All righty, then. Where were we? Ah, yes: when last we delved Earth Science 4th Edition’s pages, the authors were trying to tell us about their One Magic Ice Age Wot Explains Away the Physical Evidence and that Job Really Probably Lived Through Cuz He Mentions Snow a Few Times. Next on their agenda: they’re gonna tell us about The Diluvial Geologic Column.
We know that there was at least one continent where everything lived when God created the earth. Creationary geologists think that the continent foundation or basement was probably the rock we call granite, which makes up the deepest rocks under the continents today.
Hoo nelly. So much evidence here they don’t at all understand how rocks or continents work. Folks: continents are heavy. The roots under the thickest crust run deep. What happens when rocks are under tremendous heat and pressure? Well, they don’t stay cheerfully unaltered. Granite is not the deepest rock, kids. I don’t think these folks even grok what basement rocks are.
They yammer about how they can totes see the “key geologic phases of the earth” if they just look at the strata “from a biblical viewpoint.” They think they see the vast majority of rocks either forming in or being redeposited by the Flood. They have no real idea how minerals precipitate from a solution to form masses of rock. They don’t know how consolidation happens. The things they think happened in a single Flood year don’t happen that fast and/or in those kinds of conditions (here’s one example). We’ve studied this. We’ve done experiments. We know.
Of course, they admit the Flood didn’t create the entire geologic column. There was that mythical post-Flood ice age, carving valleys and dumping glacial detritus all over the place. Never mind that we have evidence for multiple ice ages – just put on your Biblical Blinders, kids, and you’ll see there’s only one!
Gah.
Anyway, then they give us Tasman Walker’s idea of a geologic column. It’s microscopic compared to the geologic column those icky secular scientists have put together after centuries of research. It goes, from oldest rocks to youngest:
- The Creation Event. You know how the stuff at the bottom of our column has no fossils because life hadn’t evolved yet? Creationists handwave that absence by saying there was no death. Also, Tasman Walker seems to be completely unaware of metamorphic rocks, since he says those strata are mostly “the basement granite rocks and any original soils that remained undisturbed and covered during the next two phases, then turned to rock.”
- The Lost-World Era. So, this is after Adam and Eve partook of the wrong produce. So yeah, shit was dying, but there are still no fossils cuz “sediments rarely collected fast enough to rapidly bury dead things to form fossils.”
- The Flood Event. The Top Galah of the creationist column. They think the vast majority of the geologic column formed here. Yep. Most of those miles upon miles upon miles of sandstone, limestone, mudstone, coal beds, volcanic rocks, and more all were deposited and lithified in less than a year. And they claim most of the fossils come from these layers “because all land animals and plants alive at the time of the Flood (and not in the Ark) were killed and many were quickly buried.”
- The New-World Era. They think most of the rocks after the Flood were formed “by local catastrophic processes such as volcanoes and local flooding.” And there are “very few fossils,” which will shock the shit out of paleontologists who keep finding abundant fossils of things like Pleistocene mammals that even creationists claim existed only after the Flood.
- Recent Sediments. Modern loose sediments. Oh, hey, there are fossils in it! Whoops! They forgot to mention that volcanoes are still catastrophically creating rocks.
Which is embarrassing, because that was one of their big points on the previous page:
I’m so sorry. I should have warned you to remove liquids from your mouth before viewing. I hope no one’s keyboard was destroyed. Look, now that you’ve already got that out of the way, let me quote their coup d’état before you take another drink:
The Bible provides a much more logical and orderly explanation for a changing Earth, rather than describing an endlessly changing planet with no direction to its history.
You poor silly creationist gits. It does have a direction: forward. Everything’s moving from the past to the future. I’m sorry you can’t deal with the fact it hasn’t got a particular destination in mind, but that’s not reality’s problem.
Anyway. You may have noticed that Tasman Walker’s work bears no resemblance to a professional geologist’s. That’s because he isn’t one. He’s an electrical engineer. Now, geology is quite friendly to laypeople, and plenty of folk whose degrees are in other fields have made important contributions to it, but if you’re intending to overthrow the entire established geologic column, you’d best be doing some serious studying in the discipline first. Otherwise, you end up with nonsense like the above.
I’m not going to debunk it in detail. That’s been done by a really-real geologist. And I’m not going to point out all the ways even creationists with professional degrees in the geosciences fail to make their models work. It’s all right here in this lovely paper, where you can sit back and watch Flood Geology get defeated by… Flood Geology.
Better Christians than these have already shown how the fossil record can be reconciled with creationist claims. They’ve already shown how these rocks couldn’t possibly all form in that Flood. I don’t have to do a damned thing except point and laugh.
Next, they’ll be telling us what they think we think of tectonics. Oh, joy.
