Prophecy Fulfilled in Long Age Beliefs

He worked to the point that uniformitarian geology became the dominant view within academia’s study of earth science for well over the next 100 years. This then supplied the story of evolution’s required deep-time framework, which Charles Darwin (and others) took advantage of.

This understanding of how the rock layers were laid down at slow and steady rates over millions of years versus the contrasting view called catastrophism1 was encapsulated in the phrase “the present is the key to the past.”

This view insisted that all our understanding of geology must be based solely on the slow and steady processes observed operating in the present. However, there are some known geologic features that made catastrophism rather obvious in some cases, but more on that later.

Uniformitarian thinking eventually became so dogmatic in scientific study that any mention of belief in catastrophic events was almost immediately mocked as “unscientific” and “religious,” seemingly a knee-jerk reaction against the biblical account of Noah’s flood.

As we saw in our last article, this was Lyell’s admitted ultimate goal—to “free the science (of geology) from Moses.”2

However, over 150 years after Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published, many modern-day geologists are freer from that more binary way of interpreting the physical evidence. Many have concluded that certain facts observed around the world demand catastrophic events to account for them and that uniformitarian interpretations, in many cases, are simply ludicrous.

To the point that Lyell has now been accused of selling the geologic community “snake oil”!3 Insinuating that he was a charlatan for insisting on his uniformitarian interpretation of geology because there is ample evidence for the rapid deposition of rock layers (entombed organisms and created fossils) having occurred all over the planet.

One such example of deposition comes from my wife’s home province in the town of Joggins, Nova Scotia, Canada. Joggins lies in the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world. So, as the water rapidly and dynamically rushes in and out, it erodes the surrounding cliff face quite quickly.

I’ve actually been to Joggins several times, and what is fascinating is that you can sometimes observe fossilized, treelike plants that are over 30 feet tall extending vertically through meters (depending on your country’s measuring system) of layered, sedimentary rock.4 According to Lyell’s uniformitarian theory, these sediments are supposed to have been laid down over millions of years.

So have you figured it out yet? How could trees 30 feet tall get buried and fossilized at a rate of thousands and thousands of years per inch of deposition? The whole idea is preposterous!

Those trees must have been buried incredibly fast. Can you just imagine how much sediment must have been rapidly deposited to bury just one of those trees, let alone all the other surroundings?

We can obviously observe living trees all around the world, and they aren’t getting covered and fossilized slowly over millions of years.

We can obviously observe living trees all around the world, and they aren’t getting covered and fossilized slowly over millions of years. As a matter of fact, if you didn’t rapidly and completely cover an entire tree before it died, we know what would occur because we’ve all seen it happen. It will rot at the bottom, dry out at the top, and fall over—long before millions of years of rock would somehow bury it.

Now, you might be thinking that good old Charles Lyell just never saw this type of evidence, so maybe he shouldn’t be mistreated as such. However, the problem is that he did. As a matter of fact, the official webpage for The Joggins Fossil Cliffs on the Unesco World Heritage website not only features Lyell’s visit to Joggins online, but the last time I went down to the beach, there was a physical sign mentioning Lyell’s visit there as well.

“Sir Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology, first proclaimed the exceptional natural heritage value of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs.”5

And the website even features a picture of a fossilized tree extending vertically through several layers with the following caption—“Lycopsid tree preserved in standing position in the cliffs.” The University of Edinburgh’s online article “‘An Epoch in History’—Charles Lyell in Nova Scotia 1842” describes, “In July and August of 1842, Charles Lyell was visiting Nova Scotia for a month of geology, to engage the local geologists and to examine the fossil forest that everyone, including Darwin would come to hear about.”6

Now, you can see why Lyell’s uniformitarian ideas aren’t getting as much love today as they used to. People have begun to take off their blinders and realize that a lot of what was taught as “science and fact” in the past were just opinions and ways to manipulate other people’s thinking.

Along those same lines and before we move on, this concept that fossils need to be buried rapidly applies to all fossils big or small. Even a fish two or three inches thick would have to be buried very quickly along with the right mineral content in the sediment in order for it to turn into a fossil, as there’s no way it could just lay there for thousands of years without decomposing. So fossils are actually a record of something happening very quickly, not slowly.

This is likely why we are also seeing quotations like the following. Modern evolutionist dinosaur expert Dr. Phil Currie admits in his book 101 Questions About Dinosaurs.

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.7

Notice, that he concedes to observing fossilization occurring very rapidly, yet he still pays homage to the possibility that some fossils might take unobserved “millions of years” to form. But why?

“Sometimes” millions of years is required, but they have no evidence of it, and the idea doesn’t even make sense. I suspect it’s that belief in millions of years of earth history is baked into the minds of those who believe in the story of evolution to the extent that they are always looking for ways to insert it, regardless.

A good example of an evolution-believing scientist who also rejected Lyell’s uniformitarianism—while still clinging to the idea of millions of years of earth history—was the (now deceased) British paleontologist, Dr. Derek Ager. He was the former president of the British Geological Association and the emeritus professor of geology at the University College of Swansea (in Wales).

Although he was certainly not friendly to biblical creationists in any way, he was one of the first vocal objectors to uniformitarianism and rather scathingly called it “brainwashing” in his work The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record.8

We have allowed ourselves to be brain-washed into avoiding any interpretation of the past that involves extreme and what might be termed “catastrophic” processes.9

Through strong language, distinguished modern-day scientists highlight the fact that the takedown of Lyell’s unwarranted and unscientific insistence on uniformitarianism is fully justified based on observable facts—not just facts seen at Joggins, but all around the world.

When referencing coal beds he’d observed in Britain, Ager commented on the foolishness of believing a fossilized tree standing vertically through meters of sediments could somehow be the result of slow and gradual processes over thousands of years.

If one estimates the total thickness of the British Coal Measures as about 1000 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.10

Snake oil, brainwashing, ridiculous—these aren’t terms often seen in scientific books, journals, and papers penned by highly respected scientific experts, especially to describe someone who was once championed (and still is in many cases) as a distinguished scientist himself, let alone the “father of geology.”11

But these terms do highlight the fact that masses of people can be duped into believing falsehoods fairly easily, especially when it’s doled out by authority figures and touted as scientific. Sir Charles Lyell got away with his ridiculous ideas for well over 100 years and still does in most cases. For example, do you remember the Britannica piece on Lyell I quoted in our last article?

Uniformitarianism, in geology, the doctrine suggesting that Earth’s geologic processes acted in the same manner and with essentially the same intensity in the past as they do in the present and that such uniformity is sufficient to account for all geologic change. This principle is fundamental to geologic thinking and underlies the whole development of the science of geology.12

Uniformitarian thinking was largely proposed as a direct counterproposal to the historical account of Noah’s flood revealed in Scripture.

But does it, really (remember, this is on the Britannica website currently—October 31, 2024)? Does uniformitarianism actually make sense of many of the facts we observe? No, many times, just the opposite. Uniformitarian thinking was largely proposed as a direct counterproposal to the historical account of Noah’s flood revealed in Scripture. Uniformitarianism was used to further what Charles Darwin described as the Devil’s gospel.

For those who know their Bibles, this shouldn’t come as a surprise because there is a prophecy in Scripture that warns of this happening laid out in 2 Peter.

Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. (2 Peter 3:3–6)

Here we see how the apostle (inspired by the Holy Spirit) warns against people’s coming belief in uniformitarian principles where it says scoffers will say “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (i.e., the present is the key to the past), and they will deliberately “overlook” (i.e., deny) that Noah’s flood took place.

Understand, these neo-catastrophists (or new believers in catastrophism as they are sometimes referred to) do not hold to the idea of Noah’s flood as a real event in history.

What they believe is that not just one big flood occurred, but that multiple, large, catastrophic floods have occurred on earth over the supposed millions of years of earth history. Many also hold to the idea that slow and steady processes may have taken place in between such events. They cling to the concept of millions of years with a naturalistic death grip.

In fact, in Ager’s very last book The New Catastrophism, he went out of his way to distance himself from his conclusions or criticisms of uniformitarianism being supportive of creationism.

I should, perhaps, say something about the title of this book. Just as politicians rewrite human history, so geologists rewrite earth history. For a century and a half the geological world has been dominated, one might even say brainwashed, by the gradualistic uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell. Any suggestion of “catastrophic” events has been rejected as old-fashioned, unscientific and even laughable. This is partly due to the extremism of some of Cuvier’s followers, though not of Cuvier himself. On that side too were the obviously untenable views of Bible-oriented fanatics, obsessed with myths such as Noah’s Flood, and of classicists thinking of Nemesis. That is why I think it necessary to include the following “disclaimer”: in view of the misuse that my words have been put to in the past, I wish to say that nothing in this book should be taken out of context and thought in any way to support the views of the “creationists” (who I refuse to call “scientific”).13

Of course, what is interesting is that adherents to “flood geology” (belief in Noah’s flood as the explanation of the majority of the fossil record) have been using many of the exact same scientific arguments that Ager himself used against uniformitarianism, which demonstrates his unwarranted bias against biblical creationists.

Why deem Bible believers as “fanatics” because the Scriptures contain a historical account that clearly describes a mechanism that would account for the physical evidence found all over the world (billions of fossils entombed in sediments all rapidly laid down by water)?

I submit that it was because Ager was one of the “scoffers” that 2 Peter warned about and that it was his willingness to “deliberately overlook” the evidence for Noah’s flood that was everywhere he looked in his geologic studies. As he himself said, “I cannot help thinking that people find things that they expect to find. As Sir Edward Bailey (1953) said, ‘to find a thing you have to believe it to be possible.’”14

So, despite his ability to see through Lyell’s brainwashing in regard to uniformitarianism, he was not immune to the truly toxic effect it had on belief in Noah’s flood as a historical event and the resultant lack of trust in the rest of Scripture as authoritative as well. Unbelief is always at the root of a hard heart in rebellion to God’s Word.

Indeed, Hebrews 11:6 states, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

Join us for Part 9 where we’ll dig even deeper into how all these various ideas we’ve covered so far have directly affected Western culture’s lack of social cohesion. And how the derailment of our society can only hope to be brought back on track through a return to the authority of the Word of God, which once was the very foundation of Western culture.