24th June, 2005

DAVID ADAMS

Known affectionately among his colleagues as the “cave man”, much of Dr Emil Silvestru’s life has been devoted to exploring and understanding the very depths of the earth.

These days, however, his life is just as much about telling others what the subterranean world can tell us about the creation of life - and its creator.

In Australia for the past few weeks, Dr Silvestru has been giving seminars and presentations on his views about the origins of creation, caves and the “fundamental” importance of the Biblical book of Genesis on behalf of the Christian creationist group Answers in Genesis.

GONE CAVING: Living under the harsh regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Dr Silvestru says he came ot see caving as an escape. PICTURES: Courtesy of Answers in Genesis and Creation magazine.   “In Romania we used to say that every apartment that was built, was built with Soviet concrete and that was 50 per cent concrete and 50 per cent microphones. But in the caves you were sure there were no microphones. We were really free down there.”

“It is absolutely ridiculous to have people say, ‘forget about Genesis, trust in Jesus’ because Jesus trusted in Genesis,” he says, pointing out that Jesus himself is often recorded quoting Genesis in the New Testament. “Therefore if you trust in Jesus, you have to trust in Genesis. You have to be consistent.”

The 51-year-old, who now lives in Ontario, Canada, grew up in Arud, a small town about 70 kilometres north of Cluj, the capital of Transylvania in the eastern European nation of Romania.

“I first saw a cave when I was five and my parents kept telling me ‘Don’t go there, there’s a dragon’, ‘Don’t go in there, there’s a snake’...and that somehow stayed in the back of my mind,” he says.

But fuelled by his love of science fiction books, dreams of becoming an astronaut soon filled his young mind and Dr Silvestru says he soon abandoned all thoughts of caves.

By the age of 12 however, he had come to the realisation that his poor eyesight would prevent him from ever becoming and astronaut and so, keen to turn away from the sky, he began to once again explore the subterranean world beneath our feet.

Romania, with its more than 12,000 caves, proved a good place to have such an interest.

“(Caves) fascinated me and pretty soon after that, when I was in highschool, I put together a caving club,” he says.

An interest soon turned into a career and Dr Silvestru ended up studying at Babes-Bolyai University to be a geologist, eventually becoming a world authority on caves (his doctorate was on the subject of karst sedimentology) and later the scientific director of the world’s oldest speological research institute (located in Cluj, it had been founded in 1920).

Dr Silvestru says that aside from his interest in the geology of caves, going underground was an escape from the oppression of living in a country which was then in the iron grip of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989).

“In Romania we used to say that every apartment that was built, was built with Soviet concrete and that was 50 per cent concrete and 50 per cent microphones. But in the caves you were sure there were no microphones. We were really free down there.”

While many of his friends escaped the country to the west, Dr Silvestru says he and his family - his wife Flory and two daughters Cora, now 18, and Alexandra, now 23 - remained in Romania in the hope that things would get better.

He says that there were hard times - particularly after they became parents - and recalls his wife telling him how she had woken one morning and prayed for God to take her life so she didn’t have to tell her daughters there was no food only to find a frozen chicken had been mysteriously placed on their apartment balcony (they later discovered that a new neighbour had placed it there and hearing the children’s voices and decided to help the family out).

His Christian life began, Dr Silvestru says, the moment he met his wife Flory, a third generation Baptist and a former top athlete, in 1979. But while he had adopted Christianity as a philosophy, Dr Silvestru says it wasn’t until 1994 that his wife’s faithful prayers were finally answered and he invited Christ into his heart.

Dr Silvestru says it was always very clear to him in his personal and professional life that the world - life itself - didn’t come into existence through a series of random combinations. He says that while he accepted a time frame of the earth being millions of years old - a belief he was to later change - he says he never accepted the theory of evolution at all.

“You might say in a way that I was a sort of hybrid.”

Dr Silvestru says that God was also already using him to evangelise even before he had fully committed his heart to Christ.

“It doesn’t sound possible but it is with the Lord,” he says. “In the Eighties, Romanians didn’t have much entertainment and one of the entertainment was watching videos, even in public places. I ended up showing Jesus of Nazareth in people’s homes and translating it live. I’ve shown it 47 times and was never caught by the police. I was evangelising without actually being yet a Christian.”

It wasn’t until several years after the fall of communism in 1989 that Dr Silvestru - by then the director of the country’s prestigious speological institute - first came into contact with Answers in Genesis. It immediately challenged his views.

“The moment I became a Christian, I also started to think about my geology and there seemed to be a contradiction...” he explains. “Pretty soon somebody gave me AIG’s website and I started writing (to) them and before I knew I had started a conversation. I was given a very simple argument - ‘If you accept that fossils existed before Adam and Eve you have to accept that death existed before sin, so then what’s the purpose of all Christianity?’ That hit me hard because I understood as a Christian that there’s no way I can reinterpret the scripture and I had to therefore do something with my theology.”

The conversations continued and Dr Silvestru found his views on creation profoundly changed. Eventually, in 1997, Answers in Genesis in the United States approached him about whether he’d like to start doing some work for them and so Dr Silvestru gave up his position as director of the institute and teaching as an associate professor at a university and started speaking at university campuses across Romania.

Eventually, in 2002, he was approached about working full-time for the organisation in Canada and immediately accepted.

“I had already made a promise to the Lord that if He ever had some work for me that I would work for Him and I would just go for it because I actually lost so many years no doing the right thing,” he says.

“But it turned out that actually I hadn’t lost them because the experience I gained was very useful later on.”

This trip to Australia - during which he’s taken time to see some of the impressive caves at Narracoorte in South Australia - is Dr Silvestru’s second in two years.

As well as wanting to underline the importance of the Biblical book of Genesis, Dr Silvestru says he also came to Australia to show others about how the creation of caves doesn’t contradict a “young earth” scenario..

Dr Silvestru says that based on his knowledge of geology, he believes the evidence shows that caves were formed within a few years after the great flood - which Noah survived by building the ark - and did not need to have been around for millions of years to take their current form.

He says the belief that caves can be formed within only a short period of time is gaining wider acceptance among geologists and cites the example of the Carlsbad Caves in New Mexico in the United States where he says it was recently discovered that the caves’ “big room” - one of the largest cave rooms anywhere in the world - had not been formed by water coming from the surface but from sulphuric acid coming from oil reservoir underneath in as little as one year.

“The idea that some caves can form fast is accepted but the minute you say that all caves were formed fast that’s when they reject you utterly,” he says. “Because they obviously need the caves to have been there for millions of years.”

Describing himself as an “outcast” within the secular scientific community, Dr Silvestru says evolution remains a “fundamental stumbling block” for some scientists and says a few years ago he gave up trying to convince them by way of argument.

“My conviction is that only God can move them and change them,” he says.

Meanwhile, Dr Silvestru said he intends on continuing to help inform Christians about the truth of creation.

“All I want to do is equip Christians with the right answers, showing them that science is not what they have been made to believe, that a scientist is just as fallible a person as anybody else...” he says. “So that is what I do. It think it was Martin Luther King, Jr, who said this: ‘In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends’.”

“You know, if you have to be silent because you have no answers about scientific stuff, what kind of an evangelist are you? So that’s the area which I try to fill in to the best of my knowledge of my abilities.”

For more details of the final few engagements on Dr Silvestru’s visit, see, www.answersingenesis.org/events/