Creation Facts of Life (27 page)
buried in rock layers,
laid down by water,
all over the earth.
What do these thick layers of fossil-rock mean to a scientist who believes the Bible?
Actually, most scientists and scholars before Darwin took billions of fossils buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth as extremely powerful evidence
confirming
the Bible, a record in stone of the worldwide flood in Noah's time described in Genesis — and also in the traditions, oral and written, of hundreds of cultures (the descendants of Noah) from around the world.
In the Genesis account (Gen. 6–9), the corruption of God's perfect creation by man's wickedness filled the earth with so much grief, violence, and death that God destroyed the world in a global
catastrophe
, the Flood, and gave it a fresh start with Noah and those with him on the ark: creation, corruption, catastrophe, Christ (deliverance). Noah was in the ark for a year and ten days. During the first 150 days (5 months), the waters continued to rise until finally they covered "all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven" (Gen. 7:19).
For scientists called flood geologists or catastrophists, the "major layers" or
systems
in the
geologic column
are
eco-sedimentary zones
, the remains of various ecological groups living in the pre-Flood world. The first creatures buried in greatest abundance in the rising Flood waters would be the heavy-shelled, bottom-dwelling sea creatures, and these would be followed successively by near shore forms and swimmers, then lowland plants and animals, and finally upland forms, with sea creatures found in all the systems of the geologic column as the waters finally covered everything. When the mountains rose and the valleys sank down (Ps. 104:8) at the end of the Flood, the continents were covered with layers of fossils formed as stages in the burial of eco-sedimentary zones during the catastrophe of Noah's flood (Figure 32).
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Figure 33. |
Evolutionists and creationists agree that fossils reflect death and disaster on a colossal scale. Creationists see this as a
bad thing
, a consequence of the corruption of creation by man's turning from God. Evolutionists see it as a
good thing
, a record of millions of years of struggle and death, the buried remains of casualties in Darwin's "war of nature" that produced a net increase in the "quantity and quality" of life on earth (Figure 32).
It's hard to imagine two views more strikingly different! (In
The Fossil Book,
107
I have a chart comparing the two views on 15 points, p. 25.) Surely scientific study of rocks and fossils should help us decide which of these two views (if either) is better supported by the evidence. Were fossil-bearing rock layers formed
rapidly and globally
(creation/Flood geology), or
slowly and locally
(classic evolution)? Once again, science has not been kind to the evolutionist's position, but has unearthed strong support for the creationist/Flood geologist instead.
Early evolutionists were dogmatically
uniformitarian
. Often summarized as "the present is the key to the past," the doctrine of uniformitarianism was introduced into geology and into Darwin's thinking by Charles Lyell. Lyell wanted scientists to forbid themselves to see any evidence of a process going on in the past
at a rate
or
on a scale
different from what we see today:
slow, gradual,
and/or
local
(e.g., an intense but local volcanic eruption). His idea sounds scientific (and anti-biblical), but nowhere on earth today do we have fossils forming on the scale that we see in geologic deposits. The Karroo Beds in Africa, for example, contain the remains of perhaps 800 billion vertebrates! A million fish can be killed in red tides in the Gulf of Mexico today, but they simply decay away and do not become fossils. Similarly, swamp peat is nowhere slowly turning into vast beds of anthracite coal.
Some geologic formations are spread out over vast areas of a whole continent. For example, there's the Morrison Formation, famous for its dinosaur remains, that covers much of the mountainous West, and there's the St. Peter's Sandstone, a glass sand that stretches from Canada to Texas and from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Sediment does build up slowly at the mouths of rivers, such as the Mississippi delta, but slow sediment build-up could not possibly produce such widespread deposits, such broadly consistent sedimentary and paleontological features, as we see in the Morrison and St. Peter's formations. In this case, knowledge of the present tells us that something happened on a much larger scale in the past than we see happening anywhere today. That's not appealing to faith or fancy — that's appealing to fact! For purely scientific reasons, evolutionists and creationists may both conclude these are flood deposits, even if the scale of the flood is something far beyond anything observed in historical times.
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Then there's the matter of "misplaced fossils." Evolutionists believe, for example, that the land plants did not appear until over 100 million years after the Cambrian trilobites died out. Yet, over 60 genera of woody-plant spores, pollen, and wood itself have been recovered from lowest "trilobite rock" (Cambrian) throughout the world. The evidence is so well known that it's even in standard college biology textbooks. The secular botany textbook by Weier, Stocking, and Barbour
109
that my students once used puts it this way: "Despite tempting fragments of evidence, such as cutinized [waxy] spores and bits of xylem [wood] dating back to the Cambrian period . . ." most evolutionists still believe that land plants did not evolve until much later. Notice, that the evolutionist argues "despite …evidence."
The creationist does not argue
"in spite
of the evidence." Rather,
"because
of the evidence," the creationist says, "we think that land plants and Cambrian trilobites lived at the
same time
in
different places
. Normally, these sea animals and land plants would not be preserved together for ecological reasons. A few plant specimens, escaping decay, could occasionally be entombed with trilobites in ocean sediment, and that's what we see."
Misplaced fossils are common enough that evolutionists have a vocabulary to deal with them. A specimen found "too low" in the geologic column (before it was
supposed
to have evolved) is called a "stratigraphic leak," and a specimen found "too high" is called a "re-worked specimen." Often, of course, there is actual physical evidence for mixing of strata from two different sources, but sometimes, such evidence is lacking. With such a handy vocabulary available, it's quite likely that the number of misplaced fossils found — without evidence of disturbance — is far greater than the number actually recorded (which is considerable anyway).
Sometimes whole geologic systems are misplaced. While I was a graduate student in stratigraphy class, still trying to decide between the Bible and evolution, we went on a field trip to find the missing 25 million years of the Silurian. We went to a quarry in southern Indiana that was famous for building-quality limestone. The massive gray limestone was quite thick and exposed over many hundreds of yards. In the lower part of the formation, we found corals belonging to system No. 2, the Ordovician. But as we worked our way up the quarry wall, suddenly we began to find Devonian corals, those belonging to system No. 4. Where were the missing corals of system No. 3, the Silurian?
For an evolutionist, that's a crucial question. Evolutionists believe that Ordovician corals
evolved into
Silurian corals, which
evolved into
Devonian corals. Skipping the Silurian would break the evolutionary chain, and for an evolutionist would be impossible!
What was there between the Ordovician and Devonian corals in that limestone quarry in Indiana? Only millimeters separated them, and there was no change in color, no change in texture, not even a bedding plane. There was
no physical evidence at all
for those hypothetical 25 million years of evolutionary time. As the professor emphasized, such a situation is a serious problem for evolution. We simply can't imagine land just lying there for 25 million years, he said, neither eroding nor depositing, then picking up exactly where it left off!
Evolutionists have coined a term to deal with the problem:
paraconformity.
A contact line between two rock strata is called a "conformity" if the physical evidence indicates smooth, continuous deposition with no time break. "Disconformity" is used where the physical evidence indicates erosion has removed part of the rock sequence. Disconformities are often represented by wavy lines in geologic diagrams, and they often appear in the field as
real
"wavy lines" in which erosion channels and stream beds can be seen cutting into the eroded rock layer. In the case of a
paraconformity,
there is no evidence of erosion, nor any other physical evidence of a break in time, only fossils "out of place." The name even means that it
looks like
a conformity. In fact, the only way to recognize a paraconformity is by
prior commitment
to evolutionary theory. There is no physical evidence! If you believe in evolution, then you must believe there was some gap in the sequence, or else the evolutionary chain would be broken.
Creationists don't need the term
paraconformity
. Creationists can simply accept the physical evidence as it's found: smooth, continuous deposition with no time break. Suppose the Ordovician and Devonian geologic systems represent different ecological zones of creatures living at the same time. Then a change in some ecological factor, such as saltiness or temperature, could cause one group of corals to replace the other ecologically, smoothly, and continuously. Or sediment from one ecological zone could be deposited immediately on top of sediment from another zone as currents changed direction, again producing smooth continuous deposition with no time break. I included an explanation like that in my answer to an exam question about paraconformities. I got an "A" on the essay (and on the test), and the professor was intrigued with the possibility — but said he couldn't accept it because of the time span involved.
Many people think that if Christians could only accept great age, they'd have no problem with science. Actually, they would have no problem with
evolution,
but lots of problems with
science!
Gould
110
lamented that geologists are constantly reporting ecological interpretations of fossil deposits, but he said they should quit doing that, because the time scale is all wrong for evolution. Perhaps the ecological interpretations — based on actual physical evidence — are
correct,
and it's the evolutionary time scale — based on faith in evolution — that's
wrong!
Belief in great age and slow change make it very difficult to understand many physical features of our earth.
Consider
polystratic
fossils. As the name implies, polystrates are fossils that extend through many rock layers or strata. I first heard of polystratic fossils as a geology student. The professor, an evolutionist, was talking about zoning rocks on the basis of the microscopic fossils they contain. The usual assumption, of course, is that one microfossil evolved into another, which evolved into another, and so on. The rock unit he zoned was presumed to involve about 20 million years of evolutionary time. Then the professor told us he followed the rock unit down the creek bed, and found a shellfish, with a shell shaped like an ice cream cone, perched on its tip through the whole 20 million years! How could that be, he wondered. It couldn't perch on its tip for 20 million years waiting for sediment to accumulate, and it couldn't stab itself down through rock hardened over that time.
Polystrates are indeed a mystery for an evolutionist! But they would be no mystery at all, if the whole rock unit were deposited rapidly. Some things, like trees washed out in vegetation mats after a tropical storm, may float upright for a while, and they could be entombed in that upright position if burial occurred quickly enough (Figure 33).
Polystrates are especially common in coal formations. For years and years, students have been taught that coal represents the remains of swamp plants slowly accumulated as peat and then even more slowly changed into coal. There are many reasons that this swamp idea simply cannot be true: the type of plants involved, texture of deposits, and state of preservation are all wrong; the action of flowing water, not stagnation, is evident.
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