For fun, I will propose we answer the most important question of all time, namely which came first, the chicken or the egg?
More seriously, here I will defend young earth, young universe, discredit evolution, and show why science supports the young earth creation story better than the old earth view. Then I will attack the idea that science is the superior truth authority and encourage you readers to accept the Bible as literal history, from gen 1:1, and if science temporarily diverges from the Bible, you can trust the Bible, as science has been proven wrong over and over and over again.
By selected, I just mean the stuff I know about as a lifetime amateur science observer. I call out the things that were particularly memorable, that had a wow factor for me. It's only the last 35 years because I became a Bible believer then at age 30 and began tracking stuff relevant to this topic.
And this is the humorous point, if you believe the Genesis account is literal seven days, then you can definitively answer the most important question of which came first, so here it is, drum roll please... The chicken. 😀
And after the chickens were created, they got busy and laid some eggs.
I have always been fascinated with origins/secrets of the universe stuff. I read a book on relativity theory when I was a teenager, bought tons of books on various science topics, planning for my expected career in a hard science. I was the kid with a poster of Andromeda galaxy on his bedroom wall in high school. I manually copied the periodic table onto a poster when I was in third grade, and hung it on my wall. I thought all of the secrets of the universe were contained in it. You get the idea. I didn't know it at the time, but I had got religion, and I got it bad.
Unfortunately, I won't present a rigorous history, some of the older references cannot be verified, they are from memory from before the internet (to you young'uns that's only just after the dinos expired). But a lot of the better more recent stuff is verifiable (and most of the more interesting stuff is readily available), including several book recommendations by scientists of today who are Christians.
We'll start with the science problems Genesis gives us, up through the flood, that gets us to roughly 4500 years ago. Then we'll dive into some related topics that are worth calling out IMHO. Hopefully you will be able to see God gradually pulling back the veil so that all who have an eye to see, can see the beauty of God's creation story.
And woven throughout I will be critical of those who have compromised with modern science, and given in to the old earth view. Sadly, my opinion is they have disqualified themselves from ministry (and this includes most major seminaries), from rightly handling the word of God, but that's just me. I'll recommend a book that will show the theological disaster the old earth view is for Christians. It was the one that did it for me. Yes I was an old earth "Christian" for a few years (no I am not calling it heresy, but it is a disqualifying position IMHO, but one that can be repented of and restoration is in order). So, I am the pot calling the kettle black, as a pot who knows what it means to be zealously black.
Put another way, a good theological test question to vet qualifications is to ask them to answer the great question, which came first, the chicken or the egg... 😀
I was raised in science as an atheist, always thought I was going to be a scientist when I went to college. In college I discovered I was better at math than chemistry and switched from pre-med to software engineering (they called it computer programming back then, titles have inflated). My degree is actually a joint degree called math/computer science. I will say it was 75% math, and 25% computer programming, both because of the course load, and because it was offered by the math department and taught by people with PH.D.s in mathematics. So I didn't end up as I originally expected, but that's life.
Having a math degree as an amateur scientist makes physics and statistics easier for me to deal with than chemistry and biology as physics is mostly applied math, and statistics is right up my alley. But I muddle through the other bits as best I can.
As an atheist I once issued a challenge to my coworkers for anyone to prove to me the supernatural existed. Only one person tried, he was a new-ager and actually grew some plants in his cube, and put one of two pots under a wire-frame pyramid, believing those plants would grow faster. He was honest enough to admit they didn't. He then backtracked and said pyramids were a preserving agent not a growth promoter. But no food spoilage experiments were forthcoming. What didn't happen (and should have) was for someone knowledgeable in Bible prophecy to come forward and demonstrate the statistical impossibility of such huge volumes of prophecies being fulfilled literally to the letter.
Ten years out of college (in 1990) I converted to what I thought was Christianity but was actually a cult. We accepted real Christians as us, and believed the Bible was God's word, so it was a soft cult, but I doubt I was a real Christian in retrospect. But even so in 1990 I began my study of scripture and related science.
I swore an oath when I entered the cult, that if science could ever prove the Bible wrong, I would exit Christianity. But in the back of my mind I felt different, the change in me felt permanent. So my study of science was an intense one, I was looking for answers to prove myself sane or to rescue myself if necessary.
In 2005 I came out of the cult into orthodox Christianity, and was pretty angry at myself and began what is now a 20 year voyage of studying sound theology as an amateur (with some training, but not enough to mean that much). I admit I am now a Calvinist, Baptist, and Dispensationalist, but I accept our Arminian friends as fellow Christians, and this document won't get into any of that anyway.
Ten years in, still a cult member, by the late 1990's it was clear to me that science had essentially disproven evolution. My dad, a great scientist in his own right (who lived and died as an atheist) admitted to me he also believed evolution was false, more on this later.
I was still old earth, because I believed it was settled science, and wasn't worth any discussion. My focus tended to be on archeology supporting the stuff post genesis 2. I believed genesis 1 was literal history in a sense, but I subscribed to the day age theory. I was never a theistic evolutionist at any time during my early pilgrimage through Christianity, so I also looked to science that attacked evolution. Nor did I deny any of the early historical accounts. I also was fascinated by Bible prophecy which we will get into later.
In roughly 2007, two years after exiting the cult, an elder at my church who knew I was old earth gave me a copy of John MacArthur's book "Battle for the Beginning", where he described the theological loss of giving up young earth. When you chip away at what was lost in the fall, you necessarily chip away at what was gained on the cross. I found that unacceptable and had already observed the gradual progression where science was progressively proven more wrong and would either grudgingly admit it or ignore it entirely. So I made what was the last major doctrinal change after coming out of the cult 5 years earlier.
I explicitly rejected my old oath that placed science as the highest truth authority, where it theoretically had the potential to overturn scripture, and I swore a new oath, to set scripture as my highest truth authority, and adopted the young earth view entirely by faith. My long road to salvation and mature orthodoxy had completed. It was the end of the beginning. While my theological studies have continued, I have had no major doctrinal changes since then (almost 20 years have passed now).
This did create a problem for me though, and now I needed to find out if science did indeed support the young earth model.
I would not be disappointed. In those next 20 years, leading up to today, the scientific evidence for the Bible, and young earth specifically has piled on higher and higher, and seemingly at an accelerated rate. Virtually every major problem has been solved, so we can now say pretty authoritatively that the science data for earth's and the universe's past fits the young universe model better than an old universe model. If you (as a Christian) are still clinging to the old earth model (like I did) thinking that the science warrants it, please read on, I think you will be very pleasantly surprised to find out that God said what He meant, and meant what He said. Genesis is literal history, it is not allegory or fables as so many professing Christians believe today. Then you can repent in sackcloth and ashes as I did. 😀
So now lets back up and look at all those sciency things I picked up along the way.
I can think of no better opening of our history tour than Carl Sagan's famous line from his show Cosmos (a science show that ran in 1980ish).
"The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be."
At the time as a young man I thought that was ohh so sciency, and I loved it. I now recognize it as a statement of religious dogma, an untestable, unprovable assumption that underpins all of what science tells us about the origins of the universe today.
Their faith is in natural processes, believing nothing else exists, and this is the foundational doctrine of the religion of atheism. And I do classify atheism as just another religion. It has a truth authority, and a moral authority, which is us, mankind. And it addresses metaphysical issues, namely the existence of deity, which it explicitly denies. It is neither neutral nor objective in the way it claims to be. And I was a zealous adherent of this religion until age 35. Remember I told you I got religion when I was 9 years old copying the periodic table?
A science blogger around the turn of this century writing on science.com wrote (paraphrased), "the final proof that natural processes made us, is simply the fact that we are here." That brilliant young female molecular biologist failed to recognize what was obvious to me, that she was using circular thinking and what she said was only true if Carl Sagan was right.
During my atheist years it would never have occurred to me to examine the evidence for Christianity, because it was a foundation of my belief system that there wasn't any such evidence. It was not worth wasting my time. Scientific atheism is one of the strongest delusions in the history of the world IMHO. Course they say the same about us, except they deny ours has any power, and yet all attempts to squash it have failed. 😀
I have generally found I can have a polite conversation with someone in another religion more easily than with an atheist, because atheists are usually like I was, convinced that anyone who believes in the supernatural is an idiot. Therefore, they can't offer anything meaningful on any subject of note. This is partly why scientists that adopt even the very mild intelligent design position, are fired, black-balled, and cannot get a job at any "reputable" scientific organization or university. The other part is that once you admit intelligent design, it pretty quickly gets to infinite intelligence as the only real option. So I would say they are right to draw the line there, as that is where their religion collapses if the point is conceded. NASA openly fired a scientist for advocating intelligent design a few decades back, he now runs a Christian science website called crev.info, and some of the material I provide here comes from him.
People in other religions on the other hand understand perfectly well that you are still an intelligent human being, and the important part is not that you believe something, rather the issue is what you believe. That is another thing atheists seem to shy away from, especially in politics, a refusal to admit that what people believe is important and will color everything about what that person will do. They seemingly refuse to learn those points of view. They assume all people are the same and have (or should have) the same belief system they do. Doesn't make for good politics or good foreign policy IMHO.
Let's start with my dad, great scientist that he was, who was horrified that I converted to Christianity. Surprisingly though, that provoked a candid conversation with me about evolution. He said that he believed Darwinian evolution as stated was impossible, and he wanted to write a book to stimulate research into other areas, but he couldn't figure out a way to write God out of it, so he never wrote the book. My dad's wry humor was being expressed there too.
He gave two examples to clarify what he was saying, the first was fruit flies. He said fruit flies have been irradiated for 50 years in the hope of seeing genuine new mutations. He said we can get fruit flies with no wings, 4 wings, or one with a wing growing out of it's nose, but when all is said and done, it is still just a fruit fly. Crev.info years later also observed the same thing about fruit flies. Both correctly identified the problem is creating new information. Random chance cannot create new information, a lot more on this later.
And my dad's second example was a speculative solution that all forms of life were somehow there in potential form in those early Precambrian life forms. Remember the Cambrian explosion, a period of rapid development of higher life-forms from the early simple Precambrian forms? At the time there was a common chart that showed about a dozen Precambrian life forms and theorized they each evolved into the various categories of higher life forms we have today. In other words those dozen creatures were the genetic ancestors of the major categories of species today. My dad was specifically referring to those life forms. Possibly meaning their gene pools potentially had the ability to have modern life forms teased out of them by selection. More importantly though, he correctly identified the problem that new information could not be generated by random chance as Darwinism asserts. And it is clear why he couldn't write God out of it. Because he had no way to account for that information being present in those Precambrian life forms.
My dad also criticized what he called mediocre scientists who defended the party line against religionists who would pounce on any admission Darwinism wasn't true. He criticized them for not really knowing the underpinnings of their fields. He said the dogged defense of the indefensible was stifling research into other areas. I was amazed to hear an atheist say that. Years later we have been inundated with constant stories of scientists who dared to propose that Darwinism wasn't correct (or anything outside the party line) who were systematically persecuted. How right my dad was about that dogged defense suppressing other ideas.
I liken modern big science to the catholic church of years ago that persecuted Galileo for trying to tell them the earth wasn't the center of the universe. And they are doing such a good job of it too (sarcasm intended).
Sometime in the 90's, at an origins of life conference in San Francisco, a bunch of statisticians and molecular biologists got together and tried to calculate the chances that a single strand of DNA that could support life could be generated by random natural processes as they understood them at the time.
They assumed an ideal molecular soup as was proposed back then. They made every friendly assumption they could, to load the chances in their favor, and the number that popped out was 1 x 10 -80. That's 1 times 10 to the -80th power. They weren't happy with that number (if you are laughing hysterically at this point you have every right to), and they repeated the calculation converting the mass of the then known universe into the same ideal molecular soup for the then proposed age of the universe (it was billions of years but I don't know how many, I know the number today is 14 billion years). The number that popped out was 1x10 -40 (1 times 10 to the -40th power). Now you can laugh again.
And remember there was no cell wall in this calculation, and none of the trillions of atoms inside the cell all cooperating together for a working cell that could live and replicate. And the chances of just one of those ever forming was effectively zero.
I'll give you another example I heard once (unable to credit it), if you convert the entire universe into trained monkeys banging on keyboards, for the age of the universe, you will never get even one Shakespearean sonnet (a short poem).
My math background makes it easy to demonstrate, consider that a string of letters is basically just a base 26 number, (26 letters in the alphabet) and the longer it is the bigger the number it represents. Sonnet #1 is about 500 letters (without punctuation and spaces). 26 to the 500th power is roughly equivalent to 10 to the 700th power. It is such a small solution space in such a large problem space, no amount of deep time can even scratch it.
The main idea is deep time cannot overcome the problem of new information. Now consider that the generations of life forms aren't fast enough. So evolution over generations of life forms, by selecting beneficial mutations over non-beneficial ones has far less chance to work, as generations are astronomically slow compared to atoms recombining in a molecular soup. Not a chance they could produce all the fantastically complex life forms of today.
I am going to skip the discussion on RNA world, it's an interesting idea, but doesn't solve enough problems for them, but it's worth looking at if you like that kind of thing though. I will assert now that scientific atheism is one of the most pure religions in history, and is just another deceptive cult.
Irreducible complexity is a pretty standard argument, and that's because it's a good one. The irreducible complexity of a single cell (our understanding has increased dramatically as we know much more now) is the example I will use. I already gave the example of a single strand of DNA, so I'll just give a few more.
Cellular mitosis is the act of a cell dividing in two. It is a beautifully complex molecular dance, with many systems all working together to convert one cell into two. The nucleus (in cells with nuclei) has to be divided, the organelles have to reproduce, and the cell wall has to split, and DNA has to be copied.
There are trillions of atoms in a single cell, all working together in fantastically complicated interrelated systems, many of which are in delicate regulated balances, and if any of those systems get a little off the cell dies.
To believe that came about by accident is far less likely than 10 to the minus 80th power.
The human genome project surprisingly discovered that the parts of genomes that coded for proteins was small compared to large segments of DNA that did not. The apparently unused segments were dubbed junk DNA and touted as evidence of evolution. There is a common tradition in science to brand anything seen as a defect or a suboptimal part of biology as evidence for evolution because it is seen as evidence against divine design, and incomplete evolution. The problem is judgements of fitness are necessarily subjective. Fast forward to today, and epigenetics (the study of gene regulation and other related things), has identified that these "junk" segments are active in other processes and are not junk at all. A prime example of bad science being overturned in favor of God's intelligent design.
Note also that as epigenetics has grown, this increases our understanding of the complexity of cells and DNA by a large extent. Cells were once seen as relatively simple engines where DNA codes for RNA, the RNA makes proteins, and the proteins do all the real work. That is a laughably simplistic model by today's understanding.
There are other examples of something dubbed unfit that later turned out to have a useful function. Consider the appendix, that was so named because it was thought to have no function. It turns out to be a repository for symbiotic bacteria to keep your gut biome populated.
The lack of transitionary forms has plagued the fossil record. Back in the 90's they described the fossil record like this: A life form would appear, and would grow larger over a few million years, and then disappear, and then sometime later a new life form would appear, distinctly different with no transitionary evidence ever found. This was a problem and the search for transitionary forms has failed to this day.
The main proposed solution was punctuated equilibrium, that evolution occurs in spurts, too rapid to be captured in the fossil record. But it didn't hold up well, it could have worked if there was an abnormally low level of transitionary forms, but zero is pretty hard to account for even by that theory.
Many of the classic evolutionary things you have been told have been proven to be false and some were outright frauds.
Why do these errors and frauds come up. Sadly, because these "discoveries" make careers, it appears the motive is often fame and fortune, not always truth. Many new species have been retroactively renamed to be just examples of existing species.
Imagine if you dug up all the different human shapes available in the world today and dubbed them all separate species based on morphology (which is what they do with bones). We have large variations today in height (dwarfism, giantism), skeletal and facial variations. Then string them together in an evolutionary progression, based on your opinion of the fitness of those forms, and you get to take credit for discovering all those new species. That's literally what's been done.
Here is one of the more humorous (pun intended) examples of sensational science with no other purpose than to get attention. Remember the hobbits (an island where a dwarf population lived in isolation from the rest of humanity)? One of the pinky bones was larger by proportion than modern humans are. The salacious conclusion, they were very promiscuous. Yeah, go figure that one. But it made headlines.
Bible Prophecy: The 50+ prophecies of Jesus life are enough on their own to demonstrate statistical impossibility and were granted powerful status by the dead sea scrolls as we now had (partial) copies of those texts that predated their fulfillment in history. The Bible is 1/3 prophecy, most of which has been fulfilled, and fulfilled literally to the letter. There is nothing else like that anywhere in history.
In 2004 a book called "The privileged planet" showing how the earth and the universe has many special features that make habitable planets possible and earth in particular and conclude that very few if any other planets in the universe could be habitable as ours is. Many of the concepts behind the book were known and touted in the late 90's however. And I was keenly aware of them. Yet SETI continues to get funding, not because the science supports the idea, but because the ideology demands it. The updated 20 year anniversary edition of this book is available now.
Josh McDowel's two volume set called "evidence that demands a verdict" was a goto for a great deal of prophetic, archeological, and historical evidence for the veracity of the Bible. After the turn of the century archaeology has continued to (grudgingly) support the Biblical historical record. It is one source of the prophecies of Jesus life too, there are others also.
As we conclude the 90's, you can see why I made the assertion that Darwinian evolution and the whole origin of life story was disproven by then. My dad knew it, I knew it, and so did anyone that bothered to look at the evidence in an intellectually honest way.
But the cult of natural processes is not affected by evidence. As it is not fundamentally based on evidence, it is a religion just like any other.
Now we have arrived at the year 2000, five years before I came out of my cult, and embraced orthodox Christianity. I retained my old earth views for about two more years however.
Now lets move into 2000 and beyond for a bit.
In December 1999, one of my coworkers declared Dec 31, 1999 (new years eve) as the party event of the century. He brought it up in response to the announcement requiring us to be on call that evening. You see as software developers we spent all of 1999 hardening every piece of software we could against the so-called Y2K glitch. That year the whole industry was consumed by that effort, as the media continued to spread scare stories of catastrophic civilization ending failures. Given all that, I routinely assured people that the worst that could possibly happen was a small comedy of errors. Never had anything been so widely tested in software before actual live deployment. And I was correct (patting myself on the back here). I wonder if the year before 2038 will be filled with similar scare stories as that is when the 32 bit integer time clock runs out. But the world converted to 64 bits long ago, and proactive measures are being taken to remove 32-bit time constructs to avoid a repeat of Y2K. So hopefully 2038 will be a non-event. Now back to our regular story.
In 2009, the world's most famous atheist Richard Dawkins admitted that carbon based life forms like us could not have evolved naturally, and his best guess was that aliens seeded this world with life in the distant past. He thus became an unwilling intelligent design advocate. And he also admitted the existence of some kind of unobserved life form, as he just admitted that carbon-based life as we know it could not have originated naturally. Isn't God just a big alien from that viewpoint? Kudos to Dawkins for the same intellectual honesty that my dad showed. I wonder if that fired NASA scientist could have gotten his job back at that point? Or at least sued for damages, when the smartest atheist on the planet said the same thing. Notice Dawkins came to the same conclusion my dad did WRT the problem of new information, his speculation on how it got there was different, but he still tried to write God out of it, and I assert that he failed just like my dad did. Note his solution is nearly identical to my dad's, pinning the information injection point to deep in the past, so as to not upset the apple cart of everything Cambrian and later.
As I mentioned, 2007 was roughly when I converted to the young earth view, and that was before I learned what I am about to present, I confess I went looking for these things but did not find them immediately. They eventually came to me by following websites that tracked scientific progress in light of Scripture.
At this point I think it's better to go back to the Genesis story and let that drive the discussion, as the best stuff supporting it has happened in the last 20 years.
The seven days of creation gives us the first major problem, the distant starlight problem. How can the universe be young if we are seeing images of objects in space from millions and billions of years ago. Relativity theory tells us the light we are seeing is that old.
To set the stage, relativity theory is proven fact. GPS devices use relativistic calculations to be as accurate as they are. They have to compensate for the relativistic effects of those GPS satellites whirling around the earth. Put another way, your cell phone is a hand-held physics lab that proves relativity theory every time you use the GPS system.
I identified the distant starlight problem immediately when I converted to the young earth view, and prayed that God would show me if a solution existed in modern science, I had to wait a while, but the answer did come.
The pastor of the church I was attending at that time actually sent an email to the entire congregation about this research. I fully agree it is that important.
Dr. Jason Lisle is an astrophysicist who writes for various Christian science organizations, and he has a website ( https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/ ). He published a series of articles on Einstein's theory of relativity (remember I studied that back in high-school in the late '70s).
The seminal article my Pastor sent out is here:
https://answersresearchjournal.org/anisotropic-synchrony-distant-starlight/
Dr. Lisle showed the formulas for relativity (which I had seen before as a teenager), and quoted Einstein as saying that the theory of relativity only requires the speed of light to be a constant for the round trip from point A to point B and back. The one-way speed of light, according to Einstein, is unmeasurable and unprovable, thus he said we will stipulate (agree for the sake of argument) that the one-way speed of light is symmetric.
When Einstein did that, he overturned the previous stipulation that had been in use for all of human history (from day 6 of creation to now), where it was assumed that when you looked up at the sky you were seeing what was there right now, and not what is millions and billions of years in the past. So when people say that distant starlight is proof the universe is old, you can point out that they are referring to an unproven stipulation. Dr. Lisle showed the complete formulas for relativity theory, which had extra terms in the familiar formulas that allowed for non-symmetric one-way speeds of light. He asserted that of all the different values you could plug in, only two were significant, the symmetric view (Einstein's view), or the fully asymmetric view (where the speed of light is infinite one-way towards an observer, and one-half the speed of light away from an observer). He then spent a lot of time showing that all of the advanced phenomena we see in astrophysics are unchanged if we use the asymmetric view. He also went through the history of attempts to prove the symmetric view, all of which have failed in the sense they had to assume symmetric in order to prove it. Some of that are in follow-on articles on his website.
Einstein is still correct, nobody has ever proven which view is correct. But as Dr Lisle points out, the Bible clearly assumes the asymmetric view, that what we see is what is there right now.
Mathematically however, it gets even stranger, both conventions for light speed are simultaneously true from a mathematical standpoint. No observational experiment has ever been devised to prove if one is true in the real world as opposed to mathematically where both are simultaneously true.
But... recently some level of proof has started to roll in...
Current cosmology thinking believes the universe is about 14 billion years old. The thinking is if we could build a telescope that could see 14 billion light years away, we could see the early universe, and observe the gradual progression from no stars to star formation, and then galaxy formation. Most galaxy formation is believed to have occurred within the first 3 billion years of space-time. Remember this assumes of the symmetric speed of light.
Hubble could not get past the 3 billion year mark (meaning not far enough to see proto-galaxies in the early universe). But the James Webb telescope can see farther farther - to within 200 million years of the origin of time - and this was known while it was under construction. Many excited articles were published anticipating we would see proto-galaxies. Except Dr. Lisle and his crowd, I read their articles months before James Webb went online where he predicted (scientific method in action here, have a testable theory) that we would see fully formed mature galaxies no matter how far away we look.
This is exactly what happened. Young universe is a testable model to some extent and as the tests come up it is passing them.
So that covers the distant starlight problem.
The flood poses some very interesting questions, and we have some very interesting answers.
First lets address the speciation problem, there is no way even a large craft like the ark could have contained all the larger animal species we see today. Here is the proposed solution (from ICR):
All the big cats of today can interbreed, meaning they are actually all the same species. It is not much of stretch to believe that only one pair of large cats was needed, and morphological differentiation occurred by adaptation after the flood. Put a simpler way the big cats of today are different breeds of the same species.
Same for canines. 500 years ago there were approximately 200 known breeds of dogs. That was roughly when breeding dogs became popular. After 500 years of active human breeding we now have over 500 distinct breeds of canines in the world. It is also worth noting that wolves were long defended as not dogs (even though they can interbreed), only very recently has it become accepted they are simply a breed of dog.
The same argument is made for equines, only one pair was needed. Same for bovines, just one pair.
And lastly, for long lived slow-growing species, nobody said they had to be full-grown adults either.
None of the above is proof, just a claim of feasibility.
Next is genetics, a recent book "Traced" by Nathaniel Jeanson, essentially shows that humans had a common male ancestor 4500 years ago, exactly when Noah got off the boat. The scientists who performed the study didn't believe the results, so they fudged the numbers to get a 100,000 year number instead.
This is how modern science lies. It's actually a common joke too, "first draw your curve, then plot your data". It is a reference to how science is supposed to be done, first you plot your data on a graph and run statistical analysis on it to see if a curve will fit. It's even called curve fitting. The reverse (and the joke) is when you have a predetermined result in mind, you crowbar the data to fit your desired outcome. If you get undesired outcomes today, you will be persecuted, lose funding forever, become unhirable, effectively kicked out of the scientific establishment, permanently branded as a fringe scientist. That's a long way from true science; my dad called it perfectly.
There is a wonderful book from a petroleum company geologist (Dr. Tim Clary of ICR) who spent years accumulating core samples from all over the world for his job. He compiled the data on the sedimentary layers and published a landmark book showing how all of the sedimentary data fit perfectly into a recent catastrophic flood model, whereas they clearly don't fit very well into an old earth gradual sedimentation model. And he can account for all the sedimentary layers starting from the granite layer. There is a priceless video on youtube where he goes through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8eO7VtHuJw
A note on the granite layer, all of the world's sediment layers sit on a common granite layer, and no model has ever been produced to explain how this granite layer formed. There are some scientific papers that attempt to prove the granite layer had to form in a single rapid event, and not over a long process. Not sure I can find a citation here.
Let me give a brief description of this flood-geology model however. It begins with the Pangea continent, filled with early humans, including Noah's family, and proto forms of all life forms existing today. They were likely a seafaring civilization, with knowledge of boat building and so on. Noah builds the ark on dry land at God's command.
The cataclysm begins with the gradual breaking up of the Pangea continent, that over a span of 12 months separated to form the modern continents we see today (I'm oversimplifying slightly). The newly exposed sea floor was warm, storms and tsunamis went on for months, gradually scraping clean the Pangea continent. Biomes closer to sea level would have been cleaned first, forming the lower sedimentary layers, and forming the mass aqueously buried dinosaur graveyards common today.
The gradually exposed new ocean floor was warm and shallow, causing the sea level to gradually rise during the first half (roughly) until eventually all the land masses had been scraped clean by tsunamis. After the new sea floor cooled, and the final sedimentation layers were deposited, the sea floor gradually dropped, and new land masses were exposed. Some instances of incredibly violent runoff as those continents were exposed carve some of what we see today.
One of the most interesting things he showed was that the top sedimentary layers could be found world-wide, on the tops of mountain peaks (complete with small ocean fossils), and on ocean floors, demonstrating that the whole world had to have been submerged at some point in recent history.
That wraps up the major topics for the flood.
We will stop our historical progression model at this point and present the remaining events of the last 20 years in a per category fashion. A lot of this stuff is from crev.info:
Archaeology is a particularly interesting topic, it is a stubborn progression where Biblical accounts are denied until proven true.
The most visible example is the long denial that King Solomon and King David ever existed. Once some proof of their existence was found, the next denial was that they were not powerful kings with middle east spanning kingdoms, but were just minor regional kings, not significant enough to show up in archaeological evidence. But the evidence keeps coming.
A very detailed summary of this exact controversy is here:
https://armstronginstitute.org/405-did-david-and-solomon-actually-exist
No other ancient historical document is treated this way, guilty until proven innocent, necessarily false until proven true. But I believe this is right well and good, let God show Himself in irrefutable ways to everyone. Poor easily challenged evidence does nobody any good.
As we are now discovering, Moses got it right when he penned Genesis. And he wrote in a time period when little knowledge of previous history had survived. He grew up in Egypt, and they certainly did not teach what He wrote in the Bible. Consider the staggering truth that Moses got all of pre-history right, from an advanced scientific viewpoint. That to me is the real information problem.
This document is meant to be a non-rigorous summary, and a jumping off point to others who have dedicated their lives as scientists to this cause, and there is where you will find the rigor. For every question, there is some kind of answer. Some of the answers are better than others. We are still learning. But at this point the weight of this position is strong, as the major problems have all been dealt with.
The idea is that the young earth position is now intellectually tenable, as is the historicity of the Bible. And it is based on verifiable evidence you can research yourself.
Now if you have been following what's been going on for the last 20 years, I doubt much of this is a surprise to you. But just step back for a moment and imagine what it was like 30 years ago. Anyone who thought the earth was young was dumber than dumb. Mocked, sneered at by the more "sophisticated" crowd, even in many Christian circles. And while it's better now, that is still true more than it should be. Even famous Christians of the past like C.S. Lewis bought the lie the earth was old. Theologian John Calvin 500 years ago mocked those who denied the earth was young, so this discussion isn't as new as you might think.
So, If you are a professing Christian refusing to fully submit to the authority of scripture as I was, I suggest you repent and believe. As Jesus said, it is more blessed to believe if you have not seen, but now that you have seen, you can still believe.
If you are not a Christian, the same suggestion applies, repent of your sins and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that the Bible is the inerrant, sole authoritative word from God to mankind, everything else flows from that.
Institute for Creation Research: https://www.icr.org/
Crev.info article on recent flood articles:
https://crev.info/2024/03/noah-and-flood-get-media-exposure/
Inside the above article here is the evidence for a global flood video, Dr Tim Clary (of ICR) touts his book there too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8eO7VtHuJw
A later video by Dr. Clary on global megasequences, evidence for a global flood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLQrGw9v4nw
"Battle for the Beginning" - John MacArthur, available on Amazon
"The Privileged Planet"
"Evidence that Demands a Verdict" Josh McDowel, available on Amazon
Dr. Jason Lisle on the distant starlight problem:
Dr. Lisle (and company) website: https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/
"Traced: Human DNA's Big Surprise" by Nathaniel Jeanson, available on Amazon
Crev.info article on evidence against evolution, featuring Dr. Carl Werner's massive five volume work: