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.
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We support teachers How it Works. In keeping with this view, mainstream Christians reinterpreted the biblical stories of the creation and flood after geological discoveries revealed that Earth had a longer and more complicated history than would be inferred from a literal reading of Genesis. Perhaps, they concluded, the days in the week of creation corresponded to geological ages. For over a century, such views dominated mainstream Christian theology until the twentieth century rise of young Earth creationism.
This is the version of creationism to which Ken Ham subscribes — you might remember his debate with Bill Nye from Interestingly, one can challenge Flood Geology on biblical grounds. What did Noah do in the biblical story? He saved two of every living thing. So consider the case of fossils, which creationists attribute to the flood. This simple fact offers a stark contrast to what you would expect to find based on a literal reading of the biblical story.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics roughly states that energy can only flow from a hot body to a cold one in a closed system, and that the measure of this is called entropy, which only ever increases. Alas living things are not closed systems.
Your problem here is really with physics. Can you take it up with those guys please? Christ alive, to be excluded from that club for being a bit dim is harsh. Are you in the wrong list? What about cheese?
Or pottery? Or tiny tiny bats? Can you remember when you last had it? The best-fit theory currently is in white smoker hydrothermal vents around four billion years ago, where an energetic disequilibrium provided by proton gradients swirled in and out of porous serpentenised olivine submarine rock. More details in Creation , by me, out now!
Thanks for asking! Interesting theology. Decent evolutionary biologists support neither intelligent design nor panspermia. There are literally thousands of transitional fossils — ones that show features in common with distinct later species. I like Tiktaalik the best, an ugly brute with some fishy gills, land-lubbing lungs, and some bits that were in between a wrist joint connecting to fins.
Yes, well spotted. Clever eh? They picture scientists as sitting off in an ivory tower just "making things up" and then declaring these things to be truth. They have it backwards. That's what theologians do. Theists often wave their hands at the world in general and say "Surely this wonderful and perfect natural world all around us must have a purpose. Nature has no goal in view and final causes are only human imaginings. My feeling is "How can anyone with a straight face say this world is perfect?
Creationists are fond of citing the human eye as an example of wonderful design and functional perfection. Not everyone sees it that way. Hermann Helmholtz, who did pioneering studies of human senses, once remarked that if his instrument-maker ever sent him an instrument as badly designed as the eye he'd send it back to be remade.
We now understand the evolution of the human eye quite well. It was a series of small changes that improved performance, but never perfected it. Ask anyone who suffers from cataracts, macular degeneration, or any of the other afflictions of eyesight about the perfect design of the eye. Some animal eyes developed over a different evolutionary path, and have some features that are better than those of similar function in the human eye.
For example, some marine animals have the light-sensitive receptors on the retina in front of its blood supply, unobstructed, while humans have them buried behind a network layer of blood vessels that obscure portions of the retina from the incoming light. But once an evolutionary path is taken, there's little chance of "going back" to fix those mistakes. We are stuck with them.
Any orthopedic surgeon can easily envision a better biological design of the human knee, hip joint, or spine. And who can say that cancer is a beautiful and wonderful thing? Name any of the other gruesome deformities and diseases that can afflict man, and then talk about the beauty and perfection of nature. Of course, theists have all sorts of ways to hand-wave those away: "They are the result of man's sin in the Garden of Eden" or they "Are the work of the Devil.
If a theist asks, "Surely you don't think all this could have arisen by blind and purposeless chance? Chance and probability play a role in nature, but geometry and natural laws must be taken into account and they are responsible for the "appearance of design", so it's never "mere chance". This is a major reason why creationists reject science. They want a universe with guiding purpose, and science shows no evidence of such a thing. They also like to think that the purpose was leading to mankind, and that we were made "In God's image".
Science has nothing to say about such notions. Perhaps science should ask for equal time in Sunday Schools. As I have said, science doesn't prove or disprove any supernatural beliefs, for science is silent on such matters. However, I will offer this suggestion to theists, with no scientific weight at all behind it.
The result is what we see today. This creator didn't have to return to tinker with it as time progressed within it, for the result was entirely the result of those laws the creator invoked.
The universe shows no evidence that could possibly reveal its manner of creation. So science can study it and describe its behavior without ever conflicting with religion. Religion can grapple with questions about the divine purpose, the existence of evil, disease, and other theological issues all by itself without interference from science.
That is essentially the position of some mainstream religions, which have no quarrel with science. Let's admit that some scientists have been guilty of trespassing into theological matters. They have strayed beyond the boundaries of the knowable into speculations on the purely hypothetical. Some of them write books in which the boundaries between established science and wild speculation are blurred to invisibility.
Too often they use the word "believe" without qualifying it as "tentative or provisional acceptance". They do not clearly and carefully state the limitations of presently known data, and the resulting limitations on our laws and theories. Some have even been known to utter the word "truth", which is entirely unnecessary in scientific discourse.
Some of this has trickled down into school textbooks. The fact is, fantasies and fiction sell books, while hard facts do not.
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