Do facts change? Real, observable, empirical facts don’t-except in the most determined post-modern mind. So if the “facts” you’ve been given are altered, something is wrong. In my science classes at school-admittedly quite a long time ago now, I was taught “uniformitarian” doctrine: the present is the key to the past…
Change occurs over eons of time at the rate of processes we observe now, was the instruction I received. Well, all that proven “fact” seems to have changed considerably, and today, while you may well not have been told it yourself, the common view in the world of evolution theory concerning the history of the earth is that there have been five mass extinctions, and many “lesser calamities”. These have altered the course of earth’s history sometimes at rates very different to those we observe today.
Mass-extinction events affected, say the evolutionists, the entire world. They were “world-wide” (1.) Hmm, mass extinction events…affecting the entire globe…
Evolutionists have numerous explanations for what they see as many unrelated extinction events, ranging from stagnating oceans to asteroids, vast eruptions to global climate change, a “single gene transfer event” to burning coal (3). Oh, and there was Gary Larsen’s theory: the dinosaurs smoked too much.
Many of these mass extinction events, and lesser calamities, are said to have occurred in a “geologically abrupt” period of time. The current definition of “geologically abrupt”, according to experts interviewed on the BBC’s “In Our Time”, is anything up to millions of years, but ICR relays a statement by one evolutionist, MIT graduate Seth Burgess, related to timing. “Mass extinction can take 10,000 years or less—the blink of an eye, by geological standards”. However, as Frank Sherwin points out:
“Such a statement does not line up with the fossil record that clearly shows the sudden and catastrophic formation of fossils, a process that kills creatures in their prime and entombs their fresh carcasses in just minutes or less” (2).
These mass extinctions, by all contemporary evolutionary accounts, saw thousands of species wiped out. But as Sherwin asks, how did literally billions of fossils form of complete creatures, sometimes huge animals, all around the earth, often clearly buried rapidly or instantly in sediment? Organisms on the surface will rot or be eaten long before they can be fossilized.
In Our Time evolutionists also revealed the consensus view that there was once a “super-continent”, in which most of the earth’s land-mass was in one place. That’s interesting, because the Bible was saying that thousands of years before the evolutionists came up with the idea:
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so (Genesis 1:9).
If the water was all in one place, presumably so was the land.
In evolution every theory is on the table….except, of course, the one which has been recorded in the Bible for thousands of years-long before any talk of mass extinctions in the secular world under modern evolutionary theory. The Flood account was there before Darwin and Lyell and others formed their ideas, which by design (pun) swept away the entire idea of the Flood, and a God of judgment. However, the evidence remains, for anyone willing to recognize it.
1 BBC Radio 4, In Our Time: “The Late Devonian Extinction”.
2 https://www.icr.org/article/worlds-most-catastrophic-extinction/
Fuel for Faith 