154 - Young Earth with Marcus Ross - Apologetics 315 Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to the Apologetics three fifteen podcast with
your hosts Brian Autun and Chad Gross. Join us for
conversations and interviews on the topics of apologetics, evangelism, and
the Christian worldview.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Where's doctor Marcus. I'm doctor Marcus. Hi.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
This is Brian from the Apologetics three fifteen podcasts, joined
by now another then Chad Gross. Yess hey, you know
when I do these intros, listener, you know, this is
the longest I've ever been podcasting. In fact, next week
will be the longest I've ever been podcasting. But the

(00:43):
time that we do doing the intros, it just gets
worse and worse and worse. And I should write my
intros out, but I don't because I've been podcasting for
so long. Why would I even write it out?

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Well?

Speaker 3 (00:56):
And what would I laugh at if you wrote them
all out?

Speaker 1 (00:58):
I mean, yeah, yeah, I could literally mess mess up
the intro fifteen times and Ched, I'm gonna let you
take the lead on telling us everything about Marcus. Mister Ross, Uh,
why don't you take the lead?

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Chad?

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Tell us about And this is why I dread editing.
It's like record in About six months later, I'm like,
I'm better get editing this thing, this travesty I've created
for myself. All right, I'm not you know what, I promise,

(01:38):
I'm not going to edit this. I'm just gonna leave
all that. And so yeah, I'm even this right now,
even this, even me saying this to you, I'm gonna
leave this.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Crazy Everything I say is going to be on the podcast.
This is usually made me sound so much better than
I normally do in real life.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
It's not because I don't care, It's just that I'm lazy.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
All right, So tell.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Us about our guest today.

Speaker 4 (02:04):
So I'm going to let him tell you about his
specific credentials because that's one of the questions I have.
But we are going to be interviewing today doctor Marcus Ross.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
Now.

Speaker 4 (02:14):
I came across doctor Ross's work via a debate with
Michael Jones also known as IP Inspiring Philosophy, and another
debate he did with Hugh Ross. I also saw a
video he did responding to some comments by Ken Hamm,
and what came across to me is that one of

(02:35):
my I am myself not a Young Earth creationist. However,
one of the things that I have said in the
past is that Young Earth creationists really need a better
spokesperson because some of the people that speak loudest for
Young Earth creationism I don't really think are the best
proponents of it, or people that I would want representing

(02:56):
my view. So I stumbled across Doctor Ross through the
materials that I mentioned, and I was just struck by
how reasonable he was, how fair minded he was, and
I thought, Wow, this is a guy I would really
love to talk to. Now it should be noted for
my perspective when I say I'm not a Young Earth creationist,

(03:18):
I don't want anyone to think that I go the
root of saying that I think those who are Young
Earth creationists are somehow irrational or the view is embarrassing
or anything like that. And the reason that I feel
that way is because I know of people, for example,
like Kurt Wise who teaches at Harvard, who's a Young
Earth creationist, Paul Nelson with the Discovery Institute who's a

(03:39):
Young Earth creationist, Chris Date with Rethinking Hell, who I
think is a very good Exejeet is a Young Earth creationist,
and even somebody like John Mark Reynolds the Philosopher is
a Young Earth creationist. So for me, to say that
Young Earth creationism is irrational, I would somehow have to
say that they're being irrational and holding that view, and
I just don't think that fall. So kind of our

(04:01):
goal today, Brian in the interview is to just talk
to him about how he came to hold the position,
what he thinks the best evidence is for that position,
and then also, you know, address some of the challenges
maybe that are sometimes leveled at the view.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, that sounds like a great plan, and I think
I share pretty much the same kind of thinking as
you on this. I one point thought that was what
Young Earth creationism, well, we'll call it y e.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
C for short.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
You know, I thought why EC was the way I
remember at one point thinking anytime I would listen to
podcasts where someone said something like if the words millions
of years ago came out of someone's mouth, I just scoffed,
and I just thought, you know, very negatively of them,
and I could I didn't see anyway that there could be,

(04:57):
you know, the Old Earth view had any credibility. Now,
you know, I hold an older view, but it's not like, oh,
now y e C is stupid or now I don't
scoff at it from the other way, because I see
both sides, and so I feel like I'm on a
like a teeter totter or whatever. H And I'm happy

(05:22):
to walk either way, towards towards the weight of the
evidence and say, okay, well, right now, I think the
weight of the evidence is on the side of the old,
older Earth. But if you can walk me over to
the other side with more evidence and arguments that are
sound and legit to me, then then I'm happy to
go that way. And I have no sort of bone

(05:45):
to pick or like, I don't. Oh yeah, And that's
that's the other thing when we were having this guest
on is we're not there to argue and try to
prove him wrong or have any singers or gotcha's or
anything like that. So this is completely like, you know,
Chad and I want to have the podcast in such
a way where we're having these conversations and we're sharing

(06:06):
the conversations that we want to have with other people,
regardless of any if anyone were to hear them or not.
So we're not doing it for views or clicks or
you know, oh, we're going to get paid more if
we can get more people to download this zero chance
of you know, that, influencing us, because we don't get
anything from the podcast in that regard. So we're just

(06:26):
happy to say, oh, yeah, here's someone who I would
really love to It's kind of like, yeah, convince me,
show me some really good arguments I really want. I'm
open and I have no Yeah, it's no debate or
anything like that that we plan to have today. It's
just like, Okay, let's talk about it.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
You know.

Speaker 4 (06:45):
Yeah, And I'm just excited to have who, you know,
over the years of doing a lot of reading and
listening and following different thinkers, I'm excited to have who
I think is, at least to me, the best proponent
for this position that I've ever heard personally.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
Now, the other background bit is, I, even though you
told me all about him, I've just not got around
to like looking at any of this stuff or anything.
So ched he knows all the question to ask. And
so I don't know too much about doctor Ross and
Marcus Ross in the case you're thinking we're talking about
Hugh Ross. But yeah, so I don't know a lot

(07:22):
about doctor Marcus Ross, but Chad does and tell us
a little bit about his background.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Chad All right.

Speaker 4 (07:29):
So, Marcus Ross has actually loved paleontology, especially dinosaurs, since
he was a kid growing up in Rhode Island, and
he's continued pursuing that passion and he is currently researching
extinct marine reptiles called monosauruses. And he's greatly interested in
issues surrounding the creation evolution controversy and the intersection of

(07:52):
geology with the biblical events of creation and Noah's flood,
which we're going to ask him about some of those things.
He served as a Professor of GLI and Director of
the Center for Creation Studies at Liberty University from two
thousand and five to twenty twenty one, where he taught
courses in Earth science, environmental science, geology, paleontology, and creation
studies at Liberty University. And he's currently a fellow of

(08:16):
the Center and is the CEO of the Cornerstone Education Supply.
He and his wife Karina live in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
Let's get ready switch me on.

Speaker 4 (08:29):
All right, well, doctor Ross, thank you so much for
coming on the Apologetics three fifteen podcast.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate
it very much.

Speaker 4 (08:38):
Yeah, absolutely so. I actually was the one that reached
out to you because I have come across your work
in when I heard your debate with Hugh Ross not
to be confused with Marcus Ross right and the other
doctor Ross. Yes, yeah, yeah, either way, you get it right,
and of course with Michael Jones from Inspiringilosophy. And then

(09:01):
I heard a talk that you did kind of responding
to some comments that ken Ham had made about you,
and I was just struck by how reasonable you were
and how fair you were with the evidence. And I
also appreciated so much the fact that you saw your
view as one that was important but also not one

(09:23):
that was salvific. And I thought, man, this is somebody
who I would love to get on the podcast to
just talk to about the view of Young Earth creationism.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Well, thank you, thank you very much for I mean,
that's very gracious of you, and far more gracious than
some of my Young Earth creation colleagues have been lately.
You know, But be that as it may. You know,
we're a fractious we're a fractious little community.

Speaker 4 (09:49):
But people, yeah, yes, yes, Well tell us about your
your education, like your background.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Sure, so I grew up k through PhD in state
run schools. I grew up as a as a born
again believer in Rhode Island, which is not exactly one
of the evangelical bastions of the United States. And I
grew up in independent fundamental Baptist circles, so very very
conservative circles for that, but surrounded, you know, culturally by Catholicism.

(10:21):
Rhode Island is a deeply Catholic state, and so I
was used to being, you know, one of the people
who was, you know, one of one of the few
people who thought the way that I did in any
given circle that I happened to be in. You know,
my good friends in college were agnostics or Catholics. I
had one one evangelical, you know, or two evangelical good
friends in high school. But you know, out of that

(10:44):
was that was all. Yeah, there are very few of
us who who would have been considered evangelicals or fundamentalists
growing up in the in the eighties and nineties in
my in my area and then from Rhode Island, I
went to Penn State University, where I did an undergraduate
in Earth sciences and focused a little bit on paleontology there.
I always loved dinosaurs from the point I was four

(11:05):
years old when I first discovered them. I just absolutely
fell in love with these things. Read everything that I
could get my hands on at the library, and you know,
pre Internet, that was a far more limited set of materials.
But you know, watched every television special on PBS and
the Discovery Channel that I could watch, and realized very
early on that there was some kind of seeming conflict

(11:28):
between what I was reading in the Bible and what
the dinosaur books were telling me as well. Right, it
didn't take very long to realize that my perspectives on
Earth history didn't jive very much with the dinosaurs living
millions of years ago and going extinct at the end
of the Cretaceous type of thing. And I wasn't really
introduced to evolution till much later on, just because it

(11:49):
wasn't a point of strong emphasis in high school biology
classes in the eighties and nineties. That push would come
a little bit later on, So it wouldn't be until
I was an undergraduate at Penn State that I was
really faced with some of the full force of the
arguments for an ancient age of the Earth, or you know,
all my professors were arguing for biological evolution in biology

(12:10):
and paleontology. It was a very formative time for me,
both as a young scientist and scholar, but also as
a Christian, finally kind of moving, broadening out my circle
of Christian friends and associates beyond the independent fundamental circles
that I had been in. From there, I moved to

(12:32):
South Dakota and got a master's degree in vertebrate paleontology
from the South Dakota School of Minds in Tech. Faced
a lot of difficulty at that school. That was actually
a very very problematic place to be a young Earth
creationist at the time. You would have thought that, you know,
Penn State or Rhode Island would would have been more difficult,
and they were not not difficult, but South Dakota was

(12:54):
a period of very intense persecution. I was left without
a Esis committee for two and a half years. I
was being hung out to dry and attempted to be
failed out of classes. It was ugly, very very ugly.
But the Ward saw me through that, and I found
my wife in South Dakota, so far better than any
degree he could have gotten. I was trying to get

(13:17):
out of the state, but the Lord wouldn't let me
do that until I found the right gal and we
got married in South Dakota and then boomerang back to
my home state of Rhode Island, where I would work
on a PhD under the paleontologist David Fvestowski. He's well
known for dinosaur paleontology. He's co author of a widely
used dinosaur textbook, and he had worked out mathematical statistical

(13:38):
approaches to dinosaur extinction back in the eighties and nineties,
and so it was well versed in the extinction issue,
and I decided I wanted to look at some other
organisms whose extinction is coincident with the dinosaurs. But we're
living in the water, these big marine animals called mosasaurs.
If you saw a Jurassic World, Yes, the big lizardy
thing in the water, those are my guys. Okay, maybe

(14:02):
about three to four times larger on film than in
real life.

Speaker 4 (14:06):
Oh man, you mean Jurassic Park is not completely accurate.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
You know, anytime you say genetically modified organism in a movie,
you can do whatever you want. Oh yeah, physics need
not apply. You don't have to worry about like what
could an organism actually be? Like, you can have them.
You can have them do the whole shamou thing and
grab the shark, and sure that wouldn't liquefy your organs
on the way down. Sure to be quiet. So before

(14:35):
I finished off my PhD, I moved to Winchburg, Virginia,
where I currently live, and I started teaching at Liberty
University and finished up my PhD shortly after that, and
so I've been in Winchburg ever since. I taught at
Liberty for sixteen years. And four years ago I stepped
down from teaching full time as my wife and I
started Cornerstone Educational Supply while I was still teaching, and

(14:57):
as the company grew, we started realizing, Okay, there's only
so much time for everything that we want to do.
And if I want to be an educator, if I
want to run a business, and I want to contribute
to creation related types of issues, there's really only time
for two of those. And so so which of these
two are we going to go with? And so we
decided to ditch teaching and we have the steady, stable

(15:20):
job behind sort of stable at Liberty University. It's better
now it was. It was rough there for quite a while, indeed,
but I do I do find it very very fun
that my last year of teaching I outlasted Jerry Junior.
So that was great. That was cool. He resigned the
first day of the semester of what would become my

(15:43):
last year, so that was good. That was good.

Speaker 4 (15:46):
We had been praying a long time and that was
kind of the crazy time you were referring to. Oh
that was not Jerry Junior and all of that. Yes, okay,
that's why I assume, but I didn't want to.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
It had been a very bad decade from from twenty
twelve to twenty twenty one. Was was rough at the school,
very very rough. He uh he ran rough, shot over everybody. Uh,
just a total climate and culture of fear of being
let go. You know, everybody's disposable. And his behavior became
just more and more erratic over time. You know, he

(16:16):
had ceased being I don't even know when he would
have ever been an actual functional Christian, but he had
certainly ceased being one boy bye. I probably by the
time I got there in five. There are all sorts
of things going on way back then now that we
look back and like, oh my goodness, you know it
was some of that bad stuff. Would you know had
seeds from long long before. But yeah, the drinking, some

(16:39):
substance abuse, and and you know, the sexual problems of
him and his wife. You know, those that last part
were things that none of us were completely aware of
until the big story broke. But I did know that
there was some weird stuff going on with with that kid, yeah,
just because I had a good friend who was very

(16:59):
cold to the Fallows. But even he didn't know the
extent of what was going on there. They had hidden
that well. But you know, thankfully I ended up leaving
Liberty on good terms. I didn't leave because I was
angry or disgruntled or they kicked me out. And I
retained a good working relationship with the folks that are there.
And you know, we even supply a couple of their

(17:19):
online classes with materials. So you know, that's all good. Yeah,
good good, that's excellent. My wife likes to say that Cornerstone,
we're the stuff people. So we don't make curriculum. We
make the stuff that goes alongside the curriculum. So if
you're a biology class, says, go get things to do
dissections or you know, chemistry activities that we have all

(17:41):
that physical material excellence, all right, So that's what I've
been doing.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
Okay, that man lots going on, lots of exciting stuff.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's a long history.

Speaker 4 (17:51):
Yeah, no, no, it is super helpful, thank you. One
one of the things I want to kind of do
is before we start getting into like the actual evidence
for younger Earth and some of our question because that's
really our goal is just to we want to hear
the best evidence allow you to address some of the
common objections to it. I was thinking my fear here,

(18:11):
and I hope you'll understand. I'm pretty sure you understand
where I'm coming from, is that, you know, this view
of young Earth creationism is sometimes scoffed at and of
course like kind of hand waved before it's even heard.
I was thinking of someone like William Lane Craig, who
I've actually unfortunately heard, you know, say that the view
is embarrassing, which I don't agree with that at all.

(18:34):
So I want to make sure that that's clear. So
if somebody's listening right now and they kind of have
that knee jerk reaction of oh gosh, you know young
Earth creationism, you know this isn't to be taken seriously,
how would you kind of respond to that so that
they would stick with us and hear you.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Out that's nicely put. Thank you for that. I would
say one thing that I would appeal to their thoughts
on is how should we approach, even critically, positions that
have been long held across denominations and across the span
of Christendom, both in time and space. If we find

(19:12):
that we have positions that have been very, very widespread,
and Young Earth creationism would be one of those, as
we might kind of get into the whys of that
maybe in a little bit, I think it is wise
for us to not uncautiously toss aside positions that have
been so well regarded by so many saints over so

(19:32):
long a period of time, without a good appreciation for
the arguments why those seem to be compelling, in the
case of something like Young Earth creationism, why they seem
to be compelling. For nearly eighteen hundred years, we really
don't see much for challenge to Young Earth creationism as
a and I'm not talking about the modern Young Earth
creation approach necessarily, but an overall perspective of a youthful

(19:58):
creation of a historic atom, of a global flood, of
a historical and universal in effect fall. Those components of
things are held by the Catholic Church, by the Orthodox Church,
by all the reformers, by large numbers of Christians over time.

(20:19):
Not I think because it is a simple approach to
the Bible. I think that it is simple in some ways,
but actually, because it's simple and robust at the same time,
it makes the most sense of the Biblical data as
we have it now. As geology advanced in studies through
the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, there started to be these

(20:40):
kind of rumbles about, I don't know, maybe we need
to understand things in slightly different ways, and these manifested
themselves in written form by the time we get to
the turn of the nineteenth century, the very beginning of
the eighteenth century is sorry, nineteenth century eighteen hundreds is
when we see in written form within Orthodox Christianity, right

(21:01):
small Orthodox Christianity, alternative proposals to understanding Genesis. So that's
why I would say, you know, we have kind of
this eighteen hundred year period in which people held to
these components to earth and human history. And yes, there's
arguments about the days and whether the days should be

(21:22):
understood allegorically or whether they are understood as literal days,
and so you can take a look at, you know,
Augustine and his monumental defense of an allegorical approach to
Genesis one and before him Augustine and sorry not before
him origin. And as one recent historian of the Church

(21:43):
has written, it's almost by the sheer might and power
of Augustine alone that this position remained one that was
viable through the Middle Ages. Most commentators in the Middle
Ages actually disagreed with Augustine on it, but they couldn't
toss Augustine because he was such an incredible skl like,
if Augustine holds this, boy, you know, we got to

(22:06):
maybe keep it as an option, but we honestly don't
think that he's correct. And you can even see that
with with someone like a Quinas. It's actually really hard
to tell what Aquinas thinks because he engages so deeply
on both sides and his method of writing his dialogue
back and forth and pros and cons and cons and
pros and pros and cons again and again. So you
kind of you can find what books to be support

(22:27):
for Augustine's view in Aquinas. But at the end of
the day, Aquinas is like Nope, that's not the way
that it works. But regardless of whether you took the
days allegorically or whether you took the days literally, both
Augustus and Aquinas would have been in complete agreement that
the world's history basically begins with the creation event. Days

(22:50):
are or instantaneous, and that all of history basically begins
with Adam and Eve. You know, for me, as a
young Earth creationist, I say plus five more days before that, right,
that's all there was. And there's just absolute uniformity of
the Church on this position. And it wouldn't be until

(23:10):
the discovery of the New World in the you know,
fourteen and especially fifteen hundreds, as exploration starts going out
that you start to see people that are very much
on the fringes of Christianity starting to make some arguments
that maybe the Earth is a little bit older, or
that there were people around before Adam. That that argument

(23:31):
crops up in the on the late fifteen hundreds and
is completely and roundly, you know, abused by all. The
guy who proposed it even is not a Catholic, but
he was arrested and dragged to Rome, forced to convert
and recant his viewpoint because you know, the alternative was

(23:52):
highly unpleasant. That was Isaac Lapeirier, and so he was
a very good student of geography. He'd learned a lot
about Greenland and the people there as this was a
new discovery, and he just felt that, boy, maybe the
Bible is only talking about with Adam the beginning of
the Jewish people. So he said Adam was the first

(24:13):
Jew basically, which is kind of weird when you find
out that you don't actually have Jews until the end
of the Book of Genesis. But he said, basically, Adam
is the history of the Jewish people, and in Genesis one,
God created mankind. Those are all the other people around
the world that was done some other time earlier on.
So he dissociated Genesis one and two as accounts in

(24:35):
order to have God making people around the world and
then making Adam, which would be the lineage bring us
to the Jewish people. Nobody bought that. Everybody hated it,
and he was I mean, there weren't that many denominations
at the time, but over the next thirty or so
years there would probably be about a dozen or twenty
major refutations of his book, coming from all quarters, from

(24:57):
the Lutherans, from the Calvinists, from the Anabaptists, from the
catholic from the Huguenots, everybody did that. And I look
at that and say, that tells me something about the
deepness and the coherency of the view of Young Earth creationism.

Speaker 4 (25:12):
Okay, So essentially, what you would say to the person
who says, oh, you know who dismisses this position before
hearing it out, is that, hey, this was the prominent
position for the first eighteen hundred years of Christendom, and
so since that we it has that track record, we
should at least be willing to hear it out.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah. I think that's a good summary. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
While you're talking there, I'm just trying to think of
things that come to my mind as far as well, yes,
it has been a historical view. What would your thoughts
be upon if someone were to say something like, yes, well,
for that long we didn't have the tools or the
evidence that we do now, and so therefore we reached

(25:56):
the final tipping point where now we have access to
new information, and so we could have had been excluded
from access to measuring tools of various types for various
things for ten thousand years fifty thousand years, you name it,
and just because we held the view, we didn't have
the ability to know. So does that how do you

(26:19):
think about that as far as the longevity of someone
holding a view versus maybe the weight of the evidence
that we have accessible to us.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Now, yeah, I think that's the natural next question for
someone you know, who's asking me, you know, why should
why should I even bother listening? And first let's say, well,
if we're both Christians and we have a common understanding
of faith, then okay, let's take a look at something
that seemed to have been basically universal affirmation across the
church denominations. And then one would say, yeah, but now

(26:50):
in light of geology, right now, in light of astronomy, now,
in light of evolutionary biology. Okay, that's and I think
that's fair. I think that's a good next step to make.
I'm just hoping to maybe you know, stick my foot
in the door and say, okay, before we just say
that this is a ridiculous idea, which you know, we'll
get you know, tossed out altogether, I think too quickly.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
You know.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Bill Craig in his book mentions that he thinks that
the hermineutical case for a young Earth creation is actually
pretty decent, but he thinks that the scientific argument for
it is indefensible, right in his words, you know, indefensible
and so okay. So what is it that makes Bill
Craig say, at least grudgingly so that the hermineutical case
is okay, is decent. I think it's actually far stronger

(27:33):
than he even understands, or that he's willing to admit.
If then we have something like geology, and one might
say it was kind of the same thing as you know,
going from geocentrism to heliocentrism. Right, we just assume that
the Earth was in the center of it all, and
we learned that wasn't the case. The Church adjusted and
adjusted just fine, right, we didn't. We don't have a

(27:55):
massive problem over geocentrism heliocentrism here. Yeah, in the books
as an example of the Church, you know, treating people
badly or whatever. But you know, those books usually don't
tell you the Galileo was also a real jerk and
you know, did some things to get the punishments that
he did. He was still correct ultimately, but it's one

(28:16):
of those speaking truth with grace versus versus pride types
of things. I would say Young Earth creationism is a
different issue than something like geocentrism, in part because geocentrism
involves I don't like sometimes how strongly we distinguish between
observational empirical sciences and historical sciences in Young Earth creations,

(28:39):
and we sometimes bifurcate those so strongly that it seems
like one is science and one is just conjecture. That said,
there are differences between how the empirical observational empirical sciences operate.
I can, you know, put material in a test tube.
I can see if it changes color. I can do
the same thing over and over again to make sure
that it works the way that I think of that

(29:00):
it does. You can do lots of experiments on something.
In the historical sciences, we don't have those kinds of
luxuries because whatever it is that we're seeking to understand
already happened, and there's no way to actually replicate the
individual event itself. So if we're looking at a t
rex skeleton, for example, we're excavating that and it's laid

(29:21):
out in a sandstone, we might come to some hypotheses
about how that skeleton came to be where it is,
and we're going to be looking at modern analogs of
where the sandstones form under what conditions are these near rivers?
Is this by the side of a beach or you
know those types of things. But one thing that we
can't do is grab another t Rex and bury it

(29:44):
in a bunch of sand and see if it produces
the same structure as the t rex. There. We have
one t Rex and one t Rex only, and we
have to explain how that particular one came to be
in its particular place. That's a singular kind of event.
And so in the historical sciences, we don't get the
luxury of replication that you get in the empirical sciences.

(30:08):
We still make observations, we still make hypotheses, we still
test those hypotheses by going out and collecting data, but
we don't get the repeatability that you get in the
empirical sciences that are operating on the day to day
stuff drug you know, things, chemistry, activities and those sorts
of things. Historical sciences are forensic by nature, and so
you have to go with an approach that is like

(30:29):
a forensics case in a courtroom. You've got to build
a case and have a compelling case overall.

Speaker 4 (30:34):
In kind of inference to the best explanation.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Exactly exactly, that's what you're going to have available to you.
And therefore, the difference that we see between something like
the geocentrism helio centrism debate dealt with observations that could
be replicated and somebody could get the same kind of
tool and look at the moons of Jupiter that Galileo saw, right,
And he saw that Jupiter had moons, and that ended

(31:00):
up not being a problem. That was okay. Everybody's like,
this is incredible, and Galileo with his telescope is an
absolute genius, and he is right. This telescope was already
being used, and he's like it's being used to like
spot people along the way. That's a dumb use. I'm
going to look at the heavens, right. And Kepler, likewise,
was able to get a telescope from Galileo. Galley sent

(31:21):
him one, so Kepler could do the same types of
observations and from those data observe that there were certain
features of the world that were in that were unable
to be explained in a geocentric fashion, that were much
more naturally explained in a heliocentric fashion. When it comes
to the age of the Earth. What we have then

(31:42):
are those inferences to the best explanation. What we have
are radioactive materials and their decay products. And when we
look at them in the lab and we see how
they behave we make the inference that they behaved the
same way going into the past. When we look at
those sands that are at the beach or by a
river and we see the sand stone that the that

(32:02):
the t rex is buried in, we're making an inference
that those methods of formation, those modes of accumulation are
analogous to what happened with the t rex. And that's
possible that, in fact, it might even be likely. So
you know, to grant to my potential opponent here or
you know, the dialogue partner, you know, grant that, Yeah, Hey,

(32:26):
when you look at radioactive decay products and how quickly
they are produced and how regularly they are produced, and
you look back into the fossil record and you look
into the geologic record and you find them, this seems
to be a strong case for an ancient Earth. And
so you know, am I still justified in being a
Young Earth creationist in the weight of that evidence, right,

(32:47):
And somebody says no, and I say yes, So now
it's going to be incumbent upon me in order to
come up with another inference that handles those same data
in such a way that it explains them along with
any other difficulties that the competing model seems to have
with those data. Does it even recognize that there might

(33:07):
be inconsistencies or difficulties with those with those data. So
I would say that to the person who says, you know,
but now we know a whole lot more, I would say, yes,
you're absolutely true. And that's some of the major reason
why so many people shifted into an Old Earth affirmation.
Even prior to Darwin, prior to the discovery of radioactive dating,
there were evidences out there that seemed difficult to jive

(33:33):
with a young Earth and a global flood. I think
that our current models of young Earth and global food
and our current understanding of geology helps us to go
back and actually explain some of those difficulties. We're still
left with others, but we've actually made some good progress
on what we've been working on. At least the scientists
that in Young Earth creationism that are out there trying
to collect data and interpret them and understand them and

(33:56):
publish their result their results doing science. I would say
that we've had enough interesting results come back from us
that lends me to think that we actually are onto
something here. We actually do have some interesting evidence that
we have discovered that maybe parts of the rock record
don't form so slow, or maybe the radioactive decay hasn't

(34:18):
always been exactly the same pace, And that would be
anathema to most physicists to say, yeah, but if you
ask the question, you go back to the rocks and
you actually find some evidence that it might be that case.
You just discovered something potentially very very important.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
So I don't mean interrupt, but you're like reading a
mail right now, because literally where I want to head
right now is I want to give you an opportunity
to kind of present in you know, you mentioned kind
of an imaginary dialogue partner, right, So imagine you're in
this dialogue with somebody and they are skeptical of your view,

(34:54):
and you have this opportunity to present maybe two or
three of what you considered to be the best lines
of evidence for Young Earth creationism. What is it that
you would share with them.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Sure, and what I might share would also depend too
a little bit of are they a Christian? Are they not?
So if they are a Christian, we'd probably continue on
and discuss some attributes of biblical interpretation, and in part
before I get to the science. Just to say that
from my own side of things and how I approach science,
I because I believe that God's word and his world

(35:28):
work hand in hand to construct you help us construct
reality properly. I think that what is said in the
Bible about historical situations need to be part of our evidence.
They need to be part of the understanding of how
I even go about work as a scientist. That puts
me very much at odds with how most people think

(35:50):
science ought to be done right. Science is supposed to
be done in effectively a philosophically theologically neutral fashion. But
what that philosophical or theologically neutral fashion is is a
default naturalism, which is not philosophically or theologically neutral. Naturalism
assumes that God has no discernible effect on the natural world.

(36:16):
If there's anything the Bible tells us, it is that
God has discernible and real effects on the natural world.
No doubt, just Cardlank. That's it. He created it, he
sustains it, he maintains it, and he moves into it
at times, most of course in the incarnation itself. But

(36:36):
he moves into it to bend it to his own
particular wills and desires at given points for his own purposes.
Where we use the word miracle because they are unusual
events what philosopher of science Dell Ratch called counterflow ways
in which things go opposite to the normal way that

(36:57):
nature does. Not all miracles do that. Sometimes God uses
a miracle in the way that nature would do something,
but he has divine timing that goes along with it,
or what have you. But there are other times in
which the world operates in a different fashion than it's normal,
And that's why we have a word like miracle, right
in order to encompass those types of activities. So I
think that the creation itself is a miraculous event. The

(37:20):
creation of the world, the creation of human beings, the
bringing of the judgment of the flood certainly involved natural
components of the world in order to enact God's will,
But the timing of when and how and what God
was going to do involved no doubt miraculous work as well.
So if I'm talking to a Christian, I'm going to
be trying to also get them to think that maybe

(37:42):
methodological naturalism, just assuming that nature is all there is
and all we can use to explain anything, is an
incorrect starting point for places where the Bible actually talks
about God doing things. I'm not expecting God to do
something weird in the test tube when I'm looking to
see if those colors change, because God still does uphold
the world through normal, providential operations. But I need to

(38:06):
remain open to those times and to those events when
God actually especially states outright, I was at work here.
So with that in my mind, and with that in
the mind of someone, you know, the other good creation
colleagues that I have out there, we start asking questions
about you know, these hard these hard arguments, you know,

(38:26):
something like radioactive dating techniques. It's not all contamination, it's
not all just geologists selecting the dates that they want
out of a pool of things that they had sent
out to labs. And it's just crazy, and they just
pick whatever they want because they have an agenda. That's
unproductive talk. That's not how geology operates. And I can

(38:47):
say that because I've spent you know, twelve years of
my life in geology programs and many years after that
going to geology meetings and listening to presentations and reading
books and teaching, and so the type of knee jerk
reaction would just say, no, those people really don't know
anything about what they're doing. It's all a lie because
you know, at their at at the heart, they're all

(39:08):
just Richard Dawkins and they just want God to to
stay dead.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, No, that's that's that's not my experience in grad school. Uh,
that that's not my experience going to geology meetings. There
are there are the rabbit atheists out there, but the
reality is nobody likes them. Even even their fellow atheist
friends don't like them very much because the rabbit people
are just you know, they're they're a little unsteady.

Speaker 4 (39:34):
Well they're not necessarily you know, it's not great to
have conversations with people like that.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
No, typically, no it's not.

Speaker 4 (39:40):
You can't really have a back and forth, or you
can't really teach them anything because they already know everything.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Right, you know, science can be a pretty rough and
tumble place. I've I've been to plenty of science meetings
where you know, during the Q and A, it's there's
people are yelling at each other and you know, all
this sort of stuff and just insults fly. It's not
usually like that, but it gets like that once in
a while. Everybody wants to make their mark and you know,
show that they're doing good work. And some people who

(40:05):
don't do good work or you know, the most vocal
at saying that they do good work, and it leads to,
you know, some problems. But for those for those normal
people out there that are in geology labs and doing
stuff like the whole creation evolution thing just isn't in
their mind and they're not you know, they're not orienting
their research towards disproving God. So what do we do
with those people that seem to be doing good work,

(40:27):
that are that are following what they think are good
methodologies in order to solve problems and answer questions because
they think there's a real history to the world. You know,
they're not postmodernists to think that you can believe whatever
you want about the world. Most scientists are very still
firmly in the modernist camp. You know, philosophically, and I'm
I'm overall pretty happy about that. Yeah, So a couple

(40:52):
of things that I would bring up for for somebody
who is asking me, you know, what evidence do you
see of a young Earth out there? About twenty years ago,
there were a group of creation scientists that formed a
project team to look at radioactive dating. It was called
the RATE team and RATE stood for radio Isotopes and
the Age of the Earth so rite. And this was

(41:14):
a project that was spearheaded by the Institute for Creation
Research and the Creation Research Society. They started it in
the late nineties. They published their first volume in I
think two thousand, which was kind of the papers outlining
the problems that were going to be addressed and how
they were going to address them. And then they had
a second book that was published in two thousand and

(41:36):
five that contained the results of their activities. And so
one of the things that they posited was that, you know,
contamination wasn't so ubiquitous that all dates are wrong. The
methodologies used by the labs in order to determine how
much radioactive versus decay product was there do a fine job.

(41:59):
This is empirical work. You can send samples through over
and over again and get good results. They thought that
the rate of radioactive decay may have changed in the past.
It may have been faster in the past than what
it is as we measure it today. Now that's a
big thing to propose, because the physics behind radioactive dating

(42:21):
is very, very tightly mathematically constrained. Radioactive decay generally doesn't
change between temperatures, states of matter, chemical compositions, and bonding.
It's something that's happening in the nucleus of the atom,
not with the electrons. So you can't change how nuclear
decay operates by making chemical compounds, for example, but nonetheless

(42:45):
taking that idea, taking that hypothesis, and then going to
the natural world. They made some hypotheses. Okay, that sounds good.
You have an idea, you make a hypothesis, you go
to the natural world, you collect some data. One of
the things that they said is that if radioactive decay
is moving faster in the past than it was in
the present, some of the decay products from that might

(43:07):
still be hanging around that otherwise shouldn't be if the
Earth is very old. Let me give you an example. Ye,
Uranium is an unstable atom, right we use it for
nuclear power and nuclear bombs. It will decay into lead
over a series of about eight to ten steps. It's
actually a big chain reaction. There's eight final steps that

(43:27):
have to be made, but it can bounce around a
lot on the way along those eight steps. Uranium also produces,
beside the lead, eight helium atoms. So basically uranium is
becoming lead by shedding parts of the nucleus. Those protons
and neutrons are being jettisoned out, and usually there's about

(43:48):
eight helium atoms that are shot out from the uranium
nucleus as that happens. Now, all this is typically happening
inside a small crystal in essay, a granite called zircons.
Zircons are tiny little crystals. They have uranium in them
because uranium is about the same size as zirconium, hence
the name zircon for the crystal. And so it's kind

(44:09):
of like switching out red and blue lego bricks in
your lego construction. They're the same size, they have the
same charge, they're about the same radius, and so they
just switch out. And so these little zircons are radioactive
because they've accumulated, they've incorporated uranium into their crystal structure.
They don't include lead in their crystal structure because lead

(44:30):
is like a tinker toy. It doesn't belong with legos.
And so when the crystal gets built, you have no
tinker toys, you have no lead in the crystal. So
that means any lead that we find in the crystal
is very likely to be a product of these uranium
atoms decaying into lead. And now just stuck. You've got
a tinker toy that's locked inside this Lego matrix. No neo,

(44:51):
no agent Smith, something like that.

Speaker 4 (44:52):
But Brian was just talking about the matrix before we
got on the podcast, so that's kind of funny you've
brought that up.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
I was remind it. Actually just yesterday, I was at
the Regional Evangelical Theological Society meeting in Winchburg. It was just,
you know, at Liberty University, you know, four miles from
my house. So I went. My sister's the theologian, so
you know, hang out with her a little bit. And
somebody was giving a talk on Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche,
and he had a passage of Nietzsche. And as I
read the passage from Nietzsche. It was astonishing. It sounded

(45:20):
just like agent Smith and I actually I'm wondering if
they actually kind of adapted some of Nietzsche's musings about
he was talking about basically being almost kind of contaminated
by the stench of normal human beings, and it sounded
just like Smith talking to Morpheus anyway.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
You know, trapped in existence and despising where he was.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
That's exactly right. I mean, the Matrix is already deep,
deep into philosophy. I mean the first half of the
movie is all, you know, sequence of sets of doubt,
you know, as you go through that philosophy to get
to I think therefore I am. But anyway, that's getting
us too far afield. But a matrix, yeh, I noticed

(46:05):
Brian's got a Mandalorian helmet in that you are earning
so many points, Brian, I built. I built my own
white saber hilt for myself, my PhD advisor for when
I walked with my PhD. I'm like, this is this
is the academic equivalent of Jediyes. So here we go, man,

(46:27):
thank you for training me. I'm no longer a cad.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
There might be some of this Young Earth stuff Jed,
you know.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
You can hang out. We're fun, we're geeks. So getting
back to the uranium, right, you've got these pieces of
lead that are stuck inside the lego matrix and like
a kyber crystal basically, then it's right, that's right, because
kyber crystal, and it's getting thick. It's getting thick here, boy.

(47:00):
But one of the other things that might get trapped
in that crystal are these helium atoms that get shot out. Now, helium,
unlike lead, can't bond with anything at all. It's one
of those noble gases, right, It's completely self contained. It
doesn't have to bind with anything, and so helium is
actually very free to escape the crystals. It just bounces
around the crystal lattice until it gets out and then

(47:23):
it's gone. What the Young Earth creationists thought, however, is
if radioactive decay had been accelerated in the past, then
there would have been a rapid build up of both
the lead and the helium in those crystals. And if
the Earth is young, there hasn't been that much time
for the helium to escape out of the crystals, whereas

(47:43):
if the Earth is exceptionally ancient. In these crystals are
you know, hundreds of millions or a couple billion years old,
that helium escapes at a very easy rate and doesn't
accumulate inside these crystals. So they got zircons and they
sent them off to an independent laboratory because I didn't
want anybody saying, oh, you young Earth creationists are just
screwing up everything. You don't know how to process materials.

(48:05):
So they sent them off to independent labs and had
them analyzed. And four years before in the first book,
the scientist who was working on this process, Russell Humphries,
he made a graph predicting how much helium would be
expected if these crystals had been around for several hundreds

(48:26):
of millions of years or if they'd only been around
for several thousands of years, And the difference between the
amount of helium was not small. We're talking three orders
of magnitude, right, so there should be a thousand times,
or it might have even been more. I'd have to
consult the chart, but it was multiple orders of magnitude
different between what we'd expect for an ancient Earth and

(48:47):
what we'd expect for a young Earth.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
So in these terms, we're talking drastic.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, yeah, we're talking. Yes, you know, is the money
you give me to invest, Is that going to make
five percent a year or is it going to make
five one thousand percent in a year? Right, And that's
the big difference here. And the results came back plotted
directly on the Young Earth expectations. I mean, it was
right in the middle of the plot. And you kind

(49:13):
of look at that and go, Okay, there's no physical
reason why helium should be retained by the crystal. The
helium doesn't bond, It can't bond. In fact, we have
helium in our atmosphere precisely because it's being formed by
uranium and escaping and getting out into the atmosphere all
the time. That's why we have it. So, Okay, that's
really really odd. That's very strange. It seems like you've

(49:35):
got two clocks in operation here. You have a radioactive
decay clock that would seem to indicate that this crystal
is very ancient when you look at the uranium in
lead ratios. But when you look at how fast helium
escapes out of this crystal, which is pretty easy to calculate.
You look at the size of the crystal, the temperature,
and how much helium has been produced eight times the

(49:56):
amount of lead. And you can say, okay, this would
be our leak rate. This, this would be how fast
helium gets out of this And that's age independent, that's
just helium will get out of this crystal at this rate.
And it turns out that we have a boatload of
helium still in here. That shouldn't be if the Earth
is very ancient. Could it be that the granite was
actually exceptionally cold. No, actually it can't be, because the

(50:19):
granite spent most of its time deep in the Earth,
where the temperatures are actually much much hotter than they
are at the surface. So if anything, helium should be
able to escape out of that crystal faster the deeper
in time you go.

Speaker 4 (50:32):
Is the granite I'll call it the granite objection or
the cool objection. Is that one of the proposed explanations
by people who resist this as evidence for a young Earth?
Or were you just putting that in there to help us?

Speaker 2 (50:47):
I would say, yeah, you know, the first thing that
I would think is, okay, well maybe the temperatures were
a lot lower. Oh okay, But that's in the end
not going to be a helpful line of defense because
the granite actually is in a thermally very active area.
It was from the Mountain West and the Mountain West.

(51:07):
As you go down in the ground, the temperatures actually
get very, very hot, very quickly. Geothermal heat is a
viable option from most of the US west of the
at the Rocky Mountains and westward where I live in Virginia.
You'd have to drill down hundreds of miles to get
the or one hundred miles probably to get to the
same temperature that you might get in about forty miles

(51:28):
in the Rockies or thirty miles in the Rockies. So
I'm on a cold section of the crust. They're in
a hot section of the crust. That's where these crystals
are coming from. So a temperature argument's not going to
be helping. So instead, what you might have to argue
is that the crystal has inherited helium from other places,
that somehow other helium from other granites nearby have worked

(51:50):
their way through that granite and they've gotten kind of
entrapped within this crystal. But the helium isn't entrapped in
some of the other surrounding minerals, the quartz, the feldspar,
the micas that make up a typical granite, they don't
have any. They have less of the helium than the
zircons do. So what would make the zircons something special

(52:11):
that it would entrap helium? There's nothing chemically there. Again,
it doesn't bond. It just keeps wiggling its way out
of crystals until it escapes to the surface and then
escapes the atmosphere. So helium is actually used in sensitive
testings for different types of tubing on you know, highly
precision levels as an escaper. You know, do we have

(52:32):
any micro holes in this are we get any helium
that's making through? So this stuff is fantastically good at
getting out of things, and there's no chemical mineralogical reason
for it to be in the zircon except as a
product of decay as not as an attractive place for
a helium to gather. So, you know those I like

(52:53):
to point to that as a good example of how
a creationist does science and does science in a pretty
typical methodology. We're not even talking about something you know
that We're not saying a miracle happened. We're saying, if
an acceleration of nuclear decay happened, that's a possibility. What
would we anticipate discovering. Let's go look for it and

(53:16):
see if it's there, And it turned out it was,
and so we've discovered something interesting about the world through this.
The Rate team found new data that nobody else thought
to look for, because the Earth has got to be old, right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:31):
And so that example that you offer to if I'm
understanding it correctly, it kind of challenges that notion that's
made by some It goes something like this, well, you know,
younger creationist scientists, they kind of just reinterpret existing data.
They really don't generate any new findings. I mean, you
just kind of debunk that with that example, if I

(53:53):
understood it correctly.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Yeah, I think that's true. The Rate team was very
specifically a research orient novel hypothesis approach, and I think
it represents in that way some of the best of
what Young Earth creationism can do. I think our imaginary
interlocutor on the whole is actually correct. A lot of
Young Earth creationists writing is simply taking what the rest

(54:18):
of the scientific community has discovered and reinterpreting it in
particular ways. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with
doing that. Right. If we're looking at we still have
data that needs interpretation. Those interpretations could be good, bad, better,
worse than each other. And let's face it, you know,
the Young Earth creationists are not always going to be

(54:38):
about the business of going and making their own hypotheses
and testing because there's so much interesting stuff that's being
discovered by other people. We represent a very very small
component of the community, and we have very little funding
and very little opportunity. Most of us, like myself, you know,
I taught it at a teaching institution for a long time.

(54:58):
I taught at Liberty Universe. My full time profession was
teaching students. I had four or five classes every semester
that I had to teach. That doesn't give a whole
lot of room for research activity. We're not like a
public school university where I might teach three classes a
year and the rest of it I'm supposed to be
writing grants, grant proposals and bringing in money and training

(55:23):
graduate students. Most of the places where Young Earth Creationists
are employed in education, we don't have those opportunities. So
we do research on the side, and to the best
of our ability, we might use our students and do
student involved research. Cedarville University is one of the best
at doing this, especially on the geology side. Their geology

(55:44):
program has been around for probably fifteen years now something
along those lines, and they've produced a good number of undergraduates.
They've produced graduates have gone on to graduate school and
gone on and get their PhDs and now are teaching
and training others. So I'm actually, you really looking at
the future of Young Earth creationism within geology and some

(56:07):
areas of biology and going Actually, we've got an interesting
pipeline here of people who are being trained on how
to think about the world from a creationist perspective and
not merely from an anti evolutionist.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
Perspective, which is very Yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
Those are different things. They are, they are, They're definitely related. Right,
I'm not an evolutionist because I'm a Young Earth creationist.
But I am not an evolutionist because I am a
Young Earth creationist, not because I don't like evolution, not
because I want it to be wrong. I don't think
that it's correct, and I'd rather spend my time to
discovering more about what I think is correct than trying to,

(56:44):
you know, poke holes and what I think is incorrect.
There are times and places for those kinds of dialogues
where you're you know, okay, let's give your evidence, let's
give mine, this sort of thing. But on the whole,
Young Earth creationism is going to be better served by
a longer approach of building out our own model, producing
our own hypotheses, coming up with our own tests and methodologies,

(57:05):
so that eventually we can be a much more competitive
alternative to Old Earth geology and biological evolution. Right. The
only way that people are really ultimately going to change
their mind is if you give them something that's more
attractive than what they have.

Speaker 4 (57:19):
Yeah, And I thought that came through really well in
your debate with Michael Jones. It was very much in
the spirit of you know, hey, I'm just trying to
get to what makes the most sense. It didn't come
across as you know, I've got to obliterate this view
and all who hold it, which I very much appreciated.
It was very much like, well, no, I just think

(57:39):
this makes the most the best sense of you know,
sometimes it was the biblical data and sometimes obviously it
was a scientific data depending on the topic.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
So yeah, I thought that came through.

Speaker 4 (57:49):
So yeah, I would feel really like I was missing
an opportunity here talking to a guy who loves dinosaurs
so much with your educational background, if I did not
ask about you know, everybody wants a piece of the
fossil record, right the evolutionists, the ID people, the Young
Earth creationists, Old Earth creationists. Everybody wants to claim it

(58:10):
for them themselves, which I get. You know, it goes
back to trying to explain the data. But you know,
how do you interpret the fossil record in light of
Young Earth creationism? And then, just for fun and for
my friend Chad Vaughan, how do dinosaurs fit into that?

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Gotcha?

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Those are some loaded questions right there.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
Sorry, yeah, I mean it's the fun stuff, you know, obviously,
it's the fun stuff. If you get to talk about dinosaurs,
you get to talk about a whole bunch of things
that aren't dinosaurs that you know, you only weren't about
in you know, in grad school or stuff like that.
There's all kinds of just wild and interesting creatures, plants,
et cetera that are out there. A Young Earth creationist,
generally speaking, is going to look at the fossil record.

(58:52):
And when I say the fossil record, think about, you know,
kind of the first visible marine organism life sort of stuff.
In the ID circles. They'll talk about, say the Cambrian
explosion or just below that is what's called the ediakron.
And I worked with Steve Meyer when I was in
grad school on a long paper that was the nucleus
for his book on the Cambrian explosion. So I've been

(59:16):
heavily involved with the intelligent design community in the past.
I was a fellow of the Discovery Institute for a
few years, and then as I went into my PhD program,
had to set that aside as I worked on my
other work. So in something like an Old Earth creation
or intelligent design perspective, they look at the Cambrian explosion
or some of the other proposed explosions along the way

(59:37):
and say, these are basically evidence of design events, right,
these are points in time. Say, if you are Hugh Ross,
the other doctor ross On here, he'd be talking about
God creating all the organisms at the time of the
Cambrian explosion. Intelligent design kind of skirts along the same
kind of argument, right. They never kind of quite come
out and say creation, but that's what it is. And

(01:00:02):
for Young Earth creationists. On the other hand, the Camber
explosion is not an evidence of the creation of anything.
It's the first evidence of the destructive event of Noah's flood.
So the fossil record starting maybe a little bit below
the Cambrian with a few other organisms that show up.
Most of us believe that represents the initiation of the

(01:00:25):
flood and the first deposition of ecosystems in which a
variety of different types of organisms were alive at the time,
and that these ecosystems were stripped from their original location
and dragged into lower areas basins where sediment will accumulate.
If you think about I mean, my desk is pretty messy.

(01:00:48):
I am not a highly organized guy, and so if
I want to figure out where something is on my desk,
I often need to try to remember when was I
using it. You know, I have to think in terms
of time, so I can then think about how deep
in the pile I have to go to find it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
That's a great example.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
It's a it's a familiar one. Yeah, well, that's why
it's great. I'm identifying so geological layers of sedimentary rock
work the same way old stuff is on the bottom.
Young stuff is on the top because gravity works, and
so the first things that go down into a low
spot get covered by the next thing, by the next thing,
by the next thing. So as a as a geologist,

(01:01:26):
as a paleontologist, I think in terms of old on
the bottom and young towards the top. Anytime somebody does
it the other way around on a graph or I
just like I lose my mind. I can't, I can't
handle it. So old on the bottom, young's on the top.
The Cambrian explosion is one of the lowest units that
has a wide preponderance of a whole bunch of different
types of marine creatures, shelley things, non shelley things, worms, clams,

(01:01:50):
trial bytes, brachiopods, and they have a very sudden appearance.
The Intelligent design and Old Earth folks, this is why
they look at that and say, this looks like a
dis line event to us, because we don't see much
for evolutionary predecessors in the rocks immediately below. It looks
like they really just kind of pop into existence or

(01:02:10):
phase into existence at these very high levels of biological taxonomy.
Like you look at the brachiopod, which is an animal
with two shells, but is very different internally than clams.
So it's not a mollusk. It's a totally different type
of critter. You can't make good chowda out of uh
and you got to say it, right, Gotta say chowda.
Can't make good chowda out of a brachiopod. They're terrible,

(01:02:32):
they're awful. But you can make great chowda out of
a clam. So these are two fundamentally different animals. They
belong to different phyla in biology.

Speaker 4 (01:02:43):
And real quick, if I can interject, and Meyer I
think uses the phrase like, is this the same thing
as what you're saying body plans? Yes, okay, okay, I
was just making sure that we were talking about the
same thing.

Speaker 3 (01:02:53):
I thought we were, but I wanted to double y.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Yeah, that's exactly right. So the body plan of a
brachiopod and a clam both include two shells top and bottom,
but the internal body plans are just radically different. One
of them has got basically a siphon pump that it's
moving food through its stomach. The brachiopod, on the other hand,
has this spiral shaped set of hairs that it beats
like a whole bunch of Viking oars in order to

(01:03:17):
create a current to draw food into its stomach, which
has built in an entirely different fashion. And it also
has a big muscle that comes out of the back
of the shell that digs down into the sand and
anchors it. And there's no muscle on the inside of
a clam. I mean, I'm sorry, on the outside of
a clam, there's no muscle. They just dig their whole
shell body in. So that body plan, that phylum level

(01:03:39):
difference between those two is they're right from the beginning.
So for the intelligent design and Old Earth folks, they're like,
this is a good example of design. I look at
it and say, well, what would it look like if
you buried a modern ecosystem off shore and then excavated it.
You would see a whole bunch of different animals. You
would see clams, you would see horseshoe crabs, you would

(01:03:59):
see starfish, You would see all these different body plans,
and they likewise would seem to appear out of nowhere.
If this was a depositional event, if this was erosion
and deposition that happened at the beginning of the flood,
it would give you the same visual signature as if
it was a creation event. But if the world is
young and the flood is the response, then what we're

(01:04:21):
seeing is a sequence of deposits, not a sequence of designs.
So if you're an Older Earth advocate, you're going to
go with this is God creating different things over time
and apparently destroying them and restarting new things over and
over again. God uses these organisms for millions of years
and then wipes them all out and then creates a
whole new things or fairly similar things. Sometimes as you

(01:04:44):
go up through the rock record. For Young Earth creationists,
we look at that and say, no, it's a single
destructive event because it was part of the curse on creation,
because it had gone so badly under the bad stewardship
of humans. The whole world was going to be judged
because we, as the vice regents, as those put in
charge of the planet with the Imago day, we had

(01:05:05):
so bad we mismanaged the world that it was filled
with violence at the time of the flood. That all flesh,
and the Hebrew there is coal bussar. It's literally all flesh,
and that flesh is not just human flesh, that's animals.
It's used all the time in Hebrew to talk about
the flesh of animals, the flesh of people, flesh generally

(01:05:26):
living things. So we seem to have a clear instance
in scripture about the destruction of the world. The flood
is a decreation of the initial creation and fun thing
for you guys to do, if you've never done it before.
Open up Genesis one and open up Genesis eight in
parallel and read them side by side, and you will

(01:05:47):
find that Genesis eight follows the pattern of Genesis one
as the world emerges out of the flood, and it starts, Oh,
it starts with the first verse in Genesis eight, God
caused a wind right, and God God remembered Noah. Then
verse two saiding God sent a wind. The Hebrew word
for wind is ruach, which is also the same word

(01:06:09):
as spirit. So in Genesis chapter one, when the spirit
of God is hovering over the waters, it's the spirit
of God is the ruoch Elohim. And here Elohim sends
a ruoch over the waters, and it gets cooler from
there on out because you start to see then, you know,

(01:06:30):
God shuts off the you know, the fountains of us,
the fountains, the windows of heaven are shut off, which
is very reminiscent of the separation of waters that happens
on day two. Because now the sky and the oceans
are separated again, there's distinction, whereas during the flood there
was no distinction. You see mountains emerge. And what happens

(01:06:53):
on day three God separates the land from the waters,
and we have dry ground. And now Noah sees the
dry ground amidst the water. As the water is going down,
you eventually have birds that are released, like on day five.
And then what's on day six when God says to Noah,
come out you and all of the beasts of the field,
and all the cattle and all of the creeping things.

(01:07:13):
All the same words that are used in Genesis one
are used again in Genesis eight. And what does Noah
do after that? He worships, which parallels the Sabbath. That
is the rest that God does on the seventh day.
So Genesis one in Genesis eight. What Genesis eight is
showing us is that the world was completely destroyed and

(01:07:35):
recreated in a sense. You know, it's not a true recreation.
God is not actually creating new things here in terms
of causing them to come into existence when they had
not before. But it's letting us know that the flood
narrative is not one about some local event that only
affects humans. It is as cosmic as the original creation is.

(01:07:58):
And that's why, Oh, go ahead, I was just.

Speaker 3 (01:08:00):
Going to say, how have I never heard.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
That it sort of mirrors baptism as well?

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
Though it does? It does. Yeah, we get that in
the Testament that the baptism mirrors that. And in Second
Peter we see that Peter ties the second coming of Christ, right,
the escaton, to what two events that were universal, the
creation and the flood. Right, he actually says that it's

(01:08:25):
the people forgetting about the miraculous and universal nature of
the flood that was unlike anything else in the past,
that is causing them to say things ridiculous, like from
the beginning of creation, all things continue just as they have. Right.
That's the argument effectively of uniformitarianism in geology, that we
look at the president and it's always been like this

(01:08:47):
since the beginning. And Peter is doing this theologically. You know,
he's making the argument that Jesus did in fact rise
from the dead, and he will come back to judge
the people that are saying all things continue are Jews
who should know better, because he's saying they willfully forget
about the flood. And so Peter definitely sees that the

(01:09:08):
flood is every bit as cosmic as the creation, and
that Jesus's return is every bit as cosmic as the
two of them. And we can know that Jesus's return
will be universal and global what we would call today global,
because of the universal global nature of those two other events.
So if this is one of those things for those
who are Christians listening, I would say that you risk

(01:09:31):
mucking with a lot of things. It turns out if
you make minor tweaks to your understanding of the creation
event or the flood, because it turns out that there's
a lot more theologically wrapped up in these things than
if you were just reading Genesis one by itself. He said,
maybe we can understand it this way, that's possible, but
maybe you can't understand it that way. Really, when you

(01:09:54):
keep reading on in Genesis, you know, a Genesis one
through eleven view might not allow that, and a canonical
view of scripture might certainly not allow that perspective. And
we were understandably looking I think, you know, early geologists
were understandably looking for ways to kind of get around
what looked like the young Earth argument in scripture because
they were afraid that the geological evidence could not be

(01:10:17):
understood in this fashion, and so they sought alternate interpretations.
That in itself is not bad, right, because we have
evidence from the world and we have evidence from scripture,
and we're trying to make sure that we can make
sense of them together. But I think they were too
quick in making changes to the understanding of genesis without

(01:10:37):
seeing how those connections would affect theology further down the road.
That pulling on that tapestry in this one little spot
actually did unravel the eyeball somewhere else on the sheet.

Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:10:52):
I think that's an important point. That's really important, and
that's really helpful. Now, even though you've you know, pretty
much destroyed my Jurassic Part worldview, I would like to
I would like to find out though, in you know,
how does a Christian And particularly the reason I'm asking
you this is because I do have a friend who
I mentioned Chad, not this Chad, another Chad the other

(01:11:15):
chat and he he said, you know to me once
He's like you know, my my son asked me like,
how do I make sense of the dinosaurs? And he
himself is trying to make sense of creation and what
to do with the Genesis texts and all of that,
and so I thought, well, I've got the guy to ask,
and so how would he help his son, you know, understand, like,

(01:11:37):
how do we make sense of the dinosaurs on this
you know kind of Young Earth timeline that you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
Yeah, so then going back to those you know, stacks
of sediment like the messy desk, right, Yes, we've got
things like the Camberan explosion which has all these marine organisms. Right,
These these all look like offshore you know, aquatic types
of creatures. The higher you get in the geological record,
the more terrestrial types of critters you start to encounter.

(01:12:08):
The sea has never gone, the sea is always kind
of around. I think that's also interesting thinking from a
flood perspective. But there are more and more kind of
terrestrial creatures that you find as you go up through
all these layers. So I've mentioned Cambrian. We have all
kinds of unusual words like ortivision and Devonian and Silurian.
But then eventually we get to things that are like

(01:12:29):
the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, which we at least all
heard at some point from the dinosaur books. And they're
called those things because in that stacked sequence you run
into certain characteristic creatures, dinosaurs being some of them, that
are in there. As a Young Earth creationist, I see
those layers as evidence of terrestrial ecosystems that we're finally

(01:12:52):
being impacted by the effects of the flood, being ripped up, destroyed, transported,
and deposited on top of this other stack of stuff
in various places. Sometimes that stack is thinner, sometimes it's thicker,
but nonetheless eventually having those ecosystems being destroyed and placed
atop some of the other ecosystems in our stack, until

(01:13:16):
such a time that all ecosystems, all terrestrial ecosystems, were
completely covered by the floodwaters and you had no more
so the dinosaur ecosystems. I think we're alive at the
time of Noah. I don't know that human beings were
living in and amongst them. We have no evidence of
human beings, or at least no evidence that I find

(01:13:37):
compelling of any human beings living in with those deposits
that have dinosaurs. Okay, that's an interesting challenge against Young
Earth creationism. Where are the people? That's a bigger topic
than what we can get into right now. But I
think we've got some answers, but not a completely robust
set of answers for that. That's still a hard challenge.

(01:13:59):
But nonetheless, I still think that we've got these dinosaur
ecosystems that are now stacked on top of previous ecosystems
that started in the marine realm. Because the flood is
an ocean event, and it starts off by destroying ocean environments,
and as it climbs higher and higher, the floodwaters are
engaging in many more ecosystems along the way. Then you
know where dinosaurs brought on board Noah's ark as a

(01:14:21):
Young Reth creation. You're going to be asked that, right,
I would think so, because the description going back to
these connections between the flood account and creation, the types
of animals that are talked about in the flood narrative
of what's being brought to Noah. You know, God says
He's going to bring two of every kind to a
very kind of beast of the field and bird of

(01:14:42):
the air, and creeping things, and you know those sorts
of terms again that are identical to Genesis one Genesis two.
So you could try to make the argument that God
brings whatever subset of those that he deems so he
brings all the animals whatever, all those animals happen to be.
But I think that's probably not in good keeping with

(01:15:02):
the text. I would say that it would seem to
be all the same kinds that he had originally created.
So why do we not have dinosaurs around today? Is
because sadly we don't.

Speaker 3 (01:15:15):
Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:15:16):
Depends depends on the dinosaurs. Some of them are pretty cool.
And one of the things I do, I will say,
Jurassic Park Dominion, the last movie that came out, it
was it was terrible. They should have spent their money
on one plot that could work rather than two.

Speaker 4 (01:15:30):
That didn't, right, and try to bring back the old
actors and put them with the new actors and yeah, yeah,
the whole distant work.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Yeah maybe it could have. I liked seeing the whole
band back together again, but yeah, man, that was that
was terrible. Yes. Well, one of the things I mean,
as always, the actual animals that were created for the
movies were spectacular. They were they were wonderful. And one
of the cool things about Dominion is that you actually
got to see a number of non dinosaur creatures that

(01:15:59):
you know, a apparently in gen had had created, including some,
you know, just really weird stuff that you would never
find unless you were, you know, a verbal paleontologist. I'm
geeking out pointing at the screen, like they got one
of these things here? Can you believe that? Oh wow,
it's really it's really awful. It shouldn't be that way.
It's a herbivore, it shouldn't be so groupchy. But you know,
it's enslaved to be in a pitfight with other animals,

(01:16:20):
So I'll give it some space.

Speaker 3 (01:16:22):
There you go.

Speaker 2 (01:16:22):
But you know these, you know, why don't we have
dinosaurs in some of these other kinds of creatures from
the fossil record. And my colleague Kurt Wise, also a
paleontologist and a Young Earth creationist. He's at Harvard, right,
he got his PhD at Harvard. Oh, okay, under under
Stephen J. Gould, who was America's most foremost evolutionary thinker
of the twentieth century.

Speaker 3 (01:16:43):
Punctuated equilibrium.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
That's right, very good yes, yeah, he was co originator
of that idea with Niles Eldritch, who was also a paleontologist.
Eldridge studied trial bites and Gould studied gastropods. He studied
snails and stuff like that. Gould studied every everything, but
he was a specialist on snails. So yeah. So Kurtwise
was trained at Harvard under Gould and was the first

(01:17:06):
Young Earth creationist to have a PhD in paleontology, and
probably the second with any geology training as well, because
paleontologists and geologists were kind of both at the same time.
Because the fossils are found in rocks, so you have
to learn all about the rocks so you can know
what's going on in your fossils too. He made I
think an astute observation that when you look at the

(01:17:27):
types of plants that are in the same sedimentary layers
that have your dinosaurs, they're not the sort of plants
that we see around us today in large numbers. They're
gigantic cycads and horsetails, and we have cycads and horsetails,
but they're tiny little plants these days. They're not big
tree sized sorts of things. It seemed that the dinosaur

(01:17:48):
and ecosystem was built on different types of plants for
the herbivores, and if those plants don't really take off
after the flood, Noah was not told to bring on
all sorts of different plants. They told to bring on
plants for food, not for regermination. You know, the flood
is an opportunity for everything to have another chance, but

(01:18:09):
it's not a guarantee that it will last beyond God's
providence after that. So if the plant communities on which
the dinosaur systems were built never got themselves started up
again after the flood, but instead we ended up with
a lot of these flowering plants that produce fruits and
stuff like that. Dinosaurs didn't eat those, They just didn't

(01:18:32):
consume them, and that means that their entire ecosystem would
probably have collapsed shortly after the flood. They were also
fairly large animals, might have been more difficult for them
early on to acquire enough food to sustain themselves distaining
their offspring. Whereas mammals on the whole are much much smaller,
reptiles are you know, most other reptiles are much smaller.

(01:18:54):
Birds are much smaller so there might have been some
built in biological ecological advantages to the things you know
to certain groups after the flood compared to everything that
was brought on board.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
So I'm thinking about how we interpret data, and to
my mind, data isn't self interpreting, you know right now.
My thought is that data is something that we interpret
in light of something else that we're more certain of. So,
for instance, you might it might be a form of
reasoning something like this, since we know X, therefore here's

(01:19:28):
how we interpret why. And so if someone has a
very firm interpretation of scripture and that they are certain
that interpretation is true, then that informs their interpretation of
other data in the world. Whereas someone might come and
they say, well, my interpretation of the data in the
world is so firm, therefore I can interpret the scripture

(01:19:53):
in light of that. So I'm not saying everyone does
that necess and that's why they're holding a certain position.
I'm just thinking that when it comes to how might
I be persuaded to take on a Young Earth view,
I think of I think of an example sometimes if

(01:20:16):
someone handed me a note card and says, okay, here's
the note card. This is the truth about subject X.
If you handed me a note card and you say
the Earth is ten thousand years old, this is this
is just the truth card I'm handing it to. I
honestly wouldn't have too much trouble just reinterpreting all the
data around me and say, well, it must be this way,
it must be that way. Or if you handed me

(01:20:37):
the old Earth card, I don't think it would have
too much trouble or reinterpreting all the data. The problem
is that this is like a circuit box full of
a zillion wires, and we don't have the truth card.
We have it to my mind, we have Oh well,
this seems like the strongest data to interpret other things from.
So if I look at data for the universe being

(01:21:01):
old for me, I feel like that's really strong data.
I can think of some objections to my own thoughts there,
like reverse extrapolation. It might be a fallacy of presumption
or something like that. But if all things you know
mathematically work out, then it seems to me starlight and
all of that sort of stuff. Okay, I don't have

(01:21:21):
the truth card. I don't know if the Earth is young,
because I could reinterpret the universe as young. But if
I have a strong thought that the universe is old,
you might actually be able to persuade me that, well,
the Earth is young, but it still could think it's
an old universe or something, because I honestly don't have
a lot of confidence in any one interpretation of genesis.

(01:21:45):
For me, I see the authority of it and the
strength of it, and I do not think it's malleable.
But I just I don't have any confidence that one
interpretation like wins so strong over another. I think that
they're great arguments on both sides. So I'm saying all
of that to say or to ask, like, in a way,

(01:22:07):
what's your starting point? What is your strongest place by
which you interpret all the other data? Because I think
whatever side one takes, there comes a point where and
less we're super hyper vigilant, then a lot of what
we may do is just be confirmation bias. I'm saying
about it myself, about about anyone else, Like, once you

(01:22:28):
think oh okay, well man, I can't be persuaded otherwise,
then it's kind of like everything else is confirmation bias.
I'm just thinking about how might you find your starting
point for what are you most certain of I think
if someone like can Ham or the answers in Genesis Camp,
they'll always say the starting point of scripture, And to me,

(01:22:50):
I appreciate the sincerity of that. I don't doubt the
desire to honor God above all things. But I think
maybe there's a fallacy there that like thetting their interpretation
above of the scripture in place of scripture itself, because
either way, it's authoritative, whether you see it as an
old or young. So I don't I hope in your say,

(01:23:12):
my starting point scripture, my interpretation of the scripture, you know,
in that sense, but where do you start and what's
your sort of reference point for that?

Speaker 2 (01:23:20):
You know, Yeah, I appreciate the way that you frame that,
because that is that is an easy temptation to fall
into of you know, I've I've picked my pony, and
everything kind of just ends up reinforcing that along the way.
For myself, given you know, given my history in geological

(01:23:41):
programs that were secular right there, I never spent a
day at a Christian school until I got a job
at Liberty University, right so it was you know, weird actually,
you know, going to a Christian school very very weird,
and it ought to be weird in a lot of
good ways as well, but it was just, you know,
very unusual were for me to be able to do
that as looking forward to I really enjoyed being there,

(01:24:03):
but it was different than k through PHDT, you know,
in public schools, and because I had spent all those
years being challenged on issues of evolution, issues of the
age of the Earth, issues of starlight. Although I usually
would tell my friends, I've got enough problems with the
rocks at my feet that I don't care to look
up at the stars and you know, think of more.

(01:24:27):
I'll let people you know who have better grasps of
physics and astronomy handle those issues, because those like I
look at rocks, dude, you know, rocks and bones. And
so I have also been self conscious about that potential
for just confirming my own perspectives. I always had thought

(01:24:49):
that my interpretation of Genesis one through eleven, let's just
say the corpus of that part of of the Bible,
was on the right track. But I still, even when
I was teaching Liberty University, would often say, if someone
could convince me from the pages of scripture that a
allegorical approach to Genesis one through eleven, or you know,

(01:25:11):
something like that, if a different approach to Genesis one
through eleven robustly handled that portion of scripture and the
canonical reflections on it, I would be willing to entertain that.
And I could easily I don't know about easily, but
I could see myself becoming an Old Earth advocate if

(01:25:31):
I thought that the biblical data also pointed could be
understood in that direction in a robust fashion. You know,
in ways that gap theory and day age were just
kind of simple patches that didn't end up working well.
What about John Walton's approach that Genesis one is a
cosmic temple typology. I've read that. I don't think that

(01:25:51):
it works well, and actually neither do most Old Testament scholars.
I would say, I was talking with one and he said,
you know, maybe five percent of Testament scholars think that
John Walton's right. The vast majority of us, don't. You
know that that guy is a theistic evolutionist, so you
know he's looking at that saying, no, that's not going
to work. Framework hypothesis approach. I think there's a lot

(01:26:12):
to framework hypothesis. Actually, I think that there's a whole
aspect of the literary nature of Genesis one that Young
Earth creationists have frequently kicked to the curb because when
framework hypothesis was proposed, it was proposed as a way
to avoid see what seemed to be the historical claims
or statements in removing Genesis one from an actual sequence

(01:26:33):
of historical creative events. I think that what you've got
with framework hypothesis is a beautiful literary construction that is
draped over the historical events of the creation week. So
I don't think that actually gets you out of the
woods on the historicity of it. I've looked at, you know,
other other types of allegorical approaches, and there's there's a

(01:26:57):
book by two scholars, Greg Davidson and Ken Turner called
The Manifold Beauty of Genesis One, and they go through
seven different interpretations of Genesis one, none of which involved
the days being days or ages or anything like that.
They try to keep the question of day and age
out of Genesis, but Greg Davidson can't help himself. He's

(01:27:19):
a very strong theistic evolutionist, Old Earth creationist and our
Old Earth advocate, and so he keeps kicking at Young
Earth creationists throughout the book. It's otherwise. If he didn't
do that, I actually would have used it for from
our creation studies text at Liberty University was very very
well put together. Is this talking about Israel and the
land and the promise of land and rest and all

(01:27:39):
those sorts of things. I have yet to see anything
that handles the Biblical text the way that I think
a robust not a cartoonish, but a robust Young Earth
creation theology does, like what I shared here between Genesis
one and Genesis eight, and how the flood is so
intimately connected with the creation account, and it goes well

(01:28:00):
beyond that. You start looking at parallels between Adam and Noah,
and you're going to see a dozen pop off of
the pages right away. I've got a chart of that
in the Dictionary of Christianity and Theology by Zanderban where
I go through some of those parallels between the creation
account and the flood and then between Adam and Noah.
And I talk about that as well in a chapter

(01:28:22):
on in Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve, where
I present a Young Earth creation perspective on Adam contra
three other basically theistic evolution perspectives. You've got Ken Sparks,
who's an errentist with respect to the Bible. So he
thinks that the Bible is not an errant, it's filled
with mistakes. He and I actually agree about how Genesis

(01:28:43):
ought to be read. He just thinks that it's incorrect,
and I think that it's right. But you know, here,
you've got this guy who's a scholar of the Old
Testament in ancient and ear Eastern you know, context is like, absolutely,
they thought that the world was created in six days. Absolutely,
they thought Adam was the first human being. And of
course they thought that the world was deluged with a foot.
Everybody did. It's unsurprising. So he and I both look

(01:29:06):
at it and kind of look at each other and go, wow,
we actually agree on a lot of things until we
get to the point of like, oh, none of it's right.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
Well yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
And sitting in between right, So in that book, you've
got it's set up as like, you know, he's the
far left liberal guy and I'm supposed to be the
uber conservative type of guy. And then in the middle
are the reasonable positions that you're really supposed to grapple with,
you know, and that's that's William Wayne Craig's mythohistorical view
on on Adam and Andrew Loake's genealogical Adam argument very

(01:29:41):
similar to Joshua Swamidas's, and I don't think either of
those work very well at all. I'd actually push comes
to shove. I would probably take Kent and Sparks arrentist
view of the Bible over what I think you have
to do to the Bible in order to get around
a Young Earth creation perspective. I just don't think that
you approach the Bible with appropriate with the consistency that

(01:30:05):
in Errancy expects. So I'm not saying that someone like
h Ross is not an Arrentist or not an evangel
of course he is. We're going to disagree about the
interpretation of Genesis. I think that he's actually inconsistent in
his application of his hermeneutics, and it leads to these
differing perspectives out there. So, you know, for me, both

(01:30:26):
on the science side, I've been challenged by the evidence
for an ancient age of the Earth and for the
evidence for biological evolution, and I think that Young Earth
creationists can answer a lot of those challenges on the
theological side, I've been challenged. I went into writing this
book on atom or at least my chapter on Adam,
and I was honestly quite concerned that my Young Earth

(01:30:47):
creation interpretation was going to be shown as I delved
into the commentaries and I delved into all the technical
writing of this, that I was going to be very
naive and that the Young Earth creation perspect was not
going to be able to hold a candle to all
these folks who had the backgrounds not only of the
Hebrew world, but also of the world of the Canaanites

(01:31:09):
and the Sumerians and the Babylonians and you know, the Egyptians,
and you know. I mean, I'm at the point now
where I'm reading like inuma Elish and the ball Cycle
and things like that to get a better handle on
what's going on, which is weird. As a paleontologist, why
I never cared about people. I like dinosaurs, I don't
like people. But now I'm reading these things. But I

(01:31:31):
was really surprised that the arguments, especially theologically and hermoneutically,
against Young Art creationism, we're nowhere near as substantive and
compelling as I thought they could be. And so for me,
trying to maintain that balance of having some certainty in
what I think is really real, but also being open

(01:31:51):
enough to allow it to be challenged. Right, which which
for someone like me who's been in this game for
a while, right, this would be this would be a
dramatic shift. This would be really difficult for me to
say Young Earth creationism is incorrect. I've invested a lot
of time and effort, and I've made a lot of arguments,
and the position is deeply bound within me because I

(01:32:13):
think that it's so deeply bound within the pages of
the Bible. But if somebody could have shown me that
actually the Bible makes better sense as a whole based
on this view, I would much rather go with a
proper interpretation of the Bible than a comfortable one.

Speaker 1 (01:32:30):
Yeah, So for you, that your starting point would be
your certainty. Now I'm not saying certainty is a naive certainty,
a robust confidence that. Look, I've surveyed all the different
ways you could look at this also in light of
all the evidence I've examined, and I'm still confident that

(01:32:52):
this is the best to reading. And therefore that's my
comfortable confidence starting point for interpreting data. Would that be accurate?

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
Yeah? I think that is and it yeah to know,
you know that in science or theology, or philosophy, or
you know, whatever discipline that you happen to really love,
there are those things that you hold on to very
firmly because you really do think this, this is what
I know. It could be wrong, but probably really not.

(01:33:22):
You know, I got ninety some odd percent certainty that
this is actually right, and that certainty will then help
you to guide you as you go through and encounter
other aspects of your studies or your experiences that don't
seem to make as much sense. I think you were
right as you were talking earlier on about you know,

(01:33:43):
this this balance between you know, what I think I
know or what I'm comfortable, you know, in my level
of knowledge in these other places where I can be
a little less comfortable about stuff. And my wife and
I were actually talking about this with somebody we recently
hired at my company who is not a Young Earth creationist.

(01:34:05):
I don't just hire only Young Earth creationists. I hire, like,
you know, hopefully, people who can do a good job
for me. And you know, this person has experience in geology,
and they're not a Young Earth creationist. They they are
more of an Old Earth creationist. And as we were
all talking over lunch, the three of us, you know,
my wife was saying, you know, there are those things

(01:34:25):
that we have comfortable being. We're comfortable being uncomfortable with
some things. You know, we're okay with being uncomfortable here,
and we're not okay with being uncomfortable in these other places.
And it's yes, a subjective call as to you know,
what part makes you more or less comfortable. And so

(01:34:46):
my high level of comfort or confidence, uh in what
I think is a proper interpretation of the page is
the Bible and some of the things that I've discovered
in science gives me the ability to maintain an uncomfort
sableness right a situation where I have no idea what
the answer to this other perplexing problem happens to be,

(01:35:07):
and it's okay for me to have that tension. And
I think that's something that for those who are maybe
listening in on the podcast here, it's all right to
be uncomfortable. That's normal. In our modern society, we do
a lot of palliative work to make us not uncomfortable,
and we have very cushy jobs, We have very cushy

(01:35:30):
worlds around us. Our houses are generally pretty nice. Not
everybody is in that situation. Some people are in far
less comfort than we all are. The fact that somebody
might even be listening to this podcast on a set
of earbuds, right, is a comfort because they don't have
to listen to whatever is on the radio at work, right,
They're just doing their own thing.

Speaker 3 (01:35:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:35:46):
We all have these levels of comfort, but being uncomfortable
is what causes you to then think about the tension
in these sorts of things, and maybe when it comes
to something like distance starlight, I don't have the chops
to do this. I'm just going to have to remain
uncomfortable with what seems to be evidence for very very
distant starlight in creation that is very recent. And there

(01:36:10):
are other people in creationism that I'm just going to
have to rely on to approach that problem. That do
understand astronomy, that do understand general and special relativity, that
understands string theory. If anybody understands string theory, right, that
can do that sort of thing. Because again I looked
at rocks and bones, you know, there's not my issue,
and somebody else, you know, might be perplexed by some

(01:36:33):
issue in geology or some issue of evolutionary biology or
developmental biology. There might be some other area of human history.
And we've just got to rely on there being other
people who can work on those things while I do
the faithful work of addressing what's in front of me
the best of my ability, and being uncomfortable is just
going to be part of it. It's okay, it's all right.

Speaker 1 (01:36:54):
Yeah, well, sort of along that line. You know, I
mentioned the likes of answers in Genesis and you know,
not trying to diss anyone, but some people would maybe
be afraid of like changing their view. Oh no, I
can't change my view. As if this the age of
the Earth is a very very central to a tenant

(01:37:17):
to being a Christian. What are your thoughts on that
and what sort of maybe encouragement or whatever would you
have people in examining their view being okay with a
discomfort and you know, being willing to question maybe where
they're sitting. I mean, I mean, we hold the young
old Earth view, but we're like wanting to know more

(01:37:40):
about the you know, convince me otherwise, you know, because
I'm thinking it doesn't matter where it doesn't. It's not
essential to my salvation kind of thing. But anyway, what
would you say to people exploring their view who have
maybe this, Oh, no, I can't question that.

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
Well. I think you put it well, Brian. It's not
essential to Christian faith and practice. It's not essential to
becoming a Christian. Let's face it. Not even the Nicene
Creed is essential to becoming a Christian because there's a
man next to Jesus on a cross who simply said,
please remember me when you come into your kingdom. Right,
all you need is that affirmation that Jesus is Lord

(01:38:20):
and I submit to you. After that, it's about becoming
more like Christ and becoming more consistent with the ways
of God himself. Right. So for me, I look at
young Earth creationism as part of what I think is
a consistent picture of the Biblical meta narrative, right from

(01:38:40):
a good creation gone wrong, through a fall, to ultimately
a savior brought in for a resurrection and ultimate restoration.
There's this overall flow to the story of what God
is doing that we're wrapped up in. And I think
Young Earth creationism makes the most sense of that story,
and then we might get that story wrong and important ways,

(01:39:01):
maybe if we choose the wrong approach to the beginning,
because if you have you know, if you don't have, say,
original sin, if you don't have an initial fall, there
are big consequences, I think, not just for humans, but
also for understanding things like natural evil in the world.
How do we come to grips with the fact that
this is a world that is that seems to be

(01:39:24):
operating well and yet is broken in very obvious kinds
of ways. So it's not a salvation issue, but it
is one of those things that if you think about
it wrong and hard enough right that you eventually find
your way into how this does impact the Gospel itself.
Why do we need a savior in the first place? Again,
the meta narrative of scripture tells us why, and it
starts off at the very beginning with a good creation,

(01:39:46):
a paradisical place for Adam and Eve, and a point
of disobedience that ushers in sin and death and I
think cosmic consequences to the fall. It's a place where
my where young earthers and old earthers tend to disagree
a little bit is on what extent the rest of
creation is affected by human sin. But you know, certainly,

(01:40:09):
if if you don't ever have a historical fall, you
have a hard time justifying why we need a savior.
And unless you're willing to go say so, I've picked
on Bill Craig a little bit here. But Bill Craig
doesn't hold to an original sin view. He holds two
of you where we need a savior because we are sinners.
You know that's original sin is original to us individually

(01:40:31):
each time as we go, that's sufficient for the need
for a savior. And it might be, but I don't
think that's the scriptural argument that's being made. I think
that's a philosophical position one could stand on, but it
might not be a very good scriptural argument to stand on.
So I think that you know, these types of issues
about young Earth, creational Old Earth creation, theistic evolution, atheistic

(01:40:55):
or agnostic views right do have an impact on then
an understanding of the rationality of the Bible itself and
the work of Jesus Christ and what he is doing. Peter,
again looking to the Escaton, points back to the original
creation and to the flood as the physical, concrete reasons
to know that the next phase is going to be

(01:41:17):
radically different and will be universal now just cosmic in
every sense of the word. So for those listening, you know,
if you're a theistic evolutionist and you're listening to me,
we could be a church on Sunday, side by side,
singing hymns and taking communion together. Praise God that we
can be right. This is interior arguments within the church,

(01:41:44):
but I do think they're important. But I also don't
want that to be the hang up for somebody as
to whether or not they want to become a Christian.
They don't need to be a Young Earth creationist. They
don't have to be an Old Earth creationist theistic evolutionist.
They can leave the issue completely aside and simply affirm
Jesus Christ. They can think that the Bible is inerrant.
They can think that the Bible is errant and still

(01:42:06):
be a believer in Jesus Christ. We might not always
attend the same churches as a result of the choices
that we make in that. So Kenton Sparks and I,
you know, arrentist and in Arentist. We agree about Genesis,
we disagree about the Bible itself. We can put our
arms around each other and both praise God and call
Jesus the risen ward in Messiah. But we're not going
to actually be at the same churches. You know. It's

(01:42:28):
it's just not going to happen. And He's okay with that,
and I'm okay with that. And he has a tremendous
evangelistic spirit to him. He wants people to come to
know and love Jesus. There will be people here is
going to be able to reach that I can't. And
praise God that there is Paul and Barnabas and Peter

(01:42:49):
and Sie, the different people who had the different abilities
to go out and do this, and God continues that
work today so we can be united in Christ, even
though we might not always be united all the way
down the line. That's okay. And to defend answers in
Genesis a little bit here. They do make that clear

(01:43:10):
right that creation is not a salvation issue. What I
wish that they would make even more clear is a
little bit on the follow up of why they believe
that's true, because usually they follow up with but it's
so important that you know, and I get that, I
really do, because I feel that myself, but for those
who hear them, a lot of times that part overrides

(01:43:35):
the initial statement that this isn't a salvation issue, because
again they jump in with the importance level and the
consistency and all this sort of stuff. You really, you know,
this is really the only way to be a good
Christian perhaps is to hold this view, and that's that's
not true. So I think we as Young Earth creationists

(01:43:55):
have to be a little more careful not to overplay
this importance, while at the same time reci I think
ultimately we have a deep importance to it, but let
people move along their spiritual journey and help them as
best we can along that way.

Speaker 1 (01:44:08):
It's really well put well, doctor Marcus. Since uh, since
the beginning of this talk. You know, I was, I
was an Old Earth creationist, and now I'm a Medium
Earth creationist.

Speaker 2 (01:44:24):
Next time I'm on, you might be medium rare.

Speaker 3 (01:44:26):
I mean, let's me, oh man, I've heard uh.

Speaker 4 (01:44:30):
I heard John Bloom once he was he was doing
some kind of talk with like, oh my gosh, it
was like Sean McDowell and ken Ham and Ray Comfort
and I don't know who else was there, and he
said they they tried to pin him down, and he said,
I'm Middle Earth.

Speaker 3 (01:44:49):
I'm sure he's.

Speaker 1 (01:44:50):
Probably heard all the jokes already.

Speaker 3 (01:44:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:44:54):
I think I've probably heard John Bloom say that. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:44:59):
Yeah, I was just curious about I had somebody ask
me once and I didn't have a rough and ready answer,
But I thought you would be a good person to ask,
is why don't and maybe this is happening and I
don't know about it? Why don't Young Earth creationists and
Old Earth creationists like collaborate and work together more on
what they do agree on, because they do agree on

(01:45:21):
quite a bit.

Speaker 3 (01:45:23):
So what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2 (01:45:25):
You know? It's interesting because I was recently on Reasons
to Believes podcast last fall, Fuzzerana asked if I would
come in, and they're trying to reach out to, you know,
other folks of different persuasions and see ways in which
they can you know, have good cordial discussions, and so
fuzz and I had a very good discussion primarily about

(01:45:46):
a little bit about you know, Young Earth versus Old
Earth and then human origins because there are stronger similarities
between Young Earth and Old Earth on that. We both
Reasons to believe and I both want a historical atom.

Speaker 3 (01:45:59):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:46:00):
The issue that you run into is because we have
such massively different historical constructs between an Old Earth and
a Young Earth, you would say, oh, you know, maybe
you could talk about design and biology. We could, we
could definitely work together on design and biology. And one
of the things that Fuzz and I discussed a little
bit was I kind of think after the program, was

(01:46:20):
you know, there are more ways in which Old Earth
creationists and Young Earth creationists could approach the question of
what are the created kinds together? Potentially Young Earth creationists
have actually been at this for a long time. We've
got a series of different types of methodologies to approach
fossil taxa, living taxa, plants versus animals, different sorts of
things like that. We actually have been working on this
issue for a while, and I've always been surprised that

(01:46:42):
Old Earth creationists and intelligent design folks were never involved.
Part of that is, I think because they're just too
scared of being associated with Young Earth creationists, and also
because Hugh Ross himself was actually a species fixist. He
thought that God created each species individually, with the exception insects.
Like you thought, no, maybe the genus for insects is fine,

(01:47:03):
but for mammals and reptiles and birds, the species was
the unit of creation. Well, Young Earth creationists haven't been
species fixes since like Linnaeus, and he changed his mind
and did not believe in species fixy by the time
you get to the thirteenth edition of his System in Natura.
So like youngerth creationists haven't been species fixed basically ever.

(01:47:26):
And with Hugh Ross at the Helm of Reasons to
Believe for forty years, there was no way that we
could even work on something that you would think maybe
we could, and then you know, after that it gets
into geological arguments and the flood, and they've got a
vocal flood. We have a global flood. So as much
as we actually are very similar in terms of our

(01:47:47):
approach to scripture and hermeneutics and things like that, we
really just got like this little hang up on what
to do with Genesis one through eleven. But both of
us believe in inspiration. We're all evangelicals. We think that
it's a historical narrative that is providing us with some
details about the actual history of the Earth, and we
have like this one point of inflection that changes the
models dramatically. As I've been explaining it lately to some

(01:48:11):
some different audiences in a talk that I give. We're
like cousins in a family, you know, at a at
a family gathering. We see each other a lot. We're
at every family gathering, and most of the time we
get along, but we also bicker a lot because we're
at the same churches, we're in the same ministry groups,
and so we just we bicker all the time. We
fight with each other constantly, and it's because we're cousins.

(01:48:33):
You get second cousins. You don't bicker with them nearly
as much because you don't get to see them very often.
They're a little strange, or maybe they're kind of cool,
and you know that sort of thing. So like I
think of my you know, my other Christians brothers and
sisters in further out in Protestant is like my second cousins.
And then like you know, Catholics and Orthodox are like
third cousins. Like we never see them, so we don't

(01:48:53):
argue with them like ever, because what's the point, right,
you know, you can just be arguing with like somebody
who's never showing up. Some of you've only ever heard
about but young Earthers and older Aarthers, which is, you know,
we're like forks and spoons and the drawer together. We're
just right here all the time, in the same churches
and the same groups. So you know, I kind of

(01:49:14):
hope that on biological issues there would be some places
where we actually could work together. That would be the
first spot I think where we could have significant agreement,
especially since Fasrana is not a species fixist and he's
now President of Reasons to Believe. Yeah, yeah, maybe you know,
he's a little intrigued with what the Young Earth creationists
have been doing with what we call baramnology. It's the

(01:49:35):
arah is create men is kind so the study of
the created kinds. We've been at this for a long time,
so it might be something. You know, the intelligent design
folks I always thought could be involved in that as well,
but they, likewise were so worried about being tarred as
creationists that they would, you know, never have anything to
do with us. And a little bit of that is relaxing,

(01:49:57):
which is good to see, but not very much. And
I eventually never kind of got back into working with
the intelligent design folks, in part because you know, even
my PhD advisor said, listen, Marcus, if you're going to
be a creationist, just be a creationist. And since when
I worked with intelligent design folks, I had to kind
of default position be an Old Earth creationist and approach

(01:50:19):
the world from kind of an Old Earth approach, why
would I continue to do that if I didn't think
that was actually the right way to go. So I
found intelligent design to be altogether too limiting actually, because
you don't know who the designer is. You don't know
what their motivations are. You don't know when they worked
in Earth or human history. You don't know how they

(01:50:40):
might have worked in Earth or human history as a paleontologist,
as a historical scientist. I don't have anything to kind
of hang my hat on and say, this is how,
this is what an intelligent design position actually looks like.
It's so nebulous because it's defined so broadly so that
the most number of people can be in it. So

(01:51:00):
you get the advantage of having a big tent, but
you have the disadvantage of as soon as you actually
start nailing down specifics, you lose members out of the
tent completely. And so ultimately I don't think that intelligent
design will be able to contend with evolution writ large,
because evolution actually does have all those hooks to hang

(01:51:21):
your hats, and an intelligent design has none of them. Besides,
design is real and can be detected using the means
of science, philosophy, and mathematics. I think that's a good
starting point, but you need a lot more if you're
actually going to go up against something like evolution, which
is a comprehensive view of biological history.

Speaker 3 (01:51:40):
That's helpful. And see listener.

Speaker 4 (01:51:42):
If you're ever troubled by some of the back and
forth between your Young Earth and Order Earth friends, just
look at it as cousins at a family reunion.

Speaker 2 (01:51:51):
Give them a dollar and say stay away from each other.
That's what my grandfather did to me one time with
a cousin the day. I didn't like her at all,
she didn't like me. She's wonderful now I love Jody,
But man, as kids, we hated each other. And yeah,
my grandfather paid us a dollar, said I don't want
to see either one of you around, either one of you.

Speaker 3 (01:52:10):
There you go, there you go, jid man.

Speaker 2 (01:52:12):
This was like nineteen eighty two. A dollar.

Speaker 3 (01:52:14):
Yeah, you could actually buy something.

Speaker 2 (01:52:17):
Yeah, yeah, I think I got I think I got
a Gi Joe toy.

Speaker 4 (01:52:22):
Well, doctor Ross, you this has been outstanding. You've been
so generous with your time and we're so grateful. Could
you point listeners to where they could find more of
your resources?

Speaker 2 (01:52:32):
Sure? Well, let me point them first to. I think
what would be great places if you enjoyed hearing this
kind of approach to Young Earth creationism. I would say
the places to take a look at where I think
youngerth creationism is really in its most exciting and interesting
place is called new creation dot Blog, and that is

(01:52:54):
a blog run by mostly a bunch of up and
coming students and recent graduates who like this model bill
holding experimental approach to Young Earth creationism that isn't quite
so quick to react against everything you know that's been
found by an evolutionist and they're so wrong and all
these like no, like they found something. It's cool. Why

(01:53:15):
because it's something God made? You know, that in and
of itself makes it worthy of study. And so New
creation dot Blog is a great place to kind of
see you know, updated, you know, once or twice a
week or a few times a month, something like that.
Great articles written by really sharp young scholars and emerging scholars.

(01:53:37):
If they like other podcasts or whatnot, I would recommend
Let's Talk Creation by Paul Garner and Todd Wood. Paul's
a geologist, Tod's a biologist. They're both solid Young Earth creationists.
Paul's in the UK, so you get to enjoy a
lovely British accent. Yes, and also if you like accents,

(01:53:58):
you've got Let's see what is It Creation Unfolding by
Ken Colson. He's a Australian, did his PhD here in
the United States at Wilman Linda University as a geologist,
and he's got a great channel lots of different sorts
of things, everything from short fun videos like hey do
dinosaurs have feathers? He's got like a four parter on

(01:54:18):
that it's really cool and fun, to long form interviews
like these and everything in between. So he's a great
guy to listen to, really really interesting and a great communicator.
And you're not going to get beat up, you know,
listening to any of these folks. You're going to be
informed by a competent Young Earth creation scholar. And I

(01:54:39):
think uplifted by the sorts of things that you hear
out of that. So those would be some places where
I would direct the readers and the listeners and hearers
of the program. For my part, I've got a chapter
in a recent book called Perspectives on the Historical Adam
and Eve. And you can find that, you know, the

(01:55:00):
Amazon and other sorts of places. You can find it
at our website for my company, which is Cornerstone Educational Supply,
and buy one from my company. I'll sign it send
it off to you, right your blessing. So yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:55:14):
Along with some dinosaur DNA, right, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:55:17):
So I got it sitting around here in a bucket.
I do have a bunch of dinosaur bone, you know,
little scrappy bones that we put in our geology kits
and things like that, but haven't tested it for dinosaur
DNA or proteins or other sorts of nifty stuff that
is found in dinosaurs. I think another interesting, you know,
potential argument here for a recent creation is that we

(01:55:39):
actually do have all sorts of soft tissue and proteins
and materials from not just dinosaurs but other prehistoric animals
that are supposed to be many, many millions of years old,
and yet these proteins have decay horizons, if you will,
that are far more recent than the presumed ages that
these things are found, and so those would be great.

(01:56:01):
One of the place actually where you can learn a
little bit about that as well is the website for
is Genesis History. This was a movie that came out
in twenty seventeen. I was privileged to be part of it.

Speaker 3 (01:56:12):
Watch that.

Speaker 2 (01:56:13):
Okay, Yeah, a younger doctor Ross was in that film
about eight years ago.

Speaker 3 (01:56:21):
Really eight years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:56:22):
Yeah, Genesis History. They just actually last summer came out
with a sequel to the movie Beyond Is Genesis History too.
Mountains after the flood, and so that is actually a
great example of creation research being done by doctor Andrew
Snelling by doctor John Whitcomb sorry Whitmore at Cedarville University.

(01:56:46):
Andrew Snelling was answers in Genesis at the time and
going out collecting samples from the Grand Canyon in order
to test hypotheses about whether or not these folded rock
units in the Grand Canyon show the evidence of having
been formed under great temperatures and pressures that were typically
thought to be required to fold mountains over long long

(01:57:07):
periods of time, but rather if the mountains were formed recently,
that they were formed when the sediments were fairly still
fairly loose and not completely consolidated, and that would be
a great resource for those who are looking to see,
like what does creation research actually look like? Hey, two
hour movie is a lot more interesting than an eighty

(01:57:29):
page dry paper. And so the website for his Genesis
History has got loads of content. I mean, the entire
movie is up on YouTube, and then they've got you know,
extra clips, courses that have been filmed, and then is
Genesis History too. Mountains after the Flood can be picked
up on their website and it's a fantastic, fantastic documentary.
The one thing I love about the director of those

(01:57:49):
films is he's a film guy and he wanted something
that looked beautiful and so we filmed on location all
over places. It was just stunning, absolutely stunning. So that's yeah,
that's where I would recommend people take a look and
if they need any of that stuff for their science
curricula speaking it Cornerstone Edge Supply and you know, whether

(01:58:10):
it's beakers or dead frogs, you know, we got them
and fossil kits. Got to put in a plug for
my fossil kits. Those are awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:58:19):
Well, very good. Well, doctor Marcus Ross, thank you so
much for your time. It's been a really great conversation.
The time is flown, so thank you so much. We'll
point people your way.

Speaker 2 (01:58:28):
Thank you so much, Chad, Thank you, Brian. You guys
have been wonderful hosts. I appreciate the opportunity to speak
to you guys, and to the listeners out there.

Speaker 1 (01:58:34):
Thank you thanks for listening to the podcast. If you
have a question you'd like us to address, or just
a message for us feedback good or bad, you can
either email us at podcast at apologetics three fifteen dot com,
or leave a voice message for us using speak Pipe.

Speaker 2 (01:58:50):
Just go to speakpipe.

Speaker 1 (01:58:52):
Dot com slash apologetics three fifteen to leave us a message.
And remember, if you include a Ghostbuster's quote in your question,
we guarantee that we'll read it on the podcast. We
also ensure up to fifty percent better quality answers. Also,
if you've enjoyed today's podcast, please leave a review in
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share this episode with a friend if you've found it useful.

(01:59:14):
Remember you can find lots of Apologetics resources at Apologetics
three fifteen dot com, along with show notes for today's episode.
Find Chad's apologetic stuff over at truthbomb Apologetics. That's truthbomb
dot blogspot dot com. This has been Brian Auten and
Chad Gross for the Apologetics three fifteen podcast, and thanks
for listening

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154 - Young Earth with Marcus Ross

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}154 - Young Earth with Marcus Ross