Blog

by Steve Risner

Over the last few weeks, I've written on the trip my wife and I took to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky. It was great, and I appreciated the fact that it was true to the Word of God. We discussed in the last 3 writings the decks of the Ark Encounter, the impact overall of the attraction, some common claims by skeptics concerning the size of the Ark compared to the animals inside, the vast expanses of sedimentary layers that span entire continents or even are found in multiple continents, fossil graveyards, and several other things concerning the Flood. My plan is to continue in that vein today.

I was taught in school that sedimentary layers were the result of millions of years of accumulation, and that fossils were trapped in the layers as they accumulated. This is called uniformitarian philosophy and is rarely an accurate way to describe anything we find in nature. It happens, but it's not near as common when we're looking at geology or anything that deals with the age of the earth or universe. The earth's surface is riddled with the scars of catastrophe. They're everywhere.

Canyons are of particular interest. If you do some reading, you'll find that uniformitarian beliefs monopolize the popular thinking on canyon formation. The trouble is, the ideas are all unverifiable because of the time they require. Another issue with the idea that canyons are slowly cut by tiny rivers over eons is that we've seen canyons form very quickly in—drum roll—catastrophes like Mount St. Helens and others. What I find amazing is that we've seen canyons form very rapidly when large volumes of water travel very quickly over land. We cannot see if uniformitarian views are accurate because they require too much time. So what do you read about in the literature? The uniformitarian view on the subject.

Sedimentary layers were quite clearly laid down very quickly. At least, those that contain fossils had to have been rapidly laid down. An organism that dies in the mud and sits there for eons while it gets covered would not leave a fossil behind. It would, in fact, be eaten or simply rot away with no evidence. But an animal buried quickly in sand and/or mud would be covered and would be able to be suspended in time for us to find later. Polystrate fossils also suggest rapid burial. These are fossils that extend through multiple layers of the geologic column, most often of trees. I'm sure we all understand the absurdity of a tree standing up for a hundred millennia while it gets buried slowly in sediment. This quite logically explains the petrified forests of the western US, but that's a topic for later. The bending of rock layers without breaking or cracking also suggests the layers (many of them at a single time) were still soft and were more pliable. This means numerous layers of sedimentary rock were bent at the same time and with no cracking or breaking, as you can see in the picture below.

That seems weird, right? When was the last time you bent a rock? They seem a little brittle, so rather than bend they will tend to break. The deep time proponent will tell you that this is an easy fix: pressure and temperature played a role here. They'd like us to think that you could heat these enormous rock layers enough to bend them without breaking them and without changing their composition because of the heat. This is highly unlikely.

The idea of rapid burial of organisms that leads to fossilization is also supported by some of the fossils themselves. There are numerous examples of fish giving birth or in the process of eating another animal frozen in time as a fossil. We have fossils of animals that we can identify what's in their stomachs (often times mammals with dinosaurs in their bellies, which is interesting).

How do we have many fossils like this from around the world if these creatures didn't die in a massive and very fast catastrophic event? Rapid burial is the only way to make sense of it that I can see.

To review: I, like most of you, was taught that sedimentary layers were laid down through some mysterious process that took millions of years. This is contrary to the evidence as 1) fossils wouldn't exist if they had to lay uncovered in mud for years, decades, centuries or eons of time before being buried in sediment, 2) fossils frequently show animals caught in some action (giving birth, eating, etc.) and can still have food products in their gut, and 3) sediment layers must have been laid down in a short period of time because many of them we find bent together as though all of them were still soft since there are no signs of fracture or cracking. To me, these all speak to the historical nature of the Flood of Noah's day.

We'll continue our look at elements of the Flood next week.

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