ShallowTime

Planetary Transgression

 

Note: This was originally written as a prelude to my chapters on the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and early urbanization periods.  It is a work in progress, and will be published, Lord willing, as part of the second volume of a planned series on the New Courville perspective.  (Updated 1/8/09, 1/29/09.)

 

Note: Added 10/3/09: Looks like we Flood theorists aren’t the only ones who believe the ocean had a lot more to do with mass extinctions than uniformitarian geologists have so far allowed.  See:

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080615142247.htm

 

By Vern Crisler

Copyright, 2007

Rough Draft

 

1.  Theory of the Earth

2.  The Geological “Ages”

3.  Mass Extinctions

4.  When Life Nearly Died

5.  Re-imagining the Flood

6.  Geological Controversies

7.  Lamarck versus Darwin

8.  Darwin’s Problem

9.  Secrets of the Ice Age

10.   Bones of Contention

 

 

1.  Theory of the Earth

 

An interpretation of the geological data in light of the Bible’s narrative of the Flood would constitute a “sacred” theory of the earth.  In the past, those who held to a sacred theory included Nicolaus Steno, William Whiston, Thomas Burnet, John Woodward, and in more modern times, George Price, Byron Nelson, and Henry Morris.  The question arises, is the universal Flood only an element of a sacred theory of the earth, or can it also be part of a secular theory?  A “secular” theory of the earth would posit a near universal deluge, but would not trace its cause to divine action.  It would thus hold to uniformity of causation in earth history, but not to uniformity of rates.  The chief representative of this during the 19^th century was Henry Howorth, who rejected the biblical narrative of Creation and Flood, but nonetheless believed in a near universal flood.  (Cf., Howorth’s The Mammoth and the Flood, 1887.)  I’m unaware of any modern evolutionary geologist who would accept a Flood theory, whether secular or not.

 

Many who’ve been raised on a steady diet of uniformitarian geology or Darwinian evolutionary thinking will be tempted to dismiss the idea of a universal cataclysm as unworthy of serious discussion.  This would be premature, however, for after years of neglect and banishment, the idea of non-uniformity of rates has made a strong comeback.  In fact, books on mass extinctions, on highly destructive meteorite or asteroid impacts, and on extensive volcanism in the past, are part of mainstream geology nowadays, and are even part of popular culture.  Science fiction writers and environmentalists posit a “sixth” extinction, a reference that assumes previous mass extinctions in earth history.  Two of the most astonishing extinction levels were the end-Permian and the K-T (the one that killed the dinosaurs).  Whether the “sixth” extinction turns out to be a result of an alien invasion, or of “global warming,” there can no longer be any doubt that the concept of uniformity of rates in earth history is no longer accorded uncritical acceptance.  (For a critique of uniformitarianism by someone who cannot be accused of friendliness toward creationism or flood geology, see, Stephen J. Gould, “Toward the Vindication of Punctuational Change,” in W. Berggren & J. Van Couvering, eds., Catastrophes and Earth History: the New Uniformitarianism, 1984, pp. 10ff; see also, L. Dingus & T. Rowe, The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution and the Origins of Birds, 1998, p. 46.)

 

There is no reason why an atheist, agnostic, or local Flood theorist should reject non-uniformitarian events.  Nor is there any good reason to reject catastrophic process involving water.  Local Flood theorists are usually Christians who try to accommodate the biblical narrative of the Flood with modern geological theory.  By localizing the Flood, they are saying the Flood had no geological significance.  Let us call this the “Flood-lite” theory.  Atheists and agnostics, of course, will reject a Flood theory based on the Bible, but I don’t see why this necessarily entails a rejection of Flood theory per se.  Such a theory would stand or fall like any other theory¾on the basis of evidence or lack thereof.

 

In this section, I’m not attempting to prove that the Flood happened, but only that it’s not as far-fetched as some might think.  The following descriptions of the geology of the earth have been separated out from their uniformitarian context.  Obviously, the author of these quotes would by no means agree with such a procedure, for the quotations are “out of context.”  I’ve done this on purpose, however, because I want the reader to see what the raw data looks like before any interpretation is placed upon it in terms of time, geological age, or whatever.  I’ve had to use plenty of dot, dot, dots to do this so the reader is forewarned that the quotations leave out age and time.  The source is the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol 1, Part 1, 1970; hereafter CAH:

 

“[T]he European platform has been repeatedly and extensively transgressed by shallow epicontinental seas….[The basement complex in Russia] is deeply buried beneath thick layers of sediment.”  (CAH, p. 9.)

 

“[The Hercynides mountain building period] came to an end…when the sea once more transgressed from the Tethys far and wide over Europe.  The continent was almost completely inundated…and over most of the submerged area very substantial thicknesses of pure soft limestone accumulated—the familiar chalk of both sides of the English Channel”  (CAH, p. 11.)

 

“In Hercynian Europe almost all the upstanding areas had by now passed under the sea.  The Bohemian upland was covered by shallow-water sandstones….”  (CAH, p. 11.)

 

“Beyond the Urals the…seas spread over the Turanian depression into western Siberia….”  (CAH, p. 11.)

 

“As we have already seen, it was at this same time that the Tethys overflowed its southern shores widely into Saharan Africa and Arabia.  It is literal truth to say that at this time the waters of the Tethys reached their high-water mark, and, since much of the Americas and Australia was then under the sea also, it may well be that at no other moment…have the continents been so reduced in area by inundation.”  (CAH, pp. 11-12.)

 

“[T]he great bulk of the Tethyan sediments were laid down on continental foundations which became so deeply buried that in effect they were depressed to depths comparable with those of the oceans.”  (CAH, p. 13.)

 

“[S]edimentation of a new kind began in many areas.  Thick monotonous sequences were laid down in which grey unfossiliferous muds…alternate with micaceous sands….[Such] Flysch deposition is now associated with the uprise of individual fold belts within the geosyncline.  Material eroded from the rising ranges is rapidly deposited at a great variety of depths without ever having been sorted by stream or wave action.  Much of it has been deposited from great sub-marine mud-flows or ‘turbidity currents.’”  (CAH, pp. 13-14.)

 

“Once the folds had been erected into mountain ranges erosion by rain and rivers immediately set about destroying them.  This fact, too, is recorded in the sedimentary record by deposits of distinctive character—the so-called molasse—essential bed-loads of streams, laid down as sands or pebble beds on land or in shallow water.”  (CAH, p. 14.)

 

“In one of these [molasse deposits], near Turin, boulders of gneiss, gabbro and serpentine testify to the torrential nature of the transporting streams….”  (CAH, p. 23.)

 

“A remarkable feature of Eurasian geography…was the flooding of an immense tract from Bohemia and Hungary through Galicia and Ukraine, across the site of the Sea of Azov and Black Sea, on both sides of the Caucasus, to the Caspian and Aral Seas by the brackish waters of the ‘Sarmatian Sea.’  This sheet of water extended southwards to the Sea of Marmara, and its deposits now form the cliffs and hillsides on both sides of the Dardanelles.”  (CAH, p. 23.)

 

“From the Himalaya to the Danubian region an astonishing number of streams cut their way through ranges that rise to elevations greater than those of their sources….[These are called] antecedent rivers.”  (CAH, p. 28.)

 

“It is tantalizing that geological science can as yet throw so little light on the causation of these patterns of land and water [involving the Afrasia and Eurasia land masses]…but, in geological as in human history, elucidation of the nature and succession of events must precede speculation about causes.”  (CAH, p. 33.)

 

“[M]oister periods of geological significance known as ‘pluvials’ have affected the Fertile Crescent on several occasions….They were caused by more frequent depressions over the eastern Mediterranean, with more numerous rainstorms passing eastwards.  these pluvials were probably associated with more frequent torrential rains….”  (CAH, p. 53.)

 

“[M]asses of alluvial gravels [in the Levant] were transported and deposited by streams now inconspicuous.”  (CAH, p. 54.)

 

“[In pre-history]…Egypt experienced a sequence of pluvial [rain-caused] episodes.”  (CAH, p. 62.)

 

“[I]n the Kharga oasis, Caton-Thompson and Gardner found clear evidence for two major pluvials….”  (CAH, p. 71.)

 

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that seas, rivers, streams, and pluvials have been important in earth history.  Indeed, water appears to have been a constant agent of change in geological history, as even John Playfair, in his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, (1802), had to admit when he said that “the present land was once deep immersed under the waters of the ocean.”  (Dover edition, 1956, p. 1.)  If even one of the founders of uniformitarian geology could admit that the earth was once under deep water, then who are we to argue?

 

 

2.  The Geological “Ages”

 

Uniformitarians of course, do not think this immersion happened all at once, but over several ages of geological time.  Even in this case, however, the role of water as an agent of great change is acknowledged.  The following are descriptions of the various levels of the geological column from William J. Miller’s An Introduction to Historical Geology, 1952, hereafter IHG.  Putting aside the interpretive element (the concept of “age”), the reader should note that the ingressive and regressive nature of the waters may be suggestive of some sort of tidal regularity (of inflow and outflow, especially with respect to Paleozoic levels):

 

“Cambrian rocks consist very largely of shallow water sediments…with well-preserved ripple marks very common.”  (IHG, p. 107.)

 

“During Early Cambrian time [sic] there was partial submergence of North American….”  (IHG, p. 111.)

 

 “During Late Cambrian….[t]he sea transgressed over the great interior land to about the northern border of the United States, forming a vast interior sea….In a general way we may say that shallow-sea water spread eastward…to meet similar waters which transgressed westward from the Appalachian geosyncline.”  (IHG, pp. 114-15.)

 

“According to Shuchert the Cambrian period closed with ‘a very wide and probably complete retreat of the epeiric (continental) seas from the interior parts of North America, leaving the continent all or nearly all dry land.”  (IHG, p. 115.)

 

“It is also a significant fact that most of the widely distributed Ordovician strata by far were laid down under sea water.”  (IHG, pp. 118-19.)

 

“[T]he whole continent was a remarkably flat, lowland area at the close of the Cambrian.  For this reason little change of level between sea and land was needed to permit widespread submergence.”  (IHG, p. 126.)

 

“Late Ordovician…was market by the most extensive transgression of the sea in the known history of the continent….[T]hree times during this period, seas advanced over, and retreated from, extensive portions of North America.”  (IHG, p. 129.)

 

“We have learned that, as a result of physical disturbance toward the close of the Ordovician, much of the interior Paleozoic sea was drained….”  (IHG, p. 140.)

 

“During Early Silurian…there was a more or less gradual encroachment of the sea….”  (IHG, p. 140.)

 

“Another grand marine invasion set in, especially over much of Canada….”  (IHG, p. 140.)

 

“An outstanding feature of North American Devonian history was the more or less steady advance of marine waters from the beginning of the period to beyond the middle.”  (IHG, p. 153.)

 

“Then the sea [in Late Devonian] began to retire from the land, first from the east and finally from the west, leaving the whole continent, with little possible exception, dry land at the close of the period.”  (IHG, p. 153.)

 

“As in North America, there was considerable encroachment of the sea [in the Mississippian “age”] so that much of the non-marine ‘Old Red Sandstone’ became covered with true marine sediments.”  (IHG, p. 170.)

 

“Very early in the Pennsylvanian the sea began to transgress over the land….”  (IHG, p. 179.)

 

“The Late Pennsylvanian sea withdrew almost entirely by the end of the period, thus leaving the continent practically all land.”  (IHG, p. 182.)

 

“Early in Permian time an interior sea spread over much of Nebraska, Kansas [etc.]….”  (IHG, p. 196.)

 

“By late Middle Permian…the western sea became much enlarged….”  (IHG, p. 196.)

 

“In very Late Permian…the great western sea almost completely vanished….The whole continent was a land area at the close of the Permian, and it stood unusually high.”  (IGH, p. 198.)

 

“In Early Triassic…Pacific waters spread over middle-eastern and southern California, much of Nevada [etc.]….Typical Red Beds were deposited extensively….”  (IHG, p. 275.)

 

“Late Triassic…was marked by the development of a large lagoonal basin in the western interior of the United States.  This basis seems to have been a more or less cut off arm of the sea….”  (IHG, p. 275.)

 

“Marine waters withdrew from the Pacific Coast region during latest Triassic…, and all of the continent was a land area.”  (IHG, p. 276.)

 

“The Pacific Coast region of North American seems to have been above sea level in earliest Jurassic….Then the waters encroached upon the land….”  (IHG, p. 287.)

 

“An important change occurred in the Late Jurassic, namely, the spreading of a shallow sea southward from the Arctic Ocean to the east of Alaska and south to northern Arizona.”  (IHG, pp. 291-92.)

 

“Well before the close of the Jurassic, the interior sea vanished, and renewed continental deposition occurred….”  (IHG, pp. 292-93.)

 

“Cretaceous…was in general characterized by a gradual encroachment of the sea upon the continent…and then gradually waning to disappearance.”  (IHG, p. 307.)

 

I’ve been regaling the reader with geological facts—something done to my friends and acquaintances, too, when they cannot easily escape.  So by now I hope the reader can see what the raw data looks like.  Does it not look a little like the Flood?  Again, I’m not trying to prove that the Flood happened, since most people will either accept or reject the Flood based on their prior metaphysical commitments.  But the above quotations at least show that the raw facts are not all on one side, and irrational faith on the other.  Things are more complicated than that.  Uniformitarian author John Playfair acknowledged the role of water in laying down the strata of the earth:

 

“It is well known that…[subsurface rock] is found to be regularly disposed in strata, or beds of determinate thickness, inclined at different angles to the horizon…that often maintain their parallelism to a great extent.  The strata bear such evident marks of being deposited by water, that they are universally acknowledged to have had their origin at the bottom of the sea [sic]; and it is also admitted, that the materials which they consist of, were then either soft, or in such a state…as rendered them capable of arrangement by the action of the water in which they were immersed.  Thus far most of the theories of the earth agree….”  (Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, Sect. 1:1.)

 

 

3.  Mass Extinctions

 

Water has made a comeback in recent discussions of earth history, but in a rather odd way.  J. D. Archibald in his Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era, 1996 argued that retreat of continental seas back into oceans may explain the pattern of survival and death during the K-T mass extinction.  The regress of the inland seas would, in this view, cause habitat fragmentation, as well as other environmental problems, for late Cretaceous fauna.  Those vertebrate animals that survived tended to be partially aquatic (fish, turtle, crocodiles).  Critics point out that it is hard to determine habitats based on fossils, and there is no reason why dinosaurs should bear the brunt of habitat breakup vis-à-vis other vertebrates.

 

Archibald seems to be on surer ground when he argues that inland sea regression brings about an elongation of river systems.  This would have given a competitive advantage to fresh-water animals and made it more difficult for marine creatures such a sharks.  In addition, increased competition from hoofed animals moving into the newly dry ground would have been too much competition for many late Cretaceous mammals, such as marsupials.  Unfortunately there is no way to test competition in the fossil record, so the theory remains promissory.  (For a fuller discussion and criticism, see Dingus & Rowe, The Mistaken Extinction, p. 90.)

 

What is of interest to us is that this appears to be one of the few instances where a researcher has had the courage to introduce water as a main cause of mass extinctions.  Only in this case, Archibald departs from common sense.  Isn’t it more likely that seaway ingression would have a greater impact upon species than seaway regression?  After all, an ingression of the sea—a flood in other words—would have an immediate effect upon creatures living on dry land, or ones that could not escape the incoming waters.  Turbidity currents—i.e., mud and sand filled currents—would have swept up marine creatures and large vertebrates into the swirling waters, then would have settled them out into the strata of a newly formed late Cretaceous inland sea.  That would seem to be a much more likely cause of the mass extinction at the K-T boundary, regardless of whether it was part of a global flood or not.  It just seems more likely that an ingress of the ocean would have a more devastating impact than a regression upon the fauna that lived in the area of the new continental sea.

 

Of course, scholars believe that other factors were at work at the K-T event¾impacts and volcanism, for instance, but geologists are still having difficulty explaining why some plants and animals survived the impacts and volcanism, but others didn’t.  Why, for instance, should dinosaurs become extinct from impacts or volcanoes, but crocodiles and turtles live on?  In our view, a combination of these factors would provide a better explanation.  Perhaps if water regression was connected with water ingression, and further complemented by impacts and super-volcanoes, a theory could be developed for explaining the haphazardness of these extinction level events.  Unfortunately, water ingression might look too much like the dreaded Flood geology, than which nothing could be more evil in the eyes of uniformitarians.  So the more common sense theory may take some time to enter into the discussion of the causes of mass extinctions.

 

 

4.  When Life Nearly Died

 

The greatest of all mass extinctions happened at the end of the Permian geological level.  This event saw an estimated 90 percent of all life on earth destroyed.  Michael J. Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Bristol, has written a book called When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, 2003 (hereafter WLND).  In speaking of a Permian type site in Russia, he says:

 

“One thing that was immediately obvious in the field was the apparently sudden appearance of massive conglomerates….This was not a local feature…but appeared everywhere around the South Urals.  Something dramatic had happened—a large-scale change in sedimentation patterns….” (WLND, p. 245.)

 

These conglomerates mixed up material from different sources, and involved “several huge, fast-flowing torrents which hurtled down the mountain sides, rolling and tumbling great boulders.”  (WLND, p.. 246.)  Torrents rushed down the mountain slopes and came into contact with enormous rivers.  This resulted in giant fan-shape flows:

 

“By careful mapping, [the Russian archaeologist] was able to work out the exact shapes of these huge outwash systems, termed alluvial fans, or, more properly, megafans, since they are several orders of magnitude larger than the gravel fans below.”  (WLND, p. 246.)

 

During the late Carboniferous, seas covered much of the area of the Urals, where marine sediments grew to great thickness.  A change from mudstones to sandstones and gravels signaled the last phases of basin filling.  Benton says,

 

“Then came the massive conglomerates.  The easiest explanation might be that there was a sudden increase in rainfall.”  (WLND, p. 247.)

 

Against rainfall as the cause of the conglomerates, Benton claims that the sediments show a reduction in rainfall, though he does not provide any documentation to establish the point.  He believes that there was a reduction in vegetational cover and this would lead to massive runoff:

 

“First, all the soils that had been held in place by plant roots would go.  Any rainfall would then have a devastating effect on the stripped hillsides; the bare rock would rapidly be cut in deep ravines, and fast-flowing torrents carrying boulders would smash further rocks out of place, until the river became a moving liquefied flow of rock debris.”  (WLND, p. 248.)

 

Benton says little about what would cause the loss of vegetation (aside from later speculation about volcanism leading to global warming, etc.), but in our opinion, massive rain conditions would be the likeliest immediate cause.  The Flood would have caused massive monsoons along the sides of mountains.  Such monsoonal rain would produce erosion and liquefaction (over-saturation of soil), and this would remove much of the top soil, trees, bushes, weeds, grasses, and other natural drags upon water.  The result would of course be great amounts of water and rock flows leading to the formation of huge fans of boulders that are characteristic of the region studied by Benton.

 

Some of the questions raised about the effects on the earth of super-volcanism, hyper-rain, massive meteorite impacts, and other catastrophic phenomena, show the need for more research in these areas.  Only in this way can a new, more comprehensive, theory of the earth be developed.

 

 

5.   Re-imagining the Flood

 

Mediaeval representations of the Flood tended to focus on Noah’s ark and the bodies of human beings or animals floating in the water around it.  These almost look like scenes from James Cameron’s movie Titanic, where the hapless passengers struggle in the water around the sinking ship.  In the Mediaeval productions, a crow or vulture is sometimes seen feeding upon the head of a man sticking out of the water.  This reflects the biblical view that the Flood was a judgment upon man for his evil.  Other representations focus on Noah emerging from the ark, the idea being the Noah is like Christ, and those on the ark are like the church preserved from stormy judgment.

 

Around 1660, Nicolas Poussin painted Winter, or the Deluge, where the focus was no longer on Noah and the animals, but emphasized landscape and nature.  The ark itself would be shown way off in the distance, while the foreground was dark and tragic.  In the late 17^th century, Athanasius Kircher’s Arca Noë was illustrated by a return to the earlier Mediaeval pattern of showing dead humans and animals floating on the surface of the Flood waters, with the ark nearby.  In 1681, Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth represented the world as a globe covered by water, with only the ark visible on the face of the globe.  This reinforced the universality of the Flood.

 

At the beginning of the 19^th century, however, J.M.W. Turner and John Martin returned to Poussin’s vision, and produced theatrical paintings of the Deluge.  These focused on the elemental forces that were unleashed by the Flood—dark clouds, lightening, fire, winds, tidal waves, and the suffering of people amidst all of the terrifying elements.  The ark was always somewhere in the distance, representing a place of safety that was forever out of reach amid the chaos.  In 1840, Francis Danby painted the Deluge, a particularly good illustration of suffering people desperately clinging to a large rock jutting up out of the raging waters, dark clouds pouring out rain and storm.  Other paintings (such as Dore’s) tended to follow the same pattern of depicting desperate people or animals sharing a forlorn crag surrounded by rising water.

 

All of these representations share something in common.  None of them actually shows what happens beneath the waters of the Flood.  I suppose it would be boring to show great masses of mud and sand being transported in high energy oceanic currents, but Flood theorists think that would be a more realistic representation.  However, the romantic and the tragic are undoubtedly more interesting, and so in all these paintings we see the earlier stages of the Flood, or we see the Flood in its latest stages.  That is, we see it when it has already covered most of the mountains and only a few isolated rock masses may break the surface to allow a temporary respite to some living things—this better to emphasize the hopelessness of their situation.  Occasionally we see a tidal wave, but there are no depictions of turbidity currents, tidal transgressions or regressions, no orogenic or mountain-building events, no breaking up of super-continents into smaller continental masses, no impact events or mass volcanism, no mega-fans, and so on.   These are the sorts of things that might accompany a universal or near universal Flood, but none of this is conveyed in traditional paintings of the Flood.

 

One of the largest problems in accepting Flood theory today amounts to much the same thing, the problem of re-imagining such a cataclysmic event.  None of us has ever experienced the sort of hydrologic events that would have occurred during the Flood.  Ice ages are easy enough to imagine, whether they actually occurred or not.  It is no trouble at all for our minds to move the icy environments of the North and South poles across the globe.  Since the 1980s, impact and super-volcanism theorists have developed imaginative scenarios for explaining mass-extinctions, but Flood theory remains under-imagined.

 

In regard to under-imagined events, Carolus Linnaeus, John Fleming, and Charles Lyell believed in a tranquil Flood.  In this view the Flood was slow and bureaucratic and did not upset any apple carts as it inched its way up to cover the highest mountains on earth.  Some have ridiculed this as a form of quietism, but it’s logical, given Lyell’s theory.  Present rates of change must govern all theories of earth history, says Lyell, and that would certainly include the Genesis Flood.  Hence, it must have been so non-catastrophic as not to leave a trace of itself behind.  This understanding of the biblical Flood would seem to be a failure of both interpretation and imagination on a grand scale.

 

I suspect that the more sophisticated we become in our use of computer graphics and film, the more we will be able to do some justice to the reality of the Flood, both above and below the water.  Until then, Flood theorists will remain at somewhat of a disadvantage to uniformitarians, for the latter theory does not require any imagination at all.  During the 19^th century, that was its selling point, for it worked well with the growing empiricism and positivism of the age.  Since the 1980s, when impact theory began to be discussed widely, the standard uniformitarianism was quietly swept aside.  Of course, even though imagination has returned to geology in the last twenty or so years, it has not been enough to allow prodigal Flood theory to come back home and partake of the scientific feast.  Perhaps that will change within our lifetime.

 

 

6.  Geological Controversies

 

It is often thought that the progress of science in general and of geology in particular was held back by “fundamentalists.”  These supposedly narrow-minded people required everyone to believe in creationism and Flood geology, and to reject evolutionary science and uniformitarian geology.  Enlightenment dawned with Charles Darwin, and science finally triumphed over theology and religious fanaticism.

 

This standard hagiographic account of the triumph of uniformitarian geology and Darwinism over the forces of religion is rather simplistic.  Prior to the 20^th century there was often no real division between those who practiced religion and those who practiced science.  Leading geologists were often ministers, for instance, and the idea that religious people were not allowed to have a voice on geological matters would have surprised many scientists during the 1800s.

 

So what were the main controversies?  It might come as a surprise that the nature of fossils, or of basalt, or of geological strata, would cause any controversy.  Much of it seems rather boring today.  I think this is due to the fact that we are the beneficiaries of past controversies and don’t have to start from scratch in understanding the geology of the earth.  We can certainly raise our noses, and affect a superior attitude to Steno or Woodward, or to Werner and his opponents, or to Murchison and De la Beche, until a new geological mystery comes along and we are stumped for an explanation.  We would then be in their shoes, making many of the same mistakes.  We should count ourselves fortunate if in fact we could pave the way for future solutions, as these men did in their day. 

 

One of the first controversies was not between Flood theory and science, but rather between Flood theory and Aristotelianism.  Those who advocated the latter believed that fossils were spontaneously produced in situ in the rocks.  The Flood theorists believed, however, that fossils were formerly living plants or animals that had become encased in the rock as a result of the Flood.  Nicolaus Steno and John Woodward were the important Flood theorists of their day, and it was Woodward who did much to convince the world of the true nature of fossils, that they were once living things that had become encased in sedimentary rock.  (For standard accounts, see Martin Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, 1972, 1976; Carroll & Mildred Fenton, The Story of the Great Geologists, 1945; Frank Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences, 1938; Archibald Geikie, The Founders of Geology, 1905.  For Steno, see Alan Cutler, The Seashell on the Mountaintop, 2003.  From a Flood theory perspective, see Byron C. Nelson, The Deluge Story in Stone, 1931, 1968)

 

The next great controversy was between Neptunism and Vulcanism.  Abraham Werner was at the center of this controversy, and it is hard to tell now why it would cause such a stir among geologists.  The issue was what caused the formation of basalts¾precipitation from a universal primordial ocean, or by way of volcanism?  Werner, a deist, was not supporting Flood theory with his universal ocean, so this was no Bible versus geology controversy.  Still, it’s hard to see why anyone would care much about the issue.  It may have had something to do with the universalization of Werner’s theory.  Werner knew about the coal industry, having worked in it before becoming a teacher, and his theory of rock formations might provide some economic benefit in predicting where new coal measures might be.  Thus, any assault on universalization was an assault on the ability of his theory to provide an economic benefit.  Other than that, I have no explanation of why anyone would get worked up over basalts.

 

James Hutton, followed by his expositor, John Playfair, introduced into geology the theory of uniformitarianism, which would later be popularized by Charles Lyell.  This was the view that past and present were basically the same, and that the history of the earth involved vast amounts of time.  For Hutton there was “no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.”  Hutton denied accusations that he was an atheist or was returning to Aristotle’s eternalism, but his theory is very similar to Aristotle’s in some respects, especially the see-sawing of land and sea throughout history.  Basically, Hutton’s theory is more deistic and machine-like than Aristotle’s (given the popularity of machines in the 18^th and 19^th centuries).  His “no vestige of a beginning” also appears to be more Kantian than Aristotelian, in that it only means “we cannot see any further,” into the past, not that there was no beginning of nature.  (For Hutton’s views, see A. Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, 1983, pp. 34, 35.)

 

Catastrophists, on the other hand, saw nature in terms of major discontinuities.  They did not regard the present as the key to the past, or that what is, is what was.  The leading catastrophist of the 19^th century was Georges Cuvier, who theorized the existence of several catastrophes.  He rejected actualism, the idea that the present is the key to the past, and pointed out that present day agents were not sufficient to account for nature’s “ancient works.”  (Hallam, p. 37.)  He also believed that catastrophes in nature were confirmed by the empirical facts, that the several ingressions of the sea upon the land were sudden rather than gradual, and that the lands were repopulated by animals from areas that had escaped the flooding.  His floods were therefore not universal in terms of scope, though they were catastrophic in terms of rate.  (Ibid., pp. 38, 39.)  Cuvier also was an opponent of Lamarck’s theory of evolution.

 

Geologists have in the main returned to catastrophic theories, though not necessarily to flood theories.  Cuvier’s “revolution” theory of the earth is not in accordance with the biblical narrative, which records only one catastrophe, but his views are at least consistent with the evidence of mass extinctions in earth history, and for this he has gained much more respect in recent years.

 

Many of the next controversies were over the identification and naming of strata that make up the so-called geological column.  I will spare the reader any account of this history.  Martin Rudwick has written a big, detailed book on the subject called The Great Devonian Controversy, 1985.  I got halfway through this book, same place I got in War and Peace.  What I managed to read of the Devonian controversy, however, gave me a good idea of what geological debate was like during the 19^th century.  It was not all neutral and objective and honest, though this did not prevent the recognition of the Paleozoic strata now called Devonian (sitting between Silurian and Carboniferous).

 

With respect to 19^th century theories of evolution, it may come as a shock that the primary opposition to it came from the leading scientists of the day.  Most rejected Lamarck’s views, and were not enthusiastic about Darwin either.  Even Lyell, for instance, while bending over backward to accommodate Darwin, could not bring himself to believe in an “insensible passage” from animal to the “improvable reason of Man.”  (Cf., The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, Dover edition, pp. 387, 392.)

 

Let us look more closely at the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin

 

 

7.   Lamarck versus Darwin

 

Darwin agreed with Lamarck that nature could not be divided up into essential species.    For both men, the stability of species was an illusion, and the species concept was purely arbitrary.  For a transformist—one who believes that all life has arisen by a series of small, imperceptible evolutionary transformations over time—the concept of species can only seem a paradox.  But didn’t both men make use of the Linnaean system, which recognizes essential species?  Yes, they did, but on their own presuppositions, the Linnaean classifications are merely the accidents of survival or preservation, not of fixed or immutable species.  Speaking of Lamarck’s view, which was more extreme than Darwin’s, Martin Rudwick says:

 

“The word ‘species’ still retained for him its original breadth of meaning, and such divisions were as unreal among, for example, chemical substances and minerals as they were among animals and plants.”  (The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, 1972, 1976, p. 117.) 

 

Lamarck believed in the “scale of being” concept, and saw it as a dynamical process involving a principle of continuity from the smallest thing to the largest.  Because nature ran together with insensible gradations of being, there could be no real discontinuities in nature, i.e., there could be no species to demark one form of life from another.  In practice, species could be identified and named, but not in principle, for in principle there was only continuity.  Thus, the species concept was purely nominal.  This view is more philosophical than scientific, and at bottom it is a denial of the Christian doctrine of creation.  It’s not that Darwinists care about the doctrine of creation, but the basic issue between Darwinists and Christians should not be lost sight of.  For creationists, nature has both continuity and discontinuity, and neither one can be reduced to the other, nor regarded in nominalistic fashion as an illusion, or as a purely arbitrary creation of the human mind.  Thus, the Linnaean system has a real structure, embedded in reality itself, and is not merely a matter of convenience in classification.  (This does not rule out mistakes of classification, of course.)

 

In order to convey the essentiality of species, some creationists have adopted the term “baramin” (baw-RAW-men).  This term is based on the Hebrew words for “created kind.”  Unfortunately, it’s not a neutral term and for that reason is unlikely to achieve general use.  I would suggest a different term, perhaps biomin (buy-owe-men).  This conveys the concept of essentiality, but is neutral with regard to whether the species was created.  It would allow evolutionists who do not believe in creation, but who believe in essentiality, to use the term.  Obviously, there can be no transgression of the biomin.  If a biologist claims to find such a situation in nature, then the original animal was mistakenly classified, or else the biologist is deliberately using a different meaning for the word.  This has already happened with the species concept, but the biomin is suggested as a remedy to that problem, not as another term to be abused and redefined.  (Note: If biomin seems too obscure, perhaps biotype would serve the same purpose.)

 

Rudwick says that Lamarck “had little understanding of stratification” and generally adopted the Huttonian theory of the earth, where the oceans and continents supposedly see-sawed up and down, replacing each other over time, running like a machine.  “[W]ithin the framework of deistic natural theology,” says Rudwick, “only a steady state could demonstrate the wisdom of nature.”  (Ibid., p. 119.)  Given his belief in the scale of being, Lamarck also denied the reality of extinction.  “Life was essentially a process of continual flux, species were unreal, and it was inconceivable that the insensible gradations of the scale of animals and plants could ever had been left imperfect by gaps caused by extinction.”  (Rudwick, Ibid., p. 120.)  For Lamarck, when an original form of life was transformed into a higher form, no gap was left in the scale of being.  The reason is that “spontaneous generation” insured that there would be a replacement of the old form.  Hence, extinction was an illusion.  Nevertheless, for those who believed in the essential reality of species, extinctions could be real, too.  If a species had limits, then it was possible for external environmental pressures to exceed the adaptive capacities of the species, leading to extinction.  In a Lamarckian view, species were plastic and adaptively superior to their environment, and thus there could be no real extinction of species.

 

Interestingly enough, in the last few years, a new form of “classification” has arisen, called cladistics.  Cladistic theory goes beyond Lamarck and Darwin in abandoning the Linnaean system.  However, the latter two only did so in principle, whereas cladists do so both in theory and in practice.  Their theory is based on the grouping of all plants or animals in terms of a supposed evolutionary development.  The problem is that these idealized developmental pathways are not supported by the fossil record.  In some ways the cladistic program is like a modern historian who imagines that the immediate precursor to WWII was (say) the Fall of Troy.  Such an idealized concept of history would not match up with what actually happened in history, since Troy and WWII were at least three thousand years apart.  Cladism is basically the application of this absurd method to the history of life on earth.  For example, what if a cladistic “ancestor” of the birds might be found in the fossil record at a much later level than the first birds themselves.  The cladistic response would be that the fossil record is inadequate and that the supposed fossil of the bird ancestor has just not yet been found in strata prior to the birds.  In other words, it’s an accident of survival or collection that bird fossils are found at an earlier level than the supposed ancestor of the birds.

 

We can see the lengths to which this theory of classification will go.  Dingus & Rowe’s book The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds, 1998, abandons the Linnaean classification system, and argues for a system based on supposed evolutionary ancestry.  They admit that it’s a “radical shift in perspective” and “deeply upsetting to many scientists.”  Why?  “It would mean…that dinosaurs are not extinct!”  (Ibid., p. 205.)  Moreover, “[w]e now tell our students that birds are card-carrying avialian, maniraptoran, coelurosaurian, tetanurine, theropod, saurischian dinosaurs, and don’t you forget it!”  (Idem.)  Further, “So, from today’s cladistic perspective, not all dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.”  (Ibid., p. 206.)  Based on the cladistic concept of continuity, we can no longer tell the difference between a dinosaur and a bird!  Of course, neither Lamarck nor Darwin appear to have been so stupid as to base biological classification on conceptual phylogenetic relationships.  They (unlike cladists) accepted for practical purposes the Linnaean binomial system, which is based on empirical morphological relationships.  After all, Darwin wanted to explain not just the origin of species, but also the origin of species.  Still, the cladist program is consistent with Lamarck and Darwin’s denial of species as an essential reality.  (For an easy to understand summary and criticism of cladism, see Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science of Myth? 2000, pp. 118ff.)

 

In my opinion, the main difference between Lamarck and Darwin is that Lamarck’s theory of direct inheritance was easy to test and thereby falsify.  The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, warned against constructing unfalsifiable scientific theories.  An unfalsifiable scientific theory is one that cannot be tested.  Such a theory is used to explain everything, but since it is not testable or refutable by anything in experience, it actually explains nothing.  Of course, only a fool would construct a theory that was subject to almost immediate falsification.  A wise man knows that he must offer up his unfalsifiable theory in a way that makes it look falsifiable.  This may not be good for science, but it is good for the scientist.  Darwin was a wise man, and invoked the impenetrable abyss of deep time, and made his transformational process something that was “silently and insensibly working.”  Lamarck, on the other hand made his process loud and obvious, and got what he deserved—a refuted theory.  Surprisingly, though, Lamarckism was still believed in well into the twentieth century (e.g., Freud).

 

The fact is, a short-necked giraffe ancestor did not (a la Lamarck) develop a desire to grow a long neck to reach some desirable food in a tree, and then pass the change on to its children.  No, it just doesn’t work that way.  If you cut off your hand, this doesn’t mean your children will be missing a hand when they are born.  If you have a desire to become an athlete and develop strength and endurance to achieve this result, it doesn’t mean your children will be athletes.  Inheritance is a matter of a change in genetic information, not a change in morphology (large scale structure)  Darwin, as smooth a customer as they come, allowed that there were already longer-necked giraffes in the population, and that they would be able to reach the higher food.  This gave the longer-necked giraffes a competitive advantage over short-necked giraffes and pretty soon they would reap the benefit of the favorable circumstances—i.e., longer necked giraffes would survive and short-necked giraffes would tend to die out.

 

 

8.  Darwin’s Problem

 

One problem that Darwin faced was that there are “gaps” in the fossil record that appear to contradict the continuity of the evolutionary process.  Darwin, however, ascribed them to the imperfection of the fossil record.  His supporter, Thomas Huxley, claimed that the gaps were never real, but were intermediate species that had simply died out, without leaving anything behind to mark their passing.  This is a variation of the imperfection of the fossil record argument.  For Darwinists, the fossil record only shows a miniscule fragment of all the plants and animals that have ever lived and died in earth history, and that is why there are so many gaps (i.e., discontinuities).  It’s the IOTFR again.

 

It is no surprise if critics of Darwinism storm out in protest over IOTFR.  Arguments from the supposed imperfection of the fossil record, or of its supposed minimalist nature, in order to account for the gaps in the record of life, seem all too much like evasions.  Critics might wonder if there is any possible way to refute Darwinism.  No matter what kind of evidence is brought against the theory, it is explained away, IOTFR.  All problems that could pose any real threat are sucked into the “black hole” of time, minimalism, or imperfection, and the light of knowledge can never emerge from the darkness.

 

Nevertheless, a more forgiving critic could grant all that Darwin wants with respect to imperfection or minimalism, or time.  But he would argue that there is in fact a much deeper problem for Darwinism than discontinuities in living things (species), or discontinuities in death (fossils).  It is a problem that is much more difficult to evade.

 

Creationist literature had longed pointed out that life is highly complex at the cellular, molecular, or genetic levels.  But it was not until Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 1996, that many began to realize that the theory of evolution might not only be false, but also impossible.  It would seem that the problem is not merely a matter of climbing Mount Improbable, but rather of climbing Mount Impossible.

 

What might give rise to this impossibility?  It is the problem of what Behe [Beehee] describes as “irreducible complexity.”  I know that many evolutionists are tired of hearing this term, but one should not let annoyance at repetition cloud the issue.  The problem is that much of life, especially at the molecular level, is made up of interacting parts.  So it is not enough for Darwinism to show that an organ came about by ever so slight changes in its structure.  It must also show how systems of interacting parts came about by ever so slight changes in structure.  The crucial problem in explaining the origin of some of these systems is that they don’t work unless all the parts are working.   That’s why their complexity is termed “irreducible.”  In an irreducibly complex (IC) system, if even one part of the system doesn’t work, the system ceases to function.  Creationists had discussed this problem before, but it was left to Behe to invent a term that, like “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest,” manages to encapsulate a whole way of looking at evolution.  Behe says,

 

“An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly…by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.”  (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39.)

 

Behe gives some steps for determining whether a system is complex in such a way that it cannot lose a part without losing its primary function.  His most famous example is that of a mouse trap, a system that has component parts but that cannot serve its intended function if any of the parts are missing.  In other words, in such interacting systems, function cannot be approached in a gradual manner.  Even if some of these parts have other functions, or can do other things outside of the system, the latter would still not work if the parts did not perform relevantly in the system.  Behe goes on to discuss many interacting, complex IC systems such as the bacterial flagellum, the blood coagulation cascade, the antibody-diversity system, biosynthesis of AMP, etc.  He not only believes these complex systems show the falsity of the theory of evolution, but also the inductive likelihood of intelligent design (hence the name of the familiar movement, Intelligent Design).

 

So far, the problem of irreducible complexity looks insurmountable, and it even led me to offer online a ten thousand dollar reward for anyone who could bring about the evolution of a primitive cell into a rabbit.  Obviously, the amount is based on the Amazing Randi’s similar challenge to paranormalists and others of that stripe.  However, all I got for my offer was abuse and evasion, but I never got the rabbit.  This challenge was not brought up to disprove the theory of evolution.  I had just gotten tired of all the smug claims that evolution was a fact, not a theory.  To make the challenge more interesting, I suggested that if anyone could not evolve a primitive cell into a rabbit, they should pay me ten thousand dollars.  Again, I wasn’t trying to disprove the theory of evolution, but was just trying to undermine the swagger and arrogance that often accompanies debates on this subject.  It was an attempt to show the sheer enormity of the problem facing Darwinists, and I probably would not have had the confidence to offer this challenge had it not been for Behe’s book.  In any case, by all standards of rationality, IC systems show the impossibility of evolution, and the fact that most scientists still accept it, leads me to believe that scientists today are suffering from a kind of collective insanity.  Who will provide the cure?

 

It should be understood that Behe’s challenge to Darwinism is not at the gross morphological level, i.e., at the level of what we can see, such as arms, legs, wings, etc.  It is at the biochemical level.  The smaller we go, it seems, the more complex our world becomes.  The gradation of being and its application in dynamic fashion to the history of life may be superficially plausible at the anatomical level, but when we analyze the parts at the biochemical level, we find that smallness is dangerous for Darwinism.  (For a simple explanation of irreducible complexity, see J. Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, 2006, pp. 107ff.)

 

 

9.  Secrets of the Ice Age

 

Note: I have modified my views somewhat since writing this, and I will make revisions in the near future:

 

I grew up believing in an Ice Age.  I think it must have first come into my consciousness from an episode of the television show Star Trek, in which Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy went back in time into an Ice Age.  This Ice Age was not even on earth, but not being overly concerned about such minor and unimportant details, I became “hooked” by the coldness and frozenness and windiness of it all.  Even when I came to believe in creation and the Flood, doubts about whether an Ice Age had ever occurred never entered my head.  This was largely due to Henry Morris’s acceptance of an Ice Age as caused by the Flood.  (Cf., The Genesis Flood, 1961.)  Even though Morris offers some skepticism about an Ice Age, the concept is still accepted as a reality:

 

“They [ice sheets] constitute the primary characteristic of what is called the Pleistocene Epoch, and are universally accepted by modern geologists.  Since the onset of a cold period is also strongly implied by our deductions from the Biblical description of the Deluge, we do not take issue with the accepted uniformitarian geology at this point.”  (The Genesis Flood, p. 292.)

 

Morris went so far as to claim that Pleistocene deposits “can be excepted as post-Deluge.”  (Ibid., p. 295.)  Thus, Noah and his family would be the first inhabitants of a Pleistocene world.

 

Nevertheless, despite the acceptance of an Ice Age by Morris (and other Flood theorists), my faith was undermined by D. S. Allan & J. B. Delair’s book Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., 1997.  Did great ice sheets cover much of the northern continents?  Did half of the world look like the Arctic region, or even Antarctica?  Allan & Delair’s book cast grave doubts upon the whole idea.

 

Still, one wonders, could the Ice Age have come about, as many creationists believe, after the Flood?  Michael Oard’s book Frozen In Time: The Woolly Mammoth, the Ice Age, and the Bible, 2004, answers the question in the affirmative.  I read the book, anticipating that my faith would be restored as at the first, but alas, faith was replaced by cold doubt.  Oard’s theory is that the Ice Age was a reality, that it lasted only a few hundred years, and represents an after-effect of the Flood.  However, he brought so many criticisms against the uniformitarian view of the Ice Age that I fear, despite his intentions perhaps, that I may have apostatized completely from Ice Age orthodoxy.  Is it possible that the Ice Age is just a 19^th century myth?

 

The following chart represents the generally accepted geological correlations for the Ice Age, which is thought to have lasted through the Quaternary period.  The chart is based in part on William J. Miller’s An Introduction to Historical Geology, 1916, 1952, pp. 442; 509:

 

 

Period	Epoch	Ice Ages N. America	Cultural   Age	Tool Type	Fossils
Quaternary	Holocene or Recent	Post-glacial	Metallic Neolithic Mesolithic		Modern
	Pleistocene	Wisconsin glacial	Paleolithic	Magdalenian Solutrean Aurignacian	Cro-Magnon
		Sangamon interglacial		Mousterian   Acheulian   Chellean or Abbevillian   Pre-Chellean	Neanderthal     Peking man Pithecanthropus Heidelberg man   Piltdown man*     Australopithecus
		Illinoian glacial
		Yarmouth interglacial
		Kansan glacial
		Aftonian interglacial
		Nebraskan glacial

 

*Note: In the preface to his 1952 edition, Miller failed to mention the fraudulent nature of Piltdown man, and retains it in his table.  All evolutionists now know that Piltdown man was a hoax, though there is disagreement as to who is responsible for the hoax.  (See, M. Boule & H. V. Vallois, Fossil Men, 1957, pp. 165ff.)  I have also added the Mesolithic period to update the cultural ages.

 

In conventional views, the Ice Age correlates with the Pleistocene and Paleolithic categories.  The post-Ice Age period begins with the Mesolithic, which is correlated to the “Pre-Boreal” phase, which in turn follows the period called “Younger Dryas.”  The latter is regarded as part of the Late-Glacial.  (Cf., J.G.D. Clark, Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 1, Part 1, 1970, p. 91.)

 

The question is, how does Oard’s post-Flood Ice Age fit into this?  Basically, he believes the Ice Age started with Noah’s descent from the ark, and lasted well into the time of the patriarchs.  This would mean the Pleistocene and Paleolithic periods were post-Flood and lasted at least to the time of Abraham.  Oard also has no hesitation in saying that the Book of Job was written during the Ice Age:

 

“Biblical history records events during or soon after the Ice Age.  This epoch includes the Book of Job and the life and times of the Jewish patriarchs.  The Bible’s focus is on events that took place in the Middle East after the Flood.  So, we should not expect to read about an Ice Age in the Bible.”  (Frozen in Time, p. 127; cf., p. 133.)

 

It is further claimed that the Tower of Babel incident took place while the Ice Age was “well underway” and that those who dispersed from Babel included “Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man.”  (Ibid., pp. 128, 129.)  This view of the Ice Age is seconded by John D. Morris, son of the late Henry Morris.  In his The Geology Book, 2000, John posited that after the Flood, the waters were “quite warm,” which allowed precipitation, but at the same time, the continents were Ice Age cold.  This paradox is part of Oard’s theory, and doesn’t make any more sense when repeated by Morris.  In addition, the mammoths who died in the millions during the Ice Age, were descended from two mammoths who walked off of Noah’s ark.  (Ibid., p. 68.)  This seems highly implausible.

 

From our point of view, Noah’s embarkation from the ark signals the end of the geological period and the beginning of the archaeological period.  Thus, the Paleolithic and all previous sedimentary levels are the result of the Flood, while the Mesolithic (or proto-Mesolithic) represents the beginning of the post-Flood era.  (This was Courville’s view.)  Further, the Tower of Babel incident took place at the end of the Uruk phase (just before the Early Bronze Age), and the Conquest took place at the end of the Early Bronze Age.  If Oard agrees with conventional archaeology in its placement of Abraham in the Middle Bronze 1 phase, or even later, then how would he reconcile the placement of the Paleolithic period into the Middle Bronze Age?  This is implied by his placement of the Ice Age into the patriarchal period.  In fact, this cannot really be done since the archaeological levels are clearly stratified, from Mesolithic to Iron Age, and are certainly post-Paleolithic.  Oard’s theory would have to ignore several different archaeological levels, or at least squeeze them into such a small time period as to render the whole thing quixotic.

 

Oard’s theory of how an Ice Age could occur in the first place appears rather speculative, but at least he provides a good discussion of issues in Ice Age theory, e.g., criticisms of ice-core dating methods, myths about the woolly mammoth, implausibility of uniformitarian explanations, etc.  Aside from the archaeological problem of relating post-Flood Ice Age theory with the metallic ages, Oard’s book is well worth reading for its helpful introduction to the subject.

 

Allan and Delair’s book Cataclysm! also has its problems (e.g., too much Velikovskian-style reliance on myth and legend to interpret geological events), but it recognizes that much phenomena used to prove the existence of an Ice Age (or several) can be accounted for in terms of water.  They do not deny an Ice Age may have occurred but say it must have “occurred in a form and by a means not properly accommodated by conventional dogma.”  (Ibid., p. 25.)  On their theory, this “greatest single disaster” took place around 9500 B.C. and was part of a wider catastrophe involving interstellar phenomena including the solar system.  Its effect upon the earth was remembered by early man as “the Great Flood or the Noachian Deluge.”  (Ibid., p. x.)

 

It seems to us that if an Ice Age did happen, or if creationists insist on keeping it as a theory, it would more likely have occurred after the Flood maximum (150 days) but during the drainage period that followed (about 114 days), when the waters were diminishing slowly from the continents (Gen. 8:1-3).  It’s not hard to imagine that some of the shallower northern waters were subject to freezing in light of the new weather conditions.  The regular climate system had not yet reached equilibrium, so during the months that Noah waited on the ark, vast ice sheets may have formed over the northern continents.  Presumably, these did not last long in the sunlight, which may have created melt-waters, ponding, formation of conglomerates, drift, or other “Ice Age” phenomena.  In addition, some of the waters that ponded were released when their ice dams melted (e.g., the Bretz flood), and the remnants of the Flood may still have been swirling and receding, carrying great icebergs and iceflows along, dropping off erratic boulders, causing striations, tillage, and other recessional effects.  In any case, however it may have happened (if it happened), the Ice Age could only have been a pre-archaeological event, and that would leave only the latter part of the Flood as its likeliest time slot.

 

Allan and Delair do not seem to have any obvious theological orientation in their book, but they do bring up many problems in Ice Age theory, and are prepared to accept a greater role for “colossal masses of water.”  (Ibid., p. 68.)  The geological column is accepted as a reality, but what is questioned is the length of its last period.  The Pliocene is regarded as much more recent than conventional geologists will admit to, and the subsequent Pleistocene is theorized to be of a very short duration, in which the Ice Age “largely vanishes.”  (Ibid., p. 340.)  The reason is that the Pleistocene level is thought to be the result of a catastrophe rather than of slow uniformitarian processes.  The writers do believe in a continuity between the Pleistocene (Younger Dryas) and the Recent periods, but not so much as to run them together, or to ignore the archaeological ages.  In my opinion, Allan and Delair’s theory is in contradiction to the Bible’s account of the Flood, but as a secular Flood theory, it at least seems possible (if shorn of annoying Velikovskian features).  At least their work shows that there is no need to adopt Oard’s theory of a post-Flood Ice Age with all the attendant difficulties that follow from such a concept.  The so-called Ice Age may never have happened at all.

 

We tentatively accept the view that the Pleistocene is part of the Flood rather than part of a post-Flood Ice Age, and also accept that Noah is to be found somewhere at the beginning of the Mesolithic (a proto-Mesolithic stage, perhaps).  There is then no need, under this theory, to posit an Ice Age of long duration, as uniformitarians would have it.  Or if an Ice Age is found to be necessary to account for all the data, the most likely solution would be to locate it (or most of it) during the last part of the Flood, not after the Flood, as some creationist would have it.  A post-Flood Ice Age would impinge upon the archaeological ages, and it would be better not to have an Ice Age at all than to ignore the well-established stratigraphic levels of archaeology.  Such is my faith as it stands today.

 

Note 1: a more in-depth discussion of the Flood/post-Flood transition can be found in the “Mesolithic” essay under the Archaeology category.  In that paper we explore the possibility that the Pleistocene is the immediate post-Flood era, and the Mesolithic represents a separate and later migratory movement.  Nevertheless, regardless of whether the “Ice Age” was a Flood event, or a post-Flood event, or both, or regardless of whether the post-Flood transition was Pleistocene or Mesolithic, what we are basically objecting to is the notion that the “Ice Age” can be brought down into the patriarchal era, or overlap with the archaeological ages (Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age, Bronze Age).  We could very well accept part of Oard’s theory, but not that part!

 

Note 2:  In the essay “The Antiquity of Man” (in preparation) I will discuss the Ice Age as a post-Flood event.  One large reason for my previous discomfort with a post-Flood Ice Age was that I couldn’t fit the extinction of the mammoth into the theory.  However, after more research, I find that I must disagree with those Flood theorists who claim that it was a sudden, mass extinction event that resulted in the death of millions of mammoth.  I shall instead argue that the mammoth extinction took time and did not involve nearly as many mammoth as some Flood-theorists claim.  Accordingly, a reduction in the number of those mammoth that became extinct means that a post-Flood Pleistocene epoch is rendered more plausible.  A few hundred thousand mammoth deaths as a result of climate change is a lot easier to fit into a post-Flood biblical chronology than are millions of mammoth deaths in massive post-Flood dust storms (as Michael Oard believes).

 

 

10.   Bones of Contention

 

Darwinists are never so earnest and at the same time never so deluded as when they tell us that man has evolved from ape-like ancestors.  Some notorious examples of this delusion are the famous “Piltdown Man” and the remarkable “Nebraska Man.”  In the case of the former, V. Gordon Childe wrote a book in 1936 called Man Makes Himself, wherein he confidently referred to Piltdown Man as an early member of the human family, although one of the “side branches.”  Even the tell-tale signs of fraud were treated as illustrating different rates of evolution:

 

“It is not surprising that in some early attempts at man they have progressed at different relative rates.  Piltdown man (Eoanthropus), for example possessed a brain-case comparable in size to our own, but preserved the heavy lower jaw and the projecting canines proper to an ape.”  (Man Makes Himself, p. 28.)

 

In fact, the skull was human and the lower jaw was orangutan, with teeth filed down to make them look more human.  “Man makes himself” indeed!  This illustrates one of the greatest intellectual sins of Darwinism: to ascribe human traits to extinct species of apes (e.g., Australopithecines), and to ascribe “simian” traits to true humans (e.g., homo-erectus, Neanderthal, etc.).

 

With respect to Nebraska Man, Henry Osborn used it to belittle William Jennings Bryan, and in an article entitled “The Earth Speaks to Bryan” Osborn said:

 

“What shall we do with the Nebraska tooth?…Certainly we shall not banish this bit of Truth because it does not fit in with our preconceived notions and because at present it constitutes infinitesimal but irrefutable evidence that the man-ape wandered over from Asia into North America.”  (The Forum, May, 1925; quoted in The Scopes Monkey Trial, A.C. Bradbury, available on the Internet.)

 

This bit of Truth?  Irrefutable evidence?  The London Illustrated News of 1922 ran an artist’s impression of Nebraska Man, showing not only the long-haired, slightly bent human, but also a companion squatting next to him.  It turned out, however, that Nebraska Man was based upon the tooth of a pig.  This gives an idea of just how much wishful thinking, combined with sheer arrogance and dogmatism, is involved in the concept of human evolution.

 

Another example is H. G. Wells, of Time Machine fame, who wrote a book on history appropriately titled The Outline of History, 1920 (Doubleday ed. 1971).  In it he illustrated his chapter on “Apes and Sub-Men” with framed representations of our supposed ancestors.  There in one frame is Australopithecus, and in another there’s Pithecanthropus, looking either plaintive or angry, it’s hard to tell which.  These frames give the suggestion of being pictures in a family album, of members of the family only a mother could really love—if she were blind.  If we turn a few more pages of the album we find Neanderthal Man, who is made to look rather ill-kept and dumb.  But further on we find Piltdown Man, the rascally old fraud.  The revisers of the book claim that Wells’ original discussion of Piltdown Man was “sceptical,” and they present him as having an oh-I-knew-it-all-the-time viewpoint.  Wells, however, had no hesitation in using Piltdown Man in his arguments against his contemporary religious opponents.  (This just illustrates how gullible Darwinists can be on human evolution, because they want so much to believe.  Recall that Piltdown Man was a hoax, not just a legitimate fossil that was badly interpreted.)  Next in Wells’ album is Cro-Magnon Man, looking like a dashing movie star in comparison to the earlier, stupid-looking “hominids.”

 

Marvin L. Lubenow has written a very good book on the subject of human evolution called Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils, 1992, 2004; hereafter BoC.  Even some Darwinists, dripping with contempt for other creationists, acknowledge that Lubenow’s book is very well-informed, even if his conclusions are unacceptable in their view.  Lubenow regards human evolution to be a “fairy tale for grown-ups.”  (BoC, p. 42.)  One of his more interesting ideas is that Darwinism is inherently racist.  The problem with this is that racism was around before Darwin published his book on human evolution in 1871.  For instance, Josiah Nott argued for racial separation before the American Civil War based upon “polygenesis.”  (W. W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Vol. II, p. 42.)  According to Freehling:

 

“Polygenesis held that, the Book of Genesis to the contrary, separate races did not spring from a single pair of humans, residing in the Garden of Eden.  Instead, separate races originated in separate areas.  The tale of Adam and Eve was a nonscientific myth.  Scientific truth demanded that slavery ensure permanent separation of separately created races.”  (Road To Disunion, p. 42.)

 

Nott wrote two books, Types of Mankind, 1854, and Indigenous Races of the Earth, 1857, in which he concluded that intermarriage between blacks and whites would lead to the extinction of both.  He based this on the analogy of the mating of a horse and donkey, which would lead to a sterile mule.  The product of racial intermarriage, the mulatto, was compared to the mule, and because of the possibility of extinction, slavery was necessary to keep the races separate.  Southern Christians, however, were not happy with Nott’s premises.  Freehling says:

 

“Yet by bolstering the proslavery argument with anti-Genesis science, Nott seemed blasphemous to many proslavery Christians….To interpret Genesis was to tamper with God.  Polygenesists especially tampered with the Word, for they disputed God’s account of His Creation.”  (Road to Disunion, p. 43.)

 

There was a general tendency for polygenesists to diminish African slaves, to emphasize stereotypes, to regard them as having too much of the “animal propensity.”  Anti-polygenesists, however, rejected Nott’s end run around the Bible.  For instance, in 1850, John Bachman published his The Unity of the Human Race, in which he traced all races to one man, and argued that all races were part of a common household, a universal brotherhood.  However, Bachman did not see this as a reason to free the slaves, but as a reason to treat them better, to take a race of men “stamped with inferiority” and “elevate their moral characters,” who, in addition, ought to be taught Christian principles.  What was needed, then, was not freedom, but paternalistic care.  The theologian, James H. Thornwell, agreed with this reform message.  The goal was not to end slavery, but to make sure it was Christianized.  (Ibid., pp. 46-47.)

 

And yet all of these racial sentiments are from the mid-1800s, not in our more “advanced” 20^th or 21^st century.  Could there still be some truth to Lubenow’s charge?  Is there something inherent in the theory of evolution that leads to racism, so much so that it is still around today?  The answer may be yes, for it is still somewhat shocking to come across racial statements in relatively modern textbooks on human evolution.  For instance, Boule and Vallois’ Fossil Men has a copyright of 1957, and even though one may detect a note of irony when “so-called” modifies “superior races,” it did not stop the authors from writing the following:

 

“A comparative study of the morphology of various living human groups confirm the idea that we are here concerned with an altogether special type, very different not only from the so-called superior races, but also from the Eskimoes, the Fuegians, the Bushmen, the Pygmies, African or Asiatic, the Veddas, the Polynesians, the Melanesians, and even from the Australians, with whom attempts at comparison have often been made.”  (Fossil Men, p. 252.)

 

But the irony is short-lived, or perhaps it was directed only at the concept of “superior races” while leaving the concept of “inferior races” intact.  The authors go on to say in discussing Neanderthal Man: “All that can be admitted in this respect is that the Australian group of Men, certainly one of the least developed groups of modern mankind, is less far removed than other races from the primitive forms, and that, in consequence, it ought to have certain characteristics in common with the Neandertal type.”  (Idem; for their use of the term “lower races” without ironic modification, see p. 214; cf., also “higher types,” p. 218; also, “races lowest in type,” p. 225.)

 

It think it would be safe to say that the idea of differential evolutionary development may have racist implications, and here we may raise the issue of irresponsibility among scientists.  It certainly must have been hard for blacks (and others) to be told all their lives by leading scientific authorities that they were part of inferior, lesser developed, races of humans.  This may have been less an unhappy by-product of Darwinism than of  Darwinists.  Of course, modern evolutionists have grown so wary of racism that they’ve referred to earlier Darwinism as “vulgar Darwinism,” and they’ve even allowed fear of racism to shape their own theories of human evolution.  Lubenow calls attention to this in his criticisms of the “African Eve” theory.  The essential idea behind African Eve is that modern humans of all races descended from the same individual.  Lubenow points out that this theory is energized mainly by political correctness rather than by any convincing evidence.  (For a critique of the African Eve theory, see his BoC, pp. 170ff.)  Prior to “Eve,” evolutionists held to polygenesis ideas, but the fate of anthropologist Carleton Coon served as an object lesson for many a progressive Darwinist.  Coon separated modern races into different types and gave each of them a differential evolutionary history.  Lubenow says,

 

“According to Coon, each of these five races had evolved separately into Homo  sapiens, and each had evolved from a Homo erectus stock….Although Coon tried to build on strictly ‘scientific’ evidence and to avoid racial overtones, the racial implications were quite obvious.  If the Europeans and the Asians began to evolve…as early as 500,000 ya [years ago], and the Africans began evolving…only 40,000 ya, the Africans were the last to cross the  Homo erectus-Homo sapiens boundary and hence were less evolved or less civilized than were the other races.”  (Bones of Contention, pp. 154, 155.)

 

Coon’s reputation never survived the controversy.  Lubenow argues that the problem was not that Coon’s evolutionary theory had racist implications, but that every theory of human evolution has racist implications.  This would be true, of course, only for those evolutionary theories that adopted a polygenesis model of the origins of homo sapiens.  Today, the main polygenesis competitor to “African Eve” is the “Multiregional Continuity Model”¾but most anthropologists shun it today, even though its advocates distance themselves from any racial implications.  (Ibid., p. 155.  For a critique of MCM, see Lubenow, pp. 176ff.)  Given the problems with the Out of Africa model, evolutionists such as Stephen Gould preferred to argue that the equality of modern races was simply a lucky accident of evolution, that evolution could have gone in a different direction (i.e., toward inequality).  Lubenow is somewhat put out by the sheer chutzpah of Gould in ascribing equality to evolution, when so many evolutionists in the past interpreted evolution in terms of inequality.  (Ibid., p. 156.)   The bottom line, if what Gould says is true, is that in evolutionary theory, equality is an accidental by-product of evolution.  It was not necessarily part of the plan.  However, in a creationist view of man, equality is inherent in man, since man was created in the image of God.  Inequality would therefore not be accidental, but would be something deliberate, a result of both human sin and of human oppression.

 

Lubenow is well aware that racism existed before Darwinism, and he does not accuse evolutionists of being racists, nor does he claim that evolutionary theory is the cause of racism.  His concern is that evolutionary theory serves as a scientific justification for racism.  I think that it can be used in that way, especially by polygenesis theories gone haywire, and the concept of differential rates of development appears to give support to racism.  Nevertheless, even if, ex hypothesi, we accept the theory of evolution as true, the paucity of fossil data with respect to human evolution makes broad generalizations about differential evolutionary rates little more than guess-work.  Racist inferences from evolution may therefore be more a function of theorists than of theory.  A good example of this is Ernst Haeckel, who could always be counted on to provide a preposterous illustration of evolutionary progression.  In his 1868 The Natural History of Creation, Haeckel lined up the profiles of Africans and Tasmanians, placing them next to the profile of a gorilla, and the gorilla and other apes were even made to look somewhat human.  (See, Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler, 2004, p. 107.)  But that’s Haeckel for you; what else can you expect?

 

Darwinists are fond of another sort of racism, but this one involves the whole human race.  One of the most often repeated clichés in our day is that man is no longer the center of the universe, no longer the king of creation, etc.  Supposedly, Darwinism has shown man his true place in the larger scheme of things, that he is a mere speck in the infinite cosmos, and that the human race should regard itself as inferior in the larger scheme of things.  The theologian, G. C. Berkhouwer, calls attention to the modern-day “demasking” of man by existentialists, but he detects another goal beyond this diminishment, a “nevertheless” that finds something more basic and noble in man:

 

“[S]ooner or later there comes an end to this discounting, and a new trust in man….It is a trust which still, in one way or another, appeals to the humanum in man, the ‘greatness’ of man.”  (Studies in Dogmatics, Man: The Image of God, 1962, p. 16.)

 

Over against this new greatness, the Christian confession emphasizes the corruptio totalis, wherein man started out as a perfect being, but is now fallen, his nature corrupt in its totality (which is not the same as being totally corrupt).  Thus, Christianity agrees with the diminishment of man, but for different reasons.  For Christians, there is no leftover “greatness” in man that serves as a basis for boasting and pride.

 

The goal of evolutionists, however, differs a bit from that of existentialists.  The Darwinist demasking of man is not in order to find a remnant of greatness in man.  It is more far reaching than that.  Thomas Huxley, a chief defender of Darwinism in England, claimed that it was not even evolution itself, but the idea of evolution, that undermined man’s “most cherished and most important convictions.”  This gives us a clue as to what Darwinists mean by this decentering of man.  The real goal of this decentering, by way of undermining man’s religious ideas, and by way of a feigned humility with respect to man,  is to diminish the reality of God.  God’s reality is reduced to one of man’s “most cherished and most important convictions” and these convictions are undermined by the long ages of evolution.  It is then, not man but God who is thereby demasked, diminished, dethroned, and decentered (supposedly).  Man stands by himself as an autonomous creation who has the potentiality of growing into an equally autonomous creator.  Thus, man as new creator can direct his own evolution¾meaning he can now direct the evolution of others.  The idea of man evolving beyond man is a basic staple of much evolutionary thought today.  C. S. Lewis spoke of it in his “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” in Christian Reflections, 1967, pp. 82ff.)  But the Darwinian sleight of hand, from false humility to human exaltation and control, appears to have been first discussed by historian Gary North in his essay, “From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty” (reprinted in Genesis: The Dominion Covenant, 1982, 1987, pp. 245ff.).

 

Lubenow’s discussion goes a long way to undermining these evolutionary conceits.  The book ought to be read by anyone who has questions about the reality of human evolution.  My only real criticism of the book is that Lubenow accepts Michael Oard’s post-Flood Ice Age concept, and he sees a greater continuity of certain fossil men with respect to our modern period than I think can be sustained.  (Cf., BoC, pp. 260ff.)

 

I don’t usually like to speculate about the antediluvian period, but on our theory tool-using “fossil men” probably represented the non-urban segments of the wider antediluvian civilization.  That is to say, they were probably hunters living on the edges of society.  Most humans who drowned in the Flood would have become bloated, would have floated to the surface of the waters, and would have been subject to predation, dismemberment, and decomposition.  (Medieval representations of humans floating around the ark, subject to bird predation, may not have been far from the truth.)  Why then do we find the remains of homo erectus, of Neanderthal, of Cro-Magnon Man?  Would they not have become bloated as well, and subject to the same elements?  Perhaps the reason their remains have come down to us is that these men lived near caves, and when they died, their bones were often buried in caves, as Lubenow points out.  Also, one can guess that by staying near caves, or seeking shelter therein during storms, these antediluvians were caught in the caves by mud-flows and were buried before decomposition could set in.  Thus, they were preserved for posterity, both as subjects of scientific interest, but also as a stark reminder to future generations of the reality of divine judgment.

 

Note: I have changed my view on this, and regard all fossil men as being post-Flood, as I will discuss in my essay “The Antiquity of Man” (forthcoming).

 

Finis