What does Geology’s lean towards Catastrophism mean?

When debating for the authority of God’s word, you get berated with broad sweeping statements about how evolution is an undeniable fact, a premise I take pleasure in battling, not only to edify Christians struggling against a hopeless humanistic view of the world, but also because it is absurd in every field of science. Today we explore the field of Geology, which is experiencing a paradigm shift within its walls that it is not quite ready for. Imagine the daunting task of re-evaluating 150 years of presupposition that has influenced historical geology, but has not come to bear in recent years as scientists in the field apply the actual scientific method of systematic observation, measurement, and modification of the original hypothesis. 1.The system is so unwilling to address it that the corporate response to various geological societies has been censorship, and policy statements that disparage views other than the accepted narrative.

Let me explain what I mean. The idea of deep time came from a philosophy over 150 years ago, and during a time when there was a shortage of good data, and only conjecture that was aimed at explaining all things through slow gradual processes – the term became known as uniformitarianism. It was the goal of Charles Lyell and others to save science from the biblical model, and the works in question dripped with vitriol towards God’s word. We discussed in my last article some debate fallacies; well geology started with a big one, called “Begging the Question”. This fallacy states that the conclusion is already true. With the premise firmly planted as a presupposition from which all data must be interpreted, it was easy to see how bones in the rocks became slowly buried over time, how layers were laid down slowly, and how gradual processes were the cause of all geological features, such as diamonds, oil, and stalactites.

But geologists began to notice a great many anomalies as time went on, facts that didn’t fit the framework. For example, the fossil record, a record of billions of organisms buried in the earth, despite the fact that fossilization is a very rare occurrence, and cannot explain the plethora of examples. A fish dies and what happens? it floats, rots, and is devoured by the ecosystem around it. But they still teach the gradual process of a fish floating down to the sand, and slowly being covered (preserved somehow) until it is buried and mineralized. Many of the larger fossils (dinosaurs, birds) have been found in death throws from drowning, and eddies exist called fossil graveyards where hundreds of animals were covered with water and mud. What gradual natural phenomenon would explain this? Also found within the fossil records are soft bodied animals such as jellyfish, previously thought to be an impossibility, since it was a certainty that the lack of rigidity wouldn’t allow for fossilization.

You may recall in school being taught that petrification, stalactites, coal, diamonds all took eons to form. This is no longer the case. We have examples of modern man-made objects being petrified, we have embarrassed cave guides telling us the great time it takes for stalactites to form while standing on a metal staircase with stalactites forming off of them, we have found Carbon 14 in everything from dinosaur bones, to coal, to diamonds which shouldn’t be there (see link above), and we have been able to create in labs everything from diamonds, to oil, to opals in days.

Another great challenge to the narrative came in the form of polystrate fossils, as uncovered by the geology professor at the University College of Swansea, D Ager. He was of course trained to believe uniformitarianism, but came to realize it did not account for many things he was seeing. Specifically these polystrate fossils, trees passing through multiple layers of rock layers, sometimes through coal, then rock, then coal again. This covering of polystate fossils would be impossible at slow speeds, because the top would rot long before the hundreds of thousands of years it would take to cover it. Many geologists recognize these features as a product of catastrophe.

The detailed lists of geological problems go on and on, from the study of created granite, problems with dating methods, to river deltas, to folded rock formations devoid of fracturing, to continent-wide deposits of sediment, to quick geological sorting as evidenced by a study at Mount Saint Helen’s, which quite frankly, made a mockery of deep time when it was observed in 1980. It has become obvious that Lyell’s approach to geology wasn’t holding water, and slowly within field, more and more geologists have gravitated to the obvious conclusion, that geological features were affected by catastrophe. This is now known as catastrophism, or actualism, which stipulates that many features had to have been made very quickly. These are still evolutionists, mind you, and a large percentage will still deny intelligent design, which of course requires the continued paradigm of billions of years. However, the amusing trouble with the conclusion is that if we can observe catastrophe, but must still believe in deep time, we then have no choice but to insert the great eons of time between the layers… WHERE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE!!

It is interesting to note that each field, with its major setbacks concerning evolution, tends to depend on other fields to bolster the theory. And since each field knows which direction it must point, to change a paradigm is to go against all of academia. The dirty little secret however, is that these holes in evolutionary theory are demoralizing many fields at once from genetics, to taxonomy, to anthropology, to cosmology; and when deep time is taken away as the default, many men and women of science will be left to ponder what the alternative must be.

“It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student….have now been debunked.” – (Dr. Derek V. Ager, Department of Geology, Imperial College, London)

“Evolution is unproved and improvable, we believe it because the only alternative is special creation, which is unthinkable.” – (Sir Arthur Keith, a militant anti-Christian physical anthropologist)

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.” – (Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University.)

“The universe and the Laws of Physics seem to have been specifically designed for us. If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist: Either atoms would not be stable, or they wouldn’t combine into molecules, or the stars wouldn’t form heavier elements, or the universe would collapse before life could develop, and so on…”

(Stephen Hawking, considered the best known scientist since Albert Einstein, Austin American-Statesmen, October 19, 1997)

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” – (Dr. Stephan J Gould, Harvard Paleontologist, “Evolution, Erratic Pace”)

“If I as a geologist were called upon to explain briefly our modern ideas of the origin of the earth and the development of life on it to a simple, pastoral, people such as the tribes to whom the Book of Genesis was addressed, I could hardly do better than follow rather closely much of the language of the first chapter of Genesis.”—*Wallace Pratt, quoted by W.L. Copithorne, in “The Worlds of Wallace Pratt,” The Lamp, Fall 1971, p. 14.

“Evolution is faith, a religion.” – (Dr. Louist T. More, professor of paleontology at Princeton University)

“We have had enough of the Darwinian fallacy. It is time we cry, “The emperor has no clothes.” – (Dr. Hsu, geologist at the Geological Institute in Zurich.)