Misconceptions about the Geologic Column – Part IV

Continuing from the previous post regarding the misconceptions people generally have about geology and the geologic column.
    The geologic timescale we know today was not added to the column until after the development of radiometric dating techniques. Lyell and others had promoted the idea of millions of years of geologic history, but dates were not assigned to given layers until much later. Working on the assumptions of naturalism and uniformitarianism, the rock record was interpreted from these starting points. By the time radiometric dating techniques were implemented, the idea of millions of years of earth history had already become an established scientific “fact.”

Using uniformitarian assumptions—postulating that Earth's geologic processes acted in the same manner and with essentially the same intensity in the past as they do in the present and that such uniformity is sufficient to account for all geologic change—the radiometric dating techniques are put forward as support for the timescale of the standard geologic column.
    It should be kept in mind that as ideas on the formation and age of the earth changed, the ages assigned to the layers of the geologic column changed along with them. Different radiometric dating techniques have been developed to date the rocks, and thus the fossils in adjacent layers, but the use of index fossils is still the primary method of identifying and describing the strata in the rock record.
    If the ages determined for a fossil do not fit the presuppositions, the ages are often massaged until they fit within evolutionary thinking. Far from being independent from geological uniformitarianism, biological evolution is supported by the ages and the ages are supported by the fossils and their supposed evolution. The dating game played by anthropologists to make the fossils fit the expected dates is as unscientific and subjective as one could imagine.
    Thus, we find that the geologic column is not an independent measurement criteria at all, but an arm of the evolutionary means of selling the public on the age of the Earth and eliminating God form the equation of creation. In this way, if a measurement does not validate the geologic column, it is changed until it does—if more than one date results from the testing, the one closest to the geological column prescription is chosen, even if more show a vastly different age. It is the geologic column that holds sway over the concept of geology, not what is actually found or actually dated from testing.
    Another problem with the geologic column is where an entire species of animals is found out of place in the column and what evolutionists have to do to warrant that finding. Take dinosaurs, for example since it is clear that dinosaur fossils are usually found in the same layers as gymnosperm plant fossils (a vascular plant having seeds that are not enclosed in an ovary; a conifer or cycad), and not angiosperms (flowering plants that produce seeds enclosed within a carpel—such as herbaceous plants, shrubs, grasses, and most trees). While evolutionists claim this is because of a time difference (placement within the geologic scale), it does not have to be—it could simply be an environmental factor.

As an example, dinosaurs may have preferred a habitat of gymnosperm forests, while mammals tended to live in angiosperm areas—how would anyone know that a time factor was not the issue, but an environmental one. Thus, the buffalo preferred open plains and did not use forests as habitats. We know that only because we could observe that. With dinosaurs, it is all guesswork.
    The problem is, such out-of-place fossils do exist, such as mammals in the dinosaur layers. But to answer that, evolutionists claim that these out-of-place mammals were really “proto-mammals,” that is the first of their kind on their way to evolution. In that case, rabbits simply did not live in the gymnosperm forests, and the existence of a rabbit fossil in the dinosaur layers becomes very unlikely, though not impossible. There is an old “joke” which asks, “Why do polar bears not eat penguins,” with the obvious answer being that they don’t live in the same part of the world. If this were true in a pre-Flood world, we would not expect to find fossil polar bears with fossil penguins.

This is why when any display of a dinosaur that is placed with plants, it typically shows the dinosaurs walking among ferns or cycads (above). There usually aren’t any grasses in the display. Why not? Because according to the geological column, grasses and dinosaurs didn’t live at the same time. After all, dinosaurs mostly died out by the end of the Cretaceous period, which was supposed to have closed about 65 million years ago. According to Christopher Potter, grasses didn’t evolve until much later (You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, Harper, 2010, p245).
    There is also the absolute certainty within the evolutionary circle, which shows up in the geologic column. Take, for instance, the writing in Potter’s work: “Rabbits and hares appear 55 million years ago. The Himalayas begin to rise 50 million years ago. The face of the earth looks recognizably as it is now, except that Australasia is attached to Antarctica. Bats, mice, squirrels, and many aquatic birds (including herons and storks) appear during this period, as do shrews, whales, and modern fish. All major plants make their appearance and grasses evolve.”
    Notice how certain the author is. He is telling us the story of the history of life as if he is watching it happen. According to his “observations,” grasses didn’t evolve until about 50 million years ago, long after the dinosaurs were extinct.
    This kind of certainty is rampant in evolutionary writings. For example, in The Encyclopedia of Earth (Environmental Information Coalition and the National Council for Science and the Environment, Washington DC), we find written: “The evolution and spread of grasses undoubtedly resulted from their ability to adapt to seasonally dry habitats created as tropical-deciduous forests developed in the Eocene (58 to 34 million years ago). Considering their importance and taxonomic diversity, grasses have a relatively poor fossil record. While the earliest potential fossil grass pollen was described from late Cretaceous sediments, the oldest reliable megafossil grass fossils were spikelets and inflorescences from the latest Paleocene 58 million years ago. These were primitive proto-bamboos with broad leaves, quite unlike the narrow-leaf modern grasses of desert grasslands and deserts.”
    It should be kept in mind, as is often the case, current research is demonstrating just how wrong this evolution-inspired reasoning is. Back in 2005, Vandana Prasad and colleagues published some startling results based on their examination of fossilized dinosaur dung (called coprolite).

The assumption of what a Titanosaur dinosaur would have looked like

They think that the fossilized dung came from titanosaurs, in which they found silica structures called phytoliths in the fossilized dung. These microscopic structures are produced when plants decay, and typically, one can identify the type of plant from the structure of the phytolith. They found phytoliths typical of the kinds of plants usually depicted with dinosaurs, but they also found phytoliths that they claimed could have only come from some form of grass! Since grasses weren’t supposed to have evolved back then, it was a bit of a surprise to find their phytoliths in dinosaur coprolite. After all, how could dinosaurs have eaten plants that hadn’t evolved yet? (Vandana Prasad, et al, “Dinosaur Coprolites and the Early Evolution of Grasses and Grazers,” Science, vol 310, iss 5751, 2005, pp1177-1180).
    Typically, when evolutionary reasoning is tested by the data, it is rarely confirmed. But that is not to say that evolutionists don’t have answers—in this case, they just claim that their results “require that substantial grass evolution must have taken place during the time of the dinosaurs.” Now the hypothesis of evolution is so plastic that it can certainly be remolded to allow for grasses to have evolved with the dinosaurs rather than with the mammals, as has been so confidently asserted for so long. It is not that this is a problem, but it does point out that evolutionists will adjust their previous dogma to include changes they cannot dismiss in any other way—just another example of the faultiness of conclusions based on the geological column.

An illustration of a cross section where a (yellow circle) group is out of formation in proper groups of formation in a geologic column

We need to keep in mind that all of this merely shows that the geologic column, as claimed by evolutionists and geologists, is not as set as claimed, and in fact, we could go on and on about all the errors that have been found and reported. These problems merely show that the age of the Earth is not set, there are numerous problems with all geologic dating systems and pre-set dating systems. When we rely on the Lord, which he dictated dates and times to Moses who dutifully wrote them down in the ages of the Patriarchs as found in Genesis, we are going to come much closer to the dating of the Earth than we ever will following the precepts of man in the geologic system.