Take Some Time to Consider the Fossils

by Terri Kammerzell

Truth of Genesis Ministry Partner

Happy Senior Citizen’s Day! Did you know that President Ronald Reagan declared this a national holiday in 1988, and two years later the United Nations made it a world holiday, to be observed on August 21 each year? The day is to help raise awareness of issues that affect the older and (usually) wiser generations. You can celebrate the day by taking some time to bring cheer to your own aged relatives or find some others who need it. In 2020, although the opportunity for physical contact might be less, the need to cheer these folks is undoubtedly greater.

While you may want to refrain from calling them such names as “fogie” or “fossil,” I, nevertheless, thought it would be a good week to introduce my Fun Fact about the fossil record:

What is the fossil record?
The fossil record is a “recording” of history found in sedimentary layers and made of fossils, which are the remains or traces of plants and animals found in rocks.

As I mentioned in my first blog, posted on June 10, these Fun Facts I’m introducing to you are “evidence” or “science” -based. But it’s important for us to understand that there is another perspective to Creation apologetics: presuppositional. The best way to explain the difference is that we all—believers and unbelievers—live on the same planet and have access to the same evidence. How we interpret that evidence depends on our worldview (which is a network of our pre-assumed beliefs). It’s kind of like the prescription of the glasses you wear which makes your view of things a little (or sometimes a lot) different than other people’s views. The fossil record is probably the best Fun Fact I have to illustrate this.

The fossil record is a “recording” of fossils, and that is undeniable. But your worldview will determine how you view that recording, and even how you view those fossils. It happens to be through the lens of Scripture and a biblical view of origins that we are able to explain the fossil record more clearly and with fewer unanswered questions.

I’ve known some Christians who believe that an evolutionary approach to explaining the origins of the world is incongruent with the Bible, but they’ve never taken time to learn of the confidence we have in the evidence which actually supports the biblical account. Instead, they try to dismiss whole truths and categories of science because they assume that evolutionists have “created” them to support their humanistic ideas. It’s so important to be able to know the difference between real science, real evidence, and faulty interpretations. One example is natural selection. Many people have often attributed natural selection to Charles Darwin, suggesting he made up that idea and it is the equivalent of evolution. However, natural selection is a scientific process that was discovered long before Charles Darwin.  In reality, it is just the predetermined variability within a kind allowed by a creatures DNA code. He just manipulated it to try to prove his erroneous ideas. We’ll talk more about that later when we discuss other Fun Facts.

The fossil record is another example of this, though. Some Christians don’t understand that fossils do exist and that there actually is a recording of them. They assume that evolutionists have made up their existence. Fossils and fossil layers do exist. It’s our worldview that determines how we explain their existence.

So here are some highlighted findings for you to keep in mind about the fossil record, in terms of how it actually supports the biblical accounts of Creation and the global Flood:

• What Makes up the Fossil Record: More specifically, the fossil record is made up of large horizontal layers, deposited by moving fluid. The layers, or strata, are classified vertically by primary material deposited in them, which has distinct colors and textures that differentiate layer from layer. The layers were deposited on a continental scale, so that we see the same layers in the Grand Canyon as we see in the eastern states and other locations across North America. Additionally, we find comparable layers on other continents all over the world. Not all layers exist in all places, but where the sedimentary layers do exist, the layers are always in the same order.
  
  
• Evidence for Rapid Burial: Evolutionists would suggest that the fossil record was laid down slowly, over millions of years. However, in order for fossilization of a living organism to occur, it has to happen rapidly. In fact, most organisms that die do not fossilize. Instead, they are eaten, scavenged, or recycled back into their environment. So, a fossil is only formed when the organism dies and is buried rapidly, such as would have occurred during Noah’s Flood. In fact, evidence of rapid burial includes fossils of animals who were in the middle of a fight, animals in the process of eating other animals, and even animals giving birth! What’s more, some animals fossilized so swiftly that their soft parts still remain. We especially see this in the discoveries of dinosaur soft tissue with red blood cells. Soft tissue cannot last more than a few thousand years, which means there is no way the sedimentary rock layers containing them can be millions of years old. (We’ll talk about this more at a later date this year too.)
  
  
• More Rapid Burial Evidence in Trackways: Trackways are the evidence of movement, like footprints, of animals. Scientists have found that when examining the fossil record layers from bottom to top, as new layers introduce the fossils of new animal kinds, the first layers contain those animals’ trackways. That means that in one layer, an animal’s footprints—not its hard parts—are fossilized. Then, in the layer above it, the animal’s hard parts are fossilized. There is no way that there could have been a long period of time between the fossilization of an animal’s trackways and its hard parts. That had to have happened rapidly. What’s more, in many of the trackway fossils, scientists have found evidence in the heel-and-toe patterns that the animals were walking or climbing (or running) away from the direction the water current was carrying them. (This is particularly noteworthy in higher layers that were supposedly “desert deposits” laid down with little to no water. There was clearly a strong current carrying these animals.)
  
  
• Order Within the Layers: Evolutionary geologists make claims that the layers of the fossil record resemble ages, suggesting the fossils contained in them are those of organisms that died over specific and progressing time periods. However, if the fossil record had been formed rapidly during a global flood, what we would expect to find is that the lower layers contain the fossils of marine life (shells, clams, trilobites, worms, etc.). The higher you go up the layers, you would expect to find a mix of marine and terrestrial organisms with a greater percentage of terrestrial animals the higher the layer. Guess what the fossil record contains? Lower layers that contain the fossils of marine life with higher layers that contain a mix of sea and terrestrial animals. Instead of each layer representing eras of time of elongated history, it is more likely that each layer represents a stage of the Genesis Flood, and even a geographical location of the types of organisms that were living in and then rapidly buried during each stage.
  
  
• No Transitional Fossils: Finally, for Darwinian evolution to be true, the fossil record should have evidence of transitional fossils. However, there are no transitional fossils. The fossils always show that chickens produce chickens, zebras produce zebras, turtles produce turtles. Animals reproduce after their own kind, just as God ordered them to do in the Bible. No transitional fossils.

Scientific models are based on good, testable hypotheses. When it comes down to it, the fossil record is much more congruent with the hypotheses scientists make based on the historical narrative of the Bible rather than on the fictional alternative of naturalistic evolutionary processes.

Next week, we’ll cover the topic of sedimentary rock. I had a health coach who was also a science teacher and seemed to be confused between the terms “sedimentary” and “sedentary.” Every week she encouraged me not to be sedimentary. Today, I’m encouraging you to visit a senior citizen dear to you and help keep them from becoming too sedentary.
 

Don’t just take my word for it! Visit YouFormedMe.com/geology/fossilRecord.html to read, watch, and listen to supporting research and commentary from scientists, doctors, theologians, and more!
This blog is from a special series of “Creation Fun Facts” by Terri Kammerzell, starting from June 10, 2020. Read the introduction at TruthOfGenesis.com/blogs/building-a-biblical-defense-of-creation.