A question of glasses

It's really nice to come in from Brisbane. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and share something that I am really passionate about: the origin of rocks. This is a foundational issue as far as the authority of Scripture is concerned, and it connects with the gospel and so much more.

I am going to share my screen with you. I have a little PowerPoint which I have prepared, and I hope that you will be able to see it well and that it will help illustrate things. The origin of the rocks is a biblical perspective on it.

If you come to Australia, you will see some amazing scenery. I am sure it is the same as when I went to Europe and saw some amazing things there. Just north of where I live are the Glasshouse Mountains, which are these amazing, remarkable, spectacular volcanic plugs that dot the landscape. There is a sign there, as in most places in tourism these days, and the sign says, as people look at it, that it was eroded by wind and water over 25 million years.

So that is part of our culture these days. It is left, right and centre. And if you go near Sydney, just to the west of Sydney, there are the Three Sisters, quite a famous outlook there, 230 million years old, we are told. It is really difficult to connect those with the Bible. Or if you go to the centre of Australia, there is Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, an incredible monolith in the middle of the red centre of Australia. 550 million years old is what visitors are told there. Maybe some of you have been there, or even seen Wave Rock, which is the edge of a volcanic pluton, a granitic pluton, in Western Australia.

So the ages on these rocks really throw people off the trail and give no indication that there is any connection with the Bible or anything like that at all. But I always like to show a little cartoon, which I like to show to kids, but I think you will appreciate this as well, about rocks and fossils.

I just make the point that when you dig a dinosaur bone out, like this paleontologist who uncovers his dinosaur bone, and when he pulls it out of the ground, it does not have a label on it which says, “I am 70 million years old.” Of course we know that, but that makes the point about science. You see, the bone is the scientific evidence. You can weigh it, you can measure it, you can analyse it. That is the evidence based on observation. But the date there is an interpretation. It is speculation. It is based on a person’s beliefs, and there are a number of different beliefs which can be applied to interpret evidence about the past.

The key thing is that when we dig out the bone, we see the bone in the present, but we were not there in the past to see how it got there. So there are two different beliefs. One is the idea of evolution. It is like looking through a lens, a worldview, and you look at this millions of years, and we look at the evidence. Then there is the other lens, which is a biblical lens based on the God of the Bible, who created, and the history that is in the Bible. You can look at the same evidence. It is the same evidence, but a different way of looking at it.

In actual fact, when you go back on the sciences, astronomy, geology and biology, everybody believed the biblical view. It was coming out of Europe at that time, and it was widely believed by Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, and not just the church people, but even people in science and in the Bibles which were produced at that time. This is a family Bible that I have in my possession, and it was published in 1893. At the top column on the left, you can see there is a date there for Genesis, and it has got dates for different events in the Bible. But this date for Genesis says “Before Christ, 4004 years.” So that comes from Archbishop James Ussher’s chronology, which he became famous for.

So this was widely accepted, and not just in religious books, but basically in secular books as well. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771 edition, a very, very early edition, has an artist’s impression of Noah’s Ark, and it considered and portrayed the Flood as a real event in history. So we see that was the culture that was there at the time, going back a couple of hundred years or more.

Indeed, geology started out with the same sort of mindset. One of the early geologists, Nicolaus Steno, very famous in the 1600s, a pioneer of geology, wrote a little book. He intended to write a bigger book but never got round to it, which is typical of scientists. It is called the Prodromus, and in it he established, he argued, that fossils are the remains of animals which were once alive. There was a lot of confusion about that at the time, and he set that out. He developed the principles of stratigraphy, how to work out which geological features came first and which came second, the order. He developed a geological history of Tuscany, and this is the first geological history that anybody in the world has produced: Nicolaus Steno. He produced it from a biblical perspective.

In actual fact, the model that I developed, and that I will be presenting here, after I had come to this sort of way of looking at things, I realised it was the same as what Nicolaus Steno had done, which I found out some years later. So Nicolaus Steno, the father of geology, started with biblical history.

So what happened? What changed? Well, these are the principles of stratigraphy that Nicolaus Steno developed: the principle of original horizontal layers, the order that the lower ones are older than the upper ones, and the principles of cross-cutting relationships, and quite a number of principles which he set out.

But something changed, and the apostle Peter sets that out in 2. Peter 3. We read about scoffers who no longer believe, and it talks about these scoffers. It says they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. So what did they forget? They forgot creation. The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters at the beginning.

And then it goes on to say they deliberately forget that by these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. So what did they forget? They forgot Noah’s Flood, which deluged the world at that time.

In the English tradition, I am not that familiar with the European tradition, but in the English tradition one of the key figures was a man by the name of James Hutton. He lived in Scotland, was a physician, loved geology, and wrote a book called Theory of the Earth. In this book he set out the principle as to how to interpret the rocks when we did not see how they formed, and this is the key. He says, “The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now.”

So we use what we see now, which we can see, to explain what happened in the past, which we cannot see. That was the principle, and it is a rule. He developed this rule without knowing much about the geology of the world. He knew a bit about England and Scotland and a bit about Europe. And it is a deliberately forgetting. Because it rules out Noah’s Flood, it rules out creation. They do not even get on the table.

So this is the principle that comes in, the principle which is called uniformitarianism. It has been given a label: everything is uniform, everything is the same. This was really advocated, or really publicised and became very influential, through the works of Charles Lyell. He wrote a book called Principles of Geology and he advocated the principles of uniformitarianism with James Hutton in this book.

I like the title of his book, Principles of Geology, because he sets out the problem of being able to understand geology. He says here, “Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth’s surface.” So we are trying to find out what happened previously, in the former years. It is an attempt. He is not saying he is proving it. It is an attempt to explain what happened in the past. And how does he want to do that? By reference to causes now in operation.

So this became a very, very popular attitude, a very, very popular philosophy. It was adopted within geological circles, within the geological fraternity, within the academic institutions, and anybody basically who would suggest something else was often ostracised.

So this assumption of Hutton and Lyell, what does it mean? What are the implications of it? Well, the first one, as Lyell said, his aim was to free geology from Moses. So it undermines the authority, the reliability of the Bible.

The implications are that the earth is millions of years old, because if we are using processes that we see today, nothing much happens geologically. You need millions and millions of years. The other implication is that the Bible is not reliable, and so we cannot believe that its history is real history. There must be some other way of interpreting it.

And the other thing is that humans arrived very late on the scene. They were not there at the beginning. There were various crustaceans and jellyfish and shellfish and things like that, and it was millions of years, billions of years, before humans came onto the scene. So it totally changes the mindset of where the world came from and our position in it.

The other thing about it is that it does not work. It was over a hundred years of trying this philosophy that the geologists, who had been trained and taught in this field, came to see it does not really work. One of the guys who wrote a book about this is a geologist who lectured at the University College of Swansea, Derek Ager. He wrote a book called The New Catastrophism, and he wrote another book about a similar sort of theme. He basically said that after 40 or 50 years of geology, I found it did not work. Everywhere I looked I saw the evidence of catastrophe, not slow and gradual processes like we see happening today. He calls it the importance of the rare event in geological history.

So there has been a bit of a mindset change which has occurred. That was 1993, so we are looking at the 1970s to the present time, the last 50 years. In 1993 that book was reviewed in Science magazine by a man called Warren Allman. He was a director of paleontological research in New York and at Cornell University. In his review in Science magazine, which is one of the top-rate science magazines in the world, he said this: “Hutton also sold geology some snake oil.” It is a bit crude, is it not? He convinced geologists that all past processes acted at essentially their current rates, that is, those observed in historical time.

So that is the idea of Lyell. But then Allman goes on to say this: “This extreme gradualism has led to numerous unfortunate consequences, including the rejection of sudden or catastrophic events in the face of positive evidence for them, for no other reason than that they were not gradual.”

So he is saying that geologists in the past basically went against the evidence. They ignored the evidence for catastrophe because of this philosophy. But they were still good geologists. They were very good at checking the rocks, recording the rocks, mapping the rocks. So we end up with a thing like this: the geological timescale. You have probably seen this chart, which has pictures of the various animals that we find as fossils and the order in which they occur on the earth.

So they used Nicolaus Steno’s principles of stratigraphy and other principles like that to work out the order in which these fossils occur. That basically is the evidence. Like the paleontologist with the dinosaur bone, the bone is the evidence. This is the evidence. There may be little odd things about it, but basically the order represents the order in which things happened through history. But the dates down the side, can you see those dates there? They go down 200 million years, 400 million years, 500 million years. That is the philosophy. That is the belief system.

So we have this geological chart which presents a mixture of evidence, factual evidence which most creation geologists could agree with. Maybe they might have some disagreements, but basically it is the evidence, but not the beliefs. There is quite a bit of discussion in creation circles about the geologic column, but by and large I consider it is a fairly reasonable order in which the rocks were formed, although it does throw us off the trail a little bit.

And this philosophy, I showed you the pictures around Australia, all the different tourist features and the ages. It comes out of this. The same thing overseas in the USA: the Grand Canyon, over a billion years old. So this is the way it is presented.

Another one is in Brisbane. There is a dinosaur fossil which is on display in the local museum, a hundred million years ago. It roamed around Queensland. It was found near a town called Mata Bar and it was called a Muttaburrasaurus. That is what they gave it. So you can see it is dead.

I tease some of the kids when I talk to children about this. I ask them, but I say, it is obvious to me, it looks dead. And that is evolution: death, suffering over millions of years, leads to man’s existence. That is where the idea is. That is that philosophy. It has got death and suffering as the key driver in our creation. Whereas if we start from a biblical perspective, it tells us that God created a good world. There was no death and suffering at the beginning, but death came in as a consequence of mankind’s actions, of mankind’s sin. And so the wages of sin is death. That is why the gospel is that God came into the world through Christ to redeem the world.

So from a biblical perspective we say, well, we cannot accept that. This is why it is such an important issue. And so uniformitarianism undermines every major Christian doctrine. So what we are going to do is, when we are looking at geology, we say, okay, we are not going down there. We are going to start with biblical history. And that is where biblical geology begins: with biblical history.

A lot of people might say that this is really bad, you know, we are starting with the answer. Science is not about starting with the answers, it is about asking questions. It goes on. But it is starting with the philosophy. The philosophy is that we believe the Bible records true history, the same as secular geology. It starts with the philosophy, which is that they believe that everything in the past has gone on basically the same as what we observe today. So both are starting with a faith position.

And as Charles Lyell said, it is an attempt to explain, an attempt to explain. So we are not doing anything that is out of the box here. We are starting with the Bible history, and we can say, okay, let us start with that and see how it works to explain the geology of the world. How is it going to be as an interpretative system? So we start with geology. We start with not geology. We start with biblical history.

This is a little timeline showing, you know, God created 4000 years BC, and then there is the Flood, 2500 years something like that, and then Christ coming at the turn of the century BC to AD, to the present time. So there is a Bible timeline of history.

Like so many things in science, we have to use our imagination to try to understand, to develop a model, to develop a way of looking at things. So we use our imagination and we think, okay, of all the things that are recorded in the Bible, what would have the significant effects on geology? One of them would be creation, because the whole world was created in six days. So that would be a major effect when it involved the whole of the earth, so that is one.

Another one would be the global Flood, where the whole of the earth was deluged and destroyed and the water covered the highest mountains. There are other things recorded in the Bible which were geological events. There are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that are recorded, but nothing of the scale of the creation and the Flood.

So we draw a little schematic of that timeline, highlighting the key geological events: creation and the Flood. In between is the history, an era, pre-Flood era, post-Flood era. And we turn it on its end, like what occurs in the rocks in the world: the oldest ones at the bottom and the youngest at the top. Pretty common sort of geological legend.

Then we connect it with the rocks, because the rocks do not represent one-to-one across in that way. The rocks, it is nonlinear. It does not fit exactly. So we start with creation, six days, and it produced a lot of rocks. The pre-Flood era, 1700 years, probably did not produce much. And then you have got the Flood event, something about just over a year, and you have got flood rocks, a lot of rocks there. And then you have got the post-Flood era.

So that is basically, in a nutshell, a biblical geological model. That is what it is. And so we have developed a concept of what we would expect to find on the earth as far as the rocks are concerned. But we add a little bit more detail in order to help us be able to identify things.

So we can divide the flood rocks and creation rocks a little bit up, and I have done that here. You can see, like flood rocks, for example, there was a period in the Flood where the waters were going up, and then there was a period when the waters were coming down. That is very complicated, is it not?

And you can see when the waters were going up, the material was being washed in, depositing material. Then as the waters were flowing off, there was erosion. We can divide it even one further, just for the sake of helping us to find our way around. It looks a bit complicated, but it is not too complicated.

So the recessive stage of the Flood, where the waters are receding off the earth, we can say, well, to start with, the waters covered the whole of the earth, and then they started to abate, started to go down. Then, as the land started to appear, they were dispersed in big wide channels. So we can sort of come up with a concept like that. You have got sheet flow and channel flow. So that is basically our model.

So we can say, well, does it work? Like Charles Lyell, it is an attempt to explain, an attempt to have a model that is going to fit with what we see in the world. So I have looked at some rocks. Some of the first rocks I looked at were these rocks connected with one of the beachside resorts just north of Brisbane, Caloundra. Some lovely sandstone. I discovered these sandstone rocks, and this type of rock covered a lot of eastern Australia. It is coloured in yellow there, you can see that.

These sediments contain the waters of the Great Artesian Basin, and you can see they cover a number of the states in Australia. So they are large scale. If we look at a section of them, this is an exaggerated section so that we can see it. It is a hundred times exaggerated. You can see that the sediments extend some 1000 kilometres or more across the continent. We can see the dotted lines are the layers of sediments. You can see that they have been shaved off along the top right. And there is something like a one and a half to two kilometres thick depth across most of the area, and then in some parts there is some three kilometres thick there. So that gives us an idea of what is there.

We already mentioned some of the fossils that are found in those rocks, the Muttaburrasaurus. There are lots of dinosaurs found in that area. Another amazing thing is people who have been in quarries have discovered dinosaur footprints. This is a big shed, a tourist facility, which is placed over an old quarry so that people can go in and look at these footprints, these dinosaur footprints. They stand on this walkway and you look down at the footprints, and you can see there are little ones and many ones and a few big ones which have been uncovered in this quarry.

Of course, for the dinosaur footprints to be made, the dinosaurs had to be alive. And when you go there, if you do go there, it would be nice to go there, you can see they make up a story about what the dinosaurs were doing. So there is just a little bit of evidence that we have looked at, and we can look at a bit more, but that is enough for us to come to a conclusion on where those sediments fit within biblical history.

So the sediments, these yellow sediments of the Great Artesian Basin, are very large scale, so it cannot be the post-Flood or the pre-Flood era. It must be either the creation or the Flood. But they contain fossils of dead animals, so you would not expect them to be creation rocks because when God finished the creation it was very good. So these must be Flood sediments.

Then we see the footprints, so it could not have been after the Floodwaters had peaked, because all the animals had died when the Floodwaters peaked. Everything that had the breath of life in it perished. So it must have been as the Floodwaters were rising. Also, you find some other interesting features in this area which point to it being very late in the Flood. So we can actually point to our geological model with an arrow, and that is where we think those sediments belong, just there, as the Floodwaters were rising and before they reached their peak.

So it does work quite well. For those sediments we get a reasonable classification on where those sediments fit.

If we go to this geologic timescale, which I showed before, and we get rid of the dates along the edge, because that is the philosophy, we are looking at it from a biblical perspective, then this part in here, this is the sediments of the Great Artesian Basin, they are there. So that means that all these sediments full of all these dead things must have been as the Floodwaters were rising. Then after the Floodwaters had risen to their peak, the Floodwaters are receding, so this part is as the Floodwaters were falling, and this little part at the top was post-Flood.

So you can see it is very nonlinear. It is not an equal amount of sediment for different parts of the Flood. That was one of the surprising things that I found when I started applying this.

Now if you go to the Grand Canyon, you could do a similar thing in the United States. It is actually an amazing feature where you can see so much as you look into the canyon. You can see sediments that are something like up to a mile deep, and something of that order. So you look at the sediments and you can see that this part is as the waters were rising. These sediments were laid down, and they are very flat. The sediments are very flat. They extend for a long distance, and that is characteristic of what happens as the waters were rising.

And you notice the arrow goes above the horizon because as the Floodwaters were rising, their sediments would have been deposited much more than what we see there. Then when the waters reached the peak, they would have eroded the surface, and they would have eroded it flat so that sheet flow could... the abated phase, you could call it. Then the canyon itself was carved after some of the plateaus had emerged above the water, and the water was flowing in big channels out of the canyon.

So you have got the same sort of feature there on the Grand Canyon. We find it is really quite a fascinating thing. So we have got this biblical geological model, and we can put things to do with Grand Canyon on that model. We can say, well, this is where the sedimentary layers that we see in the walls of the canyon were deposited, and then this, as the waters were receding, is when the plateau surface at the top of the canyon was carved, and then this part here is where the canyon itself, the big wide canyon, was carved below the plateaus. So we can actually tie geological events into biblical history in this way.

Of course, it is only a very summarising thing what I am doing this morning, but to find out more information about it, there is a lot of information on the Creation Ministries website. This is just a screenshot of the website and some of the things that are on there. Each day a new article, and it is called creation.com.

I always make a joke about, you know, where do you go to find out about creation? It is creation.com, and I find that people remember that very easily: creation.com. So if you go there and you look for something to do with biblical geology, there is an article which is called The Biblical Geology Summary: Using Bible History to Interpret the Rocks and the Landscapes. So it basically goes through what I have just gone through with you now.

At the bottom of that article it has actually got charts, so you can download charts of the model. You have seen one of them, but I will show you what they are like, and there are colour ones and black and white ones, some charts.

Now the interesting thing about these charts is that there is also on that website a book, Biblical Geology 101. This is written by Michael Oard and Robert Carter. When I presented the paper about biblical geology to the International Conference on Creationism in 1994, Michael was there and I met him for the first time. He had been thinking, we need something like this, we need a model. He was thinking about it, and when I presented at the conference he said to his friend, he said that is just exactly what we need. So he has been one of the geologists who has used that model, written a lot about it and applied it in a lot of places, and they have produced this book called Biblical Geology 101. That is a very helpful book.

Then there is another book which is about how Noah’s Flood shaped our landscapes, by Michael Oard and John K. Reed. They talk about these very characteristic features that the global Flood produces on the surface of the earth, particularly to do with geomorphology, the shape of the earth, which, if you use uniformitarianism, just does not work. For 150 years, uniformitarians have tried to explain the shape of the earth’s surface, and it is just dead easy: the Flood. It just falls out very easily with Noah’s Flood. But I am not going to go into that now with the time that is available.

So there is the model. When you download the chart, it will look like something like that, and you can see there is a phase. Right at the very right-hand side you can see the phases there. I think there are 12 or 13 that are listed there, and there is to do with the creation period, the pre-Flood world, the Flood period and the post-Flood world. So you can see those 13.

What we also did is we took those 13 periods there. Here are the 13 periods. We developed, used our imagination, which is what scientists do, and we thought through the events of geological significance: what was actually happening, what was happening geologically. Then we thought the next column is the characteristic geologic features. If this is what was happening, what would we expect to find on the surface of the earth? So it is very early. Not much has happened on that since 1994, but it does provide an outline.

If you just look at the zenithic stage, the zenithic means it is reaching its peak, all right, the zenithic stage, and it says the waters entirely cover the earth, all land creatures are destroyed, everything with the breath of life in it perishes. That is what the Bible says, so that is what was happening at that time. Then you can think of what you would expect to find, and then we would expect to find that the sediments were of continental scale, we would expect that they have been significantly disturbed and that they would have been plastically deformed, we would expect to find signs of terrestrial life, which would be like dinosaurs, and signs of death, which would be like their fossils, and we would expect to find lots of erosion. So that is the zenithic phase, and so you can tie that down to that particular phase so that we can identify the rocks in the field. So that is very useful.

What I discovered, as I said, is that we set out what we would expect to find for creation rocks, rocks which form during creation week. Now, as we have applied this, we find that there are lots of rocks which occurred in the Flood and in the post-Flood world. Flood rocks, they are present on the earth and we are able to examine them, but we have not found creation rocks and pre-Flood rocks, or put it this way: I am not aware of any that are absolutely for certain to be creation rocks.

Now there would be some creation geologists who would point to some rocks and they would say these are creation rocks, but I tend to be a bit not so convinced about that. The reason is because we find certain features in these rocks which you would not expect to find occurring during creation. For example, just this is one article which was written about some 3200 million-year rocks which were examined and found in Australia, Western Australia, at the Pilbara there, just in the northwest of Western Australia.

The scientists who reported this said that they took some rocks and analysed some rock samples from the Kangaroo Caves Formation, and they described the Kangaroo Caves Formation as a three to four kilometre thick pile of volcanic rocks, ranging from basalt to dacite to rhyolite. When you think of a three to four kilometre thick pile of volcanic rocks, that does not sound to me like the sort of thing that would have been happening during Creation Week and God looking at it and saying, behold, it was very good. So I tend to interpret those as being early Flood rocks, with the breaking up of the foundations of the deep and the early cataclysm of the Flood.

Now another article on creation.com that could be very helpful and relevant to you is called a geology transformation tool. It deals with this topic, and if you go to this, it is how to take information which is presented within a uniformitarian framework and interpret it within a biblical framework. That is what this article is about, and it is basically a diagram. It is the tool.

The diagram is a summary of the standard geological column. You can see that this is the standard geological column, and it has got all the names and all the various areas that are on it. You have got the Jurassic and the Triassic and the Cretaceous, and you have got the Tertiary, all the various parts. You have got the Precambrians mentioned there. So the idea is, if anybody observes something or reads something about some rocks in the past and they give them a name like Jurassic Park, this dinosaur is Jurassic, you look up Jurassic and you can figure out where you are. Simple as that.

Then in the middle there is a column of numbers, which is the ages in uniformitarian ages in millions of years, and it is nonlinear. It is not even. That is really important to realise, that it should stretch out much more than it shows. So if you are given an age, for example 300 million years, you just look it up on the chart.

Alongside that are three arrows. The first arrow is the arrow of Floodwaters rising, the next one is Floodwaters falling, and the next one is post-Flood. So it is as simple as that. It is a preliminary, you know, I emphasise that this is preliminary, you know, you have to check other things to make sure that everything matches, but it gives you a ballpark to start with where things are.

Now there is this area here. You notice the arrows overlap, same this area here, because there is overlap, particularly in the Floodwaters falling area, because the way mainstream geologists classify rocks does not fit neatly with biblical interpretation. So there is quite a bit of ambiguity there, and there is quite a bit of discussion amongst creationist geologists because of that.

The other one I have already mentioned is down at the bottom, where I have made the line dotted because as to whether these are creation rocks or whether these are Flood rocks with Floodwaters rising. I tend to think that they tend to be early Flood rocks, and that is where that 3 million years fits in there.

So we have got this chart, and I had to publish a chart that people can take around and carry on them in their pocket, and that if they are going on a holiday or trip somewhere. If you go to the Wave Rock in Western Australia, 2700 million years, there it is right early, and it would be the very, very beginning of the Flood, quite early where that occurred. Then you have got Ayers Rock, Uluru, 550 million years. It is a bit later, but it is still early. Then you have got the Three Sisters, 230 million years, something like that, so that is getting towards the top of the Floodwaters rising. Then you have got the Glasshouse Mountains, 25 million years, and you can see that says the Floodwaters are receding. So it is quite a good way of being able to just figure out where you are and not be so confused.

I think I have got time just to deal with this briefly to do with the dating, and it is only going to be very, very, very quickly. Absolute dating: the relative dating goes back to Nicolaus Steno and it is reliable. The geologists are very good at doing that. But the numbers of the ages, 300 million years, etc., that are put on, they come from radioactive dating. For example, potassium-argon dating. They say it is, you know, the people who promote this or teach this will say, look, it is just like an hourglass. Potassium is changing into argon. You just read what is in the glass and you can work out the date.

Well, the problem is you do not know the starting amount. That is the big thing. We can read it in the present, but we cannot go back in time. It is the classic problem of geology. And then you do not know if anything has changed to that or to that since the rock became crystallised and became sealed, and also you do not know if the rate has always been the same.

There is a lot of material on creation.com about radioactive dating. There is this very, very simple article here about it. It gives an analogy and an example. But in a nutshell, no instrument can measure age. So no matter how complicated or how technical or how precise, we need not be fooled, because they cannot measure the past, so we cannot measure the age. They measure something in the present, isotopes, but not an age. All dating methods are based on assumptions, so you have to make an assumption for how the isotope got in there. They might use a little model or something which they base their calculations on, and you can get any age you like depending on the assumptions you make.

Also, the geologists do not accept a number that comes out of these machines if it does not fit with their expectations. There are articles on creation.com which explain some of the techniques that they use to try to make dates which conflict, to make them show that they actually agree, and it is quite... it is called interpreting the results, and there is a lot in that. But that is hopefully enough to whet your appetite.

There is a way of knowing how old things are, and there is a sure way. It is based on eyewitnesses and a written record. That is where my birth certificate is based on that. My mother was there at the time, the doctor was there, and based on those eyewitnesses, as long as the eyewitnesses were telling the truth and the record has not been changed, as long as it is like that, we know it is a reliable date, a reliable age.

And that is how, for example, in our country, we know that the First Fleet arrived in Australia from Europe on 26 January 1788, and we know that from historical records, people writing letters home and putting in logs, and so on.

And that is how we know the age of the earth, and this is a little cartoon with Adam, you know, at the beginning, at the top and at the left-hand side, and all the different people that are mentioned in the Bible following it through all the way to Christ, based on real history. We know that the earth is about 6000 years old, 4000 years before Christ.

To find out more, if you want more information, creation.com is the place to go. And if you want to get advised of new information that is coming up to date and things which are in the news, you can get connected to an email newsletter, connect.creation.com, and you can connect there. A lot of people find that really helpful, and you would too.

This is a summary, very briefly, and it has got quite a number of points. Biblical geology versus uniformitarianism, long-age geology. So uniformitarian geology, it is an anti-God philosophy. It is against the God of the Bible, the God who revealed himself in the Bible and who created, as the Bible says, and who brought the Flood on the earth. It is anti-God. And that is drastic, but that is the way it is.

Uniformitarian geology, the result is the Bible is not reliable. That is what it is saying, and that is what people think these days. And uniformitarian geology, as I have mentioned, it does not work, and the mainstream geologists recognise it does not work, and they are playing with other sorts of ways to try to get it to work. One of the ways is to call it actualism or something like that.

But biblical geology, we start with the Bible, and we show that that is quite valid to start with the Bible after all. It is the truth. And biblical geology, we find that it does explain the world. It is very powerful. And biblical geology, because it starts with the Bible, it supports biblical doctrine, Christian doctrines about the goodness of God, about the world being good, the origin of sin and that sort of thing.

So two ways of looking at the world: evolution and the Bible. That is the biblical model, and that is what it looks like, and nice colours and that sort of thing. So it should be. When there is a museum, it should say on the sign, buried in Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago. It should say that, should it not? I mean, our government institutions should not be propaganda vehicles. And when the signs around the Glasshouse Mountains, they should say, eroded as the waters of Noah’s Flood were receding some 4500 years ago.

So Psalm 33,4 says, “The word of the Lord is right and true.” That is why we start with it, and he is faithful in all he does.

So I hope that has been encouraging for you, and I will just stop sharing my screen and I will be able to see you, and I do not know if there are any questions. There may be a lot, there may not be many. We will see.