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- I teach classes in the evidences for creationism. Lack of scientific proof does not mean God does not exist, however, since the scientific proof is available, it would be foolish to ignore it when it can be so useful in helping turn people towards God as The answer. Furthermore, when one's life is in turmoil, one's faith can disappear quickly, but it is the solid knowledge of God's existence that will give confidence to stand firm in His ways rather than following another religion, and science can offer a foundation. Just as the guy in this picture, if he did not have the confidence of feeling that parachute on his back, his faith while falling to earth would soon turn to panic instead of a journey to be enjoyed, and he might try taking off the chute and start flapping his arms to his death. In Christ alone.
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- Christian, non-denominational
- Who is the greatest theologian in the last 2000 years? (Besides Biblical People!)
- Christ alone, all else pale in comparison.
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As I suggested, why not dialogue with Christian old-earth creationists and with Christian theistic evolutionists? At least then the question of atheism is not blinding you to the evidence of both an old-earth and common ancestry. Also, you never got back to me to answer the list of specific questions raised by the Christian and Population Geneticist in one of the earliest pieces I sent you.
Or let me quote a major Intelligent Design proponent,
Phillip Johnson, as interviewed by Berkeley Science Review:
"I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove… No product is ready for competition in the educational world." [Phillip Johnson, Intelligent Design proponent http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution
Or take some further young-earth admissions:
"Now - let me add this. We're not going to have all the answers. There will be some things like the issue of light from the farthest star in a young universe... we don't have all the answers." [Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis iTunes Podcast "Sermon: Six Days & The Eisegesis Problem", time into program: 1:09:12]
John Walley [a Christian] over on the ASA listserv, adds: "Ken Ham's answer is consistent with his response on this question from his 'Answers' book. The last question is this and he attempts to offer an explanation for it by saying that some YECs support an 'Appearance of Age' hypothesis but Ham agrees that hypothesis is unsatisfactory since that makes God looks deceptive. Ham concludes in his book with very similar language as his iPod broadcast that we really just don't know and have to trust. This really was unconvincing to me as this was the first book I read when I was searching out this issue and this lack of response on this issue was instrumental in leading me away from YEC to the RTB position."
Even the YEC creation-evangelist Duane T. Gish refuses to debate the age of the earth and has even admitted (much to his fellow creationists' chagrin) that the evidence for fossil succession is a challenge that his fellow young-earthers at ICR have not adequately met:
"When I visited the Institute for Creation Research towards the end of 1978... The associate director is Duane T. Gish, who has a PhD in biochemistry from Berkeley. ... Considering that I believe living things have a common origin and have evolved over a long period of time, and Duane Gish doesn't, there turned out to be a surprising amount of shared ground between us. ... Duane Gish and others of his standing are well aware of this problem [for their young-earth views, i.e., the problem of the age of the earth], but in the end they let their faith over-ride it. When I asked him what were the biggest difficulties for creationist science the points in a debate which he felt least comfortable in answering - he answered after a moment's thought that it was the apparently great age of Earth as shown by the fairly recent advances in radiometric dating; and that the the fossil record could be interpreted as showing ecologically complete ages - the age of invertebrates, the age of fishes, the age of reptiles, and so on up to the present." [from Hitching F., The Neck of the Giraffe: Or Where Darwin Went Wrong, Pan: London, 1982, pp.115-121]
In 1938 Harold Clark (a disciple of the Flood geologist, George Macready Price, whose work also inspired Henry Morris for hypothesis "flood geology" as an explanation for the geological record) was invited by a student to visit the oil fields of Oklahoma and northern Texas, where Mr. Clark saw with his own eyes why geologists believed as they did. Observations of deep drilling and conversations with practical geologists gave Clark a real shock that permanently erased any confidence he had left in Price's vision of a topsy-turvy fossil record. Clark wrote to Price:
"The rocks do lie in a much more definite sequence than we have ever allowed. The statements made in your book, The New Geology, do not harmonize with the conditions in the field. All over the Midwest the rocks lie in great sheets extending over hundreds of miles, in regular order. Thousands of well cores prove this. In East Texas alone are 25,000 deep wells. Probably well over 100,000 wells in the Midwest give data that has been studied and correlated. The science has become a very exact one. Millions of dollars are spent in drilling, with the paleontological findings of the company geologists taken as the basis for the work. The sequence of the microscopic fossils in the strata is remarkably uniform. The same sequence is found in America, Europe, and anywhere that detailed studies have been made. This oil geology has opened up the depths of the earth in a way that we never dreamed of twenty years ago." [Cited by Donald R. Prothero, A Review Essay of The Creationists by Ronald L. Numbers]
Flood geology bears all the signs of an idea that has not been properly thought through: its implications have never been carefully considered by its creationist exponents. For instance, conglomerate is a type of rock that looks kind of like a natural concrete. It has a matrix of sandstone or other fine-grained rock, but embedded in this are many rounded pebbles of various sizes, and even boulders... The Institute for Creation Research implies that Noah's Flood was responsible for all the great concentrations of conglomerates throughout the world. But they nowhere face up to the great problems that this idea creates. One major difficulty is that many large deposits of conglomerate lie on top of great thicknesses - often several miles - of fine-grained sedimentary rock. The great conglomerate sea cliffs near Marseilles, for instance, are hundreds of feet high and contain boulders more than a foot in diameter. What purely natural processes would enable the Flood to deposit a thickness of several miles of fine-grained sediments first, and then place the boulder-laden conglomerates on top? Have Flood geologists not heard the expression, to sink like a stone? Another problem for them is the clean, sharp lines often found at the boundaries between geologic layers. (The layers which face upward often have fossil limpets or barnacles attached to them. This shows that those layers had time to harden into rock and attract rock-clinging shellfish before the next stratum was laid down, which is hardly likely to happen in a flood that laid down a mile-thick layer of unconsolidated sediments in less than a year.) These sharp boundary lines are particularly troublesome in the case of conglomerate rock atop underlying sandstone. Clearly, the lower layer must already have hardened into rock before the conglomerate was dumped on top, as otherwise the stones would have sunk into it. If one flood deposited both layers in quick succession, how could the underlying sandstone have hardened so fast? Above all, there is the fact that the boulders inside conglomerate often contain fossils. How did they get there if, as Flood geologists assert, fossils are the remains of creatures that died in the Flood? And these boulders in conglomerate are nearly always rounded, as if they had been rolled around on a river or sea bed for long periods before being dumped in their last resting place. Of course, one can always argue that God specially created these rounded, fossil-laden boulders, and then miraculously caused the Flood to place them on top of the fine-grained deposits...
- Alan Hayward [old-earth creationist Christian], Creation and Evolution
Oyster-like creatures are found from bottom to top of the geologic record-strange for slow moving bottom-dwellers. In chalk deposits a definite succession of different species of the same type of creature are found, separate and unmixed, at different levels... If they all once lived together, why do whales, seals, placoderms and oricthyosaurs not appear with modern fishes in fossilized marine Devonian environments?... Why, if the flood took place rapidly, are sandstones nearly always void of fossils? Uniformitarians reasonably explain that, over a period, shells are oxidized and abraded out of existence by the sand - but is a year long flood enough time for that to happen?...
- Michael Pitman [Christian], Adam and Evolution
Flood geologists have proposed that hydraulic sorting explains the succession of fossils found in the geologic record. But such a proposal is clearly a non-starter. There are fossil ammonites, whose beautiful spiral shells contain buoyancy chambers, and are therefore very light - yet they're never found in the upper levels. And ammonoid species ranging in size from a fraction of an inch to several feet across are all found together in the same deposit... The proposal that differential mobility explains the order found in the fossil record loses all credibility too. Why is there not a single human fossil below the topmost layer? Were there no inhabitants of the coastal plains who were overwhelmed in their sleep? No cripples or sick folk unable to flee to higher ground? And why are the pterodactyl fossils all in the middle layers? You would think that at least one or two of them would have flapped their way to the hilltops... Another proposal is that the Flood scooped up hundred-mile tracts of marine and land surfaces complete with their inhabitants, and then neatly arranged them into one-mile deep stacks - and in the right sequence, and without intermingling... Even if the Flood could have achieved such results in one place, it could not possibly have done so all over the world. The average thickness of fossil-bearing rock throughout the world is about a mile. Yet the precious layer of soil in and on which all life must live (except for swimming fishes and floating plants) is never more than a few feet thick. Did the Flood pick up that thin layer and with it produce sedimentary rock one mile thick? Because, if so, God must have miraculously multiplied that layer of soil, like the loaves and fishes of Galilee!
- Alan Hayward [old-earth creationist Christian], Creation and Evolution
Even worse for the ecological zone stacking proposal of Flood geologists is the fact that it is often possible to trace such zones in the strata laterally (rather than vertically) over several kilometers and see them change from marine shelf, to beach, to terrestrial coastal plain, complete with rooted trees and coal. And there are sometimes volcanic ash beds which can be physically correlated over the same distance, confirming that the areas were synchronous - the ash bed was deposited by a single eruption (so the marine shelf and coastline at that lateral level existed at the same time in the past)... The empty shells of ammonites, like that of the modern pearly nautilus, float after the death of the animal. Nautilus shells are found over much of the Pacific and Indian oceans because they are transported after death by water currents. They sink when they are damaged and fill with water. How floating shells could be effectively sorted by their hydrodynamic properties I do not know, but the predictions of a hydrodynamic sorting model are blatantly inconsistent with everything about the distribution of shelled cephalopods and other fossils... The fossil succession of ammonoids having distinctive shell sutures is clear in the first appearance of each group... Flood geologists must somehow assume that (for example) oysters could run faster than (for example) the many other types of clam found in the Paleozoic. Considering the fact that most oysters are cemented to the bottom, this seems a little unlikely. There are some clams in the Cretaceous, known as inoceraminds, which get up to a meter in size. Why they got sorted into the Cretaceous, and not much lower, whether due to hydrodynamic, ecological, or differential mobility, I have no idea. There is a precise zonation of inoceramid clam species within the Cretaceous. Some are huge, some are small (fist-sized). They often co-occur. Even more paradoxically, for Flood geologists, is the fact that the juvenile (young) specimens, only a few centimeters in size and with much thinner shells, co-occur with the large, thick-shelled mature specimens of the same species. This is the normal situation in the fossil record... In fact, most fossil brachiopods (clam-like animals) are found in life position (cemented to the bottom of solid rock, and after they were buried and the rock hardened, another layer of brachiopods grew atop them)... The entire structure of Flood geology is nonscientific and is based directly on the creationists' religious beliefs. Neither are their ideas and proposals new. All can be found described in 19th century literature. They were wrong then,and are still wrong now, because of the geological evidence. Creationist Christian Bible-believing geologists of that period tossed flood geology models overboard for the sound scientific reason that such models were discovered to be completely inconsistent with the physical evidence. They did this despite their religious beliefs, because the evidence was so compelling. There is currently no scientific reason to bring Flood geology back. It has had its day in court. In fact, there is even more evidence falsifying it now than there was one hundred years ago.
- Andrew Macrae [non-Christian geologist], from an email at the talk.origins newsgroup
Is the detailed record of successive fossil species, from simple to more complex, from general to special, from fish to man, entirely an artifact of Noah's Flood? Not one human being, or horse, or cow, or fox, or deer, or hippopotamus, or tortoise, or monkey, was so slow, or so stupid, or so crippled, that it lagged behind the others, and thus got caught down at the bottom of the hill. Not one! Conversely, there was not one dinosaur, or trilobite, or mammoth, that was lucky enough, or clever enough, or fast enough, to climb up to the top of the hill, and thus escape the fate of its fellows. Not one! And this is sound science?
- Michael Ruse [non-Christian philosopher of science], Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies
A flood strong enough to move all the sediments of the earth would tend to mix the different types of animals and plants into one big mishmash... The fossils are in the right order for evolution but not for hydraulic selection. The light animals refuse to stay in the shallow rocks, and the dense animals refuse to stay in the deep rocks, where they belong according to creationism. For instance, trilobites, light, fragile creatures resembling pill bugs, tend to be found only in the deepest rocks... The rocks show that each distinct species usually has its own horizon absolutely distinct from the horizons of other species of the same size, shape, and weight.
- Christopher Gregory Weber, "Common Creationist Attacks on Geology," Creation/Evolution, Issue 2, Fall 1980
Flowering plants don't occur in the fossil record until early in the Cretaceous era. A forest of magnolias (a primitive tree) heading for the hills, only to be overwhelmed with the early mammals by the Flood, is unconvincing.
- Robert J. Schadewald, "Six 'Flood' Arguments Creationists Can't Answer," Creation/Evolution, Issue 9, Summer 1982
Flood geology doesn't explain why characteristic pollens and spores are found alongside animal fossils of each age (stratum), or why large, slow-moving mammals are invariably found in strata above flying pterodactyls and early birds like archaeopteryx. Flood geology also fails to explain the fossil pattern for trees.
- Ken Nahigian [former young-earth creationist]
Can creationists seriously believe that their Flood geology accounts for the numerous macro-evolutionary trends so well documented in the fossil record? Is it really possible that horses, humans, cows, and rats were true contemporaries of the primitive mammals known from Mesozoic deposits, but somehow only small noneutherian, apparently transitional (and small primitive eutherian mammals) managed to be buried beside the giants of the reptile world?
- Laurie R. Godfrey [non-Christian scientist], Scientists Confront Creationism
If the worldwide sequence of fossils are the products of Noah's flood and its resultant fallout, why, then - at no place on this vast earth - do we find dinosaurs and large mammals in the same strata; why are trilobites never with mammals (not even marine mammals), but always in strata below? Surely some retarded elephant would be keeping company with dinosaurs, some valiant trilobite swimming hard for thirty-nine days and winning an exalted upper berth with mammals.
- Stephen J. Gould [non-Christian evolutionist], An Urchin in the Storm
Why are whales and dolphins only found at high levels, while marine reptiles of similar size are found only much lower?... Why were not most of the birds exhausted far sooner, since perching places would have been hard to find in the raging Deluge?... Sardines and swordfish (teleostean fish), appeared in late Triassic times (200 million years ago) and show up in the fossil record more frequently with the passage of time. This contradicts predictions of Flood geology: these deep sea fish ought to be found in the lowest strata. Besides, these fish had no special hydraulic features and they were not especially fast swimmers. Yet all these lucky teleostean fish managed to resist the flood waters for a long time, while large numbers of speedy fish are buried beneath them.
- Philip Kitcher [non-Christian evolutionist, but not a critic of religion], Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (MIT Press, 1982)
We might well ask whether the impressively huge carnivorous dinosaurs and other reptiles of the Mesozoic were weaker and less agile than the sheep and other grazing mammals that lay in the Cenozoic layers above them. Were the Mesozoic fish somehow less capable of avoiding burial in the hydraulic cataclysm than the Cenozoic corals and snails that are found above them in stratigraphic succession? We must conclude that the similarity between the known distribution of fossils and the prediction of the creationist model is insufficient to provide a basis for serious comparison.
- Brian F. Glenister and Brian J. Witzke, Professors at the Dept. of Geoscience, University of Iowa
Remember that Flood geologists emphasize the violence of the Flood and its global scale. Dead plants and animals would have been very thoroughly mixed and transported large distances. How, then, could the sequence in which they settled out possibly be related to the original elevations of their habitats, or their running abilities? And why would man be a special case? His running and climbing ability is inferior to that of many animals. In any case, all the animals, including man, would have been killed long before the Flood finally ended, so that their ability to temporarily escape death (not burial) would have been irrelevant in the long run.
- Willard Young, Fallacies of Creationism
Creationists like to dismiss evolution as only a theory. My favorite rejoinder is that creationism isn't even a theory. When examined in the light of well-known and thoroughly researched scientific phenomena, creationist flood geology fails the most basic and simple test known to forensic science: bodies don't pile up the way creationists insist they must.
- Walter F. Rowe, "Bobbing for Dinosaurs: A Forensic Scientist Looks at the Genesis Flood," Creation/Evolution, Issue 28, Winter 1990-91
Creationist Flood geologists are well aware of the second law of thermodynamics as it relates to the origin of life, but typically oblivious to it regarding the unlikely odds of so many fossils being segregated so perfectly in the geologic record... Like it or not, the association of certain types of fossils with certain strata, and the existence of trace fossils - like neatly laid eggs, tidy nests, rodent burrows and the footprints of air-breathing animals found deep within the strata - can only be explained by different types of animals and plants living at completely different times in the past.
- Neil Slater
The hydraulic engineer and co-author of The Genesis Flood, Henry Morris, not knowing that trilobites had a relatively light (non-dense) chitinous skeleton similar to that of crabs, has long said that trilobites were so dense they all sank to the lower layers during the Flood, and that's why they are found there. Actually they were much less dense than the clam-type mollusks which are found in great abundance in the higher layers of Mesozoic and Cenozoic rock systems; and both animal types lived in the same marine ecological zone (subtidal sea floor)... Scleractinian corals are found in abundance almost worldwide, and more actual volume of their fossils is present on the earth than of any other group of Cenozoic animal fossils. So it is inconceivable that they would not have become mixed into the lower strata - in fact, all strata - of the earth's sedimentary cover if the Flood geology hypothesis were correct. By reading any of Henry Morris's descriptions of the convulsive activities which he visualizes as having occurred during the Flood one can see how completely illogical it is to assert that the Paleozoic strata were formed by the Flood, with these dense calcified Scleractinian corals somehow being held up and not allowed to sink into the lower layers of sediment. Moreover, Scleractinian corals are as dense as the more ancient corals, because they are composed of CaCO3, the same as those orders were... If Morris and the folks as his Institute for Creation Research are correct, then God would have had to have performed a very specialized miracle to sink the trilobites and hold the more dense clam-type mollusks floating in the water above them. A similar miracle would have had to have been performed to keep the Scleractinian corals suspended while two other orders of coral settled beneath them. A third miracle would have had to have been performed to keep thick layers of microscopic diatoms all over the earth rom mixing with the thick layers of microscopic radiolarians that settled in the strata beneath them! And so on and so forth. (I guess such specialized miracles were performed by God just to delude Christian geologists of the nineteenth century into rejecting the flood geology of their day? - Skip)
- Daniel E. Wonderly [old earth creationist Christian], Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata compared with Young-Earth Creationist Writings
There is a relative order to the fossilized species of plants found in the geologic record for which Flood Geology cannot account, unless you can imagine apple and orange trees with Nike sneakers on their roots, racing past the magnolias and primitive mammals, leaving the ginkgoes back therewith the dinosaurs when the Flood waters began to rise.
- Frank R. Zindler, "Creationism on the Rocks," Dial-An-Atheist, Greatest Hits from Ohio]
Under the Flood geology hypothesis, one would expect that lowland-loving plants, such as cattails, willow trees and lily pads (which live on or near the surface of water) would have been buried long before those plants which favor higher and cooler areas, such as pine trees and other conifers. This, however, is not what we find in the fossil record. Instead, the evolutionarily primitive conifers appear much lower in the column than do modern angiosperms such as willow trees and oak trees. What a miraculous Flood to have sorted such an incalculably large number of plant remains (and also their fine pollen grains) in such a precise manner! What are the odds that one, big, violent Flood could have accomplished such a miracle? How did the oak and willow trees manage to get to the top of the sediment layer along with all those mobile mammals? Did the trees run for the high ground too? What about the many nesting sites that have been found for terrestrial dinosaurs? Are we to assume that these animals, panicked by the rising flood waters and the torrential rain and fleeing for the high ground, suddenly decided to stop and dig huge numbers of nests in the Flood sediments and lay eggs, which apparently had time to hatch before the Flood engulfed them?..
Apparently, Flood geologists would have us believe that the therapsid reptiles (who they assert were all contemporary and lived side by side) just happened to drown and become sorted by the Flood into a sequence which looks just like evolutionary descent; the forms with well-developed reptilian jaw joints and incipient mammalian joints just happened to be buried first, followed by those like Probainognathus with double jaw joints, while forms like the Morganucodonts, with functional mammalian joints and receding reptilian joints, just happened to climb a little higher or sink a little slower than the others (but not so high or so slow as the true mammals with no reptilian characteristics). Sea turtles violate every presumed sorting mechanism that Flood geologists have proposed; they live in the open deep sea, but are found high in the sediment layer-- above such terrestrial animals as amphibians and dinosaurs; they are big and heavy and sink rapidly upon death, but are found in the upper layers, above such lighter organisms as jellyfish and seaweeds; they are clumsy and slow on land, but apparently managed to run to the higher elevations before the Flood engulfed them (since they are found in the same sediment layers as such speedy animals as saber-toothed tigers and horses). Again, what are the odds that one big violent Flood could have sorted all the dead sea turtles in such an evolutionary fashion?
- Lenny Flank, Can Noah's Flood Account For the Geologic and Fossil record?
What are we going to do with all those fossil fragments? After all, most animal fossils come in bits and pieces. Are we to believe that a dinosaur knee had the same hydrodynamic sorting properties as a dinosaur claw, a dinosaur tooth, a dinosaur skull? Did baby dinosaurs have the same hydrodynamic sorting properties as the adults? Did bone fragments of baby dinosaurs, dinosaur egg shells, not to mention whole eggs, all have the same hydrodynamic sorting properties as the bones of adult dinosaurs? Odd, don't you think, that in those rare cases where dinosaur skin is preserved, it is found at the same level as the bare bones? Funny, that all these diverse bits and pieces should find their way to the same level of the geologic record, species by species. I would think that at least some dinosaur teeth would wind up with the trilobites, that a few hollow leg bones would be found near the top of the geologic column. This hydrodynamic sorting principle, as used by Henry Morris, is not just wrong statistically; it is totally FRAUDULENT. It is DISHONEST. It has no more explanatory power than the usual creationist miracles. Indeed, it is nothing more than a modern day miracle couched in scientific terminology.
- Dave E. Matson, April 12, 1999
Many fossil bones found in terrestrial deposits show evidence of having been weathered for months and having been scavenged. In addition, many bones are preserved in calcareous fossil soils, i.e. the Badlands of North Dakota and the Karoo of South Africa. In marine deposits, the bones are frequently encrusted by organisms, bored by organisms, and have teeth marks from sharks and other scavengers. These are things that preclude the idea of rapid burial in a global flood. There exist almost innumerable examples in geological literature.
- Paul V. Heinrich, heinrich@intersurf.com
I'd suggest taking a look at the DNA of a specific animal, say a bat, as compared with the DNA of it's closest living relatives, then see when the bat and its nearest living relatives first appeared in the fossil record and show how near they are to one another in geological time. How could a FLOOD sort these creatures into the irrespectively close geological layers via their DNA? It took man a thousand years to come up with DNA comparison testing, but it took those muddy violent waters no time at all to sort species after species after species after species after species, all according to their DNA. Some Flood!
- Edward T. Babinski
God bless you.
Help
Feel free to write as much as you will. Generally speaking I am not questioning God's goodness rather
I am wondering over "Christian" criteria for measuring other people's regeneration/sanctification. For instance there are many who look cross on C.S Lewis' theology.
Personally I am fond of Tolkien's works as you may have guessed but I most certainly will give his book a try. Thanks for your helping hand.
God Bless You and thank you again for checking in.
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