Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
fossil record, small trilobites would always be found above larger trilobites because objects
of the same density sort by size when settling through a fluid. This is not what one finds
in the rocks. Lowland sloths that could not have fled into the mountains on short notice are
only found in the uppermost, youngest strata. Dinosaurs and people are not found in the
same rocks.
Unlike those who originally offered such ideas centuries earlier, Whitcomb and Morris
made no attempt to test them against the geologic record. Instead, they questioned standard
geologic evidence and, like their predecessors, invented scenarios and miracles as needed
to explain inconvenient aspects of the biblical narrative. To solve the problem of getting
animals to and from the ark, they argued that those making it onto the ark lived close by.
After all, world geography must have been quite different before the Flood. They simply
invoked supernatural assistance to cover the care and feeding of all the animals.
Whitcomb and Morris admit that the biblical flood could not have occurred before
10,000
BC
, the date by when archaeological consensus then held that people had made it
to North America. So they rejected carbon dating in order to conclude the archaeological
dates must be wrong. In particular, they criticized the assumptions of a constant
14
C con-
centration in the atmosphere, a constant cosmic ray flux, and a constant radioactive decay
rate to argue that carbon dating only worked for the time after the Flood. They explained
that Earth's original vapor canopy served as a cosmic radiation shield, inhibiting the form-
ation of
14
C in the atmosphere until after Noah disembarked. They then invoked greater
rates of radioactive decay before the Flood to make geologic data fit a young Earth. They
ignored how this would have generated tremendous heat, making paradise hellish in the
days before their vapor canopy collapsed.
There is some validity to their claim that carbon dating is affected by variations in the
history of Earth's atmosphere and cosmic ray activity. Cosmic ray activity does indeed vary
through time—just not enough to matter all that much. Whitcomb and Morris's claim about
its crippling effect on carbon dating was debunked in the 1980s, when Minze Stuiver and
colleagues at the University of Washington worked out a calibration curve that extended
back 13,300 years by simply counting tree rings in cross sections of logs cut at a known
