what the spreading rate was based on that radiometric age.

48:46

Now, if radiometric dating doesn't work or isn't trustworthy or if radioactive decay rates were changing or variable in the past, we have no reason to expect that that's going to give the same number that we're measuring with our

49:00

GPS unit today. Guess what? It comes out to about an inch per year.

49:09

That just blows me away that God has given us such cool tools for being able to verify some of our assumptions and to be able to figure out things that have happened in the distant past when nobody was there to see it.

49:26

Well, I'm going to have to explain myself a little bit to the listeners, but if you could define relative dating and I want to make sure our listeners know that I'm not speaking about something that goes on in the backwoods of the

49:39

Ozarks or in the royal family of England when I talk about relative dating, but if you could define relative dating and the geologic column.

49:49

So you just stole my joke. I had no idea you were going to tell any kind of a joke related to that.

50:02

Yeah, when I'm teaching this subject in classes or at seminars, I start by telling them what relative dating is not.

50:11

It does not mean taking your cousin to a movie. Wow. So we have, in the sciences, we have two different kinds of dating.

50:28

One we call relative dating, one we call calendar dating or absolute dating. So the idea of relative dating is

50:36

I may not have any idea what the actual age of something is, but I can figure out an order of age.

50:46

So if I have just a stack of sedimentary layers, horizontal sedimentary layers, it could be as simple as, well, you know, that sand layer had to be there in order for the limestone to form on top of it, so the sandstone's older than the limestone.

51:02

Or if there's a fault that runs through it, a fault that the rock had to be there in order to be faulted, so the fault's younger than the rock layers.

51:17

When we move to fossils, the way relative dating works is that if we go to many, many parts of the world and we see a particular sequence or assemblage of fossils that are always found above a different sequence of fossils, then eventually we can say, all right, we've seen that consistently in so many different places, we can now be pretty confident that the one assemblage is younger than the other assemblage.

51:54

We don't know actually how old they are, we just know an order. But I've sometimes compared that with looking at, say, a typical freshman versus senior, that relative dating is saying that the senior is older than the freshman without knowing their actual ages.

52:12

When I get to calendar or absolute dating, then I'm looking for an actual age.

52:18

The senior is 21, the freshman is 18. So most of the geologic column was worked out before we had any knowledge of the calendar age of the rock units that were being studied.

52:37

It was all prior to radiometric dating, and they were just using all of these tools to solve this puzzle of kind of putting things into order.

52:49

Now what's pretty fascinating, and I should say that the reason why we have terms like Jurassic and Cambrian and all of those is in part because they didn't know how old they were, and so they would just assign a particular time period with a name, and the convention started to be wherever you studied a particular time period most in -depth, you kind of named it according to that place.

53:19

So, like, the Cambrian period was named in honor of the, in Great Britain, an area that was known as Cambria, which is where Cambridge comes from.

53:36

In fact, could you pick up right where you left off because we have to go to a break? Sure. And anybody who would like to join us, email us at chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

53:45

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. This is where we take our elongated midway break, so be patient, and we'll be right back,

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01:03:14

This is Chris Arnzen. Before we return to our discussion with Greg Davidson on an old

01:03:20

Earth, I have some announcements I need to make from some of our sponsors. The Banner of Truth is having their

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click on Events, and then click on For Still Our Ancient Foe, which is obviously a line from A Mighty Fortress by Martin Luther.

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And that will be the Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology, and that's November 17th through the 18th.

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And last but not least, the G3 Conference is going to be held in January of next year, and I am going to be manning an exhibitor's booth there, and I'm looking forward to meeting many of you at that event.

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That's January 18th through the 20th, 2018, featuring Paul Washer, Stephen Lawson, Votie Balcom, H .B.

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01:07:05

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01:07:10

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We are really in urgent need of your help in these matters with finances. And once again, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guest today,

01:08:09

Dr. Greg Davidson, who is defending an old earth position of creationism, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

01:08:18

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And before the break,

01:08:23

Dr. Davidson, you were discussing the Cambria period, I believe? Yes, so it was in the context of relative dating versus how that relates to the geologic column and then actual calendar ages.

01:08:39

So we were talking about how relative dating works, which is just figuring out an order of events without knowing how old they are.

01:08:49

And one of the things you mentioned was use of fossils, and I'll revisit that for just a moment.

01:08:56

That if I have a collection of fossils in a layer that I'll call group

01:09:01

A, and another different collection that's group B, and yet a third different collection that's group

01:09:07

C, if we go to various parts of the world and we always find

01:09:13

A and B in the same order, where we're confident that A is older than B, and then we go to someplace else and we don't see

01:09:20

A, but we see B again, but now C above it, and that gets repeated. Well, now we're pretty confident that B is younger than C, and we also feel confident in putting those together as A, B, and C, even though we don't physically see

01:09:38

A, B, and C together all in the same place. So historically, that's how the geologic column got put together.

01:09:46

So no geologist claimed that it existed all in one spot, and yet they were pretty confident that they had the sequence correct.

01:09:56

Since that time, it's pretty significant that with the discovery of radiometric dating, that as rocks were dated that were in these same areas, the dates matched.

01:10:12

So the part of the geologic column that they thought was older actually dated older with radiometric dating, so it turned out to be in the correct sequence.

01:10:25

And maybe even more significantly, with the advent of very deep drilling with the oil industry, where they're going into some of these incredibly deep sedimentary basins and drilling continuous core, there's two dozen places around the world now where they pass through layers that represent every single period of the geologic column all in order.

01:10:52

That's pretty amazing. We have a listener, let's see, we have

01:11:00

RJ in White Plains, New York, who wants to know from your description of your guest, he is a geologist and not an anthropologist or a zoologist, but I was wondering what his opinion is in regard to Adam evolving from other life forms rather than the account in Genesis where he is made from the dust of the earth.

01:11:26

So it occurred to me over the break that I've identified each question so far, that's an important question, so if I stop saying that, it's going to sound like no question is important, right?

01:11:37

Well, I'm going to stop saying it and just say, these are all good questions that are all important. So this is a question that's on a lot of people's minds, is what about Adam?

01:11:49

It's probably the pivotal question in this whole debate. Yes, yeah, there's a lot of Christians who have a certain comfort level with the earth being of a certain ancient age and maybe even other life forms evolving, but Adam is like, okay, so here we go.

01:12:09

And you did say we've got an hour and a half left, right? Yes, actually we've got a little bit more than that, don't we?

01:12:18

Probably less than that. Oh yeah, that's 45 minutes, I'm sorry. Yeah, but no, we don't have to take 45 minutes on just this one subject.

01:12:26

I'll take a little bit of friendly issue with the wording of the question as the evolution of Adam rather than the biblical description of creation from the dust, because I'm about to describe something that I think captures both, and it kind of gets back to our understanding of the nature of God and what it means to be created in the image of God.

01:12:57

That being created in the image of God is obviously not just physical appearance.

01:13:02

I mean, all you've got to do is compare a Dutch farmer with an African pygmy, and what does

01:13:09

God look like, right? So the image of God means something much more than that, which at the very least must include things like the capacity for love, the desire for relationships, the desire for justice.

01:13:25

And that would include creativity. And if I look at human nature and creativity, yeah, we could push a button now and produce a computer -generated piece of art, and that's really unsatisfying.

01:13:37

But the real artist takes, you know, if he's a sculptor, he takes, say, a lump of clay, and he shapes it and forms it, and over time, it eventually becomes something that is what he was looking for.

01:13:49

It's the image that he was looking for. Well, if I think of God as being the consummate artist,

01:13:57

I can envision God not only fashioning an individual organism, but fashioning organisms over time, generation to generation to generation, each one a magnificent creation in its own right, and yet it's sequentially becoming something that he has in mind down the road.

01:14:19

So when I look at what Genesis says, it's fascinating that there's two places in Genesis 1 where we see that God called the earth to bring forth plants, and plants were produced.

01:14:37

God called the earth to bring forth crawling creatures, and it did.

01:14:44

Now, whether that's instantaneous or through a sequence of generations that started from nonliving earth materials to whatever we see today, that's the earth obeying.

01:14:56

God called the earth to bring forth, and it listened. When I look at the creation of man, it's described slightly differently, but it's the same earth materials.

01:15:06

God is fashioning earth materials to make man. So if God, in being the consummate artist, was creating a series of creatures, and he created hominids, and then he got to a point where he selected two individuals to start the human race where they are now endowed with a, we could call it a soul, even though various people have issues with what exactly does that mean, but some aspect of them that now gives them a unique awareness of God and of right and wrong and of morality and of the need for that relationship with their creator, that you have a genuine first couple and yet also derived from other ancestors.

01:16:06

There's a lot more that could be said about that, but I think that just gives sort of a 30 ,000 -foot overview of my take on that.

01:16:17

Well, thank you, RJ, in White Plains, New York, and you've also won a free copy of The Grand Canyon, Monument to an

01:16:24

Ancient Earth, Can Noah's Flood Explain the Grand Canyon? So please give us your full address in White Plains, New York, and that will be shipped out to you, compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CV for Cumberland Valley, bbs4biblebookservice .com,

01:16:41

cvbbs .com. We thank Todd and Patty Jennings for their faithful support of Iron Sharpens Iron by shipping out all of our winners, their

01:16:49

Bibles, books, and other prizes through their cvbbs .com

01:16:55

ministry and at no charge to either our listeners or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:17:01

And we have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says,

01:17:09

Is there any fossil record or any evidence at all that man evolved from a lower life form?

01:17:17

Kind of hinging on the other question. Yes. So there is a common misperception that the evidence for human evolution is really sparse, very fragmentary, based on reconstructions from a single tooth, and usually is discovered to be a hoax.

01:17:41

The reality is far, far different from that. There are – the director of the

01:17:48

Human Evolutionary Project in the Smithsonian Institute actually keeps a database where he has cataloged published studies on hominid discoveries, and that catalog is now up to over 6 ,000 individuals.

01:18:08

So not 6 ,000 bones, 6 ,000 individual organisms that when you put them all in a sequence, and so even if you ignored the calendar ages, you just kind of put them in that relative order of this one is older than that one, based on the stratigraphy, then they become less and less human -looking skeletons.

01:18:36

So you have to do something with that physical evidence.

01:18:43

And those opposing any kind of human evolution, what they'll typically do is just lump them, kind of draw an arbitrary line somewhere and say, all of the ones that are older are actually just extinct apes, and all of the ones that are younger are just variants of humans.

01:19:06

Except that the skeletal structures are really pretty different. So if you're actually looking at them, you can see these gradational changes between them that are hard to argue are not gradational, that they're not real.

01:19:29

Well, thank you, CJ, in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York. You also won the

01:19:34

Grand Canyon, not the actual Grand Canyon, the book, The Grand Canyon Monument to an

01:19:41

Ancient Earth. And make sure you give us your full mailing address in Lindenhurst, Long Island, so we can have that shipped out to you through our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

01:19:50

And again, we also thank Kriegel Publishing for these books. How old is the Grand Canyon and why is that important?

01:19:59

So the age of the Grand Canyon depends on if you're talking about the layers of the

01:20:05

Grand Canyon or the carving of the Grand Canyon. So the layers of the Grand Canyon, if you're going all the way down into the metamorphic rocks at the river, you're encountering rocks that have been radiometrically dated to over 3 billion years old, so really, really old.

01:20:25

The Kaibab layer at the very top of the canyon is more on the order of...

01:20:32

It's been dated more on the order of 240 million years. And then as you go north and northeast, you start going up what's called the

01:20:43

Grand Staircase, where you're getting into younger deposits that at one time extended all the way over the

01:20:48

Grand Canyon. The carving of the canyon is much younger, and it's less well -established.

01:20:59

It's a lot easier to date a layer than it is a hole, right? The hole is stuff that's gone.

01:21:08

So estimates of the age of the carving of the canyon... There's two different camps right now, one that thinks that the vast majority of the carving has been done in the last 6 million years, another camp that would not disagree that carving's been going on the last 6 million years but thinks that the beginnings of that extend back as far as, like, 70 to 80 million years.

01:21:32

So that's just the geologic answer to the how old question. Does it matter, or why does it matter?

01:21:41

So I will go on record as saying that I ultimately don't really care whether I convince somebody to believe the way

01:21:53

I believe about the history of the Earth. One of my best friends here at the

01:22:02

University of Mississippi is a young Earth, holds to a young Earth view, and we have sweet fellowship.

01:22:12

I'm down in his office quite frequently, and we've had a number of times where things have been going on and pray together and love each other, and that issue has never become a subject that's really divided us.

01:22:28

But it's because we both recognize that each of us believe the

01:22:33

Bible is true, and we're trying our best to honor it and to understand it, and we happen to have different interpretations of the

01:22:43

Genesis account, not whether God created, but just whether it's intended to teach a particular sequence of days or not.

01:22:52

If everyone had that view in the church, I would not be on the radio right now. I wouldn't have written this book.

01:22:59

I would be in my lab doing geochemistry experiments. The reason why it becomes important enough to be on the radio and to write a book and to have these conversations is because so many people in the church are drawing a line in the sand and saying, if you truly honor

01:23:19

Scripture, if you truly... In some ways, if you're truly a Christian, you must abandon modern science.

01:23:27

You must agree that our interpretation of the Bible is correct and accept this literal view.

01:23:38

That sets up a stumbling block where especially our young people that are being raised in the church and told not only that this is the view you must have, but that you can safely discount all of this scientific evidence, they get to the university and start learning the actual evidence, and they're devastated.

01:23:58

I've lost track of how many students I've had in my office wrestling with this, about to give up on their faith because they think that the church has misled them.

01:24:07

That's where it becomes important. Well, what do you make of scientists, including the one we have on tomorrow and many others who are young Earth creationists?

01:24:21

Do you think that they are just not really well -read, that they are really lagging far behind in their education and their development of understanding, or are they charlatans?

01:24:35

Because you're using phrases that basically presume that your local college professor or even the professors in the

01:24:51

Ivy League schools and more prestigious institutions, that they basically are all right.

01:24:59

They all have the correct answers, whereas Pastor Bob at First Baptist Church is totally wrong, and so are all the young Earth creationists that he had at his

01:25:08

Bible conference. What do you make of these folks? Yeah, so that's the setup for really getting me into trouble, right?

01:25:19

Well, I just couldn't help but ask that question because of the... Yes, and I don't fault you for it.

01:25:30

So, kind of the way you set that up was the Ivy League professors versus the pastors.

01:25:38

So I would rather characterize that as, say, Christians who are geologists, who are promoting the conventional geological understanding versus, say, the young Earth organizations that are promoting an alternate view and claiming that that's the biblical view.

01:26:00

And those who are identifying themselves as scientists and geologists and so on. That's really what

01:26:05

I mainly was referring to, the people who would be, in some level, your peers. Yes.

01:26:11

Whether you view them as your peers or not, in the academic or the scientific realm, that's really where I'm getting at.

01:26:19

Right. So here's kind of where the rub is, where the rubber meets the road.

01:26:27

Whatever one's position and whatever view someone is advocating, they should be presenting the data as fully as they're able to, providing all of the information to allow people to make a judgment.

01:26:48

So, for those of us, say, the eight Christian geologists, one Christian biologist in the

01:26:54

Grand Canyon book, one of the reasons that motivated us to write this and to share with the non -scientist, general

01:27:03

Christian community about how geologists actually know what they claim to know was the frequency with which we'll hear opposing views presented without all of the data, without enough information, without critical information.

01:27:23

And I'll first give you an example, and then I'll address the kind of the inherent question of why they're doing that.

01:27:34

So, taking something like... I've seen many examples of photos flashed up on the screen where here is a fish in the middle of eating a fish.

01:27:46

Here is a marine reptile caught in the act of giving birth. Here's two turtles in the midst of mating, and they're captured as fossils.

01:27:59

This, the only rational explanation, is a catastrophic global flood that has inundated them very suddenly.

01:28:10

That sounds really quite convincing. But then you go in and you actually probe deeper into the very same people who are proposing this, or presenting this, and you read other things that they've written, and you discover that almost every one of those pictures they have put up there come from layers that they themselves call post -flood.

01:28:37

All these layers coming from units that they themselves had said happened after the flood.

01:28:48

You see that, and it's like, how did you just do that? So, all right, that raises the question, how do they do that?

01:28:59

How is this even possible? Many of these people,

01:29:04

I believe, are desiring to do the right thing. The only thing that I can figure out, and that's not just an isolated example that happened, we see it over and over and over and over again, is that because it's been decided that the final result, the outcome, this acceptance of a young earth is of such importance that if they leave some information out here or there to help people get to that critical point, that it's okay.

01:29:40

And they've done it often enough that they've not even really seen what they're doing anymore.

01:29:50

Well, I'm going to read one more question for you before we go to the break, and you can answer it after the break, because he wants you to exegete a passage of the

01:30:00

Bible. Lou from Sharpsburg, Georgia says, What is your understanding of Exodus 20, verse 11?

01:30:09

Exodus 20, verse 11, and we'll have you answer that when we return from our final break.

01:30:15

And if anybody else wants to join us, now is the time to do it, because we're running out of time. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:30:22

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors with Greg Davidson and his defense of an old earth.

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01:32:33

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01:32:39

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01:35:16

Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko inviting you to tune in to a visit to the Pastor's Study every

01:35:22

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01:35:28

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01:35:33

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Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back, this is

01:35:52

Chris Arnzen and this is the last 25 minutes of day one of our two -day discussion on the age of the earth.

01:35:59

Today we have been discussing creationism from an old earth perspective.

01:36:05

The perspective adhered to by Dr. Greg Davidson of Solid Rock Lectures and contributor to the book,

01:36:12

The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth. If you'd like to join us, now is the time to do it because we're running out of time.

01:36:18

Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com chrisarnzen at gmail .com And obviously our friend

01:36:24

Lou in Sharpsburg, Georgia must have tuned in late because he really did already address this question.

01:36:30

But if you want to repeat a summary of Exodus 20 verse 11, For in six days the

01:36:36

Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea that is in them and rested on the seventh day.

01:36:43

So obviously he's referring to either all seven days or specifically the Sabbath day which was a question someone asked earlier.

01:36:51

Yeah, and actually this does have a little bit of a different flavor to it because it's asking the question or floating the proposition, if you will, that would not this verse inform us and explain how we should interpret

01:37:10

Genesis 1. And if I were looking at Exodus 2011 by itself, that would be my natural conclusion that yes, this was a six consecutive days.

01:37:23

So using Scripture to understand Scripture, I'm now looking in a couple other spots and even within Exodus, if I jump over to 31 .17,

01:37:33

it has essentially the same verse but it says that the

01:37:39

Lord made the heavens and the earth and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed. So we have not just the cessation of labor but terminology that actually suggests that God was tired and needed a break.

01:37:54

We obviously know from elsewhere in Scripture that God does not get tired. So we're seeing words within the context of the

01:38:03

Scripture that are anthropomorphic, that they're written in terms of man's experience and written for man.

01:38:12

So when I combine that with what I've then seen in Genesis 1 where a literal six -day consecutive, 24 -hour consecutive days is not the most natural reading but it introduces internal inconsistencies,

01:38:28

I see a verse like 31 .17 in Exodus saying God rested and was refreshed to be making reference not to instruction on the nature of nature, on the number of days in which creation occurred, but giving a message to man, you need to pay attention to this, the

01:38:50

Sabbath day that I've set up and look at the example I gave in this poem of creation as the example of a work day and a day of very much needed rest that's directed towards worship.

01:39:07

Well, Lou, guess what? You've won the final copy that we have been giving away, that we have to give away,

01:39:13

I should say, of the Grand Canyon Monument to an Ancient Earth Can Noah's Flood Explain the

01:39:19

Grand Canyon? featuring contributors such as our guest today,

01:39:24

Greg Davidson and others. So please give us your full mailing address and Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service will have that shipped out to you,

01:39:32

God willing, within a week or so. That's CVBBS .com CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com

01:39:39

And we thank our friends at Kriegel for these books and also our friends at Solid Rock Lectures for these books.

01:39:48

And has this book that we've been discussing, the Grand Canyon Monument to an

01:39:53

Ancient Earth, has it evoked any notable negative responses in the scientific community, both from secular scientists and fellow creationists?

01:40:03

So it's probably somewhat ironic that the vast majority of the ire and harsh words have come from within the

01:40:14

Church. So those that feel very strongly that the only

01:40:21

Bible honoring you is a literal understanding of creation in the recent past have expressed quite harsh words in a number of places.

01:40:35

Within the secular community, the reaction is mixed.

01:40:42

There's actually a sizable number who have been appreciative that for some of them, in their minds, they're just going about their business of studying nature.

01:40:57

They don't have an agenda, per se, and they're really appreciative that somebody is addressing misperceptions.

01:41:07

There are actually some professional scientific organizations that have actually begun to work together with Christians who are scientists, intentionally, to try to bridge that gap.

01:41:24

But then, of course, there's always the segment of, I'll call them evangelical atheists, that just kind of react to the notion of a scientist being a

01:41:34

Christian. There's just something wrong with the world when that happens. So you get some roll dives from them, but that covers the basis of reaction.

01:41:49

Now, to be fair, when you were saying that basically you were disturbed by Christians who say that a young -earth position is the only position that a

01:42:01

Christian should have if they are reading the Bible accurately and faithfully, and so on, couldn't you also, and the old -earth community, if you will, be charged with almost the same thing, only the opposite side, whereas an old -earth position is the only position you should take if you want to prevent

01:42:25

Christianity from being a laughingstock and having young people, especially, exit out of the church in mass after they go to college and they learn that their pastor was entirely wrong about the creation account in Genesis and that his lost or secular professor knew more about the existence of the universe than his pastor did.

01:42:51

So, I mean, couldn't that be flipped around, that same kind of a charge to old -earth creationists? Fair question, and I'll take my best shot at an answer.

01:43:03

Where I think the difference lies is in that drawing of the line in the sand, where even though I think

01:43:16

I'm right, obviously, if I didn't think I was right, I wouldn't be involved in this, right?

01:43:23

So even though I think that my position is right, I am very content, and other, like all the

01:43:30

Christian authors on this Grand Canyon book would agree with this, we're all very content with fellowshipping with other believers who have a different viewpoint.

01:43:44

With the understanding that it's, and I'll use, it's not a perfect example, but take something like infant baptism versus believer's baptism.

01:43:54

I think there is a right answer to the question of which should we be doing, but I'm not about to say that somebody who takes a different position than I hold isn't really honoring

01:44:05

Scripture, or isn't really, you know, they're undermining the authority of God's Word. They just, their understanding, their interpretation is different than mine.

01:44:15

I think they're wrong, but they're my brother. So all of us are quite content with that, and, you know, if everybody was like my,

01:44:24

I've got a Campus Crusade buddy here on campus that doesn't, he's not a scientist, he doesn't really understand all of the ins and outs of this, but when he's got an evangelist heart, and when he's witnessing to somebody, and they bring up the science issue, he says, look, here's four positions

01:44:41

Christians take, let's talk about Jesus. We're good with that.

01:44:49

On the other side, there is at least a vocal group on the other side that says no.

01:45:00

You either hold to our view, or you are undermining the authority of God's Word, and when they're talking to our young people, you must reject these things.

01:45:13

And therefore, when they're going off to college, they're getting set up for this crisis. If those same kids were actually taught, here's different views that Christians take on this, and they were actually presented with the actual evidence on both sides, they'd be so much better prepared when they went to college to be able to then start assessing which do they think is the better biblical view, which do they think is the better scientific view, without getting the rug pulled out from underneath them in the sense of their faith.

01:45:51

Well, yeah, I think that an example of how we could still have brotherhood and harmony in spite of differences like this exists right here on Iron, Sharp, and Zion, because I happen to be a

01:46:03

Reformed Baptist, and I'm a young earth creationist, and my co -host, Reverend Buzz Taylor, is a

01:46:09

Presbyterian, and he's also a Neanderthal. I didn't see that coming.

01:46:19

But I want to hear what are the most difficult challenges and questions you face from those opposing your specific views on the age of the earth.

01:46:32

The most challenging questions, well, we can divide them up into scriptural and scientific, and in a sense, there's a third category, which is just the interaction.

01:46:47

So on the scriptural side, there is an inherent human desire to have every peg inserted, every nail hammered down.

01:47:01

We want airtight arguments. We don't want any uncertainty. So as soon as a scripture comes up that you don't have a nice, clean answer for, it's like, oh, it's a hole.

01:47:14

The whole thing comes apart. Without recognition that there is no position that has an airtight case with every single scripture in the

01:47:23

Bible. So I will volunteer for you. Like, the one scripture that I have the most difficulty with, and that's when

01:47:31

Genesis talks about all green plants being given for food. And I believe it words it for both humans and animals.

01:47:43

And I think I've got pretty good arguments for practically every other scripture.

01:47:50

I get to that one, and it's like, okay. I've heard the explanations of things like, well, plants are at the base of the food chain, so that's really kind of just talking about everything that eats.

01:48:03

If you eat animals, they eat plants, and so you're all eating plants. Yeah, I don't really like that explanation very well.

01:48:10

Maybe it's right. But that would be an example of, say, a scriptural argument that, being a human being,

01:48:20

I want an airtight explanation, and I'd like a better explanation for that one. Don't have it. On the scientific side,

01:48:33

I don't know if I really want to open that can of worms. No. Honestly, as a believer, and I believe in Noah's Flood.

01:48:46

I think Noah's Flood was a real event that actually happened. If I were studying nature and finding examples where, oh, that really does look like, say, a global cataclysm,

01:49:00

I think that was actually kind of cool. And I don't see anything.

01:49:07

And the other authors that are on this Grand Canyon book, when we look at all of the arguments for the catastrophic global flooding, every one of them weaves out critical information.

01:49:20

And when you know the critical information, they don't work anymore. So that becomes more of a challenge on, all right, what do

01:49:29

I do with that information? Because then that kind of gets back to the question you asked me about, like, well, you're kind of saying things about folks that doesn't sound very nice.

01:49:39

Like, yeah? What do I do with that? Yeah, well, that is a good question.

01:49:51

Now, I'm actually surprised that none of our listeners have submitted this question to you.

01:49:58

But I think that one of the most pivotal issues next to the origin of Adam would be death before the fall.

01:50:09

It seems like an Old Earth view would require removing the sting out of the fall.

01:50:15

The main primary negative consequence that occurred from the fall is death.

01:50:24

And I'm just curious how you can bring harmony with that understanding of having death even millions of years before the fall and having it not affect the gospel and so on, if you could just comment on that.

01:50:40

Yeah, I'm also surprised your listeners didn't ask that question. You need to get after them for that. So there's two levels of addressing that.

01:50:50

One is, in my own effort to take the Bible very seriously, when

01:50:57

I look at Romans 120, not 120, Romans chapter 5, where it talks about sin and death, it says that through Adam's sin came death to all men.

01:51:15

If I take it, if I think that words are in Scripture for a reason, if the implication or what was trying to be communicated by Paul was that Adam sinned, brought all death, death to animals, then he should have left off the last three words.

01:51:34

It should have just said that Adam's sin brought death. But it very specifically says, to all men.

01:51:43

So I'm assuming that you would not, whatever you think Adam's father was, it was not a man.

01:51:49

Right. Right, not in the sense that we think of as, with the self -awareness and sense of right and wrong, and culpability to, you know, capable of sin, and having this personal relationship with God with an existence that goes beyond biological life, right, that continues in heaven.

01:52:11

Now, do you think that God in his inspired word was just using allegories and metaphors when it was referring to Eve coming from Adam's side, and also the serpent tempting

01:52:24

Eve, and so on? What do you make of those events in Genesis? Well, I'm actually going to back up a second if I can on that.

01:52:31

Yeah, you can. Because I mentioned there's two important aspects. One was that bringing death to all men.

01:52:38

The other is, what is the primary meaning of death? Because when you go back to the garden story, and it says, in the day that you eat of the fruit, you will die.

01:52:50

They ate it, and they did not die in that day. They lived for potentially a very long time after that.

01:52:58

But what they did experience immediately was the alienation from God, that spiritual death.

01:53:05

And we see that repeated in, like, other verses where it says that, you know, for the righteous there is no death.

01:53:15

Okay, we know they physically die, but they're not experiencing that spiritual death, that alienation from God.

01:53:25

And, likewise, when we go back to Romans, and we see that it's talking about, and I don't have the exact wording in front of me, but that through Christ brings life, we don't think that that verse is talking about bringing life to animals.

01:53:41

So, it's again referring to man, and referring primarily to that spiritual death, that permanent death, that alienation from God, that ultimately involves physical death as well, but physical death isn't the big

01:53:58

D death. So, in our... what do we got left here on time?

01:54:04

We have five minutes. Five minutes, okay. A little bit less, because I have to give closing goodbyes and stuff.

01:54:09

Yes, yes, yes. So, in terms of the Adam and Eve story with the creation of Eve and the creation out of the rib, and the temptation by a serpent,

01:54:25

I'm not presumptuous enough to make a declarative statement about the degree to which that's a literal rendering, or more of an allegorical rendering of real events and real circumstances, and I'm comfortable with that uncertainty.

01:54:48

Well, basically summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners right now before we run out of time.

01:54:54

Yes. So, in keeping with my Campus Crusade friends, that when these questions come up, says, here's four views that people take on the issue, let's talk about Jesus.

01:55:05

Of course I would love it if people read our book and decided they agreed with us. That's great, but that's not ultimately the objective.

01:55:13

If people read this book that were, say, Young Earth leaning, and came away from it and said, oh, okay,

01:55:20

I get how Joe and the Pew, three Pews back from me, could hold a different view than I do and still honor scripture.

01:55:28

That is a huge win. That is an enormous win, and that is bringing unity to the church and causing so much less division than we're currently experiencing.

01:55:39

So, that's what I'd love for people to take away from either this radio broadcast or from reading this book.

01:55:46

And if anybody who did not win a book wants to purchase it, you can go to solidrocklectures .org,

01:55:56

solidrocklectures .org, and click on Publications, and that is one of the options that you have.

01:56:02

The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth, Can Noah's Flood Explain the Grand Canyon? And as always, the vast majority of the books that we address here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio can be purchased through our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, that's

01:56:18

CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for Bible Book Service, .com, CVBBS .com.

01:56:25

And don't forget that tomorrow we are concluding our two -day discussion on the age of the

01:56:31

Earth with Dr. Taz Walker of Creation Ministries International, CMI. He's going to be calling us all the way from the land down under in Australia, and he's going to be discussing the

01:56:43

Genesis Flood, its lasting global impact, which proves the Earth is young. We hope that you tune in to that as well and have your questions ready for Taz Walker, whether you are an old

01:56:55

Earth creationist, a young Earth creationist, an atheist, a Muslim, a

01:57:00

Hindu, a Buddhist, a Swedenborgianist, whatever you happen to be, we look forward to receiving your questions for Taz Walker tomorrow.

01:57:10

And do you have any additional contact information, Dr. Greg Davidson, that you care to provide for our listeners?

01:57:17

Of course, anybody can just go to the University of Mississippi and the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering and easily find me.

01:57:25

And then there's also a website devoted just to the book, which is just Grand Canyon Ancient Earth, and that will also get you there.

01:57:35

And Dr. Greg Davidson also has a book, When Faith and Science Collide, where you can get that book from Malias Press.

01:57:46

That's maliaspress .com, maliaspress .com, m -a -l -i -u -s -press .com,

01:57:54

or of course, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs .com.

01:58:02

I want to thank you, Dr. Davidson, for being my guest today, and I'm glad that the discussion was ironic, and I hope it was profitable for our listeners today.

01:58:13

It was my delight, thank you. I want to thank the Reverend Buzz Taylor also for being in studio with me today.

01:58:19

Thank you, yes. And I ask of you once again, those of you who enjoy this program and listen to it regularly, we are in urgent need of finances, so I ask of you, please, if you can donate to Iron Trap and Zion Radio without siphoning a penny from your normal church giving or from your family's dinner table if you're struggling to get by.

01:58:43

If you are blessed financially above and beyond your ability to provide for your church and home, we would love to receive a gift of any kind.

01:58:51

Go to irontrapandzionradio .com, irontrapandzionradio .com, click on support, and there will be an address there where you can mail a check made payable to Iron Trap and Zion Radio.

01:59:02

If you'd like to advertise your business, your corporation, your church, your parachurch ministry, special event that you're having, your professional practice, if you're a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, anything that you would like to advertise as long as it's compatible with our theological makeup here on Iron Trap and Zion Radio, we would love to hear from you.

01:59:24

Email us at chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put advertising in the subject line.

01:59:31

Well, I hope that you all have a safe and blessed remainder of your day, and as always,

01:59:37

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

01:59:44

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for Dr.