General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Yes, Creation!

Kwabena Donkor

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians

Time is 1 of the great focuses of contention in the battle between creation and evolution.

I want to talk to you especially about 2 main ideas here that we're considering.

1 is did life gradually develop on earth over billions of years?

And this is the normal accepted scientific interpretation.

And even some people who believe in God suggest, well, God took billions of years to develop the advanced forms of life that we have now.

Then in contrast to that and very different is the biblical model that God created all in 6 days just a few thousand years ago.

So you've got these 2 basic ideas involved.

And most implicit in that last model is the idea of the Genesis flood.

The earth was destroyed by this Genesis flood.

And the fossil record harmonizes that story of creation and the flood together so that we have the explanation for all those fossils out there.

There's a significant amount of scientific data that favors the recent creation.

Science repeatedly changes its views, new ideas come in and so on.

So let's keep in mind what we're referring to in this discussion that we're having here.

The first point I want to mention to you is erosion.

Erosion is so fast that the continents should not have endured the long geologic ages.

Here's a river carrying a lot of sediment after a storm.

Well, the erosion is pretty slow, but you start talking about billions of years for the continents, and you are in deep trouble as far as the long geological ages are concerned.

I know of a dozen studies where they have studied the output of all the rivers of the world on all the continents, measured how much is being poured into the oceans.

And those studies suggest that you average those dozen studies and you get 24, 000 million tons.

Well, if you convert that to the average height of the continents, which is 623 meters, it would take about 10 million years to erode the continents to sea level.

While 10 million years is just a small fraction of time in the billions of years that are assumed for the evolutionary model.

This is data that seems to favor the creation model.

The idea of erosion has been discussed for quite a number of years.

About 50 years ago, geology became aware of this problem.

It's recognized in the scientific literature.

Here's an extreme statement by Sparks in his book, Geomorphology.

He says, some of these rates are obviously staggering.

The Yellow River could peneplain an area with average height of that of Everest in 10 million years.

Well, this river is faster than normal, but it tells you a recognition of this, hey, if you can erode Everest in 10 million years, How could the continents be billions of years old?

Right now our erosion is a little bit fast.

But correcting for all this, you can probably safely say our continents should have been eroded 100 times in the proposed billions of years of geologic time.

And we're still here, fortunately, and they haven't been all eroded away, otherwise we'd be underwater.

Well, a corollary to this is, of course, hey, how long is it going to take to fill up the oceans?

You got all this material pouring into the oceans, how long is that going to take?

The suggestion is made in the reference again regarding this, and it says here, if we next assume the present rate of erosion and exposed continent volumes to have been constant over say the past 1 billion years, then we would expect a staggering 30, 000 meter thick layer of sediments to cover the sea floors today.

And they're going to say apparently we have air battling making our assumptions and I would agree with that.

If you take the biblical story into account and so on, instead of the long evolution, you don't have the problem.

Now You go out to the seas and the deep oceans, you have about 300 meters, which is 1% of what he's suggesting here we should have in 1000000000 years.

And the continents, there's probably been 2, 7000000000 years, different ideas regarding how big they were and so on.

But anyway, we still should have a tremendous amount of sediments out there.

You have a picture there of the continents.

Sediments are supposed to have gone down in the trenches.

It's not a real argument for it because you have only about 10 to 20 percent of the sediments produced by the river that go down into the trenches and so your oceans, you can say well probably the oceans have been filled up at least 10 times in 2 and a half million years, and they are still here.

Next we have the presence of old flat surfaces that we find on the surface of the Earth that, how come they're still there?

You have a picture here of Kangaroo Island in Australia.

And look carefully at the end of the red arrow.

And you can see a straight line clear across the picture of the island.

It's extremely fine, extremely thin, right above sea level there.

And that surface is supposed to be 160 million years old.

Now, in 160 million years, you would expect about 3 miles of vertical erosion.

How come that surface, which is supposed to be 160 million years, is so flat if it is really that old?

The answer is, of course, well, probably kangaroo island is not that old.

That surface has been dated by radiometric dating.

And you can see how extremely flat it is.

It doesn't look like Kangaroo Island is that old.

Data again, it seems to favor a recent creation.

And you can see from this picture how irregular erosion tends to be.

Colorado River here eroding various canyons and so on.

And you go to the literature regarding this and a very interesting statement by Twedale at the University of Adelaide, who says the survival of these paleoforms, he's talking here about Kangaroo Island, a number of other flat surfaces in Australia, and so on, survive these paleoforms is in some degree an embarrassment to all the commonly accepted models of landscape development, except the biblical 1.

But that is not commonly accepted in scientific interpretations right at present, but the data is there.

Related to this, We talked about this very flat surface.

You find these same flat surfaces in the rock layers.

And so we have these flat gaps that we're talking about here.

Just 1 illustration here, the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

You can see the top arrow at the left goes right along the bottom of the whitish layer that you can see all the way across the picture.

Now, that points to a gap, 6 million year gap.

Why do they say there's a 6 million year gap there?

Because about 150 miles south of there, you have a layer between the 2 layers where the point of the arrow reaches.

Right below that whitish layer, you have some reddish layers.

You go 150 miles south, you got a layer, a thick layer, hundreds of feet thick.

That's supposed to have taken 6 million years.

And so when you come over here and you don't have that layer, there's a 6 million year gap.

And at 6 million years, according to our average rates of erosion, we would expect about 10, excuse me, 600 feet of erosion.

Well, going a little further down in the Grand Canyon, the middle arrow there points at a 14 million year gap.

14 million years, you'd expect 1, 400 feet of erosion.

As you look across the whole canyon there.

And that 1 is small compared to the lowest arrow, red arrow you see right there, pointing to a gap between very flat layers.

So those of you familiar with the geologic column, the whole Ordovician and Silurian is missing there.

Series

Yes, Creation!

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Creation, Science, Evidence, and Faith

Three Angels’ Messages and Biblical Creation: Sound Science Part 2

1h

Amazing Facts Bible Study Guides

01 Is There Anything Left You Can Trust?

28m

The Spiritual Connection Between Creation And Salvation

The Spiritual Connection Between Creation and Salvation Part 1

45m

The Bible and Geological Time

53m

Country Wisdom Season 3

Evolution The Evidence

28m

Prophecies of Hope

2. Dinosaurs Prove the Bible True

37m

Country Wisdom Season 3

It’s Almost Time

28m

Creation, Science, Evidence, and Faith

Three Angels’ Messages and Biblical Creation: Sound Science Part 3

58m

We Have Not Followed Cunning Devised Fables

42m

Yes, Creation!

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

21m

Plenary

Q&A Panel Discussion

54m

Sound Doctrine