2016 Creation Conference

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Midvale Park SDA Church

Leonard Brand

The Bible and Geological Time

We'll talk about fossils and time this afternoon.

Now, there are 2 kind of big areas of research relevant to this question of creation and evolution, biology, living cells, how do they work, how do they evolve, geology and paleontology, rocks and fossils.

Now from the point of view of a person doing research, trying to figure these out, can you see an important difference between them?

This we talked about this morning, biological things, biochemistry.

People studying these are studying things that are alive right in front of them.

They're studying processes happening over and over again all the time right in front of us.

The life is so complex, it's very difficult to understand it many times.

But nevertheless, we're studying things that are alive.

You can do your experiments and your observations over and over again.

How about this, geology and paleontology?

We're studying things that happened a long time ago.

We study the rocks and the fossils and we tell stories how we think they got there.

How do you demonstrate whether those are right or not?

Up Here in biology, that's where the theory of evolution is in increasingly deeper trouble, because of new discoveries, studying things that we can study in the lab right in front of our noses.

It's more challenging here in geology and paleontology.

Nevertheless, we're making progress, but still you can't go back and see what happened.

We have to assume that the processes that made these rocks and buried the fossils are like what happens on the earth today.

But we're going to do what we can this afternoon.

Does the Bible say anything about time in Earth history?

In Genesis, we have some specific genealogies that have a formula.

So and so lived so many years and begat so and so, and they lived so many years.

That's a formula that seems to indicate real time.

Some of the other genealogies have people left out and things, but those seem to indicate time.

There are a couple of different ancient translations of the Bible, different originals, and they differ.

1 of them, somebody messed with the numbers.

They either added 100 years for each person or just subtracted.

So 6, 000 to 7, 000 years is the kind of time it gives us and then there are other time.

So we don't know exactly, but the real issue is this.

Was there a literal creation a few thousand years ago, or did life evolve over hundreds of millions of years?

That's really the choice we have to make.

And we're going to talk about what geology might have to say about this this afternoon.

Happens to be the oldest known fossil bat.

Here are some things that we actually bought here in Tucson at the Rock and Mineral Show.

These wonderful fish and palm fronds, trilobites.

This little thing, you couldn't tell what it is, but this is the head of a trilobite And there's his compound eye, just like the eyes on flies.

Okay, that's a early Cambrian fossil, wonderful intricate structure.

Dinosaurs, everybody loves dinosaurs, at least all the kids do.

And there are some beautiful skeletons of them, some that are not so good.

And 1 can go out and dig in the rocks and look for fossils, looking for fossil turtles here in this case, and prepare the fossils and study them.

Here we have digging up a fossil whale in Peru.

And this is really the question when we get to rocks and fossils.

1 of our major questions, of course, is radiometric dates.

Here's the representation of what we call the geologic column.

You have layers of rock, 1 above the other, various places of the Earth.

Here in the west, we have a nice sampling of this geology column.

Grand Canyon, you have these, what we call Paleozoic rocks.

Zion Park and areas around there, we have Mesozoic.

And then Bryce Canyon and others, The rocks and fossils near the top.

Okay, so the ages, the ages that geologists give to these are 541 million years for this place right here, the bottom of the Cambrian.

That's a lot of years, 541 million years, and it goes on up until the present day.

We don't really know the answer to that yet.

I will predict that there are things to be discovered that will show that there are things about those radiometric processes that we really don't understand.

And because I don't believe the time is long like that.

I think God who gave us the Bible knows more about that than anybody else.

But that's a question we still just don't know.

But so is that, do we have to just say, well, you know, wring our hands and say, well, that's a problem?

No, because there are Other lines of evidence we can study.

We also have this fossil sequence here in the rocks.

Up here, we find fossil humans and we find horses and a lot of the creatures that we know so well.

We find invertebrates, things living in the ocean.

Now if this is a result of the flood, of course, you wouldn't necessarily expect to find people and monkeys down in the ocean, in ocean deposits.

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The Bible and Geological Time

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