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Creation and Fossils

REJOICE IN OUR CREATOR GOD

Would you join me at the Creation week? It was quite a world God made! God created the land that flourished with plants v. 9-13. The power of growth in plants is astounding! A sunflower will produce 4,000 seeds from one seed planted. A kernel of corn can do better than that. If every kernel produced by one seed were planted again at the end of the harvest and again at the end of the second year, the entirety of the USA could be planted with the 3rd years crop. That is today. What about then?

What is the THE FOSSIL EVIDENCE of "Special Creation?" As we have seen, the fossils of invertebrates, the most abundant by far of all fossils, do offer strong support for the concept of creation. But let's look now at fossil evidence from other groups. Fossil Plants are the same today!

Did you even wonder what kind of plants the dinosaurs tromped around on? The answer may surprise you. These unfamiliar animals, now extinct, wandered around among some very familiar plants: oak, willow, magnolia, sassafras, palms, and other such common flowering plants.

In the geologic sequence, the flowering plants first appear suddenly and in great diversity in Cretaceous ("dinosaur") rock. Darwin was aware of the situation and called the origin of these plants "an abominable mystery." As my professor of paleobotany summarized it, nothing has happened in the last 120 years to solve that mystery. As far as the fossil evidence is concerned, we simply find different varieties of the same types of plants we have today, plus extinction in many cases.

In Lincoln County, Wyoming, almost perfect specimens of fish, turtles, insects, and mammals have been found together with huge palm leaves, from 6 to 8 feet in length and from 3 to 4 feet wide. Even more significantly, trillions of tons of vegetation much of it perfectly preserved, even to leaves and flowers, have been buried in all parts of the world, including Antarctica in the form of coal.  Each foot of coal represents many feet of compressed plant remains, and some coal seams are as much as thirty or forty feet in thickness. Obviously, no such process of coal formation is going on today, and the so-called "peat-bog theory" is a poor attempt to cope with this problem.  

In THE EVOLUTION OF A CREATIONIST Dr. Martin explains that scientists have found tropical forests and coal deposits in Antarctica.  Ninety-foot Plum trees which were quick frozen and over ninety feet in height with green leaves have been found in the New Siberian islands where, today, only one-inch high willows grow [see Charles Hapgood, The Mystery of the Frozen Mammoths; from Bassett Digby, The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting Grounds in Northeast Siberia (N.Y.: Appleton, 1926), pp. 150-151 ].

In these frigid zones many trees, some fossilized and some quick-frozen, have been found with rings, signifying rapid, warm temperature growth. The Evolutionist asks, "How did they get here?" The Creationist says, they grew there before the Flood when the earth was pole to pole greenhouse warm."

God Created Seas That Swarmed With Fish (v. 20-23)

EVOLUTION  CHALLENGE OF THE FOSSIL RECORD model contend that it is impossible to account for most of the important geological formations according to uniformitarian principles. These formations include the vast Tibetan Plateau, 750,000 square miles of sedimentary deposits many thousands of feet in thickness and now at an elevation of three miles; the Karoo Supergroup of Africa, which has been estimated by Robert Broom to contain the fossils of 800 billion vertebrate animals;' the herring fossil bed in the Miocene shales of California, containing evidence that a billion fish died within a four-square mile area;' and the Cumberland Bone Cave of Maryland, containing fossilized remains of dozens of species of mammals, from bats to mastodons, along with the fossils of some reptiles and birds-including animals which now have accommodated to different climates and habitats from the Arctic region to tropical zones.' Neither has the uniformitarian concept been sufficient to explain mountain building nor the formation of such vast lava beds as the Columbian Plateau in the northwest United States, a lava bed several thousand feet thick covering 200,000 square miles.

WHAT IS CREATION SCIENCE? Generally accepted evolutionary dogma of gradualism or uniformitarianism. But several scientists-still evolutionists-recognize that catastrophism, including massive flooding, mountain building, glaciation, and similar catastrophes, is the more logical inference from our scientific observations. Furthermore, catastrophism helps us to explain several features of the fossil evidence.

First of all, there's the very existence of fossils themselves. Fossils don't form when plants and animals simply die and rot away on the surface of the ground or on the bottom of the sea. To have any chance at all to be preserved as a fossil, a plant or animal must be buried rapidly under a relatively heavy load of sediment. Otherwise, scavengers or the forces of erosion will obliterate the specimen. That's one reason why there's scarcely a trace of the millions of bison slaughtered in America's move westward.

Once a plant or animal is buried deeply enough in the right kind of sediment, there's no special trick involved in turning it into a fossil, and no huge amount of time is required. Minerals simply accumulate in the specimen itself or in the cavity left by the specimen after it rots away. So, fossils could be formed in the laboratory, and they are probably forming here and there today.

But nowhere on earth today do we have fossils forming on the scale that we see in geologic deposits. The Karroo Beds in Africa, for example, contain the remains of perhaps 800 billion vertebrates! A million fish can be killed in red tides in the Gulf of Mexico today, but they simply decay away and do not become fossils. Similarly, debris from vegetation mats doesn’t become coal unless it is buried under a heavy load of sediment.

The water vapor canopy may have more than doubled atmospheric pressure on earth. In this environment of heavier atmospheric pressure, healing would be more efficient. Many hospitals have pressurized rooms called Hyperbaric Rooms.  Into these rooms oxygen is pumped under pressure and healing is miraculously speeded up. Very sick people and the severely burned are treated in this high pressure environment." In the pre-flood, high efficiency atmosphere, reptiles could have grown to immense sizes, giant flying creatures could have flown more easily, and gigantism would have been much more likely."

For more information about "Hyperbaric Therapy" see: J. C. Davis, "Hyperbaric Oxygen 'Merapy," Joumal of Intensive Care Medicine, 4 (1989), 55-57. Also: Textbook of Hyperbaric Medicine, ed.  K. K. Jain (Toronto: Hogrefe and Huber Pubs., 1990), p. 492.  Also: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: A Committee Report (UHMS PUB 30 CRHOB), ed.  J. T. Mader (Bethesda: Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, Inc., 1989), p. 90. Most Of My conunents about the effects of the vapor canopy came from Dr. Joseph Dillow's excellent discussion of the effects of the vapor canopy in The Water's Above: Earth's Pre-Flood Water Vapor Canopy (Moody Press, 1982).