Clough Evolution Lesson 15

What About Geological Evidences? (2) Radiocarbon, Radiogenic Dating; Rise of Civilization

We now come to the second section in the area of geological data and in this section I would like to briefly devote some time to the question of radiocarbon dating. To appreciate the issues at hand, both in radiocarbon dating and in other forms of radioactivity or the radioactive clock or whatever you wish to say, whether you wish to refer to argon dating or uranium etc. In all of these cases one wants to be very clear that here more than in other things the issue is more precisely defined. We’re dealing more with facts and figures, we’re dealing here with real mathematical relationships and fortunately when you get into mathematical relationships and you put your reasoning in symbolic form it’s easy to see, or at least it’s easier to see what the assumptions are that you are making and it doesn’t get glossed over in the course of the discussion, so that in a way radiocarbon dating and radiogenic dating which I will use as a term to refer to both argon and uranium, both these types of dating are physically quantitative, they are fairly well understood as far as mechanisms go, the theory is fairly simple, straightforward and the assumptions very clear.

As we critique these methods one has to keep in mind that we are not in anyway saying that the Bible-believing Christian at this point is smarter than his non-believing colleague, or that he somehow handles the data in a more sophisticated way. Our argument is not on the details of the development of the theory or anything like that. Rather our argument goes deeper than this. Our argument in the area of radiocarbon dating and radioactive dating goes down to the level of the presuppositions and assumptions and it’s here where our whole discussion wants to hinge.

To start off with I’d like to concentrate on radiocarbon dating. As most of you are aware, in 1955 Libby published his book, Radiocarbon Dating. And it’s a classic work and I think anyone interested in the subject should read the book through several times to make sure he’s got the point and work through the equations Libby gives, work through Libby’s line of reasoning and understand Libby’s presentation. Also there is a journal called radiocarbon that is available in any large scientific library and I believe this comes out quarterly, I’m not sure, but it has a listing of all of the radiocarbon dates and it is a source book for discussions on the radiocarbon issue. For those of you interested in doing detail work I would recommend the journal, Radiocarbon and look for it in your local university library.

Now the theory of radiocarbon dating involves two pictures or two processes. One is the generation of radiocarbon and the other process is the decay of radiocarbon. The generation of radiocarbon is apparently due to cosmic rays colliding with nitrogen atoms in our atmosphere. It transforms nitrogen into carbon 14. For those of you who have not taken chemistry, the designation carbon 14 means that the atom carbon exists all right, but instead of having the normal weight, atomic weight of 12, these special carbon atoms have the atomic weight of 14. Now chemically they’re identical, they do the same thing that atoms combined with oxygen gets CO₂ and so on but the carbon 14 atoms are radioactive and the carbon 12 atoms are not, but chemically they combine, make the same compounds and so on.

Now the generation of carbon 14 from nitrogen…see what happens is you have nitrogen in the air as a gas, N₂ and the cosmic rays collide with the nitrogen atoms causing and setting in motion developments leading to the formation of carbon 14. Now the carbon 14 atoms immediately are oxidized to form CO₂ or carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide circulates throughout our atmosphere and permeates to the lowest levels so that it interacts with two things. First, it interacts with the ocean so that there is a balance of CO₂ dissolved in the water of the ocean and the CO₂ in the mixture of the air, and CO₂ also, of course, interacts with organic material, such as plants and animals. Now the CO₂ goes into plants and is taken as CO₂ regardless of whether the individual carbon atoms happen to be carbon 12 or carbon 14, the plant doesn’t care, it takes it in anyway. And you don’t care either, when you breathe in…of course our lungs give off carbon dioxide but if we did take in CO₂ it wouldn’t matter chemically to us whether we took in carbon 14 or carbon 12 but the carbon 14 formation is assumed to be known and the entire theory of carbon dating depends upon an equilibrium. Now by equilibrium we mean that the whole thing has gone on long enough time so that everything, all the rough spots in the system are washed out and the thing is in balance, namely that the rate of carbon 14 formation is equal exactly to the rate of carbon 14 decay. This is the assumption underlying the system, that the rate of carbon 14 formation is equal to the rate of carbon 14 decay.

Now how does the carbon 14 decay? Well, first, as I have said, you have it formed; you have it formed in the high atmosphere as incoming cosmic rays from outer space collide with nitrogen atoms causing carbon 14 atoms to form which are immediately oxidized to become CO₂ which circulates throughout the atmosphere, interacting with the oceans and water surfaces and also with organic matter. That is the cycle of generation. Once the CO₂ is in the plants and in the seas of course it begins to break down. It begins, actually, to break down from the moment it’s formed and because it is a radioactive element it begins its downward decay and so it decays and we have to have a balance, namely that the rate of decay in organic matter and in the ocean system of carbon 14 is exactly equal to the rate of formation.

Now why is it so crucial to make this assumption? For one thing, those of you with mathematic background will appreciate the factor that it makes the equations a lot easier to solve that are involved in the process if we make both sides equal in the situation without introducing all sorts of differential factors, but more importantly of ceruse and more seriously is the fact that it is believed by the men working in the field, including Dr. Libby himself, that physical observation justifies this, that carbon 14 is being formed at a rate which is equal approximately to its decay. Now this assumption is important because unless you make it, let’s suppose this way, suppose the carbon 14 were not being formed as fast as it’s decaying; what would that do to the total amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere at any given time. It means it would be dropping off; it would be like spending more money than you’re making.

The whole theory depends upon the fact that there is a constant amount of carbon 14 available in the atmosphere at all times. It’s like earning money and spending money, if you always have $3,000 in your saving account regardless of the time of year it means that you’re constantly putting the same amount in as you’re taking off, excluding interest, etc. So here’s the point; if you aren’t making enough money and your expenses continue as they were and your income drops off the total amount of money in the bank is going to start going down and conversely if you start making more money than you are spending, then the amount that you save in the bank goes up. But the only way the amount in the bank stays the same is if you are making as much money as you’re spending. And similarly the only way the carbon 14 amounts in the atmosphere remain the same is if you are manufacturing carbon 14 at the same rate it is decaying.

Now this assumption is fundamental to the whole theory of radiocarbon dating. The reason for this is that when you go to date a specimen, say for example, somebody finds a bonfire made by the cavemen and it’s a lot of carbon, obviously, and we want to date the time that those logs were burned. Well, the carbon in those logs, partially burned logs, is partly carbon 12 and partly carbon 14 and so by analyzing it we find out the ratio between the carbon 14 and the carbon 12 in any given log. Suppose we have a log in front of us, we’re looking at it. The laboratory has just told us that the ration of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in that log is such and such fraction. Now what does this tell us about the age? It doesn’t tell us a thing about the age until we assume that the carbon 14 carbon 12 ratio in the log originally is equal to the carbon 14 carbon 12 concentration in the atmosphere around us today, because when the log was growing it was taking in carbon 14 as the carbon 14 was decaying so that the carbon 14 level in the log at the time of its death corresponded exactly with the carbon 14 carbon 12 of the atmosphere in which it existed, and thus the carbon 14 carbon 12 ration for the atmosphere in which that log lived must be assumed to be equal to our atmosphere today, and this is the assumption. You can’t get a shred of a date out of radiocarbon dating until you first assume that the ancient atmosphere, quantitatively and qualitatively with respect to radiocarbon, was exactly the same as our atmosphere today.

Now if you assume this then it’s a trivial mathematical problem to derive the age of the specimen. If you know the rate of carbon decay and you know the original percent of carbon 14 and you know what the percent is now, and you know how fast it takes to go from…you know the half-life you can very easily compute the age of the log. But please keep in mind two assumptions that are being made: (1) that the carbon is breaking down at a constant rate, the rate never changes and (2) and I think more important assumption from our viewpoint is that the ancient atmosphere in which that log once lived as a tree had the same amount of carbon 14 as our atmosphere today.

Now there’s been on the part of creationists a broad scale attack against radiocarbon for this very assumption which I have mentioned. It proceeds first from the observed fact that when you go to measure the actual rate of production of carbon 14 and you measure the actual rate of decay of carbon 14, in spite of all the measurements made since 1955 when Libby first propounded the theory, in spite of all of the advances, the decay has never been measured equal to the production. The decay at the present time, as best as can be measured, is only two-thirds of the production. What does this say? The same thing that we could say about your bank account. Suppose your expenses were only two-thirds of what you’re making? What would this tell about your bank account? Would your bank account be decreasing, remaining the same or increasing, if you were making one and a half times as much money as you were spending. Obviously your bank account would be increasing. And so if we are to trust the physical measurements of carbon 14 decay and carbon 14 production then the total volume of carbon 14 in the atmospheric reservoir must be increasing.

This note about carbon 14 production was first brought to my attention in a book, Prehistory and Earth Models by Professor Melvin Cook at the University of Unity, printed by Max Parrish in London in 1966, Max Parrish and Company, 1-5 Portpool Lane, London EC-1 and in this book Dr. Cook, besides giving an excellent mathematical treatment and critique of over-thrusting, of the origins of oil and gas, the origins and the kinds of coal, geological evidences for the ice cap model, distribution of continents, continental drifts, ice caps, terrestrial expansion, gives an extended treatment of the various kinds of dating, including rubidium, potassium and the uranium as well as radiocarbon clocks. This book was written in 1965 and he points out that at that time no one still had been able to make measurements to guarantee that radiocarbon decay was equal to radiocarbon production. In 1968, September Issue of the Creation Research Society quarterly Cook again showed, as well as several other authors in that same volume that recent measurements, even since 1965, and you see here now we’re getting out 13 years after Libby’s 1955 exposition of his original theory, still there is no physical confirmation of the assumption of the radiocarbon theory. In fact, the more observations that are made the more suspicions are being aroused that in fact the rate of radiocarbon production is greater than the rate of decay and if this is true then obviously the total volume of carbon 14 in the atmosphere has been building up.

Now if the total volume of radiocarbon has been building up, then what does this say about the assumption that it’s always remained constant? Obviously it destroys it. What does it say about the radiocarbon content of the ancient atmospheres? Well, it says that we’ve been wrong to assume that the ancient atmospheres had the same amount of radiocarbon in them as our atmosphere. Our atmosphere has a lot more radiocarbon in it than the early atmospheres.

More significantly what does this do to the dates? Well, what it does to the dates is that it radically lowers them for if now we use the equation developed by Dr. Cook we soon discover that many of the great dates of carbon 14, out to 20,000 to 30,000 years before Christ now must be collapsed to 4,000 to 5,000 years before Christ. There’s that much of a radical collapse in the whole chronological scheme once you refuse to assume equilibrium and you have a non-equilibrium model of radiocarbon decay. And therefore radiocarbon, then, if the flood occurred and if we have a recent creation and if we have had catastrophes in the past that have changed radiocarbon production and indeed if radiocarbon production, even if it’s totally dependent upon cosmic rays, still the latest research in cosmic rays indicates that the incoming cosmic rays are by no means constant through time; they cannot be shown to be constant through time. And they may indeed vary. So here we have a situation where the whole structure of radiocarbon dating is breaking down, not in the sense that people are going to abandon the system but in the sense as far as we are concerned there’s no scientific fact to force us to say that radiocarbon dating is the absolute dating method. Now more to the point is the fact that when radiocarbon can be checked out against dating from other methods you find tremendous…[tape changes]

…Creation Research Society Journal that are, I think pioneer articles, by Professor Gentry, a physicist and the first one occurs in the July 1966 issue of Creation Research Society quarterly and the second article occurs in the September 1968 issue. His first paper, in July 1966, demonstrated the idea that our…let me take it back further. The problem here was that Professor Gentry often wondered about the constancy assumption of radioactive decay. He wanted to find out where in the march and advance of science was it definitely proved that radioactive decay rates remained constant over time. And so he went back and found out that much of the work actually had been done by only a few men and one in particular, a Dr. Joy of Canada, who had done work on mica, Precambrian mica, and he found out that in these Precambrian mica samples of rock that embedded in these pieces of mica would be pieces of radioactive material, which as it broke down, would leave burn marks in the mica, which are called by scientists as pleochroic halos. And Professor Gentry discovered, he didn’t discover this, actually it was known, that each element as it breaks down has its own characteristic type of mark. Well, to make a long story short Gentry went back to Joy’s original collection of mica samples and discovered that polonium 218 was among those that broke down or left burn marks in this Precambrian mica, but the startling thing was that polonium 218 has a half-life of only three minutes, and yet it occurs in Precambrian rock, rock which supposedly represents the basic core of the earth.

Now what are we to do with this discovery; what are the implications of it? Since the material breaking down will not leave a burn mark in liquid rock, we must deduce that the burn marks, or the pleochroic halo was put into the rock after it cooled down and became a solid piece of rock, but since the radioactive polonium 218 would only exist for three minutes on the average, the average half-life being three minutes, then if polonium 218 were among the original elements of creation, and you have the earth slowly condensing and cooling from a blob of metal in space, a liquid rock, the polonium 218 surely would have decayed out of existence, would have died, before the earth had cooled down to a solid rock; before the polonium 218 could have ever left us a trace of its existence. And yet the brute fact remains that polonium 218 has left a record of itself even though it existed in history for only three minutes.

Now there’s only one of two conclusions: either the earth was created within minutes, say three minutes, and the rock, the Precambrian rock was created cold and solid, just as it is today, out of nothing, with the polonium 218 embedded in it, or the polonium 218 was created inside the rock. Now one wouldn’t want to take these two routes and yet it seems like, in other words, if you were an evolutionist you wouldn’t like to take these two logical alternatives, neither of these are very nice to take for the person to take for the person who thinks that the earth’s been around a long time and gradually condensed by some nebulae hypothesis of some sort. And yet these seem to be the only two logical conclusions that Professor Gentry’s work leaves us, that either the rocks have been created cold within three minutes or polonium 218 was created inside the rock later on. Incidentally this work has been reported for the American Physical Society and several other nationwide societies so it’s not just some eccentric work; it’s one that has been accepted even though people don’t like the implications of it.

Secondly, Professor Gentry, and this is more to point of our discussion at this point, in September 1968 reported, in a paper called On the Invariance of the Decay Constant Over Geological Time, discovered that a material known as zircon expands under the process of radioactive decay and this is very interesting because if zircon expands under the process of radioactive decay and radio active has actually gone on for millions and millions of years, then as zircon expands, very slowly over the millions and millions of years, you would expect it to crack the surrounding rock matrix along the grain of the rock, much like with wood; under pressure you would expect wood to split along its grain, not across the grain. And so with rock, you would expect the split along the grain of the rock. Yet, when examined under the microscope these tiny implantations of zircon have shattered the rock matrix in a random fashion about themselves. Now this suggests only one thing; it suggests that zircon must have expanded so rapidly at some time in the past that the rock did not have time to expand and crack along its grain but had to shatter to make way for the expanding decaying zircon. And if the zircon expanded so rapidly then one would have to say that the decay constant was very, very, very much greater in time past than at present.

And if this is so, then it disproves the fact that these comet clocks have kept good time over many millions of years. In fact, the long ages which they give us may be due to the fact that they have had a massive error; somebody in other words has rapidly made the clocks move fast. For example, if I have a clock and I start off at midnight and it’s one minute past midnight, and you are sleeping on the couch and you have set the alarm for 6:00 o’clock in the morning but I tamper with the clock and make the clock go very fast, I reach behind it and turn the minute hand around one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours, and all of a sudden the alarm rings, and although, if you did not know I tampered with the clock and you had no other clock in the world you would think that you had slept six hours. Well, I’m sure you would have thought that was the worst sleep you ever got, but nevertheless, if you had no other clock to compare it with you would wonder about this thing. And yet you see, my tampering, by setting the clock ahead very rapidly, I disturb the assumption that you make, namely that the minute hand and the clock mechanism was constantly moving throughout the night at a constant rate and it wasn’t; it moved for a short time very fast. And that’s the same thing that Gentry’s paper suggests the atomic clock has done; it’s giving us a long, long, long time reading, but only because at some time in the past it went on very rapidly.

These are just two elements which I’m going to present under radiogenic dating, simply to expose you to the fact that men who are Biblical Christians, who do not stick their heads in the sand but who are genuinely interested in the Bible and yet are generally interested in science to have simply taken the time and the money and it takes a lot of money to do this work, and the effort and the hours and so on to check some of these facts out, and when you check the facts out every time you come closer to the literal meaning of God’s Word.

Now I would like to move to man and the rise of civilization. There are two basic items that I think need mention in connection with man and the rise of civilization. First is what I would call the hoax problem. By the hoax problem we do not intend to make fun of anthropologists as a group of clowns that are always bungling and being tripped up by hoaxes. That’s not the point here. The point is rather to show that there’s something in their thinking and in the general approach of the field that makes them susceptible to this, in all sincerity, not that they deliberately do this but there’s just something that’s been demonstrated over the years that there’s just an unnatural, unscientific tendency to jump at evidences that would tend to substantiate evolution and neglect evidences that would soften such conclusions.

One, for example, need but think of the Scopes Trial as a very flagrant example of this, in which it was claimed that an ancient man by the name of Hesperopithecus extant on the North American Continent was proved because of a tooth that was presented during the trial and later, in fact I have a picture from the Illustrated London News of June 24, 1922 and the artists draws a whole bunch of these men sitting here on the stream eating and all of this of course being developed from one evidence, a tooth and later on it was discovered, shortly after the Scopes trial, that lo and behold this wasn’t the tooth of a man at all, it was the tooth of an extinct pig. And then there was the famous Piltdown hoax, in 1910, a man found a fossilized human skull and nearby he found a jawbone that looked much like an ape and for many, many years this was accepted as clear evidence of sort of an ape-like human, until in 1953 analysis of the jawbone proved it to be that of a modern ape that had been falsified by stains and someone had taken a file and filed down the top of the teeth so that it looked somewhat like a person. Now this is very interesting because here you have clear cut evidence of a man that was not carefully examined, somebody was so zealously interested in proving evolution that they falsified this thing and got it passed by the scientific community.

Then we have Java man; this is the most primitive of all man, the most ape-like of all man, and in 1890 they found the top part of the skull, and for the life of you, you can’t tell that this is a man or an ape, but the thing that decided that it was a man and not an ape was the fact that nearby there was a human femur about 50 feet away, and also some other human skeletons in the area. And so therefore it was presumed, only on the basis of the fact that it was sort of guilt by association, there was this piece of bone, this skull cap, in the same general area in which there were human bones and so therefore it was presumed that this was also a human bone. And this was discovered in 1890 but it’s also interesting that the man who discovered this did not report the fact that nearby two modern human skulls were found, much like the modern aboriginal Australians and yet this was never reported until 1920 and even then only in a scientific journal. So you have the great popular press parading this discovery in 1890 of Java man and yet it’s not until 1920, thirty years later that it finally turns out that lo and behold nearby the man had also found some human skulls much like ours which evidently co-existed with this other thing, this “it” skull. So had the man actually shown the people in that day, in 1890, that in connection with this so-called Java man, in connection with it there had been these two other skulls, it would have done a lot to blunt all of the speculation about evolution that arose from this Java man discovery.

But it shows you that there is something, there’s a motivation behind this, you don’t get this again and again and again, you don’t get it in other fields of science, you don’t get this continual zealousness to promote the cause of evolution with each and every discovery as you do here. Now this obviously is not an indictment of the scientific method. It’s only an indictment of some individuals who are so zealous to prove evolution that they go to such lengths elevating data that agrees with their position and suppressing data that would disagree or at least blunt the force of a lot of their other data. So I would just cite these hoaxes, not as evidence that all geologists are deliberately perpetrating a hoax but rather of the fact that there is a hidden bias, or at least there has been in the early days of this century, to promote evolution to the point of being quite partial about how one handles the data.

Now I would like to move to the second main category of discussion of man and the rise of civilization, and here I’m following a booklet put out by Frank Cousins, entitled Fossil Man, and it’s put out by The Evolutionary Protest Movement of England, and it’s a detailed analysis of the skull findings and I think the most useful part of this pamphlet is not only that it’s relatively inexpensive because it’s paper bound, but it has photographs and a detailed description of each main skull that has been found up to 1965 complete with an analysis of how that skull was dated and the circumstances surrounding the occurrence of the skull. It would be a valuable catalogue to have in your library and I would highly recommend it. It can be bought through the Bible Science Association in Caldwell Idaho and I’ll give the address at the end of the tape. This booklet is well worth the money and I think would be well worth having in your library as a catalogue reference.

In this book, Cousins shows how clever artists can be with the data for caveman and show that an artist who’s worth his salt can take the data and analyze it in terms of an evolutionary sequence just by a mere suggestion of lines here and there. And he, for example, shows that you can have several artists draw different things from the same skull. For example, on page 42 he shows four artists who took the same skull and got four widely divergent men; from this one skull fragment one artist painted what looks somewhat like a modern man; another artist painted something that looked like an ape; then there were two shades in between. And it shows you a lot is, apparently, in the imagination of the artist.

But he makes four major points. One is there is not a sudden transition between type of skull and another type of skull, for example, between Neanderthal and modern man there’s not a sharp transition but rather you have mixed types found together and found so close together with mixed characteristics in intermediate skulls that it looks like they were all members of the same species and could interbreed. So you have the case that there is a continual blending from one to the other here, showing they are all men and showing that there is no strong age in which one dominated and the other didn’t. They apparently lived a lot side by side so therefore really don’t represent chronological successive stages of evolution.

The second thing he points out, that there are many people with similar cranial measurements of these early men among the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Bedouins, certain tribes of North and South America. He also shows on pages 79-82 that the oldest skull, the oldest skull looked very much like us, and you usually get the impression from drawings in Life Magazine’s volume on evolution, for example, which by the way, is just a lot of artist gimmickry and a lot of propaganda. The oldest skeletons really, when you carefully date them, the oldest skulls actually look much like modern man and the later skulls, between those and us, have these odd characteristics so typical of (quote) “cavemen” (end quote).

Then he also notes, fourthly, that some of these Neanderthal people have bigger brain cases than we did, and that’s very significant because usually you hear the story that well, as evolution goes on you have an enlarged brain case, an enlarged intelligence and so on, and it’s interesting to notice the fact that the older types had larger brain cases, in many cases, than we do. Also at this point I would note an article in Argosy Magazine in May, 1969, showing a person, a human form that was encased in ice, reported by Ivan Sanderson, unfortunately could not get permission to melt the ice and obtain the body for study but here we have a case of apparently a human form, a human man as indicated by his toes, yet covered with hair like an ape, and having a thumb mechanism much like an ape, and some would say aha, this proves evolution.

Yet to my mind it proves exactly the opposite because this thing, whatever it was, the article admits was alive within the last few years. So obviously these half-creatures, wherever they are, are still living and so therefore if they are still living they cannot represent a chronologically successive sequence. You see, the whole idea of evolution is that you have change of form through time, but if you have these forms still living today then they haven’t changed through time. And if you’ve had many similar forms of man coexisting side by side through time, but not one form succeeding the other, so in my thinking I don’t see how this can prove evolution at all. I think the shoe is precisely on the other foot. From a Biblical point of view I would say that all of these anthropoid forms that differ from modern man probably represent degenerate forms of man or simple diversification that has occurred since Adam.

Now I’d like to close out this section and deal briefly with the concept of the rise of civilization. Just a few brief notes here. First, it’s interesting that more civilization studies progress and particularly studies of ancient civilization, the more the locale of the first great civilization seems to be in the Mesopotamian valley. Now isn’t this interesting because this is just where you’d expect it according to Genesis 11 with the first settlements after the flood, where they went east of Mount Ararat, which would be in the Mesopotamia valley and settled there. So I think it’s rather interesting that the latest anthropological studies confirm what the Bible said all along, namely that if there was a…if you were to pinpoint one spot on earth which should have the earliest civilization forms manifest today it would be the Mesopotamian valley. And it’s interesting that this is precisely where it occurred in Genesis 11:1-2.

I think another interesting thing that has been particularly interesting to me is the explosive beginnings of civilization, why you don’t find transition levels, you don’t find any evolving of mathematics, for example, you don’t find a gradual evolution of astronomy, or a gradual evolution of languages or construction techniques. All of a sudden you’re there, in the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia; all of a sudden you’re there with the old kingdom of Egypt; all of a sudden you’re there and you’ve got all these highly developed technology, with apparently no transitional forms, no slow development, and I think this is doubly interesting in light of a recent French anthropologist. I speak here of Claude Levi-Strauss and there was a relatively complete review and discussion of this man in Time Magazine, June 30, 1967, pages 34-85, as you can tell a very extended discussion in Time Magazine.

Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist; the title of the article in Time was Man’s New Dialogue with Man, and it’s interesting that Claude Levi-Strauss’ essential characteristic of his feature of his thought school is that man has not developed. His thesis is quoted: “A primitive people is not a backward people or retarded people, indeed, it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized peoples far behind.” And then the editors continue after this quote from Claude Levi-Strauss with the following words: “If that hypothesis is true, then civilization has nothing much to brag about. Modern man does not constitute an end product, an exponential improvement of the aboriginal dowry and an evolutionary intellectual advance. He is merely another mode of human society coexisting and coequal with the most primitive tribe. The marvelous fruit of western culture, technology, medicine, literature, TV, the H-Bomb, show an exercise of mind no more commendable or admirable than the savage’s totems or bone beads. Today’s philosophies reflect no more brilliant light than mankind earliest brainstorms in the dim dawn time of thought.”

Claude Levi-Strauss is quoted as saying all men are intellectually equal. He calls intellectual evolution a complacent and self-serving modern myth, and of course at this point Claude Levi-Strauss is in very, very sharp, fundamental disagreement with the proponent of mystical evolution I quoted above, Teilhard de Chardin also a French anthropologist. Claude Levi-Strauss claims that human intellect has been fully operative and in the same fundamental pattern since the creation of human society. He says the origin of human speech and society are equivalent events; he says that language and society go together, which of course is what the Bible says. The Bible says language and society go together so much that when God judge the linguistic structure of man in Genesis 11 that it fractured the social relationships of man. [Tape turns]

… the pyramids of Egypt and you discover not an evolution of sophistication but rather the first and oldest, the great pyramid is the most sophisticated form. The pyramids that come after this one are smaller and gradually get more crude in their basic structure, so that it’s the first ones that are so fundamentally beautiful from the mathematical and engineering standpoint. And it’s interesting how you explain this explosive sudden beginning, it is as though man just dropped in on the scene with no prior evolution, which is of course what the Bible says, in effect, that the flood so destroyed the first great civilization, that Noah and his family survived and came out of the ark, settled in the Mesopotamian valley and from there kept the technology that they had known from the antediluvian civilization and immediately spread out to a continuous history until the present day.

Now a further footnote on population statistics and the population growth and the history of man. It’s interesting that if you know the rate of growth of mankind and you know the present population, what would happen if you presumed uniformity, which our friends on the other side are always presuming. What kind of creation history, what kind of length of time would it take for man to build up to his present population from an initial pair, if we knew the rate of population growth. We can run a simple calculation, based on the fact that the Jews were known to have originated around 2,000 BC. To get to the present number of Jewish people in the world the Jewish race would have had to have doubled every 160 years.

Now suppose that we use the rate of doubling of 160 and apply it to the present human race that numbers 3.5 billion. We now find if the human race doubled every 160 years at the same rate the Jewish race doubled, then the entire human race of 3.5 billion people could have originated from one pair at 2500 BC, so population growth always shows, of course it doesn’t prove anything because you could have catastrophes eliminate men, but what this does show is that you do not need long time spans to develop the high population of man but on the other hand, if you do have long time spans, as evolutionists want, then you have to have a massive destruction to keep down the population, otherwise, you would have had an explosion thousands and thousands of years ago. It’s also interesting if you take the same doubling rate of 160 and apply it to the population of the western hemisphere, it too could have been populated from a pair at 2200 BC, or approximately at the time of Genesis 10:25, if these genealogies are taken literally without any gaps.

This will summarize our discussion of man and the rise of civilization highlighting several of the points. Now we move to a summary discussion of a proposed Biblical framework into which to incorporate much of the data that we have been discussing in this series, the concept of a global flood.