Creation Facts of Life (26 page)
Similarly, the sorts of scenarios conjured up by evolutionary biologists to bridge the great divisions of nature,
those strange realms of "pro-avis" or the "proto-cell" which are so utterly unrealistic to the skeptic,
are often viewed by the believers [in evolution] as further powerful confirmatory evidence of the truth of the paradigm. Evolutionary thought today provides many other instances where the priority of the paradigm [i.e., the assumption that "evolution is fact"] takes precedence over common sense [p. 352, emphasis added].
For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers [p. 351].
In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity [i.e., evolutionism] has always necessitated a retreat from pure empiricism [i.e., logic and observation], and contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today,
it has always been the anti-evolutionists
[i.e., creationists],
not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach.
…
It was Darwin the evolutionist who was retreating from the facts
[p. 353–354 emphasis added].
On the positive side, Denton also notes that "there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims" (p. 327). At a conference in Sydney, Australia (April 1987), where we appeared on the platform together, Denton was willing to cautiously extrapolate that "significant minority" to "perhaps a majority" of first-rate biologists. He stressed also that those biologists willing to explore the design hypothesis do so for scientific reasons, apart from particular religious presuppositions (p. 341).
Creation-evolution was featured on CBS Television's "Sunday Morning" (November 23, 1980) in a superb cover story put together by Richard Threlkeld
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(who ranks up there with CBC's Tom Kelly as a fair, honest, thoughtful, and thought-provoking TV journalist). The 20-minute piece starts with my students and me "in the act of discovery," hunting fossils in the desert east of San Diego. It continues with several evolutionists, other creationists, parents, students, and teachers in action and includes a computer graphic series depicting evolution.
Threlkeld makes the inevitable trip to the site of the famous Scopes "monkey trial," but he does not allow his thinking to be buried there. "The debate goes on," he observes, "and why not?" After all, nobody was there to see how life came into being, he says; at bottom both views are assumptions. But he doesn't stop thinking there, either. Instead, he treats the two ultimate assumptions, creation and evolution, as ideas which
can
be compared for their scientific merits and which
must
be compared before we can truly appreciate our origin as human beings.
II. HOW FAST?
All the courses I took concerning fossils were taught by professors who firmly believed in evolution. Yet, when it came to the kinds of life we studied, it seemed the actual evidence made it overwhelmingly difficult to believe in evolution and very easy to believe what the Bible says about creation, corruption, catastrophe, and Christ.
Even if you could accept my conclusion, or, at least, consider it reasonable, I'm sure you'd have another question.
How fast
do fossils form, and
how fast
do rock layers get stacked up like we see in the Grand Canyon? Believe me, those questions bothered me, too! I knew that some believed, for example, that even though God especially created the first of each kind, he "spaced out" His creative activity over a vast period of time, a sort of "progressive creation."
Can science help us decide how fast fossils form, and how fast those sedimentary rock layers pile up? That's what I wanted to know when I signed up for courses like stratigraphy that deal in part with rates of sediment-layer formation.
Surprisingly enough, just about everybody — creationist, evolutionist, and everyone in between — agrees that individual fossil specimens themselves begin to form very, very rapidly! If a plant or animal just dies and falls to the ground or into the water, it's quickly broken up and decomposed by scavengers, wind and water currents, even sunlight. Fallen logs, road kills, and dead aquarium fish don't just become fossils, nor did the millions of bison slaughtered in America's move west.
Most fossils are formed when a plant or animal is quickly and deeply buried, out of reach of scavengers and currents, usually in mud, lime, or sand sediment rich in cementing minerals that harden and preserve at least parts of the dead creatures. Evolutionists and creationists agree: the ideal conditions for forming most fossils and fossil-bearing rock layers are
flood conditions.
The debate is just whether it was many "little floods" over a long time, or mostly the one big flood of Noah's time. In fact, until Darwin's theory came along, most educated laymen and scientists — including the founding fathers of geology — assumed that fossils were the remains of plants and animals buried in Noah's flood.
Although professionals understand how fast fossils begin to form under flood conditions, the general public often does not. I was on a radio talk show one time when a caller said he believed the earth had to be fantastically old because he'd seen (as I have) huge logs turned to stone in Arizona's Petrified Forest. Surely, he said, it would take millions of years to turn a log six feet (2m) across and 100 feet (30m) long into solid stone! So I asked him to think about it. If a tree fell over in a forest or into a lake or stream and just laid there for millions of years, wouldn't it just rot away? Bugs, termites, fungus, and chemical action would soon turn it back into dust.
If
that tree got suddenly and deeply buried in mineral-rich sediment,
then
minerals could crystallize throughout the pore space in the log and turn it to stone before it had time to decay. To my encouragement, he replied, "You know, I believe you're right about that!"
A museum in central Tasmania has a "fossil hat" on display. A miner had dropped his felt hat, and the limey water had turned it into a "hard hat" (which the curator was kind enough to let me feel and photograph). That same process, mineral in-fill, can turn wood, bones, and shells into fossils in a short period of time. Indeed, fossils can be made in the laboratory!
Remember the Precambrian Australian jellyfish? Jellyfish often wash ashore, but in a matter of hours they have turned into nondescript "blobs" (although watch out — the stinging cells continue to work for quite a while!). To preserve the markings and detail of the Ediacara jellyfish, the organisms seem to have landed on a wet sand that acted as a natural cement. The sand turned to sandstone before the jellyfish had time to rot, preserving the jellyfish's markings, somewhat as you can preserve your handprint if you push it into concrete during that brief time when it's neither too wet nor too dry. Indeed, the evolutionist who discovered the Ediacara jellyfish said the fossils must have formed in
less than 24 hours.
He didn't mean one jellyfish in 24 hours; he meant millions of jellyfish and other forms throughout the entire Ediacara formation, which stretches about 300 miles (500 km) from South Australia into the Northern Territory, had fossilized in less than 24 hours! In short,
floods form fossils fast!
(See Figure 31.)
 |
Figure 31. |
Like most Americans, I was mis-taught in grade school that it takes millions of years and tremendous heat and pressure to turn sediments (like sand, lime, or clay) into rock (like sandstone, limestone, or shale). We all know better. Concrete is just artificial rock. Cement companies crush rock, separate the cementing minerals and large stones, and then sell it to you. You add water to produce the chemical reaction (curing, not drying), and rock forms again — easily, naturally, and quickly, right before your very eyes. Indeed, you can make rock as a geology lab exercise, without using volcanic heat and pressure or waiting millions of years for the results. Time, heat, and pressure can and do alter the
properties
of rock (including "Flood rock"), but the initial
formation
of most rocks, like the setting of concrete, is quite rapid.
Knowledgeable people readily agree that both fossils and rock layers can and do form very rapidly. But there's a catch. Fossils and rock layers are
not
just found "one at a time." Rocks chock full of fossils are buried in layers stacked on top of one another, in places about two
miles
(
three km) thick!
Not only that, but there's a tendency for fossils to be found together in certain groups, and a tendency for these groups to be found one after the other in a certain sequence called the
"geologic column."
According to evolution, the geologic column (Figure 32) lays out the story of evolution chronologically, from bottom to top, right before our eyes. Maybe science hasn't explained how evolution works yet, but the "fact of evolution" is plain to see in the "record in the rocks." Life started with a few simple life forms (originally produced by time, chance, and chemistry), and we can chart its progress, the net increase in variety and complexity produced by Darwinian struggle and death, as we move up through the rock layers. Only an ignorant, fundamentalist fanatic with his nose in the Bible could fail to see evidence so clear and convincing as the "rock-hard" geologic column!
 |
Figure 32. |
Above:
According to the catastrophist model, groups of fossils are the remains of plants and animals once living in different ecological zones at the same time, and they were buried in rapid succession. (Drawings from Bliss, Parker, and Gish,
Fossils: Key to the Present
[Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1980]).
Right:
According to the uniformitarian model, systems and the geologic column represent stages in the slow and gradual evolution of life over eons of time.
Or at least that's the way textbooks, television, museums, and magazines usually tell the story, and that's the evolutionary story I used to teach, too. Well, there really are lots of fossils out there, and they really are stacked in thick layers of sedimentary rock —
billions of dead things,