Once Upon a Time – Part III

Continuing with the single most important geologic event in history, that of Noah’s Flood, and why it was important for evolutionism to replace it, we should keep in mind that as far as science is concerned, it should be remembered that events of the past are not reproducible, and are, therefore, inaccessible to the scientific method. 
    Neither uniformitarianism nor catastrophism can actually be proved scientifically. Nevertheless, the Flood model fits all the geologic facts more directly and simply, with a smaller number of qualifications and secondary assumptions, than does the uniformitarian model. 

In fact, native global flood stories are documented as history or legend in almost every region on earth. Old world missionaries reported their amazement at finding remote tribes already possessing legends with tremendous similarities to the Bible's accounts of the worldwide flood. Hans Schindler Bellamy in Moons, Myths and Men (1936), estimates that altogether there are over 500 Flood legends worldwide. Ancient civilizations such as (China, Babylonia, Wales, Russia, India, America, Hawaii, Scandinavia, Sumatra, Peru, and Polynesia) all have their own versions of a giant flood, that are frequently linked by common elements that parallel the Biblical account. These events include the warning of the coming flood, the construction of a boat in advance, the storage of animals, the inclusion of family, and the release of birds to determine if the water level had subsided. The overwhelming consistency among flood legends found in distant parts of the globe indicates they were derived from the same origin—the Bible—but oral transcription has changed the details through time.

Fossils are an obvious indicator of catastrophism. Fossils in the sedimentary rocks, the depositional processes had to have been rapid, or fossils could not have been preserved in them
    To become fossilized, a plant or animal must  usually have hard parts, such as bone, shell, or wood. It must be buried quickly to prevent decay and must be undisturbed throughout the long process. And the term 'fossilization' refers to a variety of often complex processes that enable the preservation of organic remains within the geological record:
1. Rapid and permanent burial/entombment. This protects the specimen from any biological or environmental disturbance.
2. Oxygen deprivation. This limits the extent of decay and scavenging.
3. Continued sediment accumulation. Eliminates the surface from eroding and preserves the long-term burial.
4. Absence of excessive heating or compression. This preserves the fossil from destruction.
    Fossil evidence is typically preserved within sediments deposited beneath water, partly because the conditions outlined above occur more frequently in these environments, and also because the more than 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water. Even fossils derived from land, including dinosaur bones and organisms preserved within amber (fossilized tree resin) were ultimately preserved in sediments deposited beneath water, i.e., wetlands, lakes, rivers, estuaries or swept out to sea.
     All of this should tell the most naïve person that a gigantic Flood was necessary in order to preserve all the fossils in water as we find today.

A fish dies naturally and drops to the seafloor. If undisturbed, it remains exposed and within a very short time is scavenged by other fish or crabs, its bone disturbed, currents scatter the remains. In this case, no fossil remains

However, if a fish is buried by an underwater landslide, or by flooding that collapses seabeds, washed away and covered by slides, etc., it then remains undisturbed and over time its moisture is driven out and the fish remains are covered within forming rock, which later is pushed upward where some small portion is exposed and found to contain a fossil impressed into the hardened rock—a remineralized copy of the original skeleton
    The importance of this fact is obvious when one realizes that the identification of the geologic "age" of any given sedimentary rock depends solely upon the assemblage of fossils which it contains. The age does not depend on radiometric dating, as is obvious from the fact that the geologic age system had been completely worked out and most major formations dated before radioactivity was even discovered—the fact that later radiometiric dating proved the column wrong in many cases was conveniently set aside by evolutionists so as not to disturb "science’s" commitment to evolution.
    It may also be of interest to note that neither does the age depend upon the mineralogic or petrologic character of a rock, as is obvious from the fact that rocks of all types of composition, structure, and degree of hardness can be found in any "age." It does not depend upon vertical position in the local geologic strata, since rocks of any "age" may and do rest horizontally and conformably on rocks of any other age.
    No, despite what geologists would have us believe, a rock is dated solely by its fossils in the pattern of the geologic column which came into being long before any type of modern dating system (radiometric dating) was invented.
    When science commits itself solely to uniformitarianism and turns a deaf ear to catastrophism, one wonders at how they view the very thing they ignore that occurs all around us throughout the years.

White Cliffs of Dover lost millions of tons of rock cliff
   In this realm of cataclysmic events, three years ago a large section of the white cliffs of Dover collapsed into the English Channel following a "substantial" rockfall. Tonnes of the cliff face sheared off near an area known as Crab Bay, but no one was injured. Dover Coastguard said a full survey had yet to be carried out to determine the exact amount and length of cliff that crumbled. In other areas volcanoes have collapsed, islands appeared and disappeared, and sea creatures have been killed in various ways. Fossils, of course, are part of that historic record.
    Consider, for a moment, that if one of Britain’s greatest fears were to take place, the collapsing of one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries. While it is considered highly unstable at the moment, should it collapse in one  block, some 20 cubic kilometers of rock, weighing 500 billion tonnes (twice the size of the Isle of Wight) would fall into water almost 4 miles deep and create an undersea wave 2000 feet tall. Within five minutes of the landslide, a dome of water about a mile high would form and then collapse, before the Mega Tsunami fanned out in every direction, traveling at speeds of up to 500 mph. A 330-feet wave would strike the western Sahara in less than an hour, the eastern coast of Brazil to New York and Boston in 7 hours (the speed of a jet airliner), and to Britain in six hours, annihilating everything within 20 miles of the coast and traveling up both coasts of the Thames at 200 miles per hour.

For for those who wonder if this could actually happen, we have the 2004 Indonesia 9.3 underwater earthquake in the Indian Ocean creating a tsunami that killed a reported 200,000 people in 14 countries.
    The point is, even in small cataclysmic disasters, plant and animal life is disrupted and fossils, over time, created, telling us a story we can hardly understand coming on the scene so late in history. If we judge the past from the present, then we get one answer—uniformitarianism; but if we judge the past from what we know, we get another answer—cataclysmic events, such as the Flood.
    The problem lies in that the only chronometric scale applicable in geologic history for the stratigraphic classification of rocks and for dating geologic events exactly is furnished by the fossils. Owing to the irreversibility of evolution, they offer an unambiguous time-scale for relative age determinations and for world-wide correlation of rocks, because the existence and identification of distinctive geologic ages is based on fossils in the sedimentary rocks and the very existence of fossils in sedimentary rocks is prima facie evidence that each such fossiliferous rock was formed by aqueous catastrophism, such as the Flood.

L-R: Moses, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin
    So one is left to decide upon Moses (left) and the Flood Account as found in Genesis, the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, and on more than 500 Flood legends around the world; or whether one agrees with Charles Lyell (Center) and Charles Darwin (right) and reject the Flood and cataclysmic events entirely, whose avowed primary or at least secondary purpose in their stand is to deny the existence of God.