Creationist Geologic Time Scale: an attack strategy for the sciences.

Should the scientific community continue to fight rear-guard skirmishes with creationists, or insist that "young-earthers" defend their model in toto?

Donald U. Wise, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Research Associate at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. email: D_Wise@ACAD.FANDM.EDU

This article is an expanded version of an original manuscript that was published in American Scientist, March/April, 1998, vol. 86, n. 2, p. 160-173.

Introduction

A Creation "Science" Geologic Time Scale

(1) 4000 B.C. Creation Week: (laws of science suspended)

     Day 1 - Space, light & dark, earth materials.
     Day 2 - Waters above and waters below.
     Day 3 - Earth's crust and plants.
     Day 4 - Sun, moon, and stars in place.
     Day 5 - Atmosphere + animals of the waters.
     Day 6 - Land animals + Adam & Eve.
     Day 7 - Day of rest.

1,500 years. Pre-Flood "Geology." Laws of science invalid.

(2) Adam and Eve, talking snakes, etc.

(3) World's waters are in great Venus-like atmosphere or in ground

water.  No rain, no ocean basins.

(4) Radiometric dating invalid; speed of light changed.

(5) Humans, dinosaurs, mammals, the "works," all live together in

peace.  Both lions and Tyranosaurus Rex are vegetarians in Eden before
the "fall."

(6) Human life spans up to 900 years.

(7) Battle of Satan and angels produces craters on moon.

Flood Year: Flood "Geology" - ONE (?) year of normal (?) "science"

Rain - 40 days

(8) Big animals run to mountain tops. Not a single dumb human caught

in all the early flood sediments.  All dinosaurs washed off only in
middle flood-time.

(9) Coral reefs (Guadalupe Mountains of Texas) grow to thicknesses of

half a mile during single year.

(10) Vast coal beds accumulate one on top of another, each as original

swamp deposits on order of 100 feet thick, all in one year.

(11) Mile-thick salt formations in Utah form by evaporation (!) of

seawater during (!) the flood.

Flood - about 250 days.

(12) Most of the world's sedimentary rocks dumped on continents to

average thickness of one mile, almost entirely during the flood year. 

(13) Most continental drif occurs. Flood waters drain into the newly

formed ocean basins.  Atlantic opens at average rate of 1/2 mile per
hour.

(14) Most deep sea sediments (average about 1,500 feet thick) collect

on the newly opened ocean floors.

(15) Hawaiian volcano built 30,000 feet high on new sea floor. (Cools

enough for birds and plants from Ark to colonize soon after end of
flood year.

Final Retreat - ? 100 days ?

(16)Volcano of Mount Ararat built 7,000 feet high underwater and cools

in time for grounding of the Ark.

(17) Successive Yellowstone ash beds bury 10 to 27 forests one on top

of another, all grown during single year.

(18) Grand Canyon cut by receding flood waters. Flood sediments

de-water and harden in one year to rock strong enough to stand as
steep, mile-hile cliffs.

Post-Flood Geology - 4,500 years of normal (?) science to Present

(19)From Ark, Noah (?) directs streams of distinctive animal and plant

communities to migrate to Africa, Australia, South America, etc.
(Ferry service ?) (Some creationists use post-flood continental
drift at rates up to one mile per hour !)

(20)Sun stands still for Israelite battle. Earth stops rotating and

then starts again due to near-miss by Venus out of its orbit ?
(Velikovsky)

(21)Only one ice age as post-flood atmosphere cools.

Geologists' abundant evidence of many great ice advances
separated by sub-tropical vegetation and development of thick soil zones
between some advances are wrong.

(22)Late-flood granite masses, formed at 1,000 degrees (F.), cool to

present low temperatures at rates in violation of all laws of thermal
physics.  Fit to radiometric daes is mere coincidence. 

(23)Extreme rates of continental drift typical of flood (1/2 mile per

hour) suddenly slow to present-day laser-measured rates of inches per
year.  Accord of present rates with radiometric dates is mere chance.

(24)Coral reefs (Bikini, Eniwetok) grow 1/2 to 1 mile thick in first

1,000 years (rate of one foot per month) then slow to present measured
rates of inches per century.

Figure 1. Unlike the 4.5-billion-year-old geologic time scale that has been developed through a century and a half of scientific research, creationism's geologic time scale compresses the history of the universe into about 6,000 years, requiring that radiometric dating be discredited and that many of the steps in the formation of the earth were so accelerated that millions of years of geologic change were accomplished in a few days or weeks. The entire fossil record of the earth is explained as having been deposited during the year of the Noachian flood 4,500 years ago.

The real battles (Schmidt 1996) between traditional science and Creationism are likely to be fought on a state by state, school board by school board basis in a form that will require active, grass-roots participation by large numbers of American scientists. Unfortunately, most of us are essentially unarmed for such battles. While Creationists regard this as a holy war worthy of their almost undivided attention, most scientists have given it short shrift, either by ignoring it or by laughing at such pretensions of "science." As a result, most scientists remain so unfamiliar with the claims, methods, and arguments of Creationists that they are unprepared for participation in any public confrontation. A notable exception was the late Robert Dietz of Arizona State University who used both science and humor of the cartoons of John Holden (Dietz and Holden, 1987) to actively debate the local Creationists. Excellent descriptions of methods used by Creationists to win such debates, at least in the public mind, are given by Thwattes and Awbrey (1993), Fezer (1993), and Arthur (1996). To develop any level of preparation for such arguments and methods, one requires copious time as well as access to the diffuse mass of "gray" publications, religious tracts, and other in-house Creationist publications. For those without the time or access to such resources, this article is intended as a "crash-course" introduction to Creationist history, ideas, and methods as well as some factual tools to oppose Creationist claims and a few of the best cartoons to inject a bit of humor into any discussion (Figure 2).

Figure 2 (GIF, 72K)

Figure 2. Creationists offer a cartooned view of science that is often hard to address in public debate. Creationism, itself, meanwhile, has tempted a few cartoonists to take up their pens. John Holden, a paleontologist by training (and co-author with R. S. Dietz of a cartoon commentary, Creation/Evolution Satiricon), has pondered the implications of Henry Morris' explanation of lunar craters as the result of cosmic battles between Satan's angels and those of the Archangel Michael.

Some Creationist History

The ASA and DGS merged briefly in the 1940s but ultimately split largely after a talk given by a young ASA member, J. Lawrence Kulp. Kulp studied C¹⁴ dating methods with Urey at Chicago and then set up the second C¹⁴ lab in the country at Columbia University. On the basis of emerging C¹⁴ results, Kulp told the combined group in 1949 that there was no escaping an interpretation of great antiquity for the human race. The result was a permanent rift. In the 1950s Ph.D. hydrologist and fundamentalist, Henry M. Morris, and broadly educated seminarian and Bible teacher, John C. Whitcomb, Jr., joined forces. They updated many of the ideas of George McCready Price's New Geology (1923) to produce The Genesis Flood (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961). Morris believed the ASA "was too permeated with evolution ever to be reclaimed." He and eight like-minded individuals, including Ph.D. biologist Duane Gish, met in 1961 with the purpose of founding a new group based on the philosophy and ideas of the book. Out of this nucleus came the Creation Research Society (CRS) in 1963 and the scientific creationist movement.

Largely under the influence of Morris and Gish, the CRS has grown into a national and international network of organizations with links to the parent Institute for Creation Research (ICR). The ICR in the San Diego area now operates as a degree granting organization, accredited by California's State Department of Education, offering M.S. degrees in biology, geology, astro/geophysics, and science education. California removed its accreditation in 1990 but had to restore it two years later under orders of a federal judge (Numbers, 1993). The Institute publishes many books and articles and sponsors its own Bible oriented "research" studies and symposia. Currently it is reputed to operate on an annual budget of 3 million dollars (Scott, 1996).

The New Crop of Creationist Geologists

A very few young evangelicals did manage to survive graduate education in geology with their Biblical fundamentalist faith intact. Three of the most prominent are Stephen Austin, John Morris, and Kurt Wise (no relation).

Steven Austin earned a B.S. in geology form the University of Washington and an M.S. from San Jose State with a thesis critical of uniformitarianism. Morris and the CRS paid Austin's tuition and living expenses while he earned a Ph.D. in coal geology from Penn State in 1979 (Numbers, 1993). During his Penn State time he also wrote creationist articles under the pseudonym of Stuart Nevins. Currently he is chair of the ICR's Department of Geology and a major contributor to their in-house publications and articles on geology. His Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, (Austin, 1994) is a slick, full-color volume designed both as a guide for Austin's fundamentalist field trips into the Canyon (Figure 3) and as a potential text for fundamentalist college-level geology courses. In these publications his scientific philosophy is never in doubt: "The real battle in regard to understanding the Grand Canyon is founded not just upon Creation and Noah's Flood versus evolution, but upon Christianity versus humanism." (Austin, 1994)

Figure 3 (GIF, 268K)

Figure 3. Grand Canyon geology --- the sweeping history of earth told in rock that has inspired generation of geologists --- has recently been rewritten by creationists. In the alternative view the canyon was not formed by layers of sedimentation atop ancient metamorphic rock deposited over millions of years, followed by volcanic flows into the canyon and the downcutting action of the powerful Colorado River. Some 500 million years of the canyon's history are explained in this view (labels at left) as taking place during the Noachian flood year, a feat that would require massive layers of wet sediments to be deposited and harden at astounding rates over the course of weeks, leaving them solid enough to be incised into mile-high cliffs by receding floodwaters. (Creationist ages, left, after Austin 1994, with basic geology after Coney 1975.)

Kurt Wise was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist family in rural Illinois and accepted flood geology as a teenager while attending a conference for Christian youth run by Bob Jones University. He graduated from University of Chicago with honors in geophysical sciences before going on to Harvard and his Ph.D. with Stephen J. Gould. He has been the focus of a number of articles in the popular press (Campbell and Scroggins, 1995, and Hitt, 1996) and currently teaches at the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan College in Tennessee near the site of the Scopes trial. He minces no words about his scientific philosophy and agenda. "I intend to replace the evolutionary tree with the creationist orchard, separately created, separately planted by God." (Hitt, 1996)

Creationist Geologic Thought at Present

The current thinking of the young creationist geologists is perhaps best shown in a paper co-authored by six of them, including Austin, Morris, and Wise (Austin et al., 1994). Their "tentative" model of "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History" starts about 6,000 years ago with a pre-flood earth differentiated into core, mantle, and a crust with horizontal segregation into granitic continents and basaltic ocean basins. "If this differentiation had occurred by any natural means, the gravitational energy released ... would produce enough heat to melt the earth's crust and vaporize the earth's oceans. ...it most certainly occurred before the creation of organisms (at the latest Day 3 of the creation week.)" The authors note that "even though such differentiation could have been performed by God without the 'natural' release of gravitational potential energy" the differentiation process provides a natural driving mechanism for the proposed next stages of rapid motion, the Noachian flood. This was initiated as slabs of oceanic floor broke loose and subducted along the edges of continents. Deformation of the mantle by these slabs raised the temperature and lowered its viscosity into a runaway convection system which overturned the whole mantle. Upwelling mantle plumes created the mid-oceanic ridges, drove plate tectonics at rates of "meters per second," and discharged magmatic steam into the atmosphere to cause the flood. Tidal waves washed the continents and piled marine sediments into great mountain systems along the edges. In a few hundred years after the flood, residual heat from the cooling ocean floor warmed the oceans and climate into a system characterized by efficient atmospheric transport of moisture to the poles to create glaciation and ice caps.

The thermal problems of this model are mind boggling. At the start, gravitative energy released by earth's differentiation into core and mantle would raise average temperature of the entire globe by 2,500 degrees (Birch, 1965). To this must be added the frictional heating of the runaway subduction plus the massive heat of condensation of a collapsing vapor canopy. Then brand new basaltic ocean floors at minimum temperatures of 1,100 degrees C. had to form over 2/3 of the earth's surface, presumably beneath non-boiling flood waters. Finally this massive thermal pulse dissipated in a few thousand years by unstated processes to leave most of the earth's surface devoid of hot springs or abnormal heat flow. The authors apologize that their "model is still in the formative stages and thus is incomplete." From a thermal viewpoint "incomplete" seems like gross exaggeration. An incandescent earth with an asbestos ark floating on a sea of molten lava would be more appropriate!

The Creationist Geologic Time Scale

Creationists will undoubtedly challenge or try to confuse arguments concerning individual items on Figure 1. The detailed discussion that follows attempts to arm the scientific community with some real data and references and to warn of typical Creationist attacks on particular points. For additional geologic discussion, a scientist would be well advised to read Heaton's A young Grand Canyon ?, Weber's (1980) paper on "fatal flaws in flood geology" or Young's (1977, 1982) books which seem to have upset the Creationists enough to make them attempt to answer his points one by one (Morris and Morris, 1989) or Gish's (1993) book of rebuttals.

Creation Week (1)

. Biblical Order Evolutionary Order

Garden of Eden (2)

Canopy Theory (3)

Figure 4 (GIF, 150K)

Figure 4. Catastrophic phenomena must be postulated to explain the occurrence of a flood powerful enough to drown all but a few creatures and to massively rearrange the surface of the earth. Creationists have suggested that before the Noachian flood the earth had a Venusian atmosphere dominated by a huge canopy of water vapor that collapsed and inundated the earth to create the flood with the help of "fountains of the deep" activated by the subduction of crustal plates. At the center of the earth in one creationist view, as yet undetected by seismology, is Hell.

Radiometric dating (4)

Related creationist arguments note (correctly) that light from the most distant galaxies has red shifts up to the equivalent of four times the speed of light. Hence, they argue that the universe appears to be expanding at a rate in excess of the speed light in violation of Einstein's equations and that these values for the speed of light must have changed with time. Thus, a very young universe is possible (Curtis, 1995). The whole argument is based on a false premise, that these red shifts are Doppler effects. In reality, the red shifts have little to do with Doppler-like instantaneous speeds of celestial objects. Instead, they represent a kind of tape measure of the wavelengths of light stretching from those distant galaxies to the earth. When these wavelengths started, they were of normal lengths. In the intervening eons, the cosmos has expanded along the line of travel by as much as four times, stretching the wavelengths embedded in it. Thus, the Creationist argument is a complete misreading of the physics: the red shift has nothing to do with instantaneous Doppler effects and Einsteinian equations but instead is a measure of long term expansion of the cosmos and everything within it.

Another creationist argument claiming unreliability of radiometric dating is that of Gentry (1992), who observed tiny spheres or halos of radiation damage around minerals embedded in Precambrian micas. An excellent summary of Gentry, both as a person and a "scientist," is by Gardner (1989). Gentry argues that these halos had to be formed in primordial granites by some, now extinct, very short-lived, radioactive element during the first few minutes between neuclosynthesis and Earth formation. Because this contradicts geologic dating of Precambrian events, he argues all those dates must be wrong. His argument with its confused geology and the real geologic facts refuting it are put forth by Wakefield (1988) and Wakefield and Wilkerson (1990), who show that Gentry's samples came from dikes that cut Precambrian sedimentary rocks. Hence, his samples must be younger than those sedimentary events: there is no way the geologic setting allows them to be of primordial origin. In contrast, the best radiometric dates yield a primordial age of the earth and solar system by defining sequential events of accretion and early differentiation in meteorites ranging from 4.58 to 4.50 Ga (Allegre et al., 1995).

Creationists commonly cite the helium problem as evidence for a young atmosphere, contradicting the radiometric dates (Vardiman 1986b, 1990, and J. Morris, 1994). It is well known that the rate of production of helium from the earth's crust and mantle exceeds by a factor of 2 to 5 the Jeans rate of strictly thermal escape from the upper atmosphere (Kellogg and Wasserburg, 1990; Harper and Jacobsen, 1996). If these were the only factors in the earth's helium balance, the atmosphere might have a maximum age of only 2 ma. (J. Morris, 1994). However, Shizgal and Arkos (1996) provide a number of non-thermal processes capable of accounting for steady-state atmospheric compositions of earth, Venus, and Mars. These include exothermic exchanges of He⁺ and N₂⁺ to boost He to escape velocity as well as the polar wind sweeping He⁺ outward along high-latitude open magnetic field lines. The helium problem is still under active scientific investigation, but it has gone far beyond the classic thermal escape models still cited by the Creationists.

Another frequently cited argument for the "unreliability" of radiometric dates is Austin's (1994) dating of the Uinkaret lava flows of the Grand Canyon region. It is generally recognized that some of these flows were so young that they cascaded over the Canyon edges and dammed huge lakes within it. Austin cites a number of different analyses of these lavas which can be used to calculate a wide range of radiometric model ages, some older than the earth itself. He concludes (p. 129) by asking: "Has any Grand Canyon rock ever been successfully dated?" The counter argument might be: "Why is your sundial not as accurate as my quartz crystal watch?" There are many methods of deriving radiometric dates, some are widely recognized as being far more accurate than others. For the most part, Austin used a ham-handed approach by dating whole rocks rather than individual minerals or parts of individual mineral grains. He then culled other dates from the literature for comparison to complain about the wide spread of all the results: a straw-man approach. In reality, there are quite precise dates on these Uinkaret volcanics, using some of the best K-Ar methods (Wenrich et al., 1995). These show a regional pattern of younger and younger dates moving eastward with time to reach the youngest of the Grand Canyon volcanos only 10,000 years ago, in good accord with the geomorphic data.

Creationist claims about radiometric dates coupled with the supposed unreliability of the fossil record fail to point out the rarity of locations where rocks with well controlled fossil dates are closely associated with proper mineral material for the most precise of radiometric dates. There are at most a few hundred of these well dated localities on which the entire dating system of the geologic column is based. Where such conditions exist, the same fossil horizons yield precise dates of the same fossil horizons even then the locations are continents apart. For instance, Bowring et al. (1993) use the finest uranium-lead methods to date zircons associated with the base of the Cambrian in Siberia at 543.9 (+/- 0.2) million years while in southern Africa, Grotzinger et al. (1995) find a number of ash beds spanning the same fossil range yielding dates from 545 to 539 (+/- 1) million years. In the Rocky Mountain region, about 20 Cretaceous ash beds are interlayered with well known fossil-bearing sequences recognized both here and in Europe. Precision dating of these ash beds by Obradovich (1993) confirms the same 1, 2, 3 .. sequence as do the fossils and field relationships for individual beds differing by only 0.5 to 1 million years.

In the face of such precision and reproducibility, it is difficult to argue that radiometric methods and the associated stratigraphy, when used with care on the best of geologic locations, have no reliability and that the fossil record is a rather haphazard jumble of life forms mashed together as the flotsam and jetsam of a single great flood.

Humans and Dinosaurs Coexisting (5)

The "evidence" most commonly cited for coexistence of pre-flood humans and dinosaurs is the exposure of footprints near Glen Rose in central Texas in the bed of the Paluxy River. In that these beds are interpreted as Noachian flood deposits, the tracks must have been made by the evil people of those days as well as the dinosaurs just before both groups were engulfed by the waters. Why the tracks are those of walking rather than running individuals is not explained.

To my knowledge, the best scientifically based discussion of these tracks is by G. J. Kuban (1986) who reports visiting the site in the company of a number of Creationists, including ICR's John Morris. Kuban's extensive documentation of the tracks includes stain markings of obviously non-human, three clawed toes as integral parts of the "man-tracks." He notes later correspondence with John Morris of ICR, including Morris' subsequent agreement that all the Taylor Site tracks (the best of the sites) were probably dinosaurian. In a following article of the same issue, J. Morris (1986) makes a half-hearted retraction.

Kuban's religious neutrality is shown in an after statement to his 1986 paper: "I am a Christian and believe in a Creator, but prefer not to be labeled a 'Creationist' or an 'Evolutionist,' since I do not fully identify with all the tenets that are often assumed to typify each camp. However, on some issues that I have studied in depth, such as the Paluxy controversy (Kuban also has published a 250 page monograph on the subject), I have formed definite conclusions. Although my findings are not favorable to the "man track" claims, the objective of my research has not been to attack Creationism, but to carefully investigate and document what actually exists on the Paluxy sites alleged to contain human footprints." Kuban notes that: "When the full evidence is brought to light, it is evident that all the Taylor Site tracks are dinosaurian."

Films for Christ Association, which made and distributed the film "Footprints in Stone" about these tracks, reviewed Kuban's evidence and showed its basic honesty by immediately withdrawing the film from distribution and giving a clear retraction (1986).

Despite all this evidence, even from within Creationist circles, the Paluxy footprints are certain to be raised again and again before scientifically unsophisticated audiences. For instance, Helfinstine and Roth (1994) have published a 109 page booklet on these tracks and artifacts. H&R are at best amateur geologists (R cites his credentials as four extension course in geology; H cites none at all), and at worst they have the bias of being past presidents of the Twin-Cities Creation Science Association. They continue the claim of human footprints as well as the existence of a "human finger" of ante-deluvian man with photos looking remarkably like a geologic concretion. They also illustrate a "pre-flood" hammer embedded in iron oxide in a setting looking like a typical bog iron deposit, a process which is still going on today and could easily surround a 19th century hammer. Interestingly, their list of acknowledgments does not include ICR's John Morris who wrote a book on the tracks nor Glen Kuban with his thorough scientific studies on the site.

Human Life Spans of 900 Years (6)

Lunar Craters (7)

Fossil Stratigraphic Sequence (8)

Figure 5 (GIF, 108K)

Figure 5. "Creation science" explains the fossil record and deposits of petroleum, natural gas, and coal as products of the flood year. Larger land animals, it is argued, ran to the mountaintops (upper insert), explaining why they appear in upper fossil strata; meanwhile massive mats of vegetation formed (lower insert), later to become coal beds. The volcano that is now Mount Ararat rose rapidly (bottom right) beneath the deluge and just as rapidly cooled to provide a place for Noah's ark to later be grounded. According to this view, human beings and dinosaurs co-existed before the flood. At lower left, water spews from one of the Biblical "fountains of the deep."

Coral Reefs and Limestone Deposits Grown During the "Flood" (9)

Recently the "young earthers" have avoided this excessive growth rate during the "flood year" by a new twist (Austin et al., 1994). For about 1,500 years between Eden and the "flood," extremely abundant carbonates were produced by the vibrant biologic activity in the postulated extremely high carbon dioxide pressure of those times. Thick carbonate muds collected in those early ocean basins only to be hurled onto the continents by violent runaway subduction during the flood as plates moved at speeds 1 to 10 km per hour, depending on the model. Conceivably this process might yield the volume of carbonate sediments on the continents but hardly the delicate and orderly succession of fossiliferous limestone and other formations of the continental interior, the Grand Canyon, and elsewhere.

Coral reefs as opposed to regular limestone deposits pose an even more difficult problem because even an unsophisticated public has some idea of typical growth rates of corals. One "young earth" approach is by omission. Austin (1994) notes (correctly) that no great coral reefs occur in the Grand Canyon and, hence, pose no problems there. He fails to mention that the Permian Kaibab limestone of the Canyon has well known and generally equivalent units in the Permian Basin of West Texas (Frenzel et al., 1988). These include the famous Capitan Reef, reaching a maximum thickness of 610 meters (King, 1948) with well exposed forereef and backreef facies, all developed on the edges of the deepwater Permian Basin. Similar integrated reefs and adjacent basin systems can be found for the Silurian of the mid-continent region (Fisher et al., 1988) and the petroleum rich reefs of the Devonian of Alberta (Johnson and McMillan, 1993).

Elsewhere, Morris and Morris (1989) argue correctly but somewhat disingenuously that "coral" reefs of the past are probably not reefs at all. They cite S. E. Nevins (pseudonym of S. Austin, 1975) that one of the greatest of these, El Capitan and the Permian "reef complex" of West Texas, comprises mostly transported fossil-bearing lime muds. However, they state that this complex had a "real topographic expression ...that... controlled the distribution and character of sediments and organisms in the region." To most geologists this is the definition of a reef whether it is 100 % coral or not. No matter what one calls them, these are organic deposits which grew in place and were buried in their own debris. In the case of the Capitan Reef, the "flood" model would require an absolute minimum vertical growth rate for the mass of 1.6 meters per day or 7 cm per hour, a rate 80,000 times the maximum ever observed for a modern reef surface (Chave et al.,1972)!

Coal Deposits (10)

Thick Salt Beds (11)

Figure 6 (GIF, 150K)

Figure 6. Flood geology must explain a massive geologic record as a single year's events. The maximum known thicknesses of sedimentary rocks of a given age are plotted at top to derive their maximum rate of deposition during geologic periods, according to radiometric dating (graph adapted from Hudson, 1964). In the chart are listed some selected features in each geologic time segment that creationist models require to have been formed within part of the year of the Noachian flood, most in a few weeks. Standard geologic interpretations require any single one of them to occupy more than the total 6,000 years of earth history allowed by creationists.

Nowhere is mention given of the enormous halite deposits of the geologic record nor of their generally accepted origin by continuous evaporation of sea water flowing into semi-restricted basins. Morris, in an earlier publication (Morris and Morris, 1989), argues that ancient "pure" salt deposits are not even evaporites because they are so unlike the "dirty" salt deposits forming today. He cites the Russian Sozansky (1973) that great salt deposits are derived from volcanic rocks as products of degassification of the earth's interior brought up by juvenile waters moving along faults. The deceptive statement quoted above about evaporation in trapped lagoons is at best only partly true and even that is obtained by tightly restricting the definition of lagoon. It is difficult to believe that while almost every elementary geology student learns about these great deposits of marine salts, a Ph.D. in geology (Austin) and another in geophysics (Morris) somehow managed to gain their advanced degrees while remaining innocent of any knowledge of such marine evaporative processes and geologic formations.

Sedimentary Cover of Continents (12)

Continental Drift (13)

A Creationist mechanism proposed by Baumgardner (1990) suggests that sudden subduction of the ocean floor caused steam and global rain for 40 days. Frictional heating of the downgoing slabs reduced the viscosity of the earth's mantle by a "factor of a billion" (from viscosity of rock to that of Jello). The result was a runaway convection system with the plates moving at high speed across the earth's surface. The fact that Baumgardner can write a finite element program to show convection motion proves nothing except that some form of mathematics can be applied to almost any set of assumptions, an excellent example of "garbage in, garbage out."

Deep Sea Sediments (14)

The "young earth" models would require all this accumulation to take place late in the flood year or during the subsequent 4,500 years, a rate averaging about 20 cm/yr or about 20,000 times that of the present. Above all, the sedimentology of very fine grained oozes and muds on the deep sea floor demands extremely slow sedimentation rates rather than the catastrophic dumping indicated by the flood model.

Hawaiian volcanos (15)

Mt. Ararat (16)

Claims of the discovery of Noah's ark in the Mt. Ararat region are reviewed by one of the few persons recently allowed into the Ararat region (Collins and Fasold, 1996). The "ark" claimed to be found by some is shown to be nothing more than a resistant bed in a doubly plunging synclinal fold. Technical discussion of some of the ark design problems are given by Shneour (1986).

Yellowstone Forests (17)

Field evidence given by Yuretich (1984) showed that most of the Yellowstone fossil trees were still in a standing position and many were rooted in soil developed in place. In a discussion and reply by Yuretich, Fritz (1984) notes "Yuretich's observation of in situ stumps is compatible with my model ... of transportation of up to 15% of the upright stumps. Additional studies on stumps picked totest the critical points of the slight differences between our models should show complete agreement." In other words, the multiple levels are for the most part a series of mature forests where were successively buried in place largely by stream related processes. The Creationists cannot represent these as the deposits of a single catastrophic year.

A related Creationist argument is polystratate fossil trees, namely preservation of standing tree stumps many meters in height penetrating a number of strata. The claim is that average sedimentation rates from traditional geologic time scales would be too slow for such trees to be buried before they rotted. The difficult is in the word average in that many geologic deposits occur as a series of closely spaced flood or ash events with the next series separated in time by hundreds to thousands of years.

Grand Canyon Erosion (18)

Animal Dispersion from Ark (19)

Earth Stands Still (20)

However, Velikovsky's mechanisms look almost like good science when compared with recent statements by an authoritative Creationist. Henry Morris, in the (1995) says:

Ice Age (21)

To explain the apparent record of multiple glaciations Oard (1990) argues for a very thin, post-flood ice cap which lasted only 700 years. Periodic surges at its lobes and edges produced local burial of slightly older tills, all of essentially the same age. He suggests that true interglacial deposits are almost non-existent, that they are hard to correlate, and that the soils on them are difficult to interpret. He also argues that some soils form rapidly in today's environment and that the immediate post-flood, ice-age atmosphere caused soil formation to proceed at even greater rates to produce the buried soils.

Real evidence for multiple glaciation is overwhelming. Older works on glacial geology (Flint, 1971; Wright and Frey, 1965) describe in great detail arguments for four great ice ages in the last two million or so years. This evidence includes well developed soil horizons and sub-tropical vegetation over-run by succeeding ice advances (Morrison and Wright, 1965). More recent works (Goudie, 1983; Wright, 1989; Dawson, 1992; Anderson and Borns, 1994) support these observations and further separate the four advances into about ten different advances. In addition, they give evidence of several other very much older glacial epochs, including some Precambrian ones which would have been "pre-flood."

Probably the best arguments for the magnitude of ice age time is the record from long cores taken through the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. Gish's outrageous statement (1992) that an armored dinosaur had been found in the ice of Antarctica might be taken as a Mesozoic age for the ice, but in reality the fossil was found in Mesozoic rocks of the Santa Marta formation (Weishampel, 1990). In the Antarctic ice, summer and winter bands can be counted back, year by year, to at least 30,000 years (Anderson and Borns, 1994) with overall core lengths indicating total time spans of several hundred thousand years. Dates from counting the annual layers in the cores can in turn be correlated with C¹⁴ dates from the CO₂ contained in entrapped air bubbles, with C¹⁴ dates from tree ring correlations which can be counted and correlated back 12,000 years, with annual sediment layers from glacial lakes, with dates from the pollen records of climatic change in Europe and America, and with radiometric dates and rate of sedimentation dates on deep sea cores. Most of these dates can in turn be stitched together and mutually supported by paleomagnetic dates from other areas and dating techniques (summaries by Anderson and Borns, 1994). As new evidence is gained and dating techniques are refined, all these lines of converging evidence show increasing good correlations with the Malenkovich cycles, based on Newtonian celestial mechanics, an additional set of time determinations linked to modern astronomic measurements. To argue in the face of such massive and interlocking evidence that the entire span of the Ice Ages constituted only the last few thousand years must represent a supreme example of faith overcoming reason.

Cooling Rates (22)

Dr. Donald U. Wise
Department of Geosciences
Franklin and Marshall College
Lancaster, PA 17604