Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
it produced warmed the planet into a tropical state, explaining why fossils the world over
seemed to have lived in warmer times.
However God did it, the water from the canopy spilled out over forty days and nights,
draining into collapsed lowlands that became the world's oceans. Tectonic movements
raised continents as the chaotic flood buried fossils in sediments that then solidified to be-
come rocks. Then for months afterwards the world convulsed with earthquakes and volcan-
ic eruptions, followed by a brief ice age. Whitcomb and Morris went on to claim that the
rock record supported all of these inferences. Their evidence: “Almost all of the sediment-
ary rocks of the earth, which are the ones containing fossils and from which the supposed
geologic history of the earth has been largely deduced, have been laid down by moving
waters.”
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Their technical argument for a global flood was that sedimentary rocks exist and are de-
posited by flowing water. From this foundation they leapt to the conclusion that a global
flood, Noah's Flood, did in fact occur.
In attacking conventional views, they quoted a geological textbook out of context to
argue that geologists use fossils to determine the relative age of rocks, overlooking how
stratigraphic order was established unambiguously in places like Siccar Point and the
Grand Canyon. Aware that geologists viewed Price as a crackpot, Whitcomb and Morris
nonetheless adopted his idea that the order to the fossil record actually recorded different
environments in different parts of the pre-Flood world. They offered three ways to explain
why the oldest rocks contain only single-celled creatures and why younger rocks contain
progressively more diverse and complex organisms. Their first suggestion was Wood-
ward's long-discredited idea about sediment and fossils settling out by density. Their
second was that marine fauna would have perished first and therefore be interred in deeper
strata. Lastly, certain animals, whether by anatomical design or ingenuity, struggled longer
to resist the Flood, their bodies settling later into higher layers of flood-deposited sediment.
Anyone in an introductory geology course could readily address how these ideas are in-
capable of explaining the fossil record. Most damning is the remarkable order to fossil se-
quences. Trilobites only occur in the lowest strata, which do not contain the densest fossils
and often host delicate floating creatures. Were hydraulic sorting to explain the order to the
