Clough Evolution Lesson 14

What About Geological Evidences? (1) Formations and Fossils

We now come to the fifth large section in this series on evolution and this concerns specifically the geological evidences. Up to now we’ve dealt with the biological aspects in the structure of the evolutionary theory. Now we are going to concentrate upon the seed bed or the data source on which most of the evolutionary hypothesis rests, and that is the geological data. Under this section of geological evidences we are going to consider formations, geological formations and fossils; we’re going to consider radiocarbon dating, also consider radiogenic dating, which I will define, we will consider man and the rise of civilization, and finally we’ll consider the effects of the flood.

In discussing the formations and fossils one has to be reminded of the fact that much of geological analysis or description of the earth’s rock strata depends upon preconceived notions which themselves assume evolution. Now this is not to say that geology is totally circular in its thinking; this is not to say this. But it is to say that in describing features of the earth’s surface and particularly analyzing any given rock system, geologists tend to be highly influenced by the evolutionary concept of evolving more complex younger fossil forms from the earlier older and more simple fossil forms, and thus when certain rock strata in one locale are characterized by, say Paleozoic type fossils, then this can be cross-correlated with rock strata in another local which also has Paleozoic fossils in it.

Now again, in dealing with this problem we are going to deal first with formations and fossils and in particular we are going to deal with out of order fossils. We’ve already discussed the footprint which we covered, the Meister findings at Salt Lake City in the summer of 1968 and the long discussed Glen Rose phenomena as well as many other sightings of footprint like features in carboniferous strata throughout the Eastern United States. But in addition to these we would like to present a list that has been compiled by Ivan Sanderson. We have six fossils, six features in rocks which do not square, in other words, these individual fossils are clearly out of sequence, out of an evolutionary sequence and one, therefore faces the problem, if evolution is true, then how does one explain the occurrence of these out of place fossils unless you say that the immediate rock in which these fossils are embedded itself has somehow become confused and misplaced.

There are six of these in Ivan Sanderson’s list. The first one is the New England limestone chalice, now I wouldn’t say a limestone chalice, I should say that in New England limestone, which dates at least one to two million years, there was found a chalice 15 feet down in sold rock, a zinc chalice four and a half inches high, six and a half inches wide, and impregnated with silver. How does one explain the existence of this chalice fifteen feet down in solid rock dated one to two million years at the very minimum, and yet obviously of human origin.

Second, in 1845 at Kingoodie Quarry in North Britain workers found a nail in solid rock about a million years old. One doesn’t usually expect Neanderthal man to have ten-penny nails. In 1844 near Tweed, England a gold thread encased eight feet below the surface of the surface of a stone bed several million years old. In 1851 a six penny nail dropped out of a piece of quartz dated at one million years old. In 1891 Mrs. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shoveling coal into a kitchen stove and a piece broke open, revealing a fine gold chain. Coal ranges from 12 to 270 million years old. Who put the gold chain inside this piece of coal? Sixth, in Salzburg, Austria, a piece of coal 12 to 26 million years old yielded a perfectly machined cube of steel. Now the usual reply is that such fossils that are out of place are actually pollution. In other words, these fossils somehow have got into the stones, either in the mining process by a sloppy person on the site and indeed there have been many, many cases like this, workers who were very sloppy in their procedures and normal materials from our own day got intermingled with this ancient rock in the quarrying process. However, in all of these cases it seems like the fossils were actually insitu and were not added into the rock after the quarrying process.

But rather than belabor a point of misplaced fossils which would involve a fossil here and a fossil there, I think more serious is the fact that you not only have individual fossils that are out of place but you have entire rock layers that are out of place. For example you would have, such as the Matterhorn in Europe, as shown in the book The Genesis Flood by Morris and Whitcomb, that the Matterhorn itself is very old rock, but underneath the Matterhorn, at its base, is very young rock. So you have a situation of very old rock on top of young rock. And obviously the normal sequence is to have older rock below with the younger rock on top. How come the rock actually becomes reversed? Well, obviously the first thing a person thinks of is how can you be sure the rock is younger and older and the only real assuring feature is that the way the rock on top is declared to be older is by fossil evidence. In other words we have this situation; you have the layers of rock underneath contain recent fossils, or highly evolved specimens. The rock layers on the top have very old fossil evidences, specimens which show very little evolutionary development. And if evolution is true, then obviously the rock that’s on top containing the older fossils must have lithified first then the rock underneath containing the later more highly evolved fossils must have lithified second. If this is true, one then has the problem of explaining how the younger rock got buried underneath the older rock, or vise versa, how the older rock came to lie on tope of the younger rock.

Now the usual explanation is that these are what are known as overthrusts. Now this is a reasonable sounding explanation because there are such things as real overthrusts that have been observed and can be definitely proved geologically, show clear physical evidences, and by overthrust we mean you have a layer of rock that slips and slides and grinds its way over another rock. For example, if you were to take a thin layer of clay, say a quarter inch thick, and lay it down on top of a piece of wood and then start pushing the clay from both sides toward the center you’d have buckling on the surface and part of the clay would slip and slide over the other. This is one explanation for how the older rocks have come to lie on top of the younger rocks. And there is a great deal of objective evidence to support that such overthrusts really have occurred.

However, the objection made by creationists and Bible-believing Christians is not that there aren’t such things as overthrusts; the objection made is that when you apply the concept of overthrusts to a massive scale, for example, most overthrusts or the overthrusts popularly shown and clearly demonstrated are in the range of half a mile to a mile or two wide, in other words, you have a slip and sliding plain for about one or two miles perhaps. And this is well-authenticated and can be shown by anyone actually going and looking at the surface between these two layers that have interacted with one another because along the boundary layer between these two rock slides there is a lot of ground up shale and so on, and rock that has been pulverized by the frictional slipping and sliding along the surface.

Now the problem under discussion here is can we take a legitimate proved concept, such as the overthrust, and extend it to include any and every problem. And that is the issue under discussion. For example, the Matterhorn, as shown in Morris and Whitcomb’s book, The Genesis Flood, supposedly moved 30 to 60 miles from its source region. Now anyone who knows what the Matterhorn looks like, a giant mountain, can imagine this thing moving 30 to 60 miles. One can accept overthrusts on the order of a mile or two, but when you have an overthrust 30 to 60 miles in length you begin to wonder about the physical properties of the rocks involved. You have another great overthrust mentioned in the book, The Genesis Flood, the Lewis overthrust, Alberta, Canada and northern Montana area, and here you have Precambrian limestone lying on top of cretaceous shale and here the Precambrian rock on top is rock that supposedly formed before life…

[Blank spot in tape]… so you would expect that you would find some evidences of slippage and sliding. Not only is it physically and mechanically almost inconceivable to have solid blocks slipping and sliding of such tremendous weight, for 15 miles and 135 miles long, not only is it almost inconceivable mechanically to see how this could have happened, but you should have evidence along the interface between these two rock layers of this sheering. If you have tons of rock sliding over other rock underneath you don’t have to be a physicist to realize that there’s a lot of friction involved and in particular when you have… it’s like taking one big concrete slab and sliding it over another one, there’s going to be some scratches somewhere.

And on many overthrusts you can see these and geologists have claimed that the Lewis overthrust does show these, and yet as reported in the book, The Genesis Flood, on pages 189 and 190 Dr. Lammert, who has taken many geology courses, although he’s not a professional geologist he knows geology, and has had as his hobby for several years taking field trips and so he’s a man who has had field experience and he went to visit this overthrust area and look at the layer or the intersection between these two rock layers. And he says this on pages 189-190, “Careful study of the various locations showed no evidence of any grinding or sliding action or slick and slide such as one would expect to find on the hypothesis of a vast overthrust. Another amazing fact was the occurrence of two four inch layers of Altyn limestone intercalated with cretaceous shale. These always occurred below the general contact line of Altyn limestone and shale. Likewise, careful study of these intercalations showed not the slightest evidence of abrasive action such as one would expect to find if these were shoved forward in between layers of shale as the overthrust theory demands.”

In other words, what he’s saying is that you have this limestone rock on top, this is the older rock that supposedly slid over the younger rock, and bits and pieces of this limestone are found embedded in the rock below and yet at the point where it is embedded you don’t find any evidence it was rammed in there as you would expect if these rocks really slid along. If, however, they were just simply laid down in a sedimentary way you would expect just the kind of thing that is actually observed in the field.

Now in a more detailed analysis of this concept of overthrust I cite a research report by the Creation Research Society, the first project of the society, in which it at least partially paid for by grant two geologists, one Mr. Harold Slusher, at the Kidd Memorial Seismic Observatory at El Paso Texas, and Dr. Clifford Burdick from Arizona, a PhD in geology. And these two geologists went and explored an overthrust in the Empire Mountains of Arizona. This report was published in the Creation Research Society quarterly of June, 1969, pages 49-54. And they went to this area of thrust fault and they found that they have Paleozoic rock these are very old rocks, above and actually lying on top of Cretaceous or Mesozoic strata beneath. Now their study actually covered real overthrusts. They went to various parts of the southwest where there were real proven overthrusts and they showed that in ever case where there was a proven real overthrust there was debris, there was rock powder separating the various layers; there was clear physical evidence of slipping and sliding between the two rock layers. Yet, at this particular place where the supposedly older rock overlies the younger rock, there was no evidence of sliding. In fact, here in the report you will actually see photographs of the unconformity along the thrust plain, better to call it the thrust plain in keeping with the prevailing theory. Here you have an actual picture, a series of photographs of the thrust plain and I’m looking at them right now and it just looks like a saw tooth; I would say that the jagged piece of the saw looked to be maybe two to three feet high and maybe four to five feet long. So you can imagine a saw tooth thing with the teeth two to three feet high and four to five feet long. How could you slide the top layer of rock over the lower layer without sheering the lower pieces off and without leaving any intermediate layer of fine ground powder? Yet this is precisely what you find here? You don’t find any evidence whatever… and I think the conclusion of their paper is very interesting because these men did a quantitative and very careful analysis of this one specific place.

And this is the conclusion to their paper: “In this study we have not intended to present a blanket denial of all thrust faults. We have shown, however, that when such faults exist they are accompanied with physical evidence of differential movement. In the specific case of the Empire range where Permian rock lies atop cretaceous we have demonstrated the lack of any conclusive evidence for a thrust. The only conclusion we reach from such data is that no thrust occurred. The area was once mapped as a thrust fault on Paleontological evidence alone,” that’s fossil evidence alone, “and physical data has evidently been disregarded. The authors suggest that many such supposed thrustfaults be reanalyzed on the basis of physical evidence alone. The lesson seems clear enough that thrust faulting must be judged hereafter solely upon the physical criteria and aside from any evolutionary preconceptions.”

This is just another case in point where a careful study of the data, a careful study of the data, aside from evolutionary preconceptions, yields a picture that is not at all at odds with the Bible taken literally. It is only when these evidences and these data are interpreted in terms of evolutionary preconceptions that your conflict arises.

So therefore we are going to leave the concept of overthrusts as a second of several things that we want to discuss under formations and fossils. We’ve discussed specific out of order fossils; now we have just finished discussing out of order layers or overthrusts and now we are going to discuss evidence for quick formation of rocks.

Obviously one of the great difficulties flood geology has always had is that if you are going to say that the rock layers, say 80% of the world’s rock layers, were formed during the flood you have the tremendous problem of explaining well, where in heavens name did you get all the sediment all at one time. Where did you get all this sediment? This is tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of sediment. Where did it come from? Where did it break loose from, and this has been a traditional criticism of flood geology. A second criticism is how to do you explain the way in which it was laid down even if you do explain the origin of the sediment. And thirdly, after you’ve explained the laying down, how do you explain that it dried out so quickly to leave this?

My own suggestion as to the origination of the sedimentation of the sedimentary particles or the material used to generate the sedimentary rock, my own suggestion will be covered in the last part of this section when I discuss a specific model of the Genesis flood. But at this point I want to point to evidences that rock layers in depth, over quite an extensive depth, have apparently in the past formed very quickly and not slowly. What are they?

Well, I would say the first evidence is the kind of fossils…the kind of fossils. By this I would refer to four things; first, freezing. How do you get fossils anyway? The only way you can get fossils is by sudden entrapment and preservation of the entrapped organisms, otherwise fish, for example, die in the ocean today and don’t form fossils; the bodies rot and are eaten by other fish. Animals dying today, the bodies exposed to the air quickly deteriorate and rot and turn to dust. Now how, then, were the fossils formed? The fossils clearly must have been formed by some abnormal process which suddenly entrapped the victim, much as many of the people were entrapped when Vesuvius erupted on the ancient city of Pompeii in the first century AD.

I would like to refer to four kinds of fossils and as I refer to these four kinds of fossils I want to stress that each of these four kinds of fossils tend to show that they must have been made very rapidly. First, frozen fossil forms. Here we encounter things like the wooly mammoth of Siberia. And with the case of the wooly mammoth we have meat totally preserved and experts have estimated that the temperature must have dropped by as much as hundreds of degrees within minutes to actually cause the freezing of bodies the size of mammoths because it’s obvious that if it was a slow freeze that the outer meat would freeze but the inner meat still possessing body heat would begin to deteriorate and yet you find the meat even on the inside preserved very well in many of these mammoth fossils.

Secondly, you find fossil graveyards, such as shown in the photograph on page 161 in the book The Genesis Flood. And you have in these fossil graveyards animals from many different climates; you have animals from dry climates, animals from wet climates, animals from cold climates, animals from hot climates. How come? These animals must have been brought or transported many, many hundreds of miles and brought to the place of the fossil graveyard before they had a chance to deteriorate and rot and decay. What force could have possibly transported hundreds and hundreds of animal bodies hundreds of miles before those bodies rotted and lump them all together at one point location? Clearly something had to do it and do it fast.

Third, and this is one of the most controversial areas, and that involves coal. Traditionally coal has been cited as an evidence for evolution, namely that it is formed very slowly and over the thousands and millions of years you have swamps and bog lands that gradually build up peat and gradually build up muck in a swamp and then you have marine transgressions, in other words, the continents sink and these become flooded from the oceans. And then you have gradual lithification, carbonization of this area, hardening of the whole thing. And then you have the elevation of the land once again out of the water and then the land becomes a bog again and you have the swamp conditions prevailing once more, and then you have the land sink and this goes on and on in a series of cycles, building up layer after layer after layer of coal. Besides straining one’s credulity at the idea that land could emerge 15, 20, even a hundred times at the same place going under the water, then above the water…[tape turns, seems to be quite a bit missing]…but on the same principle as [can’t understand word], he also points out that even the Challenge It, the HMS Challenge It expedition noted back in the last century that much of the wood in New Guinea “was floating suspended vertically in the water and most curiously logs and short branch pieces thus floating often occurred in separate groups apart from the horizontally floating timbers. The sunken ends of the wood were not weighted by any attachments of the soil or any load of any kind. Possibly the water penetrated certain kinds of wood more easily in one direction with regard to its growth than the other, hence one end becomes waterlogged before the other.”

I think this is very interesting so before we dogmatically conclude that because the fossils are in an upright position they couldn’t have floated that way one should perform a few experiments to see if that really is true and lo and behold, when one does perform these experiments, one finds that trees do float in a vertical way. So therefore we find Polystrate fossils are a very strong evidence of rapid deposition of sedimentary rock.

Now a third evidence of rapid sedimentation is the concept of incise meanders, explained in The Genesis Flood, page 155. And this is most significant because one of the authors, Professor Henry Morris, this is his field, hydrology. And he spent his lifetime in this area, so no one could criticize Morris for not being a geologist. On this point, this criticism is invalid because this is right in his own field, of which he is one of the leading experts in the United States and here is the concept that river canyons, such as the Grand Canyon and the San Juan Canyon of Colorado can be explained only as being quickly formed and not the product of millions and millions of years of erosion. The idea here is that by hydrodynamic laws and principles water will only cut…in a river will only cut horizontally in a meandering pattern with a hard floor to the bed. In other words, you’ll get erosion of the banks with a meandering river or you will get erosion downward with a straightening out river, but you can’t have a river that meanders, which is a sign that it’s eroding its banks faster than its eroding the floor of its bed, you can’t have that kind of a situation and have it cutting down; it’s cutting sideways but not down and you can’t cut both ways; the river is cutting down, it doesn’t have to cut laterally, it doesn’t have to meander.

So it’s interesting that the Grand Canyon, therefore, must have to be explained, and such canyons like it, by the rapid drain off of flood waters after the flood and at a time when the banks were still soft so that you did have cutting into the banks because the banks were soft, and you did not have, necessarily deep cutting downward because the whole canyon itself was filled from top to bottom with water, as a vast volume of water ran off the North American continent after its uplift after the flood. And this is the suggestion of Professor Henry Morris in the book The Genesis Flood. Now since Professor Morris wrote that book, Dr. Burdick of Arizona, the geologist mentioned previously, did work in the Grand Canyon specifically and reported this work in The Creation Research Society Journal of May, 1966 on pages 38-50. And he reported the amazing fact that spores of conifers, or pine tree like trees, were found in all levels, all rock levels of the Grand Canyon. I think this is most interesting because Dr. Burdick took great pains in the course of his work not to get it polluted by spores that might be on the surface of the rock or in the air around his digging. And he took very, very careful pains and one can read it for himself if he’s interested in the Creation Research Society quarterly of May, 1966. And when he dug into the rock at all levels of the Grand Canyon he found spores of pine trees.

Now this is truly amazing because if evolution is true you would think that as those rock layers were laid down, representing different stages in the evolutionary process, you would have trapped spores of different stages. In other words, in the oldest rocks you would have trapped spores of primitive plants; in the younger rocks you would have trapped spores of more recent, more highly evolved plants. And yet, the blunt facts of the case are that the spores do not show any evolutionary progress from bottom to top, as you move from the bottom of the canyon to the top of it, the spores are pretty evenly distributed throughout, which again would support the flood concept, that the Grand Canyon was made and laid down at one great catastrophic event in history.

So therefore we summarize this section by saying that these are some of the evidences that rock can be quickly, quickly formed and that indeed has been quickly formed. The fossil evidence, Polystrate fossils, incise meanders, and backed up by Burdick’s recent work showing the pine tree spores of the Grand Canyon, and thus we say that large thick layers of rock do not prove…do not prove longtime spans of deposition.