Overy the years rguing Creation versus Evolution I've brought ofup various problems witht e geoligcal column, such as that there isn't any indication on the surface of any of the separate layers of its every having been on the surface of the earth as anormal landscape. They are mostly all straight and flat as a tabletop, not uneven the way a normal landscape eis, even the flattest. They don't have gullies or deep erosion, certainly no canyons. You don't see plant roots growing down into them anywhere. There's nothing about them to suggest they ever were the surface of the world during a former time period, whichis what is claimed for eah of them. Some are supposed to have been underwater but there too you wouldn't expect perfectly straight flat surface or such a homogeneous sediment either, These conversations never went anywehre of course. They just get ignored somehow, ,but they raise serious questions about the whole idea that the geological column is made up uof successive periods of time mrked by identifiable types of sediment which have become rock over supposed misllions of years since they were deposited. Some of the time periods are over a hundred million years,, some tens of millions, but huge periods of time in which very particular animal life is found in fossilized form. Each layer of sedimentary rock has its own collection of fossilized life forms. These are understood to be creatures that lies in these time periods, which over time evolved into more odern kinds. They seem to be less complex near the bottom of the stack of layers, getting more complex as you look toward the uppoer layers, ending in modern mammals and so on at the very top which isd considered to be modern time.
Doesn't irt seem odd thhat the history of the earth would be marked off in clearly identifialble time segments defined by specific kinds of sedimentary rocks? Sometimes I wonder how that idea got so easily accepted in the first place, but it certainly has been accepted and is foundational to the idea of the fossil record which underlies much of evolutionary theroy. Nobody coments on the actual physical situatio of the rocks that I've run across, they are just taken for granted to represent these time periods in which sepefic creatures lived, each period demonstrating some evolutionary change as they see it.
It certainly is interesting that there does seem to be such a clear separate collection of fossil life forms characteristic of a particular rock layer which is identified as a pecrticular time period. And in a rough way they do seem to exhibit some kind of development from something more primitedve to something modern. It's easy enough to see how the fossil record idea got going on that simple fact. And it's a strange fact no matter how you look at it, but it is a fact.
But again, how is it that the earth could have been divided into time periods of millions of eyears so clearly marked by a very particular kind of sedimentary rock, very straight and flat, continaing a fery specici colelction of fossil forms? When we look at the surface of the earth we live on it certainly doesn't look straight and flat and ceratinly isn't of one kind of sedimentary rock, or.. Should we expect our own time eperiod to somehow or other get reduced down to such a situation as is found in each of the layers beneath us? How does that make sense?
Of course nobody does, but then nobody is really thinking about any of this from this point of view Fof course nobody is thinkiung about these things from this point of view.
Sometimes I try to think through how it could ereally have been a time period that produced a particular rock layer and how that could have come aout. Many of the layers extend across huge geographical areas, some covering whole continents and even can be found in soe form on all the continents or a umber of them anyway. There are ideas about how the sediments were laid down originally, mounstains eroding and windo blowing the sediment into flat layers among other things, b tu none of that is very convincing. SOme are explains by an incursion of water over the land, which seems to me to make more sense but even then it's hard to think the result would have been such a flat horizontal layer that eventually got overlaid by other layers and hardedned into rock.
Whenver I try to figure this out I end up with the recognition that any amount of such esediment existing on the surface of the earth would have makede it impossible for any creature to surfvive there, either in it or on it. Creatures can't live on a pure sand deposite. So maybe the sand came layter and the animals lived on a normal surface that was eventualy covered over by the sand or other sediment? But when it was covered over then the animal life would die, it couldn't go on living, and if it died then it didn't pass on to the next time period where an evolved form went on living, it just died because there was no place for it to go on living. So maybe it lived on part of the surace that wasn't yet covered over by this sediment. But since it was eventuqally covered over, as we can see from the rock layers in the column today, then they would have died there too. Nobothing could live wherever these sedimentary deposits were the surface they had to live on.
So maybe thy formed beneath the surace or something like that, and then the surface was somehow eroded away and left only the sedimentary layer which got covered over by a new kind of sedienyt as the next supposed time period began to develop. But it's the same problem. When the livable surface is gone, erotded away or whatever, leaving only the sedimentary deposite we see as rock in the scolumn today, wheaever had been living on that surface would die because it couldn't live on that bare sedimentary surface. Or in it if we're talking water deposition and sea creatures.
No nmatter how you try to rearrange the possibilityies, you end up with an unlivable environemnty. For every one of the rock layers we see in the stack of layers we call the geollgical socolumn. Nothing could have lived in any environmentin which those sedimenyts were actually present as the surface of the earth which for at least some wshort period they had to have been becaue there they are now in that stack of layers. If nothing could live in that environment then clearly those are not time periods those rocks represent, othing ever lived there, it's all a great delusion. There is no Geological time scale in which living forms evolved. There just isn't. It's all a delusion. There are plenty of dead things encased within the sedimentary rocks, but they could never have lived in an environment of csuch sediments, they had to have been carried within the sedimentas and deposited with them. Or something like that. There was never anything living whever those sedimentas lay on the surace of the earth or on the sea floor either. Nothing could have lived there. That seems to me to be perfectly clear even if it's hard to thingk all this through and rearrange things in your mind.
Without the fossil record, what happenes to the theory of ewvolution? Can it keep going on biological and genetic considerations alone without the geoloigcal suport of the fossils? I don't know. I'm sure those who believe in evolutio woud try to keep it alive one way or another. I'm sure if they every thought about what I'm writing here they'd be concvinced I must be wrong one way or another and try to prove me wrong and maybe even manage to convince themselves that I'm wrong. The theory would just go limping along on the basis of what they think must hve happened rather than on any clear evidence that it did happen. But then that's the way it has always been. Evolution has always been an imaginary construct, building from the real biolgoical fact of the variations we see all the time in living things m, each species having a large range of ways it can vary its apparenantce, that's all real enough but they imagine from thant fact that the variation can just keep going from species to species and there's really no way it could.
That's another line of thought that undoes the etheory of evolution. I just finished listining to a wbook by Seteven Meyer, Darwin's Doubt , in which he diescusses instance after insnace in which the evolutionary biologicals themselves question the claims of the theory and shows ythat it is never resolved. tThe same problems remain after every attempt to find a way to solve it or get around it. Meyer gpoint out many times that variation or change only occurs in existing entitties. If there is no docode for it it can't happen. the code is convinced to the genome of each species. There is no way to get outside of that code, the genome of the species, to form any kind of new thing.
But that's another whole direction of argument I'm not up to going into right nwo. I think the faiure of the idea of the geological time scale is enough to kill the ehtthroy of evolution. There are certainly many ogther ways to kill it. I think it's really been shown to be dead for years but so many people are so committed to the idea they just keep beating the dead horse expectin git to get up and move again. Oh well.
