Q&A25: How are we to understand the Genesis creation account? - Part I

Okay, the handout rather astoundingly is just two sides of one sheet of paper. And that's because contrary to what we've usually done here, I'm gonna be going through a slide series for the most part. And so this is a little different from what we have been doing, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. This is kind of three parts here that we'll be working on.

And what I'd like to do is kind of give you some insights of the geology curriculum that I went through and ended up stopping that and shifting to civil engineering and why. So anyway, I call it a geology adventure and it was adventuresome. I gave this at RMCF several years back. We'll be looking at everything from the earth to Western US, starting in California, where I was taking the geology courses.

I majored in geology until Nancy and I got engaged and that kind of made my thinking change for several reasons. We're going to talk about that. I'm going to also talk about, it was petrifying. And then the last thing, why are the days of Genesis 1 are literal solar days?

Okay, the first thing here, a little over 30 years ago, closer to 40, anyway, I was majoring in geology. And one of the things, of course, that's a part of that, a subset of that is paleontology, looking for fossils. I did quite a bit of that. And there's also mineralogy and that sort of thing. And of course, I was with the greatest folks, you know, in studying geology. Some very advanced thinkers, as you can well imagine. And so I joined them in these studies. We went to a number of different places.

Of course, one of the fun things is these various kinds of caves and that sort of thing. I always enjoyed that. Even if in one case it was because my brother shoved me up into a hole because they couldn't get into it. Then also going to various volcanic sites, that was always exciting. Wherever the ground is steaming, that's kind of exciting stuff. Doing a lot of studies, going to mine sites, which of course that gets exciting too. even if you shouldn't be there. And then looking at various ores and minerals and things of that sort.

I went to Foothill Community College for starters there and then to San Jose State and At any rate, as I was looking at that, of course, I had already been for some years prior to that, a Christian. And so there was this kind of wondering, okay, I've got this geology thing, and that's a lot of fun. And I've got the Bible, and how do I make these two reconcile here?

Geology, of course, has the geologic time scale, which extends back for hundreds of millions of years. And so this scale was something that we taught and all the things going on, memorizing all these names of different ages and geological periods. There was also a matter of going through different places and digging up the fossils and looking at the rock formations in those different places. And there were of course books to study and laboratory projects to perform and some of the books that were there that was looking at geological maps and doing laboratory studies on different things. I also looked at Exodus 20 verse 11. It says, For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and seed and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day.

Okay, what does that mean? I thought there must be a solution. And so the solution that I had, the solution that I had was to take this word day and lengthen it to make it into a day. A day? A really long day was the solution that I came up with. And so as I did that, boy, when will I stop doing that? I had the days end up being many long days and stretched those out. I had the creation account and I kind of snipped and chopped and moved it around and stretched the days.

There, now that works. Not so good. And so between the scissors and the glue stick, I thought I'd find some kind of a solution. I'll take what the Bible says and stretch it and snip it and move it around until I get this thing fixed. And so I tried to reconcile what they were teaching me with what I read of the creation account. Well, as I began doing so, And using the glue stick, I found that it got to a place where I was stretching the Bible a bit too far. It was beginning to snap. The pages were not that rubbery. So, when I looked at this, 4 and 6, and maybe a lot more, but certainly not less, days.

The Lord made heavens and earth, right? Is the way I was looking at it. and the sea and all that is in them and rest on the seventh day. So that was the approach. Then there were the field trips. Going out to lots of different places. Going to the Grand Canyon. It was interesting. We hiked to the bottom in a blizzard.

I don't have to qualify that. At the top it was a blizzard. intense that I would not, for example, be able to see from here to Pat and probably not from here to Doug. But, by the time we got to the bottom, it was not only not snowing, it was not even raining, it was dry. The difference in elevation. But the next day, it was a layer of snow on the ground. The storm had cleared. And I had flat bottom boots. So anyway, it was a lot of fun.

Going in and out of the Grand Canyon. But the thing that they told me was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon were rocks that were from before there was life. And then I read Dr. Clifford Burdick out of Phoenix, Arizona said he had repeatedly sampled pine pollen in those rocks where there was supposed to be no life yet. Several professors from Loma Linda University have found the same thing.

Very interesting. But that's not what they told me on the geology trip. That's not what the professor said. That's what I found out. We went to Zion National Park and the Death Valley. If you haven't been to Death Valley, I highly recommend it. It is one of the strangest places on earth. Very different kind of place. What I saw had me wondering. We went to a place in Idaho, in Southern Idaho called Higgerman. And at Higgerman, by the way, boy, they grow a lot of potatoes around there. Went through miles of potatoes.

There was what has been called a horse query for over the last century. They've been pulling horse fossils out of it. They still are. Horse fossils and horse fossils and horse fossils. No one knows why so many animals died in the same place at approximately the same time. Hmm, I wonder why. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of horse fossils all in one place. All buried, looks like about the same time. They're just all gathered together in one spot.

They taught us about the horse series, how these horses, this Eohippus, This small creature at the bottom evolved into these larger and larger creatures of this form. And the diagrams look like, okay, that makes sense. But there were some things that I discovered that they hadn't told us. And the so-called horse series was not so much a clean series as a bush with disconnected limbs. You see a lot of these animals, instead of going through this nice sequence, a lot of these animals lived together at the same time. So it's not a nice clean sequence.

And some of the animals to go from one to the next lived on different continents. And so this doesn't work. Aside from that, you see this one at the bottom, the Eohippus? That is in your King James Bible called a cuny. In some of the other translations, a rock hyrax. Very, very similar to this so-called Eohippus. It's still around. And it's even a biblical animal. So how come the things that were supposedly the source ended up still being around? So as I looked at it, I said, this sequence that they've been teaching me does not hold up to scrutiny.

Well, we also went to Smith Valley, Nevada, and I've been there a few times since then. Smith Valley, south of Reno and Carson City, and not too far from the California border on the eastern Sierra there. This is very interesting. Here you are in Nevada out in the desert.

Fossil horses, rhinoceros, camel, bear, birds, rodents. Upright opalized tree trunks. Here's tree trunks of whole trees that are opalized or petrified. Mastodon and giraffe in great abundance and fossil deposits. In the class that I had, we excavated a mastodon. the whole skull, you know, jaws, everything. Every one of the teeth is about the size of a fist. Amazing. So phenomenal things.

Things that you say, are there rhinoceros in Nevada? Well, it's been a while, right? Giraffes in Nevada? Well, it's been a while too. So some amazing things that we saw there. Here's the mastodon skull. We went in the shores of the San Francisco Bay. Let me tell you, that bay mud out there, be careful. If you try to walk in it, you will sink down. I can't tell you how far. I never wanted to do that, but you will sink down.

So we went out there with snow saucers. And we do leapfrog with snow saucers. You know, you throw a snow saucer out and then you throw another one out. And we, you know, do that leapfrog with snow saucers and then take plastic tubes and go down, shove a plastic tube into the bay mud and then pull out sections.

And so you get back into the history there of the bay mud. Well, real interesting things. You'll have these windy slews that go in and out of there. We looked at geologic processes. Essentially had a class on beaches and bays. We went out into the bay there and real interesting, some of the things we found.

The entire San Francisco Bay Area has a layer of volcanic ash. As you do cores around the area of the bay, you find this layer of ash all over the entire San Francisco Bay Area. We did radioactive dating techniques, arrived in the age of the volcanic acid of about a million years, according to the calculations and whatnot, plus or minus a half million years. So that's quite an interesting tolerance there. And that, of course, assumes that all the various assumptions that go into the calculation are correct.

I did a special physics project on carbon-14 dating. So that's not Nancy and I dating. It's carbon-14 dating. So at any rate, we went through that and did a study. Again, carbon-14 dating is based on assumptions about the decay rate and also assumptions... And this is the foundational idea. The assumption that the build-up of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has reached an even level.

And why is that assumed? Because it reaches an even level where it doesn't change after about 40,000 years. Well, if the Earth, by chance, is not 40,000 years old, guess what? then all the calculations are off. And the older the calculation says that it is, the farther off it is. But it's based on an assumption that the carbon-14 in the atmosphere reached equilibrium, they call it. The rate of buildup and the rate of decay reached equilibrium. That's the way the formula is designed.

I went to Berlin, Nevada, ichthyosaur fossils. There's a state park there where basically you go in and see these ichthyosaurs. Imagine, here are these ichthyosaurs, ocean creatures, no longer exist. Ocean creatures right there in the middle of the desert.

It's in an area where they probably get two or three inches of rain a year. It's kind of amazing. Here's an ichthyosaur. One of them that's... They're at the state park. There are a number of ichthyosaurs, in other words, when you go and look at it, there's a number of them all within one small area. They all got fossilized at once. Oh, and one of them has a baby in it. A baby ichthyosaur. And so they had these, quite a set of teeth on these critters. This is what they might have looked like in the circumstance there.

But what's interesting, ichthyosaurs have no fossil link whatsoever. There is no link between any other animal and the ichthyosaur that has been identified. None. The supposed ancestor is a terrestrial reptile, but it doesn't have any of the precursor dorsal fins or any of the other things that would indicate that it's really connected. It's just a guess. Basically, there is no link. Talking about missing link, it's missing links, plural, right? So I saw that. Here's interesting biologist Stephen Jay Gould back in 1993. I think he's dead now.

Said the ichthyosaur was his favorite example of convergent evolution. Converged so strongly on fishes, they actually evolved a dorsal fin and tail in just the right place with just the right hydrological design. These structures are all the more remarkable because they evolved from nothing. The ancestral terrestrial reptile had no hump on its back or blade on its tail to serve as a precursor. Amazing. Okay. Then there were some seminars.

Henry Morris, who I understand years ago has actually been here. Dwayne Gish. Henry Morris is home with the Lord now. Dwayne Gish is, I think in his late 80s, closing in on about 90 years old, but I heard him speak. I heard speak and talk to Dr. Arthur Custance.

He's home with the Lord now too, an anthropologist. And then Lambert Dolphin, a physicist, is another fellow that I spoke to. And he even had some home visits, like with Lambert Dolphin was one of them. And visited some other scientists. Here is a fish that has been discovered. But what's interesting, this coelacanth, and they're during pronunciations.

It's living now, but a total gap in fossil evidence, according to the dating methods that have been out there. For the last 65 million years, the way things are dated, no fossil evidence, but somehow they're alive. How come there's no fossils between the time when they supposedly existed and now? And here they are living. Hmm, maybe something's wrong with the dating system.

Bats, believe it or not, you will be surprised, have always been bats. There is no half bat. There's no little mice with weird wimpy wings or anything. None of that. No halfway grown wing, just full bats. Every bat fossil you find, it's all bat. It'll drive you batty. So bats have always been bats and there's been no half bats.

The age of the universe and solar system was another thing I looked at. One of the things that I looked at was various kinds of issues of geophysics and astronomy and things of that sort. So I examined that, looking at meteorites, something called the Poynting-Robertson effect. Some of those different things. I did a lot of reading on my own. Prehistory and Earth Models, I called up Dr. Melvin Cook.

He is a Nobel, we hear about the Nobel Prize, the next level down is Honorable Mention, and he was one of those guys who received an Honorable Mention, so I talked to him. E.J. Young is a professor of Hebrew, now home of the Lord. I wrote to Dr. Thomas Barnes. He's home with the Lord now too, so I didn't get to meet him. But I wrote to Dr. Thomas Barnes and met and talked with some others as well.

I studied, I looked at the lifetimes of the patriarchs in Genesis and noticed this pattern, as others have noted, that except for Enoch who was taken away, the lifespan is fairly consistent for the pre-flood patriarchs from Adam to Noah. Then dropping down, and I ran a mathematical curve through here, It is a decay rate formula, fits that decrease reasonably well. I went through that step. I talked to Dr. Melvin Cook, as I mentioned, the Nobel Honorable Mention.

He performed a carbon-14 date. One of my interests was, since I had done some special studies on carbon-14, of a piece of wood taken from a mine site in Cambrian Rock. Cambrian is the first age when life was supposed to have existed. And what he found was a piece of wood dated in the carbon-14 dating system 4,000 years old. For life that was supposed to be hundreds of millions of years old, to find a piece of wood that dates with carbon-14 dating at 4,000 years old, That's pretty unique. And so that also caused me to question what I had been taught in the classrooms. Dr. Cook gave me the address and phone number for William Meister. I'm pretty sure he's now home with the Lord now. He went to Antelope Springs, Utah.

And there was a particular species of creature called a trilobite. that is found in the rocks there. This is in central western Utah. Anyway, they are in great number in this particular formation. He was actually a draftsman by occupation. He and his wife and another couple went out there. Boy, it is a long way out because he gave me the place to go to look at it myself. They went there and were on a fossil hunting vacation.

You see that little impression in the rock? He pulled it out of the side of the hill and was amazed to find what looked like sandal prints. As a matter of fact, there's even a line here where there would be a heel. in this print, but those are trilobites that are 500 million years old in the print. And so anyway, he came down off the hill just speechless. Wow, look what I found!

And his wife said, what are you doing with those silly sandal prints? We're looking for trilobites, right? Well, and it was interesting is William Meister took these sandal prints to the guy who wrote my historical geology text at University of Utah. The professor of geology there, Lee Stokes, William Lee Stokes, looked at the sandal prints and he looked at the trilobite and he said, those look like real sandal prints. Those look like real trilobite. Don't you dare show those to anybody.

And after he showed me these prints, I mean himself, he brought the rock out, he'd cast it in plaster and he says, that's nothing. And he brought out a whole bunch more and laid them out all on the table and around the room. He had a whole bunch of them that he'd found there. And he said, I used to have more, but I took them to a geology conference and they broke them.

Wow. And so then I wrote to Dr. Clifford Burdick. I wrote to him. He was the one who also found the pine pollen at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And Dr. Clifford Burdick also went to this site and he found footprints in sequence at this same site. So he found footprints one right after the next there at the same site. Now, I wrote to Dr. Thomas Barnes about the origin and destiny of the Earth's magnetic field. You see what's been happening is the Earth's magnetic field has been decaying.

It's been measured since the middle 1800s and so it's been measured and it fits a decay curve. Well, what happens is if I go back in time, project that decay curve back in time, it means that the mechanism for generating the Earth's magnetic field would not allow the Earth, and it assumes again that it projects in time, which is an assumption. but it would not allow the earth to exist with life on it beyond about somewhere between 10 and 20,000 years. Because around 20,000 years before the present, the earth would be white hot. Well, obviously that never happened, at least not with life on it. So that would set a much younger age than what is typically the case. I went through a lot of his calculations and did independent computer analysis myself to confirm what he had done. I went to Glacier National Park on my own trip. This was my own trip, not a geology class trip, to what's called the Lewis Overthrust.

That is an area where hundreds of square miles of rock have the fossils in the wrong sequence. So the solution to fix that is that hundreds of square miles of rock shoved up on top of another layer of rock. And that's the reason why the fossils are out of the evolutionary sequence. I was not convinced. I looked at it and there's no evidence of this rock sliding up on top of another. I could not see it. I hiked up to the supposed contact point where these layers of rock were supposed to have shoved on top of another. I couldn't find any evidence for it.

So the evidence for it is it's got to be because that's the way the evolutionary sequence requires it. Not because the geological evidence is there to say that one layer of rock shoved on top of another. I found polystrate tree trunks, that is tree trunks that go through multiple layers and if layers build up slowly, how do you get tree trunks sticking up above there that get fossilized? Don't they get a rot off first? So that was another evidence.

We went into limestone caves. I did some studies on limestone cave development. How fast the limestone makes those stalactites and stalagmites. How fast does that happen? So I did some studies on that. I studied a lot of the area between San Francisco and San Jose.

Right in here is where I did the limestone cave studies. That was where my brother shoved me in the cave because they couldn't fit. So anyway, yeah, I saw some eyes back there and I really wondered what that was. Turned out it was just a big salamander, so I was okay.

Now here's another thing when you talk about what is science. This is an important thing I think to get straight. Science is facts, measurements, colors, textures, and temperatures. It's also an example of that would be water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Unless of course you've got things like salt in it and things of that sort. Water normally freezes at 30 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees centigrade. and interpretation of those facts, classifications, theories, principles, formulas, empirical relationships.

The relationship between all those facts is then a matter of studying science. For example, the earth when you put the facts together is not exactly a globe, it's a light spheroid. That is, it's a globe that's been somewhat compressed at the poles. Widened out in the middle. So that's science.

The best kind of scientific evidence is what's repeatable. That is, can we and or someone else check it again and again? Can someone go through an experiment to check it again and again? That's the best material to work with for science. Is someone present to observe the process?

If I want to take a look and see what happens when I shoot a potato at 300 miles an hour at a concrete wall. I can repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. I might even find it entertaining. At any rate, when you do that, someone is there to observe the process of shooting a potato at the concrete wall at 300 miles an hour.

Do we get consistent results, objective facts to work with? That's science. I do an experiment. I come up with my results. I report the results and all my measurements in between. I then, after reporting that, have somebody else who does the same experiment and said, yes, I did the same thing Vern did and came up with the same results. then that would be a confirmation of the experiment and therefore you're dealing with something that is in the ideal realm of science. For example, we have the laws about a pendulum. I can do measurements about pendulums and the length of the pendulum and the weight of it and work on that and somebody else can do a similar experiment with the pendulum and they can reproduce those results. That's the ideal realm of science.

Here are the characteristics of a good theory as I saw it. One, a good theory explains the facts. Secondly, it's simple. And thirdly, it's a good predictor. Now this is very important. A good predictor. If I have science that is good, it will allow me to predict what will happen in the future. Your automobiles that you drove here are based on science. with consistent results and predictability. Otherwise, we wouldn't dare drive the car here, right? It's based on predictability. Very important. And it's also testable. That goes to the kind of evidence.

Can we test whether a particular theory or law is true? If I have the law of a projectile, for example, I could do it again and again. as the military does, right? And so I can test it again and again. So, I began making presentations on science and creation to junior high, high school and college groups. Let me see, California and Nevada for the most part. I even did it for a group of Stanford University students.

Here is Ginkgo. Ginkgo is unchanged from the fossils many many millions of years old according to the fossil record and the dating systems that are used. You take a modern ginkgo and you take a fossilized ginkgo and they look identical. Unchanged after supposed millions of years.

I even taught creation in a public high school biology class in 1982. I went to the high school I graduated from. And at the end of the year, I wasn't returning. I wasn't going to do this again. But I was teaching a biology class, so I just told everybody. I even told the teachers. I said, I'm going to teach creation towards the end here, and nobody objected. I even invited the teachers, and some of them came. So I taught creation towards the end of the class time.

It was probably illegal, but who cares? They weren't going to do anything to me, so that's what I did. Finally, while the debate on many of these topics continues to rage, I was searching for real science where skewed assumptions, worldviews, and trench bias did not control the conclusions, and therefore I switched to civil engineering.

You know, it's like, okay, do I believe that these horses evolved? Nah, I don't. Do I believe that these horses evolved over millions of years? Not even close. I want to have something where, if I'm going to put my stamp on it, I know it's based on science, solid science, so I switch to civil engineering where that involved in dams, and cathodic protection systems, and bridges, and erosion control, and things of that sort where there was some solid science to work with. I didn't want, again that's one thing, you put your engineer's stamp, you go through all this engineering certification and all that, you don't want to put it on guesses. You don't want to put it on something where you're not so sure. When these people drive all those cars across the bridge, is it going to fall?

Well, I hope not. Is that what you want to hear? No. I don't want to have contrary evidence to what I'm about to approve and put my stamp on. So I made the switch. Now, I want to tell you the next part. See if I got time. A little bit. It was petrifying. I'm going to tell you about it. It was petrifying. Different story somewhat later.

This is a piece of, it's not wood. It might look like a piece of old redwood. It's in a section of California where redwoods grow and as a matter of fact it was once a redwood tree. But it's a piece of rock. But very interesting about this rock. This was in Mendocino County in Northern California.

That's where my parents and my two brothers live. Here in the southern part of the county, in Ukiah, you see Mark there. All three of our kids were born in Ukiah, so the area I'm familiar with. In the Robinson Creek drainage that you see there near Ukiah, and this is on the geological map for that area. was where this piece of petrified wood was found. But there's an interesting story behind it. It goes like this.

In the 1920s, there were some guys who were cutting down what in those days were some pretty substantial trees because they had not logged the area before. And so they went through that area and cut down a whole bunch of very large redwood trees. Well, it so happened that not too many years ago, just a few years ago, a fellow who was a logger that worked in this area and goes to my brother's church in Mendocino County, where my brother's a pastor, this logger went in And he was working alongside the grandson of the fellow who had cut down this same area in the 1920s. Going in and logging again now just several years ago. And so here the grandson was helping to re-log the same piece of property.

Well, when this fellow Kevin, Kevin Williamson, was driving one of his big cats, D8 or D9 or something like that, he came up against what looked like a tree stump. Only his cat couldn't budge it. The tree stump that had been from a tree cut in the 1920s was now solid rock. I mean real solid that he couldn't budget. He was able to break off some pieces and that's what you see.

Some pieces of this trunk and here is the exposed side and there's the cut surface from the old trunk when they cut it. Because what they would do is make a wedge. They cut out a wedge in order to make the tree fall in a certain direction. So it's not cut straight across, it's cut with the wedge surface there where they cut it. So what's so special about these woods? They're cut down in the 1920s. So the grandson of one of the 1920's crew was part of a crew which logged the area again in 2003. So between the 1920's and 2003, these three trunks had turned into solid rock. Petrified within two generations. So how long does it take to make petrified wood? A couple generations, right? Or less. Because we don't know how long this had been rock. So, what's interesting here, you see the end of that?

That's what the fellow had previously cut back in the 1920s with a saw. Let me tell you, there's no saw that's anything you'd use to cut a tree down that would cut through this stuff now. It is really hard. Really tough stuff. This is the top where the trunk was cut. You can see the old axe marks, can't you? where they cut it originally. But let me tell you, you wouldn't take an axe to it now. It is very hard rock. It is petrified down into the roots. Even the roots underneath the ground were all turned to rock within two generations.

Okay, and there is the top of that stump there, visible. This piece shows the cut surface from the top of the tree trunk there. There you can see it. There's a closer shot where you can see where they, in those days, they didn't have big chainsaws, so you can see where they cut it with an axe.

Okay, so that was the petrifying experience. Let's see. It's a matter of time. Does it require a long time to turn the petrified wood? Not so much. Not when you have it documented and you're with, you know, pictures and locations and the people and everything. So anyway, my friend Kevin Williamson, who's in my brother's church, told me about that. Oh, one other thing. V.L. Westberg, he's now, he's a believer, but now home with the Lord, sent me a piece of wood taken from 80 feet under the surface of the bay mud. Here's bay mud that accumulates very, very slowly, right?

It was found dozens of feet below the volcanic ash that had been dated at a million years plus or minus a half million years. It was neither petrified nor rotted. So this is very interesting. The conditions determine whether or not something petrifies, not just simply age. So since that was below the volcanic ash layer where D.L. Westberg sent me the pieces of wood that were still very much wood, they hadn't even begun to petrify. and that volcanic ash layer is supposed to be about a million years old. Wow, you got some really interesting contrasts and this where you found the wood in the bay mud and the tree trunk are just within a couple counties of each other in California.

Okay. The handout that you have, and we're going to wait till next week to cover it because we run out of time. The handout that you have contains nine reasons which lead to the firm conclusion that the days of Genesis 1 are literal solar days. We'll go over that next week. So that's enough. I flooded you with pictures. There's been over a hundred pictures I've shown you. Flooded you with pictures and stuff. Any comments, questions, aspirations? Yes. One of the things I...

I can't remember who was mentioning it, but it goes in the Bible through different days of creation. The days are millions and millions of years. So Adam's created. The next day, whatever, he's created. Wouldn't he be millions of years old if a day was really millions of years?

Yeah, you get to have some real anomalies. And plus the sequence isn't quite right. What you find is on day four is when you start to get the various astronomical bodies created. Hmm, how does that fit with the usual sequence? It doesn't. And that was part of what I wrestled with. I ended up having to do all this changing of sequence and stretching the days. And it just, it wasn't, the more I studied it, the worse it fit.

How come there weren't elephants in that dead sea? How come there weren't elephants in the Dead Sea? Where? In the desert. Oh, in the desert. Actually, there were. Yeah, but it was another form of mastodon, basically. An elephant-like creature. But yeah, there was elephants, there was giraffes, there was rhinoceros out there in the desert. Amazing. Yes, it does.

What's interesting is what you're talking about is mineralization and what happens is the wood material has to be replaced by mineral material in order for it to become petrified. What you had on the ground where the stumps were, was apparently a very ideal petrifying environment and set of circumstances, where it petrified in two generations or less. What was underneath the ground from the wood that V.L. Westberg sent me, was something that by age it should have been petrified sometime before, but the mineral exchange with the wood and the mineral material, the mineral exchange process was not there. And so now here you'll have this wood on the surface get petrified in two generations and now here's this other piece of wood 80 feet down and it's not even begun to be petrified.

Really an amazing contrast. And it's a matter of what are the conditions necessary. If the conditions are ideal, being petrified obviously can happen in less than a century. If the conditions for being petrified are not ideal, as in the wood that D. L. Westberg sent me, what happens is the wood is preserved as wood.

Some of the interesting contrasts as you look at various samples of wood and other materials is what survives and what gets petrified is sometimes rather astounding. One of them, for example, that's been reported fairly recently is dinosaurs where there's still identifiable DNA in the bones. For something over 60 million years old, that's pretty extraordinary. Yes? I was wondering when you mentioned that sea creature that... The ichthyosaur? Yeah. You mentioned that there were no links to it. Yeah, none.

But isn't it true there are no transitional forms at all? Well, part of the difficulty when you say transitional forms is you can put things together like with the horses, right, that appear to be a transitional form. The difficulty is how can you prove that one was the source of the next is the source of the next when you have what may appear to be a transitional form. So even if you have something that you look at and you say, well, that is a transitional form, There's no way to take the animals and cross-breed them and things like that to try to determine what's related to what. And so the tendency is to take similarity in appearance as the only evidence that you have that it's a transitional form, when in fact you cannot prove transitional form anytime, anywhere. You simply can't do it. You can only assume it. Which, how many times do assumptions go wrong? Yeah, not so much a solid thing to do.

Thoughts, other thoughts, questions? Yeah, let's call it here. Lord, we thank you. As we look at these things, We've not yet stepped into what your word says directly and yet we've looked at a lot of these things and we can see there is at least reason to question what has been categorically laid out to us that life on this earth evolved.

In fact, while people who are scientists by occupation may say they believe it, the scientific evidence that things simply evolved is not there. The reality is that you are the one who is present to tell us what took place. None of us were. And no modern scientist ever was. And we just thank you. You're the one who has revealed to us what's true. Thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.