Clough_Geologic_Column D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_003.doc That's why often our conversations get so slippery and greasy and we feel like after we spend 15-20 minutes thinking this thing through and sharing it we haven't got anywhere. Another thing to remember about what we're saying, we can't get proud about this because when we talk paganism, and we'll see what paganism is all about just looking at the text, but when we use the word paganism what we're really talking about is the carnal mind, the mind of the flesh. Apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ's absolute righteousness and the Holy Spirit working on that basis, we are pagans, so it's not like we're sitting here self-righteously throwing rocks at people. All we're trying to do is identify where the problem is. We're not blaming someone because they have cancer, but we want to find out where the cancer is -- that's the issue here. So when I talk about paganism versus the Scripture don't think of this as a rock throwing contest. That's not what it's all about. It's simply to identify problems and find out where the Scripture collides with this. Summarizing the issue on page 4, what we're saying is that any statement, any thought, always comes out in language, and that language that it comes out in always shows at least two things. It shows a belief in absolute structures and categories; every time somebody uses a noun they are believing, they are building on the idea that there are classifications out there that we can talk about, we can talk about light and darkness, red and green, we can talk objects, boys, girls, we can talk about these things that are stable. In order to use language, language is always referred in context to something; you learn something in context with something else. We want to conclude that early section by distinguishing between two words, neutrality and tolerance. Tolerance is Scriptural. Because this is a day of the age of grace we are tolerant, God is tolerant. Hasn't God withheld judgment in order that men may come to repentance in Jesus Christ? Does that mean God condones sin? No! Does it mean He's tolerant for now? Yes, tolerance is an D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_003.doc we study the text of Genesis and really think through what we're reading, this is a powerful challenge to everything in the modern world. It is a cosmic statement, that ultimately in back of everything there is no such thing as fate; there are the personal decrees of a personal God, that's back behind everything. It's a Person that drives the universe, not an "it."On the other side we have no ex nihilo Creator, therefore this other doctrine, opposite to the Creator/creature distinction. There's no neutrality, a person is going to believe one or the other, there's no other option. Continuity of Being means that the universe is basically all one, matter, immaterial, dogs, cats, trees, rocks, etc. That is the doctrine of the Continuity of Being. It's sometimes known as the Chain of Being. Turn to page 10 in the notes, the paragraph that begins: "Over against the Bible's Creator/creature distinction, paganism insists upon the unity of creator(s) and creations. Gods, men, animals and rocks are all part of the same existence or being. This is the doctrine of the Chain of Being, a doctrine you will find lurking in all forms of paganism from ancient times through New Testament times." By the way, one entire book in the New Testament is written against this idea--Colossians. Colossians was directed against this because the heresy Paul had to deal with was Gnosticism, and Gnosticism believed that you had God and the nations from God, man, etc. etc. etc. It was all a gradation, sort of like a spectrum of light, no separation. The next paragraph, watch this one because here's a sneaky little corollary that's the twin brother of the Continuity of Being idea. "Implied by the Continuity of Being idea and overtly present in some pagan origin-myths, is the concept of spontaneous generation. Since the universe basically is of one kind, everything within it differs only in degree. Thus the universe has the power to bring forth life from non-life all by itself. Man is just part of nature." Contrast this situation with the Bible's teaching about non-transgressable boundaries between man, each kind of animal, and each kind of plant." [blank spot] All this happens in eve D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_005.doc is the tension going on, why do we have to have a big strategy session. Here's why. If we start with the Genesis text and interpret it literally, our problem is thinking of people in the modern 20th century. Let me go through this list. Here's the contrast in characteristics. These are some, I could expand. Evolution – Genesis. Not a figment of my imagination, this is just the factual material, one starts with gas and one starts with God. That's how we begin. Next we have hot condensing matter – we have a cool liquid water. We have sun, stars before life on earth – in Genesis we have the sun, stars, after life is made on earth. That's pretty heavy stuff, and it doesn't require a rocket scientist to see we got a little problem here. Life evolves in the sea – Genesis has life created on land. Birds evolve with mammals after fish – Birds created with fish before mammals. Man evolves from mammals – Man created directly from the earth and the woman indirectly from man. Explain that one by natural selection! Rain occurs millions of years before man – rain doesn't occur until after man is created. This is crucial, if you don't get anything else on this list copy these two down, because we'll revisit this again and again. Evolutionary processes continue today, the process of evolution is still continuing today. If I am a scientist and I'm doing measurements, I'm measuring a process, I measure rates and changes and decay rates today, and I say they are the same and they go back to ancient times. The evolutionary processes continue to this very hour. Turn to Gen. 2:1-3, at the end of those six days, we'll look at the seventh day. Count how many times you see the verb for complete, finished, or however your translation reads. Verse 1, "Thus the heavens and the earth were completed," first occurrence of the verb complete. Verse 2, "And by the seventh day D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_005.doc t He rested from all His work which God had created and had made." So we come now to a very different, very fundamental thing. Evolutionary processes continue today in this world view. In the Genesis text whatever processes were used were turned off at the end of the sixth day. There's a difference. And few readers pick up on this obvious difference. The two world views are recording two different ideas of processes, one has the processes that are continuing, the other has the processes turned off. This has powerful implications about how you interpret data. Then fundamental unity of life differing in degree in the evolutionary world view, different areas of life, cats, mice, dogs, rocks, differ in degree, all have protons, all have electrons, they're just arranged differently, life is just a different categories of arrangements, but fundamentally it's the same thing, electrons and protons. In Genesis we have fundamental differences in kind, one difference is in degree, in Genesis differences in kind, animals reproduce "after their kind," plant life reproduces after its kind, and there's a reason for that. That point is not just a little isolated detail, in the list of verses in that exercise one of the verses is I Corinthians 15, if you looked at that verse you would have quickly noticed how this little characteristic is being used by Paul to explain the resurrection. Paul uses that precise point, that there are fundamental differences in kind to dramatize, describe and reveal what resurrection is all about. Another thing which we'll get into later on is in the evolutionary world view, death is normal, sorrow is normal, tears and pain are normal, they're adjuncts of mere existence. In the Bible God created everything very good and death was introduced later so death becomes abnormal. Death is something that came in after creation. Evolution, in fact, D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_005.doc esupposition they operated from, that's the accommodation strategy, and what happened was by the 1850's when the tension got worse because suddenly more people were adding millions of years to time, the Christian started backing up, backing up, backing up, reinterpret, reinterpret, and here's some of the gimmicks that they used. "By the 1850's Bibliotheca Sacra articles began to evidence the impact of uniformitarianism as certain aspects of astronomy, such as the argument from the speed of light," by the way this is 1850, so when you encounter this, this is not new, this is not something that happened in 1981, this is 1850, "the argument from the speed of light, and geology, the strata of rock formations and the fossil record, suggested a much older earth. One clergyman confided ‘Moses seems to assign a comparatively brief period to the creation; astronomy and geology assert a vast period, how shall they be reconciled? [not sure of word, sounds like Mayers] postulated three theories to explain the compatibility of geology and Scripture, a gap theory in Genesis 1 of indefinite time followed by divine creation in six 24 hour days, a day-age-day theory of indefinite periods between 24 hour periods, and a day age theory of indefinite periods. He opted for the third view, thus conceding an important bulwark of traditional Scriptural interpretation, limited time. He said we cannot bring the period of geologic ages within 6,000 to 8,000 years assumed and as taught by Moses. If the Mosaic record is, as we believe, reliable, we must admit an interpretation which will give the period the facts demanded." So this is what was going on over 100 years ago. It's still going on in evangelical circles. This is why you can listen to Dobson's radio program, and he has Dr. Ross on doing the same thing, it's the same strategy of accommodation. On page 15, the last strategy, D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_006.doc and Eve with us, whoever we are, wherever we are, we are carrying around the direct genetic descent, the baggage from Adam and Eve. And there are implications in Rom. 5 about that. This is an observation that will come back when we get into salvation, redemption, etc. But the idea there is that we get a distinct answer. Let's go back to the question again, "Who am I?" If I work with the presupposition of the Scriptural viewpoint, the answer is this. If I deny this Biblical answer, if I say that the universe is the impersonal, the bottom line on page 19, now what does that make me? Let's draw a picture. What that makes me is that God, if He exists, we'll put god(s), men, animals, rocks, we have this scale of being, and who knows what's out here beyond this, fate, chance, whatever. And this is why on page 20, the first full paragraph, I have this sentence: "And what does the pagan world view tell you that you are? It tells you that reality at bottom is one." What do I mean "reality at bottom is one?" What I mean by that is you can't split between God and the creation. That split between creation and God is available only to the Bible believing Christian. We are the only ones who can make the split. Everyone else holds to this idea, that all reality encompasses everything, one level of existence. Then I say, "there is only one level of being. It matters not whether is reality is pictured as a vast machine," as many people did in the 19th century, "or as some sort of cosmic organism," which is ancient and also now coming into modern vogue. "The universe" and this is the sentence I want you to look at, "beneath you, above you, in front of you, and behind you is an infinite impersonal ‘it.' You and your ‘personal' nature differ only in degree from its electrons and protons. In the Chain of Being your thinking, talking, emotions, loving, and artistic exp D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_006.doc iety determines right and wrong, the Nazi racists were right, and you can't answer them. The only way you can answer them is to say this society is not the source of ethics, God is and He transcends society. If you don't hold to that position, you have no defense, no defense against this sort of thing. When a society collectively becomes mad, you can't stand against it. Or, what's happening today, we're getting more sophisticated, we think, and we're going back to nature. The problem here is if you make nature the source of ethics, what happens in the boundary between man and animal now? It goes away. So now we see the spectacle where we're concerned if a seal hangs himself up on a rock, and we have a million dollar rescue effort, and meanwhile we can pull a baby halfway down the birth canal and shove a scissor up its brain and suck its brains out. Isn't that logical though, if it's just nature you can define your ethic any way you please. I talked about a rubber Bible; you've got a rubber ethic, stretch it any way you want. So these are practical questions that come right out of the Scriptures and right out of Genesis. Look at page 21, I hope you look those verses up listed. Those are key passages in the Old Testament where God's distinct nature transcends the creation, the Creator/creature distinction. And if you look particularly in the Job reference, Job 38, where God is doing the speaking, see if you can as you read that read God's emotions. The emotional level with which God speaks those words are very strong, and you want to pick that flavor up ... [tape ends] D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_007.doc as revealed that He is trustable. And because I know He is trustable, I am going to trust Him for this, and when I trust Him for this, and I trust Him intelligently, see this is where our non-Christian skeptics think we're naïve, they really do, they think "oh yeah, here's the religious idiot of the family," etc. and you've all experienced that. And really they're the idiots, because if you think about it, they don't have comprehensive knowledge. Where are they going in life? They haven't got it figured out, so don't come to me as a Christian and say I'm stupid and I'm an idiot and I don't have it figured out and you don't have it figured out. You that live in glass houses don't throw rocks. The difference is that I know the One who controls those facts and I trust Him. So what's the crime there? That's why there's a passage in Deut. 29:29 in the lesson we had where God says through Moses the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children. What's He's confessing is there's lots of secret things that He will not reveal, and I have always found it amazing that when God confronted Job He didn't do it like I would have, if I would have been God I would have felt sorry for the guy, he's getting creamed, and I want to tell him Job, trust me, let me show you how good I am, I did this, and I did that, and it all fits together. That's what I would want to say to Job. And if I were God, I would never have wanted to confront him like God did, but God did do it that way, so I have to say well Clough is mixed up, you don't have the mind of God because God didn't do it the way you thought he should do it. And the way you reason your way through there is to simply say that God approached Job that way to insure if all else failed, Job would understand that God is God and Job is Job, and there's an infinit D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_008.doc owed them this part of His character. We won't have time to go through all these verses, I just put them down, there's plenty more, but these are a sample. Psalm 139:7, "Where can I go from Thy Spirit? Or where can I flee from Thy presence? [8] If I ascend to heaven, Thou art there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there. [9] If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, [10] Even there Thy hand will lead me, And Thy right hand will lay hold of me." How do you suppose you could contemporize that to the 20th century; think in terms of Star Trek or something. Anyone have a suggestion how you could universalize Psalm 139 a little more. If I go on a rocket trip into the next galaxy, is God the same? Is God holy there as much as He is here? Yes. So the omnipresence of God means that He is holy at every point. That's hard to describe. How can God be holy at every point, He's not half here and half there, He's all here and He's all there. He is infinitely present at every point. We don't get samples of part of His character. We said that every one of these (Q)ualities, if you turn to page 27, every one of these attributes is mirrors or is the anchor for something in our lives that are parallel to that. We can locate ourselves in space by our imagination. Surely everyone in this room can, in your own head, visualize, maybe in your childhood, you can go back in time, and you can relocate yourself. You can have that power of imagination to alter your location mentally to yourself. God can instantly be everywhere, He always is everywhere. So our thing is a very impotent, weak, partial revelation of His omnipresence. Another area of thinking about this is space, space is three dimensional, it's not four dimensional unless you want to get into modern cosmology. It's interesting God has a triune nature also, so has space, so D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_011.doc out how the dominion of Genesis 1 is finally accomplished through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ finishes what Adam was to start. Jesus Christ one day conquers the universe. He conquers the entire universe, including the heavenly part of the universe. Adam started out just trying to rule the Garden, and then man was to rule the planet earth, and Jesus Christ, by His powerful ministry, is engaged in bringing dominion over the entire universe. The heavens will also be subject to man. In 1 Cor. 6, Heb. 2:5, the Bible goes so far as to say that man will one day be superior to the angels. So that whereas the original creation, if you want to do the pecking order, it's God, angels, man and the rocks and animals. In the ultimate universe, in the universe to come it's God, man, angels, and nature. You see the reversal, that reverse takes place in the new heavens and the new earth, and it has to do with the dominion of Jesus Christ, and how He is winning that dominion in some way through our obedience and disobedience, and it gets into the whole cosmic implications of why the angels watch Christians when we worship, expressed in 1 Cor. Why do angels watch us? What is Jesus doing in the angelic unseen realms? Whole dimensions to the Bible, but all it fundamentally emanates from man's role to rule over nature. Those are two distinctions in the man/nature distinction. On page 36 is a third one, this is more of an observation than something functionally of the magnitude of the first two, just to make you realize what we read in the Genesis text, and that is we read something different about our creation than the animals. The animals are created in genders, gender pair, male and female. But when God goes to create man, the human gender pair, He does so with an odd description. In the case of man He creates one body, and then He divides, hence a male and female. You may D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_011.doc ture, man is not God, but man as finite version of God and our answer to this is: yes, man's language is limited, but Gods isn't, so Gods language stands, and language is not the demeaned by merely pointing to the defects of human language. Ultimately we go back, "In the beginning was the Word of God." What's the title of the second person of the Trinity in that passage? Language. God, the Word and the Spirit, three titles to the Trinity. So language is central to Scripture, hence the Scripture and the Bible being language is the way God talks to us. It's not the only way, but it is the way He has ordained. When God comes to Adam in the garden what does He do with Adam? Does He play rock music? Or does He speak to him? God carries on a conversation. Why does God carry on a conversation? Answer: Because it's the only way you get information from one mind to the other. Language is the only way I can convey information. Every time you use a computer, every time you're talking about a modem and an R232 (?) connection you're talking about a language, bits of information are being conveyed. The modem at the other end is programmed with knowledge, its coding and decoding, and if one modem or the computer at the other end doesn't have the same language, they don't talk. So there has to be a shared language. Language is of the essence here. You can say well, doesn't that show that machines can speak? No, because man made the machines and patterned the machines after himself. In one of the exercises I ask you to look up Prov. 1:23 which is one of those passages of Scripture, very plain, very ordinary, but it's a major passage that reveals nuances of speech, and it's a great one to illustrate the point. Notice the parallelism, "pour out my spirit ... make known my words." Look at the two verbs, you've got parallelism here, let's break it down: verb--"pour out"; D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_012.doc ith government, and this passage in Deut. 21 is one of the ways in which government power steps in, not to destroy the family, but to help preserve the family. I love to bring this one up, every time we get somebody that's worried about child abuse, not that child abuse isn't real, I don't mean to diminish it, but this quite a provocative passage to take someone to that thinks that way. These are the three divine institutions, and with that we have completed an exposition of man and the man side of the man/nature distinction. I want to spend the rest of the time tonight on page 42 describing nature. Thinking in terms of nature and thinking in terms of that which is not man, just the rocks, trees, animals, stars, just think in terms of nature, and we'll draw a little Adam as an isolated soul. When you look at Gen. 2, God is training him, not only to find his wife but He's also telling him something about nature. Notice Gen. 2:20, after he goes through this grand experiment where the animals, nature, is brought to Adam for examination, for study and naming, the net result of the experiment in the last clause is that he can't find anything suitable as a helper. We know the word "eser" means a personal helper. In other words, dogs and cats are fine companions but they're not "eser's," they're not persons. You may think your dog has a personality but we're talking in terms of a theomorphic personality. There's nothing there in nature, nature is impersonal in that regard, and this is one of the fundamental differences we want to make and we want to make it very strong in our time. The reason we have got to make the man/nature distinction so firm, so solid, that we'll never be tempted to cross it. Evolution tries to cross it, that's the whole structure of evolution. But in nature we have the situation where nature cannot be a companion to man. You may love the D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_014.doc making it non-neutral, it can't sit there and hide and pretend it's religiously neutral when it isn't religiously neutral, it has a built in presupposition antithetical to Scripture. We said that the first event, creation, has powerful implications for our view of God, our view of man, and our view of nature. Those implications are critical and we review them because they are basic to all else; that there's basically only two world views in the human race. One is the Biblical position that there's the Creator/creature distinction, and the antithetical to that is the obvious, that there isn't a Creator/creature distinction, namely the Continuity of Being, that gods, men, angels, animals, rocks, molecules are just sort of in a spectrum of being, but there's no absolute difference, God is not distinguished over and against His creation. He's part of the great mystery. Those are the two positions, and what turns out is that the Biblical position, the Bible is the one that gives us an infinite personal Creator, and it's critical that we remember infinite, personal Creator. There's a person behind the universe, not a gas cloud, whereas in the pagan side of the house when you go out ultimately you go out into the impersonal background. The Greeks knew this and they called it Fate. The ancients knew this and they called it the dark chaos. Modern people refer to it as the grand mystery. But whatever the vocabulary term it's always the same thing, that ultimately furthest back is the impersonal, it's not anything personal, there's no meaning there, and all kinds of things follow. We've been trying to be careful in exposing some of the implications for man, and for God. We also said, as a result of this there's another distinction, the distinction between man and nature. We have drawn the conclusion that God's attributes, the characteristics that He has, the Scr D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_015.doc a is linked to another Biblical idea. So we are approaching things as we go through the Bible event by event so that these events become concrete illustrations and they become anchors in your head. We dealt with creation and how creation teaches us about God, man and nature. Now we're looking at the fall. We showed the difference historically between how paganism treats evil and how Christianity treats evil. We said there are basically two views, the paganism starts out with this continuum, this impersonal continuum, by that we mean that the Creator/creature distinction isn't there, that all of reality is one great mystery and inside that mystery is God, the gods, the goddesses, man, rocks, animals, plants and everything else. So even God Himself in that case, they may use the word G-o-d, but it's not the God we know from Scripture. That god is a god who himself is surrounded by ultimate mystery. Out of these two world views come different ideas of how evil started. The pagan answer never gave an answer for origins because the universe always was there in some form or another. The same thing happens when we start looking at the origin of evil. Ultimately there is no answer, and that's what we tried to show by looking at an ancient pagan text and then you can come to modern Darwinianism which holds that the universe has always been in a state of struggle, there's always been suffering, misery, it's not "blessed is the meek for they shall inherit the earth," it's blessed are the fittest for they shall survive. There's a totally different ethic involved in this picture. But good and evil, good and evil together, are normal, and something within man is revolted by this, and this is why the existentialist, these men are furious. One of the things that upsets them is that ultimately they are made in God's image and there's that inside us called conscience, D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_016.doc Scripture in every topic we've covered, so don't think we've covered anything in an advanced way; this is more a survey of the basics. I've tried to boil down the boundary between truth and error. The second great event of Scripture is the fall of man and the result that that fall has. We dealt with evil and we come back again and again to the face that in Christianity evil has a start and an end. In the fall these are the two basic fundamental truths that separate Biblical truth from error. The carnal mind, the powers of darkness, our flesh, paganism, whatever you call the whole kit and caboodle, basically always holds to some form of this impersonal continuum where God, man, nature, rocks and everything else are all part of the same mysterious universe. That mysterious universe is both good and evil, has always been and will always be good and evil. That evil does not start and evil does not end. This is a fundamental difference. We want to be very sensitive to this as Christians; only in the Bible is this true. If you go into the pagan literature you'll see that the pagans do not have an idea of a fall, they have something that looks like it, the gods got angry at the noise men make, so they decide to penalize man or some story like that. But the gods themselves are evil prior to that, so the gods are evil, man is evil, and there's no redemption from that. Look at the diagram and you'll see there are some powerful aftereffects of this; this looks like just innocent theory, but like we found with English literature, it affects literature in a profound way. We summarized this idea as having two distinct truths. On the Biblical side we say that evil is bounded, or bracketed, or limited. On the anti-biblical side, or on the pagan side evil is unlimited, unbracketed, and always is there. Think about what this means in the future, your future existence D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_017.doc oing on? What is the great grand vehicle for the creation of life inside an evolutionary world view? Struggle, chaos, out of death comes life. Think about that for a moment. Evolution is profoundly wrong, it's exactly wrong, you can't be more wrong than that, that the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, death over millions of years, death, death, death, death, death, death is the grand selector, it's death and the differential rates of death that drive the evolutionary process according to Darwin. So out of death comes life? Isn't something backwards here? So the result of that if you really go along with this and you buy into this, Sir Arthur Keith makes sense. Look at Rockefeller's quote, this was written back in the Sherman Antitrust days when they were defending the idea that big business, the railroads, the big oil companies could crush any little guy, any small business guy they wanted to, and they were allowed to do this all over the country, and he defended this and said: "The growth of large business is merely survival of the fittest... This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature." It's very easy to start setting up that morality if you buy into this. What I'm saying is we can draw little charts up here that look cute, but in practice this has very BIG ramifications. Let's go to the "Sin-Damage to Man's Rule Over Nature." We'll go back to Gen. 3:19, "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground..." by the "sweat of your face" and earlier "in toil you shall eat of it." This is a profound observation in Dr. Gary North's book on Genesis and Economics, not that I buy into everything he says but when you get to economics he's got some tremendous insights. What he is arguing for, the paragraph on page 52 is kind of the lead in, "We are forced to work together to D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_018.doc e troops out there you should have seen the logistics operation going on. It's not necessarily battlefield skills that win wars, it's the logistics, the side that can't supply their troops looses. And logistics is a tremendous and fundamental effort in all situations. The logistics of taking 2,000,000 people out in the middle of the dessert, just think of the water problem, multiply the gallons of water a person needs a day by 1,000,000 and think about the logistics. Think about the clothing, for 40 years, how many pairs of shoes would one or two million people going to use in 40 years of walking around in that dessert, and the dessert is not smooth to walk on, there are a lot of hard rocks out there. What about all the clothes? They didn't have K-Mart in the Sinai, where do they get all this stuff. Look at what it's saying, it's saying their clothing didn't wear out; you had food that you never saw before. So there's a principle in this where our suffering will be to put us in a box, we'll say I'm in a box and I can't get out. That's right. Try to think back to these people, no food, no water, a clothing problem, and all of a sudden God drops in manna and this is why He says in verse 3, you didn't know this, your fathers didn't know it, but I made you to know it, that you may understand that you don't live by bread alone, by normal processes, you live by trusting Me.So here's a case where suffering is a nudge to spiritually advance. We don't like that, we get comfortable where we are, and then God says okay, I'm going to ratchet things up a little bit. We don't like that, but it's really for our benefit. When we were a little kid we didn't want to go to school the first time. As Christians we don't like this, it gets us out of our comfort zone. I want to take one other passage, where Paul had a similar situation develop; we won't get into the details D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_019.doc rse; something about that verse doesn't fit what we know about hydrodynamics. Look at our map, there's a river that flows out of Eden to water the garden, and what does it do after it leaves Eden? It divides into four rivers. Where do you ever see rivers dividing like that? Rivers combine, the Mississippi and Missouri River combine, but where to rivers diverge. Now if you're a mapmaker and this is an observation about rivers diverging, what does that tell you about the height of the land? Make some deductions here. What does that tell you about the altitude? It tells you that wherever this place is, it was on a mountain. The only place we have a watershed divided today is in the Rocky Mountains, and the Appalachian mountains, there's a watershed division, rain drops and theoretically as a rain drop comes down and hits the knife edge of the division, some of the water molecules go east, some go west, the ones that go west drain off into Kentucky, go into the Ohio River basin, go out into the gulf of Mexico and the ones that falls on the east side come out and go into the Susquehanna and into Chesapeake Bay and out into the Atlantic ocean. There's a divergence, but the divergence is caused by a mountainous terrain. But even that doesn't really quite explain this pattern. Somehow these rivers are diverging, and it's coming from somewhere. We're not told where that river comes from, we're just told that it exits some place, waters the garden. There's a hint in verse 6, and the hint is in the word "mist," "But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground." That word is also a Hebrew word that can mean an artesian well and that's how I take it; I take it that this water was coming out of the ground. We'll take this up next week, but look before then look at two verses in the New Testament, John 4:14 and Rev. 22:1-2 and see if D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_019.doc screams of people? And Josephus says the people were being scalded to death outside because there was volcanic activity and that water was over 200 degrees that was coming up. So you have people just screaming and pounding on the side of that ark, and it's lifting off, and you can't reach out and save them. And think of what you would have said to yourself, boy am I glad I built this thing the way He wanted. Had any man ever seen a boat that big? Probably not, so there was no precedent here, and here you have God coming to a man in engineering terms with a blue print that has never ever before been done. It would be like God coming to you and you were here in 1765 and He said here's a rocket ship, follow directions, and you press the button and it launches, and then the earth disappears before you in a ball of fire or something. That's the kind of emotional trauma that these people went through, and that's what I'm trying to show you from the text that this flood event is big time stuff. Question asked: Clough replies: That's a good observation, what do you do with Genesis 2, it had not rained. Some of the accomodationists say that just means locally in the Garden of Eden it didn't rain, but if you follow the notes I'll lead you a line of logic. There are several evidences to suggest why it did not rain before the flood, because there are several observations laced throughout the text that turn out to be consistent. After the flood happens, what natural phenomenon is first mentioned? It's so new that it becomes a symbol of a covenant. The rainbow. Did you ever think about how to get a rainbow? You can create a rainbow at home with your hose nozzle, spraying it a certain way, but if you watch the hose nozzle while you're spraying you'll notice that you won't get the rainbow unless you have pretty coarse sized drops. You can get light diffraction through D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_020.doc e. Moreover, if you look at a map, where does the ark wind up after it's all over? It winds up in eastern Turkey. If this was just a Mesopotamian flood, which way does the water go in a flood? It goes toward the Persian Gulf. The ark should wind up down here. So the ark is going the wrong direction. So the Depth-Time argument simply says that the data of Scripture doesn't let you conclude it is a local flood. In addition to that argument we said there was the argument about the ark itself. The ark had a certain design, it had a size, it was fully sufficient. Let me give you a reference, it's just been published, a seven year study on the ark of Noah. The author of this is John Woodmorappe, he's been quite a diligent student, he's a Christian with two degrees, I think one in biology and one in geology, and he's written a report of a seven year study just on the ark of Noah, and it's called Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study. You can get it from the Institution for Creation Research, same outfit that produces a lot of Christian creationist materials. That report is well worth it. The feasibility study by John Woodmorappe goes through hundreds of argument, he tried to go back through and answer every single objection to Noah's ark. There have been all kinds of objections, obvious ones like the objection that you can't fit all the animals in the ark, and he says yes you can, and he has improved on Morris and Whitcomb's book that they did in 1961, and he shows that the ark could have taken more, actually only 1/4th of it was actually occupied by animals, 3/4th of it was empty. If that's so that raises a theological question about the fact that God had plenty of room in the ark if more people had responded to the preaching of Noah. So the empty ark is actually a tragic reminder theologically of a lost opportunity, that salvation was broader than people who received it. And he goes into things like how did eight people handle all the manure, a little problem, you've got a gene pool of the entire land animal kingdom, and unless they hibernated, which is another theory, that God hibernated them in the ark so their processes slowed down, you still have a little problem. So he goes through that, he has gone to ranchers, to people who work with animals, he's gotten statistics about what can an D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_020.doc a piece of wood that long, that wide, of balsa wood or something, and putting it in an aquarium. Then cut out another piece of wood that would be a perfect cube, this is a typical pagan idea of an ark, weird design, and put it in the aquarium, and then do a little slosh experiment with the water in the aquarium, start creating waves, or do it in a bathtub, and watch which wood stabilizes. What's going to happen to a cube? It's going to tumble. But what happens to this thing? This thing, Morris has computed, you take the center of gravity, then you take the buoyancy principle, and you see how the center of gravity is relative to the buoyancy force, and you can see how far this boat can rock without tipping over. I'm not sure but I remember the calculations, it can go up to something like 50 or 60 degrees and still right itself. So we're talking big stability here. So the ark design shows a cosmic purpose, a universal flood purpose. The third thing that plays a role, and we spent considerable time in 2 Pet. 3, because 2 Pet. 3 is an apostolic interpretation of Gen. 6-8, a very, very important passage. In that passage Peter speaks in terms that even dwarf the original text of Gen. 6-8. Peter says the heavens and the earth which were, and the heavens and the earth which are. Now if we've read Genesis correctly, what do we know about that word pair, heaven and earth when it's paired together. The first occurrence of this word pair in the Bible is Gen. 1:1, and in Gen. 1:1 heaven and earth refers to the universe, the universe, not just planet earth, the entire universe. Peter is apparently teaching here that universe number one was before the flood, universe number two is what we live in, and then he points to the third universe, which is the radical recreation, the resurrected universe. We're talking big, heavy stuff here, big interruption into history. The D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_020.doc ews, some of these people say Jesus is never mentioned outside of the Bible. Oh yeah, what about Josephus. Josephus reports all these traditions that the Jews believed in Jesus day, stuff that's not in our Bible, and one of the things they believed about verse 11, where it says "the fountains of the great deep burst open," they had memories of this in their Jewish tradition about there were geysers of steam and they boiled people alive, the water that was coming up from the earth, and you'd think geologically that makes sense, that these subterranean waters were hot, and these people were fried. And this may be one reason, perhaps, we don't know why there are so few human fossils in the rock record. You think what happened to all these people, why don't we encounter more bones in some of the deeper layers? But maybe they were in one area or whatever. Notice in verse 12, the rain actually only lasted 40 days and 40 nights. But I guarantee you to get rain to last 40 days and 40 nights requires some stupendous atmospherics that we don't have, and you can say I've been around here when it's rained a week. Yeah, but the reason it's rained 7 days is because the moisture was being transported into this area, but on the rest of the earth it wasn't raining 7 days. Other parts were giving up moisture that would be transported here so it could rain. But here it's raining upon the earth; this is all over the place. So the question is, where is this water coming from? That's a big question. You look at this text, 40 days and 40 nights, and nobody ever thinks where did this rain come from? One explanation for the 40 days and 40 nights is that this hot water was just continually evaporating and raining down again, evaporating and raining down again, evaporating and raining down again, etc. So there's a number of thoughts about this, I'm just trying to show you that when you read through this text don't read through it at 30 miles an hour, just take it clause by clause and observ D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_022.doc cuts God down to size, cutting Him from an absolute Creator, infinite personal Creator down to a big boy, so to speak, or a superman. When that happens, remember the Enuma Elish epic of what pagan literature looked like and how they conceived creation. Remember the observations we made? We said that there were two features to the pagan doctrines and religions of this time, and it's still true. One is that the Creator/creature distinction is submerged so God, if He is still around, just becomes sort of like a super person. So instead of being the Creator/ creature He becomes less than that, He becomes part of the Continuity of Being, with God here, angels here, man here, animals here, rocks here, we're just sort of on a scale.The second thing we observed when we read that pagan literature of the creation, we said something else happened? Remember that passage where the gods and goddesses were going at it for creation, and we said who's in charge? I said it's like a committee without a chairman. So you can't tell for sure whether next year Marduk is going to be on the throne, or some other god is going to be on the throne, because they're all competing for the throne, they're all big boys, they're all super people. So how do you know which one calls the shots? The pagan mind has a problem with this and to keep itself from falling apart usually what pagan influences do is they revert to another idea that they quickly bring in to save the day, called fate, and fate or the table of destinies comes into play. Whatever it is, as far as making a covenant, is that this party, we'll call this the God-side of the covenant, is missing or very weak in pagan thought. Either God becomes a process, like He does in modern thinking, in the beginning was gas, either He becomes a process or He becomes so weak that who wants to make a covenant with Him anyway. So right aw D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_023.doc ct is for the total environment, this includes believers and unbelievers, there's no distinction. This is not a salvation and redemptive thing, this is a universal environmental thing holding for all men, all women, all races, all cultures, in all centuries. This is a universal. The Noahic family had just come through a catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. They had seen nature torn to shreds, and they would have naturally feared that this would happen again. We sit here centuries, thousands of years later and it's easy for us who live in a relatively tranquil physical environment to kind of just kiss this off. But can you imagine the experience these people had for one year in a rocking boat, with the entire genetic pool aboard that boat. Think of the responsibility. If you were in Noah's family you might not have thought of that because you might not have been a biochemist and have the understanding we do, but riding in that boat is the entire genetic pool of the human race. There are no other genes left, they're all gone, they've been destroyed. Every one of us carries the biochemical heritage of Noah, his wife, his three sons and their three wives. We get genes from on one else except those people. If you have a dog, cat, cattle, the genes of those animals were on this ark. This is the genetic pool that has been saved, and they have watched literally the physical environment around them disintegrate before them. They have witnessed the power of God like no person ever had up to that point and probably no person ever will until the return of Jesus Christ. It was an awesome thing for them to have lived through. And then they walk out in this muddy, reshaped, radically different earth with a radically different climate, almost like they've come to a different planet, and you can't help but wonder if they're saying are we safe, are we really safe? D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_023.doc nstruct the past is that observations on a data base here, where we can control it with direct observations, are valid back there, and we extrapolate that, we say natural law is natural law, and it has to go on. But how do we know back here that things were as they appear now. I'll give you a practical illustration of this. When I get into Appendix C we're going to take a look at some physics, the physics of chronology, chronometry, etc. and one of the interesting things, I will show you a slide, it was derived from work done at Oak Ridge by a man who subsequently lost his fellowship at Oak Ridge because he did this, but he made the observation that there appears to be evidence in the rocks of the earth that the radioactive decay constant has changed. And it's a very stunning observation. His observation basically is you can go into granite matrix, rock, and you can see particles that have a half life of 3½ minutes with a burn pattern. And the problem with that is that if they only lasted 3½ minutes, when did they do that? Because of the existing model the earth was molten, and so these particles, these particular isotopes would have been floating in this molten array and surely would have decayed before the rock crystallizes hard in granite. But if they disintegrated before the granite matrix formed, it wouldn't let the burn mark. So obviously it must have radioactively decayed after the granite hardened up. But if that's the case, then how did it get into the granite matrix? A very interesting puzzle. Those are instances where we have observed radio active decay, a decay rate over this period of time. Great, we have great observations, we connect all the dotted lines, we have curves of best fit, no problem, nobody's arguing that. What we're arguing is whether the decay constants you derive from data here is valid back here, that's the debate. And there's no way around it other than speculation. Let's go back to the chart again, on the right is the time line. This is the area of direct observation of man, we can extend our direct observation somewhat with microscopes, we can extend it with telescopes, we can have high speed filming that takes smaller and smaller segments of time, at Aberdeen we're down to billionths of a second to photograph what happens when a bullet comes out of a gun and it starts to turn, you can measure little torque rates, etc. with ultra high speed ph D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_024.doc hings we want to see, and to see that this is a serious point. The New Testament makes a little commentary about this business of food. It's always been an agenda of paganism to try to erase guilt of sin, some way, shape or form. Therefore, whenever the creation seems to be too clear in its message about God's creator-hood and our creature-hood, we got to drown it out and bury it. That's why I have every title in this series of notes, the buried truth of something, the buried truth of this, the buried truth of that. What am I getting at? Because sin buries the truth, that's what we're getting at. Not only is the truth literally buried in the ground underneath our feet when we walk on sedimentary rock and we dig down and find animal death in the rock, we're walking on judgment. When we drive our cars and use a gasoline product that comes from an oil field, it comes from animals that have died; we can't even drive our cars without killing something. The very engines we use depend for their existence on input from the death of life, animals. So you would say paganism has to do something with this, and indeed it does. The pagan mind has always played and toyed with getting back to nature. It has always tried to undo, for example, government, it has always tried to undo marriage and go to a commune, it has always tried to undo the city and go to the country, it has always tried to undo the eating of meat. Interesting. Pagan religions are almost inevitably vegetarians in the Far East. In 1 Tim. 4:3 notice the characteristic. "Men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods, which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth." Obviously in the context it's talking about men, verse 2, "hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron," and in verse 1, talking about these are basically "deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons." The energizing fo D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_025.doc n't do much of a thing to kill somebody in the electric chair 14 years and 25 appeals after So and So met their death in a crime. The point is that if you watch how capital punishment was administered in the Old Testament it actually was controlled very well. God, when He set up the Mosaic Law, God is the author of Scripture, it does us well today when we're thinking about legislation, is to study how the Mosaic legislation worked, never mind how cruel it was, there are a lot of merciful provisions in there. One of the things was that you couldn't be convicted of murder without an eye witness. So they had controls. Another point was that the witness had to be the first one to throw the rocks to kill them. That meant that you've got to be sure that you're not committing perjury, because now look what you're doing. It had to be done speedy. There were a number of interesting provisions in the Mosaic code. I went to Williamsburg recently, it's like going into a time machine and they have history professors play roles, and in this room there was a fascinating guy there, a professor of history, and he was so good at mimicking what was going on in the 1700's. Some lady asked, what do you feel about rehabilitating criminals, and he looks at her, he puts on this act and looks up at her with a surprised look and says Madam, in this colony we are free men and part of being a free man is that you are fully responsible for your actions, therefore... and he went on about speedy trials, he said, in our colony at the present time our trials usually last no more than thirty minutes, we present evidence, we sequester the jury without food, water or relief, if you know what I mean, and we generally get verdicts within five to ten minutes. He went on and on and this lady wouldn't give up, she kept asking these questions, so finally he said Madam, what country do you come from? D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_027.doc of death of animals going on before this if the days are ages. What we've done is we've compromised this word also, because now it's not natural evil and human evil that started at the fall, it's only human evil that starts at the fall, not natural. So storms, chaos, and things in nature that are bad must not be bad, because they preceded the fall. If that's the case, then that also carries over further on down in the textual structure, because now what we've compromised those two things because we've made this little accommodation, now what happens in the area of salvation? Because this flood, whatever it is, can't be found in the strata any more because now we've explained all the rock strata back here, this is where the strata was laid down because that's millions and millions of years old, now what we have done is we have to adjust the flood. So this salvation and judgment gets contracted down because that becomes a minor Tigris-Euphrates river valley overflow situation. It's got to be, because there's no evidence of a global flood. That was all pushed back when we made the days into ages. And if that's the case, and the flood was only local, and God said He'd never bring another one, what does that do to the new heavens and the new earth? It trivializes the whole covenant now. I hope you see, this is one of many dramas that we could show, but you start fiddling around with how you interpret one part of the text, and you're going to get in hot water. And this is the lesson that has been learned for the past 200 years, every time accommodationism has been tried it winds up doing this, and that is why a group of men finally said in the 1950's and 60's, this has gone far enough, we are not going to do this any more. As Christians we are going to approach the text and if the text conflicts then the text conflicts, but we are not going to use a rubber Bi D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_028.doc t at the heart of the ? is the same ? procreation as we noticed in Enuma Elish, because it's part of this Continuity of Being, ? paganism in the ancient world, paganism in the modern world, it's all the same thing, it's just dressed up in different clothes. And we, as Christians, have to realize we're part of a centuries old conflict, it is not new to Charles Darwin. It goes far back into the first pagan that ever rebelled against ?, it goes back to the very fall of man. So ? ? the face off in creation and evolution is this issue, we're not going to talk about ? we'll deal with that in another appendix, we're not talking about the universe outside of the earth, we're not talking about rocks, we're only talking about these two ideas, either the world was fixed with categories, or it is part of one ?, it can transmute itself just like these gods in the ancient world. Turn in the notes on page 109, the second topic I want to talk about, we've looked at difference in structures, ? creation ? ? ? and categories, evolution ultimately does not, because ? transmute, the categories are ?, they're just weigh stations on the evolutionary ?. So we want to deal with the difference between evolution as fact, so called, and evolution as theory. I warn you about this because if you get into serious discussions you may get tripped up here, because somebody some day is going to tell you, you Christians can attack the theories of evolution, and you can poke holes in Darwin, we may not have a complete theory of how evolution happened, but we know that it happened. We don't know how, but we know that. So what is ? here is a ? is made between the theory of how it happened and that it has happened. And of course, you can't deny factually it happened. We ? you what we're denying. That's exactly what we're denying. We want to focus for a few minutes on something about the fact D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_028.doc hat it's a reptile and it just goes on its merry way. Nobody ever told it to be a reptile, it uses its wings like every other bird does. The point is, we don't know enough from skeletal material to draw those conclusions, and what exists are very small and very, very infrequent. That is one of the most powerful evidences that evolution can't be a fact, if it were a fact, where is the historical record in the fossil data?On page 113, how do we interpret this? "From the Biblical viewpoint the fossil record is obviously a post-fall product. Death came through Adam's fall. Fossils, therefore, derive from events happening after creation. The prime candidate for a cause of fossil-bearing rock is the flood. Other events may also have contributed," and I'll discuss that in D. Conclusion: "To write a natural history is extremely difficult. But for the pagan who at the very starting point excludes all data available from God's Word, the task is hopeless. Biological history necessarily deals with instantaneous creation by divine fiat, effects of the fall, effects of the flood, and mechanisms of adaptation designed into plants and animals. The full story has never been told within a Biblical worldview." As I say, probably won't be because it takes a lot of money to do the research to do that. Summing up: what have we done tonight? We have simply looked evolution in its face, and I hope we have provided you with a concept of how to deal with these things. Go back to basic ideas, don't get distracted by details, don't loose the forest for the trees. See what the major issues are and see how they're related to the structures we've learned in creation, fall, flood and covenant. Don't be snowed because somebody has a PhD and tells you something. I'm not knocking these guys, many of them are sincere. We're not impugning people's morals and ethics here. We're simpl D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_029.doc fugal, force would be spread out along the equator. So these are just some arguments of why this clock system isn't quite so cut and dried as you would like to believe. I'm going to conclude the class with showing a rather spectacular one that came up in a court trial in Louisiana, the evolutionary party saw this argument, couldn't answer it, and the head, I think he was the head of the American Geological Society, was so offended that one of the Christian physicists brought this up that he said I can't answer it, it's just a tiny mystery. Let's see this so-called tiny mystery. There's a rather exciting implication to this tiny mystery. Both those circles are died sections of mica rock under a microscope. The man who studied this probably knows more about this than any living person, the man who originated this was a Canadian back many years ago he did his study, and Dr. Gentry went ahead and embellished the work, but those little patterns... mica is important because mica represents slices off of very old rock, the bedrock of the planet. So whatever we observe by way of history in that rock, we're not talking about the sedimentary rock on top. We're talking about the bedrock of our planet. And what Gentry and these other guys noticed is that if you slice the mica very, very thin, appropriately color it, you get these strange things that show up. What causes those things? It turns out that what causes them is radioactive decay, and at the core of each one of those circles you see these little dark things. Those dark things are the element, or the compound in which the element is located, that decays. And when that element decayed by radioactive decay, it emitted radiation, and these circles are the burn marks left by the radiation of those elements as they deteriorated and radioactively decayed. It also turns out that we can tell what those elements are by measuring the diameter of those circles. And you can work back. Here's a three dimensional view of what those little things are. The mica shows them as circles because we've sliced the mica, but if we didn't slice the mica they'd be spherical. At the center you have the element that's decaying. It radiates energy and as it decays in certain stages, the energy is left on these outer rings. This is polonium 218, a halo cross-section. Polonium 218 has been the identifying thing at the D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_029.doc hat element, three minutes. You could say well maybe polonium 218 came from another element that decayed that had millions of years of life, and it came to the polonium, the polonium boom, three minutes, and it decayed to something else. You could explain it that way except for one problem, in this case there's no known precursor of polonium 218, no known precursor in the decay chain. That means that polonium 218 was the original element. Does anybody see where I'm headed with this? It's a rather astounding conclusion. Here's the point. What do we usually get in our textbooks about the earth when it was first formed? Was it a solid or was it molten blob? A molten blob. Would this rock, then, have been crystallized when the earth was first formed? It would have taken millions of years to cool down out of this blob to the point where we had crystallized mica. The problem is, how do you preserve this 218 from decaying, it's got to wait until the earth is all cooled down and crystallized before it can leave those burn marks. So you've got a problem here, either way you go. You can argue that radioactive decay didn't start until some other time, late, recently, in which case now you've got a denial of the radioactive decay constant, it's not a radioactive decay constant, it's a radioactive decay variable, OR it is a constant and what we're observing are the finger marks of God's creation, that God created the earth instantly and crystallized white mica formed, the rock was created like this, the decay happened in the first three minutes of the universe, in which case now the earth doesn't fit the whole model from which the earth came as a molten blob from millions of years. To argue against this, obviously this is quite troublesome to evolutionists, so what they have tried to argue is that these holes, these things you see here, were not there at first, but rather in tiny little cracks in the mica they were dissolved in water and oooched their way through the mica and just happened to rest at that point. Does anyone see a little problem with that? That has been known to happen, it's called leeching. But let's just suppose it happened; let's suppose those did leech into that position. What did we say the half life was? three minutes. It leeched in what, thirty seconds, got into position and then decayed. Or, if it did leech and took its time leeching, you wouldn't see a sphere, you would see a streak along the leeching pathway. But you don't observe any streak there; there are no streaks there, just circles, so how do you explain that one. They didn't have an explanation. The man in the trial mocked Dr. Gentry and said, just a tiny D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_029.doc idence all they want to until we creationists bring up the evidence, and then all of a sudden it's excused as tiny mysteries. Dr. Gentry's diagram and conclusion for his finding is that what he's discovered, by the way the thanks that Dr. Gentry got was that all of his fellowship money dried up from the National Science Foundation after he testified at the trial, we're all open-minded of course in this country, freedom of speech, etc. This would be the billion year view, here you have all of the universe, the big bang and the stars form, the super nova, the solar nebula, the earth forms, you would have had all the natural activity gone by the time the earth solidified, 4.5 billion years, Precambrian granites, they formed after... after all this activity had gone away. That can't be. That's why Gentry points out that what we have is the chemical elements were called into existence, and the primordial polonium halos are extinct natural radioactivity reduce this time period to less than 3 minutes.Either you accept that or you must deny the fact that radioactive decay is a constant. I watched one time in a university physics department, when Gentry gave... he was smart, he didn't go into all these conclusions, he just went around the country for a few years getting his work accepted before he drew the conclusions, slick operator, and I was in a room when he did this at a major university, and I knew what he was up to, so I wanted to watch what happened to the atmosphere in the room when he began to present his story. He didn't go into it like I did tonight and explain it, he didn't have to. These PhD's took one look at those polonium halos and 3½ minute half life and they knew very well where things were going to lead. Gentry got about 15 minutes into his presentation and I'm a meteorologist but I don't always carry a thermometer with me, but it seemed like the t D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_030.doc nted to do was to show and summarize at the end of the series the fact that there is a difference, and be aware of the difference, that evolution is a modern statement of an ancient idea. Something you always want to learn, don't accept ideas just because you think somebody originated them recently. Be very suspicious of the thought that there's a new idea. There usually are not any new ideas; they are old ideas with a new set of clothes. And evolution is not a new idea, and it did not begin with Charles Darwin, it began with the first pagan belief in Adam's day. And it is the belief in the Continuity of Being that all this gradation, from gods and the goddesses to man, to animals, to rocks, etc. What Darwin did is he added a visualizeable method of propagating upward on the chain whereas in ancient paganism it was always coming down the chain. So he changed the direction of the arrow, but he didn't change the idea. Creationism holds that from the very beginning God created kinds. And these kinds have never been transgressed, that God made man, God made birds, God made reptiles, God made mammals, etc. etc. etc. And what are these kinds? What do they correspond to? Not necessarily the modern species. Species originally were animals that could interbreed and animals that couldn't interbreed were somehow not part of that species. The problem with that definition is that from our point of view as Christians and creationists is that we don't know how reproduction capabilities have deteriorated over time, due to the fall. So in a larger sense, using the word "kind" and tracking it through the Mosaic Law Code, etc. several biologists who are Christians have come to the conclusion that the nearest thing that "kinds" corresponds to with what you learn in school is probably the idea of order, or family. In any case, there are these kinds, and within the D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_030.doc its edge? If you are a creature living inside the rubber, imagine you're a little tiny ant or mite, and you dig your way through this rubber, you can go travel anywhere in the surface, you can't get out of the surface, you can't go inside the balloon, you can't go outside the balloon, but you can go anywhere you want to inside the surface. Is it or is it not possible for you, eventually to come back where you came from? You can. You could travel from one of these points inside the rubber all the way around the balloon and come back to the point you started. That's called a finite model of the Big Bang. And that's the idea in the theory, you'll see it propounded, where you can take a rocket ship with sufficient fuel and you'd eventually come back to where you came from, by proceeding in a straight line in the universe. Somehow you'd come back on yourself. The other alternate theory of the Big Bang is that instead of a balloon we have a plate that is infinite in extension, that's becoming more infinite in extension. What do both ideas have in common? This is the discovery Humphreys made and I think it's a profound discovery. Both the balloon and the plate have no edges, these are both surfaces where there's no edge to it. In other words, if you're an ant you go around inside this thing, you never experience an edge. Can you ever experience an edge in that surface? And if you have an infinite thing you're never going to experience the edge either. Great ideas usually come from very simple questions. After studying that Dr. Humphreys made the point, he said what's so interesting is why is it that every cosmology starts off with the assumption the universe has no edges. Why is that? Can't we conceive of the universe with an edge? Why is it that EVERY, get this and underline it, EVERY cosmology today starts with the initial condition that the universe do D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_030.doc it. The general theory of relativity believes in something called time dilation, and it means that when gravity decreases, time speeds up. For example, you can take a clock at sea level and put another one in Colorado where the National Bureau of Standards clock is, and they do not run the same. One is subject to stronger gravitational field than the other, and there's a minutia of difference. What happens to the gravity as God expands all this mass that was once local out through the massive size of the universe, what do you suppose happens to the force of gravity. It decreases. What do you suppose happens to an observer who is riding the wave of the expansion? This guy is riding a rocket ship on the day that God expanded, a little angel, he's got his pocket watch, so God says expand, and he walks away from the earth. What is he observing? Two angels, one guy sits back on the earth and he's got radio contact with this guy, they're both clocking this. It turns out that the angel that is going like this at the front end of the edge of the universe is expanding out, his clock is speeding up like crazy. This guy sees a lapse of only 24 hours. So the light now begins to come back to us and has been coming back to us from that work of God when He expanded the universe. I won't fill in all the details except to point out some lessons learned here. This man worked on this for 10 years, believe me the math in the general theory of relativity is hairy, most of us will never get close to it, even those of us who have studied math, coordinate transformations, tenser theory, all kinds of stuff gets involved in this. But it turns out, isn't it remarkable that if you change one little starting point, the massive difference that happens. What does that teach you, even if Humphreys is wrong, what does that already teach you about the so-called facts that you're being D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_031.doc the box, and they're using the word f-a-c-t. Our point is that when the f-a-c-t word is used for something outside of the box, that word is being used differently than you're used to using it. This is where we have brainwashing going on. It's a deceitful use of words. Those are not facts, those are conjectures, and to use the word f-a-c-t to describe that, when in fact it's not fact, is wrong. It's a vocabulary problem and it's a deceitful use of words. As Christians we don't have to put up with that; we challenge the use of that vocabulary. Let's look on Appendix D on page 124. What is the basic presupposition? The issue is the principle of interpreting. How do we interpret the rocks of the earth? What do we use as an interpretive principle? The first paragraph under the major topic is that if the Bible is correct, then we have a set of information; we have creation, one major event. The second major event is the fall. What started with the fall that's significant to rocks because there are things that are in the rocks that are dead? Death starts with the fall. So now if we see fossils in rocks and fossils are dead, then it follows that the rocks must be dated after the fall. Now we have creation, the fall, and then we have the third event we studied, which Peter in this passage makes not just a local flood, but he says in 2 Pet. 3:5 and 7 that it affected both the heavens and the earth, so we have this event causing that catastrophe. We don't know what caused this, this is just data from Scripture, but something radically happened physiologically to man's body, and it's reported in the Scripture though it's never explained in the Scripture, it's just reported.So we have three events and when we as Christians, we have to learn to think Scripturally, and when we start looking at rocks and we want to answer the question, what are these, what's the principle involved, we have to say we know one thing, we know there was a creation; we know that at the point of creation that God had all the rocks, except the sedimentary rocks, the igneous rocks and other kinds of rocks were presumably created, soil was created, plants were created, and animals were created. These things came into existence at that point. Then after creation we have a second point called the fall, and that's where death starts. So if we have a fossil and the fossil was dead, the fossil must be located to the right of that point. Then we have further on in Scripture something called the flood, which Peter interprets as cosmic, that that flood was a cosmic event, not just an earthly event. Therefore we have a water-based catastrophe. Now if we have a water-based catastrophe that changed the earth, and we go out and we look at rocks, and rocks can be igneous rocks, igneous intrusions, or they can be these nice sedimentary rocks that you observe along highway cuts, etc. What's true of sedimentary rocks? Into what kind of environment were sedimentary rocks made? Water. Every sedimentary rock on earth was generated under water. Isn't this a strange coincidence? What does the Bible say happened in past history? A major flood. So we had a water catastrophe and we simultaneously observe all over the place that we have sedimentary rocks, into which fossils are trapped that are dead. So the challenge for us as Christians is can we take the data of historical geology and interpret it within this framework. That's the challenge, that's what the paragraph on page 124 is all about. I say in the last sentence of that paragraph "it was a high energy epic." What do I mean by "a high energy epic?" What I mean is crucial to the Bible's interpretation is when we get into stuff like the flood, I say "high energy" because energy is work, it's the work that is done, a lot of work can be done in a short amount of time. I suppose engineers would support me in saying basically we're talking about here, energy over time. We have high energy events that happened. So the Bible's theme or principle of interpreting rock strata is that it must be interpreted within at least these three events, possibly more, and that these events, particularly the flood, were high energy events. Let's go now to what we usually get in the classroom. This is one of the "facts" that we are told is a "fact." We're told that the basis for interpretation in historical geology ought to be what is called uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism says that processes, this goes back to that box illustration, that events and processes that are observed, such as erosion, such as sedimentation, that these processes that we can measure now scientifically inside the box happened back here, that's 2 Peter, "all things continue as they were." So I can take erosion rates, that's how fast the rocks wear down, and I can take sedimentation rates, how fast sediment builds up to make rocks, I observe the processes, and I perpetuate them. And using this idea, using present day rates, this is very low energy. So the principle here is this is a low energy process. The Bible position is there was a high energy catastrophe, and we paraphrase the debate over the interpretative principle as a conflict between catastrophism on one hand and on the pagan side of the house, uniformitarianism. Those are the two conflicting principles. That's why on page 125 I describe that pagan process. It says that "the universe is ‘safe' from any catastrophic intervention of the Biblical God so there has certainly not been any such high energy event like the flood that could have caused most of the global geologic formations. All rock formations and fossil assemblages, therefore, came about from a variety of ‘low energy' processes similar to those we observe today: river flooding, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc." This is the principle that they use. We want to see that we're going to come out with two different answers here, but we're coming out with two different answers not because one of us is stupid and the other one is smart, they're smart unbelievers, brilliant unbelievers, smarter than we are, we're not knocking anybody's intelligence here, this is not a question of IQ, this is a question of the premises of thought. If you start with 2 + 2 = 4 and somebody else starts with 2 + 2 = 5, somewhere along the process you're going to get different answers. It's just a feature of thinking. The history of geologic interpretation, page 125, I want to review that so you get a feel for what's happened here and why we are where we are today. "As geologic studies began," I want to read this because there's a lot of material packed into these sentences and I want to explain as I go through, so much of tonight I want to pretty well stick with this text. "As the geologic studies began after the Protestan D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_031.doc of tonight I want to pretty well stick with this text. "As the geologic studies began after the Protestant Reformation," notice when they began, who was the trigger house and the source of geologic study? It occurred after the Protestant Reformation. Isn't that an interesting historical side note? "...several Bible-believing naturalists tried to develop a flood-model to explain newly-discovered data. To their credit," and please note this, this is a historically valid point for our side, "it was these Bible-believers who first argued against the medieval interpretation that fossils were strange objects produced ‘in situ'." It was a belief during the Middle Ages that fossils in the rocks were created in the rocks, that they weren't the bones of dead animals. That was the prevailing belief. It was precisely the Bible-believing geologists who started out in the Reformation who said we're convinced the Scripture is the authority, we're not going to accept all these traditions of the church, we go back to the Scripture, and the Scripture tells us about Noah's flood. So we say that those things that we observe in the rocks are fossils from Noah's flood. So it's very interesting, that they were the ones... superstitious Middle Ages, yes, but it was Bible believers that straightened it out. "By the late 1600's," watch this because here's where a failure happened, and we today have got to learn from our past mistakes. This is one of those lessons learned chapters. Let's not repeat the same mistakes that we made before. "By the late 1600's, certain weaknesses in their approach led them to begin reinterpreting Genesis to allow more time for the natural history of the earth. Unintentionally, they insisted upon explaining geologic data by means of processes that was still going on in their day." Underline that, because that was their error. They were trying to account for this stuff on the basis of processes still going on in their time. But once they had done this, which if you look at 1 Pet. 3 what were they doing? They were compromising with uniformitarianism, and once they had done that, then the unbelievers came right in and said see, we told you all along, no way can processes today be interpreted in any kind of a Scriptural framework. And they were had, lost the battle. It started o D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_031.doc he Title "Flood geology Today," on page 126, "Uniformitarian-based geology," this is what you're going to get in every textbook, you will get this in every classroom, you will get this on every TV program, in every news article, so I'm not telling you something that I'm making up, this is all over the place, and if you doubt this you're looked upon as some sort of intellectual freak. "Uniformitarian-based geology that completely dominates the intellectual world today prides itself on its ability to explain the many different geologic formations around the world with one picture. Geologists speak of a ‘geological column' that contains a historical record of macro-evolution from its lower layers of simpler fossil forms to its upper layers with more complex fossil forms." Let's look at what they are talking about here. This is a geologic column, you see it in every earth science textbook that you'll ever own, presented as fact. We'll see how factual it is today. This is supposedly factual. Nobody doubts this except a few fundamentalists. Rock, obviously on the bottom was there first, and the other rock laid on top of it. We call that the principle of superposition. A good principle, we don't argue that, we're not arguing that principle, no problem. What we're arguing is (a) whether this exists as a uniform principle all over the earth, and (b) the time scale associated with it. Let me show you something. Here, down at the bottom, is the Precambrian rock strata, every high school who does earth science knows of the Precambrian layer, that's the layer before life really gets going, just primitive cells found in Precambrian rock. Over that we have all these kind of rocks. For the purposes of tonight, so we don't lose the forest for the trees, because we don't have time, just think of this as three periods, Cenozoic, which means new, the new era, "zoic" is the word for life, new or recent life. Mesozoic, middle life, and Paleozoic, old life. So let's divide the column three ways, new life, middle life, and old life. Those are the words that they've given to these geologic columns. Let's go further. "They assure us that the many layers of sedimentary rock took untold millions of years to lay down. Vast times were required for the necessary volume of debris to accumulate in order to supply thick sedimentary rock layers (many thousands of feet thick)." By the way, this sedimentary rock is immense. In cretaceous strata that I was working with in Texas, underneath where we were digging was probably 14,000 feet worth of sedimentary rock. That's over 2 miles of sedimentary debris. That's a lot. So they are right, in many places it's very thick. "Erosion of large chunks of such sedimentary rock--so-called ‘missing' layers--demands hundreds of thousands of years." The challenge is for us to go into this. Let me explain the rest of page 126 by a little doodling on this slide. What happens, you say how do they date these rocks. Remember these rocks were dated before radioactive dating systems, so how do they date them. The clue is right there, "zoic, zoic, zoic." How do you guess they're dating the rocks? If they're naming them for life forms, what are they using to date the rocks? Fossils. Isn't that interesting? In other words, Paleozoic rock is characterized, not just because it's down bottom, but because of the kind of fossils that are found in it. Similarly for Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Not all fossils can be used this way, because there are some fossils that occur in all three areas. Let's make a fossil that looks like a star. If a star type fossil is found in all three, can that be a fossil used for dating? No. So in dating what kind of a fossil do you have to use to identify the rock? A fossil that's always found in that kind of rock. So we find what we call index fossils. We'll call these little eyes [on our star]. Keep in mind there's dozens of these index fossils. They say that wherever eye one is, that; eye two this, because they've observed that, they start to know the areas. Here's some problems that immediately arise. The problem is, as you can go around El Paso, Texas, for example, and you'll find rock with two layers, and you go walking along the rock interface and you see an edge, not flat, like a saw tooth. Furthermore, you observe eye one fossils here and eye three fossils here. What did we say eye three fossils were? That's a new fossil. These are old fossils. Now how did the old fossils get on top of the new fossils? It'd seem to me then evolution's reversed. The explanation is over-thrusting. The explanation is that originally the rocks were sort of like this, another rock was like this, and somehow the earth buckled, and in many cases this happened, and one plate, the old plate, slid over the new plate. It's called an over-thrust. That happens. But where it happens you can see the grinding nature of what took place. What do you notice about that that would sort of complicate that little interpretation? You don't have to be an engineer, isn't there something obvious about that, why that can't be an over thrust? It can't be an over- thrust because if it thrust over, how do we have the jagged nature between the two? High co-efficient of friction [can't understand word, may be narratives] say. So the only reason they want to say that's an over- thrust is what? Where are they caught? What happens if they don't say this is an over- thrust? Put yourself in the uniformitarianist position. What would happen to you if you admitted that that was super-positioned and was not an over-thrust? What does that do for you? Tears up your whole scheme of biological evolution, doesn't it? Because now you've got the advanced fossils down underneath, and the primitive fossils up high. So from our point of view we can accept the physical data and they ca D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_031.doc e narratives] say. So the only reason they want to say that's an over- thrust is what? Where are they caught? What happens if they don't say this is an over- thrust? Put yourself in the uniformitarianist position. What would happen to you if you admitted that that was super-positioned and was not an over-thrust? What does that do for you? Tears up your whole scheme of biological evolution, doesn't it? Because now you've got the advanced fossils down underneath, and the primitive fossils up high. So from our point of view we can accept the physical data and they can't. Look at this, I'm talking about physical data. See that interface, that's hard physics, so we can come up to the rock and we allow the physical data to interpret it for us. They can't, because they're stuck with their fossil scheme. Let me show you another example, not quite so graphic but occurs far more often. Let's say we have Paleozoic rock, then we have Cenozoic rock lying on top of each other. Now we have missing layers. What do we do about the missing layers? If you were a uniformitarian geologist how do you deal with the fact there's no Mesozoic rock there? What would be an explanation? Did anybody take earth science? The usual explanation is Mesozoic rock formed, and then for some reason it eroded away over millions of years, and then the next layer of rock was deposited on top of it, so we explain missing strata as eroded away strata. The problem is that often times in some of these interfaces you find, if you look with a magnifying glass, that the rock is imbedded, layers of it, combined with each other. What happened to the Mesozoic rock? Maybe it never was there. Well, then where do they get the geologic column? They told me in my text book that that was fact. Yeah, it was, we go back to the column, that column is made up of all possible instances on all possible continents. In other words, that is a conglomeration of stuff that's in the North American continent, South American continent, European Continent, Africa, and Australia. It's a conglomeration of all the possible rocks that have ever been found, because in some areas, you never have all of this, except in very few areas. What's been so slick recently is the same guy that did the study, remember I mentioned a man by the name of Woodmorappe, who spent five or six years studying just one problem, the ark. He's answered every argument ever brought against the ark. What did they do with the manure? How did they feed the animals? All that kinds of stuff. This guy is a real leech, he latches on to something, he goes for it. He's got two graduate degrees, one in biology and one in geology. Smart guy. So what he decided he'd do is check out this fact that we're always told about. He divided the earth into 967 squares, he went through library after library after library, I think he consulted 4,000 or 5,000 different geology articles, and plotted with a computer program, every one of the 967 squares, whether it had this rock, this rock, this rock, this rock, this rock, etc. He went through the whole planet that way. And here's what he found out. This geologic fact, this geologic column you would expect to see all over the place, after all, it's fact. But let's see how much fact it is. Here is a map he made where he tried to locate where on the planet you find all the Paleozoic section of the geologic column. The black are areas where he can't find any. This is a careful study, 4-5,000 geologic articles. There are some areas, all the Paleozoic rock is found there, some there, quite a bit around the Tibet area, China, part of the Philippines, Java, Borneo, northern tip of Australia, a little bit around the Great Lakes. Interesting fact that we're all assured is undeniable. But when you read the literature, and by the way, he was very generous in this study because he permitted the layers to be inverted, he didn't care what order they were, he was just looking for all of them, show me where all the Paleozoic rock is on earth. After doing that he decided, hmm, let's look at another fact. Let's see about the Mesozoic rock, see if we can find the areas of the world where the entire part of the Mesozoic rock of the geologic column exists. He had more luck here, bigger area, the Rockies, out here, British Columbia, Central Africa, tip of Africa, all through the Middle East, and that area. So the Mesozoic is there. Then he went on and did the same thing with the Cenozoic, and this slide shows where the entire geologic column exists, black indicates it doesn't. There are some places where every rock in the geologic column is, there's a little place there, two places out here, one in Mexico, the largest area on the earth is in Poland. Folks, this shows you what happens when a Christian who is a scholar takes some time to look carefully at what's going on. For 150 years we've been told about this geologic column stuff, and when you go to look at 4-5,000 geology references, that's what you find. And we're supposed to be the people that are the superstitious ones. The critic will say okay, how do you Christians explain the rock? We've got to come up with an interpretive model to explain how do you suppose the flood caused all this rock to form the way it did? That has not been easy, and it hasn't been easy because we're not sure how much of the rock was done during the flood and how much was done by the earth shaking itself out after the flood, we know there were vast changes in the earth, for example, those of you familiar with the west, the Great Salt Lake, [blank spot] ... in the rock layers. Let's just think of a process here, before I show you Woodmorappe's model, let me throw this one out. If you look at the geologic column and you happen to notice that in the Paleozoic rock, it's called Paleozoic, old life, all of those fossils that are used have one thing in common. It's very interesting. They are all marine animals, marine fossils. If the world were flooded today, where would you find marine fossils? In the middle of Maryland? No, you would find the marine fossils, which had to have come from some area, obviously low lying, where the water was shallow and these things were living. Ah, doesn't this suggest something? Perhaps a model of the formation of this is if we could hypothesize that what causes rock strata is the flood operating on different zones, different ecological niches, so that this Paleozoic rock isn't old rock, it's pre-flood, the remnants of a pre-flood swampy area. To make a long story short, what Woodmorappe has done is come up with this model. Here's how we envision the flood had happened. When we studied the flood there was an observation I said that you wanted to pay attention to in the text because we'd come back to it. Tonight we come back to it. Turn to Genesis 7:11, when the flood began two observations are reported. It says" In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the flood gates of the sky were opened." Where did the water come from? It came from below as well as above. Now if it was below it came out of the ground. What happens if the water was in the ground subterraneally, subterranean water, and it suddenly burst above the ground, what happens to the ground over which was over where the water was? You have a sink hole. What Woodmorappe has apotheosized is that at certain stages of the flood, early stages, here is one of those sink holes forming, here is an area of land with a sink hole forming, the water rushes in because the flood is now increasing in depth, the water flushes into this sink hole, from this strata here, notice he's labeled this section one. Notice that the rock around the land area that is now being scoured in the debris from area 3 is now being brought into and burying area 1. What Woodmorappe thinks is if you took a geologic dig at point E, which is in the middle of a sink hole, you would look at your column and you would see this, it would be Paleozoic rock, one say, the lowest kind of rock, and that's all you'd seen in that area. In the areas where the scouring occurred, let's take a sample at location B, in that location you'd have the rock one that was buried, plus the debris from area three so now you look at the column there and lo and behold, we have three on top of one. Then in other areas where you have rock four, higher than three, four sinks into three, which is sinking into one, so in zone K later you could reconstruct the rock, you'd have rock one rock three, and rock four. What this has done is now this explains why there is, in fact, a tendency to form a geologic column because you don't see one, four and three; one generally occurs at the lowest level or it doesn't occur at all. There is a certain sequence, statistically to the rock, and that's exactly what we observe. We don't observe it uniformly as the maps show, but statistically it's there. So this is the Woodmorappe flood model, it took about seven or eight years work, as you can imagine digging through 4000-5,000 journals to get this data. But this is the sort of work that Bible-believing scientists are now at work doing, of constructing this. Last week I told you about Humphreys and I told you about Herrmann and their models that explain relativity, explain the nature of time, explain gravity and time interactions, explain the issues of sudden appearance of catastrophic happenings, etc. If you turn to page 127, there's the quote from Woodmorappe, "How much of the column actually exists across the earth's land masses? In a remarkable study John Woodmorappe divided the earth's land surface into 967 equal areas. He then surveyed geologic literature for reports on the fragments of the column found in each area. He found, much to his surprise, that of the ten periods in the geologic column, less than 13% of the earth's land surface has as many as five periods represented and less than one percent [of the earth's surface] has all ten periods" represented. So obviously it's a very unusual event to have that much rock put together. "These figures count the periods whether or not they are even in the proper sequence." His conclusion: "'Since only a small percentage of the earth's surface obeys even a significant portion of geologic column, it becomes an overall exercise of gargantuan special pleading and imagination for the evolutionary- uniformitarian paradigm to maintain that there ever were geologic periods.' Areas of ‘missing' layers are usually explained as due to non-deposition or erosion, but Woodmorappe notes that this excuse ‘is self-serving because there is no deterministic reason why the earth's land surface should (or should not) become everywhere depositional sometime within the span." What he's saying there, remember I said were missing layers and he's just saying that there's no apriori reason why you should find vast erosions in one area and not in another one, if everything was uniform. The point that Woodmorappe has made by this technique is, again I caution you as I did last week when we dealt with Dr. Herrmann and Prof. Humphrey, I said these guys aren't saying they've got the last word, but they're men who are gargantuan pioneers, they are doing in our day what Darwin did in the 19th century in his day. These are guys that will be maligned, ridiculed, obscured and ignored by the intellectual community, but believe me, they are your fellow believers who are brilliant people operating in their specialized scholarly areas, who believe that Christ is Lord, and they are showing that He is Lord by their gutsy way of taking on all their colleagues, challenging the whole concept in which they live, and basically becoming rebels for a very great cause, a remarkable story of stuff that's going on in our time. I want to conclude by pointing out the fact that not only has Woodmorappe discovered things like this, and is able to at least show us that models are possible, that do explain the data on a Biblical basis. But we can also review the fact that in the course of the last 30 years of careful field work that creationists have done, they have discovered things like poly-strata fossils. Here's the poly-strata fossils. I'll see if I can draw one. This is a tree trunk, these are rock layers, there's the tree, a petrified tree, at a sixty degree angle, piercing many rocks. What does that tell you? Look at that, what are some explanations of that? Think through this, millions of years to lay down each strata. What's wrong with that explanation? How come the tree sat there at a sixty degree angle for 3,000,000 years, and didn't rot? We've got a little problem here. And if you say well, it took millions of years and the tree was rammed down into it. If you can ram a tree trunk like that through rock, let me know, I have some engineer friends that would love to do that for piling work. So this is one area where the data clearly shows evidence of catastrophic deposition, at least in this part this had to have been laid down rapidly. If it was laid down rapidly, then it proves, doesn't it, that there was a process, a high energy event, at one time at least to do that. Then we have areas where we have total chaos, we have what we call fossil graveyards, where fossils are just piled one on top of another, all smashed to pieces. Just three weeks ago there was an announcement of some work in Africa being done and they found a dinosaur, apparently a female dinosaur in the middle of the Sahara Desert, her body was completely hovering over eggs, and the interpretation is obvious that something happened very fast, that dinosaur chose whatever it was that buried her under this massive debris, she chose to preserve those eggs while she was subjected to this catastrophe. I'm not suggesting that was the flood, there's other explanations for that, post-flood explanations. But I'm just saying that in earth history there is this tendency. Woodmorappe also, in the course of this modeling, has an explanation of why it is that human remains probably haven't been found in the lower Paleozoic rocks. I say "probably" because at least on two occasions I have had it said to me, one by a Christian who retired from the Smithsonian Institute who said deep in the bowels of the Smithsonian Institute are fossils that you would be very surprised at, that don't fit the scheme and they've been in drawers down there for the last 30 or 40 years, but they're never trotted out because they just don't fit. One of those fossils, this man said, was brought into us by coal miners from Kentucky, who deep down in the coal, carboniferous period many years ago, found a human hand. I tell you that if a human hand could be documented as being found a carboniferous period, it'd blow the lid off the whole evolutionary story, because we're talking millions and millions of years before man is supposed to have evolved. But we don't know that because we're not the custodians of the data, the other side has all the data. So we don't know that. But on Woodmorappe's model, what his argument is, is that in the antediluvian earth, when the flood happened, that the antediluvian earth was flatter than today, and when this deluge process began, if you took a map and this was the sea, and you had rivers flowing into the sea, the human communities were probably small and along these rivers. At the flood, these rivers became torrents and probably swept most of the people in those local areas of human habitat out to sea, in which case their bodies were never fossilized, because they floated. What happens in floods to dead bodies? They bloat and they rise to the surface after while, and they're eaten or they rot. And so by varying the habitat and the location of the antediluvian race, and saying that there's within 10-20 million people living in Noah's time, and dividing the total volume of sedimentary rock by the number of people, you come out with the fact that even if they all were captured, and none of their bodies rotted, they all were fossilized, there would probably be one person for every hundred cubic miles of rock, so the probability of ever seeing a human being in any of this is exceedingly small, because Woodmorappe reminds us of something. In Genesis, how many human beings were created in creation week? Two. How many animals were created in creation week? We're not told, thousands and thousands. So therefore what was the human ratio to animal population in the antediluvian world? Very small, so therefore the statistical likelihood of even finding any fossilized human in any part of the rock layer is very small. And we don't know whether or not they've been found, there are some odd evidences from time to time that people say they saw it. We have had another report in Ohio and again this happened about 1910, an old family in Ohio was shoveling coal into their coal fired stove and a big chunk of coal dropped out on the floor as they were shoveling it in and broke open, and inside they found a broach, a piece of jewelry. That's interesting, how did the jewelry get inside of the coal. This I have documented, as far as I've tried to find eyewitnesses, I've located a picture of the thing, I've located an eye witness account that swore they saw it, and we have an explanation given by the other side that the broach just have fallen into the coal somehow. But the point is that these evidences do crop up from time to time. That concludes our section, and for our series this year, and next time we'll start in with Gen. 12 and go on in a more classical Bible study, though we will also deal with things like the Ice Age and what happened to dinosaurs since the flood, because that has to be dealt with because the book of Job deals with it. So we have to work our way throu D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_032.doc read, he knew what he was doing in that movie, he is presenting paganism, the structure of thought through paganism. I'm not saying he's immoral, we're just saying he's pagan; that is a pagan principle. And it can be traced centuries and centuries back. To show that it's not me speaking, here's what some of the historians point out, just some quotes so we understand the cleavage of Gen. 1:1 separates the men from the boys. Here's where we separate faith from non-faith. This Chain of Being is a belief that can be traced for centuries in the thoughts of men, that's this Continuity of Being, the idea that gods shade into angels that shade into men that shade into animals that shade into rocks. There's a Continuity of Being. And what's interesting is that that shows up in our modern idea of cosmic evolution. What we call evolution today is not new, it did not start with Darwin, here's Sol Tax writing in the Darwin Centennial, Darwin wrote in 1859 and the University of Chicago put out this big book in 1960, Far Eastern philosophers thought of creation in evolutionary terms, a belief in an inherent continuity of all creation, and second, a reference to the merging of one species into another. Turn to Gen. 1 and let's reflect on a portion of the text. What does Gen. 1:24-25 say? Contrast what you're reading in that text with what I just quoted on the overhead projector. See if you can see what the big difference is. "The God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind, and it was so. [25] And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and every thing that creeps on the ground after its kind...." What's the emphasis there? Continuity and merging of species, or separation of species? You could argue, oh but that's just a biological tr D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_033.doc they all had the truth at one time, it's just dropped out through the sinful mind, the carnal mind, which is at enmity with God, can't be submissive to God, therefore it works subliminally to distort and pervert the truth. So you have perversions of the truth all over the human race. We have these two things and the partition that divides these belief systems is belief or disbelief in the ex nihilo Creator, the Creator that creates from nothing. God is not a part of a process. In the ancient myths this belief side, usually the gods and goddesses propagated the universe out of their bodies. Their bodies were the universe, so there is a continuum between God, man, angels, semi-gods, to rocks. It's all part of one continuum. That began in the ancient world, it continues in Eastern religion, it is part of Western philosophy, it's in modern theology and in modern historical science. It's not true that Darwin started it; it goes far, far more back than that. The key to remember is this is the ultimate environment, if you keep pushing back to the basics and beyond the basics, what's behind the basics, finally here's what you arrive at: you've got an infinite universe that is impersonal, there's not a being out there, there may be gods and goddesses, but they're just greater versions than man, so Dr. God and Mr. Man, but there's just degrees of difference. There's not a qualitative difference between God and man, just a quantitative, just a size difference, so there's nobody that's ultimately in charge on this side of the house. Then we come over to the Bible side and we find that this has certain implications. The big one is that we have an infinite God, but the ultimate environment, we talk about environmentalism, the ultimate environment is God the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they are the ultimate environment, not nature, not a gas cloud, not a cos D:\Bible_Srch\Pastors\Clough\Framework\Clough_Framework_033.doc on and Holy Spirit, and if the Bible is correct in saying that this God is absolutely good, ABSOLUTELY good, meaning by absolutely good that He defines what good is, His character is the ideal good, then He is always good. He always has been good, He always will be good, there never has been a lapse at any point in time of His goodness. That's the ultimate environment. If that's the case, remember here's the difference,
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