Oct 26, 2026 Show with Tommy Lohman on “Does the Fossil Record Back the Bible’s Creation Account or Modern Secular Science?”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 26th day of October, 2026.

And before I introduce to you my first-time guest and our topic for the day, I have a very important prayer request for my very dear friend. Many of you who listen to this program, especially if you listen regularly and have listened for many years, you will no doubt recognize the name of my dear friend, Dr. Joseph C. Moorgrave III.

Well, Joe needs prayer. He is experiencing some health difficulties. He has a urinary tract infection, and he has a torn rotator cuff, and these things are causing him excruciating pain in his jaw and in his shoulder.

And he has been battling with a fever, and these things are obviously a lot more serious and dangerous for an 82-year-old man, and that is how old Joe is. He was supposed to be my guest this Thursday.

When I spoke with him last week, he was fine, but these things developed over the last few days. And he was hospitalized. I believe he is home now from the hospital. His wife, Becky, told me that they are uncertain whether he will be capable of conducting the interview Thursday.

So I just ask of you all to pray for this dear brother in Christ, this powerful, very important man of God, proclaimer of truth for so many decades, such a valuable gift to the body of Christ, such a wonderful guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, that I hope I continue to have opportunities to interview.

So just keep that brother in prayer, please, Joseph C. Moorgrave III, who is pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia. But today we have a first-time guest that I had the privilege and joy to meet face-to-face very recently when I had my most recent Iron Sharpens Iron Radio biannual free pastor's luncheon, and that featured, as my keynote speaker, Dr. David A. Harrell of Calvary Bible Church of Jolton, Tennessee.

And Dr. Harrell, when he flew out from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, he brought with him the man who is my guest today, one of his elders, Tommy Lohman. And after having conversations with Tommy, especially over dinner, I realized, oh, I've got to get this brother on my program, too.

Tommy Lohman is a field paleontologist who worked for the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Montana from 2015 to 2026, and as I've already stated, he is an elder and also an adult Bible teacher at Calvary Bible Church in Jolton, Tennessee.

And today we're going to be addressing, Does the Fossil Record Back the Bible's Creation Account or Modern Secular Science? It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Tommy Lohman.

It's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me, and I'm looking forward to our time together this afternoon.

Did you enjoy yourself at the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon?

I did indeed. It was a blessing to be in fellowship with the other brothers, to get little glimpses and conversations of kind of where they are, the good things, the struggles, and just to see really the victories that the Lord is bringing about in all of our lives.

Amen. And your pastor, David A. Harrell, is such a gifted, powerful proclaimer of God's truth. And when that event was over, I was being approached by quite a number of men in attendance who were raving about how blessed they were by hearing Dr. Harrell's message, and some even said that they thought he was the best keynote speaker I've ever had at the luncheons, those that were in attendance at many of them.

And so that is quite a compliment, because we've had some pretty amazing men speak at that conference, that pastor's luncheon, I should say.

We're blessed to have him every Sunday, leading us through the Word, for sure.

Well, tell our listeners about Calvary Bible Church in Jolton, Tennessee.

Well, we're a smaller congregation, kind of sit on the northern edge of Nashville. As a Bible church, we hold to the high esteem of Scripture, trying to rightly divide the truths that are tucked within, understand them, and then live by them.

It's really quite simple. Our congregation is a little over 30 years old, and it's really a unique blending of people who have a unique love of the Lord, a desire to serve and fellowship, and really an astute insight into his Word as well.

So I'm blessed to be able to be an elder there and just part of the fellowship in general.

Amen. Well, if anybody wants more information on Calvary Bible Church of Jolton, Tennessee, especially if you live in Tennessee or perhaps you have family, friends, and loved ones in the Jolton area, not far from Nashville, or if you're going to be passing through that area, vacationing there, going there on business or what have you, whatever reason our Lord would providentially have you in that area, and you want to attend worship at a solid biblically faithful church, and you want to find out more about Calvary Bible Church of Jolton, Tennessee, go to cbctn .org, cbctn .org.

Well, Tommy, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, a tradition that it seems many people who listen faithfully to this program view as a highlight of the show, where they get to hear the salvation testimonies of first-time guests, which would include men like you, who provide a summary of their testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised and the kinds of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to Himself and saved them.

And we would love to hear your story, Tommy.

Tommy Lohman’s Salvation and Interest in Creation

Be glad to. Yeah, it's a blessing to be able to share just what the Lord's done in my life. Last Wednesday night, I was leading a home fellowship group, and I was just talking with them about the fact that as I get older and I get to look back over the course of my life, certainly there are things that I've decided to do, not to do, make choices.

But the more I look back over what the Lord has done over my life, I see more of His sovereign hand moving in many unique and special ways. And certainly so much of that's really anchored at my salvation.

At nine years old, the Lord saved me and regenerated my heart and my mind, redeemed me and really set my feet on a different path. Now, I was raised in a fairly moral home where the word of God was put forth.

I was raised in a Southern Baptist denomination, so I've been blessed by that environment. But one of the things that's unique and really, I think, relevant to where we're going today is I had an interest for dinosaurs as far back as I can remember, five, six years old.

I still have my old Viewmaster that I got when I was five and the dinosaur reels that were with it. I remember some of the toys that I got. And so it was an interesting parallel way of seeing life where I had this older evolutionary dinosaur worldview, but being raised in church, believing in the creation and flood.

Long about 17 years old, I began to figure out or at least work through the where are the conflicts, where are the tension points in those two worldviews? Because I was beginning to see that both could not be true as I understood them, at least at that moment.

And I remember asking my pastor at the time how to help me basically reconcile this. How do I understand dinosaurs in particular in light of Scripture? How do I understand this science versus theology tension point?

And so what the Lord brought me to is a season of really not answering that question just yet. There was a pastor at the time did not have an answer and kind of came away a little bit. I don't know if disillusion is the right way of saying it, but it wasn't until 1993 when Jurassic Park came out that I began to re-ask some questions.

It's not that the movie itself answered any questions, but I began to connect with ministries such as Answers in Genesis, Institute for Creation Research. You've had gentlemen from both of those ministries on your program.

And in that, I began to see the Scriptures, Genesis 1 to 11 as historical, began to understand the limitations of science. And really, that's been so much of my study over the past 30 years. And paleontology is just an extension of what the Lord has done in my life in helping me have that foundation of Genesis 1 to 11.

And it has really illuminated my understanding of the rest of Scripture so well. And so, again, I'm seeing his faithful hand in my life throughout the course of it. And I've been so richly blessed that he's simply allowed me to be a vessel through which his word can go forth.

And today is just another opportunity. And I'm sure you probably in your own way feel that as well, that opportunity to be that vehicle through which you get the word of God out into the world.

And so what actually led you to, other than your interests since a child, what led you to actually receive further and deeper education formally in the area of paleontology?

We, I'd say probably about 10 years, which would be early 2000s, mid -2005, 2007, so on there, begin to really teach more on this. And there was an opportunity that Answers in Genesis had to go out to Montana to dig up dinosaur bones.

And I thought that would be a really interesting way to kind of help flesh out what I was already beginning to put into place as far as teaching opportunities and speaking opportunities. And so we connected with this ministry, Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum.

Otis and Miriam Klein were the founders, and we got to work with them several years. Otis was the paleontologist of the museum, and he began to teach me the trade of excavating fossils to identify them, to do fossil prep work.

And in conjunction with that, I got back into school, finished up my bachelor's degree, got into my master's degree, wrapped that up. And really, my focus has been more on apologetics. So taking that which we see in the ground, recognizing that it needs an interpretation and then going back into Scripture and seeing how Scripture might frame it historically and then unpacking it more completely from there.

So it was just a journey of seeing a need, being impressed by it, and really just finding what doors were opened up and what do I need to know in the process.

Praise God. And well, first of all, can you please give us a detailed description of the specific areas of science that paleontology and paleontologists like yourself are involved in? And what are the connections with geology?

Paleontology, Geology, and the Fossil Record

Yeah, paleontology is the study of, if you will, ancient, which is a little bit misleading, but the study of ancient organisms, ancient life. And that's typically found within the ground, within the fossil record itself.

But there are many hats that you would wear in that. So as a paleontologist, I need to have some sense of the biological structure of living organisms and how they function, how they work. I need to have some sense of the engineering principles, like the sauropods is an example.

They're big, huge skeletons. How does an animal that's 100 feet long and weighs 60, 70 tons, how does it even walk? What goes into that? So there are engineering principles there. And then as you were alluding to, Chris, with the geology, I need to understand the ground and that's where so much of the fossils are really, they're always tucked into the ground in layers, but being able to look at an area of ground and see the stratification of layers, where we dig out in Eastern Montana, you can look into the hills and you can see the different layers of sediment stacked on top of one another.

And so that strata is sorting sediment out into different packages of sediment. That can only occur with the presence of large volumes of water. And it's not, I'm not talking about a river moving through this area, but we're talking about volumes of water that exceed the ground that you see.

So if you're standing and seeing 200 feet of ground, you need at least 200 more feet on top of that. And so that is just a reminder as you look through the, what we call the deposition phase, the strata being laid down, the sediments being laid out, fossils being caught in that, we see various ecosystems, if you will, captured in that.

And then you see the evidence of the water runoff. And this isn't just an isolated thing. This is, in many respects, this is happening almost continent wide. The idea of a term called megasequence, where we see the deposition of one layer of sediment that can cover, like I said, almost a large chunk of the United States, the Morrison Formation out in the western part of the United States is one of those.

And what we begin to recognize with flood is it wasn't just a little bit of water moving in, but we see that it was depositing large packages of sediment spread out in a flat layer over an extended amount of time and capturing fossils along the way.

And can you tell us, this may seem like a foolish question because many people listening may automatically say, why is he asking such a childish question? But since there seems to be such a radical disagreement amongst civilization, on the very definition of this word, and it has enormous implications that lead people into all kinds of ideologies, religions, and even political affiliations.

Can you tell us what is science?

Science as the Study of Creation

What is science? Oh, wow. That's a, that's a wonderful question. The word itself is rooted in the idea of knowledge. If we go back into the early 12th century, you begin to see the early forms of that word refer to dividing.

Like we would use the word schism today as a separation. And I believe in its basic idea, science is the process of studying physical phenomena, separating it out by name, number, and purpose in order to gain knowledge.

So if I see an animal, a new animal, as an example, never seen before, I will apply a name to it and then quantify it, create dimensions for it, and then recognize its purpose. Is it a flyer? Is it a swimmer?

Is it a land animal? And so in many basic ideas, that is what science is doing. And we even see this laid out in Genesis chapter two with Adam naming the animals. And I believe that science as a concept was given by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Now, much of it's being co-opted today because it really now functions more as a way to explain God away as opposed to see the hand of God upon creation. And so science has a function in which it's gathering knowledge, but I believe it's an important framework that it needs.

It needs a true theological framework. As Paul wrote to the Romans in Romans one, that the hand of God, the eternal power and divine nature of God is clearly seen within creation. It's a part of science I believe should be seeing, recognizing, and affirming the hand of God in what it sees within what it studies.

And there is such stark disagreement in the scientific realm over how Bible believing Christians, or at least a considerable portion of Bible believing Christians, view the origins and age of the earth and how they understand fossils and things like that and how they understand the geological record.

I had to stop myself there for a minute because as you know, there are quite a number of Bible believing Christians who disagree with you and disagree with all of the old earth creationists, and they arrange in a spectrum of antagonism, for lack of a better term, and believe it or not, I don't know if you have ever heard this, but I have personally heard this from professing Christians, at least one professing Christian who is a dedicated, committed, young, I'm sorry, old earth creationist, who actually, when I have had young earth creationists such as yourself on the program, he said that I am actually jeopardizing the salvation of people because especially young people are hearing from the young earth crowd things that are easily disproven, moronic, and at odds with science.

And these professing Christians who are old earth creationists are in, not in every way, but in many ways, they're actually in agreement with the secular scientists, some of whom are even atheists and even could be described as enemies of the scripture.

But explain this whole controversy and what you've experienced in the midst of it.

Young-Earth and Old-Earth Views of Science and History

Yeah, it's a real thing. I do encounter people who are more older than their perspectives, would not suggest that they're not saved. Inversely, I would say that my young earth position is not against scripture and it's even not against science.

I realize that some Christians have come to believe certain things about what science is and the type of knowledge or the depth of knowledge it can produce. I think that's part of the struggle that we should recognize is the belief that science, as beautiful as it is, and I think it's a, I think it was a God ordained aspect of how mankind thinks.

It's part of the Imago Dei that resides within humanity. But in that we fail to recognize that science has limitations. Fundamentally, science is the process of observing, testing physical phenomena. But as soon as that scientist begins to make historical claims that he cannot test, he is stepping outside of his scientific realm into a historical realm.

Now, I don't have a problem with that process. But we need to ask ourselves, Paul, which history is he now beginning to grab a hold of? And this is really so much of this tension that we experience is, if you will, Young Earth versus Old Earth creationists, is whose history we're going to pull from?

We're going to use a secular scientific model with the geological column, the assigned dates of millions of years, the phylogenetic tree of Darwinian evolution, or are we going to let Scripture stand on its own?

Are we able to look at Genesis chapter one and say that those days are real days, one through six creation days? I mean, creation itself is a supernatural activity, Chris, as you know. The fact that God can do it in six days, who was it that said, was it Martin Luther that said, why did he take so long?

You know, you recognize that we see this process. And so I had to come back around to the comments of what you're talking about with science and just make this one point. Creation scientists and geologists are now beginning to recognize that within the dinosaur bones are what we call soft tissue.

That's a very generic term, but we're talking about red blood cells, blood vessels, collagen fibers, nerve fibers and so on. These are not fossilized in their state, they're actually in a decaying state.

Which means they are continuing to decay as time progresses. Now, the question becomes is how long can these things actually reside in dinosaur bones? And even the secularists would press us to be 1 million, 1 .5 million years old, which I think is an extreme number.

But let's just argue that that soft tissue can last that long. But dinosaurs went extinct 66 .2 million years ago, according to secular science. So we've still got a chasm of time. And I would argue that what science is beginning to produce and insights it's beginning to share actually are solid and point to a literal interpretation of the historic account beginning with Genesis chapter one.

I would say science is affirming scripture in a literal historical reading of it all.

The more. And we're going to pick up where you left off when we return from our first commercial break. If anybody would like to join us, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. And don't go away. We are going to be right back right after these messages with more of Tommy Lohman and paleontology.

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And if you just tuned us in, this is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and our guest today is Tommy Lohmann, a field paleontologist who worked for the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Montana from 2015 through 2026.

He is an elder and adult Bible teacher at Calvary Bible Church in Jolton, Tennessee. We are addressing the theme, does the fossil record back the Bible's creation account or modern secular science? And so there are, what you were saying before the break, there are discoveries of dinosaur bones that actually contain flesh that has not decayed, which would be virtually impossible for something a million years old.

And this is agreed upon by scientists, even secular ones. However, the conclusions that are drawn from that radically differ. Can you, am I, am I catching that correctly? Oh, sorry, brother. I have you on mute.

Sorry.

Go ahead. All right. Yeah. Let me clarify, the flesh part is certainly, we're not talking about muscles and tendons, we're talking about smaller tissue that you would see under a microscope. As an example, any bone would have a blood vessel running through the bone itself.

So we're talking about that level. And as you can take a fossilized bone and begin to thin slice it, you can find and discover these blood vessels in there. So that's what we're looking at. As far as the, the implications, yes, that really, this is so much of what we're beginning to recognize, or at least be reminded of, is this is so much a battle over history, because the secular paleontologists can take the same bone, run the same procedure, find the same blood vessel as we can do.

The, the question that sits behind it is, is why are they there when they are clearly not stable enough to survive deep time processes, temperature changes, infiltration of water and chemicals? If a bone has been in the ground and exposed to these volatile changes in the ground for millions of years, one would logically deduce that they should have been gone, completely destroyed a long time ago.

And so we're simply asking the question, why are they still there? And the fact that they're still there challenges the conventional paradigm of deep time. Now, when we go back into scripture, we see, as I've already argued, that I believe the days of Genesis chapter one are literal, normal, typical days.

And so if you have a, if you flesh out just a basic timeline from scripture, we're talking a little over 6 ,000 years of Earth's history from the beginning to now. So to see these dinosaur bones with ages that are much younger than the conventional paradigm would allow, I'm just simply arguing they are more consistent with a younger perspective than an older perspective.

And do some, as I have a vague memory of hearing, do some scientists claim that the Ice Age or something could have been the reason that these biological matter have been preserved because of the being entombed in ice and all that kind of thing?

Well, we're not finding bones that are dinosaur bones that are entombed in ice. And we're not finding them in what would be glacial flows. So the dominant collection of dinosaur fossils are not found in what we would call an ice-related environment.

I am part of a project looking for dinosaur bones up in Alaska with the anticipation of finding not only blood vessels, but the hope of finding DNA. That the logic is, is pressing a little bit towards what you're suggesting.

If cold helps preserve the soft tissues in these dinosaur bones, then let's go where they have likely been coldest the longest. And so we begin to, I'm hoping next summer, begin to excavate fossils out of the permafrost and in that we'll see what we can discover, but to suggest that that alone would be a mechanism to preserve would not be, the fossil record as a whole is not consistent with the correlation to an Ice Age.

Can you define permafrost, please?

Yeah. Permafrost is where the, where the ground is basically frozen year round. And so like up in Alaska, you can have ground that gets, that falls over the course of the summer, but there's a point at which that fall stops.

And so there's, you get deep enough, cold enough, it simply never gets warm enough for that to ever fall out, which is going to make it a challenge if we get to that point where we're excavating, because we would have to dig through the sediment just to get through that permafrost sediment, just to get to the bones themselves.

But that's, that's the goal.

All right. We've got a fellow Tennessean who has a question. All right. Ollie in White Creek, Tennessee. And Ollie says, how do you respond to carbon -14 dating, which many leftists just parroting what they hear from their favorite scientists will say this is proof positive of an old age for the earth?

Carbon-14 Dating and the Age of Dinosaur Fossils

Actually, it would be just the opposite, that carbon -14 is the process of a living organism, an animal consuming plant life that would have this material in it. That material breaks down. And then when that animal dies, it stops replenishing the carbon.

And so we can pretty much measure the half-life of carbon -14 is I think 5730, 5 ,730 years. And the thinking is, if there's every 5 ,730 years, the carbon that would have been in a living organism once it dies is reduced by half.

The thinking is anywhere between 50 and 100 ,000 years, carbon -14 would be completely eradicated from a dinosaur bone, as an example. I know Bob Enyard, years ago before he passed, was part of trying to get Jack Horner to get some of his bones tested for carbon -14, which is another thing that gets seen in the dinosaur bones.

Go ahead, Chris. Nothing, I was just starting to chuckle.

And so we were just seeing that this carbon -14, ultimately, if it's present in the dinosaur bones themselves, that's going to point to an age of no more than 100 ,000 years, again, it's another point that we can observe and see these things through science are demonstrating, at least pointing us in the direction of a much younger Earth paradigm, 66 billion years is just not reasonable.

And from what I understand, young Earth creationists, for the most part, would say that even 100 ,000 years is a leap of logic and goes beyond what the scriptures say, which, from what I understand, most young Earth scientists believe that the Earth is no more than approximately 6 ,000 years old.

And, you know, when you see a living organism, an animal, a mammoth is an example, and he's dated to say 33 ,000 years ago, we're not simply suggesting that that date is accurate, but we're saying that that gives us an evidence of a younger timeframe, but we also recognize that dating methods itself are built with so many assumptions.

This is part of my point was earlier, is we do a lot of really good observed science in the process, but when we begin to make historical claims, you have to assume that the decay rate's being constant.

It's one of the big things. If you're going to do the math to extrapolate backwards to 100 ,000 years, to millions of years, whatever it is you're going to try to do, you've got to assume a constant rate, which means you've got to assume that nothing has come along and altered the clocks, if you will, and I'm sitting here and I'm reading Genesis chapter 7, and God opens up the Earth in Genesis 7, 11, it says the fountains of the great deep, verse 4, and I'm thinking, well, there's nothing else, your clock altering mechanism to change all of that.

Is carbon -14 dating reliable at all?

In my understanding, I would say the closer you get, the younger you get in dates, probably a little more accurate you're going to get, and there may be things that may be more easily indicative of an accurate date, but I don't take those dates in general and say, I don't hang my hat on any of those dates, to be honest, I use scripture to be my authority there.

And have not secular paleontologists been embarrassed by claims of certain discoveries where dates of millions of years have been assigned to these discoveries and then they were later found out to be.

Perhaps even within our lifetime, haven't there been certain discoveries like that?

There have been some of that. I can't think of anything particular offhand. I would say the only thing that does come to mind is Mount St. Helens. We know it erupted in what, 1980, I think it was. So you look at the rocks that erupted out of the volcano there and you say, okay, we're talking 46 years, and yet when you test the various rocks through the various testing methods, from my understanding, they come up with several hundred thousand years to several million.

But it's interesting, the range of rocks they tested did not all produce the exact same date. They produced a range of dates. And so here's a rock, we know its age, and yet it still produces deep time ages.

And why is it, and I'm assuming what this person said to me was true, but perhaps you would disagree with him. I don't know. But a Christian old earth advocate that I know said to me that there are hardly any young earth Christians in the field of geology who have actually received degrees in geology itself.

And that is an evidence in his mind that the dominance of the science sides with the old earth view. How do you respond to that?

The Scientific Community and Competing Geological Models

Yeah, the logic seems to be a little disconnected because even if there are a limited number of people in the discipline, it doesn't automatically refute a different kind of argument. So, but that said, you know, I know Dr. Tim Clary with ICR, I know Dr. Andrew Snelling, I know there are others that are involved with geology.

I know that there are some geologists, and I won't name any names, who are young earth creationists, but are in a secular environment. And so they are cautious about their expressing their views for the repercussions that come.