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Australia: The Time Traveller’s Guide—ABC Mythology

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morgueFile.com Spectacular Australian landscapes shown in the video were carved by receding waters of Noah’s Flood some 4500 years ago.
Spectacular Australian landscapes shown in the video were carved by receding waters of Noah’s Flood some 4500 years ago.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a government funded institution in Australia, is promoting the first of a series of videos entitled: Australia: The Time Traveller’s Guide. Episode 1 is called The Early Days.

The video shows presenter Richard Smith driving a vehicle across outback Australia, which he uses as an analogy of geologic time. It’s a powerful way of teaching the secular 4.5-billion-year evolutionary story, using fun ideas and cool graphics.

Smith imagines that, at the press of a button, his four-wheel drive turns into a time machine. Presto, he is suddenly zipping into the past at a million years a minute. What an imagination.

Of course, there is no such thing as a time machine. Everyone knows that. But most people do not know that there is no scientific instrument that can measure time into the past. (See The fatal flaw with radioactive dating.)

Dr Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the USA, described evolution over millions of years as the “creation myth of the secular elites”. He calls it the “Great intellectual rival to Christianity in the Western World”.

A myth is an invented story, one without historical evidence. That is what Smith is telling—the secular myth. For those who need to be convinced of this, ask yourself questions as you watch the video. Whenever Smith makes a claim in the video, e.g. about human evolution, or dinosaurs, or how the earth formed, ask yourself: “Who saw that happen?” “What evidence do they have for that?” “Where were they standing when that occurred?”

Science is about evidence. So is history. Nobody saw the events that Smith describes. He is presenting the great Western myth of our time.

So, how do we know what happened in the past?

We rely on witnesses who were present. We depend on their writings.

That is how we know the dates and details of the Battle of Waterloo. That is how we know about Julius Caesar. We have historical evidence. We have documents. That is how we know there was a global Flood at the time of Noah. That is how we know when it happened, how long it took, how high the water went and other significant details.

Dr Smith does not believe Noah’s Flood occurred. He does not believe the testimony of these eyewitnesses so he is forced to rely on speculation. This is how he and others in the West have come up with their own imaginative story.

Interestingly, when Richard Smith speaks about what happened in the past, when he supposedly drives backward in time, he is actually driving through country that preserves the devastation caused by Noah’s Flood. When they show us the landscapes, we are looking at country fashioned by the receding waters of the Flood. When he talks about dinosaurs roaming the land, he is referring to the remains of these once-magnificent animals that were overwhelmed as the floodwaters approached their peak. When he shows the sea pens in the Ediacaran of South Australia he is referring to organisms buried much earlier in the Flood catastrophe.

So, the same evidence can be used to support different stories, but only one can be true. The biblical account is based, not on a time machine, which does not exist, but on the eyewitness testimony of people who recorded events that happened, so we would appreciate our place in this world. And that has implications for a lot of issues currently under debate in our country. The ABC, a publically funded institution, should provide balance, especially since our understanding of the past has such significance for the worldview battles in the present in our culture.

Published: 1 April 2012