It’s been a long time since I did any serious thinking about my evolution arguments, but I recently found myself mentally reviewing the geology argument and thinking how frustrating it is that such an obvious objection to the Old Earth goes unrecognized. Which of course I attribute to Paradigm ossification.
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It started with the hoodoos, those huge humaoid figures carved bu weather erosion out of layers of sedimentary rock. No idea how I got to thinking about the hoodoos but that’s where it started. Pondering how brief a time it takes for them to be carved out of the sediemtnary rocks by erosion, and then eventually destroyed by the same erosion. A matter of hundreds of years or so, or at most, say, about four thousand, which is the time since the Flood of Noah. The original sediments were supposedly laid down a few million years ago, in the Holocene or Recent time period, plenty of time for the whole collection of hoodoos to have dissolved into dust It's a rather arbitrary designatio anyway because originally there is reason to think there were many other layers above their layer that are gone, which I've hypothesized were washed away in the draining of the Flood waters.But if the time periods are determined by the sedimentary rocks, and absurdly they are, then the hoodoos don't belong to the most recent anyway, and since the time periods typically last for millions of years the whole timing thing is problematic anyway.
Many of the formations of the American Southwest undergo this sequence: eroded to their interesting shapes and then eventually too fragile to stand any more erosion they collapse. The eroded material at the base of, say, the large buttes of Monument Valley, tells a story of erosion that will eventually reduce the buttes to dust, but it isn’t going to take any millions of years. The prevailing theory allotsmillions of years to each layer of the Geological Column, which are the source of these carved shapes, but if they’d been there for those millions of years they’d long since have been reduced to dust. Long long since.
In other words, tgiven the millions of years allotted to the time periods, none of these formations should still be standing, they should all have long since gone to dust.
That’s a strike against the Old Earth theory already. But then you have to consider that these formations occur at the very upperlevels of the Geological Column, on stop of a stack of sedimentary layers that is at least two miles deep. These formations have been eposed to weather since the sediments out of which they are carved were laid down, and wouldn’t you expect if the Old Earth theory were correct that this same pattern would have occurred in each of the layers beneath it since they too supposedly endrued for millions of years at the surface of the earth, exposed to the same weathering processes. But oddly enough there is no evidence of any such processes in any of the buried layers. Where the layering is visible, such as in the Grand Canyon, they remain intact layers with no signs at all of any surface disturbance. Many of them show sharp straight upper and lower contacts with the rocks above and below, knife-edge sharp contacts. Above and below each layer are completely different rock layers of a completely different sedimentary composition, say shale above which is sandstone, above which is limestone. In quite neat undisturbed layers. Well, relatively undisturbed since they’ve been there for some time. But they have no surface features even remotely like the erosion of the hoodoos, or even the usual erosion one would see in a grassy field on the surface of the arth today.
So what we see in the walls of the Grand Canyon is a nice neat stack of layers of different kinds of sedimentary rpclss, , obviously never having been exposed at the surface of the earth although that is what the prevailing theory would hve us expect. Are these layers really millions of years old? Is the whole stack really hundreds of millions of years old? If that wre true wouldn’t we see dramatic erosive processes at their upper surfaces? And in fact wouldn’t we see some evidence of differences between them having to do with their different ages ? But they all seem to be about equally preserved. Surely just these observations cast serious doubt on the Old Earth theory. I thiknk they absolutely destroy it myself but I realize it’s unlikely to convince the true believers even though it’s clear enough even to them. They’ll just “know” based on theirn fai \th in the theory that it must be wrong nevertheless. And haven’t they been using that theory for years and years and hasn’t it held together? Yes, remarkably consistent systems can be built out of illusions as long as you don’t stray too far outside the illusion.
The argument here is simple enough. Observation shows that the layers of sediments that make up the Geological Column show no signs of the kinds of disturbances we see on the surface of the earth until the whole stack was laid down and that is strong evidence that they were not laid down over the supposed hundreds of millions of years but over some much shorter period of time. (Perhaps a close study of the rate of erosion of the Monuments or the Hoodoos, or the walls of the Grand Canyon for that matter, might suggest a more accurate time frame for the duration of the Geologial Column).
So physically the strata, the layers of sedimentary rocks that make up the Geologial Column, don't show signs of the great age the theory attributes to them. But these layers are the foundation of the Geological Time Scale as well, that system of time periods covering those millions of years in which a particular landscape populated by particular living things is supposed to have existed. This is determined by the fossil contents of each particular layer of sediment, the hardened remains of living creatures.
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It’s puzzled me for some time that the idea of geological history could have been divided into layers of sedimentary rocks at all, let alone that each layer should have come to be identified with a very particular period of time in which the earth is supposed to have had particularly characteristics that set it apart from other periods of time also identified by a sediemtnary layer. These are huge flat slabs of sedimentary rock stacked one on top of another to a depth of miles, many of the layers covering thousands of square miles horizontally, almost a whole continent . It boggles the mind to explain how such a formation could have come to exist as the representative of the surface of the earth at all. I’ve seen attempts to make sense of it but on the face of it no sense can be made of it.
I’ve also seen it denied that there is any real correspondence between the rocks and the time periods allotted to them. But this is clearly a futile effort. There is no doubt that the idea of the time periods was based on the rocks and particularly on their fossil contents which are very specific to a particular layer of rock. There is a sedimentary layer called “cretaceous” which is word descriptive of the sedimentary content of the rock, and a time period associated with it called the Cretaceous Period in which dinosaurs supposedly lived. That is because huge numbers of dinosaur fossils are found in this sedimentary rock. I’d forgotten what the word “xcretaceous” means and looked it up only to find it used as the name of the time period without any definition of the word itself. Strikes me as an attempt to disassociate the rock from the time period, probably because the association is so obviously absurd. How can there be a time period defined by a kind of sedimentary rock? But of course that was the original basis for the name of the time period. That is also how the Carboniferous Period was named of course.
The people who made these associations were clearly not hinking about the physical impossibilities involved. They saw this beautifully neat stack of rocks with their beautifully particular sedimentary contents and their beautifully particular fossil contents and it was apparently just too much to ask of them to avoid the interpretation that the history of the planet was expressed in these phenomena. The apparent order of the fossils themselves was too wonderfully suited ot the theory of evolution to be doubted. How else explain the seeming progression up through the layers of rock from small sea creatures and insects to larger sea cretures then amphibians then reptiles up to modern mammals. Just too wonderfully neat to be denied.
Well, the history of science is littered with odd irrational thinking after all. The idea, for instance, that the fossils were particular creations of God or “sports” was one such bit of silliness. Empirical science is apparently not the most natural of cognitive functions, but very hard won. Although of course I reject Darwin’s theory, in its time it was a model of rational thinking against some of the previous ways of constructing the world of living things. For instance the different varieties of creatures were thought to be independent creations of God. Darwin recognized that the Galapogos island urtle that differed fromn the manland turtles was nevertheless related to them, which he took to mean “evolved” from them. He was right about the relationship but not about the mechanisms involved in the relationship. The different finches are all related to each too rather than being separate creations but they didn’t evolve in the sense Darwin’s theory posits, they are varieties that are bujilt into the finch genome. Just as the Galapagos and mainland turtles are varieties of the turtle genome. If Mendel’s experiments had had the influence they deserved, we might have been spared the ToE, but the ToE had some powerful defenders. That’s often how it goes in science as well as in politics. ( We are certainly suffering these days from the same kind of craziness. I just heard that although science, in response to pressure to take different racial characteristics into account, had determined that blacks have better kidney function than whites by about 20&, which could certainly be an important contgribution to medical practice. But in our current “Woke” infatuation the m edical profession has been told to ignore the science and treat the races equally, so that now blacks are subjected to treatments for kidney diseases they don’t need in the service of a political idea that is absurdly made authoritative over the science.)
I have to point out here before I forget that the irrational ideas about separate creations in Darwin’s day would not have existed if people wree following the Bible, which clearly says that God stopped creating, “rested from His work” so that nobody should have been expecting further separate creations. Since “religion” is likely to be blamed for such irrational idea I swant to point out wherever I can that Biblcial revelation is not irrational. People misread it, they invent their own God and suppose it’s the same God revealed in the Bible, but their God could plant fossils of living things in the earth just to entertain himself at our expense, put fossil sea life at the top of mountains for instance just because he was “sporting” with us. That is certainly not the God of the Bible.
Back to what the strata show us. There is a large detailed cross section of the Grand Staircase geological formation in Utal that spans all the way to the Grand Canyon, shoing all the layers that lie so neat and parallel beneath the surface. Into those layers the Grand Canyon was cut. Clearly after all the layers were in place. All the layers above the rim of the canyon were eroded away, but they remain in the Grand Stairacse to the north which climbs another mile above the level of the grand Canyon rim. The Grand Canyon is about a mile deep and its rum is at the surface of the Kaibab limestone on the north side. On the south side the limestone has been eroded away leaving the layer beneath, the Coconino sandstone which forms the plateau for some distance on that side. On the north the Kaibab limestone plateau extends to the Grand Staircase, which climbs from them up through the layers of the Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Renent or Holocene. The Staircase itself is made up of cliffs left as layers beneath them were eroded away.
The most reasonable interpretation of all this is that the entire area was originally covered by sedimentary layers at least three miles deep, at least from the bottommost level of the Grand Canyon to the uppermost level of the Grand Staircase, but most likely originally above that to some unknown depth. It’s all been eroded away above the Permian/Kaibab level at the Granc Canyon, and at each level of the Staircase to its own particular length. The entire area encompasses thousands of square miles, the distance from the Grand Staircase to the Grand Canyon being some two hundred or three hundred miles from north to south.
The point, again, is that the layers wree clearly undisturbed until such erosion occurred at the surface where they were exposed. This, again, shows the absurdity of the idea of time periods in which onje would naturally assume there must have been the same kind of surface exposure. Clearly there waan’t. the canyon cuts through it after all were in place. There is no canyon buried in the layers anwhere. The cliffs were cut out of the surface. The layers remain instact beneath. There is a volcanic erotion that shows on the far left of the cross section, magma rising from the very bottommost level beneath the “Cambrian” rocks, to the very uppermost level of the Grand Staircase where it spilllled out. Tha happened after all the layers were in place, not during their laying down. Beneath the Grand Canyon there is a formation called the Great Unconformity, which is a large block of strata that has been broken in to and tilted beneath the layers above it into which the canyon was cut. This is interpretaed by current geological theory as having occurred before the layers were laid down, but it seems to me that it is all part of the same upheaval that scoured off the Kaibab plateau and cut the stairs of the Grand Staircase and in fact cut the Grand Canyon itself. My evidence for this is that the layers curve up over the Great Unconformtity which they wouldn’t have if they were laid down afterward. Th whoe stack of layers is curved up over that basement formation of tilted strata.
And that observation leads to the idea that the forces that tilted the broken stratata raised the whole stack that was already in place above it, created a tension in the upper layers that broke them into pieces above the Kaibab limestone, one crack or set of cracks created the canyon. The same upheaval would have caused the erosion of the stairs to the north as well. And the upheaval was probably first of all a tectonic jolt but that jolt also caused the volcanism we see in the diagram.
But I didn’t really want to get into all that which is my hypothesis about how it all came about in the Flood of Noah. I just wanted to point out here that the layers that are interpreted as time periods in the Geological Time Scale which is based on the Geoloigcal Column of sedimentary rocks show no signs whatever of ever having been on the surface of the earth. What IS on the survace of the earth is eroded and broken, and any such time period should have shown those same features but none do.
The layers can be distorted in many ways, however, but pretty consistently in one huge block. In the area of the cross section they are all slightly raised as a block and they curve over the Great Unconformtiy as a block. Wherever the strata are found they are distorted as a block rather than individual layers. They may be broken twisted, folded in many different ways. As a block. Their remaining as a block is further evidence that they are not time periods, they were not separately laid down over millions of years, they had to have been laid down within a short period of time one after the ofther, and then only after they were all laid down were they subjected to the distrubances such as tectonic pressures and volcanic eruptions. These did not happen until they were all in place.
And here are sone pictures of how the layers are commonly disturbed and distorted in a whole block:.
GOOGLE IMAGE: FOLDED GEOLOGICAL STRATA
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It’s not that nobody’s noticed of course. The evidence is all out there. But the strange thing is that the reasonable inference has not been drawn from the evidence. The earth is not billions of years old. The strata do not represent hundreds of millions of years. Therefore the fossils have nothing to do with evolution. The Theory of Evolution is nothing but an irrational mental construct imposed on the physical world that has no actual correspondence to its physical realities.
And I wouldn’t mind getting some credit for pointing it out. Thank you.
GOOGLE IMAGE: FOLDED GEOLOGICAL STRATA
