As we have seen in this newspaper, they will fight to control their message, as shown by their willingness to individually address any opinions that conflict with their own. They count on the fact that the majority of Americans are not experts in science and so will take them at their word when it comes to “evidence” for their strange beliefs.
Let me premise what follows by pointing out that nothing I am presenting in any way relies upon the idea of evolution. Instead, I present evidence from the fields of paleontology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, disciplines of geology that have to do with fossils and the rocks that contain them. There is an almost endless amount of evidence from these sciences that show, without any doubt, that the flood that AIG claims as fact simply never happened.
Much of our knowledge about the geology of fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks has been garnered in the search for oil. These are the rocks, made mostly of muds, sands and gravels, forming deposits totaling up to 6 miles thick that cover most of the inhabited surface of the Earth. AIG emphatically states that this unimaginably large quantity of rock was very rapidly deposited in much less than one year by Noah’s flood.
Understanding these rocks isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it is the basis for the biggest business in the world — oil. Finding oil requires an intimate knowledge of the nature of these rocks and a tremendous amount of time and money has been invested in studying them.
One very important feature that geologists have found associated with many oil-bearing formations are buried ocean reefs. Reefs are thick limestone structures created by the growth of corals and other animals whose skeletons are cemented together to form giant masses of porous limestone. Reefs take time to grow, hundreds to thousands of years, depending on their size. These buried reefs are found unbroken, in growth position, with thousands of feet of older sedimentary rocks beneath them, and with thousands of feet of younger rocks on top of them.
AIG insists all of these rocks were deposited in less than a year. So how is it possible then for a large reef to have had time to grow and flourish in less than a year in the midst of a global maelstrom? The answer is, of course, they didn’t. They grew just as they do today, offshore from continental coastlines. These buried fossil reefs show conclusively that the sedimentary rocks in which they are found were deposited over very long spans of time.
More evidence that absolutely refutes AIG’s ideas can be found much closer to home, even directly beneath their Creation Museum. For the past 150 years, thousands of expert and amateur collectors alike have collected millions of fossils from the Ordovician bedrock of the Cincinnati region, world-famous for its well-preserved specimens of invertebrate sea creatures.
In all that time, with all of those folks searching carefully over hundreds of square miles, there has never been found the tiniest little trace of anything human, or even remotely related to humans, in our bedrock. Not the slightest trace of human life. Not one fleck of tooth or bone, not even a fragment of an arrowhead, no potsherds, nothing. Not only that, there has never been even the tiniest trace of any reptile, bird or mammal. Further, there are no land plant fossils. Not a stray leaf, not a seed, not even a single grain of pollen. Yet the invertebrate fossils are super abundant and beautifully preserved. The same pattern is seen in Ordovician rocks all over the world.
AIG claims unequivocally that all of the bedrock around Cincinnati was deposited by Noah’s flood. So how is it that nothing from the land was deposited among the perfectly preserved remains of a wide variety of invertebrate sea creatures? We know from sediment cores from modern seas that traces of terrestrial life are readily found in sediments very far from land, even without global flooding. After a cataclysmic flood, there would have been evidence of land plants, land animals and humans strewn across all of the oceans. Yet not a trace is found.
This indicates two things. First, there was no terrestrial life at the time the fossils of the Cincinnatian bedrock were deposited. Secondly, if there was no terrestrial life, there was no biblical global flood.
There are many, many other such lines of conclusive evidence which, taken as a whole, absolutely disprove the idea that a global flood occurred. If there was no flood, the Bible is not literally true and AIG’s vision of world history is erroneous.
Peter Lask of Hamilton has a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in paleontology from the University of Cincinnati.