This is a rush transcript from the “Creation Today Show,” released August 4, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Overview

Eric Hovind and Paul Taylor welcome special guest John MacKay in the 8/4/2011 episode of Creation Today. Why do scientists who believe in evolution often end up changing their theories over time, and why do some of them even contradict one another? In this episode of Creation Today, John MacKay gives us insight into and answers to such questions.

According to evolutionists, there is no absolute truth. Thus, any new theory could be correct, whether alone or incorporated into an older theory. John MacKay shows and teaches us that there is indeed such a thing as absolute truth: God’s Word. It disproves all nonsense, and establishes a true and firm foundation for us to stand on, no matter who may challenge it.

Transcript

Eric Hovind:  From the CTN Studio in Pensacola, Florida, this is Creation Today where we believe the bible is literally true and scientifically accurate and we are not ashamed to say so. I am one of your hosts, Eric Hovind.

Paul Taylor: And I’m Paul Taylor. And we’re here each episode to answer questions on the bible and on science, and cover what is going on in creation today. For the second episode running we are privileged to be joined by John MacKay, the International director of Creation Research

John MacKay: How are you folks?

Eric Hovind:  Looking forward to learning more about the research you are doing down there, and then things that we are discovering. It is absolutely amazing. You guys enjoy the show.

[Break]

Eric Hovind:  We are excited about the show today because we have got special guest John MacKay all the way from Australia. Did you fly in?

John MacKay:  Not directly. I sort of came via Canada and down so I am heading back south because I am from the real south.

Eric Hovind: The real south, the real down under. We are excited to have him. If you want to get a hold of his ministry, he has done some incredible research which is available at creationresearch.net.

John MacKay:  Dot net.

Eric Hovind: Dot net, yes. I also want to let you know that the new edition of the CSE and we invite you to get a hold of that at creationtoday.org/current where we do a lot of articles in there.

We are excited to have you. I want to get right into some of the research that you are doing and, Paul, I know you and John have known each other for a number of years. Is that right?

Paul Taylor:  A very, very long time. In fact, a couple of centuries also, yeah.

Eric Hovind:  Well, what was interesting when we were talking yesterday, Paul, you said, “Actually, I first met you back in 1980.” You named the church and you remember the lady that was there at the church and I went, “How do you do that?” God has blessed you with a really good memory.

John MacKay:  He has, there is no doubt about it. I do not know how I do that but it just happens and I take advantage of it.

Eric Hovind: He remembers all of these things. Well, remember for us if you would, the question that you are most often asked. What is it that you get asked about a lot?

John MacKay:  The funniest version of the commonest questions — I was running a youth meeting and my wife, who does not normally come to youth meetings, was sitting there and a young man put his hand up, a teenager. He said, “What is the oldest fossil that you have ever dated?”

[Laughter]

John MacKay: Now I will

Eric Hovind: I can see where this is going.

John MacKay:  My wife can read my mind because the look from her face was, “If you dare say what,” so I tried to answer it scientifically.

[Laughter]

Eric Hovind:  Oh, good. That was probably a wise thing to do.

John MacKay:  At the moment there is a real resurgence in questions about the age of things and I love to remind people, “Look, even if we could prove the world was millions of years old, there is one question you have not answered. Where did it come from?”

Eric Hovind:  That is true.

John MacKay:  Right, because how old something is does not change whether it proves creation or not. What it deals with is are the six days literal.

Eric Hovind:  Correct.

John MacKay:  And then we go on to a second question. So I love to remind them, “Look, if I was digging up King Tut’s tomb and I found a nice round bench like this. Now, what would the evidence that it was created be?” Because everyone who walks into King Tut’s tomb did not believe any of those objects happened by themselves.

Eric Hovind:  Correct.

John MacKay:  Because a creation that shows evidence that somebody existed before it, somebody is not a part of it, and somebody is smarter than and actually made wood, like this bench here, do things that wood would not.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  That is a creation.

Eric Hovind:  Yes, it does not grow like this.

John MacKay:  Yes, and what you find is the smarter the creator was the less time they took. That is how big companies make money. Put a smarter foreman on and you cut time out. Obviously if you start plotting this up, the smarter you are the faster the job gets done. Hey, if you are all smart how long do you take?

Eric Hovind:  How long?

John MacKay:  You do not. That is right. You do not need time. Time is the least important factor. So, that’s what I first of all have to dismiss. You are asking me one question but you are meaning something else.

Eric Hovind:  Yes.

John MacKay:  So that is the common sort of attitude out there at the moment; the millions of years.

Eric Hovind:  Love that, oh, I love that. So millions of years and what is the best answer for why is the earth not millions of years old? Why can we trust God’s word, apart from the fact that this is God’s word? That is a great reason to trust it. Why scientifically do we look at this and say, “No, I am going with this, not only because of what it says but for Christians out there we have got great evidence to back it up.”

John MacKay:  Okay, we are coming from two different directions.

Eric Hovind:  Okay.

John MacKay:  You see this grey hair? I have been on planet Earth a few more years than you have.

Eric Hovind:  Three, at least.

John MacKay:  At least three, that is right. But what it tells me is that all the theories about how all the world was that I learned doing a geology degree in Queensland University, I am old enough to know that they have all gone by the bullet.

Eric Hovind:  Wow.

John MacKay:  And they now have got new theories and the new theories still disagree with the bible even though they disagree with the old theories. So there is lesson number one. Lesson number two coming from that side, one year I had to give a presentation to the Oxford Union. You have been to Oxford, have you not? This is sort of a specialty group there.

Paul Taylor:  I have been to the shopping center.

John MacKay:  Oh, you have been to the shopping center.

Paul Taylor:  I was there actually handing out copies of Darwin’s original speech with a special forward by Ray Kiffers.

John MacKay: That is right. That is right. So anyway, I thought I am going to go and do my extra research because I am sure this question will come up. I had been following an Aussie fossil, a fossil that was found in Australia in 1910. But, of course, those were the days of the British Empire and God was British and they owned the world.

Eric Hovind:  We know he is American now.

John MacKay:  And Republican.

Eric Hovind:  And Republican?

John MacKay:  Right, and basically they took this fossil to the Naturalist Museum in England. I first came across it in 1987. Now, I am a bit weird I know, but I do not just photograph fossils, I photograph the little labels down in the corner.

Eric Hovind:  Right, you want to know what they say.

John MacKay:  Yeah, what they say and it said, “This fossil was found in St. Peters in Sydney and it is 200 million years old,” okay, 1987. Well I went back there in 1999, the year I had to give this presentation and I thought I will just check up on my fossil. And here there is a new label. Click. This is one of the only known specimens of an amphibian found in Australia 235 million years old. I thought, “It’s not 35 million years since I have been at this museum.”

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  So at that point I thought I am going to get out the original shipping certificates and see how old it was when it left Australia. In 1910, guess how old it was.

Eric Hovind:  6,000?

John MacKay:  No, no, it was 180 million years old.

Eric Hovind: 180 to 200

John MacKay:  Now, do you realize that we have a lot of ladies out there watching and they think they are aging fast.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  But this fossil, he aged 55 million years in only 70 years basically and you think, “Hang on, if the 235 million years was a fact, you could not read the bible as real history. If the 200 million years was a fact, you could not. If the 180 do you follow the argument?”

Eric Hovind: Right.

John MacKay:  But the fact is they are all just the latest PhDs. That is all they are.

Eric Hovind:  Wow.

John MacKay:  And so the dates of planet Earth that contradict the bible, well I love to put it and tell people there is plenty of opinions, plenty of theories that contradict everything in the bible, but the facts never do. That is coming from the scientific end. Coming from the biblical end the question I have learned to ask is, “Okay, we like to say how long would you need to make a planet?” It is the wrong question. The question should be, “Given that the bible says Jesus Christ is the creator, how long would he need to make the planet?” The best example for Christians is go to John chapter 2 and he turned water into?

Eric Hovind:  Wine.

John MacKay: Okay. H2O gives C2H5OH. Right? Now, the breweries would love to find out how he did this.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  It would cut their overheads to the bone, right? But, in other words, H is hydrogen, O is oxygen, but C is carbon. He did not spit into it, he did not drop anything into it, he just spoke. That is why it says in the beginning was the word. In other words, you do not need time to turn water into wine, you need talent. And the more talent you have got, the less time you take.

Eric Hovind:  I love this.

John MacKay:  So when you go back to Genesis, he did not need six days. He could have made the universe just like that [snaps fingers], but he took six days for a reason. He tells us in Exodus, “I made the world in six days and I rested on the seventh so you will work for six days and you will rest on the seventh.” He kept his own law. Because you remember when this Jesus creator actually rested on the Sabbath particular mention, did it deliberately, so he would not be working the day after he was crucified.

Eric Hovind:  Wow.

John MacKay:  He rested all day on the Sabbath because it was vital that he keep the law whether he was alive or whether he was dead so we could be saved from our sin.

Eric Hovind:  This is great. Man, I want to continue this conversation and ask more of these questions because I love getting these solid answers and where we are coming from the bible and of course coming the history of science, which both of you gentlemen have done. So, I am excited about this. I want to get into what the atheist would say to that though and what they would respond to that. We will talk more about you and some of the work that you have done right after this break.

[Break]

Paul Taylor: Welcome back. You are watching Creation Today with me, Paul Taylor, and with Eric Hovind and our special guest, John MacKay. We are glad to have you with us. We are looking at questions on the subject of bible and science. We were talking before the break about the big question debate — the debate that John had with the Reverend Doctor Professor Sir John Polkinghorne KBEFRS jolly clever man at Liverpool Cathedral where our friend here, John MacKay, just blew him out of the water because John Polkinghorne believed that you can mix evolution with Christianity.

John showed on that debate that you cannot and if you want to get that, have a look at John’s website, creationresearch.net or if you want to ask him specific questions, go to askjohnmackay.com or you can go and have a look at getting a hold of this from creationstore.org, where you will be able to get lots of other interesting products too; like, of course, the beginning series by our friend, Eric Hovind.

Eric Hovind:  Oh, that is a great one.

Paul Taylor:  That is a good one.

Eric Hovind:  I love that one.

Paul Taylor:  It is great, is it not? We were talking before the break about what atheist say on the subject of dating fossils. You were talking about this particular fossil that had aged so many years in such a short period of time. It just shows how unfixed their ideas are on dating. They are basically making it up as they go along so often it seems to me.

Our good friend Mike Riddle actually said about looking at scientific articles and saying you have got to spot the fuzzy words. This is something even a non-scientist can do. Quite often you see an article where you will get the phrase, “This has rewritten about our knowledge about the evolution of whatever.” As soon as you see that you know that they are basically making it up. They do not know. They just have got something new. It does not fit and so they are basically trying to put some duct tape over the theory of evolution to patch it up and to

Eric Hovind:  When you think about it, truth does not change so the fact that they keep changing their theory means that they have not had truth. I mean in order for something to be proven it has to be true. Is that correct?

John MacKay:  Do you know what one step further they have gone? Is to deny the truth exists.

Eric Hovind:  That is true.

John MacKay:  All right, and so they define truth as inoperable, unusable, unmanageable. It does not exist.

Eric Hovind:  I love it when they say we cannot know the truth. And I say do you know that or is that true?

Paul Taylor:  There are no absolutes.

Eric Hovind:  Yeah, are you absolutely sure? I love that. So, what do atheists say? You have done a lot of work with fossils. You have, in Australia, a place where you let people come and dig up fossils and then have actually planted some of these what you call living fossils there.

John MacKay:  That is right.

Eric Hovind:  Tell our audience if they did not catch the last show, which by the way we went into this a little bit, but tell them a little bit about that and then we want to ask you some more questions.

John MacKay:  Okay. If you go to creationresearch.net and click on the middle column, Jurassic Ark, there are lots of pictures in there. It is basically a dig site that sort of growed into a big project. You can now walk from Adam to Australia in our biblical plant gardens. You can follow the murals. You can get your own self-guided tour. You can come and look at the fossil log jam we found there, a flood fossil log jam. In fact, you can join us on our big dig next year if you like. We took a group last year all out to the Outback of Australia following this one [indiscernible 00:12:40] and it covers a gazillion square miles. It is just unbelievably huge. Out near [Lake ??? 00:12:45], you can actually still see the same log bed. It is incredible. So those are the sort of things we developed, so creationresearch.net, click on Jurassic Ark in the center column and get ready for some wonderful evidence of judgment as well as creation.

Eric Hovind:  Unbelievable. Okay, we were talking about before the program and by the way, you are taking a trip over there in 2012

John MacKay:  Yep, next year. 2012, yes.

Eric Hovind:  That is going to be exciting. We need to get in on that.

Paul Taylor:  I think you have mentioned that.

Eric Hovind:  I know. I think we

Paul Taylor:  See, very good, yeah. I’m in favor.

Eric Hovind:  Whatever the cost is, we will have Kyle pay for it.

Paul Taylor:  I do not care how much money we spend. I will even chip in a couple of cents myself.

Eric Hovind:  You will.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  That is British there is it not?

Eric Hovind:  Yeah. Okay, so before the break, we were discussing how fossils have aged very quickly. The reality of how do they actually date these things because I know that they came up with the ages of the layers back in the 1800s. Radiocarbon dating is what we most of the time hear, “Oh, well, radiocarbon dating proves” but that was not invented until, what? The 50s?

John MacKay:  You get 1947 you get to carbon 14. You get the 1950s the finalization of the uranium, rubidium, that sort of stuff

Eric Hovind:  Paul remembers it. He was there.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  Well, it did happen in the University of [indiscernible 00:13:56], not down in England where you are. But, anyway, what you will find is you get two types of responses. One is what I call the Richard [Dockins ???] response because I have debated him. You can see bits of it on YouTube and when you bring up a solid fact like, “Hang on, this fossil is not 300 million years old or 200. Look how much it has changed.” His first level of response is, “Well, how dare you even demand public funds and have tax deductibility.” I think, “What does that have to do with what we are talking about? You know?”

Eric Hovind:  We are talking science here.

John MacKay: We are talking science here and you end up with a personal attack. That is the commonest sort of response. I mean, “You people, how do you say this with peer reviewed journals and you are not in “And you think, “Come on, Richard. Talk stuff. Talk facts.” That is the first level of response but I am not surprised they resort to that response because one of the things that we bring out on the DVD you are in, Darwin on the Rocks, is how they got this aging system in the first place. It is due to a Scotsman who actually took up being English and graduated in [Lore ??? 00:14:57]. His name is Charles [indiscernible 00:14:59] and he sort of was Charles Darwin’s mentors. He is a bigger problem than Darwin is but Darwin was his disciple and because of a door that [indiscernible 00:15:08] opened for the vast amount of time; Darwin walked through and developed his theory of evolution. But then [indiscernible 00:15:14] and Darwin tag teamed or team tagged, whatever you say over here.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  And [00:15:19] started to use Darwin’s ideas to date the rocks. A classic example is that okay, you start in the Ordovician rocks, the ones you and I were filming in right. And you find fossil snails. They are easy to recognize. They look like fossil snails. So you think, “Hey, the evidence is snails have produced their own kind.”

Paul Taylor:  Complex science this is.

John MacKay:  It really is hard stuff, right?

Eric Hovind:  Very difficult to grasp.

John MacKay:  Yes, as I keep saying, the only thing about common sense is it ain’t all that common.

Eric Hovind:  It is not. That is for sure.

John MacKay:  And then what [00:15:47] did was say, “Well, if you add up all the rock layers up to the top, there seems to be 12 variations in the snail group.” So, if we had evolution of species, “Hey, Charles, how long does it take to get one snail evolving into another species?” and Darwin’s answer was 20 million years. So 12 times 20 is 240 so the Ordovician rocks, before radioactive dating, before any other thoughts like that, automatically became 240 million years old by [indiscernible 00:16:19] declaration. That is it. No evidence, right? You never get taught this at university because it would make it look so stupid because it is.

[Laughter]

Eric Hovind:  It is. It is an easy thing to

John MacKay:  It actually is. There is no way to get around it so I am not surprised the atheists will launch into a personal attack because there is no database. Once you get into the database, here is what you find:  It is a logical construct that they never want you to find out what presuppositions it is built on because the chief presupposition is again, Charles [00:16:48]. My aim is to remove science from Moses.

Eric Hovind:  Wow.

John MacKay:  Right? So if they go to creationresearch.net, click on search, insert evidence search, and then [00:16:59], they will get all of these quotes. And that is what the motivation was. I am going to get rid of Moses out of the bible. But do you know how he did it? He never told anybody what he was doing. He never attacked the bible, never attacked the church. Sent his money to the church every week but actually undermined it totally.

Eric Hovind:  And the name of his book, Charles [00:17:17] book was Principles of Geology.

Paul Taylor:  Yeah, this is just absolutely incredible stuff that [00:17:23] was trying to undermine Moses. We need to talk about that later. We have also learned that you can recognize fossil snails because they look like snails. More after this.

[Laughter]

[Break]

Eric Hovind:  Welcome back to Creation Today. We are having a great time with Paul Taylor and John MacKay in the studio. John is all the way from Australia and has joined us to have some good times and teach about science and the bible. I love where we are going with this. Paul, you mentioned during the break, we were discussing how we really do need to get into the presuppositions where [00:17:59] came up with these thoughts and why we need to expose what really happened there.

Paul Taylor:  It is really that I want you, John, to be able to expand on the thing that we just sort of run out of time with before the break really. I do not want our viewers to miss this point that [00:18:13], who developed the ideas of long ages and millions of years. As John was telling us, they did not come from [00:18:22] dates and this is long before [00:18:23] dating, it was basically sort of ideas going backwards and forwards between Charles [00:18:29] and Charles Darwin developing this idea of millions of years and giving this sort of divine fears on their part as to what age something should be. But it is very important that we know there was a motivation behind what [00:18:42] said. You mentioned this before the break but I really want you to emphasize it again for our viewers so they do not miss it. What was his motivation?

John MacKay:  Okay, I will actually go back a few years if that is all right

Paul Taylor:  Certainly.

John MacKay:  …to give it historic context. Have you ever heard of Theophilus?

Eric Hovind:  I have.

John MacKay:  Okay. In the second century Theophilus said the world was made about 5,700 years ago plus or minus two hundred. It is interesting that they actually had that concept right. Of course, he was basing his addition on the Septuagint version, which was common amongst the Christians those days. Then he went on to say, “Not the tens of thousands that Plato and the others have stated.”

Eric Hovind:  Tens of thousands.

John MacKay:  Plato = Pagan, right? So here we have the Pagans versus the Christians; revealed authority versus mans deductions. Now the basis of the argument has not changed. By the time you get to the French in the 1700s increasing atheism, increasing rationalism, so you get [00:19:42] and [00:19:43]

Eric Hovind:  I cannot say that.

John MacKay:  Well you have got the wrong accent.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  Good day, y’all.

Eric Hovind:  Yeah, that is right.

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  [00:19:50] basically said the earth is a blob and it cooled down from a blob of molten iron so he took a ball of iron and he heated it up and let it cool down and said, “If this little ball takes that many weeks to cool down then this big ball takes at least 70,000 years.”

Eric Hovind:  That is where he came up with that idea?

John MacKay:  That is where he came up with that. Whatever is happening in the present has always happened. Now even though he never publicly attacked the biblical position at all, the bible position as stated in Moses Genesis [00:20:23] is that once there was not a world and then there was. The present is not the key to the past. That world was very good and now it is not. The present is not the key to the past. Once it did not rain; now it does.

Eric Hovind:  Now it does.

John MacKay:  You can see the difference in approach?

Eric Hovind:  Yeah.

John MacKay: Okay, now, [00:20:40] was French so if the French say it, the English reject it. You ought to know that, right?

[Laughter]

John MacKay:  But the Scots, if their English reject it, the Scots will grab it, right, because we have been fighting them for a long time.

[Laughter]

Paul Taylor:  That is right.

John MacKay:  Anyways, in [Edinburg ???] University they start to promote this present is the key to the past concept. It has not got fancy words yet but Charles [00:21:01] grew up just outside of [00:21:03]. He comes to England and writes a book in 1831. What is happening in society? Well, over there in France where they had run with the biblical catastrophic model, you know, God made the world good and then it was destroyed by Noah’s flood, e.g. the present is not the key to the past.

Eric Hovind: Right.

John MacKay:  Then they started to say, “Well, [00:21:23], there is at least four major catastrophes based on the rocks — extinct creatures, extinct creatures, extinct creatures”

Eric Hovind:  They are looking at the rock layers and determining

John MacKay:  They are looking at the rock layers as their authority. Then his disciples said, “No, there are 27 different layers under France, under Paris alone.” So by the time you get to the end of that cycle, there are so many catastrophes it just looks plain stupid.

Eric Hovind:  Yes. Silly, yeah.

John MacKay:  So [00:21:44] takes advantage and says, “Get rid of catastrophe-ism, replace it with what became now and is uniform [00:21:52]. Basically, use only what you can see in the present and extrapolate backwards.” Now that just looks like okay, we are being scientists, we just look at the present. If it was not for the fact that after he died his sister had collected his letters and in one of those letters is, “My aim is to free science from Moses.”

Now if you are wondering why it has such an impact on the church in England or the church in America, it was Jesus who said, “If you do not believe Moses (John chapter 5) then you will not believe me.” Now you are looking at this truth that Jesus gave us being fulfilled because you are looking at an America where most of the republicans, most of the democrats, no longer believe Moses. So do not be surprised they do not believe Jesus. The two go hand and hand and Jesus said that is the way it works.

That is sort of the motivation, the long-term consequence. These guys belong to a group that said the monarchy in England is based on the concept of Moses being right, God is the creator, he has the right to appoint kings, you know, the divine rule of Kings. You want to get rid of the monarchy, you have to get rid of the creator. So you can see England’s monarchy has just faded away and they really do not know why. The reality is the whole foundation of every structure in society that is organized actually comes based on the God who is the organizer.

Eric Hovind: The organizer, yeah.

John MacKay:  Get rid of that organization and no longer in God we trust.

Eric Hovind:  That is right.

John MacKay:  So the society, whether it is American democracy or British monarchy, has no basis for truth. It will collapse.

Eric Hovind:  That is exactly where we see ourselves today. I mean that hits the nail on the head for why is America in the state that it is in? Why is society in the state that it is in? It is because we have rejected a foundation.

John MacKay:  Yep.

Eric Hovind:  And we reject that you are left with chaos.

John MacKay:  That is exactly right.

Eric Hovind:  You are left with anything goes.

John MacKay:  And it is really hard to share the gospel because the people you are talking to live on another planet. They think their brains got there by accident so do not be surprised they cannot think through the logical arguments which, whether the Christians know it or not, our presupposition is God is a God of order, my thoughts have to be ordered. Ordered thoughts from A to Z prove something. But a non-Christian’s thoughts are whatever. They do not have to be logical. They can even be illogical, right? What is the problem? Right?

Eric Hovind:  That is true.

John MacKay:  So you will find that if you want to share the gospel, you have to begin in the beginning. God made the world, he made it good. That is why sin is so bad. What is sin? Well, God has the right to tell us what is wrong and he has the right to tell us what to repent of. Ah, he has the right to judge sin and if he judges sin, you and me and everybody else, from President Obama downwards, are in trouble. But good news! This God came down as a man and he chose to die on the cross in your place and mine. You can get off the hook. That is good news, is it not?

Eric Hovind:  Amen to that.

Paul Taylor:  It is marvelous news. We know it should be preached. We just had mini-sermon there and it was good stuff.

Eric Hovind:  We did. Where they can they get more? I am looking at it. We carry some of your DVDs, of course.

John MacKay:  You do, yeah.

Eric Hovind: At creationstore.org. They can get them from your website.

John MacKay:  And they can go to our office in Tennessee, which is on our creationresearch.net website.

Eric Hovind:  Then if they have questions for you, of course, askjohnmackay.com.

Paul Taylor:  Wow, we could do about ten of these, could we not, Eric?

Eric Hovind:  You know I could. I love it. This gets down to right where it matters with worldviews, with what is going to happen when we die. All of that comes right into this.

Well that is our show for today. I want to thank John for joining us. If you have questions, feel free to send them in to [email protected]. You can also join us on Twitter @CreationToday and Facebook —œ facebook.com/creationtoday.

Paul Taylor:  Tune in every episode. Remember to see if we have answered your question and of course these programs are being archived online at creationtoday.org. This has been a production of God Quest Ministries.

Eric Hovind:  Thank you guys very much for joining us.