Dr. Don Clark of Creation Moments, along with Jim and David, examines an article from the Institute for Creation Research maintaining that California’s redwoods can help us determine the time of the Great Flood, thereby “running rings” around evolutionist thinking …
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Charley, thanks for your comments. If you believe in macro-evolution, then perhaps the trees of today could be significantly different than those before the flood. But Genesis 1 tells us that God created after their kind, meaning that while the ability for slight change was designed into every plant and anima (micro-evolution, or variation within a kind – the dog is a good example)l, the ability to jump from one kind to another kind was not (macro-evolution, dog to cat, for example). Now back to pre-flood versus post-flood trees. The trees would have been very similar pre-flood versus post-flood. Pre-flood the Earth was more conducive for life so it is possible that the trees grew even faster and larger than the ones today, and their DNA would have been the same as the trees especially immediately post-flood since the seed would have survived the flood. So in essence we can look at what we have today as a window into the past. We have many fossil records of, for example, maple leaves that look exactly like the leaves today with the possible exception of being a little larger do to the more perfect growing conditions before the flood. Hope this helps.
I was in the middle of writing a comment about uniformitarianist assumptions your broadcast about the sequoia gigantea, when I lost the site. I’m not sure it posted, so I’ll try again. isn’t the assumption that redwood trees’ current characteristics of longevity before the flood an example of uniformitarian thinking? We cannot know what the actual trees themselves were like before the flood; all we have are fossil remains. Based on the fossil stumps and logs, they trees must have been large. But we don’t know anything about the makeup or lifespan of the trees that were living at that time. So, the sequoia of those days might have gone through many, many generations over millions of years for all we know. All we know about the longevity of the trees is based on the trees that are currently living in the Sierra Nevada. The present is not the key to the past!
Charley, I’ve forwarded your comments on to Dr. Don. Stay tuned!
You guys confused sequoia gigantea with sequoia sempervirens on a few points. Gigantea grows in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the eastern part of the state; sempervirens grows near the coast in the northwest part of the state. The wood from gigantea is brittle and, therefore, pretty useless. That characteristic saved the remaining groves from logging. The sempervirens have fabulous wood with all the positive properties that you attributed to the redwoods, but without the brittleness. My family home in Mill Valley, CA had redwood siding. Many great buildings in that part of the San Francisco Bay Area were made out of redwood (semprevirens), including the huge beams that supported the roofs. Check out some interiors of buildings designed by Bernard Maybeck if you want to see some examples of what you can do with redwood. Finally, the semprevirens are extremely fast growing trees — they grow much faster than ponderosa pine, for instance. They can be easily harvested and replanted. Fortunately, some of the most beautiful stands have been preserved. If you’ve ever seen Return of the Jedi, you will remember the forest scenes on the moon of Endor. Those were filmed in Jedediah Smith State Park just east of Crescent City, CA.
Charley, thanks so much for the clarification. We learned something today!