How does creationism explain fossils

Here the facies of the river flood plains interfinger deeply with the delta facies of the Gulf Coast, which in turn interfinger deeply with the clays of the continental shelf. These deposits first started to form in Cretaceous times a hundred million years ago, and they have been accumulating constantly and without break through all that time on up to this very moment. These sediments are thousands of times too thick to have accumulated in a mere 5 or 8 thousand year period since Noah's flood.

Nor could they have been deposited during the Flood, since they are so obviously continuous with and similar to sediments being deposited today.

A similar point can be made on the deep ocean sediments. They are not a mixed-up jumble, and there is no break in their deposition from cretaceous times to today. True, in both cases the rates of deposition have varied; yet, in both cases the sediment types are so similar from top to bottom that the rates of deposition could not possibly have been much faster than the rates of today.

Question: Kofahl claims that the Mississippi Delta formed in only years. How do you reconcile his claim with your statements about the Gulf Coast sediments?

Answer: Its current delta is years old, but it has had dozens of other deltas in the distant past. Every so often it jumps its banks, reaches the Gulf of Mexico by a new path, and starts to build a new delta at its new mouth. In fact, the Mississippi River had partly changed its course in , emptying into the Gulf through the Atchafalaya River, until the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to plug the leak.

In the early Cenozoic, the Gulf of Mexico extended as far north as Illinois; the Mississippi had its delta there at that time. These facts, like those on the Gulf Coast and deep sea sediments, can be found in many freshman geology texts. Question: Is there any more evidence against the hydraulic selection theory besides the sedimentary facies you mentioned?

Answer: Yes, 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. Trilobites, light fragile creatures resembling pillbugs, tend to be found only in the deepest rocks. Pterodactyls flying dinosaurs are found no higher than the middle rocks, whereas birds are found mostly in the shallowest rocks.

Turtles, dense creatures, tend to be found from middle to high rocks, not in the deep ones. Ammonites, light buoyant cephalopod molluscs that resemble the chambered nautilus, tend to be found in the lower and middle rocks, not in the upper ones. There may be many hundreds of obviously distinct species of trilobites of a given size and general shape; the same applies to ammonites.

The ICR hydraulic selection theory predicts that many species of the same size, shape, and weight will be found scrambled together in the same rocks, but real 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. Even within the same formation, geologists often find trilobites of the same size and shape segregated by species into horizontal layers. Thus the hydraulic selection theory bristles with contradictions.

Strangely enough, Whitcomb and Morris , staunch champions of the hydraulic selection theory, show nothing but scorn for an orthodox geologist Daniel J.

Jones where he documents some small scale hydraulic selection. Jones' article merely describes in detail processes having nothing to do with evolution that experts observe in progress today moving microscopic fossils out of their proper order. He describes wave action, turbidity currents, streams, ground water, wind, glaciers, burrowing animals, and other various processes.

He even gives specific examples actually observed in various parts of the world today. He lists evidences having nothing to do with faunal succession or evolution that should put an observer on his guard that the microfossils he is observing have been displaced. For instance, if these microfossils are as large as the sediment they're buried with, then small scale hydraulic selection may have sorted them according to size out of their proper sequence.

Other telltale signs to look for are fragments of shells, lack of normal series of growth stages, and long fossils pointing in the same direction. Whitcomb and Morris say that Jones is merely trying to rationalize away fossils that are in the wrong order for evolution by assuming without proof that the damning fossils were somehow moved out of order:.

It is not at all uncommon for the smaller fossils on which rock identification is commonly based to be found out of place in the expected sequences. Such anomalies are usually explained as simple "displacements" Which, being interpreted, means that when fossils are not found in the stratum to which they have previously been assigned by evolutionary theory, it must be assumed that they have somehow been displaced subsequent to their original deposition.

And all that poor Jones did to deserve this gross misrepresentation was simply to supply a dab of evidence for hydraulic selection having nothing whatever to do with evolution.

Question: According to creationists, there are plenty of places where the fossils are in the wrong order for evolution. This must mean geologists have to assume evolution so as to arrange the geological time scale so as to date , , the, fossils so as to erect an evolutionary sequence so as to prove evolution, thereby reasoning in a vicious circle.

When the fossils are in the wrong order, geologists apparently assume the "older" rocks were shoved on top of the younger ones thrust faulting , or else, that the strata were overturned recumbent folds , even though there is no physical evidence for these processes. In particular, Whitcomb and Morris maintain the physical evidence proves the Lewis Overthrust and Heart M, ountain Overthrust never slid an inch.

Answer: Whitcomb and Morris, again, quote their sources badly out of context. There is plenty of physical evidence having nothing to do with fossils or evolution that show thrust faulting to be very real. The Lewis Overthrust of Glacier National Park, Montana, consists of the deformed Precambrian limestones of the Belt Formation that were shoved along a horizontal thrust fault on top of much younger but viciously crumpled Cretaceous shales.

These limestones, by the way, contain stromatolites and mudcracks of the sort seen forming in the Bahamas today. Stromatolites are a distinct form of calcareous deposits left by algae.

Ross and Rezak wrote in their article about the Lewis Overthrust that the rocks along the thrust, fault are badly crumpled, but Whitcomb and Morris p. Most visitors, especially those who stay on the roads, get the impression that the Belt strata are undisturbed and lie almost as flat today as they did when deposited in the sea which vanished so many million years ago.

But if we read the rest of Ross's and Rezak's paragraph. Actually, they are folded. From points on and near the trails in the park, it is possible to observe places where the Belt series, as revealed in outcrops on ridges, cliffs, and canyon walls, are folded and crumpled almost as intricately as the soft younger strata in the mountains south of the park and in the Great Plains adjoining the park to the east.

The intricate crumpling and crushing in the immediate vicinity of the main overthrust, visible in localities like that near Marias Pass, shown in figure , must have taken place when the heavy overthrust slab was forced over the soft rocks beneath In some places only a single fault surface formed, with crushed and crumpled soft rocks beneath Rocks between these faults were crumpled and crushed in a variety of ways. In some places the zone in which fracturing occurred was as much as feet thick; generally it must have been at least several hundred feet thick.

Question: Whitcomb and Morris , pp. If any thrust block had slid over that little layer of shale, it would have obliterated it.

How do you explain that? Answer: Actually, the thrust faulting is the only process that could have created this layer. Notice that the underlying shales are crushed, and the overlying limestones are distorted, whereas this little shale layer is quite level. How could the limestones have been deposited distorted-looking on top of a level layer? Obviously, the shale layer consists of powder that was ground up in the thrust-faulting process and later cemented; the sliding created the shale layer.

Question: Whitcomb and Morris claim that geologists cannot find any possible roots for the Heart Mountain Overthrust of Wyoming. How do you prove that overthrusting could have really formed it? Answer: Simple! The level Cambrian strata broke off along a bedding plane, and slid downhill. On page , they reproduce a photograph from an article by Pierce , and insist that Pierce's picture illustrates the place where the thrust block rests on the underlying rock. They quote Pierce out of context as if he were puzzled that the rocks in the picture show no evidence of sliding even though all good evolutionists know that fossils never come in that order.

Actually, this picture has nothing to do with the thrust block at all. Pierce explains that the thrust block slid over younger rocks, that parts of the thrust block eroded away, and that a volcano finally deposited some debris over the area where a piece of the block had once stood. This volcanic "early basic breccia" is illustrated in Pierce's photograph; he only states that the volcanic debris, not being a part of the original thrust block, never slid.

Besides, Whitcomb and Morris ignore some deformation of the thrust block that shows it really slid after all. Pierce notes that the thrust block strata are often grossly deformed even when the underlying strata are not. He even shows how the strata from one piece of the thrust block are often sliced across at a slant, forming an angle with the horizontal strata underlying the thrust fault. Whitcomb and Morris could not explain this fact, but it makes sense if overthrusting has really occurred.

Question: But aren't geologists sort of bound to evolution as a matter of principle? Answer: If you mean that they are begging the question, then I must certainly disagree.

Wherever one small area is undisturbed, its fossils are found in a very definite order from top to bottom. The fossils close to the top resemble modern species far more than the fossils closer to the bottom. When fossils are occasionally found in the "wrong" order, one finds that the rocks' are in disturbed areas like mountain ranges, where the sediments are being squished up and out over the surface of the earth like an ice cream bar crushed in a vice.

These mountain sediments show plenty of physical evidence of overturning and overthrusting that has nothing to do with fossils. Therefore geologists who avoid overturned rocks when they determine the fossil sequence are not committing circular reasoning. Question: But aren't geologists doing a lot of guessing when they fill in big fossil gaps in one area with the fossils of another area?

After all, the fossil record in any one place is far from complete. He is scarcely guessing at all. Of course, the land areas and the sea areas are constantly shifting, though there is always at least some land and some sea in any given geological age. The sea areas accumulate sediments washed in from the land, and the erosion of the land will leave a gap in the rocks when the land finally sinks into the sea again. That is how these gaps form.

Fortunately, none of these erosional gaps is worldwide, so we can fill the gaps of one area with the sequences of another. Ironically, the earliest uniformitarian geologists were creationists. Charles Lyell carried his uniformitarianism so far that he believed the species of animals and plants God created in the dim past remain fixed, invariable, and uniform from one geological age to the next. The doctrine that species vary was to him the superstition of catastrophists trying to prove the Flood of Noah among other catastrophes because catastrophists had argued that the turnover of species throughout the geological ages proved that several times God had wiped out all life on earth with a catastrophe, and then created a new set of living things from scratch.

When catastrophists cornered him with evidence that different ages had different fossils, he explained it away by saying that rare species had merely become more common and common species more rare. Only reluctantly at the end of his life after much debate with Darwin and with other geologists did he finally accept evolution. William Smith, a canal engineer, was the father of modern stratigraphy.

He was the first to notice that the higher rocks always had different fossils than the lower ones did. He was always a creationist, and used his discovery only to make money, yet the whole of geology today is based on his discovery. So where is all this circular evolutionary reasoning? In fact, if anybody is guilty of circular reasoning, it is the ICR creationists.

Their Director, Dr. Henry M. Morris has no reservations about stating what his real attitude to geological evidence is:. But the reason for insisting on the universal Flood as a fact of history. No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of scripture.

Geology is self-correcting, whereas Dr. Morris' beliefs are not. Of course, there is always an infinitesimal chance that he may be right and I wrong in spite of all the evidence I have given. But such a case wouldn't give credit to Dr. Since his fundamentalist special pleading is not science, his being right could at best be a lucky guess. In the end, it will always be evidence that rules, and today's evidence overwhelmingly favors evolution. Make a Donation Today. Give a Gift Membership.

More Ways to Give. Member Services FAQs. Legacy Society. Science Champions Society. We are told by anthropologists that the earliest true civilization was Mesopotamian.

The flood most likely occurred sometime between 2, and 10, B. It seems possible that ice age melting around 10, B,C, could have helped provide enough water for the flood. The flood record in Genesis neither affirms nor denies that men existed beyond the Mesopotamian valley at the time of the flood.

However, paleo-anthropological evidence for a worldwide distribution of homo Sapiens at that time is abundant. Evidence exists that man existed in America as far as 10,, years ago. Ramm The question of whether the flood was local or universal has been debated for years.

It is a matter of hermeneutical interpretation, not inspiration. At that time, do you suppose the Egyptians were even aware of India and China? With this linguistic consideration in mind, it seems likely that the universality of the flood hinges upon the universality of the experience of the one who reported the event. To the observing reporter, then, all mountains were covered, and all flesh died.

Mount Ararat has a peak of 17, feet, and the Himalayas are roughly two miles higher. Did the flood waters rise to a height of six miles above sea level? Kinns and L. Henderson as referred to in Ramm, This would require a 0. Such a vast amount of water would have crushed and killed virtually all plant life, and devastated life in the sea. Not to mention another problem: Where could all that water drain to?

Therefore, the post-flood restoration process would have required a creative work almost as extensive as the original creation itself. And then there is the matter that a series of remarkable miracles would have been required to get all of the animal species in existence at the time of Noah into the ark and back again over oceans and continents.

The biblical account may be called theological history : that is, it describes real events perhaps a regional flood event in highly figurative language for a theological purpose. Many Bible scholars and scientists who are committed to the inerrancy of Scripture reject Flood geology for both biblical and scientific reasons. Fossils also display order in other ways. Not only are certain layers of rock identifiable the world over by the fossils they contain, but moving up a column of rock, one can see a trend toward larger organisms within lineages.

The size trend only works within lineages, not between them: mammals get larger as you move up, but are not larger than dinosaurs. Furthermore, small organisms are present in every layer, but no large animals are found at the bottom. These trends are difficult to square with Young-Earth Flood geology but are exactly what one would expect if rock layers took millions of years to form and if life forms are related by common ancestry.

In one sense they are right: for a number of reasons, it is rare to find a fossil that can be definitively assigned to the lineage between two other known species. An analogy helps to show why: If you picked a grave at random from a family cemetery, it is unlikely that you would find the burial place of your great-grandfather your direct ancestor , but very likely that you would find one of a distant cousin your family, but not your direct ancestor.

True transitional forms are thus expected to be extremely rare. Archaeopteryx is a classic example—it represents the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds, but is not the direct ancestor of any birds alive today. Scientists have found many, many possible transitional fossils. Sometimes entire sequences of transitional fossils are known. These major transitions include one of many lineages of fish adapting to land, a lineage of early theropod dinosaurs evolving flight, land mammals adapting to a marine habitat, and one lineage of primates into humans.

We now turn to one example: the transition from sea to land. Fossils of land animals, or tetrapods, first appear in rocks that are about million years old. In older rocks, only sea creatures are found.

But in , scientists found a fossilized fin , million years old, with eight digits similar to the five fingers humans have on their hands. However, the fin was undoubtedly that of a fish, which means this fossil is strong evidence of a transitional form. Tiktaalik in the Field Museum , Chicago. One of the great success stories in the examination of the fossil record was the finding of a near-perfect fossilized transition between a vertebrate adapted for water and one adapted for land.

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin set out to find a more complete transitional specimen than the fin. Tiktaalik , as the specimen is named, is a remarkable example of the predictive power of evolutionary theory.

Sometimes the beauty and wonder of fossils get lost in arguments about evolution. When we step back, we can appreciate that every new fossil we find is a gift—a small piece of the vast, complex puzzle that is the history of life on our planet. For the Christian, fossils can help us reflect on the kind of world God has made. Consider the mosasaurs , a group of ocean-dwelling reptiles:. Mounted skeleton cast of M. As long as a school bus, these fearsome predators ruled the sea for 20 million years.

To put that in perspective, Homo sapiens have only walked the earth for , years! First, they reveal that predation and extinction have been a reality for millions of years, long before humans. This is consistent with the biblical description of a Creator who glories in the strength and ferocity of fearsome creatures Job , but perhaps nuances our understanding about life and death.

God is patient! These observations have implications for how we interpret the days of creation in Genesis 1. Finally, we need to wrestle with the fact that the vast majority of the creatures God has made no longer walk the earth. God could have created in any way he wanted to, but he chose to do so in a particular way. Fossils—ancient, beautiful, and fascinating—give us clues about how.