Creation Facts of Life (29 page)
Summarizing a year of media buzz,
Discover
magazine for April 2006 recounted the discovery of (emphases added) "
soft, fresh-looking tissue
inside a
T. rex
femur," a fossil presumed to be 80 million years old that contained
"lifelike tissue"
that was
"stretchy like a wet scab
on human skin," with
"supple bone cells"
and "translucent
blood vessels
."
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The article scoffs at creationists who propose the evidence suggests the dinosaur femur was not millions of years old, but the paleobiologist, Mary Schweitzer, who did the analysis said, "If you take a blood sample and you stick it on a shelf, you have nothing recognizable in about a week. So why would there be anything left in dinosaurs?"
Paleontologist Jack Horner, science consultant for the
Jurassic Park
films and Schweitzer's mentor said, "There may be a lot of things out there that we've missed because of our assumption of how preservation works." Indeed, the article talked about how thinking among paleontologists has been stunted by "faith among scientists" (i.e., evolutionists) and "dogma" and even by competition for funding and by peer review (read that "peer pressure" or "censorship") in journal publications. One reviewer told Schweitzer he didn't care what the data said, he knew (by his faith in millions of years of struggle and death?) that what she was finding wasn't possible. When Schweitzer wrote back and said, "Well, what data would convince you?" the reviewer said, "None." That makes a good case for opening up the discussion of origins to more than just "evolution only." It's no wonder the article was titled "Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery."
In reality, all the media hype was "old news." Blood cells had been discovered years earlier in the famous South Dakota
T. rex
called "Sue." According to the article (but otherwise forgotten by the media), the National Science Foundation funded a grant to study these earlier
T. rex
blood cells, and "timed the announcement to coincide with the theatrical release of
Jurassic Park.
" Actually, many "ancient fossils" have been recovered with organic substances remarkably intact.
Under federal permit, a team of five "creation explorers" brought back from the permafrost on the North Slope of Alaska about 200 pounds (90 kg) of "fresh-looking" dinosaur bones containing organic material (and we have a few on display at our Creation Adventures Museum in Arcadia, Florida).
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Evolutionists believe the ice has been there only thousands of years, so the ice could not be used to explain the preservation of dinosaur bones assumed to be at least "65 million" years old. These bones, and many other fossils that include some little-altered original material, can be analyzed for DNA and protein.
During the 1990s, analysis of DNA and protein in fossils fueled fables in the media of "dinosaur cloning" and dreams among evolutionists that molecular studies might provide evidence for branching descent that the anatomical evidence had failed to provide, but scientists finally convinced evolutionists and the media that DNA decomposes in thousands of years, not millions, and protein decomposes even faster, even under ideal conditions. In a move worthy of praise,
Discover
magazine admitted that its previous articles touting DNA and protein analysis of fossils must be in error. Without explaining how, they suggested contamination as the source of DNA and protein in fossils. There is another possibility. Perhaps the DNA and protein really do belong to the fossils as originally reported by careful researchers, but the fossils are only thousands, not millions, of years old.
Even more exciting are new studies on carbon-14 reported by Dr. John Baumgardner. While a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratories, Dr. Baumgardner was featured in
U.S. News and World Report
126
as the world's leading expert on supercomputer simulations of plate tectonics.
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His carbon-14 studies were done as part of a group of physicists and geologists investigating
Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth
, the RATE team. Because carbon-14 has such a short half-life (5,730 years), evolutionists would not usually look for it in fossils thought to be more than just thousands of years old. Baumgardner did look for it — and found it — in the carbon of "ancient" coal taken from layers with "evolutionary ages" of about 300, 100, and 50 "million years" (roughly late trilobite, dinosaur, and giant mammal "ages"). The same professional radiocarbon dating labs used by evolutionists found carbon-14 at about four times the minimum detectable amount, and they found similar amounts in fossils taken from the three major levels in the geologic column (Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic). The data suggest, therefore, that not only are the fossils
only thousands of years old
, but also that they are
all roughly the same age, formed at the same time!
WOW!
To add thrill to excitement, Baumgardner also found carbon-14 in deep earth diamonds from seven African mines! The seven RATE team scientists found other results just as dramatic in studies of radioactive decay involving uranium, polonium, rubidium-strontium isochrons, helium diffusion, etc. The results of their eight-year research project have been published in two technical volumes for specialists in the appropriate scientific fields,
128
but they have also been made available to scientifically interested laymen in book and DVD form as
Thousands …Not Billions
.
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If only the academic mind could be opened a crack (and its heart freed from fear of ridicule), there would be in these references a feast for the soul (and God at the door).
It's certainly no wonder that Darwin called fossils "the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory [of evolution]." A century and a half of fossil discovery has confirmed Darwin's worst fears. The kinds of life found as fossils suggest living things were created
well-designed
to multiply
after kind
. Rates of formation of fossils and of the rock layers in the geologic column suggest they formed
rapidly
and
recently
on a
catastrophic scale
.
The Grand Canyon
There's no doubt about it: the best place to see, test, and put together all these ideas about stacks of fossil-bearing rock is the Grand Canyon.
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The Grand Canyon is an awesome gash in the earth, running for over 250 miles (400 km) along the Colorado River in the northwest corner of Arizona. The Canyon is about a mile (1.6 km) deep, and averages about 10 miles (16 km) from north to south rims. The walls of the narrow, zig-zag inner gorge expose tilted and faulted Precambrian rock, while the walls of the outer and upper gorge are streaked with thick, colorful, horizontal bands of fossil-bearing rock, representing roughly the "bottom half" of the geologic column.
I once believed and taught, like so many others, that the rock layers in the Grand Canyon represented stages in evolution laid down over vast eons of time. After leading over 40 week-long backpacking trips through the canyon, studying the rock layers and fossils close-up, I'm ready to stake the place out with Bible verses! What I once assumed was a record of a
lot of time,
now looks like evidence of a
lot of water
instead!
Actually, the canyon seems to provide an excellent contrast between rocks laid down slowly and gradually on a local scale and those laid down rapidly and catastrophically on a colossal scale. Evolutionists have argued that fossil-bearing rocks were largely laid down in local floods and/or by rivers dumping sediments into lakes or seas. Those processes do build up sediment layers; the Mississippi River, the classic example, is continuing to build up its delta right before our eyes.
When the Mississippi is flowing full and fast (often after spring rains and snow melt), gravel is carried relatively far. Later, often during the drier summer season, the river slows, so that sand is dumped where gravel was, then silt on the sand. Such slow and gradual processes produce "lumpy" sediment layers that thicken and thin over short distances and
contain virtually no fossils.
Actually, the Precambrian sedimentary rocks in the inner gorge probably
do
represent sediment laid down somewhat slowly and gradually. Like Mississippi delta deposits, these units thicken and thin, disappear and reappear, over short distances, and they contain very few fossils. They don't have the
layer-cake
appearance — deep and wide horizontal bands of fossil-rich rocks — characteristic of
broad and rapid
flood deposits. Instead, they have the
swirl-cake
appearance — lumps of fossil-poor rock — like the sediment layers being produced at the mouth of the Mississippi River right now. To biblical creationists/Flood geologists, the Precambrian rocks at the Grand Canyon look like pre-Flood rocks formed by processes occurring like those today during the many centuries before the Flood.
Then the Flood came! There are still countless research projects to be done and questions to be answered, but let me share with you a simple model for the basic formation of the Grand Canyon, that ties together most of the ideas we've been discussing. Please treat these ideas as a stimulus to thinking, not, by any means, as the last word on the Grand Canyon.
Although most people relate the Flood to "40 days and 40 nights of rain," the Bible (Gen. 7) says that the Flood
began
when "the fountains of the great deep burst forth." It seems that
most
of the water came from below, not from above. Few people realize what a tremendous amount of water is found in molten rock (magma) trapped beneath the earth's surface! When a hole or crack develops in the solid rock capping the more liquid magma, the pressure release causes the super-super hot water to flash into steam, and "BOOM" we have an upward-outward rush of vapor, gas, dust, and ash, producing a volcanic explosion and/or an outpouring of liquid rock on the surface (lava)! A geologist looking for a way to start a worldwide flood could hardly come up with a better mechanism than breaking up the "fountains of the great deep!"
As the volcanic fountains opened up in what is now the Grand Canyon area, the colossally stupendous force just pushed the pre-Flood rock aside and tilted it up. The Precambrian rocks in the inner gorge are indeed cracked and tilted, and igneous intrusions cut across and between them, marking, I am suggesting, the beginning of Noah's flood, recorded for our study.
The first Flood current in the area came with such tremendous force that it sheared off the tilted Precambrian rocks in virtually a straight line, producing the so-called "angular unconformity" and "great unconformity" diagrammed in Figure 34. Science tells us that the tilt-and-shear could
not
have happened slowly and gradually. One of the tilted units (the reddish Hakatai Shale) is so soft and crumbly you can dig it out with your fingernails. Another is so incredibly hard (the Shinumo Quartzite) that researchers can barely knock off a piece with a hammer. Had the rocks been tilted up slowly and eroded gradually by raindrops and rivers, the crumbly rock would be all gone, leaving valleys, and the hard unit would stick up in ridges and hillocks.
Instead,
it looks as if the Flood current that eventually deposited the Tapeats came in with such titanic force that the hard and soft rocks were sheared off almost equally in a nearly straight line.
 |
Figure 34. |
Actually, the Shinumo Quartzite is so hard that parts of it
do
occasionally stick up into the Tapeats, but the force of the Flood was so great that it broke off huge boulders of this incredibly hard rock, picked the boulders up, and carried them miles (kilometers) away before finally dropping them! Wow! Even the Colorado River today, a classic example of strength and power, is unable to move lesser boulders downstream from the mouths of its side canyons.
Once the Flood got started, it began to deposit rock layers deep and wide and full of fossils, the "layer-cake" effect characteristic of floods — but on a scale far greater than anything recorded by human observers (except Noah and his family).
We do get some inkling of the kind of geological processes involved from the study of underwater landslides called turbidity currents. In 1929, an earthquake loosened sediment lying on the sea floor off Newfoundland near the continental slope. The loosened sediment roared down the slope at freeway speeds, up to 60 miles (100 km) per hour! How do we know? The dense, muddy slurry flowing along the bottom severed transatlantic telephone cables one after the other, so the time of travel could be calculated from the time telephone service stopped on each line. The roaring sediment spread out over the deep ocean's abyssal plain, covering an area of hundreds of square miles (kms) in a matter of
hours!
Many boulder flows, megabreccias, and other deposits which once mystified geologists are now interpreted, even by evolutionists, as huge layers deposited rapidly by turbidity currents. Some evolutionists estimate that perhaps 40 percent of the geologic column was formed by these stupendous flows!