Tape 5 - Evolution vs. Creation Seminar

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Dr. Irwin "Rocky" Freeman & Friends

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Now, on the other hand, based upon the evolutionary model, we would predict that the oldest rocks which contain fossils or the remnants of some past living form would contain the fossils of the simplest form of life capable of leaving a fossil record.
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And then as we search out the successively younger strata, we would expect to find a slow gradual change of the simple forms into more and more complex forms of life.
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And if this has occurred, then certainly we'd expect to find transitional forms in the fossil record.
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There should be a tremendous number of these transitional forms in the fossil record. After all, if a fish has slowly and gradually evolved into an amphibian over 30 million of years, during which time the fin of the fish slowly and gradually change in the feet and legs of the amphibians, why there should literally have been billions, hundreds of billions, trillions of these transitional forms should have lived and died during all of those millions of years.
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Because there should always be a considerable population, the definition of evolution, natural selection, is the animal that is better suited to survive, is more highly adapted, reproduces in larger numbers.
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So it seems quite obvious there'd be quite a population of these fishes and then all of the intermediates. And according to modern evolutionary theory, the changes are extremely slight, so slight they are imperceptible usually.
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So as you can see, the number of transitions that were required to change a fish into an amphibian would be vast in number.
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And the number of transitional forms that lived and died would literally number in the trillions. Now all we have to do is find three or four or five of these intermediate forms scattered through time and we can document evolution.
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Now this should be true throughout the entire fossil record. You can't appeal to the poverty of the fossil record, there's plenty of fossils, an abundance of fossils.
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We should find the transitional form demanded by the theory of evolution if evolution is true.
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Well what do we actually find as far as this record is true? Now let me first of all describe the general nature of the fossil record, then
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I'll go to some of these specific points. As a matter of fact, there is a systematic absence of transitional forms between all of the higher categories.
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The phyla, classes, orders, and down to and including almost every family appear abruptly in the fossil record without transitional forms.
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There is, now listen carefully, there is a systematic absence of transitional forms between all of the higher categories of plants and animals.
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Let me quote just a few authorities as to that point. First, the nature of the fossil record of plants.
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Dr. E .J. H. Korner of Cambridge University is an evolutionist. He does believe that plants have evolved.
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But in the book, Contemporary Botanical Thought, published by Quadrangle Books in 1961, this evolutionist made the following statement on page 97, quote,
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Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the theory of evolution from biology, biogeography, and paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of spatial creation.
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Now notice this evolutionist says the fossil record of plants actually favors spatial creation, not evolution.
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The seed -bearing plants, the flowering plants, the major plant kinds all appear abruptly in the fossil record and we cannot trace their evolutionary origin from some other plant kind or lower plant kind.
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Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, famous evolutionist, a man who does believe completely in evolution, a man who does believe there is some way to explain the gaps in the fossil record, a man who does believe that in a few cases we have examples of transitional forms at this level, nevertheless, in a book published in 1960 called
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The Evolution of Life, edited by Saul Tax, made the following statement. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small.
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Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic. And almost always large.
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One of his other publications, he pointed out the fact that the 32 orders of mammals all appear with their basic characteristics already complete in the first members, every one of the 32 orders of mammals.
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Finally, I want to quote from Dr. Richard B. Goldschmidt. Dr. Goldschmidt was a rabid evolutionist, the most rabid evolutionist
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I have ever read. He says that evolution is a fact for which no further proof is needed. And then in this article, published in American Scientist, volume 40,
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January of 1952, Dr. Goldschmidt just proceeds to demolish the theory of evolution. Because he's a rather unusual evolutionist, he did not believe that evolution occurs slowly and gradually by micromutations, by very slight changes.
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This is the so -called neo -Darwinian interpretation of evolution. Dr. Goldschmidt says that cannot be true.
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He says we have the gaps in the fossil record and they're systematic. He said the major types of plants and animals always appear instantaneously without transitional form.
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And they said that just doesn't fit. Well, Goldschmidt was not about to become a creationist, so he proposed another mechanism for evolution which he called the hopeful monster mechanism.
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Goldschmidt, for instance, proposed at one time a reptile ate an egg, and guess what? A bird came crawling out of the egg.
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And Goldschmidt says, now that's what happened. Every time you see one of these gaps, something laid an egg and something else got born.
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Well boy, what a shock to Mama Reptile that must have been. I think she'd had a hard time explaining it to Papa Reptile, and in fact,
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I think he would have sued her for divorce. And the neo -Darwinists, the ones who believe in slow gradual evolution, they didn't think that Goldschmidt had a better explanation either.
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They think he's the one that laid the egg. But here is the significant point, ladies and gentlemen,
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Goldschmidt felt forced to propose this incredible hopeful monster mechanism because he accepted the gaps at face value.
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Now we creationists are often accused of believing something incredible, but you see an evolutionist, he'll believe anything, anything, no matter how incredible, to salvage his theory of evolution.
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Well now listen, this is what Goldschmidt had to say about the fossil record. Now remember, he wanted to find transitional forms.
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If anybody in this world wanted to, he did. If anybody would admit a transitional form was one, he would.
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But concerning the fossil record, this is what Goldschmidt had to say on page 97 of his article. He said, the facts of greatest general importance are the following.
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When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick explosive, in terms of geological time, diversification, so that, now listen carefully, so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transition, unquote.
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Phyla, classes, and down to and including almost every order and family, Dr. Goldschmidt says appear in the fossil record abruptly and without any apparent transition.
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Now ladies and gentlemen, a creationist could hardly do a better job than that in describing what he would expect the fossil record to show based upon creation.
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This is the actual fossil record described by this evolutionist. It does fit the predictions of creation, but ladies and gentlemen,
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I submit it certainly does not fit the predictions based upon evolution. A little later, Dr. Goldschmidt went on to say, moreover, within the slowly evolving series, like the famous horse series, the decisive steps are abrupt without transitions.
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Ladies and gentlemen, there's a monumental gap between the so -called first horse and the ancestral order, the condylothera.
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And before we have the four -toed horse, the three -toed horse, and the one -toed horse, we have browsers and grazers and so forth, but we do not have the intermediate stages.
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Well, that's the general nature of the fossil record, ladies and gentlemen. There is a systematic gap between the fossil record.
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In one other publication, Dr. Simpson says these gaps are nearly universal between these higher categories.
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Now ladies and gentlemen, based upon any other evidence, without any other evidence, we could say the creation model is superior to the evolution model in explaining and predicting this kind of evidence.
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Well, let's go to some of the specific points. Let's go to this matter of the Cambrian. May we have that next slide, please?
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Now in these Cambrian deposits, which are dated by evolution to 600 million years ago, that is beginning 600 million years ago, these sedimentary rocks, material that was eroded, transported and deposited by water, from water, laid down these vast sedimentary deposits which contained these fossils.
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In these so -called Cambrian rocks, we find billions upon billions upon billions of fossils of extremely highly complex forms of life.
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We find jellyfish, worms, brachiopods. We find the trilobites, certainly the most complex invertebrate known, now extinct.
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We find the swimming crustacean. We find the sponges. These are sponges, not corals. We also find, as I mentioned, the jellyfish, worms, brachiopods, and so forth and so on.
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Actually, just recently, they have found cuttlefish in the early Cambrian rocks. Now, I believe it was
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Dr. Harris mentioned that all a paleontologist had to do was go out and find some unusual fossil much earlier than it's supposed to have been and he could get a raise in salary.
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Well, Dr. J. Wyatt Durham is due for a raise then because the cuttlefish, now these are not fishes, they're invertebrates, but they're very highly developed invertebrates.
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They are predators. They have jaws with teeth or teeth -like structures and had previously been found in the
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Jurassic, which is supposed to be 400 million years after the Cambrian.
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And they'd never found cuttlefish in anything earlier, so they said cuttlefish did not evolve into the Jurassic. Now, Dr.
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Durham has found cuttlefish in early Cambrian rock, supposedly 400 million years earlier.
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Now, I asked Dr. Harris, why don't we find cuttlefish in the
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Ordovician, the Silurian, the Devonian, the Mississippian, the Pennsylvanian, the
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Permian, and the Triassic? They were present in the early Cambrian and they must have been present during all of this vast stretches of time, but they're not found.
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They are found in early Cambrian. They were present, you see, and very surprisingly, they were present.
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And they have found fragments of woody plants in Cambrian rocks now.
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Again, about the comment, why don't we find apple trees down there? Well, they had thought previously we found simple plants in the early
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Devonian, then more complex plants in the middle Devonian, and perhaps the ferns and seed -bearing plants in the late
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Devonian. Now that's the reason why, because the simple plants developed in the early
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Devonian. We didn't have complex plants in the early Devonian. It was later. But now they have found fragments and spores of woody plants in Cambrian rocks, supposedly two hundred million years earlier.
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Now what we're finding then in these supposedly very early rocks is tremendous variety of highly complex form.
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Now these animals here on this slide supposedly required a billion and a half years of evolution. A billion and a half years.
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Well, what should we find then in the pre -Cambrian rocks? What should we find in rocks earlier than the
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Cambrian? Well, we should, of course, find the evolutionary ancestors of these animals.
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Hundreds of these species had hard parts, and one thing is certain, they all didn't invent hard parts at the same time. Those hard parts must have been evolving well back in the pre -Cambrian.
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What do we actually find? Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Preston Cloud, one of the world's best -known evolutionists and geologists, in an article published in just November of 1973 in the
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Journal of Geology says as far as he is concerned, we have yet to find one single unquestionable multicellular fossil in a pre -Cambrian rock.
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He says there have been some reports of these forms, but they are all questionable, they are all disputable, and as far as he is concerned, not one of them are valid.
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Not one single indisputable multicellular fossil has ever been found in a pre -Cambrian rock, and there are many undisturbed pre -Cambrian rocks perfectly suitable for the preservation of fossils, but none are found in those rocks, except for some reports of microscopic single -cell bacteria and algae.
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Now, ladies and gentlemen, I submit there is a monumental gap between a single -cell microscopic organism and these creatures, a billion and a half years of evolution, supposedly, but nothing can be found to document that remarkable evolutionary transition.
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Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, the famous evolutionist, has characterized this abrupt appearance of Cambrian animals,
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Cambrian fossils, the absence of pre -Cambrian fossils, as the major mystery of the history of life.
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Well, we have news for Dr. Simpson, it might be a mystery to him, but it's no mystery to us. Because, you see, we say, what greater evidence for creation could the rocks give than the sudden outburst of highly complex forms of life and the total absence of any evolutionary ancestry?
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They cannot be found on any continent of the world or on the bottom of any ocean. Now, furthermore, may
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I point out that we find a great variety of different kinds of creatures here. We have the crustaceans, we have the trilobites, the corals, sponges, jellyfish, worms, and so forth and so on.
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Now, there's not one iota of evidence from the fossil record that these creatures have evolved from common ancestors.
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At their first appearance in the fossil record, they are just as distinctly set apart as they are today. A jellyfish has always been a jellyfish, a worm has always been a worm, a trilobite has always been a trilobite, a cuttlefish has always been a cuttlefish, and there is no evidence of their origin from a common ancestor.
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May I submit that here again is one of the major predictions of creation that is supported by the fossil record.
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We do find these basically different kinds of creatures suddenly appearing in the fossil record with no transitional forms of any kind.
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Now, we are told that one of these invertebrates gave rise to a vertebrate. Now, that's a remarkable transformation. Suppose it required 100 million years.
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Now, suppose that one of these invertebrates evolved into a chordate, a simple animal, does not have a bony backbone, he has a notochord of cartilage and a nerve cord running down along the back.
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They are living today. We have them with us today. Then supposedly this evolved into a fish, the true vertebrate.
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What evidence do we have for that? Well, let me quote from the time -life publication, The Fishes, published in 1964, written by Dr.
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F .D. Omeny. Dr. Omeny is an evolutionist, of course. He said, how this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fish -like creatures, we do not know.
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Between the Cambrian period, when it probably originated, and the Ordovician period, when the first fossils of animals with really fish -like characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years, which we will probably never be able to fill.
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Incredible, ladies and gentlemen, 100 million years when all kinds of fossils were being laid down, but it just so happens we do not find the transitional form between the invertebrates and the vertebrates.
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The first vertebrate of fish, Agnathus fish, jawless bottom feeder, had bony armor plates, an internal skeleton, it is assumed he had a long evolutionary history, but of that history we have none.
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Now the fishes are believed to have given rise to amphibians. Next slide, please. Here in this next slide we see the fish that is believed to have given rise to the amphibians, and here in the lower portion we see what is supposed to be the world's oldest known amphibian.
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That supposedly resides in the fact you see the bones in the fins of this fish that they believe could have been transformed into the feet and legs of the amphibian.
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There's some similarity in the vertebrae and some similarity in the skull pattern. And that is mainly the nature of the evidence that supposedly links that fish to the amphibian.
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But may I point out, ladies and gentlemen, the vast difference between the two. That fish was a fish with a beautiful set of fish fins, highly designed, or adapted if you wish, for balancing, steering, and locomotion in the water.
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On the other hand, this amphibian, the oldest known amphibian, had the basic amphibian limb.
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And there's not a trace of an intermediate stage anywhere, not one single intermediate form in spite of all the assumed millions of years of evolution.
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And that so -called fish -like fin there, there are amphibians in existence today that have that kind of fin.
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No way is that linked to a fish. There's no way that a fish can do the weight of the body.
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But on the other hand, in the amphibian, the pelvic bones are vastly enlarged, they're very large, firmly attached to the vertebral column, because the limbs do support the weight of the body.
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Now there is a fundamental difference when fishes and amphibians never bridge by one single transitional form.
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Now on the next slide, we have the so -called ancestor of dinosaurs, birds, and flying reptiles.
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Now I want to consider briefly the origin of flight as a possible test case of creation versus evolution, because the change of a non -flying animal into a flying animal would cause a revolution in structure, should produce obvious transitional forms that all of us should be able to recognize.
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Furthermore, flight occurs in four classes of animals, birds, insects, flying reptiles, now extinct, and the mammal, the bat being the flying mammal.
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So supposedly we have had four different evolutionary processes, each occurring over millions of years of time, each involving hundreds and hundreds of millions of intermediate forms giving rise to flight.
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So it seems to me here, if any place, we ought to find the transitional form. All right, here, according to Romer and other evolutionists, is the ancestor of these creatures.
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The next slide will show one of the flying reptiles. Well, as you can see, what a revolution in structure has occurred.
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Look at the long tail with a rudder, the huge keel for the anchoring of the flight muscle. This was a tooth reptile.
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Notice particularly the four fingers in this creature. Three fingers supposedly remained at normal length, but look what happened to that fourth finger over a vast stretch of time by random mutational changes.
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Supposedly the finger got longer and longer and longer and longer. Other random mutational changes generated the flight membrane.
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Other purely random mutational changes generated the flight muscles, the large keel, the hollow bones, and finally we had this marvelous flying machine.
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Next slide, please. Here's another one of the flying reptiles. Notice this pteranodon. This is a toothless reptile, a large toothless beak, bony crest, and the fourth finger supporting a wingspan of over 25 feet.
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I don't know about you people, I'm glad that critter is extinct. But now if he evolves slowly and gradually over vast stretches of time, it seems to me we ought to have a few intermediates showing the formation of that toothless beak, the bony crest, and a few intermediates in the increase in the length of the finger.
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As a matter of fact, ladies and gentlemen, there is not a trace of an intermediate stage anywhere in the fossil record.
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Not a trace. These flying reptiles abruptly appear in the fossil record complete, just as predicted on the basis of creation, but no transitional forms.
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It's the same is true of insects. Evolutionists argue among themselves, what structure on an insect gave rise to wings?
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Why is the argument raging? Because there are no transitional forms. One transitional form would settle the argument.
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What about birds? Next slide, please. Here we have again the ancestor of the birds, supposedly. Next slide.
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An Archaeopteryx, the world's oldest known bird. Well here he is. The world's oldest known bird, and you can see that he is a bird.
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He has wings, completely feathered, with feathers just as complex as those in any modern bird, and feathers are very complex structures.
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A perching feet, bird -like skull. He was unquestionably a bird. And absolutely not one transitional form between this bird and his so -called reptilian ancestor, not one single transitional form between this bird and any other bird.
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Now this bird had teeth, he had claws, and he had vertebrae extending out along the tail. And these are supposed to be his reptilian features.
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Now ladies and gentlemen, this ancient bird had teeth. True. But there were other ancient birds, at their first appearance, had no teeth.
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Now ladies and gentlemen, you see this establishes no link to a reptile at all. This is true of all subclasses of vertebrates.
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Some fishes have teeth, some do not. Some amphibians have teeth, some do not. Some reptiles have teeth, but some do not.
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Some mammals have teeth, but some do not. And some of you have teeth, and some do not. But that does not really establish a link to a reptile.
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It just proves that some ancient birds had teeth and some didn't. What about the claws? Next slide please. We have birds in existence today which have claws.
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Here's a hoatzin in South America, a bird living today. Next slide please. We see the juvenile hoatzin, he has two claws, there's one and there's the other.
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There he is, a bird living today, but if you found him as a fossil, then everyone would claim we had a transitional form between a reptile and a bird.
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The Turaco of Africa has claws. The ostrich has three claws. Well, claws and morphological characteristics shared in common by the class
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A's and the class Reptilia, and certainly do not indicate any reptilian feature. Next slide please. Here again is
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Archaeopteryx, Dr. W .E. Swinton, an evolutionist, in the book published in 1960.
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Now this man's an evolutionist. He believes that birds did evolve, but Dr. Swinton made the following statement. The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction.
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There is no fossil evidence of the stages to which remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.
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There is no fossil evidence, Dr. Swinton says. Next slide please. Here's a bat.
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Now this is the final case. This is a mammal, supposedly evolved from an insectivore. All right, tremendous change in structure.
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Look at those four fingers, tremendously lengthened over millions of years of time, supposedly. It seems to me we ought to find a few intermediates.
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Next slide please. Here's the world's oldest known bat. I want to sharpen that up please. Here's the world's oldest known bat, taken from a cover page of Science Magazine.
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These are the bones, the actual bones of the creature. And if you stretch them out and close them with flesh, that's what the bat would have looked like.
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The article says these bones were found in a rock dated at 50 million years. They've never found a bat any older than this.
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This is the oldest fossil related to a bat that they can find. All right. Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the world's oldest known bat.
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And what is he? 100 % bat. Not 50%, 80%, or any other intermediate stage.
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Evolutionists must admit that the first evidence of flight in mammals occurs in fully developed bats.
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Now here we have, ladies and gentlemen, the ideal test case, creation versus evolution. And in none of these cases do we have transitional form.
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I think that evidence fits directly the predictions of creation, but certainly contradicts the predictions of evolution.
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And finally, as far as the record of man is concerned, well, we've been told that story, you know, about the evolution of man.
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But now the story has to be junked because Richard Leakey and others have now found what they say is man in strata, which is supposed to be older than all of our ancestors.
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We're supposed to have an ape -like ancestor 2 million years ago, near -man ancestor half a million years old, and now
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Richard Leakey and others have found man in strata they say are 3 million years old. Now you can't have the parents younger than the children, ladies and gentlemen.
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And I heard Richard Leakey say this in San Diego, he says, what I have found simply demolishes everything we have been taught about human evolution, and he says,
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I have nothing to put in its place. Well, I think this evidence indicates just as creationists have maintained that man has always existed contemporaneously with these creatures and there's no series leading from ape to man.
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The total weight of the evidence, then, from the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of probability, what we see in genetics and what we see in the fossil record demands a creator.
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This universe gives every characteristic of a manufactured article rather than one that has arisen by random processes.
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Thank you so very much. All right, we're going to ask
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Dr. Henry Morris to come. It's five after the hour. He'll have ten moments, ten minutes to come and make his statements.
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Dr. Henry Morris. Well, obviously in ten minutes one cannot deal with all the subjects that are relevant and we'd like to discuss.
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I'd like to remind you, though, that the two main tests of the creation evolution models which we propose, that is the evidence of what has happened in the past in terms of the fossil record and what can happen in terms of natural laws, have been demonstrated to be very strong evidence in favor of the scientific creation model.
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There ought to be, you see, some transitional forms between basic kinds in the fossil record, even though we may not expect to find many because of the difficulty of fossilization.
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There have been literally millions and millions of fossils that have been found and some statistically ought to be intermediate forms, but none have been.
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This is exactly as predicted by creation. And furthermore, there ought to be some evidence of a process in nature which impelled things to go from one degree of order to a higher degree of order, but there's no such evidence.
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On the contrary, the prediction of the creation model that there's a basic principle of disintegration in nature is confirmed explicitly by the second law of thermodynamics, which poses a real problem for the evolutionary model.
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It looks as though, as far as the actual evidence is concerned, that evolution on any significant scale from one degree of complexity to a higher degree is impossible until at least the evolutionists can demonstrate not only that the
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Earth is an open system with available energy from the sun, but that there is some program and some mechanism to convert the sun's energy into evolution.
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And so far, there's no such thing in sight. It isn't sufficient. Let me emphasize that simply to dismiss the problem as irrelevant because the
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Earth is an open system. We've discussed that point, and you have to have more than an open system. There must be a program and there must be a converter to direct the growth and to energize the growth, or you get no growth, and there's no evidence for this in the whole evolutionary picture to date.
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Now, no matter how many billions of years we may allow for the age of the
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Earth, there's still not room, not time, for anything like that to take place. One can show, for example, this has been shown in very definite research projects, that the amount of information contained in the structured program of the simplest imaginary replicating molecule for the simplest form of life, much simpler even than the
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DNA molecule, let's say, the simplest imaginary replicating protein, the amount of information required to replicate that program is far greater than all the information contained in all the words of all the books ever written in all time.
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And that doesn't happen by chance. You see, a highly complex system does not arise by any random process.
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It must be designed by a designer, programmed by a programmer. Otherwise, the probability is that things go towards disorder, never go by natural processes toward higher order.
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That's the second law. One could show this quantitatively at every stage of the evolutionary process, the origin of life, the origin of higher forms from lower forms, and so on.
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And this problem has never been resolved, never solved, as a matter of fact, very seldom even addressed by the evolutionists.
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Now, we grant that we do like to discuss the question of time, geologic time, and most creationists favor the concept of a young Earth.
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But on the other hand, even if the Earth is billions of years old, there's still not time enough for evolution. There's no evidence that evolution could take place no matter how many billions of years may be available.
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But now let me very briefly, and I don't have very much time to discuss this, give maybe some things to consider in connection with some of the points raised by Dr.
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Harris concerning the evidence that the Earth is old. Because if there is good evidence that the Earth might be young, then of course this is still a greater problem for evolution to resolve.
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He mentioned that all of the geological data indicate that there's a uniform succession of ages, geological ages, all around the world.
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And of course, this isn't so. There are many places where the order is inverted. Now there may be physical explanations as to what may cause the inversion, but the fact is that the simple superposition assumed in the geological column doesn't always exist, and in fact there are many exceptions.
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Let me quote from an article in the 1970 Science News by Dr. B .F. Ryan. He says, early studies of mountain geology, no, let me, here, in many places the oceanic sediments of which mountains are composed are inverted with the older sediments lying on top of the younger.
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Now he says there are many places like that. He gives an example of a recent study at the bottom of the Mediterranean that says it's been known for years that mountains are composed of ocean sediments.
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One location they found limestones 120 million years old directly above oozes only 5 to 10 million years old.
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Now just how does an ooze 5 million years old ooze under a limestone 120 million years old? Well, maybe there's a mechanism by under -thrusting or over -thrusting or something like that.
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But there are many places like that. There is not obvious at all, Dr. Shuchard's standard book, Shuchard and Dunbar, Outlines of Historical Geology, say of course there are many places where the succession has been locally inverted.
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But they say such exceptions will betray themselves in the evidence of disturbance and in the unnatural succession of the fossils.
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Now, if there are evidences of disturbance, as sometimes there are, of course that's one thing. But if the only evidence is the unnatural succession of the fossils, then it is not true that the fossils have not been influenced by the theory of evolution, that is the dating of the rocks by the fossils on that basis.
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Now there are many places where these giant over -thrust regions, many places, do not give evidence of disturbance.
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As a matter of fact, if one tries to calculate the mechanics of the movement of great blocks of rock over other blocks of rock to get out of the natural order, one finds extreme difficulties and the theory of over -thrusting is still very much uncertain as to what the mechanics might be.
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And the real problem is the unnatural succession of the fossils. Now, Dr.
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Harris quoted from some of our writings to the effect that one dates the rocks by the fossils and the fossils by the rocks and says that this is a false criterion.
31:18
But as a matter of fact, we didn't invent that. We documented this from evolutionary writers, for example, here's just one and we could give many others by Verndon Savage and other authors, they say vertebrate paleontologists have relied upon the stage of evolution as the criterion for determining the chronologic relationships of faunas.
31:36
For the establishment of physical dates, evolutionary progression was the best method for dating fossiliferous strata.
31:43
Evolution is used to date the rocks, to identify the fossils in the order of succession. Because there's no other method, superposition doesn't always work in many places where they're out of order.
31:53
And no other physical method because you can find all types of rocks and minerals and metals and structures in rocks of all ages.
31:59
And even radioactive dates. You see, radiometric dating is not the method for dating the geological ages because all of these were worked out long before anybody heard about radioactive dating.
32:10
We don't have time to discuss that. Many other evidences as we look in detail at the individual rock types and rock units indicate that each one can be explained in terms of rapid formation.
32:23
Coal beds, for example, instead of being formed by slow growth of peat bogs, many coal geologists do believe that they were formed by transportation processes.
32:33
One indication of this is that there are places where coal seams, many coal seams, are in interrupted by fossilized tree trunks extending through a number of these seams.
32:45
And obviously this speaks of rapid deposition. The evaporites were mentioned, great beds of soil deposits, gypsum and so forth, evaporites as having been formed by slow evaporation of seawater.
32:55
But of course there's another possibility and as a matter of fact a good deal of the recent papers on this subject indicate that there is a better model for the origin of evaporites.
33:05
Dr. Sazansky in the Geological Society of America Bulletin July 1974 deals with this subject. He says these data contradict the evaporite hypothesis and need a new explanation.
33:15
He's talking about certain types of phenomena in these we don't have time to discuss. But then he says this, precipitation of salt from highly mineralized thermal brines of juvenile origin that escape from the mantle along deep faults is the most logical explanation for the origin of soil deposits.
33:31
They didn't have to form slowly over millions of years at all, but rather by rapid precipitation from juvenile sources deep in the mantle.
33:39
Coral reefs, mentioned the Permian Reef in Texas and New Mexico. Recent articles by Braithwaite and others indicate that there's a good possibility that these reefs are not fossil reefs at all.
33:50
They're not organically bound as a true coral reef, but inorganically. And so on.
33:55
Let me just quote though from a recent book by Dr. Derek Ager called The Nature of the
34:00
Stratigraphical Record published last year. The whole burden of Dr. Ager who is head of the geology department at the
34:06
University College of Swansea in England and who very definitely is an evolutionist and a uniformitarian. But he does say that in order to actually explain the sedimentary rocks and the other types of rocks in the geological record, one must go to catastrophism.
34:18
Not just occasionally, but every type of rock in every type of formation. He says this, let me quote from page 49 of his book.
34:25
He says, the hurricane, the flood, the tsunami will do more in an hour or a day than the ordinary processes of nature have achieved in a thousand years.
34:32
Given all the millennia we have to play with in the stratigraphical record, we can expect our periodic catastrophes to do all the work we want of them.
34:39
And then he says in concluding his book, in other words, the history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.
34:49
Every formation basically was formed at least by a local catastrophe and then the only question is whether these all occurred at different times over the geological ages or perhaps as one traces from one to the other, maybe they are continuous and consecutive.
35:01
Each one formed rapidly, each consecutive one immediately without a time gap from the previous one, and finally the entire column formed as a result of a complex phenomenon of local catastrophes all comprising a worldwide cataclysm.
35:15
We believe that's a model that bears study. We haven't answered all the questions about it certainly, but it is a good model.
35:21
It does fit a lot of data. We think it has fewer problems than the uniformitarian model. Let's see, in regard to Dr.
35:49
Morris' thermodynamic argument, I can give Dr. Morris no other answer, no different answer, than he's been given by biologists, geologists, and physicists ever since at least 1970.
36:02
The life cycle and its entropy considerations cannot be separated from the food chain, which is a conversion of the sun's radiation.
36:12
The second law correctly applies when the entire system is considered. However, locally, plants grow, animals grow, crystals grow, locally order is increased.
36:24
The physicists with whom I speak and are the authorities in the field, I assume, say they find no conflict with the theory of evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.
36:39
I believe the concluding statement was that special creation does not say when this special creation took place.
36:49
I do believe that I read special creation was defined as a one -time, one -shot, sudden, not -to -be -repeated type of creation.
37:01
I ask that if it is conceded that the Earth is five billion, I think it may be only four and a half, if it's conceded to be very, very old, when would they like to have this one -shot creation?
37:13
At the beginning, which would mean all rocks everywhere would have the same fossils in them, or would they like to have this one -shot in the last 6 ,000 years in which any rocks older than that would have no fossils in them?
37:28
I heard it said that evolution is a theory that cannot even be investigated because history cannot be repeated, maybe, but I think we have a lot of people at the university who consider themselves to be historians and although they do not have a time machine to go back and look at it, they certainly can read books and geologists can read rocks.
37:55
In regard to the cuttlefish in the Cambrian, I have no evidence, I have never heard of this find, and so I can't comment on it.
38:09
I just haven't heard of such a wonderful find. In the case of the woody plants in the
38:16
Cambrian, I also haven't heard of such a wonderful find. Nobody seems to want to tell the geologists who are writing in our
38:24
GSA books. In regard to Dr.
38:39
Gish, I am going to give him a medal for having presented the most humorous paper.
38:45
He certainly got the biggest rounds of applause. Back to Dr. Morse and the matter of correlation.
38:53
No geologist ever said that the bed on top is the one that is the youngest.
39:00
He says clearly and distinctly, although no one seems to hear, the bed that was deposited on the top is the youngest bed.
39:10
Now I might reach over here and put something down on this table. The table must be there before I put it down.
39:20
Dr. Baker might turn the table over, and the paper might now be under the table, but that doesn't mean that the original sequence of age did not apply.
39:32
Everyone who is in the geology profession knows that most of the great mountains of the world are composed of sedimentary rocks that formerly were deposited in enormous thicknesses around the margins of the continents.
39:46
Subsequently, these beds, deeply buried, recrystallized, folded intensely, are shoved up into great mountain systems.
39:56
I'm pleased to see that Dr. Morse recognizes that, because that certainly takes a lot of time.
40:03
And in this matter of them being elevated to great heights, many times these beds are inverted locally.
40:12
A beautiful example at the little town of Wallenstad in Switzerland, where the enormous limestone beds are completely inverted, and at any one place you can go through three different sections, with a drill hole if you wanted to, of exactly the same bed.
40:31
The middle bed is upside down. People can see that beds are upside down, and no one denies that, or a person would be foolish to say that turning them upside down would change their relative age.
40:50
Question for the debate was, is special creation or evolution the better description for the animal record?
40:59
Since special creation is defined as a sudden one -time action, then I say
41:04
I have a very difficult time explaining the very, very long record of physical and biological events.
41:16
Creationists have objected to the gaps in the biological record.
41:22
The gaps certainly exist. If they didn't exist, we wouldn't have any work to do.
41:29
We could sit back and say we have solved everything. I call to attention the statement,
41:39
I believe, by Dr. Gish that just recently these cuttlefish were found in the Cambrian. If that's the case, then wouldn't he grant us the possibility that maybe tomorrow we'll find one of these fossils and close up a gap?
41:56
At least I think that's a possibility. As far as the sudden appearance of life in the
42:08
Cambrian, there are two reasons that are often cited, and our opponents have heard both of them.
42:17
One is that prior to a certain time, the animal life did not have hard parts.
42:25
It's very, very difficult to save an animal that doesn't have hard parts.
42:31
Occasionally, you're lucky to find some. On the other hand, there's a fantastically good chance that a shellfish, a brachiopod, since its shell is nothing but the mineral aragonite, there's a very good chance that this animal will be preserved.
42:50
And so if it's presented that the animal has evolved far enough to develop an exterior shell, then the rock record from there on will have many, many of these remains.
43:06
Prior to that, very few. In addition to that, it is apparently true that as far as the
43:12
Earth's history is concerned, shortly before the period of time we refer to as the
43:18
Cambrian, there apparently was great stability worldwide, and land surfaces were land surfaces for many, many millions of years.
43:30
Extensive erosion took place during this period of time. Most of the continents, including
43:37
North America, at the beginning of the Cambrian had been worn down by normal stream erosion to essentially a flat plain.
43:47
In the process of wearing down this surface, an enormous amount of the record is removed.
43:59
And thus, when the seas return during the Cambrian, flood the continent, and Cambrian rocks are deposited containing life living at that time, this record is deposited on very, very much older rock, not directly on rock a little bit older than itself.
44:19
And so there is a physical gap, and that requires, of course, that there be a biological gap.
44:37
I can't remember what all he talked about here. ...big deal about the world he lives in.
45:03
I would hate to think that the human race did not know more about the historical record and the biological record of the world than people who were living 2 ,000, 3 ,000, perhaps even 4 ,000 years ago.
45:18
I do not consider it to be blasphemy to say that I am a better trained and a more knowledgeable geologist than the scribes who wrote down the words which detailed the religious history of a people.
45:32
Thank you. Now, ladies and gentlemen,
45:48
I want to call to your attention the fact what Dr. Harris has been doing here for the past few minutes. He's been trying to explain the difficulties in the fossil record, the contradiction between the predictions of evolution and what we actually find in the fossil record.
46:04
Now, you see, creationists don't have to do that, because what we find in the fossil record is what's predicted on the basis of creation.
46:11
So I don't find it necessary to find some reason why or excuse why pre -Caiman fossils are not found.
46:18
I don't have to look for some reason why the transitional forms are not found, because this is the evidence predicted directly on the basis of creation.
46:25
Therefore, I don't have to look for these secondary assumptions, auxiliary hypotheses, and so forth and so on.
46:31
But this evidence is predicted directly on the basis of creation. Therefore, creation is far the superior model.
46:38
Now, I've heard a lot of reasons why in the Caiman abruptly we find all of these animals and why we have no pre -Caiman.
46:47
I've heard all kinds of reasons. This idea of soft bodies, well, that's ridiculous. Ladies and gentlemen, as I pointed out, hundreds of those species had hard parts.
46:55
They could not have invented hard parts at the same time. They could not have evolved from other animals which had no hard part.
47:02
Their very life existence depends upon the hard part. So this explanation is completely implausible.
47:11
And there is no time gap between the pre -Caiman and the Caimbrian. The underlying
47:17
Caiman rocks are identical with the overlying rocks. There is no break of any kind.
47:23
They're perfectly suitable for the preservation of fossils, but none are found in them. Now, as far as the presence of cuttlefish in the early
47:32
Caimbrian, there was an article by Gene B. Furby and J. Wyatt Durham in the November 1974 issue of Journal of Paleontology, volume 48, page 1109.
47:42
I'd like to be glad to show this to Dr. Harris after the debate. The fact that woody plants do appear in the
47:59
Caimbrian were published at least in a variety of sources. There was an article published by S.
48:06
LeClerc in the journal Evolution, volume 10, page 109, 1956, entitled
48:13
Evidence of Vascular Plants in the Caimbrian. And Dr. LeClerc cited numerous groups of workers, workers in India, workers in the
48:22
Baltic, workers in Russia, as to the verification for this. Dr. Daniel Axelrod, one of the world's best -known geologists and evolutionists, in an article published in Evolution, volume 13, page 264, 1959.
48:38
His article was entitled Evolution of the Silophyte Paleoflora. In there, Dr. Axelrod says it seems confirmed now that they have found genera, 60 genera of plants, these higher plants, vascular plants, in Caimbrian rocks.
48:53
So the documentation is present. But I find that evolutionists, paleobotanists, and geologists in general have simply ignored this evidence, so it's such an astounding thing to them.
49:05
When I debated Dr. George Ledward -Stevens, G. Ledward -Stevens, on this very topic, on evolution, when
49:12
I made the statement that vascular plants are found in the Caimbrian, here's a world -famous evolutionist, a botanist, a man who should know, and he just exploded when
49:22
I cited this evidence, demanded that I document it, and I did so. And he said he was going to run back to Davis and talk to his friend
49:30
Daniel. That's Daniel Axelrod, his friend there, his very good friend, had published the evidence and he wasn't even aware of it.
49:35
Because this evidence is so startling to evolutionists, they just simply find it difficult to fit in, so they just simply ignore it and brush it aside.
49:45
Now I'm surprised to hear the argument by Dr. Harris on this second law. We've already said if you have a living thing with complex energy conversion systems and a complex genetic system, of course a living thing can take in food from the outside and it can grow up into something more complex.
50:04
But you have to have that machinery, you have to have that control system to build machines, you have to have machines, and you have to have somebody to run those machines.
50:14
And in this primordial Earth, this primitive Earth, you would have no machines, you'd have nobody to run the machinery or to direct it in any way, and this evolutionary process, the evolution of life, would have been impossible.
50:27
And even you and I, we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics. We are all in the process of aging.
50:35
We are going to die and we're going to decay and go back to a pile of dust. And that is the way everything goes in this natural world, ladies and gentlemen, but evolution supposedly produced people from particles by natural processes.
50:50
Now I maintain it is irrational and it is unscientific to believe something like that. We must have an adequate cause for the effect.
50:59
But at least the creationist does have an adequate cause to explain the origin of the complexity, the order that we find within our universe,
51:09
God himself, the creator. Now let me refer briefly to the idea of embryological recapitulation.
51:18
Dr. Baker admitted that it is a discredited theory, but still maintained that the human embryo looks like embryos of lower creatures.
51:25
Well, of course, when an embryo develops, it must go through certain developmental stages in order to exist and to live.
51:37
And it's not surprising that a human embryo would look like other embryos. But at no stage is a human embryo anything other than a human embryo.
51:47
The appearance is purely superficial. When a train leaves a track, you have trains leaving a track, we'll say, in Kansas City.
51:55
One's going to San Francisco, one's going to Chicago, one's going to New York and other places. You have ten trains going to ten different places in the
52:04
United States. They don't leave on ten different tracks, ladies and gentlemen. They leave on one track. And as they get further and further from this railroad station, they begin to diverge.
52:13
And that's the same thing that we have in the embryological development. There's just one blob of protoplasm that's going to look like another blob of protoplasm.
52:21
But that's where the resemblance ends. The human embryo is always simply a human embryo. And to indicate support for that, they now know that the forelimbs, say, of a newt, which is an amphibian, develops from trunk segments two to five in the embryo.
52:41
The forelimbs of the lizard, which is a reptile, develops from trunk segments six to nine.
52:49
And in the human embryo, the forelimbs develop from trunk segments 13 to 18.
52:56
Now here are supposedly homologous organs. We're supposedly recapitulating or looking like our other, the embryos of our supposed ancestors.
53:06
But we find that these forelimbs do not develop from the same trunk segment, but from different trunk segments.
53:13
And other evidence from embryology has shown this to be true. The human embryo does not recapitulate any supposed evolutionary ancestry in any form at all.
53:25
The human embryo does not have gill slits. These bars and grooves in the neck region of the human embryo never open into the throat.
53:32
They are never slits. They never participate in respiration, so they are never gills. And if they're never slits and they're never gills, it's for sure they can't be gill slits.
53:42
They're simply a superficial resemblance. And they develop into other structures.
53:48
They have nothing to do with any such gill slits. Homology? Of course. Animals have similarities, exactly as predicted on the basis of creation.
53:58
God, in his creation, used good engineering principles. If you have a creature walking on four feet, regardless whether he's an amphibian or a reptile or a mammal, you use good engineering principles in developing that system.
54:15
Are we going to demand that God, say we have a thousand different four -legged creatures, that he has to invent one thousand different ways of walking on four feet?
54:25
Of course. That would be ridiculous. That would be uneconomical. God is economical.
54:32
He uses good engineering principles. He uses good biological principles, so we have the similarity in living things.
54:38
Our biochemistry is similar to that of rats and mice and snakes and so forth and so on.
54:44
Because we live in the same world, we eat the same food, we have the same metabolic problems, God, using certain good biological engineering principles, has devised these metabolic pathways.
54:55
It works for the rat. Why not use it for man? I'm glad he used the same system for man that he used for rats.
55:01
Because at the Upjohn Company, where I spent 11 years, we used 400 ,000 mice and 200 rats a year, all kinds of other animals for testing the efficacy and the toxicity of drugs.
55:11
Now supposing God used entirely different biochemical systems. What test animal would we use to test the toxicity and the efficacy of drugs?
55:20
Would you volunteer? The human would be the only thing we could use. Well, I'm not saying that God did this just so we'd have a nice test animal for drugs, but it sure did work out very nicely, didn't it?
55:33
I don't know of anybody yet who would want to volunteer for this. Yes, we see then, ladies and gentlemen, that this sort of evidence, homology, and the embryology actually is in accord with what we predict on the basis of creation.
55:53
But now may I point out they have some very, very serious difficulties here on the basis of evolution.
55:59
The fact that these so -called homologous organs develop from different points in the embryo, that doesn't fit the idea that they're truly homologous, that they exist because of inheritance from a common ancestor.
56:11
As a matter of fact, evolutions have given up on much of that argument, that similarities are due to descent from a common ancestor.
56:18
Because we have so many structures and so many organs, they now know we're not possessed by the assumed common ancestor.
56:27
So now they say the animals evolved, and then these similarities evolved later, so we have parallel evolution.
56:35
Ordinarily you have divergent evolution, then you have similarities, because the common ancestor had this structure.
56:40
But there's many that don't, so they diverge, and then the structure evolves in parallel. Then there's other cases where there's, oh, a long period of evolution, maybe hundreds of millions of years, and finally similar structures evolve, and so we call that convergent evolution.
56:55
And then we have adaptive evolution. Most structures and organs develop because of adaptation to the environment, but there are many structures and organs now that realize could not have arisen due to an adaptation, so now we have non -adaptive evolution.
57:09
So you see, we have divergent evolution, convergent evolution, parallel evolution, adaptive evolution, non -adaptive evolution, you name it, we've got it.
57:17
We can explain anything and everything, and therefore the theory is non -falsifiable.
57:24
It is just as non -falsifiable as this creation. Well, finally, let me say just one word in the very brief time left about the possible origin of life.
57:36
Ladies and gentlemen, one single protein molecule, you could take those subunits, the amino acids that you find in a protein.
57:45
Now, they must be arranged in a precise order. Just as we find the message on this page composed of letters of the
57:52
English alphabet, we have taken 26 letters, arranged them in a specific sequence to get this message.
57:58
Now, ladies and gentlemen, monkeys can't do that. They're just dumb things. You could take a billion planets the size of the
58:07
Earth, pack them absolutely solid with monkeys, give each monkey a typewriter, and let him peck away for five billion years, and I guarantee you absolutely that not one of these monkeys would not only type that message, he wouldn't even type the first sentence.
58:23
The probability is absolutely overwhelming that he could not do that, and I'll tell you why.
58:28
If you take, say, 20 letters, we won't even assume we had to use all 26 letters, we'll use 20 letters, and we have a sentence composing 100 different letters.
58:39
You can arrange those letters in 20 to the 100th different power, 100 power ways.
58:45
That's 10 to the 130th. You can arrange those letters in one single sentence in 10 to the 130th power different ways.
58:52
How big is that number? You take this entire universe, the invisible universe, assumed to be five billion years in radius, pack it absolutely solid with electrons, elbow to elbow and eyeball to eyeball, so you have no space left over, you can get 10 to the 130th power electrons in this entire universe.
59:11
Now that is how many different ways you can arrange the letters in one single sentence. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the laws of physics and chemistry are just dumb things.
59:21
They have no ability to arrange the amino acids in a protein in any order at all. You can get nothing but random arrangements, and the probability that just by pure chance you'd get one single protein is absolutely nil.
59:37
And then you'd only get one molecule, but you'd need billions of tons of that stuff on the primitive
59:43
Earth, and you'd need hundreds of other protein molecules, RNA, DNA, and so forth, and you still would have to get it all together into a complex system to have a living thing.
59:52
I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that the probability of that is absolutely zero.
59:58
You must have a creator with purpose, design, and intelligence to have created this known universe and all the living things that it contains.
01:00:06
Thank you very much. I don't know if I always end up last.
01:00:37
Stochastic events, I guess. One of the reasons that these slits are called gill slits in the embryo is because that's what they were named by biologists when they found them, and as is the case, it is a proper word to define those structures on an embryo or on any other embryo.
01:01:01
It's the proper word. As far as he said, would I demand of God, and the answer is no.
01:01:09
All right? Several times in their discussion, they have said, just as predicted by creation.
01:01:21
I guess there's some premium in honesty at this place, and I'm really not very happy about being here because I have dealt with a lot of students and a lot of people on the issue of evolution versus creation, and rather than people coming and viewing the data, everybody walks away and says, see,
01:01:41
I told you so. And it seems to me that there's a case for extreme polarization.
01:01:49
Everybody tends to go to their own camps. They don't tend to listen. They don't tend to walk away seeing how that mankind can be better.
01:01:57
And for that reason, I'm not very happy that I am here, especially if that is what is happening right now.
01:02:04
I just beg to differ with him on his interpretation of the fossil record. There is a fossil from Seymour, Texas, of all places, that biologists can't decide whether it is an amphibian or reptile.
01:02:20
And they always put it one or the other. They either say it's a reptile or it's an amphibian.
01:02:26
But biologists are basically that way. They classify one or the other. One reason you don't recognize gaps when you get intermediates is because when you fill them in, they're no longer gaps.
01:02:35
There are a lot of places that are like that. If you recognize the Earth as being very, very young, how do you explain all the millions of fossils?
01:02:44
Fossilization is a very tenuous process. It's one that doesn't occur to a great extent.
01:02:50
And for instance, when you were talking about the pterodactyls, the reptile with the long little finger that flies around, we have quite a few pterodactyl fossils.
01:03:01
They're pretty good. But as I understand it correctly, they're from a couple of localities. And, you know, we really have sampled, one given time, a very specific area.
01:03:12
Rather than having our sample size, I mean our sample from a variety of times throughout creation, we have a very specific sample.
01:03:20
And we got a lot of the same thing, but not much variation. Another question that I would ask, is there any other physical law, any other law, any other theory that we advance that we use the metaphysical to explain because we just do not understand it well enough?
01:03:41
As far as intermediate forms, again, I go back. The Archaeopteryx, the bird, there are paleontologists that do not agree that it's a bird.
01:03:50
They say it's a feathered reptile. They don't even think it played a role in giving rise to the birds. So you can see interpretation in all of these things lends itself to a number of problems.
01:04:01
And as I indicated, scientists are always questioning one another. And if they can figure out some way to argue a different point, it means another publication and tenure.
01:04:09
And they're not above that. But the thing is, is that I am thoroughly impressed by the differences of opinion.
01:04:25
As I sit and listen to these men defend their ideas, I am impressed with the fact that I see, in many cases, the same data that they do.
01:04:34
And I do not interpret them in the same manner that they do. I'd like to...
01:04:39
This is not a subject, however, that is restricted to love of text. This is a subject that is of importance all over the world.
01:04:47
I have here a copy of Science Magazine. It's dated 7 February 1975, which happens to be reasonably recent.
01:04:55
One of the letters to the editor, I think, is sort of apropos for this discussion. Within the science of biology, the theory of evolution is a very active and a very fruitful theory.
01:05:05
It simplifies the management of millions of facts by giving them a rational order. It leads to the discovery of thousands of new facts each year.
01:05:13
These are important characteristics of a good scientific theory. The so -called theory of special creation is not active or fruitful as a biological theory.
01:05:22
Almost no biologists consider it to be a part of the scientific theory. These gentlemen, of course, would beg to differ with that, but this is the way the letter reads.
01:05:32
The great tragedy of arguments over the creation theory as opposed to the evolution theory is the belittling impact upon religion.
01:05:40
Every scientist knows that the best of scientific theories encompasses but limited portions of human experiences.
01:05:47
Every truly religious person knows that a religion encompasses the vast range of human experiences and the vaster ranges of all things imagined beyond experiences and things unknown to experience.
01:05:58
And a true religion encompasses all this with a majesty, a glory, and a magnificence that engenders hope and a steadfastness in the human spirit.
01:06:07
The theory of evolution does not do these things. Rather, it sheds light in one corner of man's rational existence.
01:06:17
If relatively small portions of the rational world loom large in the religious context, then the religion must be exceedingly small.
01:06:24
Of those who are thinking of these topics in this way must have momentarily forgotten the vastness and the majesty of their religion.
01:06:32
When a religious person contemplates the greatness of his religion, all the products of the scientific world seem small, and the presumed contradictions with religion will be seen as a minor item of trivial consequences in the large panorama of his religious view.
01:06:47
Let us put away these childish arguments of the last century and get on with the greater problem of building both rational and the religious components of human culture so as to guide the present and the future activities of man toward the greater ideals found in the greater religions.
01:07:02
Thank you very much. Thank you, guys.
01:07:20
That's nice. All right, it's a quarter to six, and this debate is formally over.
01:07:25
Many people have to leave. There are students, perhaps, who won't ask questions. Gentlemen, I know that you've been very considerate to stay, and we're not going to take a long time on doing this.
01:07:36
Dr. Gish and Dr. Morris have other speaking engagements tonight, and I'm sure Dr. Harris and Dr. Baker have other things they'd rather do than this.
01:07:44
But we will allow some to ask questions. So it's quarter till, and those who are leaving, we'll give just a moment for them to leave.
01:07:53
If you have a question, I'm going to request that you come down here to the center aisle right up against the orchestra pit so we can hear you.
01:08:03
You stand in line. Do what? They're going to stand in the aisle.
01:08:09
Yes, stand in the aisle down here at the front. Now, gentlemen, each one of you will be given three minutes to respond to these questions.
01:08:17
You can address your question to either team, and you'll be given three minutes to answer your question.
01:08:23
All right, if you have a question right here, sir, and if you'll speak it up, we'll try to hear it. All right, the question is,
01:08:40
Dr. Harris gave evidences for an old Earth. What are the evidences for a young Earth? That question will be direct to the creationists,
01:08:47
I'm sure. Who wants to deal with that? You may just sit right where you are and just answer it right there if you like.
01:08:55
There are many evidences of a young Earth. It would take quite a long time to discuss even only one of them.
01:09:01
Let me just try to very briefly outline one fairly new evidence that's come to attention just recently.
01:09:08
That is the evidence of the decay of the magnetic field of the Earth. This was developed by Dr. Tom Barnes. That is a study at the
01:09:14
University of Texas in El Paso, professor of physics there. Dr. Barnes is an authority in the field of terrestrial magnetism, and he found that the strength of the magnetic moment of the magnetic field of the
01:09:24
Earth is decaying exponentially at the rate of a half -life of 1 ,400 years.
01:09:30
This is based on good measurements over 135 years worldwide. This is the best process that we have in terms of length of measurement to measure the age of the
01:09:39
Earth. Furthermore, it's a worldwide process, not a local system, such as uranium mineral in an igneous rock.
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And this means that the magnetic field will decay completely in several thousand years if this continues on a uniformitarian basis.
01:09:54
If we extrapolate into the past on the same basis, and that's what you must do in estimating any kind of an age geophysically from some kind of an
01:10:01
Earth process, then it turns out that 10 ,000 years ago is probably the upper limit for the possible age of the
01:10:08
Earth. If you go back beyond that, the strength of the magnetic field of the Earth would have been greater than is conceivably possible by any mechanism that we know to produce it.
01:10:17
The mechanism that does generate the magnetic field is probably circulating electrical currents in the core of the Earth. These have been subject to some discussion, and nobody knows exactly what causes the magnetic field except this, but what causes the currents they don't know.
01:10:30
Dr. Barnes pointed out that the decay of the magnetic field itself by a self -induction process is sufficient to explain the strength of the electrical currents in the core of the
01:10:40
Earth which generate the magnetic field. So it's a self -sufficient system to explain all the data associated with it, consistent in every way.
01:10:49
It's the best process we believe that we have available to measure the age of the Earth, and it indicates the Earth must be quite young.
01:10:55
There are many other such processes, literally dozens of them, that can indicate an age for the Earth much younger than any possibility for evolution to occur.
01:11:03
I might just add my comment on that. I want to say I don't care how this
01:11:09
Earth is, whether it's 10 ,000 years old or 10 billion years old, the evidence still strongly indicates that it was created rather than evolved.
01:11:17
Let me give you one other indication of a method that at a young age should be one of the best possible methods.
01:11:23
If you take the total amount of uranium and thorium in this Earth and the lead isotope that is produced, and the helium -4, which is produced by this decay process, these isotopes produce either 6, 7, or 8 atoms of helium.
01:11:42
Now helium is not escaping the Earth's atmosphere. There is no known mechanism to account for the loss of helium.
01:11:49
Now you take the total amount of uranium, total amount of thorium, total amount of lead worldwide, which involves the fewest assumptions, you don't have to make any assumptions about a closed system, open system, particular minerals, so forth and so on, and the total amount of helium, and assume 4 .5
01:12:07
billion years, and you need 100 ,000 to 1 million times as much helium to account for 4 .5
01:12:15
billion years than we actually have. The amount of helium we actually have indicates that the
01:12:20
Earth is quite young. One scientist proposed that perhaps a million years ago some great catastrophe happened that boiled off all of this helium -4.
01:12:29
Well, if it did that, it must have killed everyone else, and man's foes have been here for more than a million years, so I think that is rather an incredible explanation.
01:12:38
Nevertheless, this dating method does give a young age. Thank you, Dr. Gist. Do you all want to respond to that? In regards to the
01:12:45
Earth's magnetic field, it's apparent on the very best data for the last 15 years that the
01:12:53
Earth's magnetic field reverses itself periodically. The record seems to be that the
01:12:59
Earth's magnetic field has reversed itself approximately 171 times from North Pole being positive to negative to positive to negative in the last 76 million years.
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And it turns out that the flip -flop is not instantaneous, but that the magnetic field decays and builds back up again in the other orientation.
01:13:23
I'd like to give an analogy to this projection of the magnetic field decaying.
01:13:29
If an officer with a speed trap sees a car coming with the front end down, the brakes are on, the man is trying to slow down so that he will not be caught for speeding.
01:13:41
The officer might very logically conclude, going back in time, that instead of 20 miles an hour one block farther back, the man was going 40.
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It is even possible that he might conclude that two blocks back he was going 80.
01:13:56
But he cannot project that figure back in time and say that five blocks back he was going 160 and 10 blocks back he was going 320.
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And so for a gentleman to investigate the magnetic field five or six years ago and see that it is decaying is an exact statement of what is being said in all the print.
01:14:19
And as regards to helium not escaping, I find it very amusing that both of our opponents would argue that radioactivity, potassium -argon aging, is absolutely no good because potassium escapes.
01:14:34
But now we have helium, which is a much smaller ion and certainly much easier to get out of a mineral structure and none of this material escapes.
01:14:48
Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Harrison. By the way, just let me make one comment. The helium, I said, that is not escaping, we say is not escaping the earth.
01:14:57
It is escaping the rocks. There is no question about it. It gets out of the rocks. It diffuses freely in the rocks.
01:15:03
But it is not escaping the gravitational pull of the earth and that makes a vast difference. All right.
01:15:09
Thank you. Let's take a question over here, sir. Did you hear the question,
01:15:27
Dr. Baker? You might repeat it for everyone else if you could, please. The question, I think, was, do I know of any eminent biologists that are not neo -Darwinian who are evolutionists but who are not creationists?
01:15:50
In other words... Okay, okay, okay.
01:16:05
Okay, I really don't think there is a very well -developed third point of view.
01:16:12
You know, clearly one of these two views are incorrect. Possibly both are incorrect and we haven't hit on the right one yet.
01:16:32
Well, there are people that say they are non -adaptive characters and things like this, but they generally also are neo -Darwinian in part of their philosophy.
01:16:41
No, I am not familiar with anyone.
01:17:05
All right, let me add my comment. Let's move on to a better question, Dr. Baker. Well, I just want to say there are those
01:17:12
Groschmidt, Shindeville, C .P. Martin, Amigo University, these mathematicians who I quoted who were there at the
01:17:18
Wistar Institute, they could not accept the neo -Darwinian theory of evolution. They said that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery of some new laws.
01:17:27
There are evolutionists who are not neo -Darwinists. Listen, there's a good evidence of the second law of thermodynamics in the parking lot, a
01:17:34
GTW -76 gold Gremlin with its lights on, and I'm sure it's been on for two hours, and I'm sure they're dimmer than when they started.
01:17:43
So anyone who has a gold Gremlin out there, GTW -76, and you haven't left yet, I was supposed to have taken care of this two and a half hours ago.
01:17:50
Okay? Question. Do you know about that?
01:18:04
Do you address that to the evolutionists? You are directing that to myself? Yes, I can.
01:18:12
Such slabs of rock are brought in quite frequently. Another site is from Palladora Canyon, where the footprints of barefooted
01:18:25
Indians are found in the rocks, and yet the rocks are Permian. These rocks are lime.
01:18:33
These rocks are, in effect, under the ground. There is a groundwater table.
01:18:40
They are saturated with water. They've been saturated with water for thousands and thousands of years. They are really soft.
01:18:48
Now, if a sudden event comes along so that a meandering stream might undercut a bank and a bank falls off, or for any other reason, a slab of this soft material is exposed before it can be case -hardened in the sun, anything walking across it will leave footprints.
01:19:07
It's not much different than you taking some carbon and putting it on your hand and walking over and putting it on the paint on the wall and saying that it's the same age as the paint.
01:19:18
Well, I don't know when it was painted, but it was painted a long time ago. It's possible to put a track on anything, regardless of its age, if it is soft.
01:19:26
Now, the question would come up, and it would be extremely interesting, if a person would bring in the upper slab of something like that.
01:19:35
That is, if the rock that was originally lying over this footprint and made a negative cast, if both of these were brought in, then this could be accepted as some type of a true footprint.
01:19:51
But I've never seen nor heard of the upper part being brought in. People say they see these footprints, and I'm sure that they do, but the age is not the age of the dinosaur.
01:20:05
Would you like to comment on that, gentlemen? Yes, I'd like to comment briefly. Some of the footprints in the
01:20:11
Biloxi bed there, these are Cretaceous limestone, supposedly, around 100 million years old. There are a lot of footprints of dinosaurs, no doubt about that.
01:20:19
It's the dinosaur state park there. But there are also these human tracks, and they're not just superficial impressions on the surface of a rock, but rather they are impressions, that is, they're indentations, with the toes, the heel, the instep, the outline of a human foot in place, in depth.
01:20:39
And there have been some of these found in recent years in which the overlying strata had been turned over.
01:20:44
They're not carvings or anything of that sort. They're true tracks of some sort. And the casts have been found on the upper plates.
01:20:51
We have one in our office. Now, if these are not human tracks, and we did have some geologists of uniformitarian persuasion there to look at them a couple of years ago, and we can't say for absolute certain that they're human tracks because we weren't there when whatever made them made them, and therefore we didn't see it.
01:21:14
But they look in every respect like human tracks. As I started to say, one of the geologists who looked at them said, well, they did look like human tracks.
01:21:21
They were not carvings. They were not erosion phenomena. He said, but they couldn't be human tracks because man didn't live with a dinosaur.
01:21:28
So we asked him what he thought they were, and he said he didn't know. He supposed they were some kind of an unknown dinosaur, a two -legged dinosaur with feet like human feet, which may be,
01:21:37
I guess, but they did look like human tracks. Every way possible to tell. You could put your foot in them.
01:21:42
They fit like a house shoe. Some of them were giant tracks. Some of them baby -sized tracks. Most of them normal -sized tracks.
01:21:48
And they were in trails, right foot, left foot, and so on, with dinosaur trails crossing them. At least it gives a good appearance of being human tracks at the same level, the same location, same strata with dinosaur tracks, which seems to indicate that maybe the man and the dinosaur did live at the same time.