Sedimentary Rock: Evidence of Noah's Flood?
But wasn’t Noah’s Flood just a made-up fairy tale, a religious
myth? After all, we have all been
taught that people are actually the product of millions and millions of years
of Darwinian evolution, and that the cosmos developed over “billions and
billions of years.” The dogma is a familiar one: first, a Big Bang, and then a slow,
gradual upward ascent from inanimate matter to living cells, and finally to
complex animal species and mankind.
Such an intricate and delicate process of minor genetic changes occurring
over a geologically vast period of time must somehow be evident in the
geological record, right? But what
do the rocks show? Are some things so obvious we might overlook them?
The photograph above is of the North Dakota Badlands in the
Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The most striking
feature of the picture is the colorful layering of the exposed sedimentary rock. As the National Park
Service brochure1 explains, the fantastic eroded landscape of the
park consists of hundreds of feet of layered sandstone, siltstone, mudstone,
and soft volcanic ash (bentonite clay).
Additionally, some areas show layers of lignite coal (itself composed of
leaves and branches compacted into peat, and chemically changed into soft,
wood-textured coal) and even fossils, particularly fossilized wood.
The presence of vast numbers fossils is particularly
interesting. Fossils do not
normally occur today, as the carcasses of dead animals or the leaves and
branches of plants are quickly removed or decayed by scavengers, bacteria,
rotting, and erosion. Fossilization
only occurs under special circumstances, such as the quick burial into an
anoxic environment, or the presence of hard skeletal parts; so it is only
natural to wonder why they are seen here in such vast numbers.
The thickness of the layers of sedimentary rock, silt, and
ash are remarkable in themselves, for they speak of powerful movements of
water, great enough to move gravel, sand, or silt, the sediment that makes up
“sedimentary” rock. Furthermore,
each layer is largely free of evidence of surface weathering or plant
life. And “sedimentation” itself indicates
a process of sorting out particles according to specific gravity and particle
size, as may occur after shaking dirt into a jar and allowing it to settle to
the bottom. Flooding comes to
mind. And if flooding was involved
in the formation of the sedimentary rock deposits around the globe, it must
have been cataclysmic, for sedimentary rock covers an estimated 73% of the
earth’s landmass2, at an average depth of 5400 feet, varying from
none in the Canadian shield to 60,000 feet off the Louisiana coastline3.
This was a stupendously vast
amount of sand, silt, rock, and volcanic ash acted upon by water! Could this be evidence of Noah’s Flood?
Regrettably, neither of the two opposing models of the
origin of the earth’s geology (Darwinian Evolution versus Biblical Creation)
can be proven through experimentation or personal observation, since they
happened so long ago; and despite the assurances of park brochures that the
deposits were laid down beginning 65 million years ago during the Paleocene
Epoch, current methods of dating require unverifiable assumptions regarding the
initial proportion of key elements, or else demand circular reasoning from the
assumed age of key fossils. A
certain element of faith is required to believe the timeline of either model,
whether the sediments are millions of years old, or mere thousands.
The facts, however, cannot be disputed: the sedimentary deposits
created through the action of water are thick, and cover the entire world today.
When the plain facts are separated from questionable evolutionary assumptions, Noah’s
Boys in the City of Mother Earth, set in a time before Noah’s Great Flood,
may not seem so hard to believe, after all!
G.M. Horning
References:
1. Geological Rock Formations: brochure of
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, National Park Service, 2017
2. Sedimentary Rock: Wikipedia article,
accessed 6/20/2017
3. Professor Stephen Nelson: Occurrence,
mineralogy, textures, and structures of sedimentary rocks, Geology 212, Tulane
University website, accessed 6/20/2017
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