Does Mother Nature Tell?

When Richard Milton published a book on Darwinism, leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins called it “loony.” He dismissed Milton as “a harmless fruitcake” who “needs psychiatric help.” This is scarcely the language of scientific debate. Why did the book provoke such a furious response? Milton’s book is called The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism. It’s theme is that science needs to evolve beyond evolution—and it offers a collection of anomalies that undercut evolutionary theory. Consider the age of the earth. The most common method of dating rocks uses radioactive decay. But the method doesn't always work. When scientists at the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics tested volcanic lava, they got ages ranging up to three billion years old. But the lava was from an eruption that happened only 200 years ago. Here's another anomaly. The principal rocks of the earth's crust are sedimentary rocks, so-called because they are formed from sediment like sand and silt. Evolutionists believe each rock layer represents several million years. But scientists often find fossils shooting straight up through several layers of rock. Fossilized trees are found standing upright, cutting through 40 feet of rock. If it really took millions of years for the sediment to be laid down, the trees would have rotted away long before they could fossilize. But there's no sign of decay. Each tree must have been covered all at once—40 feet of sediment laid down all at one time. That dramatically collapses the standard time table. Another puzzle is huge fossil "graveyards" where thousands of fossils are found all jumbled together. This means the animals were swept up in some violent flood and deposited all at one time. Once again, evidence that huge sections of rock formed quickly. Actually, the most pervasive testimony of a young earth is that fossils exist at all. You see, when an animal dies in the wild, it is devoured by scavengers and decayed by bacteria within days. It becomes a fossil only in those rare cases when it is covered up by sediment quickly. That means any rock strata containing fossils must have formed quickly. So don't be intimidated when your children bring home schoolbooks talking about millions of years. Just turn to the section dealing with fossils and show them that fossils have to be formed quickly. That one simple fact contradicts the vast ages ascribed to large segments of the geological record. Of course, the age of the earth is not as important for creation as it is for evolution. The important thing is that God created the world, not when He created it. Christians can be open-minded about the question of age and follow the evidence wherever it leads. But evolution absolutely requires an ancient earth. Evolution pictures a world where tiny changes add up gradually, as one-celled organisms slowly evolve into fish and fowl and guinea pigs. Darwin once wrote that his theory depends on "incomprehensibly vast" periods of time. But did those vast periods of time really happen? There are enough puzzles in the rocks to make us doubt it. Mother Nature is too shy to tell her age outright. But the clues she does give suggest she's much younger than the millions of years we read about in our science textbooks.

04/28/97