The Need—for Speed!

Technologically, the past 150 years have seen the advent of telephones, wireless communication, and personal computers. And of course, all of this is now integrated and accessed via the internet, which was put into the public domain on April 30, 1993. An invention that has fundamentally altered life as we know it.

People seem to forget that just 200 years ago, there were no trains, planes, automobiles, highways, Toronto, or Canada! And it’s only been a little over 500+ years since the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus officially introduced the Americas to Western Europe on October 12, 1492. This paved the way for a massive influx of western Europeans that formed brand new nations like the United States and Mexico, with massive cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. Many things we see around us have occurred faster than we sometimes imagine.

The Evolutionary Lens

When discussing the topic of origins, however, most people seem to slip on a pair of glasses with long-age lenses attached, which often skews their understanding of the past, which, in turn, affects their beliefs about the future—including their ultimate destiny. From a young age, most children attending state-run schools are taught that mankind has arrived at the tail end of a vast amount of time because of natural processes that occur slowly over millions of years.

We are often taught through education and the media that oil, coal, rocks, and the fossils found within them came into being very slowly. From gems found underground to the animals we see wandering around, we often have the concept of deep time embedded in our minds from a very young age.

However, when we take off those lenses and just look at the data unfiltered, we can understand there’s no reason not to trust the plain reading of God’s Word that says we are actually situated in a timeline that began roughly six thousand years ago when God created the heavens and the earth. So, let’s look at six areas we are often told are the result of immense epochs and see if we can’t turn back the clock, so to speak, and see the world around us in a different light. Let’s start with the poster boys of long ages: fossils.

1. Fast Fossils

Nothing says long ages to most people like the mention of fossils, with atheistic evolutionary groups actually selling T-shirts riffing, “We have fossils, we win!” emblazoned on them. This exemplifies the fact that, for many people, the idea of the story of evolution occurring over vast ages is literally rock solid, proven by the innumerable number of fossilized creatures entombed in sediments around the world. All of which they have been taught demonstrate the history of life on earth.

However, the idea that fossils take long ages to form has been blown to pieces by new research, with evolutionists admitting fossils can form incredibly fast—new experimental research showing it can occur in only one day! Even before this 2018 report, secular scientists had admitted they had observed fossilization occurring within hours.

For example, way back in 1996, in his book 101 Questions About Dinosaurs, Dr. Phil Currie said the following;

Fossilization is a process that can take anything from a few hours to millions of years . . . The amount of time that it takes for a bone to become completely permineralized is highly variable. If the groundwater is heavily laden with minerals in solution, the process can happen rapidly.1

One wonders why, after having observed fossils forming quickly, someone would cling to the idea they could occur over millions of years? It demonstrates the indoctrination into the evolutionary paradigm that scientists have been inculcated in, even while the general public thinks of them as unbiased “truth seekers” only interested in the facts.

The fact is that the fossil beds seen around the world are actually the record of the great judgment God proclaimed on a sin-filled world at the time of the great deluge recorded in Genesis 6–9: Noah’s Flood. And that occurred around 4,300+ years ago, according to God’s Word.

2. Speedy Sediments Surprise!

Now obviously, if fossils can form quickly (and they are trapped within sedimentary rocks), then it stands to reason that rock layers themselves can form very rapidly. And we see evidence of this all over the world, demonstrated by the remains of trees and plants that extend through multiple layers (often several meters) of sediments. These polystrate (many-layered) fossils extend through rock layers that most evolutionists would say occurred over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. But this makes no sense considering dead trees don’t stand around for thousands of years waiting to be buried.

Generally, dead trees dry out at the top, rot out at the bottom, topple over after a short time, and get devoured by decomposers. So, to find them standing upright, fossilized with no/little signs of decomposition suggest they were buried and fossilized very rapidly indeed, which means the meters of rock surrounding them must also have formed simultaneously.

Such fossils can be found in Yellowstone Park, Joggins, Nova Scotia, several coal beds in both northern and southern hemispheres, and in many other places around the world. And these discoveries have even forced more fair-minded evolutionary geologists like Derek Ager (Emeritus Prof. Geology, University College of Swansea) to admit sedimentation around them must have occurred rapidly,

[W]e cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed and at other times there were long breaks in sedimentation, though it looks both uniform and continuous.2

Notice that he admits the physical evidence all points to rapid, uniform, and continuous sedimentation, and yet he believes there must have been “long breaks” in between, despite the fact it doesn’t look that way. Why? Because he believes in long ages, and so the millions of years must be placed within that framework in some way, even if only in his imagination.

But of course, since Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, geologists have before and after observational evidence that stratified rock layers can accumulate in very short periods during catastrophic conditions, including one area where 25 feet of the stratified deposit (turned completely rock hard) accumulated within three hours!3 So there’s no longer any reason to insist that rock must have formed slowly in the past.

3. Rapid Underground Oil Refinery

A quick search obtained from the wise sage Google, with keywords “how long does it take for oil to form,” reveals the top 2 articles answering in this way:

How long does it take for oil to form? A minimum of about 50 million years. Most of Earth's oil was formed between 60 million and 250 million years ago. A small percentage of the oil was formed between 250 and 500 million years ago.4

It takes a significant amount of time for oil to form, with the process beginning hundreds of millenniums ago (65-541 million years ago).5

These articles confirm what the majority of people (including scientists) believe today: the notion that oil and natural gas take millions of years to form. And even though there have been numerous studies demonstrating oil can be produced in days (by converting sewage or in showing it happening in just a few short years from coal), critics have declared these aren’t necessarily “natural” processes, so are not to be equated with what they believe to have created “real” oil.

However, way back on February 2, 1982, The Australian Financial Review carried an article called “Natural oil refinery found under ocean” (referring to an area under the waters of the Gulf of California in the Guaymas Basin), based off an original New York Times piece called “Divers Find Natural ‘Oil refineries.’”6 The article stated,

The oil is being formed from the unusually rapid breakdown of organic debris by extraordinarily extensive heat flowing through the sediments, offering scientists a singular opportunity to see how petroleum is formed. . .

Ordinarily oil has been thought to form over millions of years whereas in this instance the process is probably occurring in thousands of years . . . .

So rapid formation of oil isn’t simply based on fanciful imaginations or under artificial conditions in controlled laboratory experiments. It’s been demonstrated for decades to occur under common, natural geological conditions. So why believe it must take longer at other times?

4. Gems in a Jiffy!

For at least 500 million years . . . an inland sea covered central Australia, and silica-laden sediment deposited around its shoreline . . . 30 million years ago, lots of silica was released into a solution which filled cracks in the rocks, layers in clay, and even some fossils. Some of them became precious opals. It takes about 5 to 6 million years to make a 1 cm opal to mature.7

So says the Gemstory website, “Australia's leading supplier of solid Black opal and Boulder opal,” located in Surfer’s Paradise in Queensland, Australia. But they might be surprised to know that less than nine hours drive via State Route 49 is a man in Lightning Ridge (New South Wales) named Len that grows them in weeks!

Len Cram has an earned Ph.D. (for a thesis on his opal research) and is likely one of the, if not the most, leading authorities on the subject of opals. And he’s been making them since 1975. His work is so good and genuine that the opals he produces are indistinguishable from opals dug out of local mines that sell for hundreds of dollars. As such, he has kept his research private, not wanting to damage the opal industry.

As a matter of fact, Richard W. Hughes (one of the world’s foremost experts on ruby and sapphires, author of several books and over 170 articles and receiver of numerous gemology industry awards), recounts a praiseworthy conversation with Len in an online article;

When I saw what he had done, I asked the most natural question: "What are you planning to do with your home-grown opals." Lenny just looked me straight in the eye and said "Nothing." And after helping roll my tongue back into my throat, he explained why. He believes his stones cannot be identified [emphasis mine]. Rather than commercially producing a product that could destroy his industry [emphasis mine], he would rather devote the rest of his life to building it up.8

It should be noted that opals aren’t the only precious gem that has been shown to be produced quickly, threatening their perceived value in the marketplace. Diamonds were shown to be lab producible once again in a Jan 2019 article titled, “Lab-Grown Diamond Production Rises, but Prices Fall.” All of which shows that, once again, there is no valid reason to believe in a “millions of years” explanation for these dazzling and decorative stones.

5. Coal Can Accumulate Quickly

Although some modern evolutionary coal geologists concede that specific coal deposits are better explained as deposited by flood, most people outside the industry (including scientists and laypersons alike) think that the coal must have formed slowly in swamps and are unaware of any other proposed mechanism for it to have happened.

However, remember our hostile witness, Professor Derek Ager, who admitted (above) that sedimentation must have occurred rapidly sometimes? Well, he is also aware of large trees having been found buried upright in coal beds as well, which is why he said this:

If one estimates the total thickness of the British Coal Measures as about 1,000 m, laid down in about 10 million years, then, assuming a constant rate of sedimentation, it would have taken 100,000 years to bury a tree 10 m high, which is ridiculous.9

And it’s for reasons like this he and his other more well-informed evolutionary geologists yield to the possibility of rapid catastrophic processes being involved in coal formation (in some circumstances). But is there observational evidence we’ve seen occur first-hand that can shed light on whether all coal beds we see around the world might have been created quickly? There certainly is, and we alluded to just such an event earlier when we mentioned Mt. St. Helens (MSH) erupting.

When the 20-megaton (TNT equivalent) blast from MSH occurred, it devastated approximately 600 sq km almost instantaneously. Sixty-meter Douglas Fir trees were blown off their stumps, stripped of their branches, and as many as a million+ logs found themselves unceremoniously dumped into Spirit Lake situated beside the volcano. And because the root ends were thicker and denser, it caused many to float upright.

During subsequent years, an estimated 20K logs sank to the floor of the lake, many of them upright. Five years after the initial eruption in 1980, scuba divers and radar equipment confirmed many were buried over a meter deep, while others rested prone on the bottom. The remaining trees on the surface formed a gigantic floating log mat, constantly bobbing and banging into one another, which caused them to shed their bark and remaining branches. And this caused a remarkable phenomenon.

The falling sheets of bark, branches, and root materials had intermingled with volcanic sediments, forming a layer of peat more than a meter thick, with a coarse compositional texture and a layered appearance looking specifically like certain other coal beds found in the eastern United States.

So, the takeaway point is this: that coal beds can form rapidly during catastrophic deforestation events in a short time, and the great deluge recorded in Genesis 6–9 flood certainly would have destroyed the earth’s forests very quickly, resulting in huge log mats that would have supplied tons of bark, branches, and other woody matter that sank and provided the raw materials to form earth’s coal layers. So again, based on observational evidence, there is no reason to think coal must have formed over long ages.

6. Speedy Speciation

“Creationists have long held to the idea of rapid speciation. . . based on the biblical account of the dispersion [of creatures on board] after the Ark landed following Noah’s Flood. . . . Creationists have understood that there must be inbuilt mechanisms that could allow creatures to adapt and change in response to their environment over relatively short periods of time.”10 And “this was held to by creationists long before specific details about genetics, DNA etc was discovered”11 because it would account for how “the relatively small . . . number of various kinds of creatures were on board Noah’s Ark could account for the millions of species we see around the world today.”12

Creationists often describe speciation as “variations within the created kinds.” However, speciation is sometimes difficult to define, especially when communicating between the creationist and evolutionary community and even within them, respectively. In the general sense, a species is a group of organisms in nature which can interbreed and do not naturally and freely interbreed with another.

To quote the evolutionary source PBS Evolutionary Library FAQ page,

The evolutionary process of speciation is how one population of a species changes over time to the point where that population is distinct and can no longer interbreed with the “parent” population.13^,14

“Evolutionists of course have to hold to a Ma timescale, and so rapid speciation was something that was scoffed at by most Darwinists because it was assumed it would take vast periods of time for speciation to occur. . . . However, rapid speciation has recently been observed in different varieties”15 of creatures now.

“A major scientific conference on speciation16 held in Asilomar, California, in May 1996 demonstrated several examples of rapid speciation,”17 even without any kind of barriers between groups. This is known as “sympatric speciation, [showing] that a population may split into two species even while living in the same area, with no separation or physical barriers.”18

Of course, speciation is not “evolution” in the grand sense, because what we observe is kinds of creatures diversifying into variations of the same kind. Fruit flies turn into . . . fruit flies. Moths into . . . another variation of moths. But this is simply utilizing different combinations of the pre-existing (or damaged versions of) genetics already present in the creatures.

From mice to mosquitoes, flies to finches, lizards, daisies, butterflies, and many other creatures, speedy speciation is now accepted as common. So, there is no reason not to accept the biblical account or to assume long ages are required for speciation to occur.

The Biblical Lens

So the next time someone mentions long ages, especially a Christian, ask them why they believe in that concept and perhaps share this article with them. Point them to God’s Word as the lens through which to view God’s world, and remind them of the damage that belief in long ages does to the gospel and the concept of biblical authority. There is no reason not to trust what Scripture clearly states:

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:11)