June 2024: Interview with Dr. Aardsma, Part 2

Steve:
Today, you're going to hear directly from Dr. Gerald Aardsma on various topics, including understanding the narrative of mainstream science today, choosing to be radically different from mainstream science, advice to young people entering secular institutions, and even a little bit on the age of the earth and the concept of what we call virtual history.

We're glad you're here today on the BC Messenger podcast. This is episode number 23, June 2024, season 2, episode 11 with real science, real Bible, real history, and real world. My name is Steve Hall. As always, I'm here with my wife, Jennifer Hall, and we're so glad you've joined us today.

Jennifer:
Yes, we are. And as we were preparing for today's episode and listening through the interview that we are going to be airing today, we thought of one word that summarizes today's episode. And that is the word pioneering, a pioneer. A pioneer is defined as a person or a group that originates or helps open up a new line of thought or activity or a new method or technical development. And here at the Biblical chronologist, pioneering is a lot of what is going on. Brand new ideas, new lines of thought, new paradigms for us to think in and that we hope and pray are going to continue to mushroom out into the world, making a difference as these trains of thought get worked on and developed in the years to come.

Steve:
Dr. Aardsma is certainly a pioneer when it comes to research, when it comes to working at the interface of science and the Bible, stepping out of the box. Pioneers don't go along with everyone else. And as is going to be discussed on this upcoming interview that you're going to hear today, a pioneer is brave enough to say the radically different truth and that does take courage, a lot of courage, to take a different path, because you are on a quest for the truth. That's really what you want, no matter what. You want to know the truth. And there are not many people that are, and we'll just say it, that are brave enough to say something radically different.

Jennifer:
In the mainstream scientific climate today, everyone is pretty much expected to contribute to what's already established. The norm. The mainstream big picture. And Dr. Aardsma talks about this quite a bit in the interview so we won't belabor the point now. But just as we get started, think about the fact that a pioneer has the unique job of starting out. Starting is the hardest part. So often new territory in any area will never be discovered or tamed without those who will lead the way, you know, going into the unknown. And usually it's under less than ideal circumstances. And the person who is leading the way is going to have to face dangers and sacrifices along the way.

Steve:
A classic story that comes to mind in here in America, by the way, we wrote a song one time on pioneering you and I, called "Onward, We Go". Years ago we were part of a music ministry that we really enjoyed being a part of and we were able to write some songs and some musicals, and it was a patriotic song.

Jennifer:
It was a patriotic musical about the American spirit.

Steve:
Anyhow, a very familiar story that most of us know is the little house on the prairie series and series of books, and certainly Pa and Ma and Laura and Mary were pioneers in our country. And here's a quote from By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Listen to this quote.

"All over town, there was sawing and hammering inside the other buildings. Ma said, I'm sorry from Mrs. Beardsley, keeping a hotel while it's being built over her head. Well, that's what it takes to build up a country, said Paul, building over your head and under your feet, but building. We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started."

That's a great quote. If we waited for things to suit us before we started, that's pioneering.

Jennifer:
You just got to gird up your loins and go forward wherever you find yourself if you are called to lead the way into new territory. And it's not easy. Not everybody's going to like what you're doing, but somebody has to start.

Steve:
So this month, we are going to be sharing more of Jennifer's interview with her father, Dr. Gerald Aardsma. This was recorded last year and we released the first part of that interview. I guess it was about a year ago or a little less, actually last August. We decided to go ahead now and release another section of that interview. You can go back and listen to part one, which by the way is one of our most popular podcast episodes that we have done. The link is in the show notes. I would encourage that. But we're going hear you and your dad discuss various topics in this interview.

Jennifer:
Yes. So here's the rundown for today. We do have this interview, part two, as we've already mentioned. One guy, after he heard part one of the interview, he said, I think I feel like I could just listen to your dad talk for hours. And that is the truth. Dad, grandpa as he's known around here, he is kind of just a walking encyclopedia on many, many topics, anything scientific, anything mathematical, anything mechanical. He's the guy.

Steve:
Of course, he's also the son of a pastor, what we would call a preacher's kid, and has a very good thorough familiarity of the Bible as well.

Jennifer:
And he has so much insight to share. So I hope that will be helpful to our listeners. I know it will. And then we just have a couple other short sections this month. We have some feedback from listeners, which we always enjoy sharing. And then we have a research update on another of the biblical locations of the ancient Old Testament.

Steve:
We don't have a Helen's View this time. We'll have to wait till next time.

Jennifer:
Whenever we hear directly from Dr. Aardsma, we don't hear from Helen! That seems to be the way it works out. So that's okay. We will give her a month off and have her back in July.

All right. Well, without further ado, let's just jump right into the interview here. What our listeners need to know as part two gets rolling of the interview is that part one was almost exclusively discussing Noah's flood in the real world. And as we get rolling into part two, there's a little bit more of that same discussion happening. Noah's flood in the real world and then why those in mainstream science are not recognizing it for what it is.

Steve:
That's right. So we're just going to jump right into part two of the interview. There's not a whole lot of lead in. This is going to go right back into the discussion. And here we go. Jennifer and her father, Dr. Gerald Aardsma.

*********** INTERVIEW

Jennifer:
So do you think maybe as far as the flood at 3520 BC, we have a lot of specialized scientists and they're not really overlapping each other's fields. And maybe there's not enough chronologists, biblical chronologists, who are looking, who are stepping back and taking in the whole picture, and who are able to help to correlate all these different fields to tell the proper story of history yet. I'm just amazed that we haven't had anybody yet even make a suggestion of such a thing. But maybe like you're saying, if it doesn't fit the paradigm and it sounds too biblical or something, they're just not going to go there, or there isn't the right specialty of people to put the pieces in place. We have too many doing their own field and nothing else.

Gerald:
I think it is true that most scientists today are highly specialized and that means that they don't really look at the big picture most of the time. That means that the big picture tends to just be accepted and everybody contributes to building the big picture from their own little sphere. Not very many people are brave enough to venture into a radically different area, saying something which is radically different. It means that their career is going to get really harmed if they are radically different from everybody else. So most wills say, I must be doing something wrong, if they find something that doesn't agree with the accepted mainstream due because, after all, all of these other fields of, they all are also agreeing with the mainstream and I'm saying something which is quite radically different from my little field and they're going to be different.

Jennifer:
It's probably hard for us for me as a lay person to understand the pressure that they might feel. Because I as a lay person can say whatever I want, about 3520 BC, because that's not my area of expertise. That's not where my peers are, and I don't really know anything about it from a professional standpoint. But these people, if that's where they live and work all day every day, then it's much more of a pressure to stay within the party line.

Gerald:
The peer pressure is huge. You'll be laughed at and you'll lose funding is what will end up happening. I never was much concerned about career. I had found ultimately that I couldn't do the work that needed to be done within any institution. So I went out on my own and that meant I didn't have to worry about my career. It was already over, so to speak, as far as advancing up the rungs of the ladder. So I didn't have to worry about that.

I published early on when I first found Noah's flood and I published the integration that I had of that over several different fields, based around radio carbon dating because that was the integration point, you might say, of the research. The ability to actually date things to the time of the flood is very dependent on tree-ring calibrated radio carbon dating, which only came into vogue in the 1980s. So back in the 1980s, or somewhere back there, I was already publishing, saying, look, there's a lot of things happening here at this date, enough things to raise eyebrows. And I'm trying to convey my personal experience. I'm a young man then, out of university with a PhD, finished up a postdoc, and I'm just starting to publish and go to conferences and things in the normal scientific mainstream community, publishing what I'm finding. And I am finding that when I say there's a problem in biblical chronology, there is a missing thousand years there, which has crippled biblical chronology in the past, but that we have that fixed now, and we can put biblical chronology now together with secular archaeology and secular chronology, and look at all of the stuff that's happening right when the Bible says it should be happening... this is really wonderful, this is revolutionary... well, man, you could have seen the audience was very nervous at that point. And the great stir, you know, through the audience.

Another conference I went to and said, you know, the flood, Noah's flood happened 3520 BC. And here's the evidence and support of that. Again, there was a great rustling of papers. And you can tell you've just got everybody very uncomfortable. They think you're a bit crazy is what they're afraid of. The paper that came out from the radio carbon conference where I spoke about these things, I think had a note at the bottom of it saying that the Radio Carbon Journal doesn't personally endorse the contents of the paper.

I mean, trying to show you what will happen to anybody who just comes out and says, look, this is where the evidence is if you will just look at the evidence. So at the present time, we've got this history of kind of an evolutionary uniformitarian view of things coming back from the late 1800s up into the 1900s. And that sort of has continued to be implanted on the model of history that everybody has in their heads. They're all very excited about great catastrophes that happened 60 or 600 million years ago, responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs and all kinds of things that happened back there. But nobody is to say anything about any super catastrophes happening 5,000 years ago. Those are not supposed to be possible. And I don't know whether there's also perhaps a, I don't know, maybe a psychological component to it. We all like to think that we're living in a very safe world. And it's very unsettling to realize that man, just 5,000 years ago civilization was just completely wiped out and started over again.

Jennifer:
I could see that. That's a real scary thought. That kind of goes back to what I was saying about how sobering it is to see the evidence left behind by what we know is the biblical flood. That's probably true that 60 million years ago is a long time ago and probably won't have anything to do with us today in 2023. What you were just saying there really goes well with another one of the questions that I'm very excited to get to. But could you just quickly, before we get off the flood, just address this question. You say the Chalcolithic civilization was ended by Noah's flood. What about other ancient civilizations such as Egypt or China? Do you believe they were also wiped out by the flood? And if so, why don't they have any records of it? This is a very common question.

Gerald:
The secular records of the flood are well known and they're fairly numerous. I think my brother even had brought to my attention years ago, one from Native American Indians saying that they seem to have a recollection of a huge flood event. I think the recollections of the flood are worldwide and certainly everybody's heard of the Gilgamesh epic and that's all got a flood.

Jennifer:
Which we now know was written after the date of the true date of Noah's flood.

Gerald:
That's correct. Which is a nice problem to have solved as opposed to the traditional date because Gilgamesh is earlier than the traditional date of the flood. The question I have is coming back at these people asking these types of questions is what type of records would you expect them to have had, because writing was barely even invented at the time. It's not like they're going to leave behind newspapers that reported on the flood. As far as records go, because Chinese or Egyptian at such an ancient date, would we expect to be able to go back and find anything besides legends or folklore in those cultures, but some kind of actual hardcore record. And then understanding that the flood is actually a thousand years earlier than normally thought, that is 3520 BC, not 2520 BC, that all goes together to answer your question.

It does appear that writing was invented just prior to the flood, maybe a couple hundred years prior to the flood. And the flood in the Bible, the flood record that you read there, it does have the feeling of having been written on something like Cuneiform tablets. These are the records of Adam in the day that he was created. Then these are the records of Noah and so forth, you'll read that in Genesis. These appeared to have been like separate Cuneiform tablets or something. So writing was just invented. It appears to me that Noah himself was keeping his journal, as I always regard Noah as somewhat of a scientist. He seems to have kept a log, or ships log, or whatever that also would have been like a lab book where he's recording what he's seeing, when he's seeing it. He's giving us a careful chronology of events on such a day, of such and such a month, the following happened. So he's very much doing the sort of work that a scientist normally does, making observations, tabulating the data. And there it is, all available for us to look at today. But he can only do that if he has some means of recording and it appears that he was recording to me, here's the recording on Cuneiform tablets. That's Noah.

Now you go down further into the Bible and things start getting more and more verbose as you get down into the time of Abraham, and then the Exodus is very verbose, takes up several books. What I think is going on with a lot of that is that the ability to write, and to have the technology that you need to record things is of course improving with time. It's kind of like us, with our first computers. I built a computer back in the 1980s from then available chipsets. And I think I had probably a total of like one kilobyte of memory in the machine. And the idea that you could have a megabyte hard drive was unthinkable back then. And now of course we've gone factors of thousands beyond that, the ability to store the information and to retrieve it quickly and so forth.

The same thing would have been going on with the invention of writing, you're starting with clay tablets and with a stylus that you're kind of sticking the clay with in order to make different symbols. And then they're baking the tablets and that's the wonderful thing, that preserved that really well at that point, it's like pottery at that point. But then as you go down, the clay tablets aren't very portable, they're kind of heavy and it'd be nice to have something that was a little more compact. And now they start learning about how to write on hides, making a writing surface that way. And then how to use papyrus. So that's a plant, weeding the leaves of the plant together and beating them in whatever else they did to them, which would make it into a paper like substance.

And so the technology of writing was advancing, making it easier to record things and making it possible to record more things than they had been able to record previously. The very earliest chapters of Genesis give evidence of having been orally transmitted from one generation to a next. Things like the very long lists that you find in Genesis 5, the genealogical lists. Those are hallmarks of oral transmission that have been normal to cultures that are pre-literate. These are the places where everybody would, they would all know the stories. There would be one person who would be the person who was transmitting. Like the storyteller, the orator. So they're a performer in a way. And we read those lists of genealogies and we think, man, this is really dry, name after name, and they lived so long and they had a son and so on. But to the ancient peoples, these were the real tests of the mental of the specialist, and their acting ability, if you like. They weren't into creativity at all. They were into fidelity, transmitting the information accurately, generation to generation. And everybody in the audience is aware of what they're going to be saying because they've heard it before. And the question is, can they get it right? And of course, when they have finished this long list of names and sons and dates and all of that and get to the end of it, everybody says, wow, what a performance. That's really true. That's a hallmark of oral transmission. And you don't tend to find that in the rest of the Bible. That's because the rest of the Bible was not orally transmitted. It was written down and transmitted that way.

When you look for the flood at 3520 BC, you're looking at a time when writing was brand new. You're looking at a time when you have things like clay tablets, but you probably don't have very many people that know how to write that would have been very scholarly at that time. Advanced scholarship, PhD level, the ability to write something. So the idea that you should be finding lots of historical records of this event is false. What we tend to find things like the Gilgamesh epic, which appears to have been written a long time subsequently, when I say a long time, I don't know, a thousand years later or something. Well, that's a fairly long time in reality. But they still have a memory of it. Than they may be working from authentic records that they had access to back at that time. And when you read this stuff, you get the very strong impression that it was common knowledge. A thousand years after the flood, 2000 years after the flood, it was absolutely common knowledge. And anybody suggesting that there was no such thing as a flood would have been laughed off the planet by everybody else, because it was so obvious that civilization had disappeared.

And you see this break archaeologically over and over again, where the stuff was being built and then it goes into ruins at the time of the flood. And then another bunch of people come in and they start rebuilding on top of those ruins.

Jennifer:
And you think that's the case in the Chinese ancient civilization, as well as Egyptian?

Gerald:
You have to have modern archaeologists active in an area in order to get the data. So I don't know what the state of modern Chinese archaeology is, but at the time that I was researching all of this stuff a couple decades ago, there wasn't much there that I could find. The state of archaeology in Israel was highly advanced, Jewish people were really very concerned to get the history of their land. And so you have to have laws that say you cannot erect your building on top of this site until it has been excavated. That of course goes really against the grain of commerce. It hinders commerce, and so the businessmen don't like it. But if you just let everybody go in and dig everything up and destroy it, you lose all that information. Israel had those kinds of laws, was protecting the sites, excavating the sites, having whole departments that are devoted to emergency excavations as necessary to gather the data before the site gets ruined. Israel has lots of publications and so forth. So it's really wonderful because the Bible is mainly centered in and around Israel, making readily available a lot of extremely valuable information for trying to put ancient biblical history into its proper chronological and archaeological setting.

JenniferL
So in China, would you say then that yes, we know that's a very ancient civilization in general and they have a lot of history going way back, but we don't have the detail in the archaeology to be able to see the break or at least you didn't a few decades ago, to be able to see the break at 3520 BC. No one's really explored that at this point, but just because we know it's an ancient civilization that predates that doesn't falsify the fact that there was a major catastrophic event that happened at 3520 BC.

Gerald:
Right, a very important maxim is absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And just because you don't have evidence of a flood doesn't mean the flood didn't happen. It just means you haven't looked, basically. Of course another problem with China is that there is a language barrier which is fairly substantial. I had one paper from Israel that was done in Hebrew, a lot of work is done in Hebrew in Israel, but at least I can get it translated. I don't know how to begin looking into a lot of the Chinese archaeology because I'm sure a lot of it's written in Chinese and I don't have any hope with Chinese.

Jennifer:
Okay, so that leads into the fact that there's so much more that can be done. You have not exhausted the possibilities of finding evidence for the flood around the globe or the Northern hemisphere, but you were able to do enough that your case, you felt like your case was conclusive enough that you could move on to the next step of your research. But a young person in science today could carry on with these things in these other cultures, civilizations, core samples, whatever, and go in and do the detailed analysis like you did with these initial forays. So yes, there's so much potential and it's very exciting for a young person who is interested in these fields to be able to build upon what's been done. And that does lead into this next question very nicely. What advice would you give a young person, I would put in there a Christian young person, who wants to go into the field of science or sciences.

Gerald:
What advice would I give?

Jennifer:
This also relates back to the peer pressure and the landscape that we have in these fields today and how can we navigate these things in a pursuit of truth and successfully put out new ideas or what advice do you have?

Gerald:
Before a young person ventures off into the university world with any notion of saving the world, they need to be aware that most of the information that I'm hearing coming out of the evangelical community today in regard to science is mostly wrong. And the foundation that you're likely to have will not be able to stand up to critical scrutiny. You will not be able to defend yourself intelligently because you've been given a lot of band-aid solutions that are simply not true. I feel like this is a terrible thing to do to young people. I think there's another group of people who feel that whatever we do to help shore up a young person's faith is a good thing to do. I personally find it to be bordering on blasphemy to suppose that we need to tell lies in God's name in order to shore up young people's faith. I feel like God is really big enough to take care of himself, and he does not need me to use Satan's methods in order to save some young person from straying from the faith. This is very serious business and very deep business. I don't dwell here much most of the time.

What I find to be essential is that the data that I find be as accurately as possible presented and then the conclusions drawn from that data be as clearly presented as possible. And then the whole thing be traceable back, documented, so that any person can go back and check it out and see whether I'm telling the truth or not. I find that essential. That standard is generally missing within what we call the Christian community today. It is the case that the Christian community also has grown up with a certain, let's call it standard model, which has grown up over the last, say, generation, a standard model of earth history. And this model is mostly false. So what I'm trying to say to the young person going into the university setting is, don't suppose you will be able to go into the university setting with that basis and survive. You will not.

So the first piece of advice that I would give them is, please go read the books that I've written about biblical chronology and putting biblical history together with secular history in a defensible way. If you can do that and you still are interested in science and perhaps interested in science and the Bible together, you will have a defensible foundation for your faith at that point so that you will be able to enter a scientific field at the university level and you will be able to survive. Not only survive, I think you'll be able to thrive. You may not be able to dialogue well with many of the people who surround you. You may have to be very skillful at dialogue because they're coming from a totally different paradigm and they will think that you are really strange. This is normal in science. Galileo once was thought to be really strange. Einstein was thought to be pretty strange. And well, that's the way it goes. When you're thinking according to the truth, the truth is what it is whether we like it or not and whether anybody thinks that's what it is or not. And it just so happens that we tend to be very good at thinking wrong, error prone ideas. Much better at that, just off the cuff I mean, when we think about things than thinking the truth about a given thing. And that means that we carry around with us quite a few wrong ideas and the history of science shows that this process of reading out wrong ideas is a very, very painful one, a very difficult one and very slow, slow process.

So don't expect to convert everybody overnight or anything like that. But basically the main thing I'm thinking of is I'd like you to be able to enter the university training that you have your site set on, and not be blown out of the water in the first couple of years of general courses that you have to take, by information that you're getting from other fields that you've never seen before, and which you really can't see anything wrong with.

Jennifer:
Do you think it would be good for them also to get familiar with the concept of "Virtual History" before heading into the university setting, because it pertains to the age of the earth. And I'm sure a young person going into the sciences, coming from a Christian background is going to very quickly be faced with those types of questions as well. And you don't have any books on virtual history, but you do have a nice package of writings on it as I recall. And just being introduced to that concept can really help settle down the stress and anxiety that can happen to a person when they are faced with the reality of measurements of time in the history of the earth.

Gerald:
Right. I've been working backwards in time, as you may know. I've already shared that I first tried to figure out the date of the flood. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to date, and it turned out to be impossible, until I finally got the flood model figured out right. And then it became very easy to date that correctly. And then that got us into the whole question of, well, what about the Exodus? All scientists are saying the Exodus never happened, the archaeologists. And so you find this missing thousand years, and you correct these things and you're working backwards, Exodus, the Flood, and you get back to the age of the earth.

One of the first books I ever hoped to write was going to be called Creation Happened, something like 5260 BC. But I've never gotten there yet because the load of discovery and responsibility that came with it, especially the whole aging research thing, has preempted that. However, it still is on my to-do list. And I would love to write that book and make a simple presentation of the philosophical necessity of virtual histories within created entities so that a person can stop being frightened to death by the idea that there might be light coming in from galaxies that are, you know, five billion light years away. I mean, that's five billion years. Wow, how frightening! It's not frightening at all. Once you understand that when you create anything, that created thing will have a virtual history behind it. You cannot create otherwise. So I like to give the example of creating a cat because I don't like to pull rabbits out of the hats, but a cat is all right. And if you were to say, you know, here we are sitting here and suppose we had the ability to create, which is a problem for scientists and limits our experience with what happens when something gets created. So we're pretty ignorant about the whole thing and we tend to get it all mixed up what's supposed to happen. If you create a cat right here, right now we create a cat, the deal is the cat does not look to be zero years old. The cat looks, you know, it's got fur. When did that fur grow? You can go out of the biological realm and go into the inanimate objects and that makes it a little easier. You can say, let's create a loaf of bread like Jesus did when he, well, he made bread from a few loaves when he fed the 5,000. Let's create bread. And so if I create a loaf of bread, there it is on the table. And again, it does not look to be zero seconds old. It looks, at least it looks like somebody cooked it because it's warm. You see, it looks like it's been cooling down from a cooking process. The created thing has within it an appearance of a history which never happened. But it's necessary for the thing to have this appearance in order to be in existence. You cannot have a cat which looks to be zero old. You cannot have a loaf of bread which looks to be zero seconds old. It looks like it's made out of wheat and somebody seems to have ground the wheat into flour.

Jennifer:
And so if you did science on it, analyzed it in the lab, you would never reach the conclusion that it had just been created.

Gerald:
That's correct. That's right. The only way you're going to know that it's been created is if the Creator tells you that it's been created. And that's what the Bible tells us about. It says, you're living in a created universe. And that universe was created about 5,600 B.C. according to my best reckoning of the biblical chronology. And God has the ability, he's big enough to have brought the whole universe into existence 10 seconds ago if he wanted to. He would then have created it with you and I sitting here looking at each other, having parts of this podcast which never really happened, but we still remember them as if they happened. And so forth. He can bring us into existence, our whole world, the whole universe at any moment he pleases in any way he pleases. I mean, it's his machine, his creations, not ours. And it certainly isn't created on its own. It didn't bring itself into existence.

So the deal is he has told us that he created about 5,600 BC. That does not mean that what he created 5,600 BC looked to be zero years old at the moment of his creation. Certainly Adam didn't look to be zero years old when he was created. And the trees evidently would have had tree rings because after all the trees and tree rings kind of go together. You look at the hair on the cat, if you're going to create cats and God did create cats back then. They would have had hair on them too at the moment of their creation. And so this whole concept is so simple, it's so child simple. You don't have to be a sophisticated scientist or philosopher to understand this. God can create things when he pleases and how he pleases. And when he does so, they will come into existence within a parent history. There's nothing wrong with it.

It's kind of like saying Tolkien wrote a book about a hobbit. And then the very first page on the book you find that the hobbit has buttons on his jacket and you're saying, well, who sewed the buttons on? Tolkien didn't tell us about that part of the story. He started this world up, this hobbit world up with Bilbo Baggins on page one. And there's a whole lot of stuff that's happened.

Jennifer:
There's a backstory there and woven right into the fabric of the story. You cannot have a story without a backstory. How do you open a story that had nothing before it? Right. Like you're saying, he tells us when he created, but we know that he could have created at any moment along this story. And that brings to mind to me, that scripture that says that in him we live and move and have our being.

Gerald:
Yes. So it's his story and he's writing it the way he's chosen, but he's been very gracious and merciful to give us the ability to verify the history that's in the scriptures until we get back to the creation miracle. And then we have enough confidence that it's reliable in the history that it's giving us. And then we can trust the fact that it is a created universe, although our scientific methods will never reveal that to us. We will instead be looking at the history that's built in.

Jennifer:
So I think that that's a very key concept for a young person to have in mind going into the university. And maybe as you're saying, you know, if they have this foundation of these problems having been solved through your work here, and if they go in with their eyes wide open and ready to learn and receive, they might have more insight into what's going on into some of the things are being taught than even their professors might have as far as even like the flood at 3520 BC. And they, like you're saying, they might not be able to dialogue about it, but they can definitely be making mental notes and, you know, getting ready for wherever they're going to launch out into.

Gerald:
Yeah, that's kind of what I meant to imply that I felt like it would be a wonderful thing to be in that position in any field because you are going to make discoveries, because you're coming in with a different paradigm than the other ones. The other people around you that will cause you to see things in different ways and to be able to put data together in ways that they cannot. Basically, you're coming in with a true historical foundation that they just don't have. And it's really delightful to be able to understand something for the first time that others have never been able to understand before. It's very rewarding.

Mind you, once again, it doesn't happen overnight. It requires a great deal of dedication. You'd have to be dedicated to your studies, work very hard, forgo a lot of social stuff.

Jennifer:
Well, that's very helpful. And I'm be glad to be able to share that with people in the coming days and years as we continue our communications efforts here.

** END INTERVIEW **

Steve:
Well, lots of information there and that's one of the great things about podcasts. You can go back and listen to different sections of that again. And again, don't forget you can go back and listen to part one. The link is in the show notes this month, easy access to the first part of that interview.

Jennifer:
Moving on into the feedback from our listeners section. We have a couple of comments we'd love to share with you. Some are from those of you who are listening now. So we had an email that came to us back in January that said, "I appreciate what you guys are doing. It's very, very important work." And just two sentences like that is so encouraging. Thank you for those who send in your comments and feedback, encouragement, questions.

All right, another one came in just a couple of weeks ago on May the 9th. "We so enjoy the podcast and want to get the word out to others." And this individual was asking for us to send some business cards that they could pass out to invite others to listen. So that's something anybody can do. Let us know. We'll send you some in the mail.

Steve:
All right, here's another one. One lady has written into us and said, "Just listened to April's podcast for the second time. Thanks so much for sharing. I always learned so much."

Jennifer:
Man, the second time now that is dedication right there. Listened two times. That was the one I think about the Egyptian pyramids. So yes, glad that was educational and helpful.

Now this next one is from a fellow who is a PhD. I don't know if he listens to the podcast. So this is just feedback on Dr. Aardsma's work. I hope he listens, but he was ordering the anti-aging vitamins. And then I asked him, how did he find out about us? And so this is what he replied. He said, "About 20 years ago, a friend at work gave me a copy of Dr. Aardsma's newsletter describing his theory about how the flood occurred. I was so impressed with his analysis and I've continued to follow his research. I lost contact while he was researching aging and I just recently reconnected."

And then this one came in from a fellow who said, "I have enjoyed reading your take on the biblical Exodus and conquest." This was written directly to Dr. Aardsma. "I am writing a book and would ask your permission to include the image of 1 Kings 6:1 with and without the 'one thousand'."

Jennifer:
That can be found in Dr. Aardsma's very first book, "A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel." And so this gentleman is writing a book on something to do with the ancient Old Testament and wanted to include a portion of that research work.

Steve:
Well, we have quickly a research update. This one you can read is called the location of the Ascent of Akrabbim. Now this may not be very familiar to you, that term, that title.

Jennifer:
I had never heard of that before when this article came out, The Ascent of Akrabbim. I did not know that was in the Old Testament.

Jennifer:
But we'll just say this. Now that the location of Kadesh-Barnia has been identified. And by the way, you can find links to all of these articles in our show notes, another area can now be identified. And that is the Ascent of Akrabbim that the Bible talks about.

Jennifer:
Now the cool thing about this is that really what it has to do with is where the southern border of ancient Israel was, as God was describing to them, "This is going to be the boundaries of the territory that I'm giving you." And until you understand the time period that we're looking in and understand where these locations are based off of that time period, and of course, the geography that's described in everything, you can draw any number of maps and outlines of where you think the borders of ancient Israel were. But in Numbers 34, in Joshua 15, this specific Ascent of Akrabbim is mentioned as part of the border, and a bay that turns southward and some other very cool things that just, it just comes to light once again as these puzzle pieces fall into place.

Steve:
Right. So that is another piece of the puzzle of these ancient Old Testament locations fitting beautifully into place. And you're welcome to go to the show notes, click on the link, read that article. The location of the Ascent of Akrabbim. We always want to mention biblicalchronologist.org. And on the side bar is newsletters. You can go and scan through all of these newsletters that Dr. Aardsma has collected over the years.

Jennifer:
All right. Well, as we close out today, of course, if you ever have a question you would like to have answered pertaining to the work here, please send it in. And we can get Dr. Aardsma to answer it.

Steve:
Hey, for those listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, would you leave us a rating? And maybe you've done that in the past, left a rating and that does help.

Jennifer:
As we seek to expand the audience and the reach of our show, we would love for you to leave us a rating. And that helps, we would become more visible to people as they search for this type of a podcast.

Steve:
We'd be ever grateful. As a teacher used to say, you would be a gentleman and a scholar. So be a gentleman and a scholar.

All right. Well, onward we go as pioneers.

Jennifer:
Yes. And we will see you in July.