Tag: geology

“All you need to do is find a single fossil out of place!”

Once again, I recently received an unsolicited pelting of questions by an evolutionist online, in a Biblical Apologetics group no less. The descent into tension, as per usual, begins pleasant enough, where questions regarding my opinion are disguised as genuine interest, and after cautiously answering, and wishing the best of luck in further studies, trying to disengage peaceably, there are always follow-ups, and it becomes clear that no amount of either answering questions directly, or encouraging the other to keep studying, will redirect the vendetta that has now formed in their head; a personal mission to take on the stupidity of the bumbling, misinformed Christian.

The temptation is always to fire back; to ensure the opponent there are indeed answers; that good science can be attained, and understood, and that evolution’s theoretical, absurd processes propped up by goal-post moving and fudge factors casts very reasonable doubt. But as anyone on either side of the argument knows, answering back simply begets a follow-up attack, and at some point, hopefully before rising tensions, someone just stops answering. That voice inside tells you they must feel victorious if you quit the debate, but you also tell yourself, I am a grown man, spending my Sunday arguing with someone on line who has no desire whatsoever to actually learn what my opinion is, seems silly. He wishes to prove how dumb I am, so that he can feel superior in his belief. Why? Well same reason as me; it feels good to bolster your understanding of the world, gain faith by withstanding the onslaught of counter-points. And let’s face it, it serves the ego, does it not? But Darwinian evolution has, since its inception, always served a more sinister purpose; providing intellectual ammunition for those those who desire greatly to deny God. Charles Lyell, the inventor of the geologic column, wished to save the sciences from Moses, after all. And many scientists admit the absurdity of evolution, the mission transitions, the circular reasoning.

In this particular case, the debate was left when the evolutionist said, “All you need to do it find a single fossil out of place. Nobody has ever done that. This is your chance: just find a fossil that has life from two different geological periods in it. That would disprove evolution.
But nobody has ever found such a fossil. You believe this to be a lie, so . . . show me the evidence that it is a lie.”

Before this, I was stating the obvious facts of geology, that the geologic column exists truncated, out of order, and in no way resembles the geologic column so artfully cartooned in text books the world over. Furthermore, that fossils are found up and down, scattered this way and that, and are out of order all the time! Clearly, and as most geologists are coming around to, the layers we see were formed through catastrophe. Of course most still believe in millions of years, but with no erosion between layers, evidence of animals being buried suddenly, soft animal fossils, and geological sorting, catastrophe is now a staple of geologic observation. So where do they put the millions of years? In between the layers! Where there is no evidence!

Why? Because in the the scientific world’s mind, evolution is a naturalist foregone conclusion, the only acceptable explanation of how we came to be, even among believers in that field, and they have been taught that it is an immutable fact of science. Furthermore, each field of science is parceled off in particular areas of expertise. The biologists “knows” the paleontologist has proof, they in turn “know” the geologist does. The geologist trusts the anthropologist has proof, and so on… so every observation is cemented into an undeniable belief that Darwinian evolution is fact.

But no transitions exist when there should logically be MILLIONS! Think about it; slow gradual change through eons of time would produce animals in droves hardly discernable from one another. How is taxonomy even possible? Well, it would seem when we find an animal in the dirt, like soft bodied jellyfish, bats, or whales, they are always the fully formed version of itself, not what Darwin was expecting. To counter this obvious fact, many began promoting various versions of punctuated equilibrium; providing through mutation, great leaps forward in evolution to explain away the lack of evidence. Keep in mind, finding no evidence doesn’t make them question the veracity of evolution. It merely causes them to double down on a previously absurd and long denied process, but recycled in some new way, giving more power to time, and mutation then has ever been observed.

So why can an evolutionist spout confidently about there having been no out of placed fossils ever found? For one, Bill Nye, in his famous debate with Ken Ham, blurted this nonsense amidst the back and forth, and it was never one of the points specifically countered. It was then pounced on as some death knell to be wielded triumphantly over the moronic creationists. But secondly, and most importantly, evolutionists, under the guise of adjusting the evolutionary model to a growing knowledge base, have taken any out of order anomaly, and either denied it, quietly acknowledged it while as little fanfare as possible, or adjusted the model to explain away the observation in a way that could not hurt the theory. The greatest part about evolution is that any number of things could have happened 100 million years ago, and no out of order fact could possibly sink the faith in this religion. So unlike good science, evolution is not making accurate predictions about what we will find (it has failed miserably in this regard), but rather, because “we already know it is true” anything we find can be adjusted to fit into it without compromising the overall belief. Then it just becomes scientists arguing for the best order of things in an echo chamber, while doubters of Darwin stare in disbelief at the utter lack of cohesiveness.

An example, you say? Well, I am glad you asked. It is not surprising that fossils are being found in the “wrong place” all the time!

  1. We find them on the surface all the time. Just laying there, getting stepped over, millions of years, in rock that can be designated to the proper geologic level depending on what fossil is in it. “The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately.” J.D O’Rourke.
  2. “If there were a column of sediments … Unfortunately no such column exists.”
    Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Earth Science 1989, p. 326
  3. Even some of the most devout evolutionists are honest when confronting misplaced fossils; highly respected coauthor of the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria, Dr. Niles Eldredge, Curator, Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, since 1969, has written that the fossils cannot be used to date the rocks that they are found in. One reason for this is that we now know that all animal and plant kinds are found all the way “back” to the beginning of Cambrian layers.
  4. Cambrian layers we now know contain even vertibrates, the most complex forms of life, which it most certainly should not, but also contains every phylum we have a classification for, that appeared in full form, and vastly different than all the others. Imagine going from bacteria to a starfish, sponge, flatworm, crab, mollusk, and vertebrate, all at once! That is some powerful evolutionary magic right there.
  5. would the wrong place include living fossils? Animals found alive after being extinct for millions of years? Horseshoe crabs. Coelacanth. What about finding a living Wollemi pine that went extinct in the fossil recorrd 150 million years ago? Would that be considered the wrong place?
  6. To correct for finds that don’t fit, columns are corrected upwards, and downwards. The Nucha vancouverensis sponge, found in Canada, in a layer 220 million years old, was found across the world in a 500 million years layer with none between, and was corrected for.
  7. Grasses were not to have been formed until way after dinosaurs, but dinosaur dung was found to have grass in it. So it was corrected.
  8. Mammals were supposed to have evolved well after dinosaurs. But a large rodent was found with dinosaur babies in its digestive tract.
  9. Dinosaurs were supposed to have evolved into birds, a recent but latched onto theory, yet birds were found in wrong layers putting them together.
  10. Guadalupe woman and her modern burial site found in a layer 28 million years old certainly provides for a misplaced set of bones.

It takes very little effort to find sharks teeth in North Dakota, whale fossils in the desert, petrified closed clams on mount Everest, and a myriad of other finds that did not hit the expected targets of evolutionary thinking. This is to say nothing of carbon found in coal, diamonds, dinosaurs, which should not be there if millions of years old. A great testimony to good science was when carbon dating was first discovered, science kept a journal that acredited scientists could add to when things were dated, and a bunch of dinosaurs, and extinct animals made it in, before the concerted effort to not publish more than half of the results, once they realized the dates were compromising the theory.

Is it worth arguing back and forth with someone who is so sure nothing has ever been found out of place the world over that would topple the evolutionary house of cards? We know full well that every result will be crammed into some reorganized version, dismissed for the larger picture, taught in compulsory schooling with the drum beat of certainty, regardless of every prediction having fallen short. Evolution is a golden calf that, despite no evidence combating abiogenesis, irreducible complexity, the language of DNA and simultaneous ability for cells to read it, no transitions, and a dating set that has no solidarity whatsoever, will not die. Because as they have admitted, “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
[Billions and Billions of Demons – JANUARY 9, 1997 ISSUE]”
― Richard C. Lewontin

What Are Students Taught about the Death of Dinosaurs?

dinokiller

A giant, life ending, asteroid is the common theory, yes? 65,000,000 years ago, teachers confidently espouse, that the most “likely” scenario was an asteroid that our dragon friends could not survive. Despite no evidence for such an event, there are a surprising amount of specifics taught to children about this make-believe impact. It is a model that fits the bill, when one is needed to prop up faith in evolution, and allows evolutionists to maintain their pre-supposition in molecules-to-man, despite the observable data at hand.

The asteroid was apparently 6 miles wide, the needed girth to cause an impact great enough to change the weather, which would have created a crater 110 miles across. There are no craters in the surface of the Earth that show evidence of such an impact, though scientists have tried to pigeon-hole the data from the Caribbean Sea to imply that this event must have happened there. This impact, according to the theory, first proposed by geologist Walter Alvarez in about 1980, wiped out the dinosaurs, along with 80% of the Earth’s animals.

This theory is mostly propped up using the discovery  of a higher content of  of iridium in the Caribbean,  and coupling it with the made-up geologic column which exists no where on Earth. (Iridium is a mineral found in many meteorites, but is also heavily prevalent in volcanic events, which occurred during the flood.)

It is worth noting that though this is a prevailing theory, it is not the only one. Many scientists believe that alternate events killed the dinosaurs. Some of these include mammals eating dinosaur eggs,  the evolution of narcotic plants, climate change,  diseases, loss of plants causing herbivores to starve, which in turn caused the carnivores to starve, lowering of oxygen partial pressure in the atmosphere.

There are excellent articles and evidences addressing reptile size, geologic column, radiometric dating, etc, from a creationist perspective. But the important point here, and the crux of this article, is to note that none of these theories indicate a global flood. None of these indicate a drowning event, or water at all, as a catalyst for bringing about the extinction of large reptiles.

Why is this important? We can safely agree that academia in general has a strong bias against the bible, and its historical narrative, so we certainly wouldn’t expect the default opinion of secularism to match the global flood history recorded in genesis.

But what is telling is the actual observable data.

Certainly we know about finding buried dead things all over the Earth, including large pre-flood dinosaurs, or dragons. IMG_9378We have discovered billions of dinosaur tracks over the last 20 years, across the globe in over 1500 different locations. Scientists are slowly agreeing that these fossil graveyards, soft bodied (jellyfish) animal fossils, and fossils buried mid-meal, or mid-birth indicate a quick catastrophic burial, rather than some slow burial lasting millions of years.

But even more telling is that we have scientists themselves admitting that these finds were originally deposited due to water. For example:

World’s Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death, By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor – “The way the fossils are linked together in the same layers of earth within these bonebeds suggests all these Centrosaurs were wiped out simultaneously. The likely culprit in this scenario was a catastrophic storm, which could quickly have routinely made the waters flood up as high as 12 to 15 feet.”

Drowned dinosaur eggs’ fossil remains reveal embryos grew fast, Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2013|By Amina Khan

Publication in Yellowstone National Park – “Mammoth Site in South Dakota. Mammoths and other megafauna got trapped in a sinkhole and drown about 26,000 years ago.”

This is just a sampling. All over the world, and in article after article, scientists observe the data that these fossils were drowned at the time of death.

Now, look at these pictures of dinosaurs discovered buried:

Struthiomimus_skeleton_jconwaydownloaddeath_pose-lgcompsognathus_fossil

Notice they exhibit this peculiar contorted position popularly called the “death pose.” This pose of many fossilized dinosaurs, with wide-open mouth, head thrown back and recurved tail, likely resulted from the agonized death throes typical of brain damage from asphyxiation, according to paleontologists. If they were buried in rock slides, or were buried after death and then fossilized, they would not have this position. These animals were obviously suffocating as they were being buried by mud and water. These animals drowned.

We find this data all over the globe, and yet, I would remind you that all of the deep time, secular speculations taught in schools do not involve water! I would say that I remain curious as to why that is. But I know the answer. It puts science a little too close to a biblical theory that must not be allowed in the door. But, as it has many times before, the bible continues to be shown as the most accurate explanation of our early Earth. Is the story fantastic, and amazing? Absolutely. But it so easily explains so many geological features that it puts secular theories to shame. Academia will of course continue to scoff at the bible, regardless of how well the data matches the history. But it is quite faith-building to know that when you put in the time and research, you can stand on a great deal of evidence to support the biblical narrative.

———-

2 Peter 3:3 Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” 5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.

Archeological/Geological Response to Atheist Part 5 of 5

Atheist: Here’s a very incomplete list of things that cannot be explained by your flood or fit into the young earth creationist’s timeline (continued):

(for part 1, click here)

(for part 2, click here)

(for part 3, click here)

(for part 4, click here)

nor [evidence for] the global flood,

As you can see from the many examples given in this 5 part series (not exhaustive by any stretch) we can be encouraged and edified in trusting the word of God to be accurate,  and to be a realistic telling of the events that occurred in history, as it is embedded within observable science and laws. Many of our major geological features are not only explainable in a deluge model, but this is in fact the easiest way to explain them all at once! If someone says, there is just no evidence of the flood; its ridiculous.

Particularly difficult to apply the principle of uniformitarianism to:
1. Cause of mountain building
2. origin of geosynclines
3. origin of petroleum
4. Cause of continual glaciation
5 overthrusting mechanics
6 cause of peneplains
7 volcanism causing vast volcanic terrains
8 origin of mineral deposits
9 saline deposits
10 granitization
11 origin of coal measures….. and others….

One geological note about where I live specifically:

There are over 1700 water gaps in the Appalachian mountain ranges alone, where water should have gone around, not through mountains. This could only happen if water was carving valleys while over the mountain tops such as in the great flood of Noah’s day. Water doesn’t run uphill, and takes the path of least resistance, an embarrassment to uniformitarianism. The geology of the Blue Ridge Mountains could not have been formed, except through this catastrophe.

Geological evidence is being pointed to, forcing geologists to admit to catastrophism and the quick twisting and reshaping of the earth’s surface. Evolutionists such as Gould, and Krynine admit to it, stating uniformitarian thinking is contradicted by facts. Gould says “”present is key to the past” is a smokescreen hiding confusion for both teacher and student.” – Is uniformitarianism useful?- 1957

Evolutionist and geologist, KE Caster states, “the vast bulk of stratified rock is shallow water deposits.” These layers are riddled with fossils. FOSSILIZATION DOES NOT NORMALLY HAPPEN TODAY. IT REQUIRES SUDDEN DEATH, SUDDEN BURIAL, AND GREAT PRESSURE. There are no fossils in the bedrock granite. Fossil creation is so rare, and yet Millions of animals died SUDDENLY! Evolutionist Colbert states,”At this spot in Wyoming… the concentration of fossils was remarkable; a veritable mine of dinosaur bones; piled in like a log jam.”

The many fossil graveyards means, at some point in history, vast amounts of animals were buried suddenly, all over the earth. For anyone to look at the earth’s crust and state there is no evidence… must be trying very hard not to see it.

 

I encourage more study into any areas of interest, but in regards to the flood being actual history, one note to be made is that we have presently over 270 ancient flood legends from different people groups around the globe! There are over 270 ancient flood legends and traditions recorded in ancient history, 80% of them mention a large vessel saving the human race. 88% involve a favored family. In 70%, survival was due to the boat. In 95%, the flood was responsible for the death of mankind. This is remarkable evidence that a flood occurred to the ancestors of all people groups. In fact, you could even imagine if there were no flood legends, this would be quite the effective criticism from atheists, saying how come there is no written or oral history to back up the story other than the bible? 

Also, the  city of Nineveh in the Bible had its Library of Ashurbanipal excavated in the 1850’s. But in 1872, George Smith of the British Museum discovered cuneiform writing that had to be deciphered. It said, “The mountain of Nisir stopped the ship. I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and turned, and a resting place it did not find and it returned.”

This Babylonian flood legend, along with the much older Atrahasis epic, and Sumerian deluge story, make up some of the over 270  legends we have catalogued in archaeology, all having astonishing areas of agreement with the Bible, lending veracity to its historicity.

 

nor a couple million Hebrews wandering in the desert (zero trace of that), and in fact contradicts several parts of the bible, like cases where the stories reference a city that did not exist at the time the story supposedly took place (but DID exist hundreds of years later when the bible was actually written).

These points were mostly addressed. Often critics accuse the bible of being written later than what is reported, therefore explaining the exactitude of its prophecies. Unfortunately for the critic, this doesn’t hold water either. Again, archaeology proves time and time again that even the people groups, cities, economies, and famines described were true. From the price of a slave, to the grave of Joseph, to many eye-witness accounts, we do not have to fall for the critic’s accusation here. These continue to be either arguments from silence, or in most cases now, ignorance of the embarrassing amount of evidence we have.

They try this with the New Testament as well, since it predicts many things about Jesus’ life in great detail. How accurately was prophecy fulfilled? Could a book have predicted accurately over 500 years before in OT: Zec: 11 “I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD to the potter.”
NT: Matthew 27 – Judas returns 30 silver coins to the chief priests and the elders, they decided to use it to buy the potters field.

or

Micah 5:2-5 But you Bethlehem Ephratah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are of old, from ancient times…

Fulfilled over 500 years later: Matthew 2: 1-6 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?”

or

Born of a virgin Isaiah 7:14 Matt. 1:18, 25
Born at Bethlehem Micah 5:2 Matt. 2:1
He would be preceded by a Messenger Isaiah 40:3 Matt. 3:1-2
Rejected by His own people Isaiah 53:3 John 7:5, 7:48
Betrayed by a close friend Isaiah 41:9 John 13:26-30
His side pierced Zech. 12:10 John 19:34
Crucifixion Psalm 22:1,
Psalm 22:11-18 Luke 23:33,
John 19:23-24
Resurrection of Christ Psalm 16:10 Acts 13:34-37

So, it must have been written after to be so accurate, yes? Josh MacDowell teaches us this:

“If you are not satisfied with 450 BC as the historical date for the completion of the Old Testament, take into consideration the following: The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, was initiated in the rain of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 Bc). It is rather obvious that if you have a Greek translation initiated into 250BC, can you had to have The Hebrew text from which it was written. This will suffice to indicate that there was at least a 250 year gap between the prophecies being written down in their first fulfillment in the person of Christ.”
There is nothing scientifically accurate about the bible.

This absolute statement shows the bias against the bible. Even scientists who believe in evolution have used the accuracy and history of the bible to find many discoveries. To say there is “nothing” is to show the true and emotional disdain towards the idea of a creator God. That being said, evolutionists and materialists often criticize the bible for its belief in miracles at large. If something is claimed to be a supernatural event, science will automatically dismiss it, and therefore, if anything supernatural exists at all, science will never find it. But consider, if the first verse of the bible is true, that means all miracles within it are indeed possible. This goes not only for the creation itself, but miracles like the parting of the Red Sea, healings, Sampson’s strength, and of course the Resurrection. So with the realization that the bible is a book about a supernatural, or beyond-natural being who is above space time and matter, we can conclude that He can act supernaturally within His creation.

But there is more evidence within the bible that proves its natural scientific accuracy as well. It spoke of many things long before science proposed it, or understood it to be true:

Stars are innumerable (Genesis 22:17; Jeremiah 33:22)
Stars differ in glory (1 Corinthians 15:41)
Stars follow a predictable pattern (Jeremiah 31:35)
Earth is round, not flat (Isaiah 40:22; Psalm 103:12)
Earth hangs on nothing (Job 26:7)
Water cycle (Ecclesiastes 1:7; Isaiah 55:10)
Sea currents (Psalm 8:8)
“Fountains of the deep broken up” (Genesis 7:11)Job 38:16, God asked, “Have you entered the springs of the sea? (water coming up into the ocean from the crust)
Life in the Blood, Blood circulation (Leviticus 17:11)

Many of these may seem obviously true to us now. But much of history was ignorant to these simple truths. We thought the world sat on the back of a tortoise, and blood letting was performed even up to recent history.

Considering these biblical truths, inspired and breathed by the God who created them, we would expect them to be accurate. And as it turns out, that is precisely what we find. As I always state, the bible is not a science book, nor a book on taxonomy, biology, or geology. It is much much more. But nevertheless, if it is full of true history, and we would expect to find a great many explanations in it that fit with what we observe today. After all, science just means knowledge. For one to claim that within God’s word there is no knowledge… well, we can only pray that one day, like it says in Phil 2:12, that the atheist who said it will continue to work out his salvation with fear and trembling.

Science tells us it is impossible that the current human population of the world came from a single breeding pair, or even three pairs. The minimum estimated population during the most severe bottleneck in our past was at least a few hundred, and probably closer to a few thousand individuals.

Our final point, and again the more ludicrous of the two options is the evolutionary premise, which would have us believe that mankind in one form or another, has existed between 1 million and 7 million years, depending on who you ask and when you start counting them as man rather than some ape ancestor. The premise is that in these pockets of slowly evolving people  lived in nomadic tribes, and that life was so harsh that the population remained stable until about 5000 years ago when agriculture was discovered. This is the catalyst that skyrocketed the population. As you can imagine, this creates a long, long, long long long, ridiculously long timeline of no population growth until just about the exact time that the flood occurred. According to creationists, the population sprang up from the 8 people on the ark about 4500 years ago. Tracking basic population rates, longevity in different periods, death rates, etc, we easily and rationally can surmise the 7 billion people of today coming from just a few people a few thousand years ago.

“In the “out of Africa” model of genetics, evolutionists say that humanity went through a near-extinction bottleneck before a population expansion. Why is the bottleneck part of their model? Because they are trying to explain the lack of diversity among people spread across the world. The diversity is much less than they first assumed. The bottleneck is an ad hoc addition to evolutionary theory. But low diversity, and all coming from very few (a bottleneck) has been part of the creation model from the start.”  -Dr Robert Carter.

The fact is, the creationist population growth analysis makes perfect sense, and what’s more, the history laid out within the word of God supports what we observe in genetics as well. It would be quite unreasonable to assume a mankind only slightly more sophisticated than apes, with no art, or music, or play stations, or golf clubs, and virtually no forms of escapism from everyday life, to not do the one thing that seems to come naturally to all mammals. The math here is unmistakable,  which is why we have the agriculture story to try and prop up the cave-man mythology. If the population doubles 29.5 times between now and the flood (once every 152 years) we have achieved the current population. (The world’s population was approximately 600 million in the year 1650 and increased to about 2,400 million by 1950. This means that it would have doubled twice in 300 years, at an average rate of once every 150 years). It fits perfectly.

So again this point is slung like so much spaghetti against the wall, to see which strands stick. Unfortunately it isn’t rooted in facts. This is why evolutionists must assert presumptions into an un-testable model. Agriculture, nomadic tribes, population wiped out several times. At the end of the day, I would hope that hanging one’s faith upon the hopes of a weak evolutionary model isn’t the determining factor on whether or not that person considers a relationship with a God who loved us enough to come die for us.

 

Again, these 5 articles are not meant to be exhaustive. But as an enjoyable exercise for myself, and hopefully to bolster the faith of other bible believing Christians who are constantly being told that the bible is ridiculous and inaccurate, it was neat to counter typical atheist criticisms for a bit. I would encourage you to keep reading, keep praying, and keep building your relationship with God, or if you haven’t then start by reading of His love in the word. We know by now Romans 1:20 – “For from the creation of the world the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”

We know there exists within us a moral law, a realization that design and beauty is all around us, that it couldn’t be random chance, and that God wishes for all to come to know Him. I pray you keep studying, keep seeking, keep searching. The answers are out there. But remember, if the supernatural does exist, and you refuse to believe it possible, you will of course never find it. Not in this life. Your faith instead will be in chance, in time, and in self, three things that cannot offer salvation.

 

 

Archeological/Geological Response to Atheist Part 4 of 5

Atheist: Here’s a very incomplete list of things that cannot be explained by your flood or fit into the young earth creationist’s timeline (continued):

(for part 1, click here)

(for part 2, click here)

(for part 3, click here)

the almost universal disarticulation of vertebrate fossil skeletons (complete articulated skeletons would indicate catastrophic burial),

Fossils are found articulated (together), disarticulated (space between vertebrae), and partial. Considering the swirling violent nature of a world wide flood, and the amount of eroding mud and water that was displaced, we get exactly what wPicture100would be expected, which is various fossil graveyards, sea creatures fossilized on mountains, evidence of swirled eddies of decaying flesh buried by mud, and yes, disarticulated spines. A better question, I think, is how do you explain this picture and many like it without a global catastrophe?  Could this happen all over the world with slow natural processes?How were these animals log jammed together in what would become a fossil graveyard? How do 36 bus-sized sea creatures (Mosasaurus) end up buried on the Rocky Mountains? How are petrified clam shells, buried before death (closed), found on Mt Everest? And I guarantee that most of the vertebrate animals finding themselves in these swirling, violent, muddy deathtraps were disarticulated.

ancient sandstone that formed in deserts (not floods),

This is most likely a reference to the Coconino desert sand dunes found at the Grand Canyon. Evolution-believing geologists such as Young, Strahler,  and Stearley use this formation as a slam dunk to discredit the flood. Though, as of Creationist Geologist Dr. John Whitmore’s study, none of these scientists had actually been there. So a team of Creationist Geologists (The study had many participants, including Ray Strom, Paul Garner, Stephen Cheung, and Guy Forsythe, resulting in many scientific publications, presentations, and abstracts within the scientific community, with John Whitmore as the lead investigator) went out there to examine the claims, and do lab work. They found 7 myths being perpetrated upon students of geology regarding these formations that served to convince others it was not formed underwater.  (“Intraformational Parabolic Recumbent Folds in the Coconino Sandstone (Permian) and Two Other Formations in Sedona, Arizona (USA),” January 21, 2015; and “Petrology of the Coconino Sandstone (Permian), Arizona, USA,” December 10, 2014.)

These included, by where not limited to whether or not the sand grains are well-sorted, well-rounded, and the dunes were at the correct angle for being formed under water vs by wind – over 200 samples revealed angles of 20 degrees, not 32, which was indicative of underwater formation rather than wind; corroborated by other geologists, and comparable to observable underwater dunes today. Bottom line? It took Bible believing scientists who saw flaws in the formation story of these dunes to investigate it themselves, without the presupposition of evolutionary time, in order to discover the problems with often adhered to claims. With molecules to man evolution having been widely accepted by academia as true, geologists unfortunately feel no need to re-examine the claims of their peers, despite the fact that contradictions with what is taught in text books exists for all to see and observe.

P.S. Similar results were found at the Navajo Sand Dunes.

P.P.S. We can add this to the list of features (coming up next) about the Grand Canyon that have no evidence which can discredit the flood, but can instead be used to support God’s word. Expected, but still amazing!

 

the physical shape of the Grand Canyon,

Taken at face value, the Grand Canyon continues to be quite the perplexing formation for evolutionists. The dedication to this paradigm forces geologists to theorize beyond what would otherwise be so simple. Creationists who understand the obvious reason for its formation need no such gymnastics to explain it. With proof that great spillways can form rapidly now apparent since the Mt. St, Helens eruption, and with several obvious observations at the Canyon itself, we can take joy in the truth of God’s word:

„Middle is higher elevation than the head waters (Kaibab Plateau)

„Both sides agree uplift of center occurred before the river was there (water doesn’t run uphill; another great observation for second graders)

„Gargantuan river delta that should be present is missing

„Stable, shear cliffs, little rock fall – not slow erosion, but washed out

„No Talus at base of cliffs – Amphitheaters hundreds of feet of sheer Cliffside over one mile from water, with no debris (washed out)

„It is relict – unchanged from what formed it, stable in current condition.

This geological feature becomes quite obviously the result of a global flood. Slow erosion could not have created it, nor could any river system imaginable. Also, the lack of river delta was addressed in an earlier part, which happens to be missing if the 1000 cubic miles of mud and rock were washed away slowly.

[side note: geologist and creationist Dr. Snelling is currently in a lawsuit with the Grand Canyon Authorities, due to them not allowing him to collect samples for his work, because of his beliefs and how they pertain to his field.]

 

ancient stromatolites,

These are algae fossils within the “Pre-Cambrian” strata. Creationists understand that faulty assumptions based on a geologic column that was invented out of the imagination of a bible hater in the 1800’s, and that exists no where in the world except for in the text books where they teach children about evolution, would need to be re-examined. Catastrophism is quite obvious in the fossil record, and is quickly being admitted to even by evolutionary geologists. But throwing away the sacred cow of the faith based geologic column is anathema to evolutionists. That being said, if the circular reasoning of arbitrarily dating the ‘pre-cambrian’ strata, and then using said date to infer that its fossils must pre-date the flood is again not science. It is assumption based on faith. This type of argument is called begging the question. It isn’t logically or scientifically valid.

 

concentrations of helium in zircons (which comes from radioactive decay),images

At the present evaporation rate of helium within zircon, if it were millions of years old, there should be none left, yet we find plenty. This is yet another coffin nail in the evolutionary timeline, along with many various dating issues, such as the Carbon-14 found in diamonds!  The RATE Team (8 doctors who believe the bible) did an 8 year study on this and other remarkable geology. Find it in their book “Thousands, not Millions”.

the changing chemistry of rocks over time,

addressed at dolomite question (part 2)

the nearly complete absence from the earth’s crust of elements like technetium (the most stable isotope has a half life of 4.2 million years),

This element is literally a man made, synthetic element created in the 1920’s.  I had to chuckle when I looked this up. I can’t imagine how this could be levied against Christians in a desire to make their beliefs seem foolish. It being absent from the earth’s crust, being that it’s man-made, would have no bearing on this argument whatsoever. It was hard not to be sarcastic in this answer.

the current temperatures of huge masses of igneous rock (which would have taken millions of years to cool down),

Again, we are creating a problem here based on assumptions. Are we counting Granite which makes up 70% to 80% of the earth’s crust, as igneous rock which must be cooled?  According to Berkley,  “Debate has long centered on whether granite is igneous or metamorphic in origin. Originally granite was thought to form mainly from magmatic differentiation of basaltic magma, but geologists now believe there is simply too much of it for it to have formed this way… Evidence of intrusion or great mobility is considered to indicate an igneous origin that stems from melting of sediments; but where no good evidence of either a magma chamber or of fluidity is observed, a metamorphic origin must be considered.”

This means to the layman, that much of the earth’s crust must have been made chemically, not from being melted. This reduces the amount of rock that needs to be cooled, as the intrusive rock layers, or plutons, which are considered igneous, may instead have a metamorphic origin, which means they were never melted. Polonium halos also speak to granite’s quick formation. See the book, “Creation’s Tiny Mystery”, by Robert V. Gentry.

Again, defining the problems without assumption give us many plausible answers. Much of the crust can most easily be explained by creation on day 3.

Regarding the actual igneous rock formations, many could have actually been formed at the time of the flood during the development of tectonic plate movement. Great strides have been made in the understanding of the viscosity, and its cooling, (conduction vs convection) of plutons. Evidence suggests that these sheets of rock were quickly injected into the earth’s crust, and could have cooled in less than 3000 years.

large metamorphic bodies,

Amusingly, the creation model detractor has put every type of rock we observe in nature on his list for reasons their can’t be a creation or a flood. This has more to do with the fact that geologists have adopted the evolutionary paradigm of biology, and presume millions of years upon every feature they observe. As with the geological sorting that has occurred to lay down sedimentary rock layers showing obvious signs of catastrophe, and likewise the observable processes and evidence of igneous rock formations, we can now consider the observable reality of metamorphic rocks. The evolutionary model of how these formations were formed of course involves millions of years. As with other factors, this is simply not the only possibility, and through studying, can even have evidences stacked against it as a possibility. More importantly than that, though, is the realization that according to the creation model, dry land was formed, created by God on day 3. If God truly created the heavens and the earth, if the bible is in fact true, then the miracles of earth formation, as well as stars, water, the sun and moon, and other actual creative miracles were obviously assumed to be the method of formation in many cases.

Evolutionists will claim this is a “God of the Gaps” argument, that we insert God’s creative powers anywhere that doesn’t fit the biblical paradigm. This could grow into a lengthy answer, if responded to completely. But the short answer is simply, a realization that this is not a fall back excuse, but a believed in process, supported not only by the great design we witness, but by the fact that the alternative is that matter had to have made itself, which is its own ‘evolution-of-the-gaps argument, relying on time and unobserved mutations, violations of laws of motion, and of thermodynamics, to create matter, and order from nothing.

the sheer amount of volcanic deposits…

Most of the volcanic evidence we observe in the earth’s crust was from when when the fountains of the deep broke open. The evidence shows just how volatile the flood really was. Spillways, mountains, volcanoes, oceans, ice age, these geological observances indicate not only the event’s seriousness, but also its scale. Remember this was to wipe out all life.  It is not the mild rains depicted in children’s books. It was a global killer, and is responsible for the fossil record, the ring of fire, and the great amounts of pillow lava we observe, some making up whole sections of continents (Northwest America), evidence that the magma burst forth under water. Again, all this points to the reality of a flood, and continues to.

Archaeology does not support the exodus from Egypt,

This is quite plainly a false assertion. Archaeologists tend to know that despite biblical criticism, the bible ends up being proven right as more and more evidence is uncovered. It used to be that arguments against the bible were made from silence, that is they said we hadn’t found evidence to support it yet. But that is always a dangerous position, as many have found; and as more evidence has been uncovered, in archaeology specifically, it corroborates what the OT has already stated as history for thousands of years. This is true with cities, kings, customs, economies, and more, and we have an embarrassing amount of evidence, such as bulla, cuniform, and architecture to prove it. Anyone making this claim is saying so without proper study, or is being intellectually dishonest, and more than likely wishes there to be no evidence and is willing to take a skeptic’s rant against the bible as true fact.

There are over 52 historical  people from the bible who have been confirmed archaeologically, many cities such as Nineveh, and Ur, Babylon, and Jericho. And there are great studies and documentaries on the subject in question, such as “Patterns of Evidence: Exodus” which detail evidences of the forensic science of archaeology, and how it pertains to the bible.

(Continued in Part 5)

Archeological/Geological Response to Atheist Part 2 of 5

Atheist: Here’s a very incomplete list of things that cannot be explained by your flood or fit into the young earth creationist’s timeline (continued):

(for part 1, click here)

plate tectonics, the higher elevation and older age of the continents compared to ocean floors,

Plate tectonics is not a criticism of creationism. Both models agree we see observable plate tectonics. However, based on what we observe today, there are many features that can be explained by a global flood. Many canyons and hundreds of volcanoes lining the ocean floor; layered strata, most fossils, the ice age, the Grand Canyon, and yes the tectonic plates, which were created when the great fountains of the deep burst forth. Imagine water exploding violently from great cracks in the crust such as the Atlantic Ridge, forcing water and mud to race around the globe. Great plates of land began to buckle, forming the mountains of today (complete with buried lifeforms on top of them), This is why the major mountain chains are parallel to the ridges from which they slid.

In regards to the assertion that the age of continents are greater than the age of the ocean floor, my response would be, who dated them? This is circular reasoning. One cannot tell me the earth is very very old, and then use the date they tell me it is to prove it is old. This conclusion is based solely on the faith in this evolutionary model. Aside from its obvious assumptions, this is like declaring that the mountains are old because they are old.

the sheer number of animal species that exist,

Doctors and scientists from both AIG and Creation MInistries International have done exceptional work in this area. Taxonomy and speciation have massive hurdles to overcome if evolution is true, as well as does the fossil record. The animals found are stubbornly found complete and distinct, perfectly designed, and in most cases easily classifiable. This would not be the case if evolution is true, and again obvious to a second grader, if slow gradual change was the rule, then it would not be necessary for all evolutionists to scramble at every presumption of a found transitional form, for there would obviously be millions and millions, so many that taxonomy itself would be impossible. The great variety of species is a boon to special creation, because we do not have to assert that humans, bananas, the porcupine, mold, and octopuses are all somehow related!

Further study will allow you to conclude that not only was their room on the ark for all land animals, but that God has provided great variety within His beautiful design. Species in each case can be traced back to either the genus or family level of classification, now known as the baramin, and each baramin can account for the many species and sub-species that micro-evolution has caused over time. But in each case, and this is key, we always find that biological constraints keep one kind from changing beyond a pre-designed, natural, genetic limit. 

angular unconformities,

Not overly familiar (I am not a geologist), though there is a great creation evidence in bent rock layers, evidence that great amounts of earth were buckled and uplifted during a time where all the rock was soft and pliable (no evidence of cracking). This wouldn’t have happened it hard, brittle rock was slowly uplifted for millions of years. Regarding the uncomformities, I’d direct anyone who wishes to delve into it specifically to Creationist Taz Walker’s explanation of the most famous site for angular uncomformity east of Edinburgh, Scotland.

dolomite,

Touting dolomitization as evidence for evolution, we find evolutionists claiming “evolution” as a pervasive force through all sciences. This is done as if natural occurrences are for some reason denied by Christians in a continued attempt to label them “anti-science”. I have hotly debated atheists who are very precise in their definitions, and who attack when attempts to offer different syntax through context are used. It is a great inroad to an ad hominem attack in many cases. That being said, the consensus among the science-minded elite within the debates have asserted emphatically that evolution is defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool. This is from experience, and again, this was emphatically, sometimes rudely asserted. As you can tell from the definition, it applies to organic material. Yet somehow, we keep running across inorganic evolutionary assertions, like in geology here, or in regards to chemical or stellar evolution, where one must deduce that somehow inorganic material is somehow also mutating to provide the universe with different or more abundant types of matter. (We find this as an insurmountable hurdle in the Big Bang Theory model, as matter not only has to explode from the central explosion, but must also keep creating new material along the way).

The reality regarding dolomite is that minerals do change over time. This is hardly anything new, though claiming it is analogous or even a type of evolution, and that biological and geological evolution have occurred together to bring about the existence of man was not something Darwin agreed with, but has become part of the great evolutionary thinking that has been forced to cover many sciences, since without God it must explain everything. That is of course what materialism is. Robert Hazen the geologist wanted dolomitization to be defined as ‘mineral evolution by mutation’ (Hazen, R.M. et al., Mineral evolution, American Mineralogist 93(11–12):1693–1720, 2008).  The bottom line, the chemical changes of minerals over time is well understood, is observable, and does not exclude a creationist account.

massive deposits of salts via evaporation of ancient lakes and oceans,

Remember, the claim is that this is a list of things that CANNOT BE EXPLAINED by a flood or in a young earth timeline. In this case, this is predicated upon evaporation being the definitive cause of these large salt beds, a theory presented by Ochsenius in 1877. Here are a few problems with the evaporation theory, however:

  1. To form a deposit only 1 km thick would require seawater 60 km deep to be evaporated.6
  2. The salt formations show negligible contamination with sand, contradicting the evaporation model which requires a sandbank in combination with consistently dry weather over a long period of time. This process would introduce a lot of sand into the salt evaporation enclosures.
  3. The salt formations exhibit negligible contamination with marine fossils, contrary to what would be expected with seawater constantly flooding into the evaporation area and the enormous amount of seawater involved.
  4. The evaporation areas need to be in regions of high sunlight and low rainfall if the seawater is to evaporate. However, the distribution of salt deposits globally contradicts the idea that all of these areas were once near the equator for the required time to achieve such a result.

This model is wholly inadequate to explain the thickness of these formations. The obvious response to evolutionists is, ‘based on your assumption that the evaporation theory is how these formations formed, we may have a time problem. However, is that how it was formed?’ James Hutton, who introduced deep-time as a geologist, was convinced that these formations had a hot magma, or igneous origin. This model has been studied since and explains the formations much more adequately. So yes evolutionists can debunk biblical chronology only if they cling to assumed theories they know demand great time. This is often the default assumption in science, since they already “know” that evolution is true. It isn’t a surprise that if you devise a theory based on great amounts of time, you can then use that same theory to prove great amounts of time.

syntectonic deposits,

These are simply deposits that accompany tectonic activity, which were of course abundant and global during the flood. Not sure which geological observances around cracks in the earth’s crust would be proof against the flood, but again, I am not a geologist. I would caution those who study it though, to be mindful, just like in the prior salt formation examples. A theory based on deep time to explain a deposit will no doubt be asserted because “we already know evolution and deep time is true”. So you will get lots of “millions of years ago” and “slowly over time” comments. The fact is most geological features we can observe can happen very quickly. Obviously, based on the observation of deposits laid down all over the world catastrophically should lead most to conclude that there must have been a catastrophe. To be blind to it because you have already philosophically ruled out a global flood is not science. It is faith.

To be continued Part 3

 

Don’t need God, Just Add Time…

One of the arguments apologists make is called the teleological argument, or simply stated, the argument from design. The old adage goes, if I were to come upon a pocket watch laying on a  beach,  I would quickly observe the dials, the polished metal, the small bits of assembly required to make it run. It would be clear to me that it had a designer. In much the same way, we can observe the infinitely more complex information, and organization of nature and confidently say it has a designer as well. DNA language, irreducible complexity, biodiversity. These are things we instinctively realize are not accidental, though some may hope them to be. As Romans 1:20 says,

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.

rustic_wood_look_planks_large_clock-r7e0ef10db0d34208b51758b252490b09_fup13_8byvr_324But since Sir Charles Lyell’s book, the Principles of Geology, where he imagined the geologic column, and perpetuated the idea that the world was much older than the bible chronology reported, we have been adding great amounts of time to the theory of molecules-to-man evolution. Sir Charles Lyell who wished to “save the sciences from Moses”, and was a contemporary and major influence on Darwin,  proposed that the world was at least 35,000 years old after his trip to Niagara Falls in 1841.

The story goes that upon his visit, with the firm desire to “prove” the world was older than the bible said, he visited the falls to test the erosion rate. Rather than wait and measure, he asked the locals their opinion on how quickly the falls eroded per year. A collection of reports from locals that had lived near the falls for years stated that the erosion rate was probably about 3 feet per year. Measuring back to Lake Ontario at this rate only gave him a date of around 12,000-15,000 years. Lyell, needing the dates to be much older, assumed this was an exaggeration, and when he ended up back in England to write down his “research”, he felt the more likely rate of erosion was 1 foot per year. The seven miles from its beginning therefore allowed him to assume it had taken the falls 35,000 years to reach its present position.

As it turns out, the actual median erosion rate of the falls is 5 feet per year, which by that measure would have brought the date to only about 9000 years old, or even younger when you figure the beginnings of that erosion were caused by the fast moving drainage of Noah’s flood. But Lyell had a uniformitarian view to prop up, and it was his hatred of the bible that motivated it. Incidentally, by the end of his career, Lyell presumed the beginning of life was 200 million years.

This idea of long time didn’t start with Lyell, though he was the one that popularized it. James Hutton, who was died the year Lyell was born, suggested a long time frame and wrote that the present was the key to the past, which of course led to uniformitarian viewpoints. Before him was Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788, who first proposed broad scale mutability of species. In Epoques de la Nature, he suggested the Earth was torn from the sun 75,000 years ago.

As we know now, the assumed time for the age of the earth is around 4.5 billion years. The more fossils that were found, and the slower it seemed evolution took place, so slow in fact that evidence for it was non-existent, the dates of life’s beginning moved from Lyell’s 35,000 years to 2.1 billion years. This is the time frame that evolutionists believe is necessary to evolve humans from a one celled organism. So slow in fact, that evidence for it is completely un-observable. Sounds a lot like faith, doesn’t it?

Dr. George Wald, a Professor of Biology at Harvard University, and Nobel Laureate wrote “The origin of life”, and article in Scientific American, August 1954. In it he states, “However improbable we regard this event [origin of life], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.” He goes on to say, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”

Sound like faith?

You see, time itself is the miracle worker in evolutionary theory, not God. Time can do the impossible. Time fixes all the issues, the lack of evidence, the problem of entropy. Time, with no purpose, intelligence, or reason, has somehow created all we see, and done so opposite of the laws we observe today. If you add enough of it, that shouldn’t matter, as long as we have replaced faith in God with faith in something else.

Why? I will let Dr. Richard Charles Lewontin, from Columbia University, an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, academic and social commentator answer that question:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Or perhaps Nagel, Thomas could give you extra insight as to why:

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.” – The Last Word, pp. 130–131, Oxford University Press, 1997. Dr Nagel (1937– ) is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.

So the premise maintained by the goo-to-you believers is that given enough time, disorder, without any intelligence guiding it, will become order, opposite the Laws of Thermodynamics, Motion, etc. The opposite of entropy.

To conclude, I will give you the example Dr. Ron Carlson gave during one of his lectures. He says, go up in a plane to 5000 ft above the Space Center Complex, take some neatly stacked index cards and toss them out. You must do this over and over until they land in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex parking lot so that they spell out “Welcome to the Kennedy Space Center”. (This simple phrase of only 30 letters should be easy, as compared with the perfectly ordered 3 billion letters of our genetic code).

We observe at 5000 ft that these cards are not organizing, but instead ending up all over the place. So in order to produce more of a chance to organize in a way that makes sense, we will now follow the theory of evolution’s assertion and give these cards MORE TIME.

We will now take the plane up to 25,000 ft, so they have more time to fall, take our neatly stacked cards, and toss them out.  With all this extra time to fall, we must conclude that eventually they will organize into a proper sentence, or word, or even one letter. We have added the magic of time like evolutionists!

But wait –  the cards are now spreading out in an even more disorganized radius of chaos, some landing even 10’s of miles from where the plane dropped them!

How then, my friends, do we explain the beauty and exactitude of nature with this process? The answer is, we cannot. It is impossible.

I submit to you that this scientific experiment will provide us with more truth about our reality than any of the postulating, question-begging, circular reasoning, and assumption of our evolutionist friends, who like Dr. Nagel, hopes there is no God.

 

 

 

Gray Fossil Museum

IMG_6304

Visited the Fossil Museum in Gray TN this afternoon. There is a dig on site from which students and paleontologists are pulling out some amazing fossils. I want to preface this article by stating that I am very proud of the community for honoring the scientific find by dedicating resources to the site, as well as moving the direction of the highway in order to accommodate the dig. There are a plethora of fossil samples being pulled from the ground, two of which have been classified as new species. The exhibits are classy looking, and beautiful, and the facility, labs included, appear to be top notch.

This unfortunately is where my admiration for the project ends, as the whole site is absolutely dedicated to forcing evolutionary propaganda down each guest’s throat at every turn, and on every wall. It was egregious how prevalent the indoctrination was. Granted, I was expecting to encounter the millions-of-years mantra several times, but from the beginning 15 ft 4.5 billion year time line on the wall  at step one, to the ode to Charles Darwin hallway at the end, it dripped with the insatiable need to reinforce the religion of humanism, naturalism, and evolution.

It was never presented exactly how the dates were determined for the dig (between 4 million and 7 million years ago), but it could be deduced by both typical evolutionary presupposition and normal modus operandi that pre-determined index fossils dated the rocks, and of course the rocks date the fossils (a.k.a. circular reasoning).

In a 1979 interview with *Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: “How do you date fossils?” His reply: “By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found.” Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, “Of course, how else are you going to do it?” (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

“The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.”—*J.E. O’Rourke, “Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of science, January 1976.

“The charge that the construction of the geologic scale involves circularity has a certain amount of validity.”—*David M. Raup, “Geology and Creationism,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, March 1983, p. 21.

“It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology.”—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

 

“The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism.”—*J.E. O’Rourke, “Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

Furthermore, if you will notice the picture I took of one of their displays IMG_6303(sorry about the glare), it states another hard-nosed take on how evolutionists practice science. Let me paraphrase the sign for the laypeople that pass by it. “We here at the Gray Fossil Museum already know that these fossils are as old as we were taught in school, therefore we know we don’t have to use a test that may prove it wrong, despite the fact that C-14 has been found in everything from dinosaurs, to coal, to diamonds (see link here on Carbon dating), and may in fact be found here, which would ruin all of our predetermined expensive exhibits. We would not be able to handle reaching conclusions such as a fossil known to be 4.5 million years old with a C-14 result of 12,000 years for example, and if these conclusions were determined, we would of course throw them out based on the obvious reasoning of either contaminated specimens, leaching, our faulty testing, without once considering a change in our presuppositional position that was determined without any observable, demonstrable, repeatable testing whatsoever.”

This type of “science” has unfortunately become more normal, but is intellectually dishonest. I would be willing to bet C-14 was quite prevalent in these fossils, if one of the local scientists had the integrity and courage to test for it. But as you can see from the picture, they have already informed the public that it is wholly unnecessary.

A final note about the Gray Museum is in regards to the story they present about how these fossils got here. According to their “experts”, water leaked into a cavern under the surface, creating a sinkhole which eventually became deep, and then was filled with trapped wild life from tapirs to snakes to bear, and was then fossilized slowly over time. This conjecture makes me want to take everyone involved and set them on the rim of a sinkhole, toss in hundreds of animal carcasses, and make them camp and watch how quickly nature recycles dead flesh. (Don’t mind the smell, that’s just the rotting away of all your theories). I reiterate what science knows already, which is that fossil formation today is exceedingly rare. Is this sinkhole trap an anomaly that explains the possible thousands of trapped animals? What about the billions of other fossils all over the earth? Perhaps the earth was covered with sink holes? Ridiculous. Fossils are made when organisms are buried quickly by mud and water, and the world is filled with organisms that have been buried quickly by mud and water. Sorry Gray Fossil Museum, but it’s time to take Darwin the racist, incestuous philosopher off your wall, and start to practice real science.

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.)

 

 

 

  1. – Dr, Tasman Walker, PhD, “Evolution’s Achilles Heel”

Diamonds Have Carbon-14; Why Is This Important?

If I told you that the RATE Team found Carbon-14 in diamonds would you care? Maybe you should.

Why is this important to you, you may ask? It may change your perception of history. You see, diamonds were thought to be millions if not billions of years old. Academia teaches students that coal takes millions of years to form, along with great heat and lots of pressure. This organic plant material is mostly carbon, and is an energy source we use every day in the world, typically dated to 300 million years old. An assumption based on the laughable geologic column, index fossils, and the presupposition that the evolutionary timetable is a fact. Hopefully, if you have been following along, and/or doing your own research you know better by now, or at the very least are questioning it.

Diamonds, a hardened form of carbon, is said to take even longer to form, often with a timetable of billions being attributed to them.

And who is the RATE Team? Only your scientific Christian heroes! A team of eight Christians who are all doctors of various fields that set out on an 8 year scientific journey to verify that our concept of geological, evolutionary time is grossly inaccurate. If you’d like details on this journey, I highly recommend reading Thousands not Millions. For our purposes, all you need to know is that these highly trained, meticulous scientists discovered carbon-14 in both “300 million” year old coal, and also in diamonds. If you know anything about carbon-14, you already know this is impossible.

Why shouldn’t there be carbon-14 in it? Good question. The answer is simple, and I will put it in layperson’s terms so that we can all enjoy the dumpster fire that is evolutionary theory. As living things interact with our atmosphere, we absorb carbon-14, a radioactive form of the element that breaks down slowly at a speed that we call a half-life. According to the creation model, there was most certainly less carbon-14 in the atmosphere prior to the flood, but we will get to that in a minute. As plants exchange air with the world, and we eat plants, and animals that eat plants, we reach an equilibrium with the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, but when we die, we are no longer absorbing it into our cells, and so it decays from our remains at a specific rate.

The interesting thing about carbon-14 is that it decays fast enough such that it can only be detected for a few 10’s of thousands of years. With modern equipment, potentially 50,000 to 100,000 years, but with a large margin for error. Coal, our “300 million year old” carbon, is supposed to be 3000 times older than any age at which we can detect carbon-14 before it reduces to an indeterminate amount. And yet, what do we find? Carbon-14. In 300,000,000 year old carbon we find something that cannot be detected past 50 or 100 thousand years.

Now, wait, you may ask? What about the fact that creationists claim the bible dictates a world that’s only a few thousand years old? This is not a problem, as the atmosphere was much more favorable in pre-flood conditions. It fits the model beautifully, pointing to a pre-flood earth with more protection from the sun, and less carbon-14 in the atmosphere. You see, like all dating methods, evolutionists assume way too much. One assumption is that the carbon-14 levels have remained constant. But consider, if the pre-flood world is exchanging less carbon-14 with plants, humans, and animals such as dinosaurs, then when tested, those specimens will seems much older, because much less carbon was there to begin with. Also, we must remember that most specimens tested were buried in Noah’s flood, and therefore do come from this pre-flood environment. And lets not fool ourselves. Solving for a discrepancy of 20,000 years is a much easier task than trying to ignore the glaring 299,900,000 year that evolutionists are stuck with.

That being said, it should of course be even more inconceivable that diamonds would hold carbon-14, since it takes a billion years to form, and should have leached all traces out long ago. But I am sure you have already guessed what our scientific heroes found in the carefully tested diamond specimens. That’s correct. Carbon-14.

I must of course qualify the statements by using adjectives such as ‘carefully’, and ‘meticulous’, because when results do not fit the theory, the demagoguery and ad hominem  attacks ensue. Not real scientists because they believe in God, must have tainted the samples, etc. These attacks are launched at men with impeccable credentials, but I would have you check for yourself, rather than take my word.

This carbon-14 is an example of a ‘limiting factor’ like I mentioned in the article 35 Years or 2.6 Million Years. This means that despite common theories, it takes much less time to create coal and diamonds in nature than previously thought. And the flood was catastrophic enough to cause the geological conditions we see today, and explains a great deal of the earth’s features.

Consider this as well: Scientists in a lab made coal in 6 hours. At a different time, in 1982 the British made oil in 10 minutes. Noel McAuliffe of Manchester University triumphantly stated, “We are doing in 10 minutes what it has taken nature 150 million years to do.” This is yes another stellar example of our presuppositions determining our interpretations. Another, more obvious conclusion, if one were not blinded by evolutionary theory would be to instead  triumphantly announce, “It doesn’t take nearly as long as we thought for coal and oil to form!”

Please share with friends and family, and as always feel free to ask questions. We will find the answers together. I wanted to leave you with one final truth however, before your curiosity prompts you to ask. The answer is yes, they have found carbon-14 in dinosaur bones as well, along with soft tissue, and blood cells. We are not holding our breath for the scientific community to adjust their timeline accordingly.