Part 4 - WEIRD SCIENCE

In a poll done in January 2007 for the BBC programme ‘Horizons’, 48% professed to believe in the theory of evolution, 39% believed in the Biblical account of creation and 13% didn’t know.

Some 40% believed the Biblical account should be taught in schools either alongside evolution or instead of it.

How do you determine who to listen to?

In both scenarios we have to apply an even hand. For a theory to be fact it has to be observed or tested and, in both cases, we can’t do that. I wasn’t there when the Universe was created. I wasn’t there when man first walked the Earth. And nor was any scientist, no matter with how much conviction they will argue that their hypothesis is correct.

So now it comes down to source material.

But, as we have already seen with the ‘Big Bang’ theory and evolutionary theory, that source material doesn’t hold up.

But science has many weapons at its disposal in the form of technology and resources. If the Earth and Universe are indeed as old as science would have us believe then it should be possible to find evidence to bear that out – it should be possible to scientifically place an age on the Universe, even if it’s just going to give us a rough estimate. Surely even the roughest estimate, if it could be scientifically proven, could immediately undermine the Biblical argument.

THE DATING GAME

The first and most obvious starting point in all of this must be to determine how we calculated the age of the Earth in the first place. How did science arrive at the figure of 4 billion years old?

Simple – we looked at the rocks…

We can date rock by using a process called the Isochron method. This method measures tiny fluctuations in the radioactive signatures of rock. Using this method, we have rocks dated rocks as far back 4.5 billion years, hence the Earth must be at least that.
But recently a glaring problem has occurred with this method.
The technology has become so good and so sensitive that scientists has found that the Isochron method is reading not one type of radiation but several and it wasn’t until now that we could make the distinction.

This led an expert in this field from the Geochemical Institute of the University Of Gottingen, Germany, called Dr Y Zheng to say: “As it is impossible to distinguish [which radiation signature they should be measuring now] caution must be taken in explaining the [signature] age of any geological system.”

This has left geologists everywhere with a problem as they had really put all their eggs into this particular basket when aging the Earth but, if at first you don’t succeed…

The US Geological Survey’s own website admits it hasn’t found a way to determine age with any certainty because ‘Earth's oldest rocks have been recycled and destroyed by the process of plate tectonics.’ They then go on to say that they use the ‘probable age of the Solar System’ to calculate the age of the Earth based on an assumption that the Earth and the Solar System are the same age.

The bottom line is that rocks cannot provide a cast iron method for providing a reliable age for the Earth so let’s go to method number two – the speed of light.
We know that light travels pretty quickly – 186,287.5 miles per second. We know that light speed is constant because experiments can be done to prove it.

Distances in space are measured in light years. A light year is how far light can travel in one year. If you know how far it can go in one second then you can easily work out how far it can travel in one year - best part of 6 trillion miles.

Fine, I’m willing to accept this as fact so far but how can I use this to determine age?

Let’s say we want to find the age of the Universe.

Here’s how the calculation goes: Let’s say we know some far off star is exactly 1 billion light years away. We know the star is there, we can see its light and we know how far it is because we have the technology to take a reasonable guess.

Because we can see the star and because we know its a billion light years away, we can say that the light from that far off star must have begun its journey at least 1 billion years ago. If it had only begun its journey just 500 million years ago then the light would not have reached us yet and we would not be able to see it.

Therefore - The Solar System must be at least 1 billion years old because it contains a celestial body we believe to be at least 1 billion years old.

Even if you can say, with any great certainty, how far away the star is to begin with, this argument still has two critical flaws.

We can only guess at how old the Universe is based on the furthest celestial body we can pick up light from. Our best technology can’t see any boundary to the Universe - the estimate is we can see light from 10 billions light years away but as technology improves we will see further.

The second problem is that the premise of using light to make calculations like this could have a critical flaw. If you fill an empty tank with water under pressure through a hose several hundred feet long. Once the tank is full, the flow immediately reverses when the pressure is discontinued and no matter how long the hose, the water will reverse direction immediately and pours out the other side at a rate determined by the pressure inside the tank. Light is a type of energy and would behave very much like the water. Light photons would become visible to us immediately from very distant celestial bodies as pressure from the initial creation process equalised.

The speed of light is a valid method of measuring distance but not determining the age of the Universe.

So what other dating methods does science have?

One of the main dating methods used by science is called the Carbon 14 or radiocarbon test. It works like this:

Everything organic is made of carbon. All plants, animals and people – if it lives, it’s made of carbon. Carbon can come in different varieties and one form is called carbon 14. It gets its name because it’s 14 times heavier than a hydrogen atom.

It’s made when cosmic rays hit nitrogen – this knocks neutrons out of its atomic nuclei in the upper atmosphere. These displaced neutrons hit ordinary nitrogen atoms at lower altitudes, converting it to carbon 14.

Unlike common carbon, which comes in another variety called carbon 12, carbon 14 is unstable and begins to decay immediately after it is created. As the carbon 14 slowly decays away it changes back to nitrogen.

Carbon 12 – your common carbon for the want of a better term - is found in the carbon dioxide in the air. Plants breathe it, they are eaten by animals we eat the plants and the animals – in fact carbon 12 is so plentiful that we find it in all organic matter. It is in our food chain.

Even in an organic body – such as us – carbon 14 is still reacting with nitrogen and keeping the numbers fairly constant.

Now we know that the ratio of carbon 12 and carbon 14 is fairly constant, one trillion carbon 12 atoms to one carbon 14 atom.

If the organic body carrying the carbon 14 dies then the carbon 14 levels are no longer being replaced (no breathing, no feeding) and they start to drop. They slowly decay away. Take a bag of carbon 14 and leave it for 5, 730 years. Open the bag and you will find the amount of carbon 14 in the bag will have halved. This is called a half life – carbon 14 has a half life of 5,730.

It decays at a very slow rate.

So we know that, while alive, the organic matter had one carbon 14 atom to every one trillion carbon 12 atoms. Now we have an organic timer – something we can measure. The moment the organic matter dies – be it plant animal or human, the ratio of carbon 12 and 14 is going to start changing. By measuring that change we can take a rough swing at the date of death.

This leaves some interesting questions.

Coal is supposed to be millions of years old but not a single sample has ever been found on the face of the planet that is devoid of carbon 14. Carbon 14 should have long passed away from coal.

But weren’t we told that coal supposedly takes millions of years to form? We can artificially create small amounts of coal in a matter of a few hours using extreme heat and pressure in lab conditions. How do I know this? A member of the coal industry wrote it in their own trade magazine.

"A rather startling and serendipitous discovery resulted… These observations suggest that in their formation, high rank coals, were probably subjected to high temperature at some stage in their history. A possible mechanism for formation of these high rank coals could have been a short time, rapid heating event." [Six Hours], Chemtech, May, 1972, p. 292-296.

Fossilised woods found in Upper Permian rock that is supposed to be 250 million years old still had carbon 14 present.

Carbon 14 testing is not terribly reliable for anything other than a rough age for anything up to 50,000 years old. Beyond that the test is useless because all the carbon 14 would have decayed away but radiocarbon testing does tell us the following: Radiocarbon testing supports the Bible because it clearly shows cosmic radiation has only been around since 5000 BC.

Radiocarbon testing shows that the oldest man, animal and plant life specimens tested all appear to equally old and appeared very suddenly.

Radiocarbon testing shows a worldwide event that wiped out most land based life and puts the date of such an event at around 3000 BC – perfect timing for The Flood (more on that subject in a later chapter).

WATER, WATER, EVERWHERE

Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit them in the ocean. This material accumulates as mud on the rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters.

If the earth was billions of years old then the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep. But the biblical account of creation would accumulate the level of deposits we have now in roughly 7000 years.

An interesting feature of the oceans is its salt content. Salt is put into the ocean by runoff from the countless streams that feed it. But once the salt is in, it doesn’t evaporate away like the water does – it simply stays put. So, the ocean has been getting gradually saltier over time. Scientists can measure how the saltiness of the oceans changes over the course of a year, so from that we can roughly figure out how long salt has been entering the oceans. The answer they came back with is something science has been trying to grapple with for years.

There is nowhere near enough salt in the water for the oceans to be millions of years old. That’s because God made the marine life fully formed according to Genesis so therefore there must have been enough salt already present to sustain marine life. But, even if I give science the benefit of the doubt and say that there was no salt at all in the oceans when they were first formed, to go from nothing to the salt content today would take just over one million years, not the billions of years we are led to believe by science.

PURE MAGNETISM

The Earth has a magnetic field and without it, life on this planet would not be possible. This field deflects cosmic rays which, if they were to strike the surface, would kill organic life. If the field was too weak, rays would get through. If it were too strong then the current required sustaining the field would cause a catastrophic chain reaction in the Earth’s core and it would explode. Trust me, this is a bad thing.

When the Earth was formed, it actually generated a huge amount of electricity. The electrical current would then begin to disperse over a period of time as the matter it passed through would create a resistance. So the electrical current coursing through the Earth is traveling slower and slower speeds as the mass of the Earth slows it down.

The same effect can be seen by shooting a bullet into a large mass of water. The bullet hits the water like it wasn’t there to start with but the resistance of the water slows the bullet down and eventually stops it completely. This electrical resistance and the resulting magnetism can be quite accurately measured. Not only on Earth but we have done it for other planets in our solar system too. At the current rate of decay, the Earth cannot be more than 10,000 years old.

ON ROCKY GROUND

The rock that formed mountains is found to be in layers, or strata to give the layers their proper name. These strata are thousands of feet thick and can be found bent into right angle shapes.

Big deal – what’s the significance of this?

If the world is billions of years old then these formations would have been very deeply buried and would have solidified for hundreds of millions of years before the natural movement of the rock occurred. Yet the formations have no cracks or fractures in them.
The only way that is possible is if the formations hadn’t solidified at the time of movement. So the folding must have occurred within thousands of years, not billions, after forming. In the US, there is a place called Colorado Springs. There you will find the Ute Pass Fault.
Part of the strata in the rock formation was still unsolidified when forced to the surface during the natural formation of that area.

But that stratum was supposed to be at least 430 million years old and would have solidified if that were the case. It couldn’t have been more than hundreds of years old.
Evolutionist Adolph Knopf has stated: “…estimates of time based on thickness of strata ‘are hardly worth the paper they are written on’… rocks generally give no internal evidence of the rate at which they were formed.”

Six hundred feet of layered sedimentary rock built up in months after the Mt St Helens 18 May 1980.

Radiohalos are rings of colour formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay. 'Squashed' Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time-scale.

THE HELIUM PROBLEM

All naturally occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, then there should be a great deal of helium in Earth's atmosphere.

The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in five billion years. This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age.

A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.

THE GOLDILOCKS EFFECT

The Sun is 110 times the size of Earth and without it; no life would be possible on this planet. Parts of the Sun can burn at around 15 million degrees Celsius and the core is under 200 billion times more pressure than the surface of the Earth. As you can imagine, to keep the fires burning you need fuel. Luckily the Sun has its own source of fuel; it’s basically a big ball of hydrogen & helium.

But that fuel will burn out one day.

In the very distant future, the Sun will exhaust its fuel supply and the light will go out. We know that, as the Sun uses its fuel supply – i.e. itself, the Sun shrinks. It’s shrinking at a rate of 5 feet per hour. As the Sun shrinks, the actual shrinkage slows down which means that, at some point, we know that the Sun was decreasing at an even faster rate – one estimate puts it at 15 feet per hour but the accepted wisdom is around 10 feet per hour so I will use that figure.

So if we take science at it’s word and say that we started with shrinkage of 10 feet per hour which has gradually slowed to 5 feet per hour then 20 million years ago the Sun had a large enough mass to touch the Earth. Four billion years ago, the Sun would have been impossibly huge.

Our distance from the Sun is very finally balanced and is referred to in science as the ‘Goldilocks Effect’. The Earth is the third planet from the Sun – if we were the second, which is Venus, the oceans would instantly evaporate, our atmosphere dissipates and all life would be burnt to a crisp.

If we were the fourth planet from the Sun, which is Mars, everything would freeze and, again, bang goes our oceans and atmosphere and all life on Earth. Our distance is just right hence the term of the ‘Goldilocks Effect’.

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

We are told by science that the Stone Age lasted for at least 100,000 years. All through that period these scientists agree that the population was roughly between one and ten million people. We also know that they buried their dead during this time, usually with trinkets and possessions they thought they would take with them into the next life.

If this time period lasted for 100,000 years then that would equate to over 3 billion dead bodies. Yet, despite all the technology at our disposal (archaeologists don’t even have to dig these days with a special machine that acts like a sonar), we have only found a few thousand skeletons and a small number of buried trinkets. With what we have found, the Stone Age lasted about three to four hundred years.

ANYONE GOT A SPARE PENCIL?

We know that Stone Age man was just as smart as we are. They built monuments, created carvings and cave paintings and kept records of the lunar cycles. But we know that written records didn’t appear until 6,000 years ago. We are being asked to believe that these people could carve, paint, build and do basic astronomy but the thought to write anything down wouldn’t occur to them for another 94,000 years?

PRIMORDIAL SOUP

The ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet light that, if it were to get to the surface, would kill us. The ozone layer is just less than 30 kilometres above the Earth and is one of the first layers of our atmosphere. And it’s just as well it’s as high up because ozone is a poisonous gas to us. For evolution to take place, we would have started out as a chemical soup, simple amino acids combining to form ever more complex organisms.

Here’s the rub. In order for this to happen, oxygen levels in the atmosphere would have to have been almost nil – this process would not and could not of happened with oxygen present in the atmosphere. But ozone is made up of oxygen – 3 atoms of oxygen to be precise. No oxygen, or a very little of it, means no ozone which means life could not have developed in some chemical soup.

Evolutionists tell me that a dead, volcanically active planet managed to create some kind of chemical goo from eroded rocks that, in turn, evolved into man? And I can hear all the evolutionists get up in arms and cry ‘that’s not what we said – we said a meteor or a comet brought life here’ – A meteor is another dead rock and a comet is a dead rock surrounded by ice and science has never aged a comet beyond 100,000 years old.

DEEP FREEZE

In July 1942, a small squadron of US fighter planes were forced to crash land their aircraft in a desolate region of Greenland. The area they ditched in was nothing more than an icy wasteland but they all made it out alive.

It wasn’t until 1980 that any efforts were made to recover the aircraft. The salvage crews were expecting it to be an easy job to locate and recover the planes but it wasn’t until 1988 they actually found them buried under 250 feet of ice. None of the scientists on the salvage team could believe it at first – they thought it would just be a case of shoveling the loose snow away to free the aircraft. Not only were they buried under 250 feet of ice but had been badly damaged by the weight of the ice and had been dragged three miles from their expected location by glacial movements.

Aren’t we told that glaciers and ice formations take thousands of years to build up and only move at a snails pace?

It’s not just this example; Amundsen abandoned equipment at the South Pole during his 1911 expedition which has now been found, 40 feet under the ice.