This is a follow-up discussion to Will Barlow’s Scripture and Science class, parts 12-13. If you haven’t watched or listened to that yet, you can go here or find it on the Restitutio podcast feed as episode 464 on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Sean Finnegan asks Will Barlow about earth science, climate change, geology, radiometric dating, and Noah’s flood.
Questions for the interview:
1. Why did you do a whole episode on earth science?
2. I noticed you didn’t get into atmospheric studies, specifically the whole topic of climate change (or as it used to be called, “Global Warming.”) Have you looked into the science of that? What’s your take on it?
3. Let’s talk about uniformitarianism. Geologists see a trickle of a creek at the bottom of a deep valley. They measure the rate of erosion in the present and then assume that rate has always been the same in the past. YEC point out that a couple of catastrophes over the years would drastically shorten the time required to dig the valley. Any thoughts on this?
4. You talked about radiocarbon dating–the process by which the parent atom (Carbon 14) turns into the daughter atom (Carbon 12). This dating system has come under scrutiny due to dating items of known age and finding them to be thousands of years older than they are. We also saw this with Mt. St. Helens when they data igneous rock using Argon-Potassium or Lead-Lead dating and found them to be millions of years old and we know that rock formed in 1980. Do you think there’s some way the daughter atoms get changed or siphoned off? Why do we get these wrong dates? How confident are you in radiometric dating?
5. Ice cores are another area that clearly shows and old age of the earth. Right? Have you looked into this much?
6. Plate tectonics explains how continents move, right? Do you believe the old theory of pangeia?
7. let’s talk about Noah’s flood. Global or local? What do you think?
8. So cool that most ancient civilizations have a flood story. It’s like a fingerprint left at a crime scene.
9. How confident are you that a flood happened as described in the bible?
