A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 5)

As we’ve seen in Parts 1–4, upon closer examination, the individual pieces of evidence used to prop up the gleaming tower of evolution are actually just rickety supports that collapse under even the slightest weight of scrutiny. Like a rusty old car gone over with a shiny, new coat of paint, it may look good from a distance but proves rather disappointing upon close inspection.

Indeed, without the ongoing support and massive promotion and protection of the story of evolution through publicly funded institutions and media, this monolithic structure would be quickly seen for what it truly is: a scrapheap of twisted truth and misinterpreted facts that simply do not carry any weight whatsoever beyond the circumstantial.

Indeed, if evolution were true, it would hardly need to use such flimsy (and often fraudulent) evidence to promote it. It should be self-evident.

The Mirage of Deep Time

This leads us to the fallacious foundation on which the evolutionary worldview has always been perched—the concept of “millions of years”—because without it, the entire story could never have gotten off the ground.

Think about it. If everyone on the planet were suddenly convinced that the earth was less than 10,000 years old, how many would continue to believe in the story of evolution? The fact is, “millions of years” is a “die-on-the-hill” battle for evolutionists, for without it, the war for their worldview would truly be lost.

Evolution’s Bedrock

The pylons anchoring the story of evolution were metaphorically driven deep within the sedimentary rock layers seen all over the earth, which had been reinterpreted to illustrate the concept that they were laid down slowly over millions of years, rather than the biblically derived concept of having been laid down rapidly during the year-long global flood event described in Genesis 6–9. This view was highly popularized by a man named Charles Lyell in his book called Principles of Geology in 1830.

In it, Lyell championed the idea of geological uniformitarianism, which stated the earth processes (such as rates of sedimentation) we see today should be assumed to be the same as they always have been, and that by extrapolating these rates into the rock layers we see presently, it could be determined that these layers must have taken millions of years to form.

Remember, this was well before radiometric dating methods and big-bang or distant-starlight arguments had even been proposed and used to reinforce the idea of deep time. Uniformitarianism applied to geology became like a mantra to naturalists, and because of this, the “The present is the key to the past” catchphrase dominated geology for well over 100 years following his book release.

That continued until fairly recently.

Foundations Laid Bare

Modern evolutionary geologists have now conceded that large portions of geologic strata must have been laid down rapidly because specific fossils within them could not have been buried slowly but rather must have been buried catastrophically in order to account for their rapid burial before decomposition occurred.

For example, Professor Derek Ager (Emeritus Prof. Geology, University College of Swansea) has written:

[W]e cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed . . . .1

And why would he say that? Well, he’s intimately familiar with the geologic record, which includes very tall trees found buried upright in rock layers and coal beds.

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.2

Of course, these are arguments Bible-believing creationists have used for years. The idea that polystrate (many-layered) fossils extending through meters of rock layers were buried over millions of years is ridiculous!

Obviously, dead trees don’t stand around for thousands of years waiting to be entombed in rock. Rather, when they die, they dry out at the top, rot out at the bottom, tip over, and get devoured by decomposers after a short time.

And yet, fossils like Ager described can be found all over the world, including popular sites easily accessed by the public, such as Specimen Ridge at Yellowstone Park and the famous fossil cliffs in Joggins, Nova Scotia, CA (located in the Bay of Fundy—home of the highest tides in the world). These findings only confirm that rapid deposition has occurred all over the planet at some time in the past. And this confirms the biblical account, not the story of evolution.

Obviously, fossils and the sedimentary rocks they are buried within are intimately related—literally inseparable. And evolutionists now admit that fossils can be formed rapidly because it has been observed in real time. For example, paleontologist Phil Currie from the Royal Tyrell (a world-class dinosaur museum in Alberta, Canada) has stated:

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.3

But no one has observed fossilization happening over millions of years, and yet we have seen it happening quickly. So, based on scientific observation, the concept of millions of years is not supported by the facts in geology regarding deposition of rock or the formation of fossils—two of the most common arguments used to convince people to believe in millions of years of earth history.

Ultimately, instead of how rock-solid of a foundation the manufactured evolutionary evidences were heaped upon seemed, at the true foundation, all of these naturalistic arguments were simply stacked upon a pile of sinking sand. No wonder evolutionary arguments kept disappearing into the quicksand below, along with all of the other overturned, debunked, and discarded examples.

Ironically, even honest evolutionists like Professor Ager occasionally pull their heads out of that sandpile and make statements like the following:

It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student . . . have now been “debunked.”4

Unfortunately, most evolutionists simply dive straight back in, dazzled by the next generation of evolutionary evidences piled up before them, thinking somehow things will be different this time.

And that’s one of the main reasons the Answers in Genesis ministry exists—to provide answers to the objections to God’s Word that continue to be churned out by the world and fed by the constant discovery of new facts that get interpreted toward an evolutionary rather than God-honoring explanation.

(As we do not have time to go over the many more supposed proofs of an old earth (like arguments from cosmology or radioisotope dating methods), I encourage you to search the website for articles. The point of this article was to demonstrate that the concepts used to establish old-earth ideas were flawed from the beginning.)

Build Your House on the Rock

Jesus said,

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24–27)

Our Lord’s analogy is quite straightforward. To build a sound, solid structure, one must have a firm foundation as it will inevitably be tested. And any not set on a firm foundation will eventually be struck down.

Seeing Genesis 1–11 is the seedbed of all Christian doctrines, those believers who do not stand on its plain reading as the true history of mankind often leave themselves open to attack from Bible skeptics due to the result of inconsistencies that inevitably occur when doing so.

For example, non-believers are often puzzled about why Christians inconsistently adapt their interpretation of Scripture according to naturalistic interpretations from science (adding millions of years and/or evolution to the Bible by saying Genesis doesn’t mean what it plainly says) while still holding to supernatural explanations elsewhere that modern science also denies (healings, water into wine, walking on water, resurrections, etc.)

And remember, attempting to add millions of years to the Bible inevitably requires somehow inserting that time (represented by the rock layers) within the six days of creation. In doing so is the admission that the record of what is within those layers (fossils, i.e., dead things) must have occurred prior to Adam sinning, which is a declaration that the loving God of the Bible used billions of years of death and suffering to create and called everything very good—all before Adam sinned.

If there was death before the fall, how can we explain the gospel and the character of God correctly? Inevitably, there’s no need.

Accepting that rock layers filled with fossils occurred at the time of the great flood in Genesis 6–9 removes the need for “millions of years” explanations because all of the sinful actions recorded within it occurred some 1650 years after the fall, reconciling any conflict or contradiction the evolutionary story brings.

Peeking Behind the Curtain

Ultimately, believers should understand that the concept of millions of years wasn’t derived simply from an examination of facts that the idea simply “fell out” of. Rather, it was imposed on the facts we all have access to and based on the concept of materialistic naturalism that shaped how individual bits of information were then interpreted and arranged as evidence for long ages.

Think it through. If one assumes naturalism, there is no mind or designer to account for existence. But believing that our vastly complex universe came into being fully formed is simply illogical. Therefore, in order to account for the vast diversity in our universe, the processes involved must have occurred over an immense amount of time.

From there, the concept of some kind of biological evolution causing matter to go from simple to more complex becomes the ultimate conclusion. In fact, true naturalism means that cosmological, geological, chemical, biological, and human evolution must have occurred at some point in the past for us to even be discussing it!

So, in essence, all of the core elements of the grand theory of evolution are simply a logical, philosophical outworking based on the concept of atheism and then applied to the world we live in. As modern as some of our science and technology may be today, none of these “big ideas” are truly new.

Even Charles Darwin’s atheistic grandfather (Erasmus Darwin) published a book detailing a naturalistic explanation of the world called Zoonomia in 1794, a full 65 years before Origin of Species came out.

Zoonomia included claims that the earth came from a cosmic explosion, life began in the seas, simple life-forms became progressively more complex, and people were simply the highest life-form yet produced by these natural processes which occurred over millions of years.

And many ancient cultures, including the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, and Romans all had ideas of millions of years and/or biological evolution contained within their belief systems—all without access to facts commonly interpreted today as evidence and proof of evolution, such as DNA, radioisotope dating, hominid fossils, etc.

Reexamining the Mountain of Evidence

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, the “fact” of evolution was virtually unquestionable to me growing up. It seemed so solid—analogous to a towering skyscraper, its gleaming super-structure filled with enormous evidentiary I-beams, each supporting countless floors chock full of “proofs of evolution.”

It was only when I decided to peel back the shiny facade from that tower of evidence and examine each individual support for itself that I began to see it for what it truly was. And eventually, the entire structure collapsed into a heap of ruins for me, where its materialistic pylons were laid bare, sticking out of its ultimate foundation—the unseen and unproven concept of millions of years of earth history.

I trust the Lord will use this series as a blessing to you and/or those around you in overcoming any doubts surrounding the accuracy of the Bible and the authority of God’s Word. As it says,

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. (John 17:17)