Truth
Evolution for Fundamentalists 3.1
Abstract
Biologists are unanimous in concluding evolution is a fact. The evidence… adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record.Pulitzer prizewinner, Professor Edward O Wilson, a brilliant biologist, brought up a creationist!
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Geology and the Flood
The rocks fossils are found in are called sedimentary rocks, about 80% of rocks at the earth’s surface, made from deposits laid down often from the erosion of existing rocks. Layers of particles are overlaid with other layers and so on through thousands of such layers, often precipitated out of water. Scientists study how things happen today, and assume they worked like that in the past. It is a reasonable assumption, but one that is not necessarily correct. Even so, it seems so reasonable that anyone basing a hypothesis on some other assumption must show why it is more reasonable in the circumstances envisaged than the standard assumption that things do not change. Even so, it is a popular assumption for creationists to challenge, though they can never give us a better one that fits the evidence. In the case of geology, studies of present sedimentation is taken to illuminate what happened in the past, and correct deductions thus made prove the assumptions.
How long it takes to lay down sediments can be observed today in lakes and studied experimentally, and the way sediments emerge from water, and relationships between the nature of the sediment and the speed of sedimentation can be found by essentially simple experiments. Any child can do the experiment with a handful of earth, a glass bottle and a water tap. Sediments precipitate out in an obvious order, massive boulders first, then smaller boulders, pebbles, gravel, sand, and lastly mud, the finer the particles of it the more slowly it precipitated and the finer the mud was.
So, an earthwide massive flood would have left the earth covered in a thick layer of silt and beneath it would be a set structure like that described with large boulders only found at the bottom. Moreover, any bones of animals killed by the flood would settle in the same fashion, so all the large bones of massive animals like apatosaurus would be deep and smaller bones of smaller, lighter animals, like birds, would be higher up, together with any small bones of large animals dislocated from their decaying bodies as they floated in the water. At the top would be minute bones that did not simply rot away, and a lot of plant matter that would be expected to float on the surface for a long time until it got waterlogged and settled on the top layers of mud. If that were the whole story, one might be tempted to believe the sediments could have been laid down in a single catastrophic flood. Needless to say, no such simple order is found in reality.
Certainly the order of the sediments is inversely proportional to age, the topmost sediments being the last to be laid down, and earlier sediments lying progressively deeper in the earth, but the sediments have very often been mixed up by immensely powerful earth movements. A look at any geological map will show that there are no regular layers of sediments everywhere, the geology of the earth being extremely patchy. Anyone can go to a cliff by the sea and note the layers of rocks that are the sediments. They are sometimes level as expected, but most often they are tilted at an angle, and the angle can be acute. In fact, in places the layers of rock can be seen to be folded, and even folded back on themselves. The earth has been convulsed with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Remember, this flood was only 4000 years ago, so creationists say, so there has not been a lot of time for the sort of earth movements that could have done to the regular sediments of the flood enough to leave the actual sediments as confused as they are over the whole world. Tilted and folded sediments are so common that vast movements of the earth must have happened in the relatively short time of 4000 years or so, and everyone on earth must have been killed by earthquakes, let alone the flood.
Then the flood was 17000 feet deep, an incredible volume of water amounting to a depth of three miles. Where did it all come from, and where did it all go? And sediments go much deeper than three miles. Not only that but sediments exist at levels above three miles on mountains even higher than Ararat. In places rocks are not sediments but are igneous rocks that have solidified from molten form. How can the flood account for these rocks appearing among the sediments? Elsewhere the sediments are not laid down from water but are deposits of wind blown sand, or immensely thick layers of tiny molluscs that must have lived and died for millions of years to lay down such thicknesses of their dead shells. How can a short flood of less than a year account for it? And again, where did all the water come from and go to? Fundamentalists think God just makes it appear and disappear because he is almighty, but you have to be an almighty mug not to use your God-given brain to question it.
Some places have unmistakeable signs of flooding, but it was sporadic over a long timescale, not a one off event however catastrophic. The Torridonian sediments of the island of Rhum in Scotland are up to eight kilometers deep, and consist of many river channels that were cutting across an arid plain which often flooded, a situation that must have existed for myriads if not millions of years—judged by comparison with existing comparable desert regions—for the sediments to build up to that depth. The river channels are visible all the way through the sediments, criss-crossing each other, and forming alluvial fans at all depths. The sediments are red, typical of desert conditions caused by the dry oxidation of iron containing minerals, and the intermittent nature of the flooding of the rivers is proved by examining the pebbles which are clearly eroded by wind blown sand. Towards the south west the rivers ran into a sea. There is no mistaking the fossilized shore lines, beaches and sea cliffs.
Vast deposits of rubble up to seven kilometers thick surround the ancient mountain ranges of Scotland, which can be compared with sediments accumulating at the edge of younger mountains like the Himalayas and the Alps. The rocks, and rock fragments that constitute the rubble in each case are the same material as the mountains, showing where they came from. The rates at which they are accumulating shows that the rubble has taken hundreds of million years to get as deep as it is! Another way of getting an idea of the age of old rocks is to find intrusions of molten igneous rock. This is lava that pushed up from the hot magmas below the crust of the earth and intrude into layers of the sediments. The heat of them melts the sediments forming metamorphic rocks, rocks that have recrystallized from the melt. The physics of the process can be studied in the laboratory and the field, and from the observations estimates of the time needed for the intrusions to heat up and cool, allowing the sediments to melt and recrystallize as metamorphic rock on the scale seen, can be made. Millions of years are necessary. Certainly, there is no way that hot lavas could intrude into recent deposits such as the creationists postulate for the flood, melt them in volume and then cool and all in 4000 years!
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and this country [the USA] in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10000 years old, in my opinion, he should see a psychiatrist.Sir Francis Crick
From a complex of carefully evaluated evidence like this geologists can get a good idea of what was land, and the nature of its vegetation, what was sea, where rivers ran, the direction they flowed, where lakes were, and mountains, and the depth, salinity and even the temperature of the sea the rivers flowed into from the types of shellfish found fossilized. There is simply no way all of this can have been formed by accident or peculiar artefact from a single year long flood.
From the jigsaw of paleogeographic evidence that emerges, predictions of commercial importance have been made such as where oil, coal and metals can be found. Has that great oil man, Bush, got fundamentalist Christian geologists who do better from the Flood, because the success of predictions is the ultimate criterion of a scientific hypothesis?
Geologists know full well that the sediments of the world have been laid down, uplifted, rifted and folded, but the timescale has to be millions of years, not just a few thousand because the mechanical properties of rocks show they will break when the forces on them are too great for short periods. Such cracks do happen in rocks on both a large and a small scale causing “faults”, “thrusts” and “rifts”. Fundamentalists try to bring the necessary time scale down by claiming the rocks deposited in a great flood would not have the same mechanical properties, perhaps through heat, and so could have been folded in a short time, but this is not scientific. They have no way of testing it, and so it is merely explaining away. They also say the mechanical properties are heavily dependent on temperature, which is true, but that the rocks were hot enough to slow and fold in the last 4000 years would be quite obvious. The rocks do not show any signs of having been hot, and vast bulks of rock do not cool at all quickly—they take myriads of years.
Creationists are fond of using the appearance of the island of Surtsey off Iceland—in a volcanic eruption from 1963 to 1967—to argue that recent rocks can seem ancient. Thus E H Andrews, a professor of materials science at Queen Mary College, London, writes:
Within a period of months this sterile, virgin rock was transformed into a “mature” island with beaches pebbles, sand, vegetation and many other features which would superficially suggest great geological age.
Andrews weasels the sentence with his quizzical marks and use of the word “superficially”. He knows he is on dodgy ground, but also knows that his Christian lambs are not likely to be too critical. Shortly, he adds:
I am not suggesting that Surtsey proves anything conclusively, but merely the appearance of great age or geological maturity can be vastly misleading.
It is not misleading at all to a geologist, and appearances prove nothing, even if they do for Christians. However the island “superficially” appeared, simple tests show the truth, and the facts of the matter can be simply explained. Thus boulders are projected from volcanoes like this as molten balls of soft porous pumice which, being already speherical and soft, are quickly formed by the action of waves into pebbles, making the beach “superficially” look old. Some of the ejected material is also red hot and fractures readily when it hits the sea, splintering and making instant sand! Where rocks are hard and dense, the action of the waves takes millennia to make pebbles, and sandy beaches.
The dishonesty of this man, a professor, is also shown by his comments on the age of the earth. Thus the rate of accumulation of the elements in the oceans can be used to estimate their age. The sodium age of the oceans is 260 million years but the silicon age is only about 9000 years. Which is right? Probably neither, but Andrews, though a professor of material science, does not bother to consider that sodium salts are soluble, and so will remain dissolved in the water to be measured, whereas silicon forms salts that are insoluble and precipiate out. The sodium age is therefore the better estimate because the element is more likely to remain where it is being measured. Andrews knows this but prefers to leave the lambs gaping in admiration at the age of ther oceans almost matching Genesis, on the silicon measure! Be certain about this. It is effectively lying!
Sediments contain the remains of the life that lived in the age that the sediments were formed, and the dates yielded by the physical methods give an order that matches the complexity of the remains. Rocks dated to be before the history of the biosphere began contained no life at all. Then somewhat later rocks contained primitive life, and successively dated rocks by the methods available contained ever more complex life. The earliest vertebrates were jawless fish, in rocks dated later, fish with jaws appeared, then amphibians, reptiles (dinosaurs) and mammals. Despite the fantasies of the creationists, mankind did not appear until a few million years ago, recently in geological terms, even if far too old for the whole of the life of the world, according to the creationists.
The age of sediments can be estimated from sedimentation rates, and it would have taken millions of years to lay down the miles and miles of sediments that exist in the earth. A more precise method of finding the age of rocks is the radioactive methods, such as how quickly uranium changes into lead, and the potassium-argon (K-Ar) method, and they confirm that the sediments are millions of years old. There might be room for argument about quite how many millions, but not that it is millions of years. Here again Professor Andrews equivocates by arguing that the methods can give dates only from about a seventieth of the radioactive element’s half life to about seven times it. So, if a half life were 700 million years, say, then the range of ages measured can only be from 10 million years to 5000 million years. At the limits all you can say is that the rocks are less than or greater than the appropriate limit, with no precise value put on them. In other words, the methods work best when the age yielded is close to the half life.
Andrews dishonestly wants his readers to believe that the method sets the date within these limits whatever the true age might be, when what it means is that dates near the limits are treated with caution because the errors in them get so large the date yielded is likely to be spurious. It is something he knows he is on safe ground with, because most of the lambs cannot seem to understand radiochemical dating at all, and think that geological dating is done by measuring radiocarbon, when the short half life of C-14 restricts its range to a few hundred years as a minimum, and about 35000 years as a maximum. Radiocarbon is used for dating history not geology, though Christians would love to use it to date everything, on the Andrews principle that it would only yield dates that are young ones!
An important check on physical methods of dating is concordance. Suppose the rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr) method is used on different mineral crystals in the same rock and gives the same date within the expected experimental error bounds, then the dates support each other through their concordance. Suppose, as an alternative approach different methods, perhaps K-Ar and Rb-Sr, are used to date the same mineral crystals in a rock and give the same dates within experimental error, then the same applies. Chance concordance is most unlikely, yet concordance happens much more often than does discordance, notably for rocks with a simple and not chequered history.
It is not to say that discordances do not happen. The methods are sensitive to contamination by the daughter molecule which obviously tend to give high dates, though leaching of it gives low dates, and these happen. It would therefore be even more lucky for any radiometric date to match the relative ages of rocks as judged by their order of sedimentation yet, most often they do. A telling datum is that the half life of Rb-87 was first calculated using the the U-Pb series. If either of the methods had been subject to gross errors, as the creationists argue, then the result would have been wrong. In fact it agreed remarkably well with laboratory determinations!
Even if fundamentalists question the absolute accuracy of the physical methods of dating, the relative dates they give match closely the relative dates of the rocks according to geological theory. Since geologists rely primarily on the strata, radiometric dating gives them confidence that their reading of the rocks is correct. So it is that, in those places where the stratification record is complete, the radiometric techniques can be checked and calibrated, then used elsewhere, where the strata might be more confused, with some of the systematic errors cleared out of the way.
Most of the absolute dates yielded match everything that can be deduced about the geology of the earth, but fundamentalists cannot abide them because they are so long. Dating the rocks of the old Scottish Caledonian system yields dates of around 500 million years, close to the dates guessed from the physical condition of the ancient mountains and the rates of erosion. Similar dating of the Alps gives about 50 million years, also in line with expectations. The dates are consistent with the expected relative ages of the two mountain ranges. Moreover, in all the continental blocks of the earth, the dates of the rocks are consistent. The oldest rocks are short of 4000 million years old down to about 3000 million years, and even these contain metamorphic rock showing that sediments were being laid down even earlier. Clusters of radiometric dates suggest bursts of geological activity.
These dates compare with 4500 million years for meteoritic rock and moon samples, and that brings in cosmological considerations. The best estimate of the age of the universe is 13 billion years! The formation of the earth, other planets, the sun and the galaxies, simply could not happen in six days. “It could. It was a miracle of God,” the creationists cry. Yet, the ages of these objects, when they have been measured, are billions of years, not six days. All of the evidence, however it is questioned by Christians, points to the same conclusion. The earth is much more ancient than 4000 BC! Genesis is a million times out!
Even creationists capable of studying the evidence agree that the natural way of understanding it is that the earth is very old, and the universe several times older than that. Genesis is unlikely to be correct:
The evidence available by the plain use of the senses is relevant, and makes a literal reading [of Genesis] very unlikely, for it is likely that the world is very old, was not created in six days, and that all living creatures are related.D C Burke, Professor of Biological Sciences, Warwick University
Evolution has had this vast time in which to happen. The only reason these creationists demur is the bible! Thus Verna Wright, a Professor at Leeds University, preferred “to take the literal reading of the biblical text” and re-examine scientific data. Does he cure rheumatism with spit and exorcisms? Do these people take Psalms 93:1 to refute the motion of the world on its axis or around the sun?…
…the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.
If the bible is being poetic here, then why not in Genesis too? The creationists always say Genesis is not poetic or allegorical, with no foundation at all. Rather the opposite. The verses of Genesis 1 are plainly rhythmic, the rhythm beating to the time of each daily creation. And why days? Because the creation was celebrated in ancient times at the New Year festival in which each act happened on successive days, making up a week. The author is describing when the stages of creation were celebrated, not when they were actually done. Using the methods of science necessitates ignoring spurious authorities, or at least examining them properly.
Flood geology cannot explain the complexity of geology:
- the shifts over time of distribution of the continesnts, seas and oceans
- the implied changes in topography over time
- erosion and sedimentation on the scale that happend
- the interruption of sedimentation many times by colossal movements of the earth causing folding, faulting and rifting—mountain building.
- repeated intrusions of igneous rock and the metamorphosis of sediments that went with it
- different climatic phases, especially glaciation and desiccation
- the correlation between the type of rock and the fossils in it, and why freely swimming animals should only be found in certain layers when a general flood would have allowed them to distribute evenly
- continuous changes in the shells of the tiny organisms that make up some thick deposits
No reconciliation is possible between the hypothesis of a single catastrophic flood and the geological record. One phenomenon that defeats Flood geology utterly is the presence of fossils in sediments that are partially metamorphosed, then overlaid with new sediments, in which fragments of the metamorphosed rocks can be identified, but with different fossils. It is quite impossible that one flood event of short duration could account for this phenomenon which occurs around Shap Fell in Cumbria.
The remains of life are not randomly mixed up in the rocks, and nor are they deposited in the way that a historically recent single sedimentation event would require. They are deposited in an order of complexity, and the dates of the rocks match that order. In some places continuous deep deposits of one kind of sediment exist, like the chalk deposits of tiny shelled animals. Within these deposits the changes in the forms of the animals deposited can be clearly traced, such as the changes in the ammonites, shelled molluscs that swam in the water. Such animals can be seen evolving and in this case they can be seen to end their existence in extinction.
Evolution can explain the growing complexity of life over time, but the time could not have been the short time the young earth creationists want to match their fairy story, and life did not just appear as the fully formed separate species that creationism wants. It began simple and grew more complicated. Creationists can quibble over the timescale to their hearts’ content, but it is certain it cannot have been as short as 4000 years—even human history began before that—and the order given by the physics matches the complexity of life of the biologists. It utterly contradicts creationism.
Genesis does not say that Noah refused to save some animals or was told by God to abandon some. Creationists therefore have to imagine that Noah had dinosaurs on his ark! Yet most of the remains of life found in the rocks does not now exist. What happened to them afterwards? Perhaps Noah ate them, since there could have been nothing left to eat except the things he had on board. Dinosaurs will have tasted like a large Thanksgiving Turkey no doubt. Then again maybe he had to offer them up as a sacrifice to the Intelligent Designer who enjoyed sacrifices in those days, and dinosaurs were the ones with the short straw. Creationists are barking!
Creationists depend a lot on the flood to explain sediments and extinction, but very many devout Christians cannot accept it, far more than the minority of cracked pot fundamentalists. God decides (Gen 6:17) to kill off life on earth because it is wicked (Gen 6:11). The lives of people before the flood, the bible claims, were immensely long—almost a thousand years—100 years being considered as a typical generation. Incidentaly, what was an animal generation when the human one was 100 years? Were animals afflicted by this same extension of their active lives? Were other intervals extended too, such as the gestation period? Anyway, at the flood, people were still living who were immediate descendants of Adam. The bible tells us that God got fed up with his first batch of humans. Named people in the bible lived almost a thousand years, and God got rid of them about two millennia after the creation in Noah’s flood.
Noah’s flood happened, the Christian creationists tell us, in the time of recorded history, and no one recorded the end of the human race, and nor is any such end traceable in archaeology. What was the population of humanity before the flood to make it worth all the bother. There is nothing in the bible to suggest it could have been that great, nothing like it is today, for example, and nothing in history suggests that the population of the world before 2000 BC was excessively big. And nothing in history suggests that after getting so big, the population of the world was wiped out suddenly.
So the almighty, omniscient and omnipresent God had no sooner made the world on his eternal timescale, filled it with His wondrous creation of novel creatures individually made, and humans with incredibly long lives, than He decided it was all wrong and should be killed off. It is asking a lot to be expected to believe that this God was omniscient when He seems not to have foreseen that He would have to destroy the results of His effort. Christians have no trouble with it, needless to say. Wavering, He then decides to allow Noah to preserve the life He had just now decided ought to be destroyed with no compunction! What is the point of it? If, omniscience or not omniscience, He got it wrong, an almighty could have covered up his mistake and started again. He could have kicked over His sand castle and scuffed up the remains. No one could have been any the wiser in a later creation. God showed no mercy to innocents swallowed up by the tsunami in Asia or even the 9/11 atrocity, let alone millions of other instances of innocents dying, often at the hands of heartless Christians. Christians claim innocents killed in God’s curious plans are instantly comforted in heaven, so why could Noah not have had his reward in heaven instead of being allowed to survive God’s punishment? It is a fairy tale that is even incoherent in Christian terms.
How long would it take to populate the world after everyone had been wiped out in a flood except one man and his family? How long would it take a babel of languages to develop in a small population. The Tower of Babel must have existed within a few hundred years of the flood. Neither the human population of the world nor its languages could have multiplied much in such a short time. The fact is that Christians will not think about what they claim in their silly fantasies. They are impossible. The Egyptian pyramids are about as old as this supposed flood, but must be younger as they are not under the mass of flood sediments from that time that give the world its geology, according to creationists. No doubt Pharaoh built them as island refuges for the people of Egypt in case the waters rose again. But it is hard to see that there could have been enough slaves in existence to build them, so soon after everyone in the world had been drowned.
The story of Noah is absurd. It actually makes sense only as an alternative creation myth in which the ark stands for the world and Noah is the first man. When God separated the waters, he created Noah as the primaeval man floating on the flood of the primeval water in an ark—the world containing all of the animals of creation. Genesis contains three creation myths in its first six chapters! If Christians have no trouble believing all three, then they ought to have no trouble believing the real one—Big Bang and evolution.
