Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Creation Podcast, a show where we discuss science that confirms Scripture.
I'm your host, Ivana, and my guest today is Dr. Brian Thomas, ICR research scientist and
paleobiochemist.
Thank you for being here today, Dr. Thomas.
My pleasure, of course.
Great.
Well, today we wanted to talk about maybe one of your favorite subjects, I hope, and
I imagine you know quite a bit about fossils.
But to start us off, can you just tell me what is a fossil?
A fossil is just the remains of a once living thing.
And so when we talk about fossils, it could take a whole bunch of different forms.
It could be like a carbonized impression where the organism got squished in mud and then
baked.
And so everything that was organic turned into a thin film of carbon, so you have the
outline of the creature.
So that's one type of fossil.
You have footprints.
That's another type of fossil.
And then what I was taught what a fossil is, you have a bone and then the bone gets replaced
by minerals.
So now you have a rock basically in the shape of the bone, but all the original bone material
is supposed to be gone.
And what I've discovered in investigating fossils firsthand is that's not usually the
case.
And so if you have a bone that's got some minerals in it, the minerals came from the
outside.
We call it permineralization where it fills the little pore spaces in the bone, P-O-R-E,
those little gaps.
It's partially mineralized, permineralized.
So that's another form of fossil.
But there's a rare form.
I don't know how rare it is.
It's becoming less and less rare.
But the most interesting fossil to me is just leftover animal.
It's like a naturally mummified carcass.
So it hasn't been carbonized.
It hasn't been permineralized.
It's just old bone in the dirt or in the ground.
And so what we're finding is more and more examples of these and that's really interesting
because it's made of the original animal.
And how can it be there still?
That's the question I'm trying to answer.
Wow.
Thank you.
That is very interesting.
And if I were or if you were to ask the average scientist, what kind of ages would you assign
to these fossils?
All scientists are trained to think in terms of the secular age and time scale, which would
be millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of years depending on which layer
of course the lowest layers that have fossils in them would have the hundreds of millions
of years age assignments attached to those layers and the fossils that are in them.
And layers above that would be younger.
So tens of millions and then the uppermost layers younger as you ascend the rock column
in any given location.
And generally that holds true.
The relative timing, it's older in the bottom, younger at the top.
But the absolute age assignments, I've grown skeptical of those.
I really have.
I used to believe, well, of course it's 100 million years old because scientists have
proven it and they use science to prove it.
And then later on I thought, wait, what science do they use?
And I started to investigate that and I found holes in that.
And then after I began to doubt the age assignments based on how holy the process was, then I
thought, well, wait a minute.
Now there's positive evidence for recently deposited fossils in the form of these original
biochemicals that are still in there because they look young, they look fresh.
That's what really piques my interest with these fossils is the tissues in them.
Generally it's not whole tissues, like a chunk of liver or something is still floppy.
That's not what we find in the fossils.
It's really generally dried down, really crispy, but it's original biochemistry.
You've got proteins and lipids and DNAs, I guess sugars.
No one's done a lot of looking specifically for sugars yet, but they'll find it.
It's there.
So you mentioned that they're giving these age assignments and that it should start oldest
obviously to youngest, but how do they get to those numbers?
Can you explain that process?
So part of it has to do with history.
So there's a historical precedent that we have to conform our answers to.
And it started in the 1700s when the majority of scientists decided, yeah, we're going to
go with this old earth view.
And then there were some dissenters back then who said, we don't think you guys have good
science to back up this eons concept.
And it was philosophically driven.
It did not come from the data.
So even back then, in the 1700s, you had some scientists who really held sway.
And in other words, these were the guys who had control of the top journals.
So they were the top editors.
And so they would say, well, we're going to choose to highlight this article because it's
got old earth in it.
And we're going to choose to not even publish that article because it mentions Noah's flood
and we want to get away from the flood.
Why would a scientist be biased against the flood?
And so that bias is really what I found in my little history searches that I've done
that drove the rise to prominence in the scientific world of old earth and long aged thinking.
That's a fun question to try to answer because scientists are people.
And so what do people do?
We fill our minds with what we want to hear and we build, we construct little worlds in
our minds that fit the kind of world that we want to be in.
And if we don't want God in our world because we have sins, and if I have a sin and God
is like, hey, you have a sin, you need to repent of that sin and let me save you from
that sin, Jesus said it this way, men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds
were evil.
And so maybe that's what's driving these scientists.
But anyway, what we have now is if I grew up as a scientist and I have to age date a
certain fossil, if I don't make it conform to what everyone else out there is saying,
then I'll be labeled not a real scientist.
I'll be labeled a moron or an idiot and I'll be ostracized from my colleagues and I won't
get any papers published and I won't get any funding.
So it's this whole practical side of it where you've got to have papers to get publications
to get funding to put bread on your table as a scientist.
But there's also a spiritual side and both of these sides are pushing my secular colleagues
anyway toward making sure that I conform to the view of the old earth view.
What they've done since then is they've used all kinds of different age dating techniques,
none of which work because there is no process that happens today that could give us an age
of an event in the past.
There's no process that can even do that.
You can measure decay rates but you don't know the original conditions of what was decaying
into what, how much of the original stuff was there in the beginning, how much of the
decay product was there in the beginning, you don't know.
And has the decay rate stayed constant?
You don't know.
And has some more of that original material been injected into the sample or the decay
product been injected into or taken out of the sample?
So there's too many variables to use any scientific process to determine an age.
It's not a tool that science really has but everyone thinks it is and I used to also think
that science can, science determined that this is so many, plus or minus 25 million
years old, they give age ranges to make it look scientific.
But anyway, there's assumptions built in and no one can fill in those assumptions.
And so what I've found is that the best way to determine the age of a thing is to look
at historical evidence.
So do you have a name and a likeness on a coin in an archaeological context?
Well, that gives you a really tight age because you can take that name, Caesar so-and-so,
and the likeness and you can compare it with actual historical records to build a chronology
for that.
And so what we find in the Bible itself is a chronology for the whole world and that's
a historical record that is reliable, much more reliable than guesses.
You can measure isotope ratios in a rock, but how do you turn isotope ratios into an
age?
Well, you have to plug in the isotope ratios into a formula and what does the formula have?
Variables.
You took math, right?
I did.
Yeah.
It wasn't very good.
Wasn't it your fave?
You remember variables are represented by letters and so you solve the equation for
the variable or whatever.
Well, these equations have variables and the variables are unknowns and it turns out that
in order to solve the equation to obtain an age estimate, you have to fill in the unknowns
with guesses.
That's what's going on under the hood that a lot of people don't talk about.
You mentioned earlier that scientists can find fossils with original tissues still within
them.
Having that original soft tissue, doesn't that seem to deny the long ages?
You barely touched on that earlier, but could you shed more light on that, what the implications
of finding those soft tissues are?
Right.
So I just finished saying that you can't use any scientific decay process that we could
measure today.
You could see it decaying, whether it's isotopes decaying or tissues decaying.
You can't use that to determine a specific age, but you can get a clue as to the general
life span or shelf life for that.
So there are age indicators.
They just don't give you a solid age date.
One of those indicators is what I wrote my thesis on and that's the proteins that are
in there.
On the one hand, we've done experiment after experiment to verify and determine the decay
rate of certain proteins.
We know they're falling apart because chemistry happens.
You can't keep chemistry from happening.
So what chemistry happens to proteins?
Proteins fall apart because they're reacting with water molecules.
They're reacting with oxygen molecules and others.
So this is a relentless process.
It turns a brand new, freshly formed, let's say a collagen protein.
So the collagen is a protein that we find in our bones and in skin and connective tissue.
Let's say you've got a collagen molecule just freshly made and then the animal dies.
What happens to that collagen molecule?
Well, oxygen reacts with it, water reacts with it, and then you end up with something
less than the original collagen molecule.
And after a certain amount of time, you end up with no collagen left.
This stuff can last a long time.
It's what makes up a parchment.
And so the Dead Sea Scrolls, a couple thousand years old, those are made of parchment fragments.
Why are they fragments?
Because the chemistry that's been going on since the 2000 years since they were…
Chemistry happens.
Yeah, it can last a long time, but it doesn't last a million years based on the measured
decay rates.
So why do we find these proteins in fossils that have age assignments of tens of millions
and even hundreds of millions of years?
The age assignments, again, in my experience, come from the secular constructs.
They cherry-pick numbers that fit the belief.
So it's a belief-driven process, this age-dating thing.
And so, yeah, my field of paleo-biochemistry.
Bio means old.
Bio means life.
Chemistry means chemicals.
So these are the old remnants of the chemicals of life, like collagen, like proteins.
So that's what I'm interested in, really, is how long can this stuff last?
And the answer that we're getting over and over is it can't last even a million years
at reasonable temperatures.
So this is a decay process that is temperature-dependent, unlike radioisotope decay.
It just decays at the same rate at any temperature.
That's why we have refrigerators.
So you put your food in the fridge so that you will slow the rate of chemical reactions.
It can last thousands of years, but not a million.
And so it looks to me, based on the fact that we have biochemicals from the original animals
that made them in fossils from the very bottom of the rock record.
Also fossils at the very top and fossils in between, the whole rock record.
It looks like the whole rock stack, the pancake stack of rocks that we're all standing on,
were all deposited relatively recently.
And that fits, the model that we have from the Bible about Noah's Flood happening recently.
And we're interpreting these rock layers as all having been deposited in one year.
So within a short time span recently, it's totally crazy to the secular mind.
But it fits the data.
So Dr. Thomas, can you tell us what about the objection that these original biochemical
fossils could just be contaminants?
Oh, right.
That was a popular theory for a while.
The people who raised that objection seem to think that there's only one sample.
And someone dropped their lunch in the test tube there or something.
But we don't have just one sample.
We have literature, scientific technical literature, going back to the 1960s.
And we've actually compiled the literature on this.
So we have example after example.
It's from all the different continents except one.
It's from all the different rock layers except two.
And there's 117 papers compiled in our big list so far.
And that's of fall 2021.
And by the way, it's dozens of different taxa.
So not just dinosaur.
It's in turtle shell.
You've got actual skin in bird.
You've got bird feathers.
You've got swimming creatures, remnants of internal organs in sea creatures.
It's in clam shells.
There's protein inside the clam shell.
So how are you going to contaminate a world worth?
You're going to contaminate the whole world?
I answer the objection of contamination by just listing the over 100 technical literature
examples.
Can you just go a little bit further into explaining how the existence of soft tissues
can be expected, especially for Christians when we're trying to combat what we've heard
all our lives, but we claim to be believers and we believe in Scripture.
So can you just help us make sure we differentiate why we would believe one or the other?
So the Bible is very clear, starting with Creation Week.
These are days.
They're normal, everyday days.
They're ordinary days.
And they're defined that way.
Day one is defined as morning and evening.
So it's this transition of cycling from light to darkness.
This is a day.
Then you have six of those days.
The first three had no sun to mark them.
We don't know what marked them, but that's okay.
Then the third three had a sun to mark those three days, and we've had the sun not as the
definer of a day, but the administrator ever since then.
Okay, so now we have days.
That's how we mark time.
Six days, creation.
That's what the Bible teaches, not just in Genesis 1, but in the Ten Commandments written
in God's hand a couple thousand years after creation on a stone tablet given to Moses.
For in six days, the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything that's
in them.
And on the seventh day, he rested.
What context is that?
Well, this is why I want you to take a Sabbath day.
This is the commandment.
Take a Sabbath day of rest to remember your Creator.
And we do this work week.
We still do it today.
It came from that.
There's no astronomical precedent that defines our work week.
The seven-day work week just comes from God's Ten Commandments, and he built it into the
way our societies function.
So the Bible has a lot more to say about chronology, but that's where it starts.
Seven days, six days of creation.
And then you add up the genealogies in Genesis 5.
You go from creation to the flood.
That's 1,656 years.
And then you add up the genealogies in Genesis 11, and you get, what, 270 years from the
flood to Abraham.
And everybody knows, everybody, that Abraham was about 2,000 BC.
And so from Abraham forward, we get to the Lord Jesus, and everybody knows he was a real
historical person also, roughly zero BCAD transition there.
So 2,000 years to go from creation to Abraham, 2,000 years Abraham to Christ, about 2,000
years from the Lord Jesus to us today right now.
You add up 2, 2, 2, what do you get, mathematician?
Six.
Six, yay!
I do know that one.
Six thousand years for the history of the world.
And that comes from the reliable eyewitness testimony of the Scriptures themselves, people
who were there, people who witnessed these events and wrote it down so that we could
know where we came from and when we came.
Now that's what the Bible presents.
So how do soft tissue or original biochemicals, is how I would phrase it, in fossils, how
do they fit that view?
The flood 4,400 or so years ago, you can have tissues last 4,400 years, maybe in scratches
and remnants and scraps of them.
Why do we know that?
Because of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
They're still around after 2,000 years and that's just skin.
What about locked inside bone?
Protected even better maybe.
And we know the decay rates, so you measure the decay rates.
So you can have remnants last for, in theory, tens of thousands of years actually.
So we would expect to see some scraps and remnants if bacteria don't get to them.
If bacteria get there, all bets are off and they eat it up, it's gobbled and gone.
So by having a recent creation, by having a recent flood, thousands not millions of
years ago, that's what the Bible presents.
That fits the data that we're seeing in all these original biochemicals that are throughout
the fossil record on every continent except Australia.
But I mean, it's worldwide.
It's like there was a giant worldwide deposition event.
Where have I heard that?
Worldwide.
Like Dr. Clary here says, it takes a worldwide cause to produce a worldwide effect.
So we have a worldwide effect and that is young looking biochemicals in fossils.
Some of these are still smelly.
You pull them out of the ground and what's that smell?
Well, it's still rotting underground because it was deposited recently.
That's a good way to explain it and that happens to fit what the Bible says about the history
of the world.
And so as Christians, what do we do?
We say, okay, the Bible got it right.
The Bible does explain where we came from.
The Bible does explain why we have these rock layers, not with flood, and why these rock
layers look recently deposited, stinky flood layers, you could put it that way.
And so if the Bible got that right, then I as a Christian have more confidence than ever
that anything else the Bible says, I can trust.
Now this is the word of God and what that means is if we're going to come to the Bible
as Christians and say, well, this part of the Bible is right, but that part of the Bible
is wrong, then what I'm saying is the part that's wrong, supposedly, God's responsible
for the Bible and since God wrote the wrong part, then God must have made a mistake.
So we need to get our act together as Christians and kind of go through, are you sure that
part's wrong?
Are you sure you want to cast blame on God who is perfect?
So there's a theological...
And then this is where I was actually, so I'm speaking from experience and saying, when
I looked at these parts of the Bible that didn't agree with my secular thinking, like
recent creation, for example, I'd go, well, that part can't be right, but that means God
can't be trusted.
And it comes down to, who am I going to trust?
Whose word am I going to trust?
And I can trust a little bit of God, it's like I'm tiptoeing toward God, but what we're
saying here at the Institute is, there's scientific evidence to support all of it, the whole Bible.
God made zero mistakes.
He doesn't make mistakes.
And so the science does support that scripture.
The science of original biochemistry supports the scripture that talks about recent creation.
To me, that's very encouraging, and I'm just hoping that our audience would be able to
process all that information in light of what you shared, as far as really looking at what
is driving the interpretation of the data, and then, of course, just not forgetting to
trust scripture, because we weren't there when the dinosaurs were buried or made, but
there was someone who was, and he left us his information in the Bible.
So just being able to align all of that together.
So thank you so much for sharing, and just so that our viewers and listeners would know
that we have your thesis that you mentioned.
We actually sell it as a resource, and so this would give you more of that information.
It's ancient and fossil bone collagen remnants, and so you'll be able to find that on our
website, or if you were ever here in person at our Discovery Center, but thank you so
much for sharing that with us, Dr. Thomas, and I guess we can say the proof is in the
fossils.
Maybe you should make that also a t-shirt.
But to all of our viewers and listeners, thank you for joining us.
You can find this podcast on YouTube or anywhere else you might find your podcast.
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And if you had any additional questions, like Dr. Thomas mentioned, we can't elaborate on
everything in this one episode, but send us a message on social media if you'd like to
know more about something.
But I'm Ivana, and we'll see you guys next time on The Creation Podcast.