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| The Creation of Adam (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
In
the ongoing conflict between science and creationism, evolution is
usually a main point of contention. The idea that all life on Earth
evolved from a common ancestor is a major problem for creationists. As a
geologist, though, I think that the rocks beneath our feet offer even
better arguments against creationism. For the creationist model doesn’t square with what you can see for yourself. And this has been known since before Darwin wrote a word about evolution.
What the rocks say
I don’t
have to travel very far to make this case. There’s a slab of polished
rock on the wall outside my department office that refutes so-called Flood Geology:
the view that a global, world-shattering flood explains geologic
history after the initial creation of Earth by God. This eight-foot-long
slab is a conglomerate – a rock made from water-worked fragments of
older rocks.
It’s what
you’d get if you buried a riverbed composed of many different types of
rock deep enough below ground for temperature and pressure to forge it
into a new rock. Preserved in it, you can see the original particles of
sand, gravel and cobbles made of various kinds of rock. And if you look
closely you can see some of the cobbles are themselves conglomerates —
rocks within rocks.
Why does
this disprove the creationist view of geology? Because a conglomerate
made of fragments of an older conglomerate not only requires a first
round of erosion, deposition, and burial deep enough to turn the
original sediments into rock. It requires another pass through the whole
cycle to turn the second pile of sedimentary rock fragments into
another conglomerate.
In other
words, this one rock shows that there is more to the geologic record
than creationists describe in their scripturally-interpreted version of
earth history. A single grand flood cannot explain it all. Embracing
young Earth creationism means you have to abandon faith in the story
told by the rocks themselves. This, of course, is no surprise to
geologists who have established that the world is billions of years old,
far older than the thousands of years that creationists infer from
adding up the generations enumerated in the Bible.
Read more:
Evolution Aside, Even Basic Geology Disproves Creationism
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