Christian Astrophysicist Explains Young Earth: Dr. Jason Lisle Interview
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to Christian astrophysicist, speaker, and author, Dr. Jason Lisle. They talk about dinosaurs and cavemen, evidence of a young earth, and the Bible as a history book. Dr. Lisle obtained a Master's degree and Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Colorado. He has since written a number of best selling books on the topic of creation including: Taking Back Astronomy, Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky, the Ultimate Proof of Creation, Discerning Truth, and Understanding Genesis. He also founded the Biblical Science Institute, where they help defend the Christian worldview against people who call it unscientific. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Bible as a history book The problem of death before sin Genesis being doctrine Snopes article about creationism being a conspiracy Humans are all one race Current state of Young Earth Creationists scholarship Human origins Dinosaurs and cavemen Dragons Evidence of the Young Earth Carbon dating Origin of the universe explained with popcorn Subscriber Portion Comets The great flood Geological evidence of the flood DNA Theological problems with Aliens Slugs on the Arc Accuracy of the Interstellar movie Blackholes Distant starlight problem Problem with measuring speed of light 10 Questions
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
The Earth.
How old is it?
How did we get comets there?
There's a magnetic field, and yet the iron isn't ripping out of our blood like Magneto does to people in X-Men.
Did people ride on raptors?
Did Jesus ride on a raptor?
Did a raptor ride on Jesus?
What is a raptor?
What is love?
Baby, don't hurt me.
Today we're talking to Dr. Jason Lyell of the Biblical Science Institute.
He is kind of a weirdo because he believes the earth is 6,000 years old.
He must be a complete idiot with no education.
Yeah, he's anti-science.
We just want to make clear, anti-science, crazy conspiracy theorist that we are not.
We are just interviewing him.
Complete mockery.
For the laughs.
For the laughs.
Oh, he's also an astrophysicist.
Oh, he's also like a really smart guy.
Yeah.
So maybe, maybe those things aren't true.
But yeah, he's the president of the Biblical Science Institute.
He's something up there.
Yeah, he's a big Ultimate Proof of Creation, one of his books.
Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason, another book.
Discerning Truth, another book.
Wow, he's written a lot of books.
He's written a lot of books.
A lot of space and God books.
He knows space and God.
That would be his two areas of expertise.
And not Scientology.
So even if you're an old earther, if you believe in the traditional, normy, non-woke stuff that the Earth's billions of years old, or if you're smart and you believe the Earth is young, like I do, then you're going to enjoy this interview and expand your mind a little bit.
Yeah, just be open.
Don't be such a, you know.
Yeah.
Don't be such a you.
Stop being a you.
Stop being an old fuddy-duddy old earther.
Yeah.
Listen to ideas that are different from.
All right, Dr. Lyle, well, thank you for coming on.
It's an honor to talk to you.
You're a guy who believes in a young earth.
I mean, that's right.
Relatively young.
Yeah, I believe all the Bible, actually, including its time scale.
Wow.
Shots fired, man.
You're firing at the old earth people.
Yeah, I am a little bit.
Yeah.
That's like a mic drop moment there, I guess.
I don't know.
So you're a scientist.
You're a smart guy.
You really are a scientist, right?
And I'm a real scientist.
A real one.
And you believe the earth is roughly 6,000 years old.
Why is that?
Well, the primary reason is because we have the birth certificate of the universe.
We have the Bible.
And God is the only one who was around when the universe was first created, at least until day six.
And then we have human witnesses thereafter.
And God tells us that he created the world in six days.
Each day is defined as an earth rotation, you know, bound by evening and morning.
And from the genealogies, there's only, I think, 76 genius, 76 genealogies between Adam and Christ.
So there's no way you can get millions of years in there.
The time scale comes out to something like 6,000 years.
And we can't get an exact date for it, but it wouldn't be millions or billions of years.
So my primary reason for that is recorded history, the Bible.
And the Bible is a history book.
It's not just fairy tales.
It's real history.
Secondarily, I do think there's science that confirms that as well.
Maybe we can get into some of that a little bit later.
But I think things like a lot of people think carbon dating gives millions of years.
It doesn't.
Carbon dating is consistent with roughly the biblical time scale.
It has its issues too.
But you can date fossils if they have sufficient carbon left in them, sufficient collagen, for example.
You can carbon date them and you never get millions of years.
You always have detectable amounts of C14 in them.
And that wouldn't work if they were millions of years old.
So that's just one example.
And we can go into more if you'd like.
But my primary reason is because it's what the Bible clearly teaches.
If we take it hermeneutically, if we read it in a natural fashion, trying to get to the intention of the author.
And I think it's also confirmed by science.
My question is why, because people get really passionate about this on both sides.
And I'm the guy that's sitting there like, why?
Like they're debating across the table, like throwing their beer mugs at each other and shouting and tearing each other's face skin off.
I'm like, why are we so, why is this such a big deal?
Yeah, not saying you throw beer mugs at people or non-alcoholic.
Not often, but yeah, it's it.
I think from the old earth perspective, I think that they would say, well, you're making us look silly by holding to this position because it's so contrary to what the secularists teach.
Yeah.
And I would agree that it is contrary to what the secularists teach, but then again, they don't teach resurrection from the dead.
We believe that, you know, we believe that Christ rose from the dead.
We believe in miracles.
And so it's not a problem for there's no logical problem in believing that God created the way he says he did and that God is able to communicate, which I believe he is able to do that.
If he can create the universe, I think he can tell us how he did it.
That seems like a much simpler task.
From my perspective, taking Genesis as written, there are two reasons why I think the issue is important.
And of course, none of us believe that it's a salvation issue in the sense that nobody's saying you have to believe in six days to be saved or anything like that.
I have brothers in Christ that hold to an old earth.
I think they're wrong on that issue, but that doesn't mean they're not saved.
But it is important for two reasons.
And the first is death before sin.
If fossils are hundreds of millions of years old, then that means you've got death hundreds of millions of years before human beings came around, because even the secularists agree human beings are recent.
Human beings don't go back many, many millions of years.
But doesn't the Bible say that death came into the world as a result of Adam's sin?
And I know some people say, well, that's just human death.
I don't think you can defend that biblically because when Adam sinned, God sacrificed an animal to provide skins of clothing for Adam and Eve.
So God instituted animal death at that time.
And the reason animals suffer the effects of the curse is because they're under our authority, under our dominion.
God gave Adam dominion over all the creatures of the earth.
And so his sin affected the whole world.
Romans 8 makes that clear that all creation suffers under this bondage of corruption.
It was made that way because of Adam.
And of course, death being the intrusion, being the enemy that entered the world when Adam sinned is rather important to understanding the gospel because the gospel message is that death is the penalty for sin.
When we sin against God, we're committing high treason against the king of kings.
And high treason, that's a capital offense.
And so we deserve death.
That's why death entered the world.
And Jesus Christ, of course, took our penalty on the cross.
He paid our death.
He paid our penalty.
He took our death and died our death for us so that we could be redeemed.
And so I would say if you say, well, no, fossils are hundreds of millions of years old.
Death's always been around.
Then that really divorces the gospel from its rational basis in understanding that death is indeed the penalty for sin.
So that's one reason.
We can come back to more specifics on that if you're interested.
But the other reason is because hermeneutically, if you read Genesis in a hermeneutical fashion, it really does say God made in six days.
And I'll grant, not everybody can read Hebrew, and I'm certainly no Hebrew scholar, but I know people who are.
It's always legitimate to ask, has it been translated properly?
I get that.
And so some people think, well, maybe the day doesn't really mean day.
And you should investigate that issue.
But when you do, you'll find that, yeah, that's what day means.
And when it's recapped in Exodus 20, 11, when it says, in six days the Lord made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that's in them.
Yeah, that's the Hebrew word yamim.
That's days.
And that's always used in the plural form, it's always used as literal days.
And so I think it's important because it's what the Bible teaches and it teaches it very clearly.
I realize there are sections of the Bible that are difficult.
There are doctrines that are tough to accept.
Genesis really isn't one of them.
It's very clear.
It's just contrary to what we have seen in our culture.
It's contrary to the views of the secularists.
And so it's one issue where I would say, as a biblical creationist, I would say we need to take a stand on that because it undermines the gospel if you don't, because it means death isn't the penalty for sin, and because it's the clear teaching of scripture.
Not that the Bible gives us an exact date, but there's no way to get millions of years into the biblical timeline without doing violence to the scriptures.
There's no way to do it exegetically.
And, you know, a lot of old earth creationists will admit that.
They'll say, yeah, if you just take the text face value, you get a young earth, but they feel like they get intimidated by the scientists and scientists who teach millions of years and big bang and sometimes evolution, some people reject, some people accept evolution.
But in any case, they feel like they have to get that in there.
And I would say, as a biblical creationist, that's really dangerous if you're going to read the Bible isogetically, taking man's opinions and trying to force them into the text.
We got to be very careful about that.
Because if you did that with the gospel, then that is a salvation issue.
If you said, well, you know, yeah, the Bible teaches Jesus died and rose again, but the best scientists tell us resurrection from the dead, that's not possible.
So we got to interpret that metaphorically or something.
Well, then you're still in your sins.
Your faith is in vain if Jesus didn't die and rise again.
That's Paul's argument.
So it is an important issue.
And it's not, again, it's not something that's required for salvation, but it is required to, I think, to make sense of the gospel message.
Yeah, Ethan, what he said.
That's what I've been trying to tell you all these years, man.
Gosh.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Cool.
Cool, man.
So, Snopes recently published an article, Why Creationism Bears All the Hallmarks of a Conspiracy Theory.
And they specifically attack Henry Morris's book, The Genesis Flood.
And then they say that creationists go to great lengths to demonize the proponents of evolution and to undermine the overwhelming evidence in its favor.
They go on to say, like other conspiracy theorists, creationists immunize themselves from fact-based criticism.
They label the study of the past as based on unprovable assumptions, thus disqualifying in advance the plain evidence of geology.
And then they go on to try to connect creationism with the same kind of crowd that believes the election was stolen and other political issues.
Have you seen this?
And do you have any response to that kind of argument?
Yeah, I've seen the article.
A friend of mine forwarded it to me.
And by the way, my friend Bodhi Hodge wrote a wonderful refutation of that article on our sister website, Answers in Genesis.
So you might check that out for details.
But no, a conspiracy theory, creation isn't in that category.
And I would argue evolution isn't either.
Some creationists say evolution is kind of like a conspiracy theory because it is contrary to fact.
In my opinion, it's contrary to fact.
But no, a conspiracy theory is where you intentionally set up things such that any evidence that really would lend itself against a position is interpreted as being for it because that's what they want you to think.
And creation isn't that way.
We understand that, but we do understand that evidence requires a worldview in order to interpret it.
And that's something that my evolutionist colleagues a lot of times don't really understand or appreciate.
And there are creationists that don't appreciate that either.
But there's no evidence.
There's no actual scientific evidence that I deny anything.
Anything that's testable, repeatable in a laboratory, I agree with it.
And so that ought to eliminate me as the idea that I'm some sort of conspiracy theorist because I don't deny anything that's observable and testable in the present.
And that's what science is all about, testing and observing the present.
But when people start speculating about what allegedly happened in the distant past for which they don't have any historic records, and granted, they might say, well, we think that there's scientific reasons to think that.
Okay, but it's a speculation about the past.
And I'm free to accept or reject that on the basis of whether or not you've made a good argument for it.
And I don't think that evolutionists have made a good argument.
I don't think they have any evidence that would lend one to believe that the neo-Darwinian version of evolution, that all life is descended from a common ancestor.
I don't see that evidence.
I don't see evidence for it.
If they want to present some, I'd be happy to look at it.
But I say they're just making a bald assertion.
They're saying, oh, this is all this evidence for evolution.
Well, where is it?
Show me.
And most of the time they can't.
They'll say, well, fossils.
And I say, hey, I've looked at fossils, but what makes you think they demonstrate evolution?
And usually they can't get beyond that.
Well, Lucy.
Okay, I've studied Lucy.
She's a three-foot-tall tree-dwelling primate.
What makes you think that, you know, how does that lend yourself to believing in evolution?
And they usually can't answer that.
Most people believe in evolution because they believe all the other people believe in evolution.
Roasted.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is funny the response you get if you even question evolution.
And I think most people that immediately scoff at you, I mean, the majority of people, I don't think they've actually read the origin of the species or done any of their own studying.
It's just we've all decided, oh, yeah, that's so stupid if you don't believe in billions of years.
And I'm curious about the original origin of the species, the full title of that book.
I can't remember off the top of my head what the original.
It's like origin of the species and black people are by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races.
Yeah, that's struggle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was his next book, The Descent of Man, where he really gets racist.
And Darwin was a racist.
There's no doubt about that.
And while racism existed before Darwin, it went up by orders of magnitude when people started believing in an evolutionary worldview, because in that worldview, Darwin certainly believed that some people were more evolved than others.
And naturally, he placed evolution's true, it has to be that it couldn't be that everybody started evolving from the exact same point.
Yeah, right?
Yeah, evolution, you know, in their view, happens at different rates.
I mean, some bacteria turned into people, other bacteria stayed bacteria.
So it would stand to reason that some humans are more evolved than others.
And Darwin held that position.
And he thought that the, I think he put, I think he put the Australian Aborigines at the bottom, and they were just barely, you know, they were closer to the other primates than human beings.
And I thought, what a despicable belief.
But that's what happens when you reject Genesis creation, where God tells us that God made man in his own image.
We're all descended from Adam and Eve.
There's only one race, biblically, the human race.
You can get different ethnicities because of the way genetics works when you have a genetic bottleneck and certain people groups that we think that happened around the time of Babel when God split up the people groups into various by confusing the tongues.
And so you can get certain features.
You know, if people with very dark skin get married to people with very dark skin, their kids are going to have dark skin.
That's the way genetics works.
But there's only one race, the human race, biblically.
And so you're racist, if you're going to be consistent Christian, you can't be racist.
And granted, not all Christians are consistent.
But biblically, there's one race, and that is a Genesis concept.
Genesis explains the origin of the so-called races, really ethnicities.
And we now understand genetics a little better, so we can go into the scientific details of how that happens.
But no, all human beings are made in God's image.
All of us have value before our Creator because we're made in His image.
What is the prevailing?
I'm asking you this because I don't know.
What is the prevailing view that you encounter among old earthers nowadays?
Is it like theistic evolution?
Is it day-age theory?
I don't know what, I don't know where old earthers currently land on that.
Yeah, if they're, I say if they're outside the church, if there's somebody, you know, I believe in God, I'm not a Christian, though.
If they say that, then they tend to hold to theistic evolution for the most part.
And I think if they're within the church, if they would say, yes, I'm a Christian, I go to church every Sunday, then they would tend to hold to old earth, probably a day-age view, but they would tend to reject theistic evolution for the most part.
That's just based on my encounters with people.
It's not a scientifically binding survey, but that's kind of my impression.
I remember reading the Genesis flood back in high school, and it was like, it kind of blew my mind because I kind of thought the earth was young just because the Bible seemed to say that.
And then it was like, oh, there's a bunch of evidence for it.
I mean, what is the current state of young earth scholarship?
I'm sure we've come a long way since the Genesis flood, and maybe some of the stuff in that book is outdated now.
And I'm sure they've got new editions and all that.
But I mean, what do you think the current state is?
Is it on the decline?
Are there more scientists joining that movement?
What's it like?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's on the increase.
I will say that the Genesis Flood, which I've read as well, it's a masterful work of Christian scholarship.
It is a wonderful book.
Is some of the science outdated now?
Yes, any science textbook that's 50, 60 years old is going to have a few things that are out of date.
But nonetheless, even the science is still pretty close to right on.
It's just they had made some guesses about radiometric dating, and we now think that there's a different solution to that than what Morrison looks.
But in any case, it's a fantastic work.
And there weren't a lot of young earth creationists in academia at the time of the publication of the Genesis Flood back in 61.
And now there's a lot of young earth biblical creationists in academia.
We're still a minority.
And that doesn't surprise, you know, the path is narrow.
So it doesn't surprise me that we're in a minority.
But yeah, I've met a lot of PhD scientists who are biblical creationists.
And some of them are in full-time apologetics ministry.
Some of my friends, for example, at Answers in Genesis, Nathaniel Jensen, PhD in biology from Harvard, biblical creationist.
Georgia Perdum, PhD in biology from Ohio State University, Andrew Snelling, PhD in geology, brilliant folks.
And then a lot of times, just when I'm speaking at a local church, somebody will be, yeah, I'm a PhD scientist in this field or that, and I'm a biblical creationist.
So it's heartening to see that people are really getting back to believing that God's word is true from the very beginning.
And of course, as science advances, we see how science confirms that.
And that's one of the things that I like to talk on is how science confirms biblical creation, how some of the details of science are what we would expect, given that the Bible is true in its account of origins.
So it's an exciting time to be a Christian.
It really is.
Yeah.
So we've been, we have a group that reads G.K. Chesterton every week.
And G.K. Chesterton.
We're reading The Everlasting Man, and he starts off the book talking about all the things we add to cavemen to make them fit our worldview.
There isn't any evidence for it, like they're bonking women on heads and dragging them around and there's these Neanderthals and stuff.
The only thing we have is the art that they put on caves.
It's the one thing that he calls it the signature of man, art.
There's no evidence of one of the examples he gives is there's no cat that draws a crude caricature of a dog or some other evidence of animals ever engaging in any kind of creativity.
What are some, all that to say, what are some things where just examples where modern science has just made a thing up to fit the worldview?
What are some other examples of that that we just take for granted?
Like everybody just kind of goes, oh yeah, caveman, they just bonked everybody on the head.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, that's some other examples.
What are some other examples?
Yeah, human origins is full of stuff like that.
When people, you know, they'll look at a fossil and then they'll extrapolate behavior.
That's, that's, you know, that's a little bit beyond what science can do.
I mean, can you look at a skeleton and tell if a person was a good guy or a bad guy?
I mean, you can't really do that from a skeleton.
You can make some guesses, but yeah, yeah, there were cavemen.
There were people that lived in caves.
Lot was one of them.
Abraham's nephew Lot lived in a cave for a while, according to scripture.
And it made sense for human beings to do that because it's a shelter that you don't have to build.
It's already there.
It's a convenient place to live.
So yeah, human beings sometimes lived in caves.
There's some that live in caves today.
I know a PhD guy, Emil Silvestrew, who is a PhD in cave.
He's spelunking, basically.
So he's a PhD caveman.
So we have those today as well.
People assume that.
Is his wife all right?
Hard to see.
He didn't bop her over the head to get her that way.
So that's the kind of thing.
Well, they lived in caves.
They must have been stupid.
Actually, that's pretty intelligent because they didn't, you know, you spent all this money building a house.
They just moved into one that already existed.
They're smarter than you are.
But you see my point.
You can't assume a person's intelligence or anything like that.
Well, they painted on the walls.
And it's kind of interesting because kids today will paint on walls and they'll get scolded for it.
But people did that in the past, of course.
Scripturally, human beings have always been intelligent.
Adam and Eve created, Adam was able to talk on the first day.
That's pretty impressive.
God apparently pre-programmed language into him.
And people were, they lived to be, you know, originally they lived to be like 900 years old before the flood.
And so they were able to accumulate knowledge.
Now today we have the benefit of the fact that knowledge can be passed on from one generation to the next and therefore it accumulates.
And so we have technologies and things like that that are amazing today.
I mean, we just landed this new probe on Mars.
It's astonishing that we can do stuff like that.
And people assume, well, that's because we're more intelligent than our ancestors.
No, it's because knowledge accumulates.
They didn't have the benefit of that technology.
But in terms of intelligence, human beings have always been made in the image of God.
They're always able to reason.
And there are some things that the ancients did in terms of the way the pyramids were constructed and so on that it's like, how did they do that?
We still don't know the details of how they did that.
These people were very clever.
And so the evolutionary story that human beings have, our intelligence has been gradually improving over time.
It's not really consistent with the evidence.
The evidence would be consistent with the biblical position that human beings were always intelligent.
And we find, you know, we find artifacts a lot of times with these human remains like Neanderthals.
Neanderthals are human beings.
They're just what you might call an ethnic variation of human beings, but they have human anatomy in all the senses.
And we find, for example, musical instruments that they sometimes buried with them, and that indicates they had culture.
The fact that they buried their dead indicates they knew something about something about the true nature of life and death, because when you bury your dead, that's an expectation of resurrection.
And granted, a lot of people have lost that connection, but it's an indication that they knew something about the truth about there's life after death and there's going to be a resurrection and so on.
So people have always had culture, they've always had intelligence, and technology builds over time because knowledge is passed on from one generation to the next.
So I'm happy to look at evidence of these human remains, but when they make up stories about how people lived in the past, that's going beyond what they can really ascertain from the evidence.
So at the Ark Encounter, they have like these raptors all fighting in gladiator pits and crazy dioramas and stuff.
So is that like a possibility that people were like riding around dinosaurs or and then, or did Satan just plant the dinosaur bones there?
No, dinosaurs are real.
Satan didn't plant them.
People give too much credit to Satan.
He's he's on a God keeps him on a pretty short leash, to be honest.
You know, Satan, you know, I got tempted because of Satan.
No, you got tempted because you're on sin nature.
But in any case, yeah, people lived with dinosaurs.
They lived at the same time.
Were dinosaurs these vicious creatures that we see in movies like Jurassic Park and Jurassic World?
Well, not originally, because originally God saw everything He'd made and behold, it was very good.
Originally, dinosaurs were vegetarian.
That surprises people because they got sharp teeth, but there are animals today that have sharp teeth like a fruit bat, have very sharp teeth, but it eats fruit.
It's not a carnivore.
So teeth don't determine absolutely what kind of food you're going to eat.
Now, some of the animals after sin obviously became meat eaters because some of them are today.
And perhaps some dinosaurs, we think there's evidence that some dinosaurs became meat eaters after the fall.
So yeah, people lived at the same time.
Did they ride dinosaurs?
I don't know.
But in any case, they lived at the same time.
There's no doubt about that.
And dinosaurs, there is evidence that dinosaurs were used by human beings.
Marco Polo reported that the Chinese royal chariots were occasionally pulled by dragons.
And that would be the ancient word for a dinosaur.
Anything that you see before, when was it 18, I think it was 1841, where Richard Owen invented the word dinosaur.
Before that, anything resembling a dinosaur would have been called a dragon.
And you'll find all kinds of references to dragons in the ancient literature.
And people say, well, that's mythical, that's legend.
Well, some of them, maybe, but some of them are apparently recording history.
And so people did see dinosaurs.
There's evidence of that.
There's evidence in scripture.
There's evidence outside of scripture.
One specific variety of dinosaur that I think is referred to in scripture would be the behemoth, which is mentioned in Job chapter 40, yeah, chapter 40, verse 15, and on.
You read the description of the behemoth, the name, that's actually the Hebrew word, behemoth, kind of means beast of beasts.
And when you read the description of it, it sounds like a sauropod dinosaur, one of the ones that had the very long neck and the long tail, long, thick tail.
In fact, it describes its tail moving as like moving a cedar tree.
And that can't be any modern animal.
It wouldn't have to be a dinosaur, but it's not an elephant because they have a tail like a little rope.
It can't be a hippo because that's got a tail like a little flap.
It's not a tail that moves like a cedar tree.
So people did live at the same time as dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs were originally peaceful at some point after sin.
Some of the dinosaurs might have become meat-eating.
We think that's likely.
So, yeah, the Ark Encounter got it right.
And I've been there.
I've been to the Ark Encounter, and it's wonderfully done.
I encourage people to go there and see that.
Is there anything they got dead wrong at the Ark Encounter?
No.
And I went ready to nitpick because I'm an apologist, and that's what I do.
So I went there ready to nitpick.
They did an amazing job.
They did a really amazing job.
One of the things I was curious as to how they were going to do this is because we know that God took two of every kind, two of every kind of animal came to Noah.
God directed them to Noah to bring on board the ark, seven of some, but mostly the unclean kinds, two of each kind.
And that's not the same.
People think that's species.
It's not the same as species.
It's kind is a broader category.
It probably lines up most typically with the family level on our modern taxonomic system.
And so you can get speciation after the flood.
And so the different, the different varieties of dog that we have today, the different breeds, you can even have different species of dogs, those are all descended from two dogs on the ark.
And there's fascinating science behind that.
Dr. Nathaniel Jensen's working on that kind of issue.
It's interesting stuff.
But because of that, we don't know what the kinds looked like that went on the ark.
What did the two dogs on the ark look like?
They wouldn't look like modern dogs.
They wouldn't look like golden retrievers or coyotes or foxes.
Those are all descended from those two dogs.
And so what would the traits of the original kind look like?
And that's an ongoing field of study called brahminology.
And so I was curious, how are you going to get around that?
The fact that we don't know what the, you know, in the ark encounter, how are you going to depict these extinct animals where we don't know what they look like?
And what they did, which I thought was probably the best thing you could do, is they say, here is a modern animal that's of that kind.
And I said, yeah, that's the best you can do at this point because we know that this is part, we know that this dog is part of the dog kind.
So that's what they look like today.
We don't know exactly what they look like originally, but it would have been, you know, not too far away from that.
It'd be good if they were like wiener dogs, so they have a lot more space on the right.
You don't want them to be giant St. Bernard's or something.
Right.
Little yappy Chihuahuas while you're on the ark for six months.
That would be, yeah, I guess that's given to you.
If I were there, they would have been, you know, I would have taken them off and fed them to the raptors.
Oh, the raptors weren't on the ark travelers.
That's right.
So, well, Chihuahuas are probably a result of the fall.
What about the, because I've never heard an explanation for this because there are people that got, you know, like 900 years old, the Bible and stuff.
Is there science behind?
Like, is there any evidence of that?
That always sounds weird.
Yeah, the only other historical evidence that would corroborate that is there are certain Chinese documents that record that people used to live very, very long ages.
But the Bible is the only document that connects those ancient genealogies to the modern ones.
The Bible is the only document that connects that.
In terms of the science of that, we're not sure.
We're not 100% sure why that happens.
And there have been different theories, but the modern idea, and I think it's a good one, it has to do with the fact that human beings went through what's called a genetic bottleneck at the time of the flood.
And that's where the entire population is reduced to just a few.
Eight people survived the flood, the eight people that were on board Noah's Ark.
Now, Noah lived the full lifespan of 900 and so 950 years or something like that.
And even though a good portion of it was after the flood, so we don't think it's environmental because then Noah's lifespan would have been a little bit shortened as well.
But if you look at Noah's three sons, their lives were a little bit shorter and their descendants shorter and shorter.
And we don't have any information on Mrs. Noah.
But if Mrs. Noah had a gene for short-livedness, then she could have passed that on to the three sons, their lifespans would be reduced and so on.
So there's a genetic mechanism in play that would constitute shortening our lifespans.
And a better way to phrase the question, though, is because people ask why did they live so old?
The better question is, why don't we?
Because human beings were originally made to live forever.
And it's very clear when you look at the different systems of our body, your skin, your skin is 29 days old.
It doesn't matter how old you are.
Your skin's 29 days old because it's constantly replenished.
The old layer sloughs off and new cells replace it.
Your bones are replaced roughly every 10 years.
They're completely replaced.
And so, you know, it's obvious that we're designed to live forever and something has gone wrong.
And that's, of course, exactly what the Bible teaches.
But in terms of the details as why our lifespan is shortened at the time of the flood, we think a genetic bottleneck is the most likely explanation.
The Bible doesn't give us an answer, so we can't be dogmatic, but that would be the best explanation at the moment.
Maybe it was the discovery of gluten.
I don't know.
It's a good theory.
Good job.
Yeah, I want to kind of dig into some of the evidence of a young Earth.
I know you say you approach it primarily from a biblical perspective, but I know you bring up a lot of things.
And I know Genesis Flood originated some of this stuff, but about these things that establish upper limits, you know, for like things that are decaying.
And so they could only be a certain number of years old.
You want to bring up a couple of those, and then after that, we'll jump into our subscriber portion and maybe dig into some more nitty-gritty.
Okay.
Yeah.
So what we do with these kinds of arguments is it's a form of argumentation called a reducto et absurdum.
And that's where you assume the assumptions, the presuppositions of your opponent, and show that even given those conditions, you still end up with a conclusion that is contrary to what your opponent holds to.
So in this case, old earth arguments always presuppose, to some extent, uniformitarianism and or naturalism.
Uniformitarianism is the idea that the rates and conditions have been sort of uniform.
They've been consistent with the way they are today.
And I would say as a creationist, well, that's unbiblical because during the flood, the rate of erosion would have been astronomically greater than what it is today because we don't have a global flood today.
So I would reject uniformitarianism.
But for the sake of argument, I'll accept it to show that it leads to an inconsistency.
And so, for example, if we look at the rate at which Earth's magnetic field is decaying, there's every indication that it's an exponential decay, that the Earth's magnetic field has been dropping in an exponential fashion.
So it kind of flattens out with time.
And therefore, if you run it back in time, the magnetic field, assuming that the current half-life, I forget what it is, but it's on the order of a thousand years.
You run it back to creation, the magnetic field would have been 20 times stronger 6,000 years ago.
That's pretty good.
Magnetic field protects us from cosmic rays.
We'd have increased protection from cosmic rays, which can cause mutations, things like cancer and so on.
So that would have been nice.
But if you run it back 60,000 years, the Earth's magnetic field, because it's an exponential decay, you run it back like that.
It gets so strong, you couldn't have human life.
It would rip the atoms of your body apart because it would be stronger than that of a neutron star.
So the Earth's magnetic field puts a pretty tight constraint on the age of the Earth that's much less than even 100,000 years.
And that's not millions of years.
That's 60,000 years.
And so that puts a pretty tight constraint on the age of the Earth, assuming the uniformitarian, assuming the exponential decay, for which there's abundant evidence that's the case.
Another example would be carbon dating.
So carbon, most carbon is C12, but there's a variety of it, C14, that has two extra neutrons, and that makes it unstable.
And C14 will spontaneously decay into nitrogen.
It'll spontaneously change into nitrogen after a certain point.
And it's got a half-life of about 5,730 years.
So nothing compared to the millions of years.
And what that means is if you have a bunch of C14, after 5,700 years, you'll only have half of the C14.
The other half will have changed into nitrogen.
And for any given atom, you don't know when it's going to change.
It's random.
But if you have a large sample of atoms, you know that after 5,700 years, half of them will have changed to nitrogen.
So it's kind of like, it's kind of like popcorn.
You don't know which kernel is going to pop next or when, but you do know that after two minutes of the microwave, if they're going to pop, they've popped at that point.
So it's the same way with C14.
And we know the rate at which that happens today, and it's thousands of years.
And yet we find it in artifacts.
We find it in things like diamonds or coal that evolutionists believe to be hundreds of millions of years old.
Coal beds are thought to be hundreds of millions of years old, but they have C14 in them.
Every chunk of coal we've ever tested has C14 in it.
And how can that be?
Because C14 is created in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays strike nitrogen atoms.
That's where it's formed.
But these coal beds are deep down on the earth, insulated from cosmic rays, where the carbon has had plenty of time to decay into nitrogen if they were millions of years old.
But they're not millions of years old.
So they come out with ages that are consistent roughly with the biblical time scale.
And likewise with fossils, we've dated dinosaur fossils.
We've had the collagen in them dated using carbon dating, and you get thousands of years.
You don't get millions of years.
Diamonds, we've taken diamonds that secularists believe to be over a billion years old using other radiometric dating methods.
So we carbon date them, you get thousands of years.
And now, granted, carbon data is not perfect either because it also makes assumptions about the constancy of the C14 in the atmosphere, which changed at the time of the flood because you've removed all the biomatter.
But in any case, it still gives ages that are much less than the millions of years that evolutionists need in order for evolution to be plausible.
So there really is abundant scientific evidence that the Earth is much younger than the secular time scale.
We go out into space, the way in which the moon is receding away from the Earth.
You run the equation backwards.
It would have been touching the Earth at 1.4 to 1.5 billion years in a hypothetical past.
And again, that's an upper limit.
So that tells us the Earth and Moon system can't be older than 1.4 to 1.5 billion years.
But in the secular view, they're 4.5 billion years old.
So that's a problem.
All kinds of things like that that we see on the Earth and in space that would limit the age of the Earth or the universe to much less than the secular time scale, but all perfectly consistent with the biblical time scale.
Okay.
Well, we're going to move into our subscriber portion where you can explain more complex scientific principles using popcorn to us, which we really appreciate.
We'll get some popping.
Yeah, let's do it.
Let's dive in.
DNA, fossil Grand Canyon record, rock formations.
More dinosaurs, why not?
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Giant boat that holds all the animals of worldwide flood.
Did it have to be worldwide?
Just some flood facts.
Sure.
How about this one?
DNA.
Why are there so much DNA that's similar to other things in humans like a tulip?
A tulip?
Or a banana?
It's a Calvinist thing.
Your professional opinion as an astrophysicist, are there aliens?
And if so, how does that affect your faith at all?
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