Introduction and Why the Flood Matters

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your co hosts for today, John Dehlin. And I am super excited to have with US in studio Dr. Simon Southerton joining us from Australia. Hey, Simon.

Simon Southerton [00:00:15] G', day, John. How are you?

John Dehlin [00:00:16] Thanks for joining us.

Simon Southerton [00:00:17] Good to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:18] And we have, of course, in studio with us, Gerardo Simano. Hey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:22] Hey, John.

John Dehlin [00:00:23] So glad to have you.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:24] Yeah, really excited about this.

John Dehlin [00:00:27] Excellent. All right, so as you all know, we have been working with Dr. Southerton to be talking about science and science and Mormonism and specifically how science and Mormon doctrine sometimes come in conflict. This is the next part in that series. We are trying to do one of these per month. I believe last time we did Adam and Eve and the garden. And today we are here to cover Noah's flood and, you know, a discussion of Noah's flood in the context of what the scientific body of research are. So, Simon, take it away. What do you, what do you got for us today?

Simon Southerton [00:01:02] Okay. Well, the global flood or the flood of Noah has always been a particularly troubling thing for me. In fact, if I was to most people would think that it was DNA that took me out of the church, but in fact, it was, it was really Noah's flood and the beliefs that the church teaches concerning the flood of Noah that sort of washed me out of the church in many respects. And we'll talk about about that a little bit later on. But, but before we go, I just want to sort of give some highlights of the what we're going to talk about today. Firstly, most importantly, we're going to be joined by Professor David Montgomery from the University of Washington in Seattle. He's got a PH I think he's got a degree out of Stanford and a PhD out of the University of California in Berkeley. He's also a very prolific writer on mostly on soil or dirt, which is a very, very crucial subject for the survival of human society. I know in Australia, soil is a very, very delicate commodity and we need to care for our soils. And he's done a lot, an awful lot of work in this area in, in the Northern hemisphere in particular. So after we've talked about doctrine, we'll invite David to join us. So I'm really looking forward to that. But some of the things that we're going to talk about today include we're going to have some short animations that illustrate the scale of floods that have occurred in the Earth's history. So it's widely believed that the global flood myth is basically derived from one of many floods, massive floods that have occurred in the Earth's history. So we have some really neat animations that illustrate some very, very large floods that have occurred right in the backyard of many Mormons, and that's in the Pacific Northwest, in the Bonneville Valley. But the thing that sort of gave me the most difficulty when I was faced with the LDS beliefs, when I was really confronted with the knowledge that really the church believes in a global flood and criticized those that didn't. For me, the biggest challenge being a biologist was the problem with the flora and fauna surviving that massive deluge. So I'll be talking a little bit later on about. After David's joined us, I'll talk about the unique challenge that Australians in Australia poses for belief in a global flood. But before we do that, I wanted to just sort of give a brief update on some stuff that we talked about very early on. I think probably in our first episode, we talked about the evolution of dogs from wolves. A paper was just published last week. In that discussion, I talked about the Australian dingo and how the dingo, it was thought to have evolved from Asian dogs. Well, they just last week published the genome of the Australian dingo, and it's quite interesting. They've discovered that the dingo was probably one of the earliest or the most ancient lineages of dog on the planet. So it. It sort of basically was almost like the original dog that evolved when humans started domesticating wolves a long time ago. So that's just a nice little update on some science that's just coming in the last few weeks. So.

Gerardo Sumano [00:05:09] And I think that's significant. Sorry, Simon, but no, go ahead.

Simon Southerton [00:05:13] We.

Gerardo Sumano [00:05:14] I think we covered one of a very famous quote by Russell M. Nelson saying that dogs have always been dog, and that's why he doesn't believe in. In evolution. Right?

Simon Southerton [00:05:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if we wanted to dig just a little deeper into some of the discoveries they made, one of the things that they've discovered with domesticated dogs is that they have many, many extra copies of a gene called alpha amylase, and that helps domesticated dogs digest cereals and starch or carbohydrates. And the dingo only has a single copy of that gene, just like wolves only have a single copy of that gene. In other words, they're adapted to pretty much solely a meat diet. So that's a quite an interesting little discovery that came from the genome work. So if we now hop straight into the. To the doctrine, which will sort of set the scene for the Science. If we go to that first slide there, we won't read this, but basically, this is straight off the current church website, and it's very clear that LDS doctrine is that the Flood of Noah was a global event. It was a global catastrophe. And you can see all of the scriptural references there to what is really unique LDS scripture.

John Dehlin [00:06:43] For, for those who are just listening and not watching. Should we read that really quick?

Simon Southerton [00:06:48] No, I just. We can read the scripture references, these scriptures. So that, yeah, it's pretty much got everything in there, hasn't it? It's got the Doctrine and Covenants, the Joseph Smith translation, Abraham, Moses, Book of Mormon. They all refer to Noah as a real man and the flood being a global catastrophe. So that's really the current belief in the church.

John Dehlin [00:07:15] So just the summary point of this slide that those who are listening can't see is that the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, they all speak about the flood as if it were literal and if it were global. Right.

Simon Southerton [00:07:30] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:07:31] And. And for those who want to check out the video version of this episode, you can actually pause it and see the scriptural references. We won't list them all now, but we maybe we can share the slide presentation for people to reference in the show notes. Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [00:07:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:49] All right.

Personal Journey: The Flood as a Faith Crisis

Simon Southerton [00:07:50] So as I mentioned, if we go to the next slide, as I mentioned earlier, the flood for me was a fairly critical thing. In 1998, I was a bishop in Brisbane and spending a lot of my time as bishops do, working for the church and serving. And I read in the. An article in the Ensign written by Donald Parry, a professor of Heber at byu. The title of it was the Flood and the Tower of Babel. And this really, this really annoyed me. And I think perhaps, John, if you could read that out, the quote from that article and you might appreciate why it would annoy a bishop who's spending a lot of his time working for the church to read this sort of thing.

John Dehlin [00:08:42] Okay, so the title of the slide is the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Donald W. Perry, a professor of Hebrew at BYU, you published this quote in the January 1998 Ensign, and it reads, quote, both of these groups, those who totally deny the historicity of Noah and the Flood, and those who accept parts of the story, are persuaded in their disbelief by the way they interpret modern science. They rely upon geological considerations and theories that postulate it would be impossible for a flood to cover Earth's highest mountain mountains. That the geological evidence, primarily in the fields of strategy and sedimentation, does not indicate a worldwide flood occurred anytime during the Earth's existence. And this is still published on the Church's website. So, Simon, tell us what that quote is. Basically asserting what Donald Perry is asserting.

Simon Southerton [00:09:44] Well, for me as a bishop, he lumped me, okay. As a scientist, he. I didn't believe that there was a global flood. I mean, there just is no evidence that the Earth has been through a global flood. So it really. That really sort of cut quite deeply for me to be lumped. You know, here I am serving as a bishop and I'm lumped in with the unbelievers. I'm as bad as those that don't believe in any flood at all. So I tended to believe that there was a local flood event, but I just didn't really think about it a great deal. I didn't have an awful lot of interest in that particular subject. But it was. It was just how. How ignorant. I mean, the article talks about a lot of essentially young Earth creationist views on science. And so it was very ignorant on the scientific front. And what I do know from scientists who work at BYU is that Donald Parry got a lot of knocks on his door afterwards from. And little scientists poking their head in saying, pull your head in. Don't publish anything like that ever again because it's complete nonsense. So.

John Dehlin [00:11:01] So, Simon, if I understand this quote right, he's saying that it's bad or wrong to believe that the flood was not, you know, didn't cover the whole Earth. Correct?

Simon Southerton [00:11:12] That's right. He was arguing very strongly. You know, basically, God can manipulate the scientific laws of science. The laws of science to. To make it either to cover it up or to make it look like there wasn't a flood or to make a flood occur. And then we're now misinterpreting the evidence. So it was a very, very troubling article, but clearly illustrated to me that that was, you know, the Church was very comfortable, obviously, because this was published in the Ensign. This is a major magazine for the church. The Church was comfortable with public expression of the belief in a global flood. And. And I just felt very alienated. And that's what led to me then, because the Internet was a very, very. Was just emerging in 1998. But there wasn't a fair bit of stuff on online. So I searched online and there's hardly anything written on the flood that I could find.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:21] Yeah, and that's something.

Simon Southerton [00:12:22] That's when I stumbled on DNA research.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:25] That's something that was pretty interesting looking yesterday. I was just, you know, Searching on, on the church's website. What do they have to say about the Noah's flood? And this is one of the only articles that pops up. There's nothing about a local flood. Any kind of like those things that I maybe heard in the apologetic, apologetic circles. Like there's nothing of that nature on

John Dehlin [00:12:47] the church's website because probably because it contradicts church scripture and core church doctrine and prophetic utterances for decades.

Simon Southerton [00:12:57] That's, that's the key, John.

John Dehlin [00:12:59] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:12:59] What you just said, that's the problem.

John Dehlin [00:13:01] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:13:02] The doctrine is so explicit in the scriptures.

John Dehlin [00:13:06] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:13:06] And it's very difficult for the church because it's got all of these. Joseph Smith had the Bible and then he got all these extra revelations. So we're going to now talk about those revelation, some of the extra revelations and extra flood beliefs that members of the church have. But first, perhaps you could read this. But these are, these are just sort of the main points that lds, the members of the church believe pertaining to the flood.

Gerardo Sumano [00:13:40] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:13:40] Which is shared by many other Christian denominations.

Gerardo Sumano [00:13:45] Right. And I think this is, this is taken from Genesis 6 to 8.1. It says God decided to destroy all flesh, all flesh on earth except Noah family. Noah commanded to build an ark and gather all unclean animals. Two by two, eight people saved. Noah and his sons Shem, ham and Japheth, plus wives rained for 40 days, plus 40 nights. Water covered the earth for at least 150 days. Noah family. Noah's family in ark for over a year. And the ark rested on the mountains of Turkey.

John Dehlin [00:14:29] Ararat.

Gerardo Sumano [00:14:30] Right, Ararat.

John Dehlin [00:14:31] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:14:31] Yeah. So they're the main elements, I guess, of the, the flood story. And the only, I guess, extra bit I can add to that would be that there were, there were unclean animals and clean animals. I think the clean animals they took on, presumably they are things like sheep and cattle. They took on seven of those. But yeah. So this is pretty much. That's the, the major elements of the flood belief. And.

John Dehlin [00:15:05] Yeah. And I can just confirm that's how I was raised. I was raised that all the animals were on the ark, that all every other animal died outside the ark, that only eight people were saved 40 days and 40 nights. We all know that earth was covered with water. 150 days. Yep. That's all.

Simon Southerton [00:15:22] So these, these. So these beliefs are the beliefs of young earth creationists.

John Dehlin [00:15:28] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:15:29] Okay. So they're basically their flood literalists. So they just believe everything that's as it's written. They just cannot do nuance at all. And so Mormon doctrine aligns very closely with it. And that's why we see these with these articles like the one written by Donald Parry. So most young earth creationists believe that there was one major catastrophe in the earth's history, a major catastrophic flood. And it created essentially created all of the fossils that we have on the earth today in one fell swoop. So in other words, the flood killed all the dinosaurs.

Gerardo Sumano [00:16:04] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:16:05] Okay, so however, if you were to back it, church leader, into a corner on this subject, I can almost guarantee that they would say, oh, the church doesn't have any position on the flood. Right, okay. But they clearly do. I mean, if we go to the next slide, this is also straight off the church website. It shows the chronology of the flood, you know, Noah, that blue line across the. So it illustrates the flood and Noah's sons and they move after the flood. Shem colonizes Palestine, Japheth, Mesopotamia and Asia, and Ham, Palestine, Egypt and, and off into Africa.

John Dehlin [00:16:51] So, and this is for those just listening, this is this multi colored visual aid that shows a timeline from basically 4000 BC where Adam's 930 years old and Seth is 930 years old. And basically makes it all very literal. The lineage from Adam through Noah to, you know, to the Old Testament times. Right, it's all literal.

Simon Southerton [00:17:14] It also, yeah, it also gives a timeline. So Noah, as you said, 950, but the flood occurred about 2, 350 years ago. Sorry, B.C. b.C. Yeah, so 4, 4350 years ago.

Gerardo Sumano [00:17:28] Right.

Simon Southerton [00:17:29] Which is very, very recent in, in the earth's history. But the church also, as I mentioned earlier, you know, Joseph Smith had the Bible, but he also got all these extra revelations and the, so the church has some really unique beliefs that are critical and some of them turn out to be extremely problematic. And we'll talk about those probably after the science a little bit more. But some of the unique beliefs that they have that Noah held the priesthood, and it was also revealed to Joseph Smith that Noah was the angel Gabriel. Now Gabriel played a very important part in the Bible. He was the angel that spoke to Mary and announced the coming of Christ to the earth. He also appeared to Joseph Smith in visions and declared his dispensation his keys, the power of his priests and all that sort of stuff. So, so Noah, LDS scripture really completely affirms that Noah was a real man. And if we go on to the next slide, there are even more unique beliefs. Now the first one is that actually other Christian denominations do believe that the, the flood symbolized baptism. But, but For Mormons, because they were baptized by full immersion. You can see how it sort of symbolized that the global flood was really important in that it symbolized the baptism of the earth, as though the earth needed to be cleansed. And other unique things are beliefs Mormons have is that the ark departed America. As we mentioned earlier when we talked about Adam, Adam was an American. Well, Noah was an American too, because he was only. I think he was about Adam's eighth great grandchild. So it's ten generations between Noah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:19:34] That's pretty significant because then you have. Because then you have Noah, right? Like going up on the ark and then having to travel all the way to Turkey. The only way that could have happened if. If there was a global flood, right, that took Noah from. From America to Turkey.

Simon Southerton [00:19:56] That's certainly the simplest way. But I have heard, I have read arguments that he. He could have built the ark and then sailed down the Mississippi river and out through the Gulf of Mexico and over to. To Turkey, although I don't know how he got to the top of Mount Ararat anyway. And one of the other points, which I think is where we get into the more problematic aspects of the flood is that Joseph Smith revealed that Ham's wife was named Aegyptus and that she carried the curse through the flood. Okay, now that's just a minor little revelation, but it's very, very problematic for the church. And we're going to talk about that a little bit after that. We talk about the science. But before we invite David to join us, we pop onto the next slide. I think this is probably the most problematic thing for the church is that really, life scientists, in other words, scientists who know enough about the science related to life on Earth and geology and those sorts of things, life scientists of Brigham Young Universities really don't believe there was a global flood, pretty much. You know, you've got quite a few life scientists in the defense of the Book of Mormon have come in to defend the Book of Mormon because of their knowledge about DNA. But all DNA scientists, or many of the ones that I've heard defending the Book of Mormon, also believe that humans evolved over 200,000 years ago, and Native Americans have lived in the Americas for 20,000 years. And Aboriginal Australians, as we learned last podcast, have been in Australia for almost 60,000 years, completely separate from the Middle east where the events of the Bible take place. And we also talked in the last, I think in the first episode about the very hostile response that the geology department posted in the BYU Daily Universe to the Firm foundation or the Heartland organization publicizing their Young Earth Creationist Conference in the BYU newspaper. So you have this problem where the Mormons, the Mormon scientists don't believe in a global flood, but it's church doctrine. However, you contrast that with the Seventh Day Adventists, who have a much larger number of universities throughout the world, about 60 universities and many other colleges, they teach young Earth creationism in their universities and they teach young earth creationism on Sunday. So it's just this really weird disconnect.

Mormon Scientists and the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:22:59] I just want to confirm that I attended byu. Gerardo, you did too.

Gerardo Sumano [00:23:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:23:03] There is not a scientist I'm aware of in any of the major scientific departments, be it biology, geology. Who's gonna, who's gonna really cop to a global flood? They're just not. And that's, that's true.

Gerardo Sumano [00:23:18] Yeah. Not even byu, Idaho.

John Dehlin [00:23:20] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:23:20] I have friends who were studying geology at the same time I was there.

John Dehlin [00:23:24] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:23:24] And they, they, I would ask them, what do you think about Noah's flood? And they say, oh, never happened.

John Dehlin [00:23:30] So you're highlighting something really important, Simon, that somehow at byu, the scientists. And by the way, there were scandals about this at BYU, what, 80, 90, 100 years ago, where like entire, you know, people were let go, people were fired because the church was so upset about, for example, you know, professors either teaching a global flood or teaching evolution. That was unacceptable to BYU 80 to 100 years ago. But somehow BYU's evolved to where, you know, because they want to be semi respectable. And so the BYU scientific professors now somehow are allowed to teach biology, you know, organic evolution and a global flood. But then somehow that doesn't really ever escape into Mormon consciousness because as you point out, the lay membership and the leadership and even the prophet, the current prophet and president of the Mormon Church are still rejecting organic evolution and speaking as though there really was a global flood. So it's a weird sort of like compartmentalization of knowledge within our culture.

Simon Southerton [00:24:37] Yeah. And I think DNA has caused a big, big problem here because in order to defend the church, the Book of Mormon in the face of DNA, they've had to bring in very respectable scientists like Michael Whiting, Hugo Prego, Keith Crandall, Scott Woodward, all of these guys who know DNA and they understand DNA, and DNA provides the most compelling evidence for evolution that we have. And it can provide compelling evidence that humans have been on the Earth for a long, long time. And you know, all of these guys know Native Americans have been completely separate from the Middle east for probably 30 plus thousand years. And I know Australian Aboriginals have been in Australia for 50,000 years. So you've, you've now brought genuine scientists who have a full understanding of DNA in to defend the Book of Mormon. And they're bringing with them these, these beliefs that challenge absolutely many other beliefs, core beliefs about Adam and Eve, about our descent from Adam and Eve 7,000 years, who lived 7,000 years ago, a global flood, which was another narrowing of the genetic base of the human population. So, yeah, I think this is a really, really difficult quandary that the church is in. And this is getting worse because you've got all of these scientists here. I mean, Hugo Prego was only interviewed a couple of years, a couple of years ago, and he's, he's saying he believes that we, the human family, is 200, 000 years old. And he's starting to talk about how people up until 6,000 years ago when Adam and Eve lived, didn't have spirits. So there were free Adamites didn't have spirits. I mean, that's just, this is just getting really problematic. How do you believe that sort of stuff? I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:26:47] Yeah, and I'll just say that's weird. And it's, it's, it's also, you know, we talked about this in previous episodes, but if there wasn't a Tower of Babel and if there wasn't a global flood, you may as well throw most Mormon scriptures out the window because that, that makes them erroneous. You know, the whole Book of Mormon narrative with the Brother, the, the Jaredites relies on a Tower of Babel and a global flood and a literal Noah story. So it's weird that somehow that doesn't compute to Mormon consciousness and Mormon culture. But I just have to just quickly highlight, before we, we bring in our guests, the, the graphic that we all saw in seminary that you just showed us that basically claimed that a global flood happened about 4, 000 years ago. That seems like one of the biggest smoking guns I've ever heard of. Because that would mean that any evidence of civilization in China, in the Americas, you know, in Australia, in, you know, in Africa, any evidence of life outside of literally Adam and Eve to, to, to Noah would have to come after 4, 000 years ago. And we know that that stuff, there's evidence of civilizations for tens of thousands of years ago all over multiple continents. And so that's just, that's just a non starter that 4, 000 years ago is when all human life began. Right?

Simon Southerton [00:28:17] Yeah, yeah, it doesn't work. So. Yeah, you've got this pre Adamite problem, which is obviously never going to be discussed in.

John Dehlin [00:28:26] But it's a pre Noah. It's a pre Noahite problem because, like, everyone before Noah died and all evidence would have been extinguished from the earth. So it's a pre Noahite problem.

Simon Southerton [00:28:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, at that point, then, I'd like to welcome David into our podcast. We met David earlier on and we're having a chat. We apologize, David, for the technical mishaps we had. We had these amazing echoes going on. But thanks very much, David, for taking your time out of your busy schedule to join us today.

David Montgomery [00:29:00] Sure. Happy to join you guys.

Simon Southerton [00:29:03] Yeah, that's good. And obviously you met John and Gerardo sorting out all the problems earlier on.

John Dehlin [00:29:09] Hi, David. Thanks for joining us on Mormon stories.

David Montgomery [00:29:12] Oh, sure. No worries. Pleasure to talk to you. It's a fun subject. I never thought I'd be trained as a geologist. It wasn't clear I'd ever be talking about Noah's flood. But it's a very, very interesting story.

John Dehlin [00:29:24] And tell us really quickly where you're joining us from. Do you teach, I assume?

David Montgomery [00:29:30] Yeah, I'm a geomorphologist, the kind of geologist who studies the evolution of topography so what shapes the surface of the earth. And I teach at the University of Washington here in Seattle.

John Dehlin [00:29:38] Wow. Well, go go Huskies. All right.

Guest Introduction: Geology and Scripture

Simon Southerton [00:29:45] Well, perhaps to begin with, David, you could just spend a moment just telling us how you got interested in science, why you got interested in geology, and then how the flood sort of popped up on your radar.

David Montgomery [00:30:00] Yeah, well, you know, it could be a fairly long story, but I'll try and keep it short. You know, I've always been interested in science since high school. I was actually intending to be a biologist in great point part, thanks to a high school biology teacher who just turned my brain on to the wonders of nature and how it works. And in college, I got distracted into studying geology and the evolution of topography and kept going that way. And the way that they thinking about really big floods came into my life is there have been really big floods that have shaped portions of Earth's topography. And geologists like to study those because big disasters are fairly interesting. And I got into thinking and looking at the history stories and origins and arguments about the size of floods and the size of the nature of the biblical flood, as actually as part of a field excursion in Tibet, where we found evidence of a very large flood that drained a big river valley. And it turned out there was an oral tradition of it that matched up Very well with the geological evidence that we found. And that triggered an interest in thinking about how many other studies of big. How many other stories of really big floods, excuse me, may actually have some roots in events that happened in the geological past. And when you wrestle with that question, you can't avoid the question of Noah's flood. And so I got into looking at that for the. My book the Rocks Don't Lie, sort of telling the story of how people have looked at flood stories and ideas of a global flood, or not back through the history of Christianity, predominantly.

Simon Southerton [00:31:36] Yeah. So it was your visit to Tibet that really sparked your interest in the global flood myths that are. And they seem to appear everywhere. And those are things that you mentioned in a very brief TED Talk. Now, we thought that just. We'll give you a little bit of a rest for six minutes and run through your TED Talk. This is something that we had the most difficulty earlier on getting sorted. This is. We got all these echoes, but I thought we'd play the TED Talk and then we might just sort of zero in on a couple of things that you mentioned in the talk and discuss those a little bit further.

David Montgomery [00:32:15] That sounds.

Simon Southerton [00:32:16] Running through some big flood animations with you.

David Montgomery [00:32:20] That all sounds good. We'll see if I remember what I said at the TED Talk.

Simon Southerton [00:32:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:24] So this is David R. Montgomery, a Geologist's Investigation into Noah's Flood. Is that the title?

Gerardo Sumano [00:32:31] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:32:32] All right, here we go.

Speaker E [00:32:34] As a geologist, I've had a lot of surprises in the field, but I never expected that a field excursion to a remote corner of Tibet would lead me to a new appreciation for the biblical story of Noah's flood. But there, in the headwaters of the Brahmaputra river, we discovered evidence for how a wall of ice and mud descended the flanks of a 25,000 foot high peak to block the river. And this glacial dam backed up an enormous lake on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. And as you might imagine, ice does not make for a very good dam. And when the dam failed, as it inevitably would have, it sent a wall of water surging down the biggest, deepest gorge on Earth. When I told this story about our discovery to a local farmer's wife, an interpreter related her reply. Yes, she knew all about our big ancient flood. And she even pointed to a point high on the valley wall where three boats apparently had been stranded. Turns out that the lamas at the local temple had told her about how Guru Rinpoche, the guy who brought Buddhism to Tibet, had fought the demon at the lake, defeated it to drain its waters and reveal the fertile valley bottom that her village now farmed. Did Tibetan villagers really have an oral tradition of our ancient flood? Well, I was intrigued, and this got me interested in looking into the origin of other flood stories from around the world. As a geologist, like most geologists, I considered such stories fairytales and rooted in superstition. But as I started to look into other flood stories, I started to realize that an awful lot of areas that had geological evidence for really big ancient floods also had deep cultural traditions of flood stories. And for example, if you look at tsunami prone coasts, there's traditional stories of large floods that rose from the sea, from Chile all the way up to Alaska and on Pacific islands, from Hawaii right on across to South Pacific islands and Southeast Asia. And at the end of the last ice age, when all the glaciers melted off the poles and sea level rose enough that the Mediterranean overtopped the Bosphorus to spill into what's now the Black Sea and inundate a fertile valley right next door to the Mesopotamia Mesopotamian roots of the biblical flood story. I was astonished. Could science really be playing catch up to folklore? Well, as I looked further into the story of Noah's flood, I was in for another surprise. It turns out that science and religion have not always squared off in polarized conflict. Indeed, some of the first geologists framed their view of the world and indeed their interpretation of their data through the story of Noah's flood. You might even say that Noah's flood served as the first geological theory. Steno, the Catholic bishop that is widely revered as the grandfather of geology, developed his foundational principles for how to read the rock record. That the oldest rocks in a stratigraphic pile, a pile of sedimentary rocks, are found at the bottom. The youngest ones are found at the top. He then interpreted his field observations by invoking Noah's flood. Steno's thinking was greatly influenced both by his deep personal religious faith and also by the long standing tradition in Christian theology that we could learn things from studying the natural world through the application of reason, what we now call science. It turns out Steno was not alone. He was not unusual. He was more the norm than an exception. Most early geologists were also clergy and they were perfectly comfortable working wearing both hats. And as they applied Steno's principles to unraveling the geological story of northern Europe and Europe, they discovered that the rock record told a story that was far more involved and complex than laid out in the biblical stories of the Creation and Noah's Flood. Their thinking was Basically involved in how you could look at the world through the lens of religion and science, and that there was not inherent conflict between the two. Indeed, the first professor of geology at Oxford, William Buckland, argued in his inaugural address at Oxford that the biblical flood story was backed up by the geologic record. Indeed, what else, he argued, could explain the large out of place boulders that you could find laying all around northern Europe? It turns out that as he studied the geologic record over the next several decades, he, he found increasingly conflicting evidence and finally decided that there was no geologic signature of Noah's flood. And indeed, by the late 19th century, geologists had laid to rest the idea of a global flood. Theological and scientific opinions converged on the realization the rocks that make up our world tell a very longer and more elaborate story than laid out in Genesis. Fast forward now to the 21st century and public opinion polls consistently indicate that about 40% of the American public believes creationist ideas that fly in the face of geological evidence. Ideas like the world is less than 10,000 years old and that people and dinosaurs lived together in harmony in the days before a world wrecking flood. Well, I was even more surprised to realize that creationism, modern creationism, is one of the most recently evolved forms of Christianity. Not even the the original fundamentalists of the early 20th century did not believe the discredited idea of a global flood. I wonder how many of today's creationists know this. Well, why is all this important today and relevant? Well, we have always and always will interpret the world around us through what we believe and what we can see for ourselves to be true. The filter of faith and the lens of reason. Now, as for Noah's flood, we know it was not a global flood, but it could have been a local flood or regional flood. It might have been the flooding of the Black Sea. It could have been a catastrophic Mesopotamian flood. I don't think it actually really matters. But if we look at the history of thinking about Noah's flood, it reveals the power and value of an open mind and how both reason and faith shape the evolution of science and religion. And I can't help but think that portraying a fundamental condition between science and religion is particularly dangerous today. Now that we really need new creative solutions to basic social and environmental problems if we're going to maintain civilization on this rock in space. And I'm pretty sure that if you think you know everything, you will never learn anything. Thank you very much.

John Dehlin [00:38:59] Beautiful. Honestly, as someone raised Mormon to believe in a literal flood, seeing that video makes me feel a tiny Bit embarrassed. And I know we're not trying to shame Mormons or believers, but it's just, it's a little embarrassing.

History of the Noah's Flood Debate in Christianity

David Montgomery [00:39:20] Well, you know, one of the things that really fascinated me in researching the book was just how long and rich the, the argument has been going on in Christianity about how to think about and interpret the biblical pass that relate to not only the creation, but to Noah's flood, and arguments about whether it was global, whether it was local, whether it was regional, how to interpret it. There's such a rich history in Christianity that often gets painted in sort of cartoon form into sort of one view or another. I think the fascinating part is actually the history of argumentation between the various sides in it.

John Dehlin [00:39:58] Really quick, David, were there, were there. Do you know if there were fables or myths about a big flood or a global flood that predated even, you know, what would have been Israelites, you know, during a thousand to two thousand years bce, like pre Old Testament quote times?

David Montgomery [00:40:18] Yeah, it's kind of hard to know. There's, there's some Native American flood stories, you know, if they are rooted in big, in actual big floods probably date back much older than the biblical stories. There's a lot of controversy about some of the Native American stories in terms of what they may actually refer to, of course, and it's difficult to interpret oral histories after a long period of transmission. But if some of the Native American flood stories are related to big floods during the deglaciation of the continent, that was like 9, 10, 12,000 years ago in that window, which takes it back to well before pre biblical times.

John Dehlin [00:40:56] Got it.

Simon Southerton [00:40:57] Yeah, I was really fascinated to hear that. Sort of basically 150 years ago, essentially the science and religious communities that were really new were studying and focusing on the flood, sort of agreed with each other. You know, it almost sounds like, I mean, I'm here in Australia. It almost sounds like Australia is 150 years behind the US in a way because we don't have such a large population believing in a global flood.

David Montgomery [00:41:27] Yeah, it was an interesting how those, those threads all came together, you know, for the first thousand years of Christianity, the priesthood and the Catholic Church argued that the flood was allegorical, not necessarily a literal global flood, but it was a story rich with symbolism. And then in the Protestant Reformation, the idea of a literal interpretation really came into the forefront with, with Luther in particular. And the back and forth on that was interesting. But, you know, the work of people like Steno, that Catholic bishop who is revered as the grandfather of geology for Laying down the simple rules that, you know, the stuff on the bottom of a pile was put there first. You know, a lot of geology is fairly common sense. You look for layers because if you think about the nature of the world, everywhere on earth is either eroding or receiving sediment, it's disappearing from the geologic record or it's piling up with stuff from somewhere else. And if you study those layers that get set down with the oldest stuff on the bottom and the stuff that's tipped on their side, they had to be deformed to get that way. There's some fairly simple rules that steno intuited, laid down and they are basically just common sense, frankly. But if you follow them out and the implications and then add a whole bunch of more modern tools and 300 years of argument about it, you end up with the current geological understanding of how the world has evolved and that the way the surface of it is shaped and formed. And there's some really big problems with the idea of a global flood. The first one being that there's absolutely no evidence for it.

Simon Southerton [00:43:08] Yeah. And of course you've got radioisotope dating which confirms things getting older and older and older is the deeper you go.

David Montgomery [00:43:17] And it's an incredibly self consistent story that, you know, the science of geology as unfolded in that following steno's principles and applying more modern technologies like radiometric dating tells this incredible and incredibly internally consistent story about the evolution of the surface of the earth. And there have been big floods in Earth history, some of them pretty dramatic and catastrophic, but the reason we know about them is we can map their edges, we can find the limits to them and therefore de facto they were not global.

Simon Southerton [00:43:50] Yeah. Well, I have a friend in Western Australia, his name's Craig Price, he's a flood model and he just loves big floods. And he's created some absolutely gorgeous models or animations that illustrate just the scale of these floods. And he's produced a couple that I, I think are pretty relevant to the audience that are listening. Most of them probably live in the near Salt Lake or in Idaho or Portland. And really some of the biggest world floods have occurred in that area. And so we've got a couple of animations that I'd love to run through. And, and here you sort of chat about David from your experience, but the first one.

John Dehlin [00:44:37] And Simon. And Simon, if I can just jump in and say if, if you one or both of you don't mind, since we have a large listening audience that won't have access to the visuals if someone can narrate what's being viewed, that would probably be appreciated by the listening audience, if that's possible.

Simon Southerton [00:44:54] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:44:55] Okay, Go ahead, Simon. You're going to talk about the first one.

Simon Southerton [00:44:58] Well, I'll narrate then, Gerardo, if you can get the first one running. Okay. When you click, don't click start yet. But the first animation shows the formation of Lake Missoula after the last ice age. And it shows this blue coloration of water that's very still. And as the water moves and floods out at the end of the last ice age, the color of the water changes. It gets yellow and red to show the speed of the water. But if you run the animation, it'll show. Actually, David, you can sort of explain what happened at the last. At the end of the Ice age that caused the breach in the Clark Fork.

David Montgomery [00:45:45] Yeah, sure. What's not shown in the animation is the giant wall of ice that's up there north of that Clark Fork label that was in modern Canada, the great North American ice sheet that advanced far enough south during the last glacial maximum to block the Clark Forth Clark Fork of the river. And if you can start the animation over again from the start, basically what we're seeing now was that the lake actually at the head behind the ice dam. And what's the last thing you want to make a dam out of? It's probably ice. Why? Well, it floats, right? And so if you basically plug a river up with a wall of ice and that wall of ice floats, it's a great way to then drain the lake out through whatever the gap where the ice was. And in this case, when the Clark Fork flooded out over eastern Washington, all those blue areas that are shown now in the channeled scablands and eastern Washington, all the way down to the Willamette Valley and out through the gorge of the Columbia river to the Pacific Ocean, the flood was just immense. And there was not just one big Missoula flood, it's the Missoula floods. There were dozens of them that happened, if I'm remembering the dates right, between about 14,000 and 12,000 years ago or so, when there were people living in the region. And there are stories that have been argued to be attributable to witnesses to these floods. It's a little hard to know really for sure the origin of any particular story like that, but these are absolutely catastrophic floods that carved out great valleys in the channeled scablands across eastern Washington and a huge and lasting impact on the region. And I would suspect a huge and Lasting impact on the people and their descendants in the region. You know, if you had witnessed a flood like this, you'd probably tell people about it. And they keep telling people about it because it'd be one of the biggest things that ever happened in the region as far as people were aware of. So these floods in Eastern Washington are really good examples of what we call a mega flood, a super big flood that. A giant catastrophe in Earth history. But you notice it's got edges. People have very carefully mapped the limits to where the water got. Yeah,

Simon Southerton [00:48:05] yeah. So, yeah, for those who can't see the illustration, it basically shows that Portland basically gets washed out to sea and the whole of the Willamette Valley in Oregon is just completely flooded. So these. Just incredible scale of these floods. And as David said, you know, this would definitely have been passed on as

Gerardo Sumano [00:48:29] a,

Simon Southerton [00:48:32] you know, many generations into the. Into the past. I believe in. In Pacific islands where they get major floods such as tsunamis, they've learned from experience. They know to run to high ground if there's an earthquake.

David Montgomery [00:48:48] Yeah, there's a rich. There's a. There's a real rich diversity of flood stories around the Pacific Rim, from, you know, Alaska to the Pacific Northwest, right on down to Chile and over into Asia. In places where tsunamis are major natural disasters. There's a lot of stories about waves unexpectedly rising from the sea as a result of fights between deities, involving a lot of ground shaking and then a wall of water rising from the sea. It's interesting that you mentioned the Willamette Valley on this video. The Missoula floods and the draining of the Clark Fork. One of the things I found in researching the Rocks Don't Lie was a Native American story from the Willamette Valley that is sort of a fragmentary story that was collected by anthropologists, you know, what, century and a half ago, and thought to be a very old story that basically talked about how one day, all of a sudden the valley filled with water and everybody ran up to the top of the high hill as the valley filled with water for no understood apparent reason. Which is exactly how it would feel if basically your valley was a backwater from the Missoula flood that happened, you know, thousand miles away. You had no idea just the water your valley filled with and then it drained. It's a very curious and most interesting story.

Simon Southerton [00:50:05] Yeah. Do you have any idea how long that would have taken for the. Once the breach occurred? And it was, I don't know, hundreds of Niagara Falls in scale. I don't know how Big it was, but it was just enormous. How quickly would it have got down into the Willamette Valley?

David Montgomery [00:50:21] Oh, you know, that is known. I don't remember stuff like that off the top of my head. But that has been looked at and studied. You can get some sense of the velocity of the float from the nature of the sediments that were left behind. And in one of the sort of interesting bits of geological trivia, some of the best wines out of Washington State are grown in the flood sediments that were deposited by these floods because they're very sandy, very well drained soils. And almost all the mammoth fossils that we have from Washington State come from these flood deposits.

John Dehlin [00:50:52] Okay, excellent, Simon and David, Just to make sure that I understand what we're supposed to glean from this, what this graphic sort of illustrates is, number one, you know, that. That there have been major floods historically. Two, it kind of shows how they happen. Number three, it shows that they would certainly be catastrophic to the people who would be living during the time of the flood. That to. From their perspective, it might have seemed like a global flood because for. For as far as their eye could see, it would look like their entire land was covered with a flood. And it would have been so catastrophic that they probably would have written about it or passed down an oral tradition about it, which is possibly the origins of where the flood myths have come from that likely predate even the Old Testament. Are those the main things we're supposed to be getting from this visual.

Gerardo Sumano [00:51:49] I think I would add another one, which is that we are able, with modern science, map out this floods and we're able to know where they started.

John Dehlin [00:52:00] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:52:00] And the kind of catastrophe that they cost thousands of years.

John Dehlin [00:52:07] That science is. That science is advanced enough now to really show us when a flood happens, how it happens and what its effects are. Right, right.

David Montgomery [00:52:15] Yeah. There's a whole crew of geologists who study really big floods. Now. There's the first couple hundred years of geology. Everybody was looking at the evidence they could find in the geologic record through the lens of the idea that Noah's flood was the origin of it. And all the logical constructs that got made on that just kept falling apart. They were inconsistent, made no sense. There's not enough. There's a whole suite of problems with the idea of a global flood. But scientists have gotten very good at identifying where really big floods in the recent geologic past, where the evidence is still preserved. Preserved on the surface of the Earth, at least pretty good at piecing those together. And there have been some really ginormous Floods on the surface of the Earth, but they have edges. They are big enough to wipe out whole regions, but not to inundate the planet.

John Dehlin [00:53:08] Got it.

Simon Southerton [00:53:09] Yeah. It's interesting that this flood, the Missoula floods, and the scale of it was sort of worked out by a scientist in 19. I think it was 1920. Riding around on a horse and driving around.

Speaker E [00:53:24] Yeah.

David Montgomery [00:53:25] And his colleagues didn't believe.

Simon Southerton [00:53:26] We've got Google Earth. That just shows us everything. It's just so obvious.

David Montgomery [00:53:30] Yeah. It's the story of J. Harlan Bretz, the geologist who figured out the Missoula floods literally on horseback and in old Model Ts in the 20s and early 30s, is a really interesting and inspiring story because he pieced together the evidence that, you know, now with satellite imagery or a really good drone, it wouldn't be too hard to try and sort of get a handle on. Doing that from an ant scale perspective on the surface is a real exercise in imaginative genius and how to visualize things. His colleagues didn't believe him, but he was vindicated and won the Geological Society of America's highest award in his 90s. And he's famously known for sort of quipping that he had no one left to gloat over because all his enemies had died.

John Dehlin [00:54:18] That's awesome.

Simon Southerton [00:54:19] That's actually how a lot of science advances. You know, people with fixed ideas that are wrong eventually die. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:30] Yeah.

David Montgomery [00:54:30] And that's.

Regional Flood Evidence and Animations

Simon Southerton [00:54:30] Well, we might just show one more. We might skip the global one. Harada. I thought we'd just show the. The Lake Bonneville animation. Now, this story is a little bit different because the flood occurred roughly at the same time, but it was. It wasn't an ice breach. It was an inland lake, Lake Bonneville, that filled after the Ice age as the ice started to melt, and then it breached through a place called Red Rock Pass in Idaho. So if you run the animation, it's really quite fascinating. It shows it's going to pause at the ancient shoreline to show you the, what they call benches that occur on the edge of a lake. Because on, you know, over thousands of years, soil is washed in and it forms a bit of a bench below the surface. But if we run that animation, you can. What it shows is this Lake Bonneville filling up, and then all of a sudden it breaches at Red Rock Pass, and then it's massive flood again. Portland gets hit because it goes down the Snake river into the Columbia River. And now we're doing a flyover. It's just pausing. Now the video is pausing. You can See those benches on the side of the hill, which is the old shorefront of the lake, or Lake Bonneville? And it ends at a place called. Oh, it's. It's flipped off.

John Dehlin [00:55:51] I'll start. I'll start it over. I'll start it over.

Simon Southerton [00:55:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:55:57] I mean it.

Simon Southerton [00:55:58] Yeah. So that's the Lake Bonneville at its peak. Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:04] Okay.

Simon Southerton [00:56:05] It was very big. Very big, light, covered pretty much most of Salt Lake City, I believe. And then, boom, it breaks. And this is probably very similar to what happened with the Black Sea, because at the end of the Ice Age, the sea levels rose, the Mediterranean flowed, rose, and then breached at the Strait of Bosporus, and then it flowed through there. And again, it would have just been at a scale that's almost significant. It's almost unimaginable, the scale of these sort of floods. Yeah. I think that one ends at a place called the Dream Mine, which has a very interesting history. Some Mormons know about it. Sounds like you're chuckling, John, that you know about the Dream Mine.

John Dehlin [00:56:51] Absolutely, yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:56:53] Here in Utah, I think they believed that the Nephites used the. The benches on the edge of the eight. That was evidence of the Nephite roads or something. But they seem to converge on a place called the Dream Mine. Somebody had a vision and a revelation, and they thought that God had told them that's where a pile of gold was.

John Dehlin [00:57:14] Anyway, I think there's a Mormon expression episode about the Dream Mine.

Simon Southerton [00:57:18] Yeah, Maybe.

John Dehlin [00:57:19] Maybe we can include that in the show notes.

David Montgomery [00:57:21] Yeah, Yeah, I guess it's just not. Not enough that they're just ancient beaches.

John Dehlin [00:57:27] Ancient beaches? Is that what you said, David?

David Montgomery [00:57:29] Yeah, those. Those benches are basically shoreline. If you have a big enough lake, you're going to get waves on it. And if you have waves cutting against a rocky hill for long enough, it carves out a little bench at the level of the water level. And so what you can do is you can look at the height of those different benches around the Salt Lake area, and that tells you where the old shorelines of the lake were, and it tells you about the rising and falling of the lake. And the big Bonneville floods came when it overtopped the Low Pass and just ripped down the canyons right on out to the. The Pacific.

John Dehlin [00:58:05] Wow. So that's why. Tell me, if I'm just totally missing this. That's why you can be climbing mountains in Utah and find shells at higher altitudes. Am I right about that or not?

David Montgomery [00:58:18] Yeah, there's. There's two ways. One would be Old lake terraces like that. The other would be if they're fossil shells actually coming out of the rocks. And so it depends on the geology that you're walking around on. But that relates back to, you know, the long running controversies in Catholicism about how to think about the flood. Because some of the very earliest Christian thinkers like St. Augustine pointed to seashells on mountaintops as concrete evidence proof of a global flood. And it's, you know, if you just think simply about how you get a shell, a fossil seashell on top of a mountain, the idea that the water once covered the mountaintop is your sort of obvious go to idea. Right. But it turns out that the other possibility that, well, maybe the mountains used the sediments used to be under the sea and they rose to form the mountains is another equally. Well, actually it's a better explanation because it happens to be the right one. But it's not as intuitive, particularly to a pre scientific culture. And a lot of our understanding of the geologic record, sort of what shapes mountains, what shapes terrain and topography, only dates back to the 1950s and late 50s and early 60s with the advent of plate tectonics, which did to geology what Darwin and DNA did to biology.

John Dehlin [00:59:37] Got it. Oh, that's fascinating.

Simon Southerton [00:59:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:42] All right, Simon. So this third, this third, you want to skip this third.

Simon Southerton [00:59:46] Just very quickly illustrates the. Some Cray has simulated the, the global flood.

John Dehlin [00:59:54] The, the hypothetical theoretical global flood.

Simon Southerton [00:59:57] Yes, the hypothetical mythical global flood. But where the video ends, okay, if you imagine that the Earth is flooded and then it starts to recede, you can see all the massive, massive lakes that are forming all over the world. If you see that's not the typical outline, the current outline of the land masses of the Earth. You can see there's a lot of lakes. In some ways you'd probably expect to see many sort of Missoula and even 100 times the size of Missoula type events in places around the world, but we just don't see it. I mean, there's scientific evidence for thousands of these massive flood events all over the world and deep into history.

David Montgomery [01:00:49] One of the problems with the global flood that animation illustrates fairly well is that at peak flooding, when the whole world ostensibly is covered with water, you know, it's pretty well established that Earth is roughly a sphere. And if you bury, if you cover that sphere with water so that it inundates the highest peaks when Tibet goes underwater on your little graphic, then there's no slope to the water surface. It's an equipotential surface. And think about what Water does in a glass, it's held flat. It doesn't flow when it's on an equipotential surface. It flows when it has a slope to flow down. And so if you actually had a global flood, it wouldn't do any work on the topography because it wouldn't be flowing anywhere. It would be like filling a bathtub up. Once you filled it up, it would stop flowing because there's no slope to drive the flow. And that's actually one of the big fatal flaws of the ideas of flood geology, because if you're invoking a single flood to reshape the world's surface so that the topography you're seeing on the animation now is. Would be post flood, not pre flood. If your flood is supposedly shaping the whole topography of the world, how is it doing that? If it's not able to be erosive once it's covering the whole planet, Then of course there's the problems like, you know, where did the water come from and where did it go afterwards? You have to somehow find and get rid of enough water to cover Mount Everest. And that's a real challenge, and especially without leaving any evidence of it. One of the other things you mentioned earlier about Mount Ararat is a particularly interesting point, I think, in my mind, for any doctrine that holds that Noah actually landed on Mount Ararat after a global flood or during a global flood, there's a really fundamental problem with that. And that, of course, is that Mount Ararat is a volcano. That's why it sticks up 14 some odd thousand feet above the rest of Turkey. But the rocks that it was erupted through and therefore built upon are sedimentary rocks. And so if all the world's sedimentary rocks were formed during a global flood, the way global flood proponents argue, because that's what they're saying is all there is to explain geology, then that means that Mount Ararat did not exist during the flood because it's built on the sediments that were la down during the flood. So therefore Noah couldn't have landed on it because it didn't exist yet. That's a good example of the faulty internal logic behind most global flood propositions, is that you kind of. You look into them and you sort of poke away at them and they fall apart under their own. The weight of their own inconsistencies. And that's just. That's, you know, not good science. Point blank.

Simon Southerton [01:03:41] Yeah. Well, you, in a talk you gave at Harvard, you illustrated what you saw as the fatal flaws, the major fatal flaws of flood, global flood geology and You've actually nicely talked about the first one, I guess, in. But do you want to sort of comment on those three points there?

Fatal Flaws of Global Flood Geology

David Montgomery [01:04:05] Yeah, sure. That first one, that there's not enough water on Earth to cover Mount Everest, I mean, that is sort of fatal flaw number one. Somehow you got to find and get rid of enough water to do that. And there have been elaborate theories that have been proposed for that dating back to Steno's time. Some of his colleagues or rivals in the 17th century had their own ideas that just didn't pan out as geologists investigated the details of them. And a big part of that was that. Number two, the geologic record shows that there are many catastrophic events. If all you really have to work with to shape the world's geology is the creation and a flood, you're really restricted to just a couple events. There's solid examples of outcrops around the world that demonstrate the need for a much longer period of time. More events. Actually, the Grand Canyon is a good one. Sicker point, the rock outcrop near Edinburgh that Scottish geologist James Hutton wrote about in the 1790s, if I'm getting the dates right, where he basically found solid evidence for not one big catastrophe, geologic catastrophe, but two in the same outcrop with two layers of deformed rock that basically showed that there was more to Earth history than just Noah's flood after an initial creation. And geologists in the 18th century in Europe traced layers across much of Europe, counted layers, and there's just far too many catastrophic events in Earth history to, you know, not globally catastrophic, although there are some, like the asteroid impact that wiped the dinosaurs out. They're. You're cute guys over on the corner of the graphic, but. And that third one.

John Dehlin [01:05:58] Oh, really, really quick. David. Josh. Sorry. And. And these regional catastrophic floods would have had to happen long before, you know, 4,000 years ago. Right. Long, long before the Noah's flood would have happened.

David Montgomery [01:06:16] Yeah. Famously characterized it as, you know, sort of requiring so much time as to be unimaginable, that so just the human mind would have a hard time wrapping itself around. And, you know, the consensus in geology today is, if I'm remembering right, something like 4.54 billion year age of the Earth's. And it keeps getting updated as people fine tune it. But, you know, four and a half billion years is a lot of years and it's just unimaginable how much can change over that time frame when we think through the lens and filter of our own lives. And that's one of the Hardest things to actually, for geologists to really, I think, come to intuit and grasp is just how deep time actually is. And that actually whatever one's religious beliefs are, that actually gives a whole lot of time and a lot of options for how the world was seeded, initiated, however you want to put it. Things don't happen to. Not everything happened as a quick catastrophe.

John Dehlin [01:07:24] And that Bonneville flood would have been billions of years likely.

David Montgomery [01:07:28] No, no, the Bonneville flood, The Bonneville and the all the sort of floods that would leave surficial evidence are probably no more than the last ice age, because ice would have erased a lot of evidence in many places during that last event. If you're looking at the processes that shape today's surface of the Earth, that's sort of like just yesterday morning in geologic time, when you're looking at what shaped the rocks that form the mountains, that's going way back.

John Dehlin [01:07:58] So ice age would have been how many years ago?

David Montgomery [01:08:00] Most recent ice age, like 12 to 25,000. On the sort of the second half of it, the peak to deglaciation is that Pleistocene.

John Dehlin [01:08:10] Do I have that term right?

David Montgomery [01:08:11] Yeah, yeah. The Holocene is the age we live in now. And that goes back from now to the last glacial maximum, the last glaciation. And then the Pleistocene goes from there back to about two and a half, three million years. And there were like 20 some odd advances and retreats of ice. And so we tend to call the Ice Age was just the most recent of those 20 or some odd. And that's thought to have played a big role. The last couple are thought to have played a big role in human evolution and dispersion around the world, because a lot of the migrations of people out of Africa were modulated, shall we say, by the climate shifts and the ecological shifts that people would have followed to stay with game and food sources. There's a lot of time to work with when you go back in the geologic record. And that brings up that third fatal flaw of flood geology, that when we actually look at what we have fossils of, what the fossil record actually contains, 99% of all the fossils or the fossil species in the geologic record are extinct. And that means that either the story of saving two of everything is just flat out wrong, or NOAA and company did not do a very good job at doing that, or there's something fundamentally wrong with the story, with saving two of everything 4,000 years ago as the story of biology, because there's far more species that did not make it through the geologic record than there are alive today. And in fact. Yeah, in fact, people have done estimates of the amount of bones in the geologic record, and this world would be covered with fossils where everything to have died all at once.

John Dehlin [01:10:07] And, David, I wanted to get your quick reaction to the explanation for that within Mormonism, which would have been, when God created the Earth, he used material from other worlds. And so the evidence, the fossil evidence that would predate Noah's flood that is in the earth, must have come from other living species, from other planets that got shaped into the earth when God created the Earth. So, checkmate. David Montgomery.

David Montgomery [01:10:35] Oh, wow. So. So God has the great original recycler. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. But, yeah, frankly, and no offense to anyone's particular theology, that strikes me as behavior more characteristic of Loki than of what I would view as a benevolent and just God.

John Dehlin [01:10:53] Well, we love Loki. Nothing wrong with Loki.

Simon Southerton [01:10:58] I should add that we have an interesting fundamentalist group of Mormons that has emerged over the last couple of decades, and they've got answers to all of those problems.

John Dehlin [01:11:12] Another checkmate. We've got the Rodney Meldrum. Checkmate.

Simon Southerton [01:11:17] There's not enough water on the Earth. Well, that's because it's in the Earth. So they believe that the core of the Earth is water. Oh, yeah, that sounds like you're sitting on a massive time bomb.

John Dehlin [01:11:28] So. So, David, really quickly, if you wouldn't mind, can you explain, is it, from a geologist perspective, why the Rod Meldrum theory that the Earth is actually full of ice at its core and not water? Could you tell us, from a geologist standpoint, the viability of that explanation?

David Montgomery [01:11:49] I would invite you to do two things. One, go down in a mine about 6 or 800ft and just see how hot it actually gets. The deeper you go down in the Earth, there's something known as the geothermic. It's. You can measure how fast it gets how hot going down and, you know, and then just take an ice cube and put it on the stove and turn the stove on, see if it stays ice.

Gerardo Sumano [01:12:16] Good point.

David Montgomery [01:12:17] It ain't gonna. I mean, the interior of the Earth is hotter than, you know. That's just ridiculous.

Simon Southerton [01:12:23] Yeah, got it.

John Dehlin [01:12:26] But what if you go farther down, it gets cool again?

David Montgomery [01:12:30] How does that work?

John Dehlin [01:12:34] I don't know.

David Montgomery [01:12:35] Yeah, I mean, there's. There's some basic problems with how that would work.

John Dehlin [01:12:40] Yeah, I guess they would say we haven't gone down far enough to know for sure whether it gets cooler at deeper levels.

Simon Southerton [01:12:46] I should add that these theories, it's called the universal model is produced by people who are not qualified, they don't have any scientific training.

Gerardo Sumano [01:12:56] Yeah.

David Montgomery [01:12:58] So yeah, I mean, it sounds like basically somebody assuming the answer and trying to reverse engineer a way to rationalize something that they can't explain otherwise.

Simon Southerton [01:13:06] Yes, that's exactly what it is.

John Dehlin [01:13:09] And David, whenever we bring on, whenever we bring on a secular scientist to discuss these matters, it feels embarrassing to even have to ask the question. And yet tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of Mormons would be retaining the beliefs that we're communicating to you. And so we have to ask the question. So.

David Montgomery [01:13:30] Oh yeah, no, it's our apologies. No, don't worry. One of the interesting things about researching a topic like I did in the rocks don't lie as a geologist was thinking about how people hold their beliefs, what shapes people's beliefs. And there's an intriguing interplay between thinking about the way scientists frame the questions that they ask, what they choose to look into and how people can, and how the evolution of thinking about Noah's flood has shaped the trajectory of both Christianity and science. And I'm a big fan of trying to think broadly about things. But the fundamental thing that really differentiates people who are really actively engaged in legitimate in science is open mindedness and willingness to look at potential causes, look at mechanisms, think about connections, and to not simply make up new stories that invoke new miracles to explain things that don't align with preconceived beliefs.

Gerardo Sumano [01:14:45] Which I think Mormon apologists, including Rodney Meldrum would say the opposite, would say the scientists, what they're looking to do is to prove their atheism.

John Dehlin [01:15:01] Yeah, yeah. Rod Meldrum's response to you, David, would be, well, David, you're an evil atheist and you're just using, you're just cherry picking a motivated, reasoning based explanation for the earth's evolution or status to promote your godless atheism.

David Montgomery [01:15:20] Yeah. You know, Steno would be really surprised to be called an atheist. And most of the early geologists were Christian clergy who were faithfully engaged in the exercise of trying to understand how God did it, how God made this incredible, wonderful planet that we're all living on and sharing. And as they looked into that, they had faith in the author of creation being the same as the author of the Bible. And that those two works, God's works in the essence of nature and creation and the earth and all that lives on and within it, would share the common origin in the sense of originating back with God as biblical scriptures. And so the long argument has been around, how do you interpret scripture? And are there ways to actually. And there's many scientists who would argue that there's ways to interpret it that are perfectly compatible with what we understand about modern science. But the thing that one has to give up to get there is the belief in a literal, a simplistic, literal interpretation of Scripture. And that's what fascinated me in researching the Rocks Don't Lie is just how rich the intellectual conversation in theology has been about just how to read the Bible.

Gerardo Sumano [01:16:38] Yeah, beautiful.

Simon Southerton [01:16:40] Yeah. And yeah, I guess the point I'd like to make is that there are many, many Christians on the earth that don't have any problem. They just see it as a myth, faith, and they draw from it other lessons. And it's not, it's not an important part of their faith that it had to literally happen. And it's just. I don't know what the numbers are, but it's a core of young earth creationists that absolutely insist that it's true and they basically build their faith on that. So. But you don't have to, you don't have to dismiss the science and be Christian. They're not mutually exclusible, exclusive.

David Montgomery [01:17:32] Yeah. I actually find young earth creationism to be a fairly rigid and defensive theology, whereas I would prefer to think about a more sort of embracing and open theology. Because I think if you start to actually look at just the vastness and wonder of creation through the actual age of the earth being billions of years old, and the incredible complexity and diversity of the processes that have shaped the surface of the earth and the wonderful workings of nature, it's an amazing, grand story that I find far more inspiring and bigger and perfectly compatible with connecting to elements of theology that are awe inspiring in their own right. So I sort of view the idea of a literal interpretation of the biblical stories as actually is not doing justice to them.

Simon Southerton [01:18:23] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:24] So we're not assaulting religion, we're sort of assaulting fundamentalist Christianity and. Or Mormonism.

Simon Southerton [01:18:32] Yeah,

David Montgomery [01:18:35] yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:18:35] Well, thank you very much, David. We're keeping you away from your garage. Is there anything else you'd like to say? We apologize for the technical challenge we had which meant we were a bit late starting. But thank you very, very much for your time. We really appreciate it.

Guest Farewell and Book Recommendation

David Montgomery [01:18:52] Well, no worries. Enjoyed talking to you guys. Best of luck. Obviously, I recommend the book to you. There's a lot in there about the whole sort of backstory about this. And I think that someone, whether they believe in a global flood or they Think maybe flood stories came out of regional floods, which is the view that I would certainly advocate for. It's. It never hurts to actually understand the background to one's own beliefs. So encourage people to check it out, read it, think about it, argue with it if they wish. That's the beauty of living in a free society.

John Dehlin [01:19:25] And the book is called the Rocks Don't Lie. Yeah, and we'll include that in the show notes. Thank you. Thank you, David.

David Montgomery [01:19:32] Okay, take care. Guys.

Simon Southerton [01:19:33] Guys, Bye.

John Dehlin [01:19:34] Such a pleasure.

Simon Southerton [01:19:34] Thanks very much. See ya.

David Montgomery [01:19:36] Cheers.

Simon Southerton [01:19:36] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:19:39] Wow, that was powerful. Great guest.

Simon Southerton [01:19:42] Excellent.

John Dehlin [01:19:43] Great guest. Simon.

Simon Southerton [01:19:47] Yeah, he's. He's. He definitely didn't go into this to sort of disprove the flood or, you know, give Christians a hard time. Yeah, he was just. He went in doing science and discovered, gee, there are myths. People have got myths about these massive floods. So he sort of. It was sort of like a reverse approach. And so he did, you know, he came away with respect for these sort of myths that are basically carrying forward knowledge to future generations about things that are important. And if you live in a place where they're prone to floods, having that myth being passed down the generations probably helped you. And, you know, if you felt a. If you lived in the Pacific and you felt an eruption or, you know, an earthquake, you're under higher ground. And that was probably carried forward in myths, that knowledge. So, yeah, so it's not, It's. I liked his approach. It's not sort of dismissing it all as completely use. Worthless. These, these myths were valuable. They carried information that was useful to future generations.

John Dehlin [01:21:07] Yeah, yeah. He calls for a more open, flexible theology, basically.

Simon Southerton [01:21:12] Yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to just spend a little while talking now about sort of the biological problems that I was more confronted by from an Australian perspective. So I thought this might be interesting for the audience, many of whom are not in Australia, because Australia really is a fairly significant problem. For in terms of what we've learned from science, it's very difficult to fit the, you know, a global flood into the geological and the biological history of Australia. So we flick to the slide a few slides down. I think you're looking at rocks there. Yeah, we hold. Yeah. This slide that we're on now shows us that Australia is floating north. Now, David mentioned plate tectonics or continental drift shift. I think many of you would be interested to know that Australia is moving northeast at about 3 inches per year. That's about the speed that your fingernails grow. And the. We know that because they even have to readjust the accuracy of GPS for modern navigation of cars. The GPS that we use because over the last 15 years Australia's moved about 3 meters, also about a meter. And so you want, you definitely want to stay right in the middle of your lane. And so they have to adjust the gps. So this is clear evidence that Australia is moving north. Well, Australia has moved about 5,000 miles over the last about a hundred and about 100 million years. And there are massive consequences for the Australian land mass of moving north.

Australia's Wildlife as Evidence Against a Global Flood

David Montgomery [01:23:19] North.

Simon Southerton [01:23:20] That's such a great distance and so close to the, so much closer to the equator. If any of you have been to Australia, it's just basically the center. You know, we're about 80% desert. It's a very hot and dry continent. And so that's had a massive impact on the evolution of plants in Australia. But our separation from the rest of the world, basically from Europe and Asia for about 150 million years has meant that our, our animals have evolved completely separately from the animals around the world. Okay. So the consequence of that is we have a very unique animal flora and fauna here in Australia that's been evolving independently from the animals and plants around the west rest of the world. So if you move to the slide Australian, we've got a slide here that shows this Australian wildlife. And the unique thing about Australia is that we focus on the animals first. We have virtually no placental mammals in Australia. The only ones we have are a couple of bats species and a few rodents.

John Dehlin [01:24:40] And tell us if that, just for those who don't understand that term placental means what.

Simon Southerton [01:24:47] This is a, an animal that has an internal organ caused called a placenta which, in which the fetus, the embryo and then the fetus develops and then you have a birth process. So it's like it's.

John Dehlin [01:25:04] They have basically a worm like human, like humans. Humans.

Simon Southerton [01:25:07] Yeah, yeah. So we're placental mammals or bears or lions, camels, lions, tigers, you know, many of the African animals. So we have essentially none of those in Australia. Most of our animals are marsupials and these are non placentals. So they don't have a placenta. They have the, the empire. The developing embryo is contained in a pouch. So this is an ex. A pouch. So they're basically external to the body but protected by a pouch. And you've probably all seen images of a kangaroo that's got a pouch and little joey's head sticking out. Well, that little joey has been in that pouch its entire, you know, from essentially it's the formation of the embryo. So and that's a very, very distinct difference. So basically most of our animals, our wallabies, our wombat koala, they're marsupials, so they don't have a placenta.

John Dehlin [01:26:10] Simon, do, do, do marsupials appear outside of Australia?

Simon Southerton [01:26:15] The only place they occur outside of Australia is in the southern most of them are in the, are opossums that occur in, in South America and I think there may be one opossum in Central America. So they're the only marsupials outside of Australia.

John Dehlin [01:26:34] Okay.

Simon Southerton [01:26:34] So that, that illustrates the connection and the reason that they there is that one marsupial or a few marsupials occurring outside of Australia is that we were about 150 million years ago connected to South America and, and South Africa and Antarctica.

John Dehlin [01:26:53] Wow. Wow.

Simon Southerton [01:26:56] And we also share plant life. Australian plants are very closely related of many of them to plants that are found in South America. So and we'll talk about that in a moment.

John Dehlin [01:27:09] Okay.

Simon Southerton [01:27:10] And we also have lots of fossils of these marsupials. Okay. So we don't have any fossilized placental mammals. Okay. Like if like your mastodon, you know, your woolly mammoths and all your mega of camels and bison and cows and all that sort of stuff. We don't have any of those sort of fossils in Australia. It's all marsupial fossils. The other ones are monotreme. So you're echidna and platypus. These are the other unique. Fauna in Australia. They, they lay eggs so they don't have a pouch. They, they, they're egg laying mammals. So really quite unique. And the fossil record shows all of the ancestors, they're building a picture of the evolution of these modern day marsupials from ancient marsupials. And it's the same story that David illustrated before. 99 of the, the fossils that occur in Australia are extinct. So we have massive wombats and massive, very large kangaroos. Can you imagine a kangaroo that's 2 meters, 3 meters tall? We have, have those that are coming out of the fossil record and we have our own unique dinosaurs as well.

John Dehlin [01:28:32] So it seems like just that finding around marsupials and the regions where they appear and the tectonic plate shifting that seems to validate age of the earth organic evolution and invalidates a global flood all kind of in one one swoop.

Simon Southerton [01:28:54] It's all a consistent story.

John Dehlin [01:28:56] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:28:57] And it all fits together beautifully. It's actually, it's a beautiful story of and yeah, it completely validates evolution and the time scale of these things. Yeah. If you look at the rate that Australia is moving now. And you extrapolate it back. Yeah. At about 100 million years ago we were connected up with Antarctica and in South America. But there's certainly a clear divide between for a very long time between the land mass, the southern land mass called Con Gondwana and the, I think it's called Laurasia, the northern land mass. So we're really unique. So I wanted to show some beautiful pictures of you. Move on to the next slide. This shows you the great diversity we have with kangaroos and wallabies in Australia. You know, we've got 60 species of wallabies and kangaroo in Australia and my son and I, we were hiking in the Flinders national park in South Australia about a year ago. We had an absolutely fantast, fantastic experience. We were hiking in areas where the yellow footed rock wallaby, which occurs on the. Which is a beautiful wallaby, it's got these lovely orange arms and legs and we were hiking hoping to see these. And in a day we were in a desert location, hiking through this really rocky valley and a storm came over and it dumped about, I don't know, a quarter of an inch of rain and we hadn't seen any wallabies. But after the rain all the wallabies came down out of the rocks and down into the valley, into the river and they were licking up, drinking the water on top of the large rocks that were in the bottom of the valley. So it's just a magical experience. But the picture that I've got there shows just how much diversity there is in these wallabies and kangaroos. So you can see that there's a tiny, there's a picture of a tiny quokka that occurs on an island off the coast of Western Australia. And you can see that it's just closely related to kangaroos. But you know, the reason we've got so many kangaroo species is because they've evolved in this, on the Australian continent independently of.

Gerardo Sumano [01:31:07] Of the rest of the world.

Simon Southerton [01:31:08] Completely independently, right? Yeah. Over millions and millions of years. These processes, it's geological time scales that David talked about. Right now the thing that I'm probably more passionate about, obviously as a forester and a scientist that worked on trees, is clips. Now they have a very interesting story because it's one of, it's a, it's a. If anyone, anyone comes to Australia, the moment you step out into Sydney or in, and you go outside of the city, anywhere, you'll see euclips, they're absolutely everywhere. Eucalypts completely Dominate the country. If you look at the photograph on the left, in the distance, you'll see mountains. They're covered in euclips. Virtually everywhere you go, there are eucalypts. And the reason for that is that it's as Australia has migrated thousands of miles closer to the equator and the country has become hotter, eucalypts have adapted extremely well to that drying climate. So they're very, very well adapted to drought, and they're very well adapted to recovering from fire. So the tree on the left in this slide is a very old eucalypt. And if you look closely at the tree, you can see that there are many dead branches that are sticking out. Okay. What trees do eucalypts are very good at doing is if things are really, really tough, they'll just let branches die and drop off, because that helps the tree to survive and hang on until the next rains come, and then they burst back into life. Now, the tree on the right is a tree that's just been through a bushfire. This is a gum tree that's been through a bushfire. And look how all along the major branches, there's recovering shoots. These are called epicormic shoots. And that's because under the bark of the tree tree, there are many dormant meristems, what they call a meristem, which is a growing point. There are many dormant growing points that are sitting there and they just wait. And when a fire comes along, everything's burnt off the tree. These meristems are triggered to grow, and then they burst through the bark, and you get the tree covered in these young. Thousands and thousands of these young shoots. This is a very, very common thing after bushfires, about a month or so after the fire. It's amazing, you go through and what were once blackened trunks that look like they're dead are just covered with this green regrowth. And the vast majority of eucalypts are just incredibly good at doing this. If you come back in about three or four years time, most of those little shoots that have grown through, dropped off, have dropped off and died. And then you'll have a few major ones will then dominate and take over. And within about three or four years, the tree looks pretty much back to normal. So they have. The eucalypts have this stunning ability to adapt to a very drying climate and, and to bushfires, which are obviously very common when the climate starts to dry. And because of that, the number of species of eucalypts has exploded over the last 10 to 20 million years. And the Next slide sort of illustrates this. It's a little bit complicated, the next slide, but it's a phylogenetic tree. People analyzed about 700 eucalyptus species and they built a tree and it looks like the vast majority of them have evolved in the last 10 million years. And that's because as the climate's just getting, we're getting close to the equator, it's getting a bit hotter and that's when eucalypts have come into their own and so they, they've radiated. So you, so the, the X axis down the bottom shows them how, how long ago they've evolved. And eucalypts evolved around about 60 million years ago. But as you can see, most of the evolution, most of the appearance of new species has occurred in the last 10 million years. And of course the next slide shows something really fascinating. As I mentioned earlier, we have animals, we share common plant and animal flora, sorry, plants and animals with South America and Africa. Right. And what we have here are fossils on the left hand side from Patagonia in South America and modern present day eucalypts on the right. Now it's, it's so obvious to me as a scientist who's worked on eucalypts, I hope you can, you can see the similarities there. But there, these are clearly ancestral eucalypts or very ancient eucalypts. In fact, they're the oldest fossils of eucalypts in existence and they're in South America. So that it's really clear evidence that eucalypts probably once inhabited parts of South America, parts of Antarctica, Australia and probably even South America. But they've gone extinct in South America and in South Africa and that's not really surprising. South America, the southern tips of South America is very wet, hilly and not really an area where eucalypts have well adapted. And in Australia we don't see a lot of eucalypts in the wettest rainforest. They're really well adapted to the, to the forest where they encounter of drought and, and also bushfires. Yeah. So, so to me, I think we'll just. This is an interesting little story that I've been sort of wanted to tell because, because this I think in my view is probably the oldest plant on the planet, King's Lamatia, which occurs in right down southern Tasmania in a very, very cold and wet area. And this, this plant is a sterile clone, okay. So it, and it occurs over a range of about eight miles and there are about 500 living trees. And the. I know scientists, I know one of the scientists that's worked on. This is Renee Valencourt, the University of Tasmania. And he did genetic tests and found that these 500 trees that occur over the eight mile range, genetically identical. So the tree does flower and it forms quite a pretty flower, but it never forms seed. And that's because it's a, it's sterile. And that's because it's got a genetic, It's a, it's had its genome duplicated. Instead of being a diploid like us, it's got an extra copy of each chromosome in its genome and that's rendered the plant sterile so it cannot set seed.

David Montgomery [01:38:34] Seed.

Simon Southerton [01:38:34] So the only way this plant can spread is by new shoots coming up from its base. Now, it occurs in an area where it's very cold, very wet. And this tree is extremely slow growing. It grows about one inch per year. So if you do some mathematics, how can a tree that occurs over an 8 mile range, how does it cover that territory when it's growing at one inch per year?

David Montgomery [01:39:06] Right.

Simon Southerton [01:39:08] That takes about a year to grow. It would take about 60,000 years for that tree to grow one mile.

John Dehlin [01:39:17] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:39:17] And that we have eight months. Okay, so you can see the problem there. Now, if there'd been a global flood, this is a very difficult plant to propagate. They've tried to grow it in glass houses and it likes to die high. It's very difficult to propagate. If it had been flooded in a month, for a month, it would be dead.

Gerardo Sumano [01:39:35] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:39:36] And the eucalyptus.

Gerardo Sumano [01:39:37] Right.

Simon Southerton [01:39:39] It, if it forms, it doesn't form seeds. Okay. So you know, the science creationists can't argue that, oh well, the seeds could have floated, blah, blah, blah, and they could have regenerated from seeds. It doesn't form seeds. It's a clone. It has to. The, the plant has to be alive to propagate itself. So this is just compelling. It all fits with the, all the other stuff that we've been talking about. It's all consistent. But I would argue that this tree is probably 200, at least 250,000 years old. And they've found fossils of it as well that are, I think the fossils are around 120,000 years old. Well, so I guess what I'm trying to say is that Australia is just, it just creates so many problems for a global flood. A belief in a global flood. And some of the arguments that I've heard, you know, that, oh, you know, because koalas, they need, they need eucalypts, fresh eucalypts every day to survive and They've argued, oh, maybe koalas, eight other trees, and then they found their way to Australia and then they adapted to the trees here. And, but, but the, the arguments are just so poor, that's just impossible to accept them. Yeah. And, and so there's just abundant evidence that Australia has been cut off from the rest of the world for a very, very long time, which, you know, just doesn't fit.

John Dehlin [01:41:21] Beautiful. Beautiful.

Simon Southerton [01:41:23] Yeah. So any questions about that?

Gerardo Sumano [01:41:27] No, not really. I thought that was a great presentation and I think we're gonna dive in, into the apologetics right now.

Simon Southerton [01:41:33] Right. Yeah. I don't know how much of a stomach I have for it actually, but I, I, look, I think the foot, the problem that I have with talking to, taking this seriously, Mormon apologetics when it comes to the flood, as we mentioned earlier, there's clearly double think going on. BYU scientists don't believe in the flood, but the Church is teaching the flood on its website. But the problem is we have of some apologists are defending the doctrine, you know, on the basis that it was a local flood and we can reinterpret the scriptures to support, you know, people who believe in a local flood. And there's quite a lot of LDs apologetics on that front. And I've given an example here of an article written by Diane Jeffrey. You're a very respected biologists at Brigham Young University, but you look at where it's published and it's published in Sunstone. Right.

John Dehlin [01:42:45] And just for those who can view, it's an article called Noah's Flood. Modern Scholarship and Mormon Traditions. Dwayne Jeffrey was a, was a professor when I was at byu.

Simon Southerton [01:42:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:42:55] Very well respected.

Simon Southerton [01:42:56] Published a few years after I left the church. Yeah, yeah. Now that's a, you know, it's a pretty good article and I think it's a good, a very helpful resource for people who are struggling to maintain their faith and, and, and you know, a belief in the localized flood. But there's just no evidence that this sort of thought is ever going to get into the mainstream.

John Dehlin [01:43:24] Not just that, not just that, but modern Mormon church leaders have condemned some stone and excommunicated Sunstone participants and, and view it as a dissident apostate publication.

Simon Southerton [01:43:37] Yeah, it's anti Mormon. Yeah, it's basically Andy. But then you look on the right hand side, you've got the Global Flood apologetics going on where they distort the science and whatever, and that's published in the Ensign and it's published currently on the earliest church website.

John Dehlin [01:44:00] Right.

Gerardo Sumano [01:44:01] Yeah. Yesterday before I saw this slide that you, that you. I think this slide is very powerful. But yes, yesterday when I was just, you know, doing some research about the Noah's Flood and what I could find on church publications, I found this LDS Living article. And you know, LDS Living is a, is a magazine by the church.

Simon Southerton [01:44:24] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [01:44:24] And I thought it was really interesting because they were talking about how to, how can members basically deal with the lack of scientific evidence with a worldwide flood? And it says, well, you can see it in this fun, like more conservative, orthodox perspective. And they give the link to, to that article from the church's website or you can see it in a more nuanced way and then they give the link to Sunstone to that Sunstone article. And I thought that's really interesting that. And I think I mentioned this earlier that in order to get to the nuance view, you have to go outside church resources.

John Dehlin [01:45:07] And honestly, to some extent, the church, believe it or not, as much as we find these arguments to be distasteful at times and, or the church condemns them simultaneously, the Mormon Church wants there to be these competing contradictory explanations or apologetics to allow for the biggest tent as possible. Because obviously the Church doesn't want to cut off huge chunks of its science respecting membership. So it needs there to be a Dwayne Jeffries or a huge Hugo Pereira or whatever to, to provide alternative narratives that are actually contradictory while at the same time the church is never going to endorse them or support them at general conference or publicly. Or if they do, they risk, they risk a bunch of people apostatizing over the, the brethren changing their position on fundamental doctrinal issues. Right.

Simon Southerton [01:46:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's the way they're dealing with, that's the way things have evolved. Evolved. Clearly it could have evolved in a different way where they could have gone like the Seventh Day Adventists and they just, you know, BYU had just turned into a creationist university. But no, they've. The, the main, you know, secular science has sort of won out at, at byu. But, you know, the Seventh Day Adventists are carrying on quite successfully. So they, it's not, it's not the only way to go. Right. But yeah, it's just, it's just completely inconsistent.

John Dehlin [01:46:47] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:46:48] Yeah, but it seems to work.

John Dehlin [01:46:50] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:46:51] Yeah.

The Curse of Cain and Its Survival Through the Flood

John Dehlin [01:46:52] What's this next slide?

Simon Southerton [01:46:55] Well, yeah, I don't know how much we want to spend on this, but I, you know, there are some really problematic. See the, the, I think the big problem is that the Global flood belief is far more consistent with LDS scripture than the, the limited, you know, like, nuanced beliefs of, you know, Dwayne Jeffrey. Now, because we've got all of these extra revelations now, if the flood wasn't global, you know, God had plenty of opportunities to clarify things with Joseph Smith, the prophet, a couple of hundred years ago, but he didn't. And it seems that it's just, it's just made it even worse. But I think one of the problematic, one of the most problematic things to come out of the sort of expansion of the flood doctrine is the revelation that Joseph Smith produced specifically out of the book of Abraham that explains how the curse of Cain got through the flood. Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [01:48:16] And this is really important, Simon.

Simon Southerton [01:48:18] I think, I think this is an extremely important. Because in, in many parts of Christianity, the curse is linked to Ham because the, in one part of the Genesis account, it talks about how Ham, Noah got drunk after the flood. Noah got drunk and Ham went into the tent and saw his father's nakedness. And, and evidently that was a very gross sin of Ham and he was cursed. And that.

Gerardo Sumano [01:48:51] That's the more common Christian belief. Right?

Simon Southerton [01:48:54] And that's the more common Christian belief of how the curse sort of had this continuation beyond the flood because they had to explain it. Okay. It's not only that, you know, the, it's not only the church that had this, the Mormon church that had this belief.

Gerardo Sumano [01:49:08] And just let me to. To just restate what you just said. So the, so the normal, the more common Christian belief is that there were two separate, different kinds of curses. There was the curse of Cain that, you know, was given to Cain, which was normally believed to be dark skin. And then, and then Ham received a separate curse. And that curse was because you just explained, because he saw, saw his father naked. And then somehow, well, Ham, you know, gets on the ark and that's how his curse, his new curse is the one that survives. But Joseph Smith was really interested in the Cain curse because that's the one about dark skin, correct?

Simon Southerton [01:50:04] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [01:50:05] So he, he needed to preserve Cain's original curse through the flood.

Simon Southerton [01:50:12] Yeah. And you can. And what we're going to talk about now, sort of you can sort of see how Joseph Smith wrestled with this problem and then he came up with. Well, I would argue that he came up with a solution. Obviously, many Mormons believe that this is revealed from God, but the book of Abraham is where Joseph Smith reveals that the curse was passed through the flood via Ham's wife, Aegyptus. Okay. And if we, we've got a slide here that's currently on the church's website and it actually says that, it says Ham's wife Egyptus was a descendant of Cain. The sons of their daughter Egyptus settled in Egypt. And that reference is Abraham there. And there's also reference to Psalms. So Egyptus is not mentioned in the Bible. This is a, this is something that Joseph Smith invented. And it just becomes very problematic then because here you've got extra detail, extra Mormon detail on, with reference to the flood that, that explains how this curse of Cain is passed through, gets through this bottleneck. This bottleneck of the flood.

John Dehlin [01:51:46] Yeah. And two, two problems immediately jump out at me. One is this whole curse of Cain thing is super racist and gross. But the second is if, if, if the church is timing Noah's flood to be 2000 years BCE that means that the Egyptian civilization is no more than 4,000 years old.

Simon Southerton [01:52:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:08] And that's ridiculous, right? Like the pyramids are clearly older than 4,000 years. Correct.

Simon Southerton [01:52:14] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:15] I mean it's, it's, it's. And the, the ancestors to the Egyptians all the way going back to Africa again, tens and tens of thousands of years ago, not 4,000 years ago. Correct.

Simon Southerton [01:52:29] Yeah, yeah. It's very difficult. So on the next slide, I don't think we want to read this, but the, the, the next slide is, is the actual scriptures that, that the church references when they make this claim about Egyptus the wife of Ham passing, being descended from Cain.

John Dehlin [01:52:50] And for our listeners, It's Abraham, chapter one, verses 21 through 26. Feel free to read through that.

Simon Southerton [01:52:56] Well, I want to read it because.

John Dehlin [01:52:57] No, no, I'm telling our listeners that they. Oh yeah, that's what they can reference.

Simon Southerton [01:53:02] Yeah. But essentially what this one, this scripture says is that Aegyptus, the, the word Egyptus in Chaldean means that which is forbidden. So it's got a dark, there's a bit of a dark side to the word Egypt. And then down the bottom of this scripture, it talks about how the descendants of Egyptus are cursed with, pertaining to the priesthood.

Gerardo Sumano [01:53:30] And he talks about race. Verse 24 talks about race.

Simon Southerton [01:53:33] Yes. So it's talking about the curse of Cain. It's linking Egyptus with carrying that curse through the flood and her descendants being cursed pertaining to the priesthood.

David Montgomery [01:53:45] Good.

Simon Southerton [01:53:47] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:53:48] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:53:48] This is racist scripture that you just cannot interpret away. Yeah. So we've got a, and this is just really problematic. And I don't see until the church either declares that this isn't scripture or removes it from the canon. The scriptural canon. I can't see how you're going to avoid these. This problem coming back to bite them all the time. So I've even gone into the. The Race and the Priesthood essay and I've got some relevant sections there that perhaps, John, you could read those out because I don't believe they really address the problem.

John Dehlin [01:54:37] The person yellow, the parts in yellow or the whole thing?

Simon Southerton [01:54:41] Yeah, probably the whole thing, I think. Okay, this is talking. So just a bit of background. It's talking about why it's sort of justifying why there were these restrictions on. On blacks having the priesthood.

John Dehlin [01:54:54] All right, from the race and the priesthood essay, the justice.

Simon Southerton [01:54:58] This is the current version on the

John Dehlin [01:55:00] church website, which could change exactly after this episode. Episode. Yeah, the. This. This is it quote. The justifications for this restriction echoed the widespread ideas about racial inferiority that had been used to argue for the legalization of black servitude in the territory of Utah. According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s, blacks descended. Descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain who slew his brother Abel. Those who accepted this view believed that God's curse on Cain was the mark of a dark skin. Close quote. And then it goes on to say, quote, today the church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse or, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form. Close quote. And immediately my question is, well, then it's also condemning both the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon. And does the. Do modern church leaders condemn the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon? No, they don't. So.

Simon Southerton [01:56:23] So, no, they don't.

John Dehlin [01:56:25] Which is it?

Simon Southerton [01:56:27] But as we've shown in the. In looking at Abraham earlier on, if you look at that scripture, it's just quite clear. So why did Joseph Smith go to all that trouble detailing how the curse of Cain got through the flood by inventing Egypt? You know, coming up with Egyptus. If now the church disavows the theories advanced in the past. What I don't like there is the way that the church has said, well, you know, this is just to, you know, we're all racists in America. It was just an American thing. It, it sort of deflects part of the blame to the rest of society when it was the rest of society that was fighting to. For Equality. Yeah. So the, the problem is for the church, really, they want people to believe that they are condemning all races and past, present in any form. Then the church has to do something about the Book of Abraham because this problem is going to go on and on and on. And the next slide.

John Dehlin [01:57:32] Yeah, and the Book of Mormon, and it's. The church knows this. And so for it to be distancing itself from the racism and blaming others without, without both account, without acknowledging that the source text for this racism is its fundamental scripture, and then choosing intentionally not to change the scripture is deceptive. It's totally deceptive.

Gerardo Sumano [01:58:00] I think, I think it was. It's pretty significant. And I think this quote is not on the presentation, but there is this quote from the Race and the priesthood essay that says that they're doing what, John, you're saying they're trying to say, oh, it's the rest of Christianity. But they're not addressing what Joseph Smith did with how he tried to preserve the curse. So basically, the sentence says black servitude was sometimes viewed as a second curse placed upon Noah's grandson Kenan as a result of Ham's indiscretion towards his father. Father. So they're addressing why other people believed slavery was okay and how that curse was passed through Ham nowhere. They're addressing what's in their own scriptures that Joseph Smith taught that the curse

John Dehlin [01:58:54] was passed through Aegyptus and he claimed that it was translated by the gift and power of God from the papyrus into the modern day.

Gerardo Sumano [01:59:02] Right.

John Dehlin [01:59:03] Like that's a problem.

Simon Southerton [01:59:04] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:05] They're condemning Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Abraham.

Simon Southerton [01:59:09] Yeah, the whole thing. Then, you know, it begs the question why, you know, why does Gyp. Why do we need to have scripture about Egyptus? Yeah, why do we need scripture that tells us about a curse being passed through the flood?

John Dehlin [01:59:23] And then if Joseph got that wrong, what else did he get wrong?

Simon Southerton [01:59:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:26] In the, in the scriptures, clearly there

Simon Southerton [01:59:28] was a theological problem that Joseph Smith was trying to address and he was

John Dehlin [01:59:34] probably joining others in trying to justify slavery.

Simon Southerton [01:59:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:38] And the displacement of native peoples in America.

Simon Southerton [01:59:41] Yeah. But the next slide illustrates how if you don't address these scriptures, the. This racist nonsense continues. These are some quotes I listened to, to your two hour interview with Rodney Meldrum a few weeks ago, John, where you were effectively, I think, trying to pin him down on what he believes about, you know, the link, the curse and skin color. And I heard all of his deflecting and humming and arring and changing the subject but these are quotes from his Rediscovering the Book of Mormon DNA. Rediscovering the Book of Mormon remnants through DNA book, which sort of his whole thing is built on. And it's really quite clear that he, you know, he. That. That he holds this belief that there. It's. The curse is linked to skin color. But it's very, you know, he. He's promulgating the belief that Noah's sons colonized the entire world. And he's even justifying, claiming that DNA backs this all up, that you can DNA test an Asian. You can clearly tell. You know, you can DNA test somebody and say, yeah, you're an Asian or you're African or whatever, but if. Unless these scriptures are, you know, removed from the canon or changed or edited, you're just gonna, you know, the fundamentalists in the church are just going to keep coming up with racist beliefs because they are supported so clearly by scripture.

John Dehlin [02:01:20] Do we want to read this quote for the listeners?

Simon Southerton [02:01:23] Yeah, sure.

John Dehlin [02:01:26] Gerardo, do you want to read or you want me to read it?

Gerardo Sumano [02:01:27] Yeah, I can read it.

John Dehlin [02:01:28] Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [02:01:29] That's just the last one.

John Dehlin [02:01:30] It's from Rod Meldrum's Rediscovering the Book of Mormon Remnant through DNA.

Gerardo Sumano [02:01:36] Yeah, it just says the Hebrew lineage stem from Noah's son, Shem Ham, who is thought to have been the carrier of the Caucasian lineages after the flood, Ham and his wife Aegyptus were the founding couple of the African or Egyptian peoples, and Japheth's family headed the Asian lineages. Ham was married to Aegyptus and was cursed by his father Noah. It is through this lineage that the curse of Cain was preserved, observed through the flood. After the flood, Ham and his descendants inherited the land of Egypt.

John Dehlin [02:02:17] Yeah. Simon, can you explain to us why saying all Asian people come from Japheth, one of Noah's sons, and all Africans come through Ham and Egyptus, including Egyptians. Why, that's ridiculous. In terms of. Of what science tells us. I mean, I guess.

Simon Southerton [02:02:37] I think you explained it earlier. I mean, if you. You could, you know.

John Dehlin [02:02:42] Yeah, yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:02:43] There are clear evidence of human civilizations existing all over the planet 10,000 years ago. You know, large civilizations emerging 10 to, you know, 5 to 10,000 years ago, well before any global flood catastrophe would have happened. So there's. There's just simply no way. All the laws of genetics would have to be completely thrown out the window in order to explain the entire human population being descended from, you know, a family of about eight people that came out of an ark 4,000 years ago. Yeah, it's, it's. I mean it's, it's, it's laughable and it's unnecessary. You know, a good Christian doesn't need to believe this stuff.

John Dehlin [02:03:32] And it's important to note that Rod Meldrum's following is in the tens of thousands in the heart of Utah county, in Arizona and Idaho. You can almost take preppers, you know, and, and Rod Meldrum's group and just like, and, and just merge them together and it's a, it's. And even the anti vaccine, anti kind of COVID vaccine, anti mask type Mormons, that's just all one big group. And these cultures kind of reinforce each other, I think in ways that's actually quite embarrassing for the church and that's actually a risk to schisms in the church. And this also includes the Denver Snuffer Group and, and the Snufferites. They're all in there reinforcing the, this anti science, anti evidence culture that is not only, you know, again embarrassing to the modern church, but, but threatening a massive schism. So it's just, it's a disaster for everyone, you know.

Simon Southerton [02:04:36] Yeah, there's certainly a very big generational problem here. Rodney Meldrum stuff really only appeals to the vast majority of died. So they're elderly senior members of the church which who were all raised with that sort of, you know, very black and white fundamentalist view. But it's just become, you know, it's, it, it's, it's really. I think it's a really big problem for the church because if the church decides to cater to young Earth creationism and they go down that path, then the appeal of the church globally will just, I mean Europe, you can kiss goodbye to Europe. I mean Europe's already in a bad way. In Australia is the same. New Zealand, all most Western countries because young Earth creationism is. I showed a graphic and I think in our first talk that showed that young Earth. The belief in young Earth creationism in Australia and belief in. Has just, you know, plummeted dramatically over the last 30 years from polls that they've done at university. You know, students entering university out of high school. So. And that's, you know, reflects the broader population. They just, yeah, they, they. The many of our countries are fairly secular and we have a fairly healthy regard for science and follow science and that's, I think to a certain extent that's been reflected in the pandemic. Australia's done really well through the pandemic because we just followed the science there's not too much argument. So yeah, I don't know, I don't know how. I mean, I think they need a prophet to solve this problem, John. We need some revelation, somebody who, you know, speaks to God and really provides some clear leadership.

John Dehlin [02:06:49] Well, again that's the problem is for a modern prophet to provide new revelation that embraces an billions of year old earth and a non global flood and a non literal Bible Bible and a non literal Book of Mormon. That prophet undermines his own authority by discrediting lots of all the previous prophets and modern Mormon scripture. And so it's a house of cards that falls once that revelation is received, you know.

Simon Southerton [02:07:18] Yeah. So I don't know how long they'll go on with this, you know, how long can they, you know, so scientists, BYU carry on being so evil and so secular and essentially not believing the major, some of the, many of the major fundamentals doctrines of the church. Yeah. Who's paying their salaries? They're paid by the church. You know, the prophet's the head of byu.

John Dehlin [02:07:47] I mean this is why Jeffrey Holland gives his talk about muskets and we have to be willing to lose our accreditation, you know, because it's just at some point these things have to come to a head and it's irreconcilable and in the church, basically what Holland is saying is when, when science and faith conflict, we're going to go with faith every time. And if that means BYU losing its reputation, if that means censoring and silencing the scientists, if that means by you becoming a laughing song stock, they're going to pick that every time, you know.

Simon Southerton [02:08:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that's their problem.

John Dehlin [02:08:28] Yeah. Well, Simon, this is a beautiful, another beautiful episode. You know, in addition to the ones that we've done before. Global Flood is a big deal. You brought on a wonderful guest and you brought an amazing analysis that includes an Australian flick flavor and Mormon stories. Listeners are loving what you're bringing to Mormon stories.

Closing Thoughts and Acknowledgments

Simon Southerton [02:08:50] Well, I must thank Craig Price who introduced me to David Montgomery. David was fantastic because he's, he's really a, I don't think he wants to be seen as the, the flood guy, the science flood guy. But he's, he's certainly got a very respectable scientific background. He's a great communicator. He's written a lot, lot of really good books. So Annie's Flood book will be a really fascinating one to read and yeah, he was. And thanks again to Cray for providing the animations which were really interesting. I Thought it'd be just nice to see some really big floods that have occurred in everyone, most people's backyard, basically. Yeah. And those floods are mega floods at a global, in terms of a global scale. Right. So there aren't many places in the world that have floods of those scales of that scale. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. And I'm hoping that our, we might be able to go and our next episode organized in about three weeks time. I'll get back to you on that. But it's going to be about the, we're going to go before the creation. We're going to go right back into distant time and look at the creation of the universe, the world and the very first life on Earth. So. And I think John Perry has agreed to join us. He's got some wonderful animations that talk about some of the science related to the emergence, the first emergence of complex molecules and then, then replicating molecules. And so science is starting to peel back some knowledge about how life emerged on Earth. And I'm hoping that we'll be also joined by Bill White, who's a very, very respected geologist out of Cornell. Been a professor at Cornell for about 40 years. He's the father of a good friend of mine here in Australia and he'll, he'll shed some light on the, the Earth's and the universe's earliest history. So I'm really looking forward to that.

John Dehlin [02:11:07] Beautiful. Well, Simon, we've, we've loved your contributions on Mormon doctrine versus science. We, we really appreciate it and we're looking forward to more episodes in the future.

Simon Southerton [02:11:19] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [02:11:20] Thanks.

Simon Southerton [02:11:21] Thanks everyone for listening.

John Dehlin [02:11:22] Thanks, Simon and Gerardo, yeah, thanks so much for all you do to make this possible.

Gerardo Sumano [02:11:26] Yeah, no problem. Thank you, Simon. This was awesome.

Simon Southerton [02:11:29] You're welcome.

John Dehlin [02:11:30] All right, thanks everybody for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast. And we, we really appreciate all your support and we, we hope you'll email us@mormonstoriesmail.com with feedback if you like what Simon's doing. You know, please support us. There's, there's a way to support us just by going to MormonStories.org Simon. Simon, you can donate to keep this, this, this series alive and you also get a free version of Dime of Simon's latest book on the Book of Mormon and DNA. So please support us if you can. Please share this with anyone you want and we'll see you all guys again. Gals and guys and everyone else. We'll see y' all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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