Paul F. Taylor is a prolific author, concert pianist and composer, creation speaker and debater. Speaking and writing on the subject of creation science for more than 35 years.
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I love Danny Cole. Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but before we meet him, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.
This advert is going to get me a massive bollocking from the wife because we were due to go to the airport ten minutes ago and if she discovers me recording this advert, she will absolutely kill me and she'll say, why do you do everything at the last minute?
And I say, well, it's just what I do.
Anyway... The reason that we're even able to go to the airport for a last minute holiday, one reason anyway, is thanks to the wonderful healing powers of Michelle Davis, who's one of the people who's been treating my wife, who's, you know, has been very, very ill.
And Michelle has helped get her back on the road to recovery.
Michelle Davis is the osteo.
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She's a good thing. And I just wanted to say thank you to her by drawing your attention to her.
She's just got a book out.
And it is called, let me look, it is called Mental Clarity, Daily Habits to Clear Brain Fog and Improve Focus.
So I'd love it if you could support her.
You can only buy the book on Amazon because that's the deal with these self-publishing deals.
So Michelle Davis, many of you know her.
Some of you have been lucky enough to be treated by her.
She's wonderful. Her book is called Mental Clarity, Daily Habits to Clear Brain Fog and Improve Focus.
I'm going to nip downstairs now and hope that my wife hasn't noticed what I've been doing because I am dead meat.
But anyway, thank you, Michelle, for all you've done.
Not just thank you for me, but thank you for all the other people, all the other people who've followed the podcast, who you've been treating and healing.
We love you. Paul Taylor.
That's what I call you, isn't it?
Paul Taylor. I'd already use your middle name as well.
No, just call me Paul.
Paul. Yeah, well, obviously, I'm not going to call you Paul.
That would be weird, wouldn't it?
But I just wanted to get it right.
I only use my middle name because there's a lot of Paul Taylors out there.
So, you know, on my books, I put the middle name in.
That's all. There's a sight more Paul Taylors than there are James Denning Poles.
There are indeed, yeah.
Yeah. So, I've been trying to get you...
On my podcast for a long time, because you are one of my sharklings, the people who congregate on my Telegram channel, on my secret Telegram channel.
And some of them are kind of annoying, and some of them are delightful, and some of them are super bright, cleverer than me even, if that's possible.
And some of them are 77th trolls and disruptors and stuff.
But I like you, Paul.
I don't know anything about you apart from the fact...
I like you too. You're English.
You live in America.
Yes. And we're going to talk about...
I think we're going to talk about the book of Genesis, aren't we?
Well, we can talk about anything.
I suggested maybe we should start there, since that's how I started getting down various rabbit holes, but...
And it's how it all started, Paul.
...into anything else, yeah.
Yeah, it is. It is.
Everything started with Genesis.
Yeah. I think we should go there.
So, first of all, before we go on, why are you telling me about Genesis?
How come you're an expert and what are you doing in America anyway?
Well, that's a lot of questions.
So, Genesis, I started with, I became a Christian at the age of 15, which is a very long time ago.
It would have been 1977.
And... Sometime shortly after that, I was very interested in Christian books at the time.
I got myself a part-time job in a Christian bookshop in Ashton Underline, and I... One day there was this book, this magazine appeared in the store and it was very strange because it had articles in it by these people who didn't believe the theory of evolution.
They actually believed that what the Bible said in the book of Genesis was true.
It was a very quiet day.
I was in the front of the store.
There were no customers at that moment.
I took the magazine through to the manager who was doing a stock take in the back.
And I said, this is strange.
These people actually believe the book of Genesis to be literally true.
And he said, yes.
What's wrong with that? And so he sat me down with a cup of tea and explained it to me.
I wanted to believe the Bible was true, but I'd not come across people who believed that the book of Genesis was literally true before.
And that's really set the pattern for my life.
That was the biggest rabbit hole from which everything else has stemmed.
And it's because I took that first step as a teenager.
I was about 17 by the time I got to that stage.
That I've been able to go down all the various other rabbit holes, climate change, even more recently the Covid nonsense, and everything has fitted in because I take what for many people is an unconventional view on the book of Genesis.
Yeah! Isn't it weird that so many Christians, I'm not sure whether one can actually say most Christians, But so many Christians Believe in evolutionary theory, for example, and they think that, yeah, okay, obviously the New Testament's like real.
We know that because it happened quite recently, but this earlier stuff in the Old Testament is kind of a bit weird and you don't want to take it too seriously.
You really don't. I mean, obviously Noah and the rainbow and stuff, it's a kind of metaphor for something or it's...
It didn't really happen as they stated.
I mean, in your experience, is that the position of most Christians?
I think it's the position of most Christians and having been brought up in a church-going family, that was the position that was taught, you know, in the churches that I was in and it was just the regular view and it still is the regular view on both sides of the Atlantic among Christians that I come into contact with and it's Really, for many people, it's simply out of ignorance.
There are some people who take a deliberate stand on not believing the Bible, and they are basically the wolves in sheep's clothing who have looked into it and have taken a deliberate stand to say the Bible doesn't mean what it says.
A friend of mine, another creation speaker, once related about someone talking to him, a little girl talking to him, and saying, you know, when people...
When you go through the book of Genesis, when do you know when God stops telling lies?
When does he stop telling lies and start telling the truth in the Bible?
And the truth is, of course, he's telling the truth right from the beginning, and we should trust him in that.
If you're looking at one of the better modern translations, one of the things that many of the best quality modern translations do is that they differentiate between historical narrative and poetry simply by the formatting of the text.
And in Hebrew, there is actually a different word order for poetry.
So when you read in Isaiah that the trees of the field shall clap their hands, we know that's metaphorical.
And it's in a section which is poetic because the word order in the Hebrew is one word order, so they know it's poetic.
So in modern translations, they format it in a poetic way.
Whereas in Genesis, the word order is different.
The word order in Genesis is...
It's historical narrative, just the same as when it's talking about what King David did.
It's the same in the book of Genesis.
So the word order is historical narrative.
Therefore, if you're going to say that it's not literally true, that it's some sort of
poetry, you have to say that the word order was done wrong.
And it's better to take the view, the sort of first principles view, which is the word
order says it's historical narrative, therefore I'm going to take it as historical narrative.
Just like Jesus did, by the way, when he said Adam was from the beginning.
Not that Adam was the first evolved ape creature after millions and millions of years of evolution.
Adam was from the beginning.
Abel was from the foundation of the world, you know, close to the beginning because he
was from the first generation after Adam.
That's the way that Jesus describes him.
Again, not after millions of years of human evolution.
Abel's from the foundation of the world.
So you see, if you're going to say that Genesis is not true, it's quite clear that Jesus believed it was.
So you've got to say Jesus didn't know what he was talking about.
So why is it clear that Jesus believed it was?
Because Jesus says that Adam was from the beginning.
I see, sorry. Using a phrase that means from the beginning of time.
The same phrase, in fact, the same construction as is used at the beginning of John's Gospel.
In the beginning was the word.
Yes. I always find this very helpful in refuting this argument that some people have.
You get a certain kind of Christian who thinks...
Only the New Testament really counts.
In the Old Testament, we shouldn't...
You know, it's more of a Jewish thing, they go.
I mean, even C.S. Lewis takes this line in his book on the Psalms, which really annoys me.
But... When Jesus is constantly quoting the Old Testament, and it seems to me that he is endorsing it by so doing.
If it's good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.
That's right. Because we're lost, aren't we?
Do you not find it's really, really hard...
Negotiating your way through Christianity and Scripture.
Because there are so many different denominations with slightly different messages.
And you're constantly on a mission to find out what is the truth.
But I'm with you, Paul.
And I wouldn't have been...
If I'd come into that shop and I'd met you...
In 1977, well, I wouldn't have come into your shop in the first place, but I would definitely have thought you were a bloody weirdo.
And really, until very, very recently, if I'd met me as I am now, the person who believes that Genesis is true, is not just a cosy story, I'd have backed out of the room.
Slowly. Yeah. That's right.
Yeah, I mean, it often amazes me the way that God has used that sort of encounter that I had and the way that we need to believe the Bible.
And it is an issue of the gospel of Jesus Christ because of the way that Jesus talks about that.
But it's also, you know, you find other parts of the New Testament that agree with this too.
The Apostle Paul talks about...
Well, he compares Jesus to Adam, doesn't he?
There's the first Adam, and then Jesus is the last Adam.
And so you've got the first man, Adam, who is earthy, and you've got the last man, Jesus, who is heavenly.
You've got that contrast.
How does that contrast work if Adam was not earthy, but simply the product of millions of years of evolution?
Or, as other Christians would believe, that Adam wasn't even a real person.
He is some sort of mythological construct, some sort of polemic against Babylonian idolatry.
And I've heard people say that.
And of course, in many ways, Genesis is a polemic against Babylonian idolatry, but that doesn't stop it being true.
And in fact, it gives it more force when you realize that it is true.
So the Apostle Paul was talking nonsense if he was comparing Jesus to a mythological person.
How does that work?
If what he's trying to tell us about Jesus is real...
But, if we take the book of Genesis literally, that means there's an awful lot of incest in the early days of man.
Well, incest is a way of describing something that is contrary to God's law, but God did not outlaw incest until the time of Moses.
And there are a few rules that God gave to Moses.
If you look at the various laws that God gave Moses, you can differentiate them.
There are some that are true for all time, and there are some that were not true, that were there to protect the Israelites at that time.
For example, don't eat shellfish.
It's not a rule that we need to follow today, and of course that was countermanded when God showed the Apostle Paul this sort of blanket full of all the various supposedly unclean creatures that he was allowed to eat.
So the reason why, of course, they weren't supposed to eat shellfish and they weren't supposed to eat pork was to protect them, because they were sort of the least healthy types of food.
So it wasn't a law for all time.
Similarly, the law against marrying a close relative was not a law for all time in the other direction.
It wasn't a law from the beginning.
It was a law to protect the Israelites so that they're protected against genetic diseases.
Genetic problems would not have existed when God created the world because he made the world perfect.
Genetic problems would have come into the world with sin.
And then generation after generation, there would have been a greater number of genetic problems, but still there would not have been a problem with a brother and sister marrying and having children for a few generations after Adam.
And it's only until, in fact, you get beyond the flood and beyond Abraham and to Moses that it becomes so genetically dangerous that God says you don't do that to protect people.
You don't do that.
You don't marry people who are closely related.
And that's the reason for it.
Right. Because this is one thing I've noticed.
Right. The rules change through the Bible.
Some do.
Some do. So, for example, I was reading Numbers the other day, I think I mentioned this on another podcast, and there was a grisly scene where somebody doesn't keep the Sabbath and he gets stoned to death.
Yes. Which is pretty rough.
Yes, and of course at that time, because of God setting an example by his people Israel, he's setting a working living parable on earth of how he deals with them, and therefore there's an intermingling of...
Church and state, if you like, that what happens for the state, the way that that nation is to be governed, has to reflect the perfection of God himself.
So that it is still, in a sense, a law that, you know, we should keep one in seven days for God because that's actually good for us.
And of course, it doesn't have to be the Jewish Sabbath, but it's one in seven.
And we choose in the New Testament that sort of became a Sunday because Jesus rose on the first day of the week and they made the collection for the poor on the first day of the week.
And so you've got you've got a transition there where the the ultimate What's the words I'm looking for here?
God's standard is the same, but his punishment is different because, as the Apostle Paul says, the church no longer bears the sword of the state.
When does God lose interest in burnt offerings?
Well, if you read Amos, of course, God never really had any interest in burnt offerings at all.
It was always the case that this was to be a metaphorical act of worship.
They were to do it, but they were acting out the fact that God's wrath needed to be propitiated.
And, of course, now we have Jesus' death on the cross as the perfect Lamb of God, and so he is the ultimate and complete propitiation for ourselves.
Yeah, no, I get that. I'm talking about the Old Testament, really.
There is clearly a cut-off period.
We should be talking about Genesis, but this is just a beef of mine.
I've just been wading through numbers.
Nauseating chapters in which it is described exactly how many male goats and perfect lambs and stuff that you have to be sacrificed on each particular day.
And you're thinking, oh, this is just horrible.
So there was that phase.
And then later on, as the...
As one of the Psalms tell us, for thou desirest no sacrifice, for thou delightest not in burnt offerings.
So clearly, sometime between the Psalms and the early books of the Bible, God's lost interest in burnt offerings.
I don't think so. I think at the time of the Psalms, the burnt offerings were still supposed to go on, and they were supposed to go on through the time of King Josiah, when the law is rediscovered.
And the only time they were meant to stop was with Jesus.
But Paul, why does it say in the Psalms, thou delightest not in burnt offerings?
Because God is showing that this is a working metaphor, that everything that's being done with the nation of Israel was therefore to act out the perfection of God to show.
I mean, the book of Hebrews says, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.
But all these things were meant to point to Jesus.
So ultimately, the sacrifice of goats and lambs could never take away sin.
It had to be repeated. Whereas the perfect lamb of God, his blood, is sufficient for all time.
You haven't quite persuaded me.
I mean, because...
What's the psalm I'm quoting here?
It's Psalm 51, isn't it?
Yeah. For thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it thee.
But thou delightest not in burnt offerings.
The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit.
A broken and contrite heart shalt thou not despise.
Yeah, and of course, David is writing that, having committed adultery with Bathsheba, and his comment is that he's not going to be able to make his way back to God by the sacrifices.
The sacrifices are symbolic of how we get back to God.
How we get back to God is through the blood of Jesus Christ, and even in the Old Testament, they could only be saved by looking forward to the Messiah who's to come.
You know, the Messiah who David talks about in Psalm 2 constantly is translated as anointed one in most versions, but it is the word Messiah.
It's this acting out of what's pointing towards the Messiah.
David can't become right with God by the sacrifice of an animal, but the sacrifice of an animal was necessary before the reality came along to point people towards the reality of the sacrifice of Christ.
But in Psalm 50, God says, I paraphrase, look, do you seriously think I'm interested in the blood of these animals that I made?
I made them all.
I don't need your kind of sacrifice nonsense.
Well, I mean, all the Psalms...
Particularly these that are reflecting on things.
I'm just looking it up now because Psalm 50 is my favourite psalm.
Yeah, it was one of the top five that Alex Thompson reckons are the five most important psalms and that's one of them.
Yeah, and I agree because there's so many things in there that are telling us that God is completely other than us.
It's great. He's really cool in that song.
Yeah, if I were hungry, I would not tell you.
This is God speaking. If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world in its fullness of mine.
Some people quote verses from this psalm incorrectly.
You know, they talk about, well, the...
As if it's an encouragement to say, every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.
As if that's meant to be a blessing to us, you know, because God's got all those cattle.
That's not what the context of that line means.
It's to do with the otherness of God.
The fact that God is completely other.
And everything that we see around us, including the cattle on a thousand hills, belongs to God, not to us.
It's just telling us how other we are.
There's the line, isn't there, where God says...
You thought I was altogether like you.
And he's not.
No, he's not.
I mean, I know we're made in his image, so there's certain things that we can understand about him.
He sent his son to save us.
But the idea that we can get into the mind of God and understand what's going on, we can't because God is completely other.
Paul, I've been very naughty here because I've strayed beyond Genesis and there's already enough in Genesis to talk about.
So look, just remind me, Genesis obviously starts with the creation of the earth.
And where does it end?
Does it include... It goes as far as Joseph and stuff, doesn't it?
Or is that... Well, I think the whole of the book of Genesis is very, very important.
You get different ways of looking at this.
Some people say, well, we want to talk about creation in Genesis chapter 1, the six days of creation.
Then there's others who will say, well, it's the first three chapters that are a little bit odd.
We should look at that.
Many... I think there's things that we need to learn about the beginnings from the entire book of Genesis.
And that's why I'm sort of in the middle of trying to write a commentary on the whole of the book of Genesis.
There have been a couple of people who've written commentaries on the whole book of Genesis, but there hasn't been a creationist who believes that it's all literally true, writing a commentary on the book of Genesis since 1976.
The last person who did that was Henry Morris in his book, The Genesis Record.
That's 1976, so we're nearly 50 years, and that's why I'm attempting to write a commentary on the whole book of Genesis.
It puts everything into the context of God literally, Creating the world exactly as he says in six 24-hour periods of time.
People lived much longer in those days, didn't they?
Correct. And Methuselah was not the oldest by any stretch, was he?
Methuselah was the oldest that's recorded.
He's the oldest that's recorded to a lot of around similar age.
One of the things that I did in my early childhood was I started looking at the details of the ages in Genesis chapter 5 and in Genesis chapter 11, the so-called chrono-genealogies, because they're the only genealogies that contain dates and ages.
And when IT functions started to come in, I remember at some point in the Late 1990s, plotting in Excel spreadsheets of those, okay?
So you see the age of the patriarch, you see the age that they had their first son, and you plot those on a chart in Excel, and you'll find that before the flood, there wasn't a great deal of change in age.
Most of them were fairly constant.
Methuselah was the oldest, but they were around about the 900 year mark.
But with two exceptions, of course, Enoch, who didn't die, who was taken straight to be with God sometime in his fourth century, and Lamech, who died at the very young age of 777.
Poor chap!
Yeah, I mean, you missed out on such a lot.
But there's reasons for that, because, of course, the name Lamech means weary.
And the first ten patriarchs, they're fascinating.
If you look at...
I mean, the easiest place to look at them is in 1 Chronicles, because you've got a list of the patriarchs there.
But you'll find this in Genesis chapter 5 as well, with all the ages in between.
1 Chronicles starts in an odd way.
It just lists the names. Adam, Seth, Enosh, Canaan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, and then Shem, Haman, Japheth, and so on.
If you take the first ten...
The patriarchs up to Noah.
Okay? Adam means man.
Seth means appointed.
Enosh means mortal.
So, you see, God was reminding the people that they were mortal.
They were not going to be immortal.
They were not going to live forever. Man is appointed mortal.
Canaan means sorrow.
Mahalalel means...
The God who is to be praised.
Jared means he shall come down.
Enoch means the teacher or teaching.
Methuselah means his death will bring it about.
Lamech means weary.
Noah means rest or peace.
So you see, Lamech was weary.
So he pre-deceased Methuselah.
He died before the flood came about.
Noah is the one who was the type of Christ, if you like, appointed by God to save the eight people through the flood.
Methuselah means his death shall bring it about.
Well, there are always different ways of looking at the various dates,
but the principal way of looking at the various dates, if you do plot that Excel spreadsheet,
you'll find that Methuselah died the same year the flood came,
just a little bit earlier in the flood.
So Methuselah's death brought about the flood.
Enoch was a prophet, remember?
And so when he named his son Methuselah, he was prophesying the coming of the flood.
And so the quotation that we have of Enoch, say, in the Epistle of Jude...
It's talking about the judgment of God.
Well, the judgment of God to come at the time of Enoch was the flood coming.
So if you read all those names through with their meanings, they tell you something important.
So if you go back to 1 Chronicles and simply read the meanings and perhaps put a couple of prepositions in as well...
It actually reads like this.
Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the God who is to be praised shall come down, teaching that his death shall bring the weary rest.
Those first ten names of the patriarchs are a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah Jesus Christ.
How many children did Adam and Eve have?
We don't know. It says in Genesis 5, other sons and daughters.
There are three named ones.
Cain, Abel and Seth are the named ones.
But it says, even after Seth, that there were other sons and daughters.
So they could have had lots.
Lots. They must have done, mustn't they?
Because otherwise, I mean, where are they going to get their wives from?
It's estimated, certain other creationists who have looked into this have estimated that at the time of the Flood, the population of the Earth would probably have been a bit larger than it is today.
Oh, really? And how old do creationists think...
They presumably use metrics to work this out of some kind.
How old do creationists think the...
When were Adam and Eve around?
I actually wrote a book on this.
It's called The Biblical Age of the Earth.
Go to all good bookshops, or even Amazon, and there's a book called The Biblical Age of the Earth.
It's not a big book, and what I've done is I've not bothered with the...
The dating methods, although I can talk about those and how they actually do agree with Genesis when looked at properly with the proper presuppositions.
But if you simply take the biblical dates, you look at the chronogenealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, and then you go on to look at how long it was going to be from...
From Ishmael mocking Isaac to the time of the Exodus, that is numbered in Genesis, and various other things, historic events that go on, until eventually you come to a fixed point, which is the destruction of Jerusalem, where we can get a biblical date, how many years after creation that was, and we have a modern date, you know, so many years BC. You add them together, and you come to the idea that...
The creation must have occurred in about the year 4003 BC. So now there's a give or take a bit, OK? Because when it says so-and-so had...
Let me just check up on Genesis 5 here to get the exact wording of this, what it says, because it just gives you, therefore, a margin for error.
So when it says, for example, Seth had lived 105 years and he fathered Enosh.
Well when Enosh was born, was Enosh born on Seth's 105th birthday?
Or was he born the day before Seth's 106th birthday?
And so probably the best way of doing it is to assume that on average all of them were the age and six months, you know.
But there's a margin of error there.
There's a couple of other margins of error.
For example, when it talks about the sojourn of Israel in Egypt, is that dated, as I just suggested earlier, from Ishmael mocking Isaac, or is it dated from the very day they go into Egypt?
And there's 230 years difference.
So I could add 230 years to that 4003, stretch things back a little bit.
There's a couple of other margins for error.
I can stretch the dates back with those margins of error in the Masoretic text.
To about the year just short of the year 5000.
And if you take the dates from the Septuagint instead of from the Masoretic text, then you stretch the dates a little bit further back.
But even if you take those dates, it's not possible to stretch the age of the earth back any further than 7500 years.
And that's the date you'll get if you take all those margins of error and the dates in the Septuagint.
So the Earth cannot be more than 9,500 years old.
But Paul, what about the dinosaurs?
Yeah. We know from paleontologists like Ross on Friends that they tell us that these huge lumbering beasts walked the Earth many millions of years ago.
Yeah, you're right.
I'm sorry. We'd better stop the podcast there, haven't we?
I'd forgotten about the dinosaurs.
Actually, some things that you've said have started to change my mind.
So let me give you two quick answers because there is a classical creationist answer.
The classical creationist answer is that this is true to a certain extent.
Dinosaurs are land animals.
Land animals were made on day six.
Therefore, dinosaurs were made on day six.
So we have to assume that if there were dinosaurs, then people were around with them.
However, it's interesting.
I think creationists actually do have something wrong about dinosaurs because when I was a small boy, I was brought up on dinosaur books, evolutionary dinosaur books.
You know, you see the classical images of dinosaurs T-Rex wandering around and so on on his two hind legs.
Yeah, exactly. Now, creationist books still show the same pictures, whereas modern children's dinosaur books now show dinosaurs with feathers.
Even T-Rex is supposed to have been feathered like a bird and so on.
This is nonsense.
Because he's Tron's Rex now.
That's why. Yeah, exactly.
So... But creationists are stuck in the old 1970s evolutionary view.
And some of the things that you've been saying about dinosaurs and dragons has made me start to look at this again, which is why I wrote a Substack article.
And when I sort of revised the volume one of my commentary on Genesis, I shall put this in, because I actually no longer believe that dinosaurs were actually real.
And I think that what we're talking about with the great beasts of the Bible, the crypto beasts of the Bible, we're talking about things that are better described as dragons and dragons.
Yeah. I believe dragons were real.
Definitely. I think so.
I mean, look, we know that the dinosaurs...
We don't need to waste much time on this, but we know that the dinosaurs that now get identified in natural history museums, they were the inventions of the fervid imaginations of...
Two pairs of charlatan dinosaur collectors who competed with one another to create new species out of nothing.
And that's what they did.
They just invented their characteristics.
So yeah, dragons are much more likely.
I wanted to ask you...
I mean, all the things that one's sort of wondered about Genesis, like, for example, okay, so if everyone is living till 700, 800, 900 years, do they age like we do?
Or when they're, say, 450, are they kind of middle-aged and they look like middle-aged blokes and middle-aged women, or what?
I think that they would have aged more or less proportionately, although I don't think that they had a proportionately long childhood.
I think the childhood may have gone into perhaps the early 20s and no more than that.
But I look at that, say, in the life of Abraham, and Abraham is in a transitional period, okay?
His age is less.
By the way... You take the several things that could be said here, and my mind's sort of racing on these.
You look at the ages in Genesis 5, and I said before that they're fairly constant.
The ages after the flood, though, you plot those, and they form an exponential decay curve.
And Abraham fits on that exponential decay curve.
He was 175 when he died.
He was 100 when his son Isaac was born.
Now here's the thing.
Was he an old man of 100 when Isaac was born, as many of the picture Bibles show?
I don't think he was.
I think if you calculate these things, even with a simple proportionality, you'd find that Abraham at that time would have been something like in his...
equivalent to being in his early 40s.
When Abraham left...
The city of Haran, he was 75 years old at that time.
His wife, Sarah, would have been 65, who, by the way, was his half-sister, again showing that it was okay genetically for those sort of marriages to happen at that stage.
But she would have been the equivalent of a young lady in her early 30s.
He would have been the equivalent at that stage of a man today being in his mid-30s.
And here's what's interesting. That means therefore that Sarah was actually within childbearing years.
So the fact that in Genesis 11 it tells us that Sarah was barren is significant.
She wasn't barren because she was an old lady.
Otherwise, why bother telling us?
If she was an old lady, well beyond childbearing years, why would it bother saying anything to us?
It says something to us because she was barren.
And you think about how all the implications in that society, you know, the most common non-biblical...
My philosophy at that time would have been the Code Hammurabi, where it was assumed that somebody who could not have children, a lady who couldn't have children, was cursed, cursed by the gods.
So Sarah is here, looking as if she's cursed by the gods, because God was going to do something very special with her, which is why her name Sarah means princess, and why Abraham...
The original name Abraham meant exalted father.
God changed it to Abraham, meaning father of all.
God is working something through them.
They are types of Christ, types of what was going to come, which means a type, means a living metaphor.
They really existed. They really happened in history.
But God was doing something through them.
And so the age of Abraham, 175 at his death, and 100 when Isaac was born, It's completely dependent on what happens in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
The fact that you've got this decay in ages after the Flood.
Because you had a genetic bottleneck at the Flood, you only had 8 people surviving the Flood.
So the decay of genes would multiply very fast, which is why the ages decay.
And if you follow that exponential decay curve in Excel, you'll find it resolves at the age of 70.
Which is interesting because what does the Psalms tell us?
Psalms tell us the age is three score years and ten.
Yes. So you see how all this fits together.
And if you don't believe the book of Genesis to be literally true, you miss out all this wonderful stuff.
Okay. So you're saying how many people survived the flood?
Eight. Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives.
Okay. And that's it.
What about the Nephilim?
Well, any that were on the earth at that time would not have survived the flood.
But, you know, it does say that there were Nephilim on the earth in those days in Genesis and then after.
So maybe the sort of conditions that caused the Nephilim could have occurred later, not just in Genesis 6.
Oh, so you think that the original Nephilim were wiped out and a new set of Nephilim were created...
Absolutely, because there's always been evil and there's always been demons around.
So demons are no different today in many ways than they were before the Flood.
Demons are the same today as they were in the Middle Ages, weren't they?
Because in the Middle Ages you had demons or demonic creatures like fairies and goblins abducting people and carrying out experiments on them rather in the same way that aliens are supposed to do today.
So there's nothing new under the sun.
These things are all the same and all go back to Genesis 6.
Right, so your take on that is, yes, everything was wiped out apart from the eight, the surviving eight.
And it's not only my idea, because of course Jesus says that, that everything was wiped out during the flood.
Right, okay. So everything was destroyed, and of course it does say that in Genesis 9, that everything had been destroyed.
All life had perished.
Yes. That can be the only other explanation, because we know, you and I know, and anyone who's awake knows whether they're a Christian or not, The demons and the seed of the serpent are very much with us and very much ruling the world.
Spiritual life was not wiped out by the flood, was it?
No. And even the eight people on the ark...
They were not perfect human beings.
Noah was doing what God wanted, but none of these people were perfect human beings.
And it's not very long after the flood that the people who are descended from those eight people start to become evil again.
So we get the Tower of Babel and all sorts of other things.
How long after the flood is the Tower of Babel?
Probably about 150 years.
Right. I'm not sure of the exact time.
I'm just taking that because I'm assuming that Nimrod, and I can't prove this, but Nimrod is mentioned as setting up cities like Babylon, so it must have been his generation.
His generation would have been probably counting down the same generation as Peleg.
And of course it says in Genesis 10 that it was in the days of Peleg that the earth was divided.
And what that's referring to is not the physical division of continents, because that happened in the flood.
It's referring to the anthropological division of people groups being forced to spread out over the world.
And that, of course, was something that would happen after the time of Israel.
Babel. So I'm not going to make...
This is not a hard fact, OK? This is not something that I'm going to die...
It's not a hill to die on.
But I am suggesting, therefore, that Babel was founded by Nimrod probably round about the time of the 10th generation after Noah.
And that would be approximately 150 years, maybe a bit more.
I think we can safely infer, can we not, that Nimrod was Nephilim.
I think that is quite possible.
You know, my views on this are changing at the moment.
If you read volume one of my commentary on Genesis, I was firmly at that stage, and I published that in 2016, I was firmly of the Sethite view at that stage.
Though again, I didn't then think that was a hill to die on, you know, a sort of naturalistic view, and I've changed my views on that.
What's the Sethite view?
The Sethite view is that the sons of God were simply the descendants of Seth and the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain.
And I'm no longer taking that view.
So when I get round to revising it, I shall change that.
And that's been mainly by a book that I can recommend by my friend Tim Chafee, which is called Fallen, where he does a thorough...
Run through the entire Bible on the subject of demonology, but particularly concentrating on Genesis 6 and who the Nephilim were, who the giants were, who the sons of God were, who the daughters of men were.
And He is very definitely of the view that the sons of God referred to there are demonic spirits who had been directly created by God and fallen angels, in other words, and that the daughters of men were therefore any men, any human women, and that they were being impregnated by demonic spirits.
And that's where we get the Nephilim and the mighty men of old.
I think that is a hill I would die on, actually.
I'm becoming more and more convinced of that, and I would recommend people read Tim's book on that.
Okay. That sounds like a good recommend.
Look, it's obvious to me.
So I've had sort of two parallel lives.
I have my... Two parallel revelatory moments.
One is my Christian revelation and the other is my kind of red-pilled revelation.
And the two have merged because actually I think that everything connects.
You cannot understand the things that red-pilled people are talking about unless you understand the spiritual nature of Of this war, whose origins are explained in Genesis.
And I don't think that the seed of the serpent are a metaphor.
I do believe that their walk among us, the descendants of the fallen angels, and that this is why...
This explains scenes in the Old Testament that a lot of Christians find very uncomfortable.
The scenes where God enjoins the children of Israel to wipe out every last member of particular tribes and their animals.
And the Israelites are squeamish and don't do it.
I'll come back to that if I may in a minute.
Yeah, but I think it's all about trying to eradicate the seed of the serpent, because God's omniscient.
He knows what's coming. He knows that...
Yeah, okay, so it's nasty, wiping out, you know, it's kind of genocide, but at the same time, it's genocide of evil...
Anyway. Isn't this why, though, that Psalm 50 is so important, telling us that God is other...
Okay? Because certain things God can do, whereas if we imitated them, we would be wrong.
For example, if God is angry, he is justly and righteously angry.
There's always a certain aspect where we can sometimes be rightly angry, but usually anger is described as a sin because we're out of control angry.
We're angry against things we shouldn't be angry about.
God isn't. God is never angry about things that he shouldn't be angry about.
plus God is patient and we forget that when we read about you know what Richard Dawkins talks
about the genocidal aspects of God having all these people groups killed but then you actually
go back to Genesis which again is why Genesis is important even after chapter 11 and you find out
that God is warning those Canaanite people 450 years before he then commands the people of Israel
They had the chance to repent.
They had 450 years to repent and they didn't do it.
Then God says, that's enough, we'll wipe them out.
But even then there were people he didn't wipe out who repented.
So you've got the Gibeonites who tricked the Israelites into thinking they were from a long way away.
So the Israelites gave a covenant saying, we won't destroy you.
And what's interesting is when God reveals to them that they had made a mistake, He doesn't then say, well now wipe the Gibeonites out.
No, he thinks that their promises are more important.
So the Gibeonites were allowed to survive out of the Canaanites because the Israelites had given them their solemn word and God thought that their solemn word was more important than their wiping out.
Then of course you've got individuals.
So you've got Rahab the prostitute in Jericho who is counted as righteous and she's even in the line of descent of Jesus Christ himself.
Because... Rahab the prostitute.
Yeah, Rahab the prostitute who takes the spies into Jericho.
Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a great scene, that.
Yeah, it is. And she's in the genealogy of Jesus.
And she is a Canaanite.
But God actually has this Canaanite woman in his line of genealogy because of her faith.
Because her faith saved her.
She had faith in the Messiah to come.
And he's not the only one.
She's probably got lizard blood in her, hasn't she?
I mean, she's bound to have being a Canaanite.
Which just goes to show you can be a seed of the serpent or have that blood in you.
God can save anybody.
I wrote a book about the flood called Don't Miss the Boat and I was trying to explain what I thought life was like before the flood and I decided to do that.
I would write four short stories.
So it's fiction and I label it as fiction.
I didn't try and pull the wool over people's eyes, but I wrote a little brief biography,
fictional biography of the four children of Lamech, not the Lamech, the father of Noah,
the other Lamech, the Lamech who is the descendant of Cain.
And I actually imagined in that, that his daughter Nema was, actually gave her heart to God
and married Ham, the son of Noah, and therefore she was one of the eight who was saved. Now
that's fiction, okay, I can't prove any of that.
But I thought that was neat and probably worked.
So I think anyone can be saved.
Of course, he's not the only one, because don't forget that God told the Israelites you will never marry a Moabite person.
You mustn't marry a Moabite person.
They're out beyond the pale because they wouldn't help the Israelites in the desert.
So the law is you don't marry a Moabite person.
But you see, there's also the laws that anyone who gives their heart to God is counted as a person of God.
So, you've got at the beginning of the book of Ruth, you've got the Elimelech, and his name means God who will provide
it.
He lives in Bethlehem, which of course means the house of bread.
But there's famine in the land, and so they decide to go to Moab.
He, Elimelech, and his wife Naomi, and the two sons.
The two sons. Well, Elimelech dies.
The two sons die.
They have married Moabitess girls, Ruth and Orpah.
Naomi starts to make her way back to Israel.
The two girls both go with her because they both love her.
And she says, no, you must go back to Canaan.
And at first, both girls refuse.
But she stops him and she entreats him and says, no, I'm not going to have sons to provide new wives, new husbands for you.
You must go back and marry among your own people.
And which of those two girls was the most obedient?
The answer is Orpah, because she obeys Naomi and goes back to Moab.
But Ruth refuses to go back.
She disobeys Naomi.
Why? Because she says, wherever you go, I will go.
Your God will be my God.
Your people will be my people.
She gives her heart to God.
And Ruth, the Moabitess, is allowed to be spared.
Not only that, but she marries Boaz, who is in the messianic line.
And therefore...
Ruth is also in the Messianic line.
She is also a Moabitess who God said don't ever marry into and God has her in the line of Jesus because she was no longer a Moabitess just as Rahab was no longer a Canaanite.
They had given their hearts to God and were counted as God's people.
Which is good news for Bill Gates and Tony Blair.
Even they could be saved.
Not Hillary Clinton though.
Come on. I have my doubts that any of those will be saved.
Or Obama. I think they're so far gone they won't.
But... That's my opinion.
And if one of them turned to Christ and was saved, we'd both be saying, praise God, wouldn't we?
Welcome into the family, brother.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's unlikely to happen, but it could.
We must, we must, we must.
It was very unlikely that someone like Ruth and someone like Rahab would be in the family of God, but they were.
Although, I don't think there's any record in the Old Testament, or anywhere, of Ruth having sacrificed children to Baal.
And that's why I think it's unlikely that those people you mentioned will be saved, because I think they've done things which are so blasphemous.
They're beyond... Yeah, that would be my inference.
Now, I have to ask you, Paul, this has always puzzled me.
Noah's Ark. Yep.
So, we know that Noah's Ark existed because traces of it have been found on Mount Ararat, haven't they?
Well, that's what some people say.
I have my doubts, but...
Do you? No, I don't.
I don't, too. I'm fully...
The Lewis Ark existed, without doubt.
Yeah. It's just that the Ark has been found in a couple of different places, and these things don't always agree, but...
Okay. It's possible, and I would be very excited if I could be convinced of it.
It's just not important to my faith to find those pieces of the Ark, just like it's not important to my faith to have pieces of the true cross.
Okay. Fine.
Um... So we know that the ark was very big.
We have its dimensions, don't we?
Yeah, about one and a half football pitches long.
Okay. So how did Noah and his wife and sons go and collect all the animals?
I mean, some of them must have been really hard.
Okay, so poisonous snakes, you know, the black mamba, say, that would have been quite, you know, because they're quite fast.
Well, it doesn't say that they had to collect poisonous snakes, does it?
Well, why wouldn't you? They had to collect snakes.
Yeah, but that line would then presuppose that evolutionary theory somehow operates, because you're saying all they had to get was a snake, and that these snakes evolved into other snakes.
Well, let me ask you this question, which will explain that.
How many lions did Noah take on the ark?
Well, a male and a female, I suppose.
No, he didn't take any lions on the ark at all.
Lions didn't exist at that time.
This is not evolution.
This is actually the opposite of evolution.
Species develop.
So tigers and lions and all other types, all other species of cats have developed from the two cats,
the two progenitors of the cat family that Noah took on the ark.
Speciation is actually the opposite of evolution because it involves an existing gene pool.
You can get a sorting out of genes within an existing gene pool that produces species and breeds.
But that's not an upward thing because evolution requires the spontaneous creation of new genetic information.
So, all in all, Noah probably took, and he didn't take two of every animal, he took two of every land animal and flying animal, and they had to be vertebrates that had lungs, because, of course, insects can survive in a catatonic state in floods anyway.
So he didn't take insects onto the ark.
He didn't take woodworm onto the ark, fortunately.
He took two of each animal, probably a total of around 7,000 kinds of animals, because they weren't species, there were kinds of animals.
Two of the cat kind, two of the dog kind, two of the horse kind and so on, from which the various other...
I'm glad about the horses. Yeah.
But, you know, all the zebras and donkeys and so on would have developed from those two equine kinds on the ark.
OK, now... I'm going to ask you in a moment how you get there.
But first of all, how do you know there were no lions?
Because they have developed from the cats that Noah took on the ark.
When I say cats, I don't mean pet cats.
Something like maybe the saber-toothed cats or something of that sort.
There would have been two felines on the ark from which all cats have developed since the flood as they spread out over the earth.
And how do you...
Okay. So, but this is just surely just inference.
I mean, how do you know this?
It's a strong inference, but it's scientific because we know that these species develop.
We see those. We never see evolution.
We never see a new creature develop because new genetic information has been produced.
But we do see speciation. We do see new species developing all the time from an existing gene pool.
What's happened is some genes have been switched off or removed and you've probably got less genes in the newer
species than you had in the older, in the old species or they've been rearranged in some way.
But that is observed and the Bible doesn't talk about species. There are millions and millions of species in the
world.
Yeah.
It only talks about kinds, and it says that these kinds would produce young according to their kind.
So you've got development of dogs within dogs.
All dogs have developed from some pair of wolf-like creatures that must have been on the ark, and the same with all the various other ones, which is why I'm saying there would have been About 7,000 kinds, of which, therefore, if there's two of each, seven of some, I know, but two of most of them, so approximately 14,000 animals.
There's been a learned scientific paper on the Answers in Genesis website, well, a series of about half a dozen papers, that explain this, peer-reviewed scientific papers that, if people are interested, they can go and look for.
I hate that phrase, peer-reviewed.
I don't trust anything that's peer-reviewed.
Yeah, well, these are peer-reviewed by people who believe the Bible to be literally true.
Right. Okay.
So... When...
Noah's Ark is about 4000 BC? Yes, 1656 years, Anno Mundi, after the year of creation.
So that would have been about...
Yeah, it would be about two and a half thousand years BC, wouldn't it?
Two and a half thousand BC. So...
The speciation process must have been pretty rapid.
Very rapid indeed. And of course that's something that we also observe.
Whereas evolutionists tell us it's got to be painfully slow.
But it's not true. We can observe it in the laboratories.
And of course don't forget you're talking about very widely a period of time after the flood when there was nothing else on the earth I think?
Even today, when you get new species, it's usually because of isolation.
But isolation would have been much easier and more common in the years after the flood when animals were repopulating the world.
Okay. So, he didn't need to pack any fish.
No, and by the way, you said about how did Noah get all these.
It doesn't say that. It actually says in the Bible, God brought them to Noah.
It's a supernatural event.
Noah never had to go and look for them.
Oh, okay. So yes, there would have been no fish on the...
No amphibians. Probably no amphibians, but they were vertebrates, so there may have been some.
But there certainly wouldn't have been any insects.
Insects can largely...
You know, they're in huge populations anyway, and they can survive in a catatonic state.
Some of them would have been clinging to vegetation rafts.
You know, dead plants and things floating around.
But they can survive those sort of conditions.
And besides which, the Bible specifically says that it's land animals and flying animals that have the breath of life within them.
So it's land and flying vertebrates.
Not marine vertebrates, so not fish, not even marine mammals like whales and so on.
It would have been land animals and flying animals that had lungs.
So, okay, so the birds, because the birds, I mean, how long was it before the flood receded?
The whole flood took over a year before things were receding properly.
And by the way, the fact that Noah was told that there had to be birds on the ark and birds were brought to Noah proves that the flood could not have been a local event, because why would that have mattered?
Birds could have simply flown over the mountain range.
So the flood was definitely a global event, the entire earth being covered by water.
Right. Okay.
And in terms of feeding and looking after the animals, I mean, and the kind of different cages they might have had or whatever, how do you reckon that worked?
Yeah, well, it does say that Noah was commanded to make rooms, cages is a good interpretation, for the animals to keep them apart so that the cats don't start eating the rabbits or whatever.
But there would have been these.
Now, there were three decks on the Ark, and you've only got eight people.
They only needed the top deck.
There would have been plenty of room to store...
Food, to store places for the animals to live and so on, and even to get rid of waste products.
The Answers in Genesis organization have made a life-size model arc that you can tour in Petersburg, in Kentucky, and it's worth doing.
And a lot of it is supposition, but it's good supposition.
But again, they're not creating a hill to die.
And if you think the ark was slightly different inside, they're not going to be upset.
but they simply want to show you a model of how it could have been done even allowing for the sort
of early technology that people think was post-flood technology. But you know there's always
the possibility as they themselves say and I personally believe that technology before the
flood could actually have been very advanced. But even if you think it wasn't, even if you think it
was sort of early medieval or early biblical type technology you could still make a working
arc where you could store food and get rid of waste products with that sort of technology.
But they would have really had their work cut out I mean even if we're talking about 7,000
pairs of kinds or whatever.
It would have been a busy time, yes.
But, I mean, again, you can...
I mean, think about it. It's difficult enough feeding a dog and a cat.
Yeah, but you can have gravity feed systems.
And so even with the technologies, even if you think that the technology was simple, there are still things that could have been done to make sure there was automatic feeding, automatic watering, that they wouldn't necessarily have needed to go to all the cages every day.
But what about the carnivores?
Because where are you going to get the meat to feed the carnivores?
Well, maybe they stored extra animals that were to be needed for food.
You know, it's a possibility. You could imagine them having lots of giant turtles and to be able to...
That's a bit sad though, isn't it, Paul?
You imagine you're an animal and you think, I've made it, I'm on the ark.
And then you discover, oh, my job is to be eaten by the other animals.
I'm not going to survive. Well, I mean, they're not thinking.
They don't think in the same way that we do, because they're not made in the image of God.
But there is, I mean, there are all sorts of different views, because we said these sort of details are not hills to die on.
The existence of the Ark and the fact that it was real is, but the mechanisms are not.
Another school of thought suggests that although there may have been some carrion eating before the flood, that full-blooded carnivorous behaviour is something that would have developed after the flood when you've got very small populations of animals.
Oh, okay.
Okay. I mean, it's quite obvious that in Gen.
1, all animals were made to eat plants.
And that's why the idea that you can look at a Tyrannosaurus Rex and say, he's got sharp teeth, therefore he ate meat, is not true.
After all, there are plenty of sharp-toothed animals today that don't eat meat.
You look at, say, the flying fox, the world's biggest bat.
It's got enormous fangs in its mouth so that it can rip through the flesh of melons.
It eats hard-skinned fruit, and that's what its sharp teeth are for.
Do you think...
Tyrannosaurus rex was not created to eat meat because God had, in a perfect world, all animals would have eaten plants.
Yeah, well Tyrannosaurus rex wasn't created to do anything because it was never created.
Well, I know what you're saying, but you know what I'm saying too.
If you find a fossil with sharp teeth, you cannot infer from that that it eats meat.
Oh, I see. That's what I'm saying.
Yes. So, do we think that there were dragons aboard the ark?
If they were land animals at that time, yes, there would have been, because when I was believing in dinosaurs, I would have thought that there were two of every kind of dinosaur.
And by the way, even with a sort of creationist view of dinosaurs, there wouldn't have been that many dinosaurs, probably only about 80 kinds of whether we call them dinosaurs or dragons.
Paul, stop it.
Don't even entertain the nonsense about dinosaurs.
Don't even give them...
Well, I'm sort of trying to develop a new thought about dragons.
If there were clearly dragon land animals before the Flood, therefore there would have been pairs of dragons on the Ark, yes.
Yeah. I haven't got time for these.
I get this sometimes.
I get Christians saying, oh, but you don't understand.
If you go to christianwebsite.com, you'll find lots of people talking about how dinosaurs were real.
No, just go away.
They're not. They're talking about dragons.
Stop it. Yeah. You're right.
You're right. Yeah, yeah.
But there must have been different types of dragons because the mythologies talk about different types of dragons, don't they?
Some with wings, some that don't have wings.
Well, we see that even today, you've got Commodore dragons which haven't got wings.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure whether they'd have been the same as dragons.
I think this is back analysis.
They were given the name dragon because they looked like it.
Yes, well, that's quite possibly true.
But, I mean, there are other creatures, too, that we may not have named as dragons.
I mean, what was Grendel in Beowulf?
Grendel, I don't think, was a man-like creature.
I think it's some sort of an animal that walks on twos on its hind legs.
But it's clearly an animal, and so is Grendel's mother.
They're very beast-like in the description.
I think that Beowulf is actually talking about, the saga is talking about a real animal there.
Whatever name you give it, it's real.
What about Behemoth in Job chapter 40?
I think that's a real animal.
Ah, do you know, funnily enough, I was going to ask you about that and Leviathan.
Yeah, exactly. And that must be true, because it says it in the Bible.
So, you know, I'm not going to start some sort of mythology and say, well, it doesn't really mean fire.
It says fire. It means fire.
Behemoth is a big animal, and some Bible notes, footnotes it, don't they, and say, this must be an elephant or a hippopotamus.
And here's the thing. The creature behemoth is described as having a tail like a cedar tree.
And I'm not saying it has branches off it, but it's clearly as thick as a cedar tree, a very big tree.
Now, if you look at an elephant's bottom, it doesn't have a big cedar tree-type tail sticking out the back.
And I've heard some people say, well, they were referring to the trunk.
Well, honestly, if you think that ancient people were really so thick that they couldn't tell the difference between an elephant's nose and its bottom, then I think you've got some problems with what you think about the intelligence of ancient people.
But this has been part of the SIOP that has been perpetrated against us.
Absolutely. So we've been brought up that every person who's had traditional education knows that when you read historians' sort of Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just kind of like crazy stuff that we can we can talk about amusingly on our history our
Enormous history podcast, but it but it but this stuff isn't you know, don't take it seriously folks
And we're encouraged to think that Geoffrey of Monmouth, this is just sort of crazy stuff from the Middle Ages.
It's got no relation to the history of real Britain.
I think he was a very good historian, personally.
Oh, I think, and so did Flinders Petrie, the eminent archaeologist, who said, hang on a second, this guy is Probably knows what he's talking about.
And in the same way, we're encouraged to think, yeah, the Bible is written by these...
these...
patriarchal men.
Primitive. They didn't really...
When they say stuff...
We shouldn't take it seriously.
It's the way with all ancient histories.
We're encouraged to distrust anything from the deep past.
Now what do you think about Bishop Bell's tomb in Carlisle Cathedral then?
Are you familiar with that? Tell me about it.
I mean, they have it covered with a mat.
And if you go to visit Carlisle Cathedral, you can ask them to uncover it so you can have a look at it.
They won't like doing it.
First, it's got lots of animals around the outside of his tomb.
Now, Bishop Bell died in the early 15th century.
And there's lots of animals drawn around the tomb.
And here's the thing. Some of the animals drawn around the tomb are today extinct in Britain, but would have been around at the time of Bishop Bell.
So you've got some bears there.
A couple of other things I can't remember.
But here's the thing. There's this long-necked creature.
Long neck, long tail.
Basically answering the description of Behemoth in Job chapter 40.
And it's interesting that God puts a description in there because people in the Middle East would have known what elephants were.
They did travel as far as India.
They would have known what elephants were.
So if it had been an elephant, they would have just said it's an elephant.
They would have known what hippos were.
If it had been a hippo, they would have just put hippo.
The fact that it was described in detail is because God knew that by the time most people would be reading the Bible, that creature was no longer there.
And so there's a full description so you know what it is.
And that creature is there engraved on Bishop Bell's tomb.
Whatever it is, it's a behemoth.
I'd like to go and see Bishop Bell's tomb.
In other words, it must have been around in the early 15th century in Britain.
That's what I'm saying. So if we're only...
The Earth is only, what, 4,500 years old?
No, the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
About 6,000 years old. It was created approximately 4004 BC. What's your take on Graham Hancock and his histories of ancient cities?
Are they just not as old as he says?
Yes, they're not as old as he says.
I don't accept the idea of artefacts.
Well, some would be buried under the flood, but the idea that you'd get big buildings like the pyramids of Egypt surviving, I think the pyramids must be post-flood.
Early post-flood.
Very early post-flood, but likely to be post-flood.
So, what do you say, 2500 BC? The Flood would be about 2,500...
The Flood was definitely 1,656 years after the creation of the world.
So whatever date you're going to take as the creation of the world, which I'm saying is probably about 4003 BC. And by the way, Archbishop Usher, in the 16th century...
No, 17th century.
Archbishop Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, in his huge book, The Annals of the World, says that the earth was created about 4004.
And a lot of people ridiculed him by saying, you know, but the thing is, he wasn't saying it was definitely then.
He was saying it's round about that time.
He gave a date, October 31st, 4004 BC. But that's only because that corresponded in the Julian calendar to the Jewish New Year.
So it makes sense for the earth to have begun on New Year's Day.
God says that's the beginning of everything.
Everything is dated from that point.
So it makes sense. But it doesn't mean that it's a hill to die on to say it's exactly that mountain.
The earth is approximately 6,000 years old, in my opinion.
Not exactly.
So who was that bishop, you said?
Archbishop James Usher.
He's an interesting person to read about.
He was born in Dublin, eventually became Archbishop of Armagh.
When he eventually resigned from that post, he went to live in England.
He was a royalist at the time, but he was so well thought of that even after the king had been beheaded, Oliver Cromwell gave him a state pension because he considered him to be an important biblical scholar.
So it's an interesting person to read about.
Yeah, yeah. It sounds it.
It's interesting to get hold of a copy of his book, The Animals of the World.
There are a few places where you can get published versions.
Have you read it? Yeah. I've got a copy.
And is it pretty much in line with what you've just been saying?
Yes. Master Books, which basically is more or less the publishing house of answers in Genesis, have done a really wonderful version of it, which they have slightly modernised some of the words so that you can understand them, and they've footnoted the old words so that you know what he originally wrote.
They've actually footnoted the old page numbers too, because obviously the modern page numbers don't fit, but you can therefore quote and find the page numbers of the original page.
You know, book from the era of Charles I, and it's a very good book to get hold of.
Okay. So, where are you on Atlantis?
I'm not 100% certain.
It seems to me, again, not a hill to die on, but it seems to me that many of the stories of Atlantis, of a lost civilisation, now buried under the water, are reflecting ideas of basically a pre-flood civilisation.
And I think that the civilisation of the world before the flood was highly advanced technologically.
Right. And who gave us that technology?
Was it the Fallen Angels?
Probably. Yeah.
Probably. Although some people would have developed it righteously too, you know, and it would have been used by both sides.
But the earliest accounts of technology are among the descendants of Cain, aren't they?
Not the descendants of Seth, which is interesting.
The Cainite Lamech Not Noah's father Lamech, another Lamech.
Lamech, seventh in line after Cain.
He had three sons and a daughter.
And those three sons are described in terms of the technologies that they have.
The father of husbandry, farming.
The father of musical instruments, playing the flute and the lyre.
And the father of metalworking.
And so you've got those three industries described there.
And I think, therefore, although I think it's interesting to say that the arc, as I mentioned before, could have worked even with primitive technologies, I'm saying I didn't think they were primitive technologies personally, because I think the technology before the flood was highly advanced.
I think they probably had electricity.
They may even have had computing power.
Oh, really? Why do you think that?
Because an analogue computer was discovered, wasn't it, at the bottom of some mud under the Black Sea.
And, you know, models of it and taking x-ray photographs of it suggest that the thing could have worked and could have done computations of some sort.
And since I also think they probably had electricity because of batteries having been found around near where the Tower of Babel would have been, I think it's perfectly possible you could put the two things together and suggest that they may have had computing power.
I don't know. It doesn't say so in the Bible.
I just think it is possible that before the flood, because the population of the world was bigger than it is today, I think it's possible that technology developed much more rapidly before the flood and they had a lot of technology before the flood.
How do you know that the population was bigger than it is today?
If you give a reasonably good estimate for the number of people, you ask me how many children did Adam and Eve have, I don't know, but you try and work out how many they could have had during a lifetime before they would get old, too old to have children, and then sort of infer that for the other generations, and then for all those various children having children and so on, that's how you infer what the population size could have been.
And they wouldn't have had vaccine injury to ruin their health.
Well, you're only talking about long-lived people because there were not many genetic problems.
No. Would they have had vaccines?
I don't know. No, of course they wouldn't.
If they did, they wouldn't have.
Yeah, but would they have been used for evil purposes?
They wouldn't have had vaccines at all, Paul.
You shouldn't take some of my fly remarks seriously.
I'm not really. Duh, they wouldn't have had.
I'm not really. I'm just saying that I think vaccines are evil.
Yeah, exactly. So they wouldn't have had vaccines in that sort of pre-lapsarian, pre-diluvian, anti-diluvian.
Antidiluvian. No, I was making a flippant comment.
Ah, okay. It's probably the evil of vaccines.
They'd probably have had the...
They'd have all taught the same language, wouldn't they?
So that would have helped. Yes, I would think so.
Because the language division didn't come, did it, until after the flood at the Tower of Babel.
So, well, we must know what that language...
We must have a vestige of that language, because Noah and his wife and his sons and daughters...
Yeah, well, the question then is, after Babel, did every single person get a new language?
And I know you can point to development of languages, but there you've got them in groups, aren't there?
Because there are certain language groups that are completely unrelated, totally, to other language groups.
So... Did every person get a new language or did some not?
I have heard some suggest that the original language was Hebrew.
I don't know. How do you think all the bad civilizations came about?
I mean, okay, so you've got the Egyptians.
God generally doesn't like the Egyptians because he destroys them in the parting of the Red Sea and takes great delight in it.
And you've got Babylon and you've got Where you've got the Canaanites and you've got all this bunch of people that God doesn't much like.
Yeah. Where did they all come from?
Well, I mean, don't you really date all those things back to Babylon, really?
The Tower of Babel.
So Babylon is the Tower of Babel.
Yes. The words mean the same thing.
They're in the same place. Yeah, we're talking about the Tower of Babel.
And I think a lot of the problem civilizations date back to that time and that civilization.
I did once hear a guy give a talk about European megalithic monuments.
And he didn't believe that they were ancient stone age type things.
He thought that you could trace them going westwards across Europe and eventually ending up with things like the Karnak stones and Stonehenge.
And he says although they're so different from each other, one thing they all have in common is their astronomical uses or maybe astrological uses.
And what's that to do with?
In their different ways, they are still trying to get to the heavens by their own means.
And isn't that precisely the sin of the people of Babel?
Trying to build a tower unto heaven by their own means.
And that's why God frustrates them by scattering their languages.
So he was saying that just using the European megaliths, you're actually tracing a migration
from Babel westwards. And he was suggesting that if somebody did the research on other
civilizations, you would probably find the same sort of thing. Basically, the bad civilizations
of the world are all trying to make their own way towards some sort of enlightenment,
some sort of image of what they think God is by their own means.
They want to get to heaven under their own steam.
Right. And where are you on the shape of the Earth?
I tread carefully.
I will tread carefully.
I'm probably not with you on that.
I think when in the Bible God talks about hanging the world on nothing and the world being talking about the circle of the earth the word used for circle there is not the normal Hebrew word for circle it's a word that's usually used for sphere I think that it's likely that the earth is spherical but the earth is the most important object in the universe Because that's the way God has made it.
I don't believe in life on other planets.
I don't think that there's life anywhere else.
God has put life here and here only.
What is this word, planet?
Well, planet simply means a wanderer, doesn't it?
Does the Bible tell us that Jupiter is a thing?
Yeah, it does talk about Venus, doesn't it?
Using the term Aurora, the morning star.
And it does use the word planet in the book of Jude.
And of course, there are various...
It talks about various things.
It talks about Sirius. It talks about Orion.
It talks about the Pleiades.
So these things are referred to in Scripture.
But precisely what they mean, and, you know, just to...
Not to sort of back up anything I say too strongly here, because under your views of the idea of a flat earth and a canopy, those things would still have meaning, wouldn't they?
Well, that's the thing.
It doesn't prove anything.
It's weird that I am actually out-bibbling a crazy creationist.
I mean, you're pretty out there, Paul, but I'd say...
I'm even more out there.
Because I believe that the firmament is...
that there are waters above, like it says in the Bible.
I don't believe in... I don't believe in space.
Out of space. I believe in the waters above.
The problem is that certain creationists used to think that the flood came from the waters above.
They thought that the flood had collapsed.
Well, that's not my fault. No.
I can't be held responsible for the wrongness of certain creationists.
I don't believe...
That the universe is infinite.
Okay? And there are some creations who do, but I don't think so, because the only thing that's infinite is God.
And the Psalms talk, Psalm 104 talks about the waters above, and Psalm 104 was definitely written after the flood, so the waters above are still there.
So whatever you think the firmament is, and whatever you think the waters above are, they are still there.
And that works with your view and it works with my view.
Because I don't think, I think, my picture in my head of the universe is of something bounded, like a very large sphere with waters beyond that.
Yeah, you know how else we know that Psalm 104 was written quite a while after the flood?
Because it says it's the Psalm of David?
No, because it's got lions in it.
Oh yes! Good!
It's got one of the best lion scenes in the Bible.
So they obviously had speciated from the cats that were on the ark.
It's a really good scene where it describes the lions going to bed in the day and having been hunting all night.
What about unicorns then?
The lion and the unicorn? I think unicorns probably existed as well.
So do I. Good.
Yeah, I don't think they were narwhals.
No, and I don't think they were really necessarily pure white horses with a horn on the forehead.
But there were certainly creatures that had a single horn.
They definitely did not have tinsel and rainbow colouring on them.
Yeah, they didn't poo rainbows, did they?
No. I was thinking about this the other day.
This is a good question.
Do you think rainbows existed before the flood?
No. Good answer.
Why? Again, it wouldn't necessarily cause a problem if someone could take me back in a time machine and show me that there were.
Rainbows occur because of the diffusion of light through drops of rain.
Drops of rain form around dust particles.
I don't think there were many dust particles before the flood.
The flood came about by volcanic activity.
It's that volcanic activity with the dust from that.
You know, it talks about the opening of the fountains of the deep, and I'm suggesting that that's volcanic, because volcanoes produce plenty of water as well as the fire and brimstone and stuff.
And I was suggesting that that is volcanic.
The mechanism that God used, he talks about the fountains of the deep.
So the atmosphere would have had drops of water in it by then, so you've got rain.
And after the flood, once the clouds have gone, you've got the sun, you can have rain and sun, therefore you can have rainbows.
I don't think you could realistically have had rainbows before the flood for that reason.
And besides which...
It's not just the science here.
Let's look at the theology of it, because God used the rainbow as a sign of his first covenant.
The first covenant he ever made was the covenant with Noah, and that covenant is basically with Noah and all his descendants, which means everyone, because everyone living on earth is a descendant of Noah.
It's the only covenant that works for every human being on the earth.
And so God made that covenant, and every covenant he made, there are five covenants in all in the Bible, every covenant he made, he gave a sign, and the sign of the Noah covenant is the rainbow.
So every time you see a rainbow, you don't think to yourself, ah, gay marriage is okay, because that's not what God said.
Instead, you see the sign of the rainbow, and you think, ah, God is never going to send another flood To judge the world until the world comes to me.
I always think of our NHS when I see the rainbow, but that's just me.
And you hear banging pots and pans.
I do. I see Nigel Farage on his doorstep.
Oh, wonderful. Fancy having that image in your head.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, Paul, it is, I've been, this is my wife signalling that it's coffee time.
That's a good idea. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you're dying to talk about?
Oh, hundreds of things, but maybe we'll get the chance to have another chat sometime.
Well, we should, but apart from your stupid time zones, I asked you at the beginning, why are you living in America?
Well, originally I went to America because I was working for Answers in Genesis at their British office in Leicester, and then another organisation called Creation Today wanted me to go over and help them set up a television programme.
They were based in Pensacola in Florida.
That's why I originally went to America, but I stayed there once I was down the route of getting permanent residency.
Root! You've got American, it's pronounced Root!
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what else.
If you're having a cup of coffee, I'm having a cup of coffee now as well, and it'll be real coffee.
It will be none of this instant stuff that you have back in Britain.
I've become an American coffee store.
No, no, no. I only drink filter coffee or...
Good. Because don't forget, we have imported the Italian tradition, for example.
Yeah. Why am I living in Idaho, though, specifically?
Because I was living in Washington State, eventually, running a ministry there at Mount St.
Helens, which was something we could talk about for hours.
Okay, Mount St. Helens, it's interesting.
But I thought...
Probably wrongly.
But, you know, Washington State is one of the left-hand coast states that will probably eventually form the People's Republic of the Left Coast.
I thought at one stage, it was in 2020, when all this stupid nonsense was kicking off, that there was a strong possibility that Governor Inslee was even going to close the borders.
And I thought if I don't get out to Washington State now, I might never do.
A lot of people forget that in November, when you have the elections in America,
you have elections for all sorts of things.
And we could talk for hours about the presidential election, but the most
important election on the Tuesday in November is not the presidential election.
The most important election people should vote in is for their local sheriff.
And where I live, we have a local sheriff who refused to refuse to implement
mask mandates, vaccine mandates.
He refuses to implement any sort of gun control.
He has even sent his deputies to defend people from masks.
One veteran from the FBI forces who were coming to confiscate his guns, he went onto his property to defend that man, saying, if you step over onto this gentleman's property to try and get his guns, he says, I will have you arrested.
So we have a sheriff who is worth voting for, and it's an unusual thing, and that is why I'm living here.
I love your sheriff. Because this is a place, he's called Daryl Wheeler, he's a Christian, he's a godly man.
Daryl Wheeler. Yeah.
Not, is it Wheeler? You know, I've forgotten his name now.
Don't forget his name. Yeah, yeah, it's Daryl Wheeler.
Daryl Wheeler, yes. Vote for Daryl Wheeler.
Okay. The point is...
You've got to be in a place where you can be defended.
Idaho is a rhino state.
It's got a supposedly Republican governor who basically caves in on everything.
But right here in the far north, you've got independent-type counters and people who are quite prepared to defend each other.
I feel very, very safe in the far north of Idaho, and that's why I'm living there.
Well, that's a good answer.
I like the sound of Darrell Wheeler.
I'm going to be there, family permitting, tomorrow.
Because you've got horses as well.
Loads of horses. Yeah, we have.
Horses and guns. God, what's not to like?
Anyway, Paul, it's been great chatting to you, at last.
Thank you for coming on the podcast.
Do you have any wares to advertise?
Do you have any sites where people can reach you or books to sell?
Yeah. I've got quite a few books.
I'm not in full-time ministry anymore for various reasons.
So I'm supporting myself with what you might call a normal job at a finance company.
But I still consider myself a Christian apologist.
That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to write things on it.
So if you start from my personal website, Paul F. Taylor, I know I've got a list.
That middle letter is an F for Frankenstein because my middle name is Frankenstein.
At least that's what I used to tell kids when I was a teacher.
PaulFTaylor.org. Look for that site.
That's where you start.
You can move on from that then to various other things.
And I'm beginning to put together a site to sell my books, but you can find them on Amazon.
I've written quite a few books.
Some of them need revising.
But, you know, my big project...
I think there's four books that I need to write to define my life.
I've written two of them because I think I need three volumes on Genesis.
I've written the first two.
It takes me up to Genesis 25.
I'm trying to get the rest of Genesis done for Volume 3.
And I want to write a biography of Charles Darwin.
I think that's very important.
A critical, creationist, biblical biography of Charles Darwin, showing what a liar he was through his life, what a wicked man he was.
And we need that biography.
I'll buy that. So those four books we need to have.
Thank you, Paul. It's been lovely meeting you.
And it only remains for me to thank my beloved viewers and listeners.
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