Thus
the fact that dinosaurs indeed once existed, along with various other
species that are now extinct, does not prove that they evolved-it
merely shows that they died off and no longer exist today. This is a point
that should not be lost with the current popularity of dinosaur
documentaries produced by evolutionists attempting to lend validation to
their ideas. Recent scientific discoveries have also shown that dinosaurs could not possibly have lived millions of
years ago either; the millions of years ago date for dinosaurs
is all an evolutionist fantasy, as will be shown later on in this chapter as well.
In
fact the demise of the dinosaurs has been an enigma to evolutionists, with
recent explanations for the "Great Extinction" contradicting one of the
bulwarks of Darwinian ideology, known as the doctrine of
uniformitarianism.
Until
the theory of evolution began making it's rounds in the universities among
the skeptics in the early part of the nineteenth century, catastrophism
had been the explanation for the presence and preservation of fossils and
for the various layers of the rock strata found in the upper
portions of the crust of the earth. Basically, catastrophism stated
that much of the history of the surface of the earth could be explained by
great, cataclysmic disasters that involved tremendous changes in the
climate of the world, and along with these disasters large numbers of
living creatures became extinct.
Cuvier, the father of paleontology, comparative
anatomy and stratigraphy was an advocate of catastrophism. One of the main
causes of the largest disaster was considered to be the Biblical Flood of
Noah. This story, found support first not only in the Biblical record, but
also in the legends of almost every ancient tribe and culture on the face
of the earth, from the ancient Babylonians with their legend of Gilgamesh,
and the ancient Greeks and Chinese, to the legends of the Indians of North
and South America, and it was believed in by two of the major founders of
the sciences of geology and stratigraphy, Nicholas Steno and Baron Cuvier,
as well as by many other distinguished scientists at Oxford, Cambridge and
Harvard.
In 1830, however, Charles Lyell published his Principles
of Geology,which directly contradicted the theory of
catastrophism. He developed the Uniformitarian Theory,which stated that
there had been occasional periods of local floods and earthquakes in the
past, but that they were no different than what we see occurring around us
today. His motto was “the present is the key to the past” i.e., present
processes could explain everything that had occurred in earths history,
and that nothing had ever occurred on the extent of a worldwide disaster
such as the flood of Noah.
Darwin
took a copy of Lyell’s book with him during his trip on the
Beagle,
and this profoundly shaped his thinking of the supposed descent of species
from a common ancestor, since the theory of evolution required extremely
long time periods, thus as evolution gained popularity uniformitarianism
became the accepted explanation for the history of the earth.
Catastrophism conflicted with the theory of evolution, since if the
extinction of a species could be explained by a universal catastrophe
(say, for instance, a comet striking the earth), then the theory of a
species becoming extinct as a result of a struggle for survival with other
species would be cast into doubt. So the theory of catastrophism was
gradually shelved as evolutionary minded men ascended to prestige in the
higher halls of learning of our Universities, and the books that were
eventually written by these men heaped scorn upon the idea that something
like a disaster of Biblical proportions had ever occurred on the face of
the earth.
So
catastrophism was laughed out of the intellectual and literary circles for
quite a few years, but in this case Darwin couldn’t conveniently dispose
of the corpse - it just kept reappearing all over the place, like that
bothersome body in Arsenic
and Old Lace.
Massive
fossil graveyards of dinosaurs still exist all over the world. The
Morrison beds in North America, the dinosaur beds in Montana, in the Rocky
Mountains, in Alberta, the Dakotas, China, Colorado, Utah, Africa, etc.,
etc., contain literally millions of dinosaur fossils piled together in
tremendous heaps. Ten thousand Hadrosaurs were found on Egg Mountain
alone, jumbled together in what appears to have been a mass death.
Would
this happen under normal, uniformitarian conditions? Think about it.
Millions of buffalo were slaughtered on the North American plains during
the nineteenth century, so this should be an ideal reason why multiplied
thousands of fossil buffalo should be scattered all over the place. Are
there any great buffalo fossil graveyards to be found?
Most assuredly,
there are not- their remains were disposed of by the normal ravages of the
weather, scavengers, and decomposition. So why are there great fossil
graveyards of dinosaurs, where the bones of millions of these beasts lie
entombed in vast heaps, sometimes buried together with the piles of
fossilized mammals, fish, insects, plants etc., testifying that they all
perished together in a great mass death?
Let
us find out what Stein and Rowe have to say about the process of
fossilization.
They state: “Effective fossilization usually depends on
having hard parts, such as bones or shells, and
being buried immediately after death. The work of predators
and scavengers and the weathering effects of rain, heat, cold, and wind
often serve to destroy most or all of an organism before burial takes
place.”[1]
They further state: “Once an organism
dies, it is seldom buried immediately . . .The point of ultimate burial
and fossilization may be hundreds of miles from the place of death.”[2]
They then give us four conditions
necessary for the preservation of fossils.
First, an organism must
have hard parts like teeth, bones and shells that are preserved, but that
is not all that is necessary, (else we would find numerous buffalo fossils
in North America). They further state: "Second,
the organism must not be destroyed immediately by other organisms or by
the action of climatic or geologic forces. Third, the organism must be
protected immediately from decaying. This usually takes the form of rapid
burial, which also protects the organism from being totally
destroyed." [3]
What
natural occurrence then could account for the great dinosaur graveyards
under these conditions, simultaneously killing and burying 
multitudes of dinosaurs, mammals, birds, fish, etc. in huge
numbers, many of them apparently dying in the prime of life, some of them
caught in the very act of eating smaller animals that became preserved as
fossils too?
It
had to be something sudden, to kill them in what appears in many cases to
be an unnatural, violent death; it was something universal that destroyed
them in every part of the earth at roughly the same period in history; it
was something that swiftly covered them up to "mummify" their remains so
that the normal exposure to water or air and other predations wouldn't
obliterate their remains, and it did this on a massive scale to create
such numerous and extensive fossil graveyards.
Only
one possible event could simultaneously meet all of these conditions: the
onrush of swift moving sediment from a tremendous, worldwide Flood.
The last of the dinosaurs were supposed
to have died off about 65-100 million evolutionary years ago. One of the
greatest dinosaur collections in the world is at China’s Zigong Dinosaur
Museum. Scientist Rick Gore, when visiting this Museum wrote: “This site
of mass death, probably from flooding, records the surge of giantism in
the middle Jurassic. Dong and I carefully descend to the mudstone floor
and walk amid a petrified forest of bones.” [4]
Here
is some interesting food for thought. When most evolutionists discuss how
the fossils were preserved, they will almost universally state that the
great beasts were browsing near some river bed, by a large lake, in a
swamp, or that they were simply enjoying a Jurassic vacation at the beach,
when suddenly a mighty rush of water and sediment overwhelmed them and
preserved them for us to come along and sniff out some (supposedly)
millions of years later.
One
recent A&E television program (Voyages, December 23, 1995) discussed a
herd of fossilized Centrosaurus dinosaurs, which were similar to
triceratops, found in the Gobi desert of Mongolia. The evolutionists could
only come up with one reasonable explanation as to how all of these great
beasts could possibly have died at one and the same time and place, and
then been buried and preserved together. A flood. Of course it was not to
be considered that this could have in any way been connected with the
world-wide flood of Noah, which would explain everything very well, since
mass graves of dinosaur remains are found in nearly every part of the
globe, while even evolutionists acknowledge that it was a world-wide
catastrophe that caused the demise of the dinosaurs.
Could
any of this be explained by uniformitarianism? With normal sedimentary
processes, even fish don’t normally form fossils when they die; they float
to the surface and are devoured by other fish, bacteria, and by the action
of the elements. Yet we find great numbers of fossil fish buried together
in many parts of the world, in quite a few cases buried with the
dinosaurs, right along with the bones of mammals, birds, and the remains
of insects.
Voyages
also dealt with a huge number of dinosaur eggs that were found in the Gobi
desert, yet the shells had not been damaged, simply buried and fossilized.
In attempting to fathom what force of nature could have killed the mothers
and preserved the eggs at the same time, perhaps not wishing to waver too
close to the Biblical account, they suggested that a sudden sandstorm or a
sand dune falling on these beasts caused their death and preservation.
[5] (Recently new evidence has turned up that has contradicted this
view, and it has now been presumed that they were suddenly buried by the
action of water and sediment.)
The
huge sedimentary action necessary for the death and burial of such large
numbers of giant beasts would not occur in normal hydraulic action in
river currents in sufficient intensity and scope to preserve the vast
fossil graveyards that exist. Rivers don’t generally bury such large
numbers of animals together; their carcasses are carried downstream where
they are eventually deposited along the shoreline somewhere. The process
that created the vast dinosaur fossil graveyards would require a flood of
truly monumental proportions.
Even
Darwin had to admit that large formations of fossils could only be formed
and preserved underwater: “But we have seen that a thick formation,
fossiliferous throughout its entire thickness, can accumulate only during
a period of subsidence . . .” (Origin, Chapter 10: On the Absence of
Numerous varieties in any Single Formation)
Even
though it might be argued that he could be referring solely to marine life
in this section, we find that Darwin also stated that under gradual,
uniformitarian conditions, neither marine life norterrestrial life would
normally leave fossils: “We probably take a quite erroneous view, when we
assume that sediment is being deposited over nearly the whole bed of the
sea, at a rate sufficiently quick to embed and preserve fossil remains. .
. .The remains which do become embedded, if in sand or gravel, will, when
the beds are upraised [by geologic processes above the level of the ocean
onto comparatively dry, terrestrial, strata] generally be dissolved by the
percolation of rain water charged with carbolic acid.” (Origin, pp. 155,
On the Poorness of Palaeontological Collections)
It is
also known now that it does not take millions, or even many thousands of
years for fossils to form. This process can take place over a few
centuries in some cases, so fossils in themselves do not mean that the
species died out millions of years ago either.
Evolutionists will go to any extreme to
ignore the evidence of creatures dying in a massive global flood, even
when that evidence is nearly incontrovertible. They will insist that it
was only a local flood, and this always has it's difficulties, as is
evident from the following article.
It
was reported in National
Geographic, January, 1993 that paleontologists had
excavated about 80 Centrosaurus fossils at Dinosaur Provincial Park in
Alberta Canada. Here is the description of the find, given by Philip
Currie: "‘It looks like a catastrophe,' says Currie. 'We think a herd was
trying to cross a river in flood. These animals weren't too bright.'"
Well,
we have a herd of animals running into
a flood.
The
authors continue their reconstruction of the event: "'All that meat drew
carnivores. We've found a lot of shed teeth and bones with tooth marks.
Also, a lot of the bones were broken. Others were pushed-probably
trampled-into the mud.'" [6]
So
now we have another herd of animals that arrives at the scene and
they
rush headlong into the same flood to have dinner, subsequently drowning
along with their intended victims! Not just a few, but "a
catastrophe." Many of them were trampled and their bones were broken!
Evidently, at least according to the evolutionists, they really couldn’t
have been too bright, and they must have been ravenously hungry.
In
the explanation that the evolutionists give do you see something seriously
wrong with the picture?
If you do, then consider this explanation. How
about a massive herd of animals trying to escape
a flood, until they had reached the last bit of dry land, and as the
waters rose up to eventually engulf them they became desperate and
panicked, trampling one another and turning on each other in a feeding
frenzy.
Here
is another mass death by flooding that shows the utter blindness of
evolutionary minded paleontologists when trying to explain the presence of
massive fossil dinosaur graves apart from the Biblical version of the
flood.
Rick Gore states: “As a scientific
journalist, I have covered the on going debate over why dinosaurs became
extinct about 65 million years ago. Were they chilled to death in the
catastrophic aftermath of a comet or asteroid striking earth? Were they
done in by a virus or by gradual climate change? The arguments have been
heated-and unresolved . . . All we can say is that near the end of the
Triassic period, about 210 million years ago (these time frames are
entirely subjective, as a quote from a noted scientist will show)something
extraordinary happened on planet earth: a global mass extinction. Many
species were hard hit . . . Did the last of the dinosaurs die after an
asteroid struck earth 65 million years ago, or were they already extinct?
We may never know.”[7]
To
try and explain how thousands of dinosaurs and literally millions of other
animals of all sizes and species were thrown together in gigantic fossil
graveyards in Montana and Alberta, at Dinosaur National Park in Utah, in
the Gobi desert in China, in Africa and in South America, in fact in
nearly all parts of the world, by any event other than an enormous flood
and massive tidal action, combined with great volcanic and tectonic
upheavals, is almost unimaginable, however evolutionists, in attempting to
avoid the Biblical account, can construct quite elaborate stories with
their imaginations.
The most available evidence
that exists for dinosaurs are their footprints, [8]often
embedded in soft clay and mud, then preserved for (supposedly) millions of
years by some unexplained (by evolutionists) method. But how could
anything besides a Flood of
truly Biblical proportions explain the 300,000 square mile
Entrata formation running across the central part of the United States,
where hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dinosaur footprints are
preserved over the coast of an ancient seashore. These footprints were all
created in roughly the same layer of strata, showing that they were all
formed at nearly the same time. But unless they were swiftly covered up by
a massive amount of sediment, the footprints would have been erased by
normal tidal action, wind, and erosion. That they were not erased shows
that something unusual on a massive scale occurred to create the
conditions to preserve these prints.
One
other notable characteristic concerning these footprints is that
they
are nearly all going in the same direction! There is no
indication that these beasts were simply milling around browsing or
peacefully gathering together at their favorite watering spot. Instead
there is clear evidence of a sudden mass migration in one direction. What
could have caused all of these beasts to suddenly travel in the same
direction all at once? Clearly they were motivated by survival instinct to
avoid something quite deleterious to their existence, something on such a
grand scale that hundreds of thousands of dinosaurs all headed off
together to avoid it.
Indeed,
massive deposits of dinosaur tracks are found all over the world.
Stretching along the coast of Samchonpo, South Korea, the writers of
National Geographic reported that “embeddedin petrified mud lies one of
the world’s richest concentrations of dinosaur footprints . . .” [9]
Paleontologist Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado described
the scene, as related by Rick Gore: “ Nearby we find the three-toed tracks
of an unknown therapod in a run. Then we reach a chaotic patch of ancient
mud. It looks like a trampled circus ground, pocked with footprints of
sauropods . . .”
On
February 24, 1996 The
Discovery Channel aired the program Paleoworld,
where they discussed Larks Quarry Trackway in Central Queensland,
Australia, where hundreds of tracks of a herd of small dinosaurs were
preserved next to the tracks of a much larger carnivorous dinosaur near an
ancient watering hole by a creek. The writers suggested that the smaller
dinosaurs had supposedly been hunted as prey by the carnivorous
dinosaur.
There
is one very serious problem with this explanation. The tracks of the two
types of smaller dinosaurs run straight toward the much larger dinosaur,
in fact they run right
over the tracks of the larger dinosaur, as though they were
all trying to escape a much larger and more impending danger from the
opposite direction, with the larger dinosaur in the way! This did not in
any way sway the evolutionists from surmising that the 160 smaller
Ornithopods and Celeosaurs “charged toward the gaping jaws of the predator
and certain death”.
It
makes no sense that the small dinosaurs did not wish to cross the stream
or run along it, even at an angle, to escape their enemy unless they were
running in terror from something much worse coming from the opposite
direction, something that swept them away butpreserved their footprints by
rapid sedimentation. [10]
The
previously mentioned article in National Geographic has an extraordinary
picture of dinosaur tracks high up on a nearly vertical, flat rock face in
Argentina!
The authors state: “. . . dinosaurs walked here along the
wave-rippled shore of an inland sea. Several agile, bipedal
creatures-perhaps hadrosaurs feeding on aquatic plants-left trails that
crisscross. A claw-toed carnivore passed nearby, possibly coming to the
water to drink or to stalk the hadrosaurs.” [11]
It is
not to be reasonably supposed that large, heavy dinosaurs walked straight
up smooth, vertical cliff faces high up in the mountains. These
impressions had to have been raised into place afterward, but with the
normal, slow processes of mountain building that evolutionists subscribe
to the prints would have all but been obliterated into broken and ground
stubble during the ages-long period of uplift: even soft impressions along
lakeshores do not normally last long enoughfor somebody millions of years
later, or even a few hours, days, or weeks later, to come by and discover,
however a sudden hydraulic cataclysm that covered the footprints with
other sedimentary strata and preserved them almost immediately after they
were formed, followed by the uplifting of the strata into a vertical
position by a massive tectonic upheaval within a few months or
yearswouldmake more sense, and this is exactly what thefloodmodel of
geological formations postulates!
Dinosaur Ridge near the foothills of
the Rocky Mountains of Colorado is covered with hundreds of dinosaur
tracks on an almost vertical cliff-face! This is part of the great
“Dinosaur Highway” running through the region, with millions of dinosaur
prints preserved.
On
May 1, 1996 The
Discovery Channel aired Guide
to T Rex where we find another example of the preservation
of thousands of dinosaur tracks that defies the evolutionists
explanations. Beginning with the unsolved mystery of the origin of
Tyrannosaurus Rex, they reported:
“Anatomical detective work can
usually identify dinosaurs to whom T-Rex is not related. But tracing its
family tree back through time is more difficult. A huge gap in the fossil
record precedes the sudden appearance of T-Rex’s first large[and
unknown]predecessor. . . But recently some of the missing clues have been
found 4,000 feet up in the mountains of Alberta, Canada, on a prehistoric
beach frozen in time, thrust on it’s side over millions of years.”
The
evolutionists want you to believe that over the period of millions of
years a prehistoric beach was gradually subjected to the pressures of
uplift, erosion, and compression, along with the fracturing, weathering,
tidal action and distortion that this would involve, and turned completely
on it’s side, yet
with the footprints relatively undisturbed, in fact scientists have been
able to measure the very stride of the animals that made
them!
Why
would a swift, sudden uplift be more credible? If you have ever
watched a pizza cook toss a pizza skin up in the air and twirl it, he has
to do it with enough thrust and speed so that it keeps it's size and
shape. If he raised his arm slowly the pizza skin would flop down over his
hand and lose all of it's shape and contour. This is a fairly simple
demonstration in physics, but the principle still applies with the
dinosaur footprints; it makes much more sense that they were raised with a
sudden uplift over a short period of time rather than over millions of
years.
Paleontologist
Philip Currie reported on these tracks as he was scaling down the
huge
vertical cliff face on which they were preserved: “The
richest dinosaur footprint sight in all of Canada is in a coal mine in
Grand Cash, Alberta. In these hundred million year old rocks, we have
evidence of armored dinosaurs, meat-eating dinosaurs of different kinds,
and large plant eating dinosaurs [All
of them traveling in roughly the same direction and preserved intact at
the same time! ]. The footprints are all in trackways and
they go across this enormous cliff face which at one time must have been a
mud flat at the edge of a sea. What’s important about this sight is that,
because of the age, one hundred million years ago, we don’t have
equivalent bone sights in this part of the world, and so we have to do a
little bit of guesswork in terms of identifying the dinosaurs.”[12]
Notice
the repeated emphasize on the many millions of years ago that these beasts
supposedly lived-one hundred million years is repeated twice in one
paragraph by Currie. The phrase “millions of years ago,” is constantly
woven into dinosaur lore, not because there is any credible evidence for
dinosaurs having lived that long ago, but because this is necessary to
perpetuate the evolutionists myth: these time periods are necessary for
the evolutionary stories to stay afloat, since the closer we get to
present time (and more reliable data for or against evolution), the less
we find of any evidence that supports it. Using the phrase “millions of
years ago” comfortably removes this problem from present time and puts it
in the far distant past, where they assume an imaginary process existed
long ago by which these creatures evolved.
Most
people have heard of the carbon 14 method for determining the age of a
fossil and are led to believe that somehow through this technique we can
determine the age of any fossil, but this is not the case at all.
Dinosaurs are believed by evolutionists to have lived millions of years
ago, while carbon 14 is useless for determining the age of any fossil
older than one hundred thousand years old, which is a mere one tenth of
one million years!
The other method for dating that most people have
heard of is potassium argon, however potassium argon is used to date
volcanic rocks, which are rocks produced from the hot magma of the earth
through volcanic processes, but these rocks do not contain any dinosaur
fossils.
Dinosaur
fossils are found almost universally in sedimentary rocks, which are
produced primarily through swift and powerful hydraulic action. There are
other methods for the formation of sedimentary rocks besides hydraulic
action, however these methods would have generally been too slow and too
localised to have led to the sudden, catastrophic events that produced the
huge dinosaur graveyards that are found around the world.
Most rocks
dated using the potassium argon method are supposedly billions of years
older than when the dinosaurs lived on the earth, according to
evolutionists.
Alan
Charig, former head of the British Museum of Natural History’s
Paleontology department, wrote:
"As yet we have no radiometric method
(that is, one based on radioactivity) for the direct absolute dating of
dinosaurs." [13]
Hotton
reported: “The bones of mice and lizards deposited in caves no more than a
few hundred years ago may be more heavily mineralized than those of
dinosaurs deposited in sandstones a hundred million years ago.” (Hotton,
pp. 49, The Evidence of Evolution)
It is uncommon but not
unknown to find fossils of mammals buried along with the
fossils of dinosaurs, and so evolutionists claim that this proves
that dinosaurs and mammals did not live at the same time, nor did they
both perish in large numbers at the same time by some great catastrophe.
There are some problems with this type of reasoning
though. According to evolutionists themselves, the creatures that
they claim mammals descended from- the so-called "mammal-like" reptiles,
the therapsids - lived millions of evolutionary years before many of the
dinosaurs were supposed to have even existed in the first place. Then, by
some mysterious process, the therapsids, along with practically any
other trace of any mammals, disappeared from the fossil record for one
hundred million years, until at about 65 million years ago, when the true
mammals show up out of nowhere.
Probably
one of the best sites on the internet to view depictions of dinosaurs and
find out more about them would be T. Michael Keesey's Dinosauricon. Keesey is not a creationist by any
means and the tilt towards evolutionary explanations for the origin of the
dinosaurs is evident, nevertheless it is a beautifully designed
masterpiece of artwork and scholarship, and one where a viewer can find a
wealth of information on these grand beasts that once roamed the earth,
providing one keeps a watchful eye out for evolutionist bias.
By
the evolutionists own reasoning, mammals and dinosaurs must have lived
together at the same time for millions of years. So the argument
that since dinosaurs and mammals are not normally found buried
together proves that they did not live at the same time is invalidated by
the evolutionist's own scheme of things.
More
bad news for the reptile-to-mammal transition: The "mammal-like" reptiles
that evolutionists claim evolved from reptiles to mammals never actually
existed as such. The therapsids were not reptiles at all; they were
as different from reptiles as any class of animals are from another. And
the fact that they supposedly went extinct millions of years before true
mammals showed up on the scene should cause some to at least doubt the
veracity of evolutionist speculations. The so-called time-lines for the
transition from therapsid to mammal, along with all of the supposed
transitional "links", are more from the imagination of over-zealous
evolutionists stumping for their cause as much as anything else. They have
been "splitting" varieties of what is probably the same species into
numerous species, and they have been grouping what are probably different
species, sometimes found on entirely different continents and in totally
unrelated strata, into a supposed phylogenic lineage. (See Chapter 6)
It's
quite a bit of smoke and mirrors, but it enthralls their audience and
masks the truly deficient evidence for their speculations.
This kind of duplicitous nonsense is paraded on The
Science Channel as fact to our children in their television series Living
With Dinosaurs (SCIENCE May 16, 2005 09:00pm.) The
information given out through the TV guide description states "Dinosaurs
are ancestors of crocodiles, giant lizards and turtles." It is meant to
show how these reptiles evolved from their dinosaur forebears. The unwary
viewer will watch the entire program and believe that he now knows that
crocodiles, giant lizards and turtles evolved from dinosaurs. After all,
isn't that what the description and lead in to the program said?
There
is one little problem with all of this: Nowhere throughout the entire
program do they say just how and when and where crocodiles, giant monitor
lizards and turtles evolved from dinosaurs! They don't state what kind of
dinosaurs these reptiles were to have evolved from. They show no fossil
evidence of their evolution from dinosaurs.
In fact, if you pay
careful attention to the program, you will hear the moderator state that
from the very first time they appear in the fossil record turtles,
crocodiles and giant monitor lizards appear essentially identical to their
modern counterparts, except for size differences! They haven't changed
over the "millions of years" of their existence!
Evolutionists like to
say that evolution is "change over time". Well, if that is the case, then
the Science Channel program Living With Dinosaurs shows quite conclusive
evidence that crocodiles, turtles and giant monitor lizards didn't evolve!
They just suddenly showed up millions of years ago (according to
evolutionist time) exactly like they appear to us today.
This is not
evidence for evolution, however this does make a compelling case for
creation, according to the very testimony of the evolutionists themselves!
Returning
to the mythical "mammal - like" reptiles and the supposed gap between the
time mammals lived and dinosaurs lived, although it is true that dinosaurs
are not usually found buried with mammals, it is also true that dinosaurs
of one species are not usually found buried along with dinosaurs of a
different species either.
Dinosaur
graveyards, in many cases, are species specific, even among dinosaurs.
Thus
to make the argument that since mammals are not buried in the same places
as dinosaurs are buried they did not live at the same time, one would also
have to believe that for nearly all of the species of dinosaurs that we
find buried, none of them lived contemporaneously either. As one person
pointed out, there has never been a case of fossiled chicken tracks found
alongside fossilised human tracks either, thus the case could be made that
humans and chickens never co-existed, by evolutionist logic that is.
It is
true that evolutionists believe that some dinosaur species did live
millions of years apart, but not all of them. Many dinosaurs of diverse
species were supposed to have lived at the same time as well, however we
find them buried in large numbers separated by species, according to their
kind, and not all mixed together.
What
might be the reason for this? Well, whenever there is a large scale
catastrophe, such as a flood or a great fire, many animals out of fear
will resort to their instinct for herding, where they will bunch up
together for protection from danger, and even stampede together in a mad
rush for safety. This would make sense, we see it in nature today, and
could have and probably would have happened in the early days of the
Flood.
Not only is the
evidence that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago largely
guesswork, there are a number of instances where evidence has been found
that sharply contradicts this evolutionary scenario. Recently scientists
have extracted bone marrow from dinosaurs that have supposedly been
extinct for 65 million years![14]
Mary
H. Schweitzer of Montana State University and co-workers extracted the
proteins from remains of Tyrannosaurus rex near Bozeman, Montana. Complex
molecular compounds in living systems begin to disintegrate soon after
death, and even in fossilized form it has stretched the credibility of
other scientists to suppose that any type of organic material could have
survived intact for such an incredibly long period of time. Of course, the
obvious implication is that dinosaurs did not live and die off millions of
years ago
Because
this has been such an embarassment to the evolutionists involved in this
they have recently done a bit of desperate back peddling on their original
claim, and even "Mr. Dinosaur" himself, Jack Horner has jumped into the
fray in an attempt to defend the evolutionist position of dinosaurs living
millions of years in the past.
Horner's
reported response to a fellow evolutionist after the story broke was:
"‘What we found was heme, a form of iron that has a biological origin, but
of course, not any soft tissue or any other component of a cell. It’s
preserved because it’s iron.’
(http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/0325RBCs.asp)
This
is a far cry from what was originally reported by his co-worker, Dr.
Schweitzer: "‘The lab filled with murmurs of amazement, for I had focused
on something inside the vessels that none of us had ever noticed before:
tiny round objects, translucent red with a dark center. Then a colleague
took one look at them and shouted, ‘You’ve got red blood cells. You’ve got
red blood cells!’"
(M. Schweitzer and I. Staedter, ‘The Real Jurassic
Park’, Earth,
June 1997 pp. 55–57.)
Dinosaur
Jack is obviously attempting to cover his tracks with this explanation,
since Schweitzer originally challenged him as to how they could really be
red blood cells after so many millions of years. Horner told her to prove
that they weren't red blood cells, but she reported "So far, we haven’t
been able to." (M. Schweitzer, Ibid)
(The Word of God says that the
wisdom of this world is made foolishness before God. They can't see the
truth, even when it is presented before their very eyes.")
The
evidence that it was actually hemoglobin that was found in the dinosaur
bones was documented by Dr. Carl Wieland as follows:
- "The tissue was coloured reddish brown, the colour of hemoglobin, as
was liquid extracted from the dinosaur tissue.
- Hemoglobin contains heme units. Chemical signatures unique to heme
were found in the specimens when certain wavelengths of laser light were
applied.
- Because it contains iron, heme reacts to magnetic fields differently
from other proteins extracts from this specimen reacted in the same way
as modem heme compounds.
- To ensure that the samples had not been contaminated with certain
bacteria which have heme (but never the protein hemoglobin), extracts of
the dinosaur fossil were injected over several weeks into rats. If there
was even a minute amount of hemoglobin present in the T. Rex sample, the
rats’ immune system should build up detectable antibodies against this
compound. This is exactly what happened in carefully controlled
experiments."
Still, Dinosaur Jack
and his following of evolutionists have steadfastly refused to acknowledge
the evidence uncovered before their very eyes and have been busy revising
their story as well as revising science, even going to the extreme of
attempting to say that now amino acids and heme could survive over a
period of 60 million years. What else could they say? They had no choice,
otherwise they would have had to admit that the bones were not millions of
years old, which would have thrown their entire evolutionary world view in
chaos! They also claim that the immune response mentioned above was
consistent with a few small amino acids attached to a heme molecule. This
is impossible. The response was to hemoglobin, not heme, and that had to
have been made up of many more amino acids than three or four, and for
these to have survived for millions of years is more in the realm of
science fiction than science fact. In fact, chemically, there is no way
the proteins could have survived that long.
Moving on: In Discovery
Magazine, August, 1995, Paleontologist Ken Stadtman of Brigham Young
University had found forty
square feet of dinosaur skin in perfect condition. This was
the evolutionist explanation as to how the fossilized remains of dinosaur
skin survived intact for
65 million years: “It seems to have escaped the scavengers
by being rapidly
buried in the bed of a slow
moving river-in sediment so fine that the skin impression
was preserved in detail. ‘The perfect preservation of the texture is
really remarkable,’ said Stadtman.” [15]
Some
people who have a hard time believing that a fish as large as a whale
could swallow Jonah will swallow this kind of explanation from the
evolutionists quite readily.
Although we are told by
evolutionists that men and dinosaurs did not live at the same time on the
earth, it is probable that the flood of Noah was co-incident with the
eventual extinction of the dinosaurs, and that men and dinosaurs lived
together before the flood.
During
the so-called "Age of Reptiles" mammals probably co-existed all along with
dinosaurs. In fact the "mammal-like" reptiles that evolutionists theorise
mammals evolved from existed long before the Jurassic period and long
before most of the larger dinosaurs ever existed. A genuine transitional
form between reptiles and mammals has never been found: Reptiles have
scales while mammals have fur and hair; mammals have mammary glands while
reptiles have none; the differences in the jaw, ear ossicles, etc. would
have to be bridged over by a vast number of intermediate forms, none of
which have ever been found.
Over
the past few years good evidence that dinosaurs lived until comparatively
recent geologic times has cropped up in at least two parts of the globe.
Bones that were discovered in Alaska (1985) in association with mammoth
bones had been thought to have been elephant bones because of evolutionary
time scales, but have proven to be dinosaur bones. Some of these bones
were subjected to carbon 14 testing, and the dinosaur bones which were
supposedly many millions of years old and thus shouldn't have given any
carbon 14 readings at all actually yielded dates of a mere 25,000 years
old! [16]
The
time scales that are thrown around to bolster the idea that the dinosaurs
lived millions of years ago are merely conjecture, much like the situation
that we saw with the coelacanth.[17]
The expedition televised on Terra X was
actually setting traps for these dinosaurs! I also have in my possession a
picture from National Geographic of an ancient cave drawing in Central
America of a creature that could only be described as something quite
similar to a Tyrannosaurus, or one of the smaller dinosaurs of comparable
anatomy. There is no other known creature on the face of the earth that
would resemble it in any respect.
Among
some of the various thesis evolutionary scientists have advanced for the
causes of the dinosaurs extinction, the following are just a sample: Raids
by flying saucers; exterminated by cave-men (even though evolutionists
don’t believe that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time); the moon
being formed out of the pacific ocean; mass suicide; world wide parasites;
cosmic radiation; starvation; they became too large (should have gone on a
diet); dwindling brain (sharks are still around and they are not known for
their great mental capacities); egg-eating mammals; stress; and senility.
[18]
British
paleontologist Anthony Hallum has come up with the interesting suggestion
that constipation might have done in the dinosaurs!
None
of these reasons explain how the mammals that lived right alongside the
dinosaurs through their extinction managed to survive these catastrophic
events. Not all of the dinosaurs were large either, some were roughly the
size of modern mammals, and many of the ancient mammals were much larger
than their modern counterparts. Scientists really don’t have any good
reason why they should have died apart from the Biblical flood.
With
the latest data on dinosaurs confirming that their extinction was sudden,
and that it was a world-wide catastrophe that killed them off, few
scientists now are debating any more on whether there was a world-wide
catastrophe, they are wondering what kind of catastrophe it was, a comet,
a nearby solar flare, an asteroid, or volcanic eruptions. Recent studies
have been done on the worldwide "iridium layer" left by the debris of an
asteroid that is suspected of having smacked into earth and killed off the
dinosaurs.
In
the National Geographic article Dinosaurs,
January 1993, paleontologist Rick Gore wrote of at least 10,000 fossil
maiasaurs along with a nesting ground of fossilized hadrosaur eggs two
miles long and a quarter of a mile wide that were found near Egg Mountain
Montana. Many of the eggs were perfectly intact with the shells uncrushed
and had partially developed embryos inside of them. What could have killed
these vast herds of dinosaurs and yet preserved the eggs intact? They
suggested “a tremendous volcanic explosion might have triggered their
death.” [19]
In
the debate on whether a gradual process or a sudden catastrophe caused the
extinction of the dinosaurs, Steven Jay Gould of Harvard wrote: “Yet I
think that few geologists would deem it inherently impossible, or even
unlikely, that the earth might have suffered grievous cosmic insults at
infrequent intervals during its vast history . . . The primary fact of
dinosaur extinction is its timing as part of a global mass dying . . . In
any case, geologic evidence constrains us to look for a contributing cause
thatis worldwide in effect, able to exterminate groups in all major
habitats, andgeologically sudden for at least some of its
results.”[20]
This
all means one thing: Lyell's theory ofUniformitarianism hasn't worked, and
scientists are being forced to admit, many of them against their will,
that at least one great catastrophe has occurred on the face of the Earth
causing the sudden deaths of multiplied millions of creatures along with
an enormous climatic change, but they still won't dare mention the
possibility of a world wide flood, because this is mentioned in the Bible
(whoops!) and what self respecting modern scientist would want any of his
ideas to be mixed up with a lot of old superstition and dogma?
Although present day evolutionary
scientists are finally coming back to the concept that the earth
might have suffered drastic changes to it’s environment over the
millennia, even the sudden reversal of it’s magnetic fields, scientists of
Christian faith had come to this conclusion centuries ago.
In
The Deluge Story in Stone, Byron C. Nelson wrote of Professor William
Whiston of Cambridge, who wrote A New Theory of The Earth in 1696. Whiston
was an advocate of the Biblical flood and his idea as to how the flood was
brought 
about is quite fascinating, especially considering what
scientists are just now finally beginning to admit might have brought
about the demise of the dinosaurs.
Nelson
wrote: "Especially characteristic of Whiston is the suggestion he offered
as to the manner in which the Deluge was brought on. This, he thought,
might have been by means of a great comet which, passing near the earth at
the propitious moment, so affected the earth by its powers of attraction
that it set the earth to wobbling and so caused the waters in the seas and
in the earths interior to flow upon the land." [21]
Another
giant in Geology was John William Dawson, knighted for his achievments as
Sir William Dawson. Dawson was a creationist geologist in the 19nth
century who believed in the Flood of Noah. He stated "Patient observation
and thought may enable us in time better to comprehend these mysteries;
and I think we may be much aided in this by cultivating an acquaintance
with the Maker and Ruler of the machine as well as with His work." Dawson,
J.W., Acadian Geology. The Geological Structure, Organic Remains, and
Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island,
1868. 2nd edition. MacMillan and Co.: London, 694pp.)
According
to Susan Sheets-Pyenson, writing for the Geological Society of America in
1998, Dawson "attracted both vehement critics and adoring acolytes for his
outspoken denunciation of Darwinian evolution." (GSA Today [Geological
Society of America ], September 1998)
Near
the end of his long and fruitful career as a geologist, Dawson had this to
say on the topic of Noah's Flood: "Further, we know now that the Deluge of
Noah is not mere myth or fancy of primitive man or solely a doctrine of
the Hebrew Scriptures. The record of the catastrophe is preserved in some
of the oldest historical documents of several distinct races of men, and
is indirectly corroborated by the whole tenor of the early history of most
of the civilized races."
"As
to the actual occurrence of the Deluge as a wide-spread catastrophe
affecting, with a few stated exceptions, the whole human race, we have
thus a concurrence of the testimony of ancient history and tradition,and
of geological and archaeological evidence, as well as of the inspired
records of the Hebrew and Christian revelation. Thus no historical event,
ancient or modern, can be more firmly established as matter of fact than
this." (1895, pp. 4ff.).Dawson, John William (1895), The Historical Deluge
in Relation to Scientific Discovery (Chicago, IL: Revell).
This
statement should make it very clear that Dawson came to believe that the
Flood was a universal catastrophe, not merely a local one.
Michael
Rogers wrote in Newsweek in 1998: “What killed the dinosaurs? Eight years
ago University of California scientists made the astonishing suggestion
that the once mighty reptiles perished after a giant asteroid, several
miles in diameter, struck Earth. The collision tossed so much dust and
smoke into the atmosphere that the climate cooled, vegetation withered and
the dinosaurs starved. . . Other researchers soon offered a counter
theory, arguing that the extinction could have been caused by gigantic
volcanic eruptions. Ash from these eruptions could have cooled the climate
and pulled up the telltale iridium from deep within the earth . . .Both
camps may be right. Last week University of Rochester geologist Asish Basu
blended asteroids and volcanoes to describe a violent yet lingering end
for the dinosaurs. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San
Francisco, Basu suggested that 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid did
smash into Earth near present-day India, triggering massive volcanic
eruptions that went on for hundreds of thousands of years. Basu’s proof
for this one-two punch is his discovery in India of quartz that, under
high magnification, shows evidence of tremendous physical impact. Such a
shock, says Basu, could only be caused by an asteroid strike. The battered
quartz lies beneath a giant lava flow, which some scientists believe began
approximately when the dinosaurs started to disappear . . .But critics
charge that Basu’s impacted quartz could have been created by the ancient
volcano itself. And others question the precise dating of his samples . .
. the exact culprit remains a mystery, the idea that global catastrophes
may cause sudden extinction has profound implications for the study of
evolution.” ( The Death of the Dinosaur: Newsweek, December 19, 1988)
There
is no reason why the fact of Noah's Flood should conflict with the meteor
or volcano theory that modern scientists are proposing. The impact of a
great asteroid could have initiated the tectonic and volcanic activity
that produced the flood, and the resulting dust and ash ascending into the
stratosphere would have mixed with the vapor canopy and condensed it into
rain. However there is one very important point to be considered when
investigating these theories.
Whether
or not a comet or an asteroid collision might have been responsible for
the Flood of Noah, God was the chief agent behind everything in the first
place. The Bible clearly states that the Flood was brought about with the
foreknowledge of God as a judgment upon a wicked race, and that it was God
Himself who brought the events to pass. This was no mere naturalistic
occurrence. When we attempt to establish a purely naturalistic explanation
for something that the Bible says was of supernatural and divine origin,
we are treading on the same ground that the evolutionists are in their
treatment of the history of life on earth. I do not wish to go down that
slippery slope. God established the rainbow in the clouds to confirm His
covenant that He would never again bring a flood to destroy the earth. Let
us remember this amid all of our human speculations.
Now, as to the evidence for
the Flood: Byron Nelson mentioned Benjamin Silliman, head of the Geology
Department of Yale University. Silliman said in 1829: “Respecting the
Deluge, there can be but one opinion: geology fully confirms the
Scriptural history of the event . . .Whales, sharks, and other fishes,
crocodiles andamphibians,the mammoth and the extinct (species of)elephant,
and rhinoceros,the hippopotamus, hyenas, tigers, deer, horses, the various
species of the bovine family and a multitude more, are found buried in
diluvium(sedimentary strata formed by great tidal action) at a greater or
less depth: and in most instances under circumstances indicating that they
were buried by the same catastrophe which destroyed them: namely a sudden
and violent deluge . . . a skeleton of a whale lay on top of the mountain
Sanhorn on the coast of the northern sea..[ 22]
As
mentioned, 99.9% of all fossils that have ever been found, except those of
insects in tree sap and animals trapped in tar pits, (and why would one
animal after another from a great variety of species run into a tar pit
except to escape something quite frightening, perhaps a one-hundred foot
tidal wave?) has been in sedimentary rock, i.e. rock formed by
compressed layers of silt, mud, and other materials deposited by
hydraulic action of swift moving water.
The
Bible declares that when the flood of Noah occurred "all of the fountains
of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened,
and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights." Notice it
does not only say in Sacred Scripture that it merely rained for forty days
and nights, but that there was clearly some kind of tremendous upheaval of
the ocean floors, along with great earthquake and tectonic activity that
violently changed the surface of the earth.
The
Genesis flood itself lasted for nearly a year, during which time the
entire surface of the earth was changed. The "fountains of the great deep"
burst forth as Earth's crust was fractured. Continents sank. Oceans were
displaced. Vast amounts of plants and animals were buried in sediments;
wave after wave of tremendous tidal currents created fossil layers of
different species, then as the waters receded from off of the face of the
earth in the later part of the flood the present mountains that we see
today were uplifted while the new ocean floors sank back down.
The
study of the process of mountain building, known as the science of
orogeny, describes four different types of mountains: Volcanic mountains,
Fold mountains, Fault block mountains, and Upwarped mountains. The above
types of mountains are good evidence that the process was not a slow and
gradual process, but the result of some sudden continental upheaval and
cataclysmic and violent action that occurred over a relatively
short period of time.
The
authors of An Introduction to Physical Science write: “The fundamental
process of mountain building remains such a mystery that the enormous mass
of data collected by scientists in the past decade serves as much to
perplex as to enlighten.” [23].
It
takes tremendous amounts of energy for a mountain range to form, and
scientists are still uncertain just how this process takes place, however
the old uniformitarian theories postulated that it took millions of years
for this to occur. With the normal amounts of sedimentation and erosion
this time scale is actually impossible. Various theories of how today’s
mountains were formed involve shifting of continental plates, mantle
boiling, convection, and contraction of the crust of the earth by thermal
energy.
The
annual amount of estimated sedimentary run-off that does occur naturally
flowing off the continents of the world into the ocean has been estimated
at 10 billion metric tons per year, which would have leveled off the
mountains and continents to sea level at least 20 times if the creation of
the great mountain ranges was by the supposed evolutionary uniformitarian
standards.
The
present mountains would have to have been raised during and within a few
years or centuries after the flood, thus being only thousands instead of
millions of years old. In Physical Anthropology, Stein and Rowe
inform us: "In the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci wrote, 'The
mountains where there are shells were formerly shores beaten by waves, and
since then they have been elevated to the heights we see today.'"
According
to the evolutionary scheme, fossils should be arranged with the oldest
near the bottom and the youngest near the top. But what of the sea shells
found at the top of the Alpine mountains?
And
what of the dinosaur bones found nearly jutting out of the surface by
Serreno in Saharan Africa and in Egypt?
Evolutionists
have invoked a host of geologic processes to explain this, such as
overthrusts, intrusions, faults, folds, and paraconformities (more on this
later), and although these processes have occured, they are more in line
with a catastrophic explanation for the history of the earth, not a slow,
uniformitarian one, and even with these events, if this was a process that
had taken place over millions of years, the dinosaur remains would have
been reduced to rubble. The evidence for their deposition points more
towards sudden burial under sediment by a great, hydraulic catastophe
within the past five to ten thousand years.
It is
known that the Sahara desert had a lush, tropical eco-system only a few
thousand years ago, which would have further led to the deterioration of
these fossil remains, thus fossils found near the surface of the earth, as
Serreno and his little group of fossil hunters have discovered lately near
the Sahara in immense numbers, could not have existed for millions or even
hundreds of thousands of years so close to the surface; the chemical
action in ground soil, even in sand at such a shallow depth, would have
obliterated these fossils within a few thousand years. (See also Darwin
quote above concerning ground percolation that would destroy fossils
buried in the earth after a few thousand years)
Hotton
wrote: “In upland areas the rapidity of weathering and predominance of
erosion drastically reduce the upland dwellers’ chances for preservation.
More often than not, their skeletal remains are either completely
destroyed by weathering or are battered to pieces by fast-running water.
Burial in local upland deposits improves their chances only slightly, for
the life expectancy of these deposits is short. Sooner or later they too
are torn up by erosion, their contents scattered and destroyed.” (Hotton,
pp. 49, ibid.)
Contrary
to popular opinion, the Grand Canyon does not have every layer of the
geologic column and the fossils that are found there are not arranged from
simple organisms at the bottom to more complex ones at the top.
Evolutionists
have claimed that they have actually found the entire geologic column in
part of North Dakota. Creationists do acknowledge that there are isolated
places on the earth where all ten systems of the Phanerozoic column do
exist, but they do not exist with the amount of soil that would suggest
that each period is as old as evolutionists suggest, and they do not cover
anywhere near the great expanses of geographic area over the surface of
the earth necessary to establish it as a universal fact.
The
geologic column is supposed to consist of successive layers of strata that
each represent millions of years of time throughout the entire earth, yet
there is less than 1% of the earths surface where they have found the
entire column in the proper order, and even in those very rare places
millions of years from many of the epochs are simply missing. If each
period represented millions of years, and the entire Phanerozoic (where
life once existed) column is at least 3,500 million years old and
encompassed the entire planet, then why is it found in only less than a
handful of places on earth?
The
geologic column itself was worked out by men in the early part of the
nineteenth century, years before any type of radiometric dating was
available, and in fact was developed by men who were creationists and who
accepted the Biblical account of the deluge. It is very rare to find any
place on earth where even half of the layers are found anywhere in the
right order, fossils of every major phyla of living creatures are found in
the lowest layers of Cambrian rock, and there are so many places
where the layers are out of place that geologists have had to use a number
of terms to explain away these discrepancies, such as non-conformities,
overthrusts, intrusions, thrust faults, folds, paraconformities, etc.
etc.[24]
This
does not mean that thrust faults and overthrusts do not actually occur.
They do, and they are not always associated with fossils. Catastrophism
would definitely predict that thrusts, overthrust, intrusions and folds
would exist, even with the Flood of Noah. After all, Scripture states that
“All the fountains of the great deep were broken up”, definitely implying
that there was tremendous tectonic and volcanic activity concurrent with
the Flood, and that afterward there were mountain building processes that
would have produced folds, thrusts, faults, etc.
There
are many mountain ranges throughout the world where the entire geologic
column is reversed, where the upper strata, consisting of billions and
billions of tons of rock, was moved (according to the evolutionary
explanation) gradually over a period of millions of years, into horizontal
position where it rests on a fairly even layer over rock that is
supposedly hundreds of millions of years youngerthat now lies underneath
it, despite the fact that there is no known force in existence that could
accomplish this feat without wearing away the entire mountain in the
process, (except tremendous hydraulic activity associated with a
cataclysmic flood that would have deposited the material in layers while
it was still in a state of solvency, followed within a few months or years
by a sudden uplift).
In
many cases the fault planes between the different layers of rock run
smoothly for many miles in a continuous, horizontal line, exhibiting no
signs of the broken stubble and breccia that should be scattered
throughout the area in profuse amounts had the older rock on top been
moved over the younger rock by the slow geologic processes that
evolutionists claim occurred over millions of years. Their formation, with
one geologic layer laid almost perfectly in horizontal fashion over the
other, often with the younger deposits underneath the older rock, could
only be explained by the successive tidal currents of a global flood
depositing the sediment in place by specific gravity beyond the scope of
anything that we see occurring today, and then afterward tremendous
tectonic activity raising these mountains above the surrounding landscape.
There is no other reasonable answer.
There
are small-scale thrusts that show sings of breccia in isolated areas, and
certain instances of folding (which would be expected even with Flood
geology), probably caused by the normal processes of faulting, but nothing
of the amount required to explain the giant formations of the size of the
Heart Mountain and South Fork thrusts, and the Swiss Alps, in addition to
the other mountain ranges throughout the world, where we do not find the
vast geologic deformity, the broken and twisted rubble, and the uneven,
fractured rock between the various layers should this have been due to a
long, gradual process without the action of vast hydraulic and
catastrophic tectonic forces associated with the Noahdic flood.
The great Matterhorn
mountain in the Alpine ranges has its layers of rock completely
inverted to the traditional time scale, a feat that should be impossible
by normal uniformitarian means. It has an Eocene layer of rock, supposedly
only 60 million years old, lying underneath the Triassic layer, supposedly
200 million years old, the Jurassic layer, supposedly 150 million years
old, and the Cretaceous layer, dated at 70-100 million years ago.
Evolutionary
geologists have presented us with the amazing story that this entire
mountain was moved virtually intact over the course of millions of years
from the African continent to the European continent! Whatever physical
reason for the cause of the flood we know from Scripture that there was
volcanic and tectonic activity of an immense scale, and of course
direct Divine interaction as to the cause of the flood is possible as
well.
The
Flood was divinely known and foretold, but that should not prevent us from
certain conjectures as to how it may have occurred, especially when these
conjectures have a sound basis in scientific evidence and do not
conflict with Scripture. Should I find that any conjecture should conflict
with Scripture, I would not hesitate to throw out the conjecture and
adhere to Scripture.
Skeptics
question how Noah would have been able to fit two of every kind of animal
onboard the Ark, and seven of every clean beast. After all, there are
literally millions of different species of plants and animals alive today.
How did Noah do it?
First
of all Noah would not have needed to take every variety of species living
today. Of the five Kingdoms of living species, he would not have needed to
take along the Monera, Protista, Fungi or Plantae (except for food). Many
of these are aquatic and had no problem surviving the Flood, while the
others would have survived on debris floating on the Flood, some possibly
in seed form.
Of
the remaining Kingdom, Animalia, Noah would not have needed to take along
any dolphins, whales, fish, or any of the creatures that lived in the sea.
In fact, he would only have needed to take along representatives of the
birds, reptiles, and mammals.
And
even this might not have been as much as would be imagined if the Biblical
concept of “kind” was closer to the genus concept than the species
concept, and in some cases even encompassed the family level. This might
be the case, or what is more probable, the species concept that we use
today in taxonomy to classify animals might actually be broader than what
we think it is. The different genus and species of cats alive today, for
instance, might really be different varieties, or breeds from one
“super-species” making up the entire cat family, and this could be true
for other varieties of the same species that are classified as separate species by
some taxonomists. They might simply be varieties of the same species, like
the different varieties that we find among dogs. Thus it is possible that
he only needed to take one pair of cat ancestors that gave birth to the
many different species or varieties of cats alive today. Most cats are
inter-fertile, and this is used by evolutionists themselves, at times, as
a definition of species.
Thus
a common ancestor of all the different types of parrots, parakeets,
conyers and other similar birds could have been taken along. A common
ancestor for the hawks, falcons, eagles and certain other birds of prey
might have been taken along. These would all have been within the Biblical
concept of “kind”. Amphibians might have lived on floating debris, which
could have been extensive, forming huge floating islands of vegetable
material.
The
largest group of animals is the Class Insecta. Many of the insects would
have survived in larval form on debris, and some winged species
undoubtedly followed the Ark as it floated over the seas. Many of the
different species of ants might have been represented by just a few
colonies that survived on the wood of the Ark or on floating debris, and
then after the Flood they migrated and developed into the various types of
ants alive today. Also, it says in the Scripture that only those animals
in whose nostrils was the breath of life would be destroyed. Insects
breath through their skin by a system of tracheal tubes, not through their
nostrils as other animals do.
Noah
would only have needed to take one common pair of bear ancestors
(creationism does acknowledge common ancestors within the species level,
and perhaps within the genus level) that would have given birth over time
after the Flood to the grizzly, polar, black and brown bears. This would
be true for many other species of life as well.
If it
is possible that the Biblical word “kinds” had a broader range than the
narrow species concept used with certain animals alive today, and is
closer to the genus level, or if the species concept is really much
broader than we think it is for many animals, then many of the dinosaur
species that paleontologists classify purely on the basis of size and
certain anatomical novelties might only be different varieties or breeds
of the same species, and when Noah took dinosaurs aboard the Ark with him,
he would not have taken full grown dinosaurs, but baby ones, perhaps he
would even have taken eggs of certain species and incubated them, so the
size problem so often brought up by doubters is easily taken care of.
Thus
a common objection of the skeptics of Scripture has no basis after a
careful examination of the facts. These objections have been the common
fodder for the "village atheist" for hundreds of years and can be easily
answered- in fact, the presumptions behind these objections are highly
illogical on the face of it.
Another
common question besides the one of how did Noah get all the animals on the
Ark is where did Noah get all the animals to put on the Ark. This type of
question belies at least a couple of assumptions: That before the Flood
all animals were distributed geographically over the face of the earth in
the same manner that they are today; That Noah only had a very limited
time to obtain the animals, and that there was very little planning and
preparation made by Noah before he embarked on his historic voyage.
First
of all, it was probable that Noah did not have to go to the ends of the
earth to find representatives of the major Families of animals that he
brought on the Ark. Fossils of many different types of plants and animals
have been found in various locations on the face of the earth that have no
correspondence to their current location. The fossils of tropical plants
have been found in the antarctic and arctic regions. Fossils of camels
have been found in the eastern parts of the United States. Fossils of
extinct horses have been found in North and South America. Rhino fossils
have been found in Europe. Fossils of species of various marsupials that
only exist in Australia have been found in South America. Mammoths and
mastodons, which are extinct relatives of the elephant have been found in
Siberia and Alaska.
This
indicates that at one time various types of animals probably shared
universal habitats and were only isolated and widely dispersed over the
face of the earth after the Flood, when seasons and climatic changes were
much more severe, which led to geographic isolation and variations within
species.
In
addition, the continents were possibly not in the same position as they
were before the break-up of the "fountains of the great deep". It says in
Scripture that the mountains rose and the oceans sank into their present
depths after the Flood. Before this all land surfaces on the face of the
earth might have been connected and animals, although separated by various
ecological zones, were not prohibited from traversing from one end of the
available existing land mass of the original "supercontinent" to the other
end.
Then
there is the question of how was Noah able to collect such an enormous
variety of animals. The Bible says that God brought to Noah two of every
kind of animal and seven of every kind of "clean" animal. Wouldn't this
have been an enormous task?
Only
if you assume that Noah only had a week or two to accomplish this and that
animals were much less numerous than they might have been before the
Flood, and that animals hid from mankind as they do today.
This
was probably not the case. The Bible says that it was only after the Flood
that animals were in fear of man and the hostility between wild animals
and man existed. This would imply that before the Flood man lived in a
grand sort of huge beastiary with animals of all species browsing nearby
him, possibly as we keep certain domesticated animals as pets today. Noah
might merely have had to set some food out to attract animals of various
species and then tended to these animals as a zookeeper does to his
beasts. He might have spent years to corral the animals and could have
created an enormous "Zoo" and then brought the young of the animals of
this Zoo onto the Ark as the time came for the Flood to approach.
It is
speculated by some theologians that Noah might have been warned about the
Flood as early as one hundred and twenty years before the time of the
actual Flood itself, so he had plenty of time to prepare. He could have
even employed laborers to help him and his family in this task.
In
addition, the Ark was roughly four hundred and fifty feet long, and held
as much storage space as over five hundred railroad boxcars, and thus
could easily have accommodated all of the major categories of terrestrial
animal species, and again, many species that are nearly identical today
anatomically and genetically, dogs and wolves and foxes for instance, or
horses and zebras, would only have needed to have been represented by one
set of parents.
Thus,
as in other typical objections of skeptics and agnostics universal, there
is a quite logical and simple explanation to these so-called discrepancies
to the Biblical account of the Flood.
Another
objection is how the many kinds of races could have come from Noah and his
three sons. This is easily dealt with as well. It is nowhere stated just
what nationality or race Noah was, or what ethnicity Noah's wife was.
After all, Noah's grandparents and great grandparents could have been a
mixture of four or more ethnic divisions. Noah's wife could have been of a
quite diverse ethnic stock than Noah was. Then there were the wives of
Noah's sons who came aboard the Ark as well. These women could each have
been of quite diverse racial background, thus Noah's grandchildren from
each of his three sons could have had ample opportunity to have been of
varied genetic stock.
In
tracing the table of nations listed in Genesis we find much from ancient
history that corroborates the names and divisions of nations that
testifies that what the Bible states concerning the origin of the races
and nations of the ancient world has much to lend it historical veracity.
There
have been disputes over how much sedimentary rock was already in existence
before the Flood of Noah. Evolutionist Glenn Morton (he makes the claim of
having been a young earth creationist at one time, but at least one former
colleague has cast doubt on the geniuneness of this dubious claim) makes
the interesting statement that "The YEC [Young Earth Creationist] paradigm
requires that there be very little sedimentary rock prior to the flood.
This is because none would have been made at creation (it would be a
deception to make rocks appear sedimentary which were in fact not
sedimentary). Thus we can calculate how much igneous rock must have been
eroded to form the presently observed volcanic rocks."
Morton's
basic contention is that a world-wide flood would have released toxic
amounts of mercury from the basaltic and granitic rock that would have
poisoned any life on earth that survived outside of the Ark, such as fish,
vegetation floating on the surface on mats, etc.
Morton's
reasoning is seriously flawed on a couple of counts.
First,
he makes the presumption that creationists claim that all sedimentary
rocks were created during the Flood of Noah. While creationists believe
that most fossiliferous
rocks were formed during the Flood, all
sedimentary rocks were not necessarily fossiliferous
before the Flood.
Morton
has either misread Genesis where it states that prior to the Flood, during
the Third Day of the creation week God separated the land from the waters,
and this could surely have created sedimentary rocks from the tremendous
tectonic processes taking place along with the hydraulic action, or alse
he has somehow assumed that Young Earth Creationism demands that God
separated the land from the waters in an instant of time on the Third Day
and that there were no geologic and hydraulic processes going on in the
earth during this process.
His
second mistake is denying that God could well have made sedimentary rock
with an appearance of age. This would not be deceptive, any more than when
Christ made wine instantly from water with the appearance of age. Both
processes, the hydraulic processes on the third day, and the instantaneous
fiat of God's Word could have worked together to have formed sedimentary
rock before the Flood.
osaurs, the
largest land animals that ever existed, and their fellow reptiles the
pterosaurs and plesiosaurs. These great beasts once roamed the earth, flew
through the air and swam in the seas. We know that these huge reptiles are
now extinct, however extinction, which is the very opposite of the origin
of a species, throws no light on the origin of the dinosaurs, which we are
no closer to solving in evolutionary terms than we were in Darwin’s day.