Very briefly, I'm just going to try to give you some idea about why I think this subject is important. Some people prefer to put the age of the earth question off to one side. That is, people agree with me on the sixth day creation. I want to put it to the side as they do the flood. Some people want to say the flood is a separate issue. I say that is not the case. I'll try to make a case for that. I'll give you some general observations that I think tend to argue against the long age view. maybe take the tact that the emperor has no clothes, that is modern science, to use another metaphor, has feet of clay. I may point out some fallacies there. And finally, I'll present a little bit of evidence on a little bit of data on some geochronometers, that is physical systems that are time dependent, which can be observed and have been observed, and which suggest some limit to the maximum age of the earth and the cosmos itself. Evidence is for a young earth. By the way, I'll have to stick pretty close to this text or we'll never get through. I'm in the habit of talking from just a few cards and slides, and that didn't fit very well with this format, this forum, and so I'll have to stick pretty close to this. I guess all I can say is if you finish before I do, then feel free to leave. But we do have until seven, didn't you say, Joey? Isn't that the next talk? The question of origins of everything and especially of life has been debated and speculated for centuries. It's the kind of question that does not lend itself to proof in the scientific sense of that word. No experiment can be done to test directly the validity of the presuppositions upon which one's conclusions are based. One can only compare the logical consequences of those assumptions with the physical evidences. That's, of course, what we'll be doing. Over the past 150 years, the sides of this debate have crystallized into the only two rational options, creation ex nihilo in the relatively recent past, as clearly as taught in the Bible, or some version of evolution over vast eons of time. The claims of the evolutionary view are so universally touted, it would be redundant to repeat them here. Suffice it to say that these claims which bombard us from all sides are usually not accompanied by any proof. The evolutionists would have you believe that's the case because it's simply unnecessary to prove the obvious. After all, facts are facts. Their conclusions are thus simply accepted by them and presented to us as if they were indeed facts. The reality is that no proof is offered because there's precious little evidence to support their claims. The debate between these diametrically opposite worldviews is not a clear-cut standoff between biblical presuppositionalists on the one hand and scientific evidentialists on the other. While the creationist readily acknowledges the supernatural presuppositions behind his position, it is not often admitted that the naturalistic position is no less dependent or even more arbitrary and therefore less defensible assumptions. And I'll just show you one thing I'd like you to look at. You've got to read it twice. You've heard the seeing is believing. The people who call themselves evidentialists or scientists enter their studies with presuppositions, and they see what they believe. They don't believe what they see. I think that's the case with most of us. We enter any kind of a study with presuppositions, and the scientists know less than the biblical presuppositions. And by the way, I want to just mention that, Joy mentioned John Reed, my interest in this subject, I mean the subject of creation and what the what Genesis account really means, and particularly the evidences for it. I owe my interest in this subject to John and his brother Robert, who were students, geology students at Furman, and asked me if I would meet with them to be a faculty advisor for a little group they wanted to form, a study group on this subject. And I guess I was a theistic evolutionist, I just never had thought about it much, and I said, well sure, and the rest of it is history. And John, by the way, I want to mention him again here, is that not only that, but John is a Ph.D. geologist working at the Savannah River plant, and he not only says the things that you and I will say, and that is that the uniformitarian geology is simply not supportable, it's not defensible, it's not consistent with the Bible, but he's doing something about it. You ought to read some of the articles he's written. I mean, they're pretty deep water, hard for me to follow, but he's trying to give us something to replace the so-called geological column that's the industry standard for interpreting field data in geology. He's trying to give us some alternative to that. Sorry for the digression. The creationist, because of the biblical worldview, his biblical worldview recognizes that the explanation of the existence of the physical world demands the prior existence of one outside of and above the cosmos and a supernatural creative act in the not-infinite past. He therefore assumes an infinite age for the universe. This conclusion is obviously compatible with the biblical account. I'm sorry, is inconsistent with the infinite age, obviously. This conclusion is obviously incompatible with the biblical account, but I understand what I've been asked to do is explore its compatibility not with the Bible, but with the physical data available to us. That is, do the observable facts testify to the validity of the biblical worldview or to that of the naturalist. I'm quite aware that some creationists would question the legitimacy of examining the data if one is a biblical presuppositionist. They might say something like, God said it, I believe it, and that settles it. Now that stance may be acceptable to one who considers himself above the fray, but it's my contention that we live in a world of washing evidence, and it behooves those of us who are believers to get down where the battle for the minds and ultimately the souls of people is being fought. We must avoid the error of elevating God's general revelation in creation to the level of his special revelation in his word, a mistake those who call themselves progressive creationists seem to consider a virtue. While we are careful to avoid their error, we nevertheless should recognize that these two sources of truth must be compatible. Thus the scientific creationist, and that's not an oxymoron, enthusiastically plumbs the depths of the scientific evidences with the full expectation that the worldview taught in the scriptures will be amply confirmed. By contrast with the creationist whose presuppositions are acknowledged, the naturalist who attempts to construct a mechanistic explanation without an initial creative act by an infinite God external to nature is doomed to that philosophical bogeyman, an infinite regression. Thus the issue of the age of the earth is further clouded by the fact that the hidden naturalistic system is internally inconsistent in that the only logical alternative to fiat creation requires the assumption of the eternality of matter. Therefore, if he is to be consistent, the naturalist is stuck with the necessity of not merely an ancient cosmos, but an eternally existing one. You could say you could just solve this worldview problem by proving the earth is not infinite in age, and let go of that. In spite of the naturalistic system's logical necessity of an infinite age, progressive creationists and other Old Earthers argue strenuously that the age issue is a trivial one, while they argue just as vehemently for a very great, though not infinite, age. A prominent representative of this camp is Hugh Ross, whose reasons to believe ministry apparently exist for the sole purpose of promoting Big Bang uniformitarian evolutionism and attacking any who espouse the young earth position. I'll document that for you. All the while loudly claiming to believe that the age of the earth question is a trivial one. You all remember one of Shakespeare's characters said he thinks he protests too much. I believe what he meant is that anyone who protests that persistently about something is unwittingly, that something is unimportant. That persistently is advertising unwittingly the fact that he thinks it to be very important indeed. I would that all my fellow traditionalists were as convinced of that importance as Ross is. Why do the theistic evolutionists, by whatever name they want to be called, you see the age question is so important. While some creationists cling to the hope that some old earth position can be crafted that would be compatible with the biblical account, a notion with which I respectfully but emphatically disagree, the evolutionist knows that confirmation of a young earth means that his evolutionary position is destroyed. I believe this is the reason there is such a calculated attack at what they perceive to be a weak point in the creationist position. It also serves as a useful, for them, purpose of avoiding the defense of their rickety philosophical position. As implied above, there are unfortunately, in my view, some who, though sharing my belief in the clear meaning of the Genesis account, are nevertheless willing to acquiesce to this claim and to concede that the age question is a separate matter from the creation and evolution controversy and one of indifference to the correct interpretation of the biblical account. Is my contention to the contrary that either the biblical account testifies that the heavens and the earth and all that's in them were created in the relatively recent past, or that they were not? I see no room for compromise on this age issue. If God created in six ordinary solar days, as I believe he has revealed to us that he did, what in scripture obligates us to grant that he may somehow have hidden away some eons of time from us? I have found no such mandate. It seems to me that John Reed is correct when he notes that every Old Earth creationist he has encountered makes no argument from biblical or from scriptural necessity, but rather leans on the possibility that some word or phrase may be being used with other than its acknowledged predominant meaning, so his default meaning. The question of evidences, which is what I've been asked to talk about, is therefore simply whether there is any reason to try to find a way to fit eons of time into the biblical account of origins As for myself, I'm not inclined to try to find some way while holding to the traditional view of Genesis of conceding the evolutionists the vast amounts of time they need to make their schemes seem defensible. I contend they won't be defensible even if you grant all the claims that they make. The fact seems to me to be that the only rationale for such a concession is to give undeserved respect to a world that holds in contempt the truth I believe in. That probably sounds kind of harsh, but perhaps I'll be excused having spent almost 50 years in the trenches of academic science. You will excuse me if I find it a little difficult to be charitable towards certain views. So rather than seek some accommodation with the ancient Earth view, it's my intention instead to look at the data using the principles the old Earthers themselves insist on, with the objective of demonstrating that the facts of science support the relative use of the cosmos, of the Earth, and of life. Won't you look at one other quote? I take off obviously on, in God we trust, all others bring money. Well, if people want to talk to us on this, they need to bring data. I guess that's what Dave Hall was saying, isn't it? It's not the purpose of this essay, nor would there be space or time, to document and defend each of the many observations that support the Young Earth position. That's been done already by many others, and I'd like to recommend for your consideration buying the book by Walter Brown, which is the best I've ever seen on this subject. In the beginning, it's on sale downstairs. Rather, it's to give, the purpose of this talk is to give a brief overview of some of the information that's been adduced to advance the view and to demonstrate why I believe that rather Turning off the scientifically literate as the progressive creationists claim, an objective presentation of the data should provide a strong appeal to the open-minded inquirer. It seems expedient given the breadth and diversity of the subject and the limitations of space and time to adopt the following modest program. I hope to demonstrate that the physical world, that is the universe, had to have a beginning and it could not have been infinitely remote. Secondly, that the creation of the cosmos not only was not infinitely remote, but could not have been the 17 billion, give or take 9 billion or so, years ago demanded by the Big Bang cosmologists. Thirdly, that the solar system and the Earth-Moon system in particular cannot be 4.6 billion years old as required by uniformitarian geology, and finally that life cannot be millions of years old as orthodox Darwinism requires. These evidences will be divided into two categories. The first approach will be to appeal to qualitative data and generic or general arguments, that is, at the level of physical laws that preclude the naturalistic interpretation, if the naturalists' own assumptions are rigorously followed. These will involve phenomena that testify negatively, that is, those which, given the assumptions the scientists themselves insist on, argue that some or all of these claimed great ages must be artifacts. The second approach will be to examine physical processes that, given the uniformitarian assumption, can be used as chronometers to indicate the maximum possible age of some portion of the universe of which the chronometer is an integral part. First of all, let's look at the cosmos and talk about this question of infinity. Actually, the question of the eternally existing cosmos is abandoned as soon as debate on origins is engaged in, and the question of age is acknowledged to be a legitimate, however peripheral, issue. Nevertheless, it's worthwhile to note that there are clear scientific evidences that prove the finiteness of both space and time. Among these are the following. If the remote galaxies are fleeing from us and from each other, as is the current interpretation of the red shift, this recession could not have been going on for an infinite time, else the density of the objects in the observable universe would be nil, and it's not. Secondly, although increasingly questioned in recent years, Olber's famous paradox suggests that space cannot be infinite unless one would see Else one would have seen no open sky at all, but only the surface of a star or galaxy, no matter what direction he looked. And regardless of the density of matter distribution in space, so long as space were infinite. That's a well-known and old paradox that some people are quibbling about these days, but they're trying to imagine there's dark matter that's obscuring. That's the reason you see what seems to be open space. But I've learned some new things about the dark matter, which I'll talk about in a minute. Thirdly, the laws of thermodynamics state that the total energy in the universe is constant and the fraction of that energy available to do useful work is constantly decreasing. Taken together, that's the first and second laws. Taken together, these principles show that the cosmos had to have a beginning at which time a maximum fraction of the invariant total energy was available to do useful work. That fraction is still constantly decreasing and could not have been doing so at any finite rate for an infinite period. Thus the biblical worldview that the cosmos had a beginning in the not-infinite past is consistent with the physical evidence, while the uniformitarian, naturalistic system is not. Now, just a few problems with the Big Bang. I told you I'd say a little word or two about that science is an edifice with a clay foundation. Before looking at evidences bearing directly on the question of the age of the cosmos, it's worthwhile to take a moment to note that the hallowed standard Big Bang model is hardly the answer the old earth of creation is ought to be enthralled with. If you don't think they're enthralled with it, just read some of E. Ross's recent writings and you'll see what I mean. This is not hyperbole. Just a few of the weaknesses of the Big Bang are these. Had the cosmic egg, technically the singularity, from which the universe is assumed to have emerged ever existed, it would have been an incredibly massive black hole that would have been doomed to remain so forever. Now remember, I'm just merely applying the principles that the cosmologists themselves religiously follow, unless they happen to get in the way of some preconceived conclusion, or presupposed, I guess I should say, conclusion. Secondly, the assumed speed of expansion of the material universe in the so-called inflationary period is some 10 to the 22nd times the currently observed speed of light. I wonder what my chances would be of getting funding for a grant if my proposal revealed that I thought Einstein was that wrong. You know, he says nothing can go faster than the speed of light. This is 10 to the 22nd, one to 22 zeros after times the speed of light. I'll have some interesting things to say about that in a minute, I hope. These are some of the problems with the standard Big Bang that have led a group of eminent cosmologists recently to publish an article in which they say, in somewhat more polite terms than I would use, that this area is dead. Whether you accept their verdict or not, at the very least, one should be wary of any program that proposes to bend our biblical exegesis of the creation account to fit this theory, which reeks of the evolutionary spirit of the age. I'm just going to mention a few of these cosmologists I'm referring to. Halton Arp, Jeffrey Burbage, Fred Hoyle, Jay Narliker, and then, a name I can't pronounce, Wick Ramsenger. All of those are world-class cosmologists, and they published a paper jointly together to say what was wrong with the Big Bang. They're by no means the only ones to do so, but they're certainly the most prominent. Qualitative data arguing against the Big Bang. Let's put aside these inherent problems that I mentioned back there with the Big Bang for a moment and just look at a few of the cosmological data that bear on the age question. While not resulting in explicit predictions of the age of the cosmos, there are cosmological phenomena that clearly suggest that the billions of years envisioned by the Big Bang cannot be sustained. And among these are the following. First, the age distribution of the stars as gauged by the cosmologists' own stellar evolution models is the same no matter how far away And presumably no matter how far back in time one looks. Now you need to think about that a minute. The remote galaxies and the ones nearby have the same age distribution. Now some people think the speed of light question will help the cosmologists on that one. It doesn't. It does help the creationists. Secondly, similarly the age distribution of galaxies based on their spectral properties. This is the age distribution of galaxies based on a different thing. That was stars, by the way, age distribution of stars that I first mentioned. This is age distribution of galaxies based on their spectral properties is the same no matter how deep in space one looks. And they all look relatively young based on the configuration of their spiral arms. Again, that's the cosmologist's measure of their age, how twisted their spiral arms are. Thirdly, there is not enough time by a factor of billions, and this is quoting directly my friend Walter Brown. There's not enough time by a factor of billions, even if the Big Bang timescale were granted, for gravity to have caused the accumulation of elementary particles, which is just the Big Bang debris, into galaxy clusters on the scale that they observed. There must, therefore, be an explanation for their formation other than the mere passage of eons of time. To make matters worse, the observed relative velocities of members of galaxy clusters are sufficient to lead to their eventual escape from the cluster. Thus not only does the formation of these clusters deny the standard Big Bang model, but their continued existence does as well. And incidentally, and this has to do with the question of the dark matter, incidentally there is now evidence that the long salt dark matter that might provide the gravitational glue needed to keep them together is simply not there. We're not only saying, as I've said all along, we just haven't found it yet. Now there is positive evidence it is not there. And the evidence is that the remote galaxies are actually accelerating away. They're not slowing down. They're not static. They're getting faster. And this is in the standard astronomy journals that you'll find this information. Well, let's look a little closer at the solar system. The solar system has supposedly been in existence long enough for the Earth to have been around for 4.6 billion years. Many properties of the system deny this claim. Here are some among those. Meteor dust is one. You've heard a lot about this. The accumulation of meteor dust on the earth and moon is far too meager to have been collecting at present rates for billions of years. We've all seen the scarcity of the dust on the moon. That the amounts that have struck the earth are similarly low is evidenced by the low nickel content of the earth's surface, nickel being a dominant element in meteoritic material. Second evidence is crater creep. The edges of meteor craters on the moon, on Venus and on Mercury, are far too steep to have been in their present state for billions of years, given the observed rates of plastic deformation, sometimes called slumping, under the influence of gravity. Thirdly, moon recession. Because of the drag caused by tidal forces, the Earth's rotational period is lengthening, that is, the rotation rate is slowing down. As a result, the Moon's orbit grows in order to conserve angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system. Had this process been going on for 4.6 times 10 to the 9th, that's 4.6 billion years, the Moon would by now be much farther from the Earth than it is, even if it had started in virtual contact with the Earth, which it certainly did not in spite of some theories to the contrary. Fourth, short-period comets. There is a profusion of short-term comets that should have vaporized long ago if the universe is billions of years old. And if some of you have taken astronomy, you may know about the Oort cloud, O-O-R-T, the Oort cloud. It turns out the Oort cloud was postulated a cloud of celestial objects, comets in waiting, out beyond the solar system that just were there and available. And something would trigger them, and they would come and replace the ones that vaporized. It turns out that the thing simply isn't there. It was postulated to avoid one of these older or younger Earth arguments. Well, it turns out it isn't there. I mean, they've looked and looked and it simply isn't there. There's no evidence for it. Fifth, hot planets. The Earth and Moon are at least five other planets. They're all internally too hot to have been losing heat at their presently observed rates for billions of years. Sixth, small icy comets. Now I know this is a controversy. A man named Louis Frank at Iowa State University has published this information and he's being challenged but nobody's laid a glove on him yet, so I'll mention it. Small icy comets. There is evidence that comets of this type strike the Earth's atmosphere at a rate which would have produced several times the volume of water in the oceans in the assumed billions of years, even if the rate were no larger in the past as it almost certainly was. And I point out to you, small is relative. These comets, that are called small icy comets, strike the Earth's upper atmosphere, according to Frank's data, at a rate of one every three seconds, and each collision adds a hundred tons of water to the Earth's atmosphere. Now, I don't know what the upshot of this is going to be, but satellite imaging and pictures and so on have indicated this is happening. And, Frank, again, I talked to, walked around just the other night about this, to get the latest so I wouldn't make a fool of myself. And he said that he had just talked to Frank recently and he says that the other people that are contesting and debating him, but so far, according to Frank, he's got new data that confirms what he has said. Okay, so much for the solar system. Let's now talk a little closer to home, the geological column. Although not capable of yielding a prediction of the actual age of the earth, There are several properties of the geological column that clearly discredit it as a valid model of Earth's history, or which unambiguously rule out processes acting over billions of years as being responsible for its characteristics. This is what, of course, says John Redoff, and this is what he's working on. He says it is not a valid model for Earth's history. And although it turns out, because of the consistency from one continent to another and that sort of thing, the fact that there are sedimentary layers you can follow over broad expanses, And there are certain kinds of formations that are associated with oil, certain kinds that are associated with coal and so on. It's useful, it is used, and it works in lots of cases, but it doesn't mean it's a good record of the Earth's history. Some general arguments against the antiquity of the geological column. Among the best evidences against the great age of the geological column are these. Each time I say that, you understand it's in my judgment, in my opinion, there's tons of evidence of all sorts. I just say I think this is among the best, that's why I picked it. Even the geologists when pressed will admit that the dating of the earth by way of the properties of the geological column involves circular reasoning. And I could quote you lists of quotes from geologists that admit that. The reasoning is that the strata are dated by the fossils they contain and the fossils are dated in turn by the strata that they are in. That's circular reasoning. Secondly, many leading geologists have long ago concluded that there is a complete absence of transitional forms among fossils. And again, I state this, and I don't have time to document all this, but I can give you many quotes that will substantiate that. Even Stephen Jay Gould, the guru of the geologists, the Old Earthers. Only a few dedicated Old Earthers like Hugh Ross continue to claim otherwise, and he is not a geologist. He's an astronomer, I think. He's not a geologist. Third, out of place fossils. Now there have been sufficient questions about the famous case in Texas, the Paluxy River case, of the supposed juxtaposition of human and dinosaur footprints in the same strata, that most John Earthers have backed away from that evidence. Some have embraced it and then have backed away when some questions have arisen. The question is mainly about some falsification of data. There have been some fabrications that took place. There's no doubt about that. Whether there is real evidence there or not is still an open question. But most have backed away. However, the attention that that situation down there has attracted has obscured the fact that similar findings in numerous other locations have been reported, most recently in a series of articles in Creation Research Quarterly, Society Quarterly. In looking up some other information, I just ran across these, I don't read that magazine and don't take it regularly, but I found three articles in just a matter of about two years on new finds of this kind, human footprints or artifacts in the same strata with dinosaur tracks. In addition to human footprints, there are also numerous reports of obviously man-made objects found in strata dated by uniformitarian geologists to be millions of years old. Fourth, volcanic debris is being poured onto the Earth's surface at a rate of about one cubic mile per year. That would have produced some ten times all of the Earth's sediments in if the process has been going on for 4.6 billion years. And it reminds you only about 25% of the sediments are volcanic in origin. So that makes it four times as serious a discrepancy. Fifth, and this has got a lot of subheadings, the most overwhelming evidence for the relative use of the Earth's surface layers is the ubiquitous evidence of catastrophic upheaval. Even many uniformitarian geologists now concede that the earth's sediments were deposited during catastrophic floods. Their view is that there were numerous local floods over the millennia, separated by eons of calm, that this is an untenable scenario, and that the true history must have involved one cataclysmic worldwide flood instead, is evidenced by the following facts. First, the global extent and volume of the sediments which would cover the continents to a depth of one mile, if spread uniformly, is far beyond what could be accounted for by a series of local events. By contrast, the ocean floor has less than half that amount, a fact that's easily explained by the hydroplate theory of the global flood, and that's the book I recommended to you a while ago. It has that theory in it, Walter Brown's book. Secondly, the existence of extensive coal deposits and fossilized trees in Antarctica is vivid evidence of the global extent of the flood. Thirdly, conformity of sedimentary layers on every continent testifies of rapid deposition from a common source. Fourth, there are marine fossils on every mountain range on earth at elevations that require some massive rearrangement of land and sea worldwide to explain. Fifth, the general absence of bioturbidity, that's the disturbance of a sedimentary layer by growing plants or by burrowing animals. could be fish underwater. The general absence of bioturbidity and erosion at the interface of successive layers that were supposed to have been separated by great amounts of time testifies of their having been laid down in rapid succession. I was calling those numbers, I got letters on me, this is F. It's a remarkable fact that meteorites have rarely been found in the geological column below the most superficial layer called by uniformitarians the quaternary layer. Thus the sediments had to have been laid down rapidly and without long periods of time between them, between the episodes. Otherwise, large numbers of meteoritic remains should have been found throughout the geological column, given the enormous quantities of sediments, for example billions of tons of coal, that have been mined over the years. One of the most dramatic evidences that the sediments were laid down rapidly is the widespread existence, especially in coal mines where they pose a safety hazard, of what are known as polystrate fossils. These are remains usually of trees that extend through many sedimentary layers that are dated by the usual methods as spanning millions of years. The obvious fact is that they had to have been buried in the time span short with respect to the time it would have taken them to decay if exposed to the elements. A telltale detail is that many of them are upside down. H. An equally compelling evidence for rapid and recent burial is the preservation of soft tissues and even DNA in many fossils. It's known that the spontaneous decomposition rate of DNA is well known to be rather short, certainly compared to thousands of years scale. Yet it's survived in many fossils. I, the last one. One final dramatic evidence that the geological features often cited as proving the antiquity of the earth could in fact be quite young, is provided in the eruption of Mount St. Helens and its aftermath. The facts are that this process produced a 140th scale model of the Grand Canyon in a matter of a few weeks. The bottom line is that the sediments must be interpreted as having been laid down in a relatively short period of catastrophic upheaval as opposed to very slow processes operating over great ages as proposed by the uniformitarian. Thus the only mechanism to explain the Earth's sediments that is consistent with the data cited above is a catastrophic worldwide flood of just the type so vividly described in the Bible. I'll turn to organic evolution for just a moment and very briefly because it doesn't have much to say about the age of the Earth in my opinion. The evolution of life from inanimate materials is scientifically so improbable, even if one were to concede the vast eons of time the naturalists demand. has to make it of no consequence in establishing the age of the earth. But I will mention just a couple of things that relate to evolution. One highly significant datum that is never cited by evolutionists is that no hominid remains have ever been carbon-14 dated at more than approximately 5,000 years. Furthermore, one of the most exciting developments in recent years is the progress made in the tracing of our maternal and paternal parentage. In the case of the maternal parentage through mitochondrial DNA, which is DNA not in the nucleus of the cell, but in, are they called organelles? Al, you're the man that can tell me this. What are those little, I think they're called organelles. Yeah. This is DNA not in the nucleus of the cell. And it is transmitted only from mother to daughter, daughter to daughter, never to the men. And so they can trace the lineage the parentage back in time and lo and behold, the evidence is that our mother Eve was a single person back some 5, 6, 10,000 years ago. They can't be quite so sure. Actually closer to 6 in the case of the female DNA. You can also trace the males through the Y chromosome DNA, man to man to man. And the wind is a bit more open there. It's more like 6 to 10,000 years is what it now points to. But there's a couple back there somewhere, some few thousand years ago, that are the parents of us all, according to the DNA evidence. Well, let's look at the chart of a few, the results of a few kilometers. I told you I would do that. We're going to turn now to more quantitative data, which actually allows quantitative estimations of the maximum age of the earth. These evidences will involve the properties of what are called geochronometers. These are time-dependent processes whose rates have been observed and the cumulative effects of which can also be observed. Taken together with assumptions about the initial conditions, these observations can be used to infer the upper limit to the time they could have been in operation at present rates. And remember, I told you I'd be using the uniformitarian's point of view. Assume everything is the same. It's always been the same. That's uniformitarianism. The qualifications of a valid geochronometer would include the following, and I've listed them up there. An observable physical process involving measurable quantitative change with time. Something you can observe. Of course, you recognize these fit the supposedly fit radiocarbon dating and other isotopic ratio dating methods, which are sort of the industry standard. Secondly, steady rate, either constant or monotonic change with time over the history of the observation. And thirdly, well-characterized current rate. Now, that's not sufficient to be a good chronometer. You have to make some assumptions because we weren't there at the beginning. Otherwise, we wouldn't have to do this experiment to see how old things were. We'd know, wouldn't we? Given these properties, one can use the process to infer the passage of time by making the following assumptions. I'll list those as well. Pattern of change has been essentially the same over its entire history. You just have to assume that. It may have varied and you don't know it, so you make that assumption. Secondly, you have to know the initial state at t equals zero. Whatever the state may be, depends on what the system is that you're looking at. Thirdly, there's been no contamination of the data, either by some spurious change in the rate of the process or by the intrusion of some foreign substance or force that would falsify the assumed starting conditions or introduce a spurious rate. Now, a few of the chronometers are tabulated, and I'll show you that. There's not space or time to analyze in detail every one of these. I've got 13 on this list, as you'll see in a minute. The idea involved in each one of them is fairly obvious, so it doesn't need a whole lot of explaining. Now, some of them are debatable. There's no question about it. Some people would quibble about how the experiment was done or whether things have been as constant as people thought and that sort of thing, just like we quibble with some of the isotopic ratio methods. Now, the first thing I had noticed is, the reason I stopped before I did that, the first five certainly wouldn't exactly make the heart of a young earther race, would it? Salt accumulation in the oceans, equal to or less than 32 million years. River sediment accumulation, 30 million years. Continental erosion, 25 million. Solar fuel consumption, 10 million. of metals in the ocean, and that fortunately is a multiple measurement because there's a number of different metals that you can track. Most of the rarer ones, salt obviously would include sodium, and the top one up there. But this is other heavy metals and things like that. But keep in mind, we're talking here about these particular processes, the accumulation of salt in the ocean, the rate at which it accumulates, an assumption about how much there was to start with. Assume there was none. That's as little as you can assume. And that makes the age the maximum, okay? So you come up with a maximum amount of time it would take at the same erosion rates today. And undoubtedly, they were a lot faster if there was a flood and if there was massive rearrangement of the earth's top layers, which there obviously wasn't, there wouldn't be a mile of sediment on the continents, an average of a mile deep. The point is that that was soft to start and much, much sediment washed into the ocean and much soluble material like salt leached into the ocean much faster in those days than it would today. So this is a maximum, so that's why it doesn't bother me that these give very large numbers. Now there's some other numbers and we'll look at them. If it creeps off tell me and I'll put it back. Okay, we should keep in mind then, these are maximum ages, and even the largest of these, you'll notice, is three orders of magnitude smaller than the 4.6 billion years. Three orders of magnitude, a thousand times smaller than the 4.6 billion years that we're supposed to have been here. Number 13 is particularly interesting, the erosion of Niagara Falls. I've seen some maps where it showed the progression of this erosion. It's interesting to me because it was once appropriated by no less than Charles Lyell, the so-called father of uniformitarian geology, who paved the way for Darwin. It was appropriated by him to prove, in quotes, that the biblical timescale could not be correct. On the basis of one visit, he visited and looked at the falls. Now that's a real scientific experiment. He looked at the falls. He assumed, I don't know where he got his information because everybody, the locals knew that the rate was greater than this. He assumed the rate of erosion was one foot per year. And on that basis, he concluded, given the length of the distance it could have eroded, that it had to have been there for at least 35,000 years. I say big deal. That really proves an ancient earth, doesn't it? 4.6 billion years? But he got 35 billion. Well, the fact is, And of course, he made a big to-do about this, disproving Usher's timescale. That was his point. And he specifically said that. The fact is that the erosion rate then, as now, was about four to five feet per year, which yields the figure in the table, 9,000 years. And there's every reason to believe the rate would have been considerably greater in the aftermath of the flood when the sediments had not been fully consolidated into rock. So that's certainly a maximum, not a minimum. Item eight, what is item eight? Carbon 14, yeah. Item 8 is also of special interest because of its relationship to one of the favorite tools of the geologist, radiocarbon dating. Actually, it might be more the biologist, the evolutionist, than the geologist per se. Excuse me. My voice is holding up reasonably well, but my plumbing is not. Sorry. The point of interest is that The validity of that carbon-14 technique depends on the atmospheric level of carbon-14 having reached steady state long before Libby proposed the method. Now, carbon-14 is produced in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays bombard it, converting that to 14 carbon. And Libby assumed that it had reached steady state. And the method to be valid, it depends on that. It has to have been known and be steady all the time. It turns out that it was Libby himself who developed the data proving that the level was far from static. And he published that. I mean, he didn't deny the fact. It's precisely the continued rise in the level that he observed on which the entry in the table is based. But he chose to assume that the data were wrong, his own data were wrong, since the level had to have reached steady state, quote, given the great antiquity of the earth, end quote. And I'll just let that sink in for a while. The logical fallacy of assuming the very thing one is setting out to prove is so blatant that one wonders at the continued reliance on such tests. Of course, the use of carbon-14 now, let me set the record straight, I'm aware of the fact that this particular isotopic method is not useful in determining the great age of the earth, because the half-life of carbon-14 is only 5,730 years. and as consequence you can't determine an age much more than just a few times that. So a few thousand years is the most you could ever prove anything was, even if the method were perfect, which it obviously isn't, but if it were, there are other isotopic ratio methods that presumably could, in theory they could if all the conditions were met. I maintain they're not, couldn't, can't really be. It's instructive to contrast this carbon-14 and other isotopic ratio parameters with those in the table. These isotopic decay systems are touted as the standard long-term timepieces, but they fall far short of most of those cited above, that is, in the table, in reliability on almost every criterion. In particular, we have absolutely no basis for the assumption of initial sample composition, and it is not credible that any specimen could have remained buried anywhere for millions of years without loss or gain of critical components. Just as an aside, just think about the concern during the so-called OJ case about contamination of that DNA evidence when specimens were sealed in bottles and watched over carefully to ensure, quote, an unbroken chain of custody, end quote. Now contrast that concern with the blithe assumption that the specimens on which isotopic ratio dating are based have lain for millions of years in the earth without their compositions being in any way compromised. One might also contrast the concern we have for landfills and nuclear waste repositories, even when they're carefully sequestered in salt mines. And we're not worried about keeping them that millions of years, but just until next year or the next year. The bottom line is that in spite of uncertainties about the unavoidable assumptions involved in the application of every one of these chronometers, there are assumptions. As I said, you have to assume the initial conditions, you have to assume the steady rates, and so on. In spite of that, in spite of the assumptions you have to have for these, they are without exception far more defensible, that is the assumptions are, than those that haunt the industry standard, the isotopic ratio method. Furthermore, each is based on a different physical process and therefore depends on a different set of assumptions, so that the unanimity of their predictions is even more compelling. Now you say, well that's not unanimity of predictions. Those are not anything like the same number. Are they not all If 9,000 is the maximum, these are all maximums. That said, it can't be more than 32. It can certainly be less. It cannot be more than 32 billion. It can be less, 9,000 is less. This one can't be more than that one, less than 40,000 years. 9,000 is less than 40,000. They are consistent with each other. They all just give a maximum, but each one is more precise than another. in predicting the actual age, I'm not suggesting they exist, they predict the actual age, only a maximum possible given the assumptions uniformitarians themselves use, and the observable facts. Well, one more thing. It would be disingenuous to avoid mention of the fact that it appears to most creationists to be the most problematic for the young earth position. the existence of galaxies that reliable evidence suggests are billions of light years from Earth. The so-called cosmological problem that this fact poses is stated thusly. If these objects are that far away, did they not have to exist for billions of years in order for the light to have reached here from there? Seems like a reasonable question. Of course, you understand that there are several assumptions involved even in the question, presuppositions, and one of them is that the speed of light has been the same since the beginning as it is now. That's only one of a number of assumptions. Others are that they actually are as far away as we think they are. I believe they are, as a matter of fact. But some people question that. Another assumption is that the light actually came here from there. If I see a galaxy in the great distance, I'm saying the light I'm seeing actually came from that object to me. And furthermore, and this is a key assumption, came at the current speed of light. A number of solutions to this dilemma have been posed whose objective is to explain how such a situation can be compatible with a young earth. By far the most satisfactory of these approaches, in my judgment, is that speed of light was much higher in the epoch immediately after the initial creation event and has been slowing more or less exponentially ever since. The analysis in 1987 of all existing data on this issue, every single measurement that could find that they'd ever been made of the speed of light published measurements by Norman and Sutterfield, presented strong evidence of this effect. But their explanation has not been universally accepted, even by creationists. People quibble about the statistics and various other questions about it. But I could give you some pretty, I think, pretty overwhelming statistical arguments that this feed has indeed, according to the data, has decreased. And this is an aside. ask somebody today about how much the speed of light is changing, they say, well, obviously it can't be changing. Well, I agree with them, it's now defined, it's a defined quantity, it's no longer measured. The speed of light is defined, and it took me a while to go through and prove that to you, but it's a fact. It's the way you define the length and the time. Time is defined in terms of length, and it's a circular argument, and so you simply define the speed of light. Well, it's most interesting, given this question about what I think is the best solution to this problem, and it would be a problem if the speed of light were constant, in my judgment. It is therefore most interesting to note that a paper has appeared within the last month in Physical Review D, perhaps the world's most prestigious journal of theoretical physics, in which the authors postulate that the speed of light, just after creation, Now they said just after the Big Bang, but just after creation, was some, hold your seats, ten to the thirtieth times the currently observed value. Now in case you don't think in those terms all the time, I'll translate this for you. This is Hebrew. Jack, I won't translate it. That's a million, trillion, trillion. Ten to the twelfth is a trillion. Ten to the twenty-fourth is a trillion trillion. And a million is 10 to the 6th, so multiply that together, you get 10 to the 30th. Now they made that assumption. These are first-rate theoretical physicists we're talking about. They published a 13-page article on the 15th of February, this year, in which they made that assumption. And they say that this assumption, the reason they made it, and of course it is an assumption, you understand, they obviously didn't measure it, they went there, at the big bang, so-called. It allows them to resolve a number of the most perplexing puzzles in theoretical cosmology. I won't list all those puzzles they say they solve, when they get into their general relativity equations, I just quit reading. I read through what they said they had concluded and what they based it on, that's what I read. Needless to say, they neglected to note that they were giving aid and comfort, not to the big bang enthusiasts, but to young earth creationists. Apparently the editors of Physical Review haven't yet gotten the word that we young earthers have recently been declared in writing by the progressive creationist camp to be scientifically less credible than those who believe that the earth is flat. I can give you a reference that you can read that. On second thought, maybe these cosmologists have just been taking a look at the data that we have. Thank you.