INTRODUCTION

by Frank R. Zindler

On Tuesday, September 13, 1988, I was supposed to debate Henry Morris, Director of the San Diego-based Institute For Creation Research. We were supposed to be debating the historicity of Noah's Flood. Henry Morris, be it noted, is the man most to be blamed for the recrudescence of creationist pseudoscience in the space-age. In 1961, along with coauthor John C. Whitcomb, Jr., Morris published the creationist "classic," The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. That was the volume of tomfoolery that formed the basis for what is wishfully called "creation science," an attempt to make biblical myths look and sound scientific.

The debate was supposed to be aired on the NBC affiliate, Channel 13, in Indianapolis. At the end of July, however, Dick Wolfsie—the host of the program on which the debate was to be held—called me to tell me that the debate had to be postponed. In a voice dripping with disdain, Wolfsie announced that Morris "has a chance to fly in a helicopter over Mt. Aardvark that day, and he doesn't want to pass up the opportunity." Wolfsie's substitution of Aardvark for Ararat nearly sent me into convulsions, and it was a while before I could ask when the debate would finally be held.

Wolfsie said that Morris now was very reluctant to debate me. "He said he's not going to go on with you if all you're going to do is spout Atheism" Wolfsie reported. "He says he just wants to debate science." Wolfsie said he had assured Morris that I have degrees in biology and geology, and that I was fully prepared to handle the debate about the Bible story in a scientific manner. I told Wolfsie that Morris probably had read my ark-debunking articles in the American Atheist magazine, knew I "had his number," and was afraid to face me on television. Wolfsie indicated that Morris was, in fact, familiar with my writings.

The debate was rescheduled for Monday, October 24, but there was some chance (indeed!) that he would send his son John to debate me. (John has a Ph.D. in geological engineering from the University of Oklahoma.) John had been to Mt Ararat a number of times, and had published two books about it. He also held the distinction of having been struck by lightning on "the mount of Noah"!

As things turned out, the October 24th debate was not to be, either. Although the TV station had us scheduled for the 24th, the creationist publication Acts and Facts said it was to be on the 25th! The debate was postponed indefinitely, and I feared it would never be. However, thanks to the tenacity and determination of Dick Wolfsie, the debate—with John, not Henry Morris—finally took place on February 13, 1989. For one spirited hour, John and I went at it on "AM Indiana," Dick Wolfsie's show.

Although the debate was very successful (from my point of view!), several things marred its spirit. I was really quite shocked when Morris denied that he had ever written that there were fossiliferous rocks on the top of Mt. Ararat. Upon returning home, I photocopied the relevant passage from his book The Ark on Ararat and sent it to him. He replied to me with a letter tacitly admitting that he had written about fossils on Ararat, but placing the responsibility for the claim upon "Dr." Clifford Burdick, a fellow creationist. In the letter he made several references to unspecified issues of the Creation Research Society Quarterly — a journal not obtainable in the libraries of Columbus — in which Burdick had published his findings.

Not being able to obtain the journal needed (indeed, not even knowing which issues were needed), I wrote another letter to Morris, asking if he would photocopy the relevant articles and send them to me. I enclosed a five-dollar bill for his expense and trouble. In the last paragraph of my letter I wrote:

"In my previous letter, I neglected to tell you that I very much enjoyed meeting you "in the flesh," and that you now seem to me to be a very gentlemanly fellow. I do hope we shall meet again."

I was quite sincere about what I had written.

When, after a fair amount of time had elapsed and I had not received a reply, I decided to telephone Morris at ICR. There had been, I should note, a second point of contention that had not been resolved during the debate. Morris had claimed that radiometric dating was not reliable because of the "fact" that rubidium/strontium isochron dates had been done of unspecified Precambrian "lava flows" at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and those dates had turned out to be younger than dates obtained with the same method from lava flows at the top of the Canyon — flows younger than the erosion surface! There had been no opportunity to ask for references for this shocking "fact," and so in the letter just mentioned I had asked Morris to supply a few details about the lava flows in the Grand Canyon as well as to send material about the alleged fossiliferous rocks on Ararat.

Almost immediately, upon finding out that it was I on the phone, Morris became quite curt and informed me that he was in a hurry and did not "have time for chit-chat" with me. I managed to ask about the lava flows and he grudgingly gave me a vague idea of where some of the samples had come from, but no specific references or even journal titles in which I could find the evidence for the outrageous claim he had made on television. He asserted that over thirty literature references existed to document his claim, but apparently was in too great a hurry to name even one specifically.

Two days after the telephone call, I received a letter from Morris — postmarked May 10,1989, but dated May 4. It contained the five-dollar bill I had sent him and began:

"Keep your money. The materials you requested are part of the public record and available in many places. I have no intention of doing your work for you."

He then asserted that "You seem to want me to provide you with information that, if your track record is any indication, you will distort and use against me." I really had not expected so rude and insulting a reply from John Morris, although it would not have been surprising had it come from certain other members of the ICR staff.

In this brief letter, Morris spoke volumes about his own character and the nature of the creation "science" enterprise. Can anyone seriously think that a "scientist" is seeking truth if, after making an astonishing claim, he refuses to reveal the source of his data, or when, where, how, or by whom they were obtained?

Was Morris just making up his "information"? Or had he misunderstood — or misrepresented — a real piece of research and feared to let me see it to discover the error of his claim? As readers will see from my annotations of this segment of the debate, the latter alternative would seem to be the case.

In my report of the debate in Volume VI, No. 3 of The American Atheist of Ohio, I boasted that "Morris was unable to make any claim that I was unable to refute, and he either evaded altogether questions and arguments raised by Dick and me, or he gave glaringly inadequate responses."

In the April, 1989, issue of Acts and Facts, however, a rather different account of the debate was published:

"On February 13, Dr. Morris participated in a very spirited debate with Mr. Fred [sic] Zindler, well-known atheist, on a state-wide TV broadcast. Mr. Zindler, a regular contributor to the journal, American Atheist, who has written numerous articles critical of ICR, insisted the debate be over the validity of the Biblical account of Noah's Flood, Judging this to be the most serious weakness in creationism. Morris was able to provide answers to all his substantive charges, while exposing his use of unfair caricatures and 'strawmen arguments.'"

We will leave it to the reader to decide which report of the debate is the more accurate.

Wolfsie: I'm glad you're with us this morning on AM Indiana. On our program today, well, we have two gentlemen who are both geologists: one says there was a Noah and a Noah's ark, and the other says not so. We'll talk to them in just a moment... ^[1]

[commercial]

Wolfsie: Good morning everybody, we're glad you're with us this morning on AM Indiana. We have an excellent show for you today, and I am sure you will find it very provocative and controversial. Both of our guests this morning were educated in a similar way, both educated as geologists; but they have very different points of view as to the origin of man. And a little bit more specifically today, we want to talk about whether in fact there was a flood, Noah, and the ark. Was that a reality? We're going to talk about the archaeological evidence. We're going to talk a little bit about creationism, and whether in fact man began as Adam and Eve and whether there was a flood. Let me introduce our guests here right now.

Our first guest is Professor John Morris. Dr. Morris is a Ph.D. in geological engineering and is a leading expert in the world on Noah and the flood, among other things. He has written books, including Adventure on Ararat and Ark on Ararat, and made a couple of trips to the mountain, is that correct? How many trips?

Morris: I've been to Turkey on several occasions. I've wanted to see if perhaps the remains of Noah's ark were still on Mt. Ararat.

Wolfsie: Good enough, sir. Also joining us, Frank Zindler. Mr. Zindler is formerly a professor of geology and biology. He is now a science writer in Columbus, Ohio, and he's a leading spokesperson on Atheism in the country. He is presently the director of the central Ohio chapter of American Atheists.

And good morning to both of you gentlemen. It's good to see both of you. Professor Morris, let me start with you. As you know I'm wrestling with how to begin this, because I know there are so many things we could talk about. But let me suggest something to you and have you respond, and then I think I can probably sit back for the rest of the show. Is it your contention, sir, that until Mr. Zindler proves otherwise you're going to accept the fact that there was a Noah and a Noah's ark, or do you believe it a fact, sir, that based on your trips, you have some proof?

Morris: Let me tell you something about science, Dick. ^[2] Science exists in the present. Scientists all live in the present, and all of the facts are in the present. The fossils, the rocks, everything is in the present; and we do our experiments in the present we study in the present, we make our conclusions in the present, and that's what science is. The scientific method of experimental observation, reproducibility. When we start talking about the long-ago past, the unobservable past, the even in principle unobservable past, we've left the realm of strict science and we're into this area of faith. ^[3] Now there are at least two ways of looking at the past. One is this evolutionary world view that the earth is billions of years old, and another world view is that perhaps the Bible is right, and that it does represent accurate history. But in a real sense either view is outside the realm of science and into the realm of faith. ^[4]

Wolfsie: One more question, Frank. Let me ask you, John, one question, and then I promise I'll let you go at it—because I want to understand something from where you're coming. You and Mr. Zindler were trained in a similar fashion, at good schools. You're both in the area of geology. Let me ask you this, and then I'll let Frank jump in. You I'm sure were taught that the earth was billions of years old. Is that correct sir?

Morris: That's right.

Wolfsie: Okay. So are you here to say that what you were taught, and the method that they reached to come to that conclusion, was inaccurate?

Morris: The idea that the earth is old is a historical reconstruction. I mean, nobody was back there to see it or to measure it. What I say about the creationist young-earth world view... We can't prove that the earth is young. We can't prove that the earth is old. The facts of geology are compatible to some extent with the idea that the earth is old. The facts of geology are compatible with the idea that the earth is young. ^[5] Now I'm a geologist. I love rocks, I love fossils, and I have a lot of them; but I've never had a rock talk to me. I never had a rock tell me how old it was.

Wolfsie: Let's see if the rocks talk to Frank.

Morris: They might talk to him.

Zindler: Well, first of all, his definition of science is rather bizarre. It would rule out almost all of science. Science is hypothesis testing, John, and you certainly can test hypotheses about the past.

Morris: You can't test history.

Zindler: Yes you can! Absolutely, you can! That's where you're wrong.

Morris: You can test the results of history.

Zindler: Yes, from the results you can infer quite definitely what happened.

Now, you claim that you... In your book Ark on Ararat, you claimed that you found some sedimentary rocks on Mt. Ararat, with fossils. Now I wrote to you, about a year or so ago asking about this, and I never got an answer. I suppose my letter got lost at ICR or something. But...I'd like to ask you now: just what kind of sedimentary rocks were these on the top of Mt. Ararat, and what fossils were in them?

Morris: Talk about switch of subjects! To answer your question, the fossils were shells. ^[6]

Zindler: What type of shells?

Morris: Dated as Cretaceous sorts of things, supposedly on the order of a hundred million years or so old. Now, I don't buy the date, but that's the normal conventional date for it.

Zindler: Now, were these xenoliths ^[7] that had been brought up with the lava, or what?

Morris: No, they were sedimentary limestone layers.

Wolfsie: Frank, help us to understand what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. You guys may be having fun, but I'm lost!

Morris: I don't know what he's talking about either!

Zindler: Okay, that's fine.

Wolfsie: Tell us what you're getting at.

Zindler: Creationists don't understand mountains, basically. They find fossils in the tops of mountains and think that that is proof of Noah's flood. Now why they're in the mountain tops instead of on the mountain tops is something they rarely answer. In the case of Mt. Ararat, this is a curious problem, because Mt. Ararat is a volcano. It's not a mountain made up of sedimentary deposits. And to say that there are fossil deposits on top of Mt. Ararat would imply that it had been under water. ^[8]

Morris: Frank, your problem is that you say that I don't understand geology. What you don't understand is creationism. In your articles written about me... You have such a total misunderstanding of what creationists do say...

Wolfsie: Be specific, Doctor Morris, tell Frank what he misunderstands...

Morris: In this subject, I have never said that those fossils were on top of Mt. Ararat. Those fossils are in sight of Mt. Ararat... ^[9]

Zindler: No, you said that there were sedimentary strata on the top of Mt. Ararat, or on Mt. Ararat, I don't know that you said that they were exactly on the top...

Morris: I reported that in 1969 a glaciologist ^[10] claimed he found a fossil layer about the 14,000-foot level. The fossil layers that I've studied are some ten miles away. ^[11]

Zindler: I know that you said that also, but you claimed that there were fossils in the rock on Mt. Ararat, and that's why I wrote to you...

Wolfsie: Frank, so what?

Zindler: That would imply that Mt. Ararat had been under water. You also said that there were pillow lavas. Now no one else has ever found pillow lavas on Mt. Ararat.

Morris: Oh, that's not true.

Zindler: That's crazy, to think that there would be pillow lavas there. In fact, we have an "ark-ologist" from Columbus, by the name of Garbe. Every time he goes climbing Mt. Ararat I say, "Well now you look for those fossils and you look for those pillow lavas," and they never find them. The photograph in your book is not of pillow lavas. You say they're pillow lavas...

Wolfsie: What are pillow lavas?

Zindler: Pillow lavas are lavas laid under water, under great depths of water, and they form like pillows because the lava congeals so rapidly. They have a glassy constitution...

Wolfsie: I've got to stop you. What do you say—Again, I've got to think about the person at home. Like, if I were home, I'd be lost here. What is it that you would have liked to have found, or did you find on the mountain, that would have suggested to you that there was a Noah's Ark? And then I want Frank to jump in.

Zindler: That's a good question.

Wolfsie: What did you find, or what would you have liked to have found relating to the ark?

Morris: In a schizophrenic fashion, he's brought up so many different subjects... ^[12] I never claimed that there were fossils on Mt. Ararat. I do claim that one fellow claims he found some at the 14,000-foot level. I have never seen them, and I have looked for them. ^[13] The mountain is a volcanic mountain. The type of lava that is on Mt. Ararat is consistent with the type that's laid down under water under great pressure. The aspect of it's being pillow, that's a very specific type of lava found in a deep-sea trench and different things, that is recognizably laid down under water. It is a field-judgement call. As a geologist, trained in these sorts of things, I found lavas that in my opinion were pillow.

Wolfsie: And that would mean...

Morris: ...and I have pictures of those...

Zindler: ...that they were laid down under water.

Now you say, on page seven, of your Ark on Ararat that Mt. Ararat was created on the third day...

Wolfsie: Don't laugh! He read the book, he bought it!

Zindler: ...created on the third day of creation week, ^[14]along with the ocean basins, but that at that time Mt. Ararat was only about ten to twelve thousand feet high. Now if all the water came down in forty days and drowned all the mountains of the world, that would require the rain to come down at about eleven and a half feet per hour. John, that's not rain, that's hydraulic mining! Everything would have been swept off the surface of the continents. The continents would be absolutely denuded down to crystalline rocks. All the sedimentary rocks would have been deposited in the ocean basins. Now clearly, that's not the pattern that we see... and it would certainly imply... that does away with Noah's flood!

Morris: Frank, let me say that if you're going to be critiquing my book, or if you're going to be critiquing the Bible, which I do believe, what you need to do is handle that [sic] data honestly ^[15] ... Now what you just have said...

Zindler: What have I done dishonestly?

Morris: ...is not what I wrote in that book!

Zindler: Oh, on page seven it's there! ^[16]

Morris: Okay, but I go on, page eight, nine, ten...

Zindler: I know, you contradict yourself later in the book...[hubub]...the ocean basins come later... ^[17]

Morris: If you're going to talk about my work, or if you're going to talk about the Bible, I'm going to hold your feet to the fire. I'm going to make sure you characterize accurately...

Zindler: I'm going to try to keep you honest

Morris: ...and not an unfair caricature of what I said; I did not say that...

Zindler: It's not a caricature, it's comic-book science ^[18] that you write, John.[hubub]

Morris: We need to come to an understanding here!

Zindler: Now, if that mountain was ten thousand feet high, where did all the water come from?

Morris: We need to talk honestly, Frank. ^[19]

Zindler: Where did the water come from?

Morris: We really need to make sure that we're talking facts, that they're not your cartoon caricature...

Zindler: Well I'm just repeating what you said. If they aren't facts, I can't help that, John. Where did the water come from to drown Mt. Ararat, ten thousand feet in forty days?

Morris: What happen to page seven, being created on day three? You know if we're going to talk about a subject, let's talk about a subject. You change the subject...

Wolfsie: All right, we have to take a break...

Zindler: We've got to figure out where the water came from...

Wolfsie: I'll tell you what we'll do. You decide what question you want to ask, I'll ask it...

Zindler: I've asked it!

Wolfsie: ...and you decide what question you want to answer, and we'll do that when we come back. Stay with us.

Zindler: Where did the water...

[Commercial]

Woflsie: We're back on AM Indiana. Both of our guests this morning were trained as geologists; but if you tuned in even a couple of minutes ago, you know we have some real basic disagreements here—about the origin of the earth, Adam and Eve, Noah's ark, and that's what we're talking about. Let me, let me ask a question, and therefore neither of you can avoid it, okay? If you just take the story of Noah, as I understand it, it seems to me there are certain aspects of it that appear to be, on the surface, rather implausible—if not a miracle: how he got all these animals on the boat, how big the boat was, how big the boat had to be... So my first question to you, sir, is do you need to explain those things, or are you simply going to say God did it, it was a miracle, no explanation is necessary.

Morris: I think the story of the flood clearly has its miraculous aspects to it; but by and large, the kinds of things that are mentioned in the scriptures regarding Noah's flood are natural processes. I mean we're talking rainfall and erosion and deposition; and these sorts of things are present processes that are studiable and understandable. ^[20] And in those areas, by all means, I do believe that the flood account is compatible with the geologic data. Now we can't prove the flood; ^[21] we didn't see the flood. It's totally outside the realm of our experience, and so we can only argue by analogy of that. My study of geology has shown me that by and large all of the rock units that are on the earth's surface were laid down by catastrophic processes. ^[22] We've studied, we have a big study of Mt. St. Helens, for instance, and we study that terrible catastrophe and we see the sorts of things... that dinky little volcano— I mean it wasn't too dinky for people living on the north side of the mountain in 1980... But that dinky little volcano did the sorts of things, laid down the sorts of layers that we see in the geologic record throughout. All of geology is beginning to move toward this catastrophic interpretation of the rocks...

Wolfsie: Okay, so your—this is what I should have asked before... your contention is that your approach that your study of the geologic data show that evolution as we understand it may not be right or your study shows you that in fact that there was a Noah or you're still unclear about the proof on either side?

Morris: The point is, science can't prove the past. What a scientist can do is study the present and do a historical interp... or reconstruction...what happened in the past to bring the present in the state it is now. That's what a scientist can do, that's what I do... that's what Frank claims he does.

Wolfsie: Okay, Frank? [hubub]...what about the ark story?

Zindler: We certainly can see the past. For example, whenever we look through a telescope, we see the stars or galaxies...

Morris: Dr. Who, here! He goes back in time!

Zindler: ...the galaxies as they appeared millions of years ago ^[23] ...But getting back to Noah's flood, he hasn't answered the question: Where did the water come from? As I pointed out, we would have had so much water come down in forty days in order to raise sea level almost two miles... that we would have had ten, eleven and a half feet of water coming down per hour. This would have scoured off the surface of all the continents. All the sedimentary rocks would have been laid down in the ocean basins in one great, jumbled mass. That is not what we find. The fossil record, the rock record, shows many cases of rock...things that had to have been formed very slowly and gently. For example, the Chalk Cliffs of Dover, the chalk deposits. These rocks are made entirely of the remains of fossil, microscopic organisms. You couldn't possibly form a deposit like that in one year's time, ^[24] let alone in the jumbled mess of Noah's flood. How could you get the chalk deposits in one year?

Morris: In order to interpret the past. In order to try to explain how any particular rock unit was laid down, we stay in the present, we're staying in the present...

Zindler: Sure...

Morris: We don't have Dr. Who's time machine to go back to see how chalk was formed...

Zindler: Chalk is being formed in the present...

Morris: ...that's right, but we have to impose on that [sic] data certain assumptions, a certain interpretive framework. In geology we were taught... you were taught, I was taught, that the present is the key to the past...

Zindler: Sure...

Morris: ...and by studying the present we may find analogies... and so we might know something about the past. But as I said, at Mt. St. Helens, there are episodes in the present which give us a peek into a very catastrophic possibility for the past... ^[25]

Zindler: It shows the 27 buried fossils...at Yellowstone Park...it shows quite clearly how 27 layers of fossil forests were buried ^[26]... But getting back to the chalk, how could chalk have been formed? These are microscopic fossils of organisms... There is a very strict limitation as to how many of these organisms can live in the sea at any one time. There are remains of little granules formed by algae, the so-called coccoliths. You can only grow so many algae per square meter of surface of the sea at one time...

Morris: Let me tell you the error of your thinking, Frank. You're making the assumption that the present is the key to the past...

Zindler: Oh, are you saying that the sunlight didn't... in the past, the sunlight didn't limit the growth of algae? ^[27]

Morris: In the laboratory, there are a number of different studies that have been shown, that the different algal organisms and different types of things in that chalk deposit... they can grow, they can duplicate, they can double in their volume every day. or maybe several times a day, if the nutrients are right, if the temperature is right... I am claiming that during Noah's flood, there were locations, there were spots in this global flood where the water was incredibly nutrient-rich, were the temperatures were large enough, to have what we call an algal bloom...

Zindler: In the darkness of all this water coming down! During this flood, when we would expect that the skies would be extremely overcast, in fact it should have been completely dark. How would you grow algae?

Morris: Well, you say it's dark, I don't see that in scripture...

Zindler: ...that's a hell of a lot of water, there, still coming down...

Morris: That was quite a storm, no question about that!

Zindler:... it allegedly destroyed the world!

Wolfsie: Let's go from the microorganisms, which I can't see...

Zindler: How about the coral reefs? ^[28]

Wolfsie: Let's talk about the big animals. We've got to take a break here ...I want to know what was on this boat, how many animals were on the boat, and let's get into the big picture here, that's people understand...We'll be right back.

[commercial]

Wolfsie: Back on AM Indiana, talking about Noah's Ark. Frank, let me ask you very specifically, let's get from the very tiny things to the big things. What about the story, the size of the ark? And what Noah would have had to put on the ark? What troubles you? And then Professor Morris can respond.

Zindler: Not only is there the problem of how do you get all of the species of land animals into the ark, the primitive people who created the flood myth in the first place, in the fourth millennium B.C. or whenever, they didn't realize that plants were living things, and they didn't realize the implications of Noah not taking fishes and marine organisms into the ark. If we limit ourselves to just the water that is known on the planet, and the volume of sedimentary strata that we know of, and if as the creationists claim, all these sedimentary strata were deposited during that one year, the ocean at that time would have been actually two parts water to one part mud! ^[29] Now, if that were the case, with a world-destroying flood, how would the whales have stayed alive? They could not have been swimming... through, straining out plankton and so on, to feed. Delicate corals die if there is just the tiniest bit of silt in the water, or change in water temperature, and so forth. So Noah would have to have had enormous numbers of aquaria in the ark to keep the whales going, to keep the marine fishes from dying because of the dilution of the salt water with fresh water, to keep the fresh water organisms alive because of the salt coming in, and all these noxious things that the volcanos are throwing out... Incidentally, if all the volcanic lava beds that we see interspersed between these sedimentary rocks were laid down during one year, the amount of heat released from that lava would have heated the water of the ocean to several thousand degrees centigrade! And so Noah's ark would have had to have been air-conditioned! ^[30]

Wolfsie: And how many animals on the boat? How many species?

Zindler: There are at least a million species of organisms known, and the creationists say, well we wouldn't have to have all the species. We would have maybe just a general representative of them. But even so, with the need for the aquaria, a boat simply the size of an ocean liner would be inadequate. ^[31]

Wolfsie: Okay...

Morris: Frank, you are critiquing the biblical account here. You're saying that Noah...[three-second flaw in videotape of debate] Here's the Bible, [holds up a Bible] Now...

Zindler: A very ignorant book, by the way...

Morris: Oh my!

Zindler: Very unscientific...

Morris: You are critiquing this account...Will you tell me where it says Noah had to take the fish on board?

Zindler: I'm saying it was an error because they didn't know he had to take the fish on board...

Morris: What you're saying is the biblical account is wrong.

Zindler: Yes!

Morris: Because there's not room on board for all the fish and whales and...

Zindler: No-no-no! It was wrong because they didn't know...

Morris: Nowhere is it claimed that they had to be on board.

Zindler: That's why it's wrong...You see, for it to be a plausible argument, they would have had to say, "and he had to take the fish on board, and the corals on board..."

Morris: See what this is? Let me show you what this is. This is Atheistic logic here...

Wolfsie: Well he doesn't deny that!

Morris: No, he doesn't...He's Madalyn Murray's right-hand man!

Zindler: I was showing that the Bible is pre-scientific, you see...

Morris: An Atheist assumes a Very arrogant position, in my mind, that there is no god. Now, every philosopher knows that there is no such thing as an absolute negative. ^[32] He's saying there is no god...

Zindler: You have to prove there is one; I don't have to disprove it

Morris: Okay, but you're making...

Zindler: The onus of proof is on you who allege... ^[33]

Morris: But to say that there is no god...that's illogical!

Zindler: On the contrary! It is extraordinarily illogical to say there is a god who couldn't tell the people who wrote the Bible that they had to take fishes and corals in the ark!

Morris: Now your logic is going the same direction...You're saying that I know, for a fact, that no whales could have survived outside the ark...

Zindler: I would hope you would know that!

Morris: Well, you're making the statement that you know this knowledge, that no whales could have survived outside the ark—Now, I think that's an illogical statement. The flood is not as you characterize it. Let me tell you some things about water...

Zindler: It destroyed the world, supposedly...

Morris: You betcha! By the billions fish, clams, whales, died in the flood, or maybe not billions of whales, by the billions...

Zindler: That's another thing. There are too many fossils for one world! If you were to...

Wolfsie: Hey, Frank, now hold it! You know...

Zindler: You can't have all the known fossils living at one time!

Wolfsie: ...I was just about to understand something, and you're changing on me! Now wait a second...

Zindler: You see, you can't have all the known fossils living at one time... ^[34]

Wolfsie: I was just on the verge of getting something here... [To Morris] You're claiming that the fish didn't have to go on the ark because the fish just would have survived, because they live in water anyway...

Morris: The Bible is very explicit about what goes on the ark. It says that—it says the land animals. It says all those in whose nostrils is the breath of life, of everything that lives on the dry land. So many animals... that's excluding whales...

Zindler: That's right! ^[35]

Morris: ...although they breathe air, but they don't live on land. It talks about cattle and domesticated animals. It talks about creeping things, the small animals...and the beasts of the field, which are the large animals. And it says very explicitly that those had to be on board the ark...and the birds. Now, he says millions of species. If you add up that number of species, you know, the maximum number even that anyone would even propose would be on board the ark would be, I mean the outside maximum, the worst-case scenario, we're talking maybe fifty thousand animals... ^[36] And the ark is certainly big enough to carry that number of animals for the length of time that they had to be...

Zindler: Okay, you'd think that there...

Morris: Now what he's saying is—he's adding to the story. He's saying that the story makes no sense unless you put the fish onboard. I think that's an illogical addition to it...

Zindler: You've apparently never raised tropical fish, John....you would know how difficult it is to keep fish alive!

Morris: Let me tell you something about water. There are many, many studies where waters of different temperature, of different salinities, of different chemistries, segregate. And during the flood there would have been zones of fresh water, of salt water... there is... again, billions of sea creatures died in Noah's flood. But all the Bible, the biblical account, requires is that two of each of these created kinds would have survived somewhere in a pocket...

Zindler: Somewhere close enough together that they could get back together after the flood! And that stratification would have been impossible, John, because of all the volcanic activity you talk about going on. ^[37] This would be churning stuff up all the time [hubub]...

Wolfsie: Were there dinosaurs on the ark? Were there dinosaurs on this ark?

Morris: The flood account does not predict...

Wolfsie: Oh! I've got to take a break... What I'm trying to establish...

Zindler: Of course there would have been dinosaurs on the ark!

Wolfsie: I want to understand, because I want to talk about how Noah's flood occurred... and then I think a fair question is, if there were dinosaurs on this ark, how is that in keeping with how we know that man and dinosaurs didn't exist at the same time. And if there weren't dinosaurs, where did they come from, since all the species were wiped out? That seems like a fair question. I'll try to remember how I asked that in just a moment, stay tuned...

[commercial]

Wolfsie: Okay, we're back. John Morris, I was taught when I went to school — might not have been the school you would have sent your kids to — but the school I went to said dinosaurs and man... dinosaurs predated man by millions and millions of years. I think a fair, straight-forward question is whether dinosaurs were on the ark. What do you think?

Morris: I think there's a great deal of evidence that dinosaurs lived during the same time that man has lived. This is what the Bible seems to indicate and there is a great deal of evidence that we can marshal in support of that idea. ^[38]

Wolfsie: There's no word 'dinosaur' in the Bible, though, I assume?

Morris: There is the word, the Hebrew word tannin ^[39] which is translated in many places 'dragons.' I'd think, I'd think... in fact I'd speculate — we don't know — that people who study about myths, like myths of dragons... and it is true that almost every culture around the world has legends of dragons... and they all describe these dragons in much the same way as we draw our dinosaur fossils. And I suspect that the legends of dragons come from encounters of people with dinosaurs, ^[40] and that they not only lived at the same time but have died out in fairly recent times. Even in fact in the middle ages, sober scientists who were listing the animals that were alive at the time listed dragons. Alexander the Great ^[41] has a very sober history of an encounter with a dragon, and most of the historians of the day list dragons as if they were real.

Wolfsie: Frank, in your opinion, is there incontrovertible evidence that dinosaurs and man could not have existed at the same time?

Zindler: Yes, that is not true. Of course, dinosaurs do exist today in the form of birds. Birds descended from small, bipedal dinosaurs. But with that exception, there are no dinosaurs surviving after the end of the Cretaceous period. The whole thing, though, is why aren't there any... all over the place? ^[42] Now—one thing, getting back to Noah's flood... if that had occurred, you see, we should have a mixture of fossils, from the bottom to the top, of all the different types of living creatures, as well as all the known extinct forms. The Cambrian deposits, six hundred million years ago, supposedly — according to him, supposedly — we should find in the Cambrian rocks at least a few traces of human habitation, ^[43] along with trilobites, along with other types of forms, oak trees... we should at least find pollen. ^[44] We should find all of these things all jumbled together if they were all contemporary.

Wolfsie: All right, that's a fair question. Do we find human beings as we know human beings, and dinosaurs in the same... what do you call them? Sedimentary deposits? Do we ever find that?

Morris: Let me tell you some facts about the fossil record. ^[45] Ninety five percent of all the fossils that have ever been found are marine invertebrates. They're like shellfish...and a lot of fish, but mostly bottom, ocean-bottom dwellers. The flood as an event was an oceanic sort of event, ^[46] and the kinds of forces that we envision as having been involved at the time would have been just right for the preservation of oceanic creatures. Those same Forces which I envision mostly as huge tidal waves and massive, catastrophic forces ^[47]... when those tidal waves come in, what they're doing, is basically scouring at the bottom and as they curl back down, the forces involved would be right for the deposition of oceanic creatures, and would be right for the destruction of land sorts of animals. Less, much, much less than one percent of all fossils have anything to do with the land. Dinosaurs, there've been a few of those you know, there have been several thousand dinosaur fossils found... there have been a few men...but mammals, mammals are just real rare; ^[48] and in fact the mammals that are found I feel date from after the flood, during events like the Ice Age, which were land-associated events which would have been just right for fossilizing land creatures and not for oceanic creatures. But basically, the fossil record shows clams at the bottom, and clams with very little change all the way up to the top. And that's the kind of thing we find...

Zindler: Well, I think people who study clams would be upset by that generalization! But anyway, we do have fossil deposits like the Karroo deposit in South Africa, where there are over 800 billion vertebrate remains. Most of these are mammal-like reptiles, connecting reptiles to mammals...

Morris: That number is an apocryphal number. I traced it out one time...

Zindler: Oh, really?

Morris: The number is...

Zindler: Your father cites it... ^[49]

Morris: It is included in a lot of creationist publications... Checking it out, it wasn't true...

Zindler: Okay, well I'm glad to hear that...but there are many billions, anyway, in that deposit. It's a large deposit; these are mostly mammal-like reptiles, connecting links between reptiles and mammals. But in that... you won't find any humans, you won't find any elephant remains, you won't find any really clearly mammalian things. But you should! I mean, there are plenty of vertebrate remains preserved there. We're not talking about deep-sea clams. We're talking about... about continental-type deposits. And they're not there. You should find at least one some place, one human fossil in a Cambrian rock. That would certainly be enough to wipe out the evolutionary idea; but that has never been found.

Morris: Tell you what, Frank, I'll concede you a point. That's a point for your side. Okay? It would be nice, for my way of thinking, to find the fossils a little more mixed up than they are. But I think there's a lot of circular reasoning involved in the fossil record. Whenever you find a human fossil, you date it as a recent layer and... ^[50]

Zindler: No, no...

Morris: ...there's a lot of circular reasoning...what we should find if the evolutionary scenario is right... we should find in that fossil record the record of types of animals changing into other types of animals. And as is now recognized by every leading evolutionary paleontologist and everybody else, what we find in the fossil record is clams, we find oysters, we find trilobites, and nothing in between... ^[51]

Zindler: No...John...no...

Morris: ...and this I think is the biggest argument against the evolutionary scenario...

Zindler: It is absolutely wrong! We have...

Wolfsie: What's wrong? Wait a minute. What's wrong? His assessment that there...

Zindler: ...that there is no sequence in the rocks...

Morris: About what I said was, there are no transitional forms in the rocks...

Zindler: ...transitional forms...In the evolution of the horse, ^[52] John...

Morris: ...and to say that's wrong is to disagree with guys like Stephen Gould... ^[53]

Zindler: No, Steve agrees with me, we've discussed this...

Wolfsie: Drop a few names, Frank!

Zindler: No, Steve Gould is not that dumb...

Morris: He doesn't write that way. He says that there are no transitional forms between the basic body types of animals...

Zindler: He's talking...well, all right, he's going back to the really basic types, the phyla. ^[54] Okay? But certainly, the classes...

Morris: And the orders and classes...

Zindler: We do have connections between classes... ^[55]

Morris: ...and connections between species.

Zindler: Well, now you're at two different levels.

Morris: I know...

Zindler: On the one level we're talking about microevolution and the punctuated equilibrium model...

Morris: Which I agree with... ^[56]

Zindler: ...which involves one species changing into the next species. On the other hand, we're talking about large-scale transitions, and Steve Gould happens to be an expert on the mammal-like reptiles. I've discussed this with him. These beautifully span the structural continuity from a very primitive type of reptile to a primitive type of mammal. The entire structure of the jaw, the middle ear structure — which is how we define mammals — is there to be seen. ^[57] The evolution of the horse, John, these are in Tertiary rocks...

Morris: The horse, I'm very confident, is after the flood. ^[58] Those fossils are from after the flood.

Zindler: The Tertiary deposits were laid down after the flood?

Morris: Not as a general...! wouldn't say all Tertiary deposits are from after the flood, but as a general rule, those Tertiary deposits that contain mammal fossils, those few mammal fossils that there are, are probably from after the flood. ^[59]

Wolfsie: Don't we have...I thought we had a pretty good scientific way of dating something.

Morris: Let me tell you how to date a sedimentary rock, the kind with fossils in them. If you find a fossil out in the field somewhere and you take it into the geology lab, and say "tell me how old this fossil is," you know what they'll do? They'll turn to this textbook, and they'll look... open to the geologic column, and they'll look until they find a picture of that fossil in this book, and say "Oh, that fossil lived three hundred million years ago, so this fossil is three hundred million years old." You cannot date a sedimentary rock ^[60] or fossil ^[61] with the radiometric dating schemes. These only work with lava and granite, things like that. But not for sedimentary rock. You date the rock by the fossils that are in there, and those dates are established by the evolutionary assumption... ^[62]

Zindler: Not so...

Morris: You betcha! It's circular reasoning!

Zindler: Okay, now...

Wolfsie: Thirty seconds, Frank, we've got to take a break...

Zindler: This is the way you do it quickly. However, the original sequence, we know that that fossil lived at a certain period, and not another...

Morris: How do you know that?

Zindler: From the position of the rock...It's just below the other...[complete chaos for five seconds] ...this is elementary geology...

Morris: I know that. You don't get a number that way, you get a sequence...

Zindler: ...you get the sequence, that's right. Now, from the sequence then you proceed to use other methods of dating. Many of the sedimentary strata are interspersed between lava flows which can be dated radiometrically, and, despite the various problems with specific radiometric dating methods, you can use one method to check another, ^[63] and you can...

Morris: You want me to tell you what's wrong with radiometric dating?

Wolfsie: Yes...well, probably not! Let's take a break. That will be complicated. We'll be right back after a quick break.

[commercial]

Wolfsie: All right, we're going to talk about this idea, how old the earth is, and this whole idea of dating. I'm going to have to put you on the spot here, Professor Morris. Your contention would be, conservatively, how old, in fact, is the earth? ^[64]

Morris: You know, I've dug up a lot of rocks in my day, and I've never dug up one with a label on it to tell me how old it is. We've got to interpret those rocks, based on what we see in the present. And one of the ways that... potentially a way to date a rock is by measuring the isotopes in there and we end up with radiometric dating. The assumptions that are involved in those methods, like the assumption that the present is the key to the past, are really in every case questionable at best, and wrong in many cases. In fact the idea of radiometric dating denies at its very core the idea that the earth might be young. It's not a possibility that those methods would show that the earth was young. ^[65]

Wolfsie: Here's what I don't understand. We're not arguing four billion years versus five billion years. We're arguing several thousand years versus four billion years—that's a disparity that I can't comprehend.

Zindler: Yes, that's important...

Morris: That's right—the scientific answer to that question, not the emotional answer, but a scientific answer, is that the rock data; the isotope data, is [sic] compatible with the idea of an old earth; and the rock data is [sic] compatible with the idea of a young earth.

Wolfsie: I don't understand... ^[66]

Morris: It can go either way. The rocks don't talk. Let me talk about a...let me tell you about a research project that we're working on right now...

Wolfsie: Quickly, I want to make sure Frank gets to respond...

Morris: In the Grand Canyon there are two different lava flows, that can be dated by the radiometric dating methods. The one is at the very bottom, one of the oldest rocks, and is probably—you know, one of the very earliest rocks down at the way bottom of the canyon. And the other lava flow is on the very plateau, and it was... there was a volcano after the canyon was formed; and the stuff spilled down in the canyon... and it is thought by normal dating methods that that should be just a couple million years old. But with the dating methods, down at the bottom, we've got a whole slough of dates, but basically they... now, by using the best methods of geology today, the rubidium-strontium isochron method, they dated that at 1.1 billion years. Using that same method, the very same method, the same technique, same accuracy, they dated the one at the top at 2.6 billion years! ^[67]

Wolfsie: But that still puts you out of business, because you're saying the earth's five thousand years old...

Morris: No-no-no-no! I'm just saying that radiometric dating is so full of unfounded, probably wrong assumptions...[hubub] you can only get out depending upon what you put in...

Zindler: Dick, we don't have time enough to go in to all of the figures, into all the techniques of radiometric dating. The creationists have screwed it up so badly, it takes hours to explain. ^[68] But we don