Geology Reference
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date and then carbon dating material from individual rings that could be lined up like over-
lapping bar codes from the ring patterns of different trees.
Whitcomb and Morris did not stop there, however. They argued that plants, animals,
soils, and rocks were all created with the appearance of age. God made rocks with isotopic
compositions identical to what one would expect had they really been ancient. In their view,
the real flaw with radiometric dating was that God had put just the right amounts of differ-
ent radioactive isotopes into rocks and the fossils they contained to make them seem really
old.
This was not the first time that the doctrine of apparent age—the idea that God made the
world to look old—was invoked to explain away geological evidence. Such thinking was
popular among nineteenth-century defenders of a global flood who argued that God pre-
loaded fossils into rocks and made them look like they had been deposited naturally. This
idea that had been laughed out of Victorian England took root in cold war America.
Whitcomb and Morris even recycled Cotton Mather's arguments about antediluvian gi-
ants. Claiming that human and dinosaur footprints found along the Paluxy River near Glen
Rose, Texas, were so close together that they overlapped, they included a photograph pur-
porting to show human footprints alongside those of dinosaurs. Pointing out the tremend-
ous size of the footprints they reminded the reader of the biblical statements about giants in
the days before the Flood. However, years later, after seeing the famous tracks for himself,
Morris acknowledged they were just dinosaur footprints after all. 5
By using the Flood to explain the entire sedimentary record, Whitcomb and Morris pro-
posed a version of geologic history that seventeenth-century cosmologists would have
recognized as one of their own. Ignoring all the data that convinced eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century flood supporters to give up on the idea of a global flood, Whitcomb and
Morris focused on that which geologists could not explain. They thought that a great flood
provided as good an explanation as geological theories if one abandoned the idea that dif-
ferent fossil assemblages recorded life at different times.
Whitcomb and Morris actually had some legitimate concerns and pointed out problems
with the traditional views of earth scientists. What, for example, did kill off the dinosaurs?
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